In today's competitive B2B sales landscape, it's more important than ever to have the right tools in your arsenal. A well-chosen tech stack can help you increase revenue, close more deals, and save time.
When launching a startup it's hard to know what tools to invest in. There are hundreds of CRMs, sales enablement, and calendars. It's hard to know which one to choose because they all share a lot of similarities.Â
It gets even more complicated when you want to start layering on tools to increase your efficiency and produce even better results.
The question on every founder's mind is do the tools actually make me better at sales and marketing? Or at least will it make it easier?
We've demoed and used A LOT of tools over the years so when it came time for us to assemble our sales and marketing tech stack here's what we went with and why.
THE PERFECT SALES & MARKETING TECH STACK FOR STARTUPS
Important things to think about…
1. You don't want to re-platform in 6-12 months as your sales and marketing activities ramp up. So you need to invest in a tool that gives you a solid foundation...but at the same time, you don't want to spend a fortune on enterprise tools that you're not going to be able to fully leverage the power of until you're a much larger company.Â
2. How many people will be leveraging these tools? With any tool, licenses can drive up the cost quickly. Be strategic and start with just one license for the power user. No tech stack will want you to do this but, if you're looking to keep costs down, share a login until you hit a point where a second seat is justified. On the topic of a shared login, I highly recommend setting up all these accounts with a generic email account that is easy to share with your team (and so they don't see your personal emails). We like to use hello@company.com or create a faux person who can be the persona for your customer service.
3. It may make sense to start with one tool at a time. Get comfortable with that tool, generate some results, and then layer on the next tool. That way you're only paying for the tools you're actively using and it will increase the ROI from the spend on the tool.
Here are four must-have platforms for B2B sales:
1. Outreach
Outreach.io is a sales engagement platform that helps you automate your outreach and track your results. With Outreach.io, you can send personalized emails, track opens and clicks, and follow up with prospects at the right time.
Why Alison loves Outreach:
Anyone who has talked to me knows that I'm an Outreach superfan. I love this tool for so many reasons.Â
My favorite part of Outreach is how it uses AI to tell you what a prospect is doing behind the scenes so you can prioritize which prospects to follow up with based on their engagement level.
Once you're used to Outreach you can FLY through your sales tasks using templates, snippets, and sequences. And the Chrome plugin makes it effortless to do the tasks directly in your inbox.
I also love how we can use triggers to move prospects through deal stages or move an engaged prospect to a different sequence so we're always providing the prospect with the most relevant information in our sales automation.
This is getting into the weeds, but Outreach's thresholds for managing how many cold emails are sent are incredibly valuable and will be critical for all businesses as Google, Yahoo, and other ESPs change the way bulk emails are viewed in 2024.
What Alison doesn't love about Outreach?Â
The platform has a learning curve that comes with getting it set up and running. You either need to be prepared to watch the training or hire someone to help you set it up and show you the ropes (P.S. LTO can help you with this if you're looking for support).
When would you want to add Outreach to your tech stack?
When you are ready to lean into automating your sales outreach. Outreach is much more affordable than Hubspot for 1-to-1 sales sequences and does a much better job. Or, if you have a lot of qualified leads in your pipeline and your deals are not progressing.
BONUS TIP: If you’re going to be sending cold prospecting emails from your domain we highly recommend using Lemwarm. Lemwarm helps improve your deliverability and allows you to view and manage your deliverability in one place. Google, Yahoo, and other ESPs will be changing the way bulk emails are viewed in 2024 so tracking deliverability is a critical component for every business.
2. Chili Piper
Chili Piper is a scheduling platform that helps you book meetings with prospects. Chili Piper eliminates the back-and-forth email dance and makes it easy for prospects to book time on your calendar.
Why Alison Loves Chili Piper:
If you're doing outbound prospecting in B2B sales the right way you know who your prospect is. At a minimum, you should have the prospect's name and contact information. Based on that, why would you send your prospect to a calendar booking page that asks them to enter all that information? ChiliPiper reduces that friction and allows a prospect to book a meeting without having to enter their contact information into the fields because you already have it in your CRM.
The one thing Alison doesn't love about Chili Piper?Â
You can't pull in multiple calendars. So, if you want to manage your availability for sales calls across multiple calendars stick with Calendly.
