Considering this year saw backyard castles manufactured with concrete and 3D printers, it’s hard not to acknowledge that the era of automation is upon us. But, with that being said, not everything nowadays can be accomplished by computers; especially in the industry of sales, it’s become even more important to interact and approach your customers and leads from a perspective that highlights your humanity. You may work for a corporation, but you are not a corporation, and neither are your clients. As Bryan Kramer says, “There is no more B2B or B2C. It’s human to human.”

So, while plenty of automation tools certainly have their place in the sales marketplace, it’s necessary not to go overboard while using them. Creating workflows to save you time while your leads travel through the sales funnel is great, but at the end of the day, human interaction can never truly be replaced. As the industry continues to evolve, we wanted to know what tools local sales leaders and clients alike have begun using throughout 2016.
 

Here’s what they had to say:

Smart Rooms, from Journey Sales. Smart Rooms are a private virtual experience for collaborative discovery, evaluation, and decision-making. It supports the way customers engage today with a personalized customer journey of content, discussions, and people. It’s integrated natively to Salesforce leveraging existing sales processes and data. It allows a sales person to not only share insight, but have their customers share the experience with others in their company in a way a seller could never do directly.

– Tibor Shanto, Principle at Renbor Sales Solutions Inc, @TiborShanto

Using some Design Thinking methodologies which teaches you to understand the problems from a position of empathy.

– Peter Gould, Head of Strategic Partnerships at Communitech, @PeterGould

We added SalesLoft this year – enabling my business development team to stay organized, be persistent with personalization at scale, while tracking multi channel outreach effectiveness; social, phone, and email.

– Brian Lipp, VP of Sales at Sales for Life, @lipp_brian

HubSpot Sales PRO has been great. Also, we added Drift to our homepage to get us closer to our customers. It allows us to answer real time questions.

– Kim Walsh, Head of Enterprise Sales at HubSpot, @KimWalsh

LinkedIn Sales Navigator, in support of the continued evolution towards social selling.

– Tim Davison, Vice President, Enterprise Client Development at Morneau Shepell, @davison_tim

We added SalesLoft to our sales stack to manage our business development team’s entire sales engagement process. From creating personalized prospecting cadences, to accurately recording activity in Salesforce, to A/B testing email templates, SalesLoft helps us fine tune our sales development process to squeeze the most value out of our efforts.

– Adam Brophy, Manager, Business Development at Uberflip, @AdamBrophy7

Our teams focused on efficiency of the current tools in the sales stack. Our sales stack includes; Salesforce.com, InsideSales.com, LinkedIn and Pardot. This year we focused on optimizing the use of our current systems and tools.

– Marlene Keay, Senior Manager, Business Development at Virtual Causeway, @marlenekeay

One of the new tools that we have been able to leverage in 2016 is HubSpot Marketing (formerly LeadIn). It provides useful data for the sales team on how the prospect entered your site, what pages they visited, and it can also keep track of future visits. This is helpful for sales people to understand the buyers journey.

– Mark Elliott, Co-owner of Venture Accelerator Partners, @markeelliott 

If you haven’t already, check our two other posts in this year’s expert series blog – The Experts: Marketing Tactics that Grew in Importance and The Experts: New Marketing Tools of 2016.