B2B Sales has changed, can your CRM keep up?

CRM systems are often the last place you look for truth in information. They can be bloated “big brother” governance tools that provide little for what you put into them. The whole name “CRM” is also a misnomer. A more accurate description would be “Prospect Relationship Management”. 

But it doesn’t need to be that way, especially if you are a B2B technology company. Our industry is often sales led, with complex buying processes, to multiple buyers, selling a thing you can’t touch. Sales cycles are long and expensive, they usually involve multiple decision makers – the average B2B buying group can consist of 6 to 10 decision-makers – and on average, you lose more deals than you win. But most notably, the sale is the beginning of a long journey for the customer, but usually the last thing the CRM system ever records. 

That last point is why we built TekStack.  At its heart, it’s what a CRM platform should be, built on Microsoft Cloud technology giving our customers a fully integrated tool that works with Outlook, Teams, SharePoint, OneNote, Word, Excel, and PowerBI. Here are my 10 most favorite things that we’ve built into TekStack’s CRM, and why I think they will make a big difference in your sales success. 

#1: TekStack’s approach to B2B Demand Waterfall 

If you are still using a Leads to Opportunity process, you are stuck in 2012. The concept of MQLs and SQLs were created back in 2006 by Sirius Decisions and updated in 2012. But the industry still tosses terms like MQL and SQL around like they are relevant. I promise you; they are not. In fact, this process is creating bad (duplicate) data, and allowing you to make bad business decisions. The new version of this is now called B2B Demand Waterfall. And its pretty fantastic, especially how we baked it in with TekStack. I can’t go through all the logic in this blog but here are the highlights: 

• Track account stage using engagement scoring 
• Move prospect accounts to pipeline when an opportunity is created 
• Move prospect accounts to Customer and ‘implement’ stage when an opportunity is won 
• Move accounts back to ReProspect and ‘engaged’ stage when opportunity is lost 

• Move customer accounts to ‘expand’ stage when they go-live 
• Move customer accounts to ‘advocate’ stage when they have a promoter NPS score. 

This approach will change how you target accounts, and now you segment existing customer accounts. All the logic is fully baked in, including a handy little visual on the account record. 

#2: Embedded Outbound Sequencing 

The most cost-effective way of creating and capturing demand for your business is through outbound sequencing. This isn’t simply giving sellers an email machine. Churning out more emails isn’t the answer, coordinating thoughtful well-written, well-choreographed touch points, across multiple channels is. But sellers struggle to manage 100s or 1000s of accounts in this way. They also often fail to hit the contacts in these accounts enough times in the correct order and cadence. Sequencing gives them the playbook and all they need to do is do the work. Yes, you could invest in Outreach or SalesLoft, great tools, but here is why I love our embedded tool: 

• TekStack connects directly to the seller’s Outlook for high inbox send rates. Our inbox send rates are over 95% because our outbound sequencing piggy backs off the DMARC, DKIM, and SPF configuration that your IT team has already setup. 
• It’s fully baked into TekStack. One contact database is maintained, versus having multiple tools and multiple systems that need to be synced. This is particularly challenging when you also combine marketing automation. 
• You only license one tool, not multiple tools on top of one another, as is often the case, e.g. Salesforce + Outreach. 
• You can use it for customer success playbooks as well. Because you don’t need to license everyone in your company, it’s automatically available to all users. 

#4: Fully Integrated Marketing Automation 

I know marketing teams like to have full control and separation of their marketing stack. However, there is a real power in having your marketing automation on the same database as sales.  Sales will have full visibility of all marketing activity without having to license some clunky plugin that costs a fortune. Marketing and Sales needs to work together and have a seamless handoff. TekStack achieves this with our friends from ClickDimensions. Obviously, the basics like form fills, scoring, email marketing are there, but here are the things I love about this integration: 

• See all things a contact has ever done. Events, page visits, email engagement, form fills. All of it fully visible to the seller, without the need for expensive licensing that allows the seller to see the data (cough cough, Marketo, Pardot, HubSpot). 
• One database means that as sellers add contacts, the contact database is there and ready to go for marketing to engage (unlike Marketo or Pardot which are separate databases). 
• One source of truth also ensures that marketing doesn’t step on contacts actively engaged in a deal, or accidently send prospect communication to a customer. 
• First and Last touch attribution. In addition, you can see all the middle points of attribution to get the full story on an account. Combined with our Account Stages, you can see how long it takes an account to go from zero engagement to pipeline, and what percentage go from prioritized to pipeline.  