When should you add Chili Piper to your tech stack?
Anyone who is actively using a CRM to manage their sales efforts and looking to create frictionless appointment bookings should use Chili Piper.
3. Vidyard
Vidyard is a video engagement platform that helps you create and share videos with prospects. Vidyard videos are embedded on your website and can be tracked to see how many people watch them and how far they get through.
Why Alison Loves Vidyard:
The way Vidyard adds animation to the video when it's embedded into the email is a great way to increase prospect engagement. That engagement allows you to drill down into your pipeline and better assess which prospects have a higher propensity to purchase.
I love how Vidyard integrates directly into Outreach and you can add videos into your emails with a single click.
What Alison doesn't love about Vidyard?Â
They now require you to use a more professional sales license to leverage automating sequences in Outreach based on actions prospects take with your videos.
When should you add Vidyard to your tech stack?
If prospects or leads aren't engaging with your emails, video can help. You just need to be prepared to do the work of recording a personal video for each prospect. It sounds like a lot, but it gets easier and the results are worth it.
4. HubSpot
HubSpot is a CRM platform that helps you manage your leads and track your sales pipeline. HubSpot also offers a variety of marketing tools that can help you generate leads and nurture them through the sales process.
Why Alison loves Hubspot:
It gives your salesperson a holistic view of all the actions a prospect has taken with your company (emails read, website pages viewed, ad campaigns clicked, etc.). You can make smarter decisions with your top-level sales and marketing efforts by assessing what marketing campaigns are driving the best SQLs and deals.
The one thing Alison doesn’t love about Hubspot?
It’s a marketing tool at heart, so its sales automation functionality is not great and significantly overpriced. Hubspot Marketing + Outreach for sales automation is a much better solution.
When should you add Hubspot to your tech stack?
If you're actively spending on paid advertising you will want to have HubSpot because you'll be able to pull in the actions a prospect is taking on marketing campaigns into your sales automation efforts.
This tech stack is a powerful combo that can help you take your B2B sales to the next level. If you're looking for a way to increase revenue and close more deals, I highly recommend checking out these platforms.
How do these platforms work seamlessly together?
Outreach.io is the foundation of this tech stack. It's where you'll create your email campaigns, track your results, and manage your leads. Chili Piper helps you book meetings with prospects by integrating directly with Outreach.io. Prospects can easily view your chosen availability and book a meeting with you all through your email campaigns that have been set up in Outreach.io. Vidyard allows you to create and share videos that can help you generate leads and nurture them through the sales process. And HubSpot ties everything together by providing a central repository for your leads, contacts, and deals.
What are the benefits of using this tech stack?
There are many benefits to using this tech stack, including:
Increased efficiency: This tech stack can help you automate many of the tasks involved in B2B sales, freeing up your time so you can focus on more important things.
Improved visibility: This tech stack provides you with a clear view of your sales pipeline, so you can track your progress and make adjustments as needed.
Increased engagement: Not all prospects will appreciate the value of your product right away. When this is the case, playing the long game is critical to closing a deal in the future. The best way to continue connecting with these prospects is by providing engaging, powerful content. When utilizing the benefits of this tech stack, customized content can be easily generated.
Easier decision-making: With an inside look into each prospect’s actions, it becomes easier for your salesperson to make smarter decisions which leads to closed deals.Increased productivity: When you’re scaling a startup, you’re wearing a lot of hats that don’t have the bandwidth to do it all. This tech stack helps you increase efficiency, close more deals, and generate more revenue.
Identify best ROI tactics: This tech stack works together to identify which of your sales and marketing efforts are driving the greatest ROI. In turn, your salespeople feel empowered by seeing which tactics are revenue-producing strategies.
How do I get started with this powerhouse combo?
If you're interested in getting started with this tech stack, the first step is to set up an account with each platform and integrate them with each other. Once everything is set up, you can start using the tech stack to automate your outreach, book meetings, create and share videos, and manage your leads.
Implementing a tech stack is one of the greatest challenges for startup leaders because they're in the middle of building a business. Spending hours researching tools and learning how to use the tools isn't in your best interest. LTO is here to help. Since we're experts in this tech stack, we can help roll it out for your company for a nominal fee.
