You’ve invested a lot of effort into choosing a tech stack that works for your business. You’ve spent the time and money to determine what will work best for your organization, for every department, and then committed to that technology stack to run your operations.
So when you’re choosing sales enablement software – or better still, revenue enablement software – you need to make sure it’s native to your technology stack.
Because if it’s not, you’re opening yourself up to a whole host of unnecessary challenges.
What is a tech stack?
A tech stack typically refers to all the tools, programmes, frameworks and software you need to implement an IT development project. But more widely, your tech stack is all the technology and software you use to run your organization efficiently and effectively.
In the case of sales enablement, the essential, central feature of your tech stack is your CRM. That’s the hub of all your operations – from sales and onboarding right through to customer success.
So when you’re looking for new, effective sales enablement (SE) software, you need to make sure it’s native to your CRM technology for these five reasons.
Choosing a native Sales Enablement Software solution:
1) Decreases time to deployment
If your SE software is native to your technology stack, you shouldn’t need to worry about getting started with it. Installation should be quick and simple, and set-up (for your organization, each department and individual team members) should be hassle free.
A faster time to deployment ensures your business starts seeing the benefits from sales enablement immediately. It reduces the costs associated with deployment and builds a strong, positive first impression of your new software.
2) Increases adoption and usage
That first impression is vital when it comes to getting buy-in from your departments and their team members. A non-native software solution can bring with it all kinds of deployment and set-up problems, which will immediately turn sales reps, account managers and customer success teams off.
If the software you’re asking your staff to work with isn’t easy to learn and simple to use, then you’ll struggle to convince them to use it. They’ll stick with their current processes and tools.
By choosing SE software that’s native to your tech stack, your team will already know what to expect. They’ll quickly pick up the new software and start using it, increasing adoption and usage across the board.
3) Streamlines processes
When you’ve deployed a native software solution for your sales enablement strategy, you’ll find it’s far easier to integrate with your existing workflows and improve every stage of your operations.
With native SE software – like Data Dwell that’s native to Salesforce – you can adapt the processes and the platform directly to how your business operates. You can align workflows, map objects and set custom fields that directly correspond to your Salesforce set up, instantly saving time, money and administrative headaches.
Non-native software will often need lots of re-framing, renaming or re-jigging of processes to make sure they align. But native software streamlines them instantly. You can mirror organizational structures directly and use it to adapt your customer experience to exactly how you’d like to work – to the process that works best for your sales reps, your account managers, and most importantly – your customers.
4) Simplifies integrations
The chances are you’ll want your SE software to be a part of a larger set-up, integrating with various other elements of your CRM, from accounting apps like Xero to document sharing tools like SharePoint.
Software that’s native to your tech stack will instantly simplify integrations because you shouldn’t need to worry about them. You don’t need separate, third party integrations, because all your software is native to the application you’re working in.
You won’t need to worry about data latency, poor connections, API plug-ins or any other synching issues. All your data, all the information you need, will be contained within your technology stack – all within your organization’s CRM – available to share instantly, in real time.
5) Improves security
By eliminating the need for problematic integrations, you’ll also reduce your reliance on third parties – a huge benefit for a security-conscious organization. Any integrations are a potential weak point in your data security, and any third party with access to your information requires extra attention and extra safety checks.
Your organization is likely to already have strict protocols on data sharing, compliance and privacy laws. You will already have data protection procedures in place, to comply with GDPR and other national or international laws.
A native software solution keeps all your data stored in one central place. It reduces risk of data breaches and it makes any opt-out or information requests a lot easier to manage.
When your software is not native to your tech stack…
…You will experience problems and challenges. You’re likely to face expensive onboarding costs, as you adapt the third party setup and processes to your organizations. This takes a lot of time and effort, delaying deployment and decreasing the adoption rate of your new software.
You may also face ongoing issues and hidden costs, relating to integrations, data sharing, maintenance and connectivity. And your team may have to adapt to a whole new way of working, which will not go down well.
That’s why Native Sales Enablement Software is so important
Choosing SE software that’s native to your technology stack and to your CRM will support your organization as a whole. It supports managers and those working on the front line. It supports security teams, sales reps, customer success managers and admin staff.
It works for your business. It’s simpler, it’s faster and it’s more cost-effective – a real no brainer.
If you’re using Salesforce, why not look at our Salesforce-native sales enablement software to support your organization?
