The One Technology You Should Invest In Now

In a presentation that I saw today, one slide features a Swiss Army knife. The following slide was a massive Swiss Army knife, much larger than anything I had ever seen before. As soon as I saw the second slide, I was struck by the concept. More is not better than better.

The sales technology stack continues to grow larger and larger for most companies. Someone finds a new way to use technology to achieve some kind of outcome, and it becomes another tool to make salespeople more efficient than ever, solving a problem that no one perceived as a problem until the product was created.

You need a CRM to manage your customer relationships. Then you need to start adding additional capabilities, like allowing the prospective clients to schedule with the salesperson by clicking on a link in their email, a function that has to be most underutilized capability in the sales stack. Add to that a social selling component to allow salespeople to share content, a lead generation component, document management for contracts, quoting software, screen sharing, conference calling, video conferencing, and Slack for communication. There is seemingly no end to what a salesperson needs to sell effectively, even though you would do well to add up your monthly spend on technology and tools.

The pictures I saw in the slide presentation showed a regular Swiss Army knife and one that was so large and unwieldy that it would be worthless to the person trying to use it. If I were to swap out the picture of the first knife, I would replace it with a pocket knife with a single blade, that blade representing the tool that lives between the salesperson’s ears, and the one tool that counts for more in the creation and capture of new opportunities than any other technology by a country mile.

For many companies, the investment that is being driven into the latest and greatest technology would be better directed to the improving what matters most when it comes to generating results, and that is the salesperson themselves. Sharpening that tool will do more to help you produce better results more than anything else.