"Our BDRs have Outreach licenses, but our AEs don't. And we expect our AEs to self-source 30-50% of their pipeline."
☝️
This is more common than you'd imagine.
Are you evaluating new sales tech & renewals for H2 2024 and 2025?
Don't make these mistakes.
⛔️ 1) Not investing in sales engagement tools for AEs
If you want your AEs to self-source more pipeline, don't make it harder than it needs to be. If your BDRs have Outreach seats, every AE should have them.
If outbound is hard and manual—don't expect your AEs to do it.
⛔️ 2) Unnecessary consolidation
The big 5 (ZoomInfo, Clari, Outreach, Gong, Salesloft) are now playing in sales engagement, revenue intelligence, conversational intelligence, deal management, etc.
You'll be tempted to consolidate into a single vendor. This MIGHT be a good decision, but don't do it to save money.
Example: The sales engagement platforms across these vendors are not created equal. Some are better than others, depending on your team's unique needs.
Don't sacrifice productivity by consolidating into an inferior tool to save money.
⛔️ 3) Neglecting basic sales needs
For an outbound-focused org, these are the basics:
- CRM
- Sales Engagement Platform (Sequencing, etc.)
- Data (phone numbers, emails, etc.)
Everything beyond this is a luxury. Don't make the mistake of investing in the latest and greatest AI deal management solution—and cutting your data spend.
Your reps can't outbound without emails and phone numbers.
⛔️ 4) Using tech to fix a people or process problem
Your org might be better off investing in more Rev/Sales ops support vs. more tech. You likely have enough tools but lack proper workflows and rep enablement to utilize them.
Example: Do your reps have a good workflow for reaching out to past customers who are now working at companies that are not customers yet? I've encountered one sales org with a great workflow that didn't require reps to hop between 5 different tools to pull this play off.
Tech is only as good as the workflows and the people executing them. Invest in your ops or enablement teams to help with this.