2022 State of SalesTech: Driving Adoption of Critical Operational Tools

A few weeks ago, SBI Research shared a chart highlighting the reasons why top-performing SalesTech is falling short of desired outcomes after the investment. This has been a significant pain point facing revenue growth leaders and is magnified by the lack of adoption of critical tools. Based on a survey of nearly 100 B2B companies, this week’s chart displays a detailed view of what the typical SalesTech stack looks like and how companies perceive the tools in which they’ve invested.

22 solution categories are in use by more than 75% of the surveyed companies and increasing as companies continue to add to their technology, but one of the many questions remains: How do we maximize the use of critical tools currently in place?

As seen in the chart, the larger red bubbles represent the major opportunities for companies to optimize their current tools. Those bubbles should sound off the alarm bells as companies deem these tools as critical but they are not being adopted. These include tools in Content Management, Contract Proposals, and Collaboration/Knowledge Sharing.

Sales Leaders' Evaluation of Tools in Use

n=89 B2B companies

In looking at the lower importance tools, the small bubbles, companies can perhaps question if they are unimportant because they've just been installed and the organization is still learning how to use them, or are they underused because they need to be evaluated. The small bubbles can help you indicate if your team should continue to use these tools or if you should invest elsewhere.

What you can do now to improve adoption of an underleveraged solution:

• Pinpoint where you have critical tools to your day-to-day and where there's room to unlock additional capability.
• Check if your sellers are motivated or enabled to use the tools with direct user feedback. Take time to understand what sellers have a great experience using and where they struggle.
• Use seller feedback to evaluate the continuation of investment in some of those tools that sellers don't like using. Weigh the pros and cons relative to potential impact to the business.

How to read the chart:

• This visual reflects the proportion of companies using each type of tool
  • Dark blue means more than ¾ of companies use it
  • Lightest blue is less than half
• Size of bubble correlates to the importance of Sales’ day-to-day operations
• Color of the bubble related to adoption
  • Red low
  • Yellow medium
  • Green high