Though Salestech is a snazzy, shiny industry, it's still not immune to buzzwords. We're rampantly anti-buzzwords here at LXA, but we also know they're pretty darn hard to escape.
So, to make the whole process slightly less painful, we've put together a list of the top Salestech terms. Consider this your top tier, helpful, and hopefully comprehensive dictionary of SalesTech phrases, acronyms and abbreviations.
Looking for the down low from a download? Want to be overly-informed on SalesTech? Well, check out our SalesTech Best Practice Guide, here!
Let's jump in.
ABM
Account based marketing (ABM) is a business marketing strategy that concentrates resources on a set of target accounts within a market. ABM campaigns aim to establish meaningful relationships with the most important clients who will deliver the highest ROI.
The great idea behind this strategy is to focus efforts where they can have the greatest impact on the bottom line, and represents the best use of resources. Indeed, 87% of B2B marketers surveyed by ITSMA said their ABM marketing outperformed other marketing efforts in terms of ROI.
Automation
Automation is about freeing up salespeople by taking care of time-consuming tasks. This may include lead nurturing, such as welcome emails sent when prospects have downloaded an eBook, or reminders to chase up valuable leads.
Buyer sentiment
95% of purchasing decisions are subconscious, so your sales reps need to rely on more than traditional buying signals to identify buyer intent. So, sales reps are increasingly recognising buyer emotions and engagement.
Buyer sentiment indicates a buyer's positive or negative emotional response to sales engagement and can indicate the likelihood of the sales process moving forwards.
If a buyer reacts positively to outreach this indicates they may be interested in finding out more information. If they react negatively, the sales rep will need to make an informed decision on whether another method of contact would be best.
Conversational marketing & sales
Conversational sales and marketing solutions have the power to rapidly enhance the customer experience by enabling potential customers to receive an answer to their query in minutes without the waiting time to speak to a representative. This also frees up the time of the sales team who no longer have to dedicate huge quantities of time answering repetitive questions.
AI, AI, AI. Everything this day is about AI. But if you want a rich, enhanced, and human conversation, you gotta trust the robots.
Conversational sales and marketing solutions have the ability to enhance the customer experience by allowing for rapid responses to any query or question. Plus, you free up time for sales teams that no longer have to spend hour after hour responding to FAQs.
Though, it might be the combination of human and machine that makes for the best CX. You might have a little chat with Wall-e, who will then send the client over to the salesperson to continue the conversation.
Database Cleansing and Appending
Data cleansing is the process of identifying if your content data is still correct and valid. Data appending is the process of adding additional information to your existing contacts for more complete data.
CRM account and contact data change all the time. For example, when companies are acquired, or someone changes jobs, their data changes. Database cleansing and appending identifies which of your contact data is incorrect, outdated, or duplicative, makes the corrections, and append or enriches missing data.
Demos
A sales demo is when a sales rep delivers a presentation to a potential customer, in order to introduce them to the features, capabilities, and value of their product. This is all conducted to close a deal. This differs from a product demo, with the sales demo being about the potential customer, whereas a product demo is all about involving a current customer. So, a sales demo is all about creating a sale.
Dialers
A sales dialer is a piece of software which eliminates the manual process of phoning up a lead, prospect, or customer. Your dialer tool can be integrated with your CRM so all contacts, records, and data are in a single location.
They automatically and accurately dial phone numbers for sales reps so they can focus on their conversations with their potential customers.
Dialers save reps time and contain features such as call queues, which can help prioritise conversations with valuable prospects first.
Dynamic Guidance
This is a data-driven tool which removes variability from frontline pricing and enables your sales teams to make pricing decisions more quickly, and with more confidence. Combining advanced analytics and ML, the tool identifies patterns in sales transactions to deliver price recommendations to the team.
Conversation Analytics
Conversation analytics is the evaluation of voice data from phone calls between prospects and your sales reps, in order to gain insights into customer behaviour. So, by recoding and transcribing call data, sales teams can better understand leads, and target them more effectively.
CRM
CRMs are the oldest category of sales tools, and for good reason. It's typically the very first tool to be deployed, and may sometimes be the only one full stop.
Standing for Customer Relationship Management, it's basically a database where salespeople can log and view information on contacts, accounts, activities, and opportunities.
CRM systems are built to engage with customers, on the basis of historical and general data gathered to create a persistent customer profile. But, they're not structured to ingest huge amounts of data from other sources.
Some benefits of CRM software include:
- Organisation
- Task Tracking
- Increase retention
- More sales opportunities
- Tracking Sales
- Personalised communication
While CRMs and CDPs both collect customer data, they differ in one big way. Basically, CRMs organise and manage customer interactions with your team, whereas CDPs collect data on customer behaviour.
Embellished Email
Embellished email is a new category of solutions that let salespeople create stylised communications which demand attention and engagement.
Engagement
Sales enablement tools help your team with everything they need to close a deal. These tech solutions help sales teams to use content, social media, pitch materials and reporting to ensure that the sales teams are aligned.
E-signing
E-signing functionality has the same legal standing as a handwritten signature and is intended to provide a secure and accurate identification method for the signatory to provide a seamless transaction. This removes the delay between the lead coming in, and the documents being signed, reducing admin times and decreasing disorganisation.
Forecasting and Forecast Analytics
Sales forecasting is an in-depth report which predicts what a sales rep or team will sell, in a week, a month, quarterly, or annually. These are usually created using past performance data. This allows you to spot any potential issues while there's still time to avoid them.
Gamification
Sales gamification is the process of turning pipeline tasks into a game. Completing tasks, such as closing deals or cinching meetings, comes with a reward, which motivates salespeople to repeat good behaviour.
Gamification also makes sure your teams have a clear understanding of their activity and goals by gamifying them.
Lead/List Building
Lead and list building solutions make it possible for your sales team to keep a dynamic list of prospects based on specific attributes like company size or job title.
Lead Engagement
Specifically for inside sales reps or sales development reps, lead engagement solutions include a dashboard of leads to contact, a way to reach them, scripts, and call disposition notes. These systems also make it possible to do high-velocity calling and dispositioning of calls along with the next action scheduling.
Lead Generation
Lead generation is the process of attracting prospects to your business and increasing their interest through nurturing, all with the end goal of converting them into a customer. Some ways to generate leads are through job applications, blog posts, coupons, live events, and online content.
Opportunity Management
Opportunity management, sometimes called pipeline management, is the process of organising and tracking the deals in your sales pipeline. This can help prioritise the deals which are most likely to close and strengthens your sales approach.
People Management
There are also a handful of sales tech solutions out there to boost the team’s motivation and improve their selling techniques. From gamification tools to drive engagement, to training and coaching tools.
Performance Analytics
Performance analysis and analytics provide intelligence about your sales strategy, and the performance of your team. It involves mining your data to evaluate the performance of your sales team against its goals. From this, you can see which products are underperforming, the problems in selling and market opportunities, sales forecasting, and which sales activities generate revenue.
Pipeline Management and Analytics
Sales pipeline management involves analysing, tracking, and organising your pipeline so that it runs smoothly. When your pipeline is updated, improved, and cleaned over time, your reps can focus on selling and allows managers to see what's happening in the pipeline. This can involve seeing where the most important deals are, to understanding how their reps are performing.
Project management tools
Features such as project tracking, file sharing and scheduling tools help to keep sales teams on track. It’s also important for these tools to integrate with other sales tech.
Renewals Forecasting
Much like a sales forecast, a renewals forecast helps the business by projecting likely growth and churn rate, and compares those to past of industry benchmarks.
Sales intelligence
Sales intelligence tools provide both sales teams and sales operations with data and insights for market access, strategy and planning.
According to LinkedIn’s State of Sales report, 71% of salespeople describe sales intelligence tools as critical to closing deals. In fact, top performers are more than twice as likely to describe them as extremely critical, with 31% doing so compared to 13% of their peers.
Sales Stack
A sales stack is vital to modern sales, with 73% of salespeople using technology to close more deals. Plus, 97% of salespeople said that technology is either "important" or "very important" to their sales process.
So, a sales stack is the software and technology your sales team uses and needs to excel at its job. It can be used to generate leads, store contact data, build proposals, get signatures, and communicate effectively with the team and customers alike.
The best sales stack is made up of sales tools that can integrate, so your team can access the features and information they need seamlessly. If you're a sales rep, the right stack can save you time, effort, and resources in the long run, at every stage of the buyer journey.
