As CEO of InsightSquared, I am extremely excited to share that Mediafly, the leader in sales enablement, is acquiring InsightSquared, creating a world-class revenue intelligence and enablement experience for B2B teams. Having spent three decades in sales and marketing leadership roles and been fortunate to witness several significant disruptions driven by technology, I am convinced of three things: We are on the cusp of advancements that will change the game within the revenue functions of B