A Peek Inside Uberflip’s (Growing) Sales Tech Stack
First came the development stack, comprised of the layers of technology that enable a dev team to execute. Then, as the martech space expanded and more marketers migrated to “technologist” roles, the marketing stack was born.
With hundreds of platforms, from marketing automation, analytics tools, A/B testing, content marketing systems and more, the modern marketer has been empowered to leverage technology to scale their efforts, expand their reach, and ultimately improve their impact on the bottom line.
Now we’re seeing Sales teams building their own stacks, around their day-to-day activities, to help them scale as well.
Over the last few months, the sales team at Uberflip has been growing its own “stack,” and as a member of the team who has been a firsthand witness as we refined our process, and adopted the new technologies that came with it, it seemed like a good time to write about how our sales team is leveraging tech to scale.
But before you adopt any technology, in my opinion, three pivotal boxes need to be checked. I’ll call them the 3 Ps: Process, Purpose & People.
The 3 Ps of adopting tech
Process: From a sales perspective, before beginning to adopt technologies, a defined sales process should be in place, and each new addition should have a direct place within that process to enhance it or shorten execution time.
Purpose: There needs to be a defined reason that the technology is being brought in. The purpose should be clear as well as the results expected. For example, implementing sales automation increases our Account Development Reps' activity and frees up selling time. The results expected are a significant increase in meetings/discovery calls booked (100-200%).
People: The entire team should be involved in the implementation/onboarding of the tool if it affects their daily routine. The outer team and support systems should be in place to get the most out of whatever is added to the stack (e.g. marketing & sales ops).
Keeping these key considerations in mind, here are the current tools we’re using in the Uberflip Sales stack.
Salesforce: The centerpiece and “system of record”
Salesforce is the heart of our sales stack. We use it at every stage of the sales process. Pretty much everything I’m going to cover in this stack plugs back into Salesforce. As our CRM, it’s where everything happens, from logging ADR activity to providing visibility into the customer lifecycle.
Information flows into Salesforce from HubSpot, and out of Salesforce into our lead lists and other tools. And any correspondence gets recorded in Salesforce.
That’s what makes Salesforce the centerpiece of our stack.
Slack: Team collaboration and communication
Slack is the all-powerful collaboration tool that helps our team communicate better, share ideas, documents, best practices and helpful content easily.
We've built out channels for our SDRs, our AEs, the sales team as a whole, and a #smarketing channel to keep Marketing and Sales aligned—just to name a few.
Datanyze: Sales intelligence
Datanyze has been an invaluable tool for me to quickly improve my warm and cold outreach.
Datanyze is a Sales Intelligence platform that crawls millions of websites and shows you the web technologies your prospects are using. It's a great tool especially for SaaS sales where it's important to understand how your solution can integrate with a company's existing technology ecosystem.
We also use Datanyze to help build outbound lists of prospects using the technologies that sync the best with our own offering at Uberflip.
For example, if Datanyze informs me that the person is using Marketo (a platform we integrate with), then that'll have an impact on the conversation that I’ll have with him or her.
Outreach.io: Prospecting and sales automation
For any outbound email and calling efforts, we use Outreach to automate parts of the process with outreach sequences to streamline cadence. It’s meant to engage cold or warm leads through sales automation to land discovery calls and book demos.
It helps us scale our efforts by removing some of the tedious parts of manual outreach.
Sidekick: Real-time engagement insight
On top of tracking email opens, which Outreach also does, Sidekick syncs in directly with our HubSpot marketing automation so our Sales team can understand — in real time — when our prospects are consuming content on our Hub, checking out our pricing page, or a case study.
This way I can act fast, knowing the context.
ReadyTalk: Presentations and product demos
It’s hard to forget the service we use to conduct our conference calls, demos and screen shares.
ReadyTalk lets us demonstrate our platform to prospects and deliver a live, personalized walkthrough to show how our solution can address their needs.
Uberflip: Content library & hyper-personalization
Sales reps say they often struggle to find content to send to prospects, so it’s important to build a content library that enables Sales to find and leverage that content in their moment of need.
We use Uberflip, our own content marketing system, to access content that the marketing team created to enable sales, from SlideShare presentations to infographics to case studies.
From there, we can create hyper-personalized streams of content that cater to their needs.
For example, if we’re using my example of the Marketo user above, I might curate this stream of content that I can share via a single link.
Docusign: Paperless contracts
When it comes down to closing the deal, our team uses Docusign to manage our contracts.
We can very easily create, manage and send off digital contracts for a signature, making the process of dealing with the paperwork and closing deals seamless.
Docusign syncs right back into Salesforce so we have a record of signatures and all the proper information is tracked and accounted for.
Never been a more exciting time to be in Sales
There’s never been a better time to be in Sales.
Enabled by a powerful stack of integrated technology, Sales reps today can act faster through automation, talk smarter with more accurate sales intelligence, and perform better when it comes to hitting our goals.
But after this, I'm sure I’ll be getting calls and emails from other salespeople (assisted by their own sales stack) telling me what I should be adding to this list. So bring it on!