• Campaign Management. Because everything is in one system, marketing can see all the opportunities attributed to a campaign, and how many of those were won to get a real ROI on spending.  

#5: Customer 360 

But actually for real. You can see everything about the customer in one spot: 

• Activity history – all emails to all contacts across all your teammates in the company 
• Subscriptions – what they own, purchase history, renewal dates, what price they bought, etc. 

• Invoices – invoice history, invoice status 
• Cases – support tickets, status, resolution 
• Projects – how did the projects go, are they complete? 
• Health including NPS Scores 
• And of course, all the other basic stuff like contacts and opportunities 

Even better, TekStack tracks ARR for each customer and stores LTV of the customer because it has all the invoices that were generated for the customer across software and services. You can compare customer segment by ARR. Example, 80% of my ARR is with my Leader segment which is 20% of my customers. 

#6: Managing Documents & Collaborating with the team 

As a Microsoft app, TekStack is fully integrated into Microsoft Teams. We’ve pre-built all the important notifications, so you don’t need another product like Troops to add to your stack. But we go much further than notifications. For example, when an account reaches a defined stage (ex. Prioritized Stage), we automatically create a Team, and the seller can invite other people into the team. From the team you can collaborate, share files, add notes to OneNote. And those files and OneNote folders are also available from within TekStack on the account record. It’s a beautiful thing. 

#7: Next level Opportunity Management 

Managing opportunities is a basic capability of any CRM. But I’ve often felt that the tools lacked the sophistication that B2B tech companies often need, for things such as subscription based products, services, and multi-year deals. These are not well managed by CRM tools out of the box. Here is what we did that is special: 

• Track subscription-based products so you can calculate ARR and multi-year deals. 
• Services-based products that have one-time fees, and create a new on-boarding project automatically when the deal is won. 
• Velocity metrics, like how many times your main contact has emailed in the past month. This engagement statistic is all-telling.  
• Track how many days an opportunity is in each stage so over time you can see where deals stall. 

• Track which stage an opportunity is lost so you can focus your sales coaching and processes. 
• Generate a quote document in seconds from one click of the button. No need for a separate CPQ too. 

#8: Built in Revenue Operations 

TekStack is a fully featured RevOps platform. On the close of an opportunity, your deal desk can review and generate the order. Because we use Opportunity products, your sellers aren’t making up products or pricing on the fly. The order will move the prospect to a customer, and create subscription records. This will tell everyone which products the customer owns, what term, what price, and when the renewal is up. Renewal processes are automatic. TekStack will automatically create renewal opportunities a pre-defined number of days before the end date of the subscription. Invoices can be automatically generated based on invoice preference; monthly, quarterly, annual, or in-advance in the case of multi year deals. 

#9: Reporting 

Because we only deal with one industry, we can take the time to pre-build reports with metrics that are relevant to the B2B technology industry. Contracted ARR, Net Retention, Gross Retention, Win Rate, Funnel Conversion, Funnel Velocity; there are 100s of metrics that come out of our pre-built reports. So no need to build them yourself, or acquire additional tools to get this information into your fingertips. The best part is that you are board ready every day, not just four days out of the year. 

#10: Our Cost 

I’ve had to make tough budget decisions in the past and it always frustrated me to see this big operating expense tied into a technology stack that didn’t provide the value it should have. It’s likely the investment you are making in your marketing automation alone would cover TekStack’s marketing, outbound sequencing, CRM, PSA, and invoicing functionality combined. Imagine what your business could do with diverted costs. Put it directly to the bottom line, add a couple sellers, add a couple developers, spend more in marketing. Sounds a lot better than spending a bunch of money on tools that don’t produce value, doesn’t it? 

There are even more features that make TekStack a great partner to help businesses scale. Interested to find out how TekStack can help fulfill your company’s destiny? Then get in touch!