Why tech adoption is key for sales success

Your tech stack isn’t just for decoration. The benefits sought and efficiencies promised are use-it-or-lose-it. Tech adoption is a lot easier said than done, but not implementing thorough, expansive, and competitive usage isn’t just wasting budget, you risk getting left behind. We’re breaking down the risk and giving you four must-know tips to boost adoption — and all the sweet, sweet benefits that come with. 

Sales tech adoption by the numbers

To better understand the risks of low adoption, we turned to the tech stack we know best: our own. Outreach is a comprehensive, end-to-end sales execution platform that tracks and enables millions of deals every year, giving us powerful data indicators of what’s working and what isn’t. While the Outreach platform is what we know best, these insights give us insight into any technology that promises efficiency.

Users who average three or more days of direct engagement with the Outreach app weekly (aka "high adopters") book 2.25 times more meetings and have 33% higher revenue attainment than “low adopters," users who average less than three days of direct engagement with Outreach app weekly. That translates to 70% more closed revenue each quarter on average.

More meetings, more opportunities, and more closed revenue — those are all the reasons we need to drive Outreach usage both internally and with our clients. And it works: Outreach has one of the highest adoption rates in the industry at 77%. The average adoption rate for sales tech is less than 30%. 

Best practices for driving adoption

Here’s how we encourage adoption on RevOps, sales, and SDR teams – even when it’s not Outreach:

1. Get sales leadership on board

Sales leadership can advocate for and embed your platform into the sales process as they set and drive expectations on the sales floor. Forget carrot versus stick, lead by example. Start by submitting forecasts through your sales execution platform, not in a spreadsheet or verbally during a manager's call. Managers will organically shift their own forecasting into the platform and drive adoption and engagement on their own teams. 

2. Align your coaching with the unique goals of each role

Sales platforms can be like going to see the wizard: everyone gets something different. Outreach was designed to support the entirety of a sales process across all of the Sales and RevOps functions. Start by arming each role with the single workflow that will have the biggest impact on their success, the rest will follow. In Outreach, we often find the workflows that are most impactful for hitting quotas are:

• For AEs: using smart views to manage their book of accounts
• For managers: leveraging reporting to understand AE and team performance and sales execution
• For SDR teams: adding prospects to multi-touch sequences to stay on top of their outreach

3. Create envy among non-adopters

Highlight the successes of people in your organization who have started using the platform. Celebrate how they are using the platform and the results they’ve achieved. The more those who are resistant to technology adoption see the impact, the more likely they are to try it out for themselves.

4. Create an enablement plan to keep adoption up

A failure to plan is a plan for failure. And there’s a reason. Ensure your teams continuously understand how to use the platform to help with their roles. Keep in mind that this training cannot be a one-and-done thing. Plan regular enablement sessions — quarterly or even monthly — highlighting best practices, ways to reduce admin time to spend more time selling, new features, and more.

At Outreach, this is just part of the customer experience: CSM-led training, live virtual training, office hours to answer questions, and more. We know how important it is for our customers to get the most out of their investment. Talk to your Outreach rep and create a game plan.

It starts with you

Adoption is scary. Learning a new tool is daunting. That learning curve takes time. Not everyone is totally comfortable with AI. Who knows what you’ll find when you look under the hood of your sales processes. But we’re entering a new era of tech, a new age of sales, and a new world of accountability. Adoption of your tech stack (Outreach or otherwise) will make all the difference.

We’re proud of our 77% user adoption rate. Outreach gives sellers and managers actionable customer insights throughout the selling process, powered by millions of data points. It leverages AI to provide real-time enablement and automate mundane and manual tasks that take away from selling. At the end of the day, Outreach’s platform is built around the workflows sales teams already have, which makes the product intuitive and easy to use.

Think about your sales tech stack and be critical of your team’s adoption. Your business demands it.