If you're a sales leader, having a well-crafted stack can be the difference between average-performing teams and high-performing teams.
To build the correct stack for your team, you need to be aware of every step of the sales process. Then, you can figure out where steps can be simplified, shortened, or integrated. Remember, the goal is to close the most quality deals with the least amount of resources. The tools you use can help you take steps towards this goal.
Sales Accepted Lead (SAL)
A marketing qualified lead that has been passed to and accepted by the sales team.
Sales Coaching Software
Video practise and role-playing has merged into a new category known as Sales Coaching Software. This is due to solution providers expanding their platforms to include additional functionalities. The third type of functionality has also been included which is coaching reps on specific deals.
Salestech
Salestech is where sales and technology meet. It refers to the tools which can help sales teams boost their productivity, better understand prospects and customers, and ultimately close more deals.
Check out our comprehensive SalesTech Guide for more.
Social selling
Social selling is another salestech trend that is also on the rise. Researching and engaging with potential customers on social platforms is now common practice for sales reps.
Social selling is pretty effective with B2B for an obvious reason, it builds long-lasting, long-term relationships.
"This sales tactic searches for and engages with prospects online, where customers already spend considerable time. Since 97% of customers research products online and 47% of buyers view at least three to five pieces of content before contacting a sales representative," says Adrian Fisher, writing for Forbes.
Social selling is all about a long-form approach that engages clients in a softer way, instead of aggressive hard selling. You might prove your value to customers through content, such as on LinkedIn. 89% of top-performing salespeople stated that social sites like LinkedIn are important in closing deals.
You can even turn your virtual events into social selling opportunities:
- Industry experts can use speaking opportunities for branding and sales purposes, increasing their own personal status and, as a result, that of the business.
- Though networking might be a bit more difficult virtually, the conversation could be moved to another platform, perhaps LinkedIn.
- Attendee lists, emails, or social media hashtags can be used to connect with interested individuals after the event, to chat more, or to find potential prospects.
- Content produced for the event can even be repurposed, by posting it on social networks to spark further discussion.
Unified Activity Entry
Often issues arise when sales reps don't log information into the CRM, which leaves management to make decisions based on inaccurate and out-of-date information. So, unified activity entry solutions recognise its possible to automatically capture activities reps perform throughout the day so they don't have to log them manually.
Unified Customer View
Having a 360-degree view of your customer can benefit your salespeople and customer-facing employees massively. So, unified customer view solutions can provide a single system of record for each customer, with health scoring and critical status changes.
Value Selling & ROI Quantification
These solutions allow sellers to quickly and easily quantify the economic impact to the customer. Value selling and ROI quantification tools can include the ability to present various hypothesis and use-case that are then translated into economic benefit.
Video Selling
Video is becoming one of the fastest-growing sales enablement tools on the market. During the pandemic when organisations had to switch to virtual selling, companies were forced to invest in technology to enable virtual selling.
It's competitive out there, you know. So, what do you do, when the going gets tough? Well, the tough get going, and then they go straight to YouTube.
More and more sales teams are turning to video communication techniques to get noticed. And Hubspot have suggested that video prospecting is the number one skill every sales development rep needs to master.
This is all about short, engaging clips, no more than two minutes long. That's two TikTok videos for all you Gen Z-ers.. Introduce yourselves, deliver value, and ask to schedule a call. Easy as.
Video selling used to be a nice add-on. But now, it's vital. Video adoption among marketing and sales teams has been increasing pretty rapidly over the last few years, from 63% of businesses using video for marketing and sales in 2017, to 87% in 2019.
Plus, video presentations, pitches, and run-throughs can communicate a quick message in a memorable way. It is now the preferred content consumption format, after all. But remember to:
- Include videos in your sales emails
- Make your videos face-to-face
- Use video on LinkedIn, to connect with leads
- Record personalised videos for leads
Web Contact Append & Save
Web contact append & save tools can allow sales teams to capture all names and contact info displayed on a web page, check to see if they feature in the CRM already, and append the data gaps.
Web Visitor Identification
Web Visitor Identification solutions identify which companies your web visitors work for. Knowing the company that a visitor is associated with can give salespeople the opportunity to find the right contact by looking up the company on socials, or a lead database service like ZoomInfo.