Succeeding in sales in the 21st century is not an easy job. In addition to needing empathy, grit, and drive, you also need to know your potential and existing customers intimately to be relevant at every touchpoint.

Sales professionals who leverage sales technology outperform their peers. In this article, we'll introduce you to the eleven sales software categories that we think are the most important for you to be acquainted with.

And that’s another year nearly gone—time sure does fly! Just like its predecessor, 2021 probably hasn’t been what we were hoping it would be. Nonetheless, even these trying times won’t stop our annual tradition of predicting the most important sales trends of the upcoming year.

As you well know, many things have changed over the course of the year, but one thing remains the same—sales activity hasn't stopped. As has been the case for a while, creativity and resourcefulness are becoming increasingly important for sales and marketing teams to excel.

A renewed focus on the role of the salespeople and the tools and technologies that can help them do what they do best. That's the premise in which we're predicting next year's sales trends—and here they are:

Account-based marketing is becoming increasingly popular as a customer acquisition tactic among B2B companies.

At this point, most early adopters of the tactic will already have an ABM orchestration platform, such as Hubspot, Demandbase, Terminus, 6Sense, Triblio, or Madison Logic, implemented.

It should go without saying, but one of the key success factors for an ABM program is the specificity of your target account lists. Ultimately, the size of your list can vary depending on your specific program, but it’s always a good idea to make sure that your lists include the companies that possess the highest potential value for your organization, whether that be the 10, 100, or 1,000 companies.

There are a lot of new technology trends popping up every year: Internet of Things, cryptocurrencies, virtual reality, and robotics are becoming commonplace. Others like digital twin, industry 4.0, and quantum computing might still be unfamiliar to most of us, but are quickly gaining attention, too.

Growth or revenue creation can be fueled by two mediums: selling to a new customer or selling to an existing customer. We’ve written about using data and analytics when prospecting and selling to new customers, but how does it translate when selling to existing customers? Now, it’s time to cover customer analysis so you can determine real upselling opportunities. 

Upselling to customers has traditionally had an unpalatable nuance to it. The sole objective has been to get the customer to buy more. I can’t help but think of that car salesman who’s aggressively overselling that four-door executive saloon, packaged in full options when your only need is to get from place a to b.

Knowing your customer in and out by way of effective customer analysis is what separates a pleasant buying experience from an unpleasant one. You’ll understand what your customers need and how to alleviate their challenges and pains with the right solutions.

Let’s get to it without further ado. 👇

With more than 100,000 concurrent customers and a host of accolades to their name, Salesforce is a giant within the CRM software industry. Offering a full range of cloud-based features and functionalities, Salesforce has for more than a decade been helping its customers streamline their communicative efforts with prospects, helping them close more (and bigger) deals and grow their bottom line.

That already sounds like a pretty sweet deal. However, Salesforce is only as valuable as the data it stores. Clean and tidy data will make your processes fly, but working with unreliable and corrupt information is a miserable experience.

Obviously, knowing what something is is important. However, the practical value often comes from knowing how to do that something, not simply knowing what that something is. On the back of this very smooth introduction, we’ll be starting our discussion of the lead generation strategies that you should incorporate into your inbound marketing practices to ensure a steady flow of new leads.

Prospecting is seldom the favorite part of the sales process. It’s often considered hard and time consuming. In fact, prospecting it’s often identified as the hardest part of the sales process. Don’t fret! Thanks to technology, it shouldn't be too difficult to find good prospect and actionable leads.

Nine out of ten marketers diss gated content. And yet, nine out of ten marketers use gated content as a way of bringing in leads.