Raise your hand if you’ve ever heard this proverb: “If you give a man a fish, you feed him for a day. If you teach a man to fish, you feed him for a lifetime.” Most of us have, and it makes sense. But it’s likely you’ve never considered how you might be teaching that person to fish. By hand? With a spear? With a pole? Some of those tools will better contribute to getting the job done more efficiently and with greater success. 

The point is: People need the right tools for the job you’ve asked them to do, and sales teams are no exception. 

Why Your Team Needs Sales Tools

Succeeding in sales is not an easy job. First, you need to find salespeople with the right personality traits: empathy, grit, and drive. But that will only get your team so far. For a true opportunity to succeed, they also need intimate knowledge of both their sales potential and their prospects and customers so they can hit every necessary touchpoint. And in order to do that, salespeople need sales tools. The tools include several different technologies such as customer relationship management (CRM), sales intelligence and prospecting, sales acceleration, and data integrations. Those who leverage these kinds of sales technologies outperform those who don’t. 

But what happens when salespeople can’t access the right sales tools because they’re not available? 

One of the top reasons salespeople leave an organization is because they were not given the best and latest tools for success. The newer incoming generations of sales professionals are incredibly tech-savvy and love having the newest and best technology at their fingertips. Not having those tools not only bogs down their productivity, but can also negatively impact morale and lead to turnover. 

But you also have to have the right tools in place. Anything that sucks valuable time away from actual selling gets an automatic black mark from salespeople. Research has found that sales teams can spend up to 65% of their time on “non-sales stuff.” So you not only need sales tools, you have to find the proper ones, or it could cost you: One survey found that 60% of sales organizations report a longer sales cycle due to a lack of proper tools. On the flip side, the overwhelming majority of sales pros agree that sales tools help them close more deals, which proves that it’s important to a) have sales tools, and b) have the right sales tools. 

Top Sales Tool: CRM

Perhaps one of the most important tools you can give your sales team is a CRM system that is built out as the single source of truth for customer data. Recent studies show that companies using a CRM experience an average sales increase of 29% and a productivity boost of up to 34%—not to mention the savings involved in maintaining your sales team and reducing turnover. 

If your organization is like the majority of companies, a CRM was—or will be—the first technology investment you made regarding sales tools. CRMs have evolved over the years into complex, multi-tiered support systems that provide features such as real-time updates, advanced lead scoring, and automation for repetitive tasks. Using a CRM has become crucial: A recent LinkedIn report found that 68% of those surveyed rated their CRM system as “very important” to closing deals. 

Extend Your CRM’s Benefits

Choosing the right CRM platform—for instance, NetSuite—is an important decision, but so is how you implement and leverage the solution. Even with a CRM in their arsenal of sales tools, nearly half of sales reps report still relying on more casual methods such as email or Excel to track and store customer information. This means you’ve spent all this time and money to provide your sales reps with a great arsenal of sales tools, and now you’ve got to ensure they use them to succeed. 

So if your sales team is keeping track of information in email, why not make an easy and intuitive connection between their inboxes and your NetSuite CRM records? 

Whether your team works in Microsoft Outlook or Gmail through Google Workspace, CloudExtend can extend (see what we did there?) the benefits to your NetSuite CRM without your team ever having to leave their inboxes. Need to update a customer record with a new title or phone number? You can do that right in your inbox with the CloudExtend app. Got an inquiry that you want to log as a new customer record? You can do that in your inbox with CloudExtend, too. Want to automatically attach anything in a specific email conversation or from a certain email address to a customer record so everyone has insight into what’s going on? You probably guessed it: CloudExtend lets you do that right from your inbox. 

Picking up a pattern? You provide your team with the sales tools they need to be successful, and we’ll help you extend those tools with powerful integration that lets them work where they’re most comfortable. 

Everybody wins. 

But don’t just take our word for it. Check it out yourself with a free trial. 

Struggling to get your teams to adopt your NetSuite CRM solution? We get that, too. Listen in on our upcoming webinar, How to Drive Better CRM Adoption, and dig into what’s behind the failure to adopt and how you can turn even your biggest resister into a regular CRM user. Register here.