The Sales Tool Checklist
“We see teams overstocked with sales tools,” says Brisk’s CEO Hampus Jakobsson. “We’re all emotional shoppers so I think it’s good to have a checklist to make sure you’re making decisions the right way.”
1. Do you actually have a problem?
“It seems obvious but we see people buying tools before they have the problem,” says Hampus. “We bought a calendar-syncing tool which was super powerful and by the time we finally got it up and running I couldn’t remember what the problem was that it solved for us.” If you don’t have a concrete problem, you don’t need a new tool.
2. Does this tool help with marketing or forecasting?
Does the tool gather gather data which allows you to run better marketing campaigns or close a lead faster? This isn’t a priority for most sales reps, and sometimes sales managers, but it should be for the company as a whole.
3. Does this sales tool save reps several hours a week?
Most sales managers want to coach people and work on sales strategy, not remind reps to update their data in Salesforce. So if a tool can either automate some sales admin or otherwise sales reps hours a week, it’s worth buying.
4. Does this tool prompt reps to take action?
The information given by a tool should be easily translatable into action. For example, if the tool shows that you have a closing opportunity this month, you have 3 weeks left and you haven’t booked a meeting with them, you should book a meeting.
5. Does this tool reinforce bad habits?
One of Hampus’s favorite tools is TabSnooze, which lets you schedule tabs to reopen at a particular time when you are ready to deal with them. Unfortunately, he tends to use it as a proxy for a to do list. “The problem is, if I were doing this right, I would put it in my to-do list and write the next action,” says Hampus. “Now I just TabSnooze and it reinforces my bad behavior, but I love it.”
Listen to James Carbery’s full interview with Hampus about the checklist in this great podcast or read his blogpost.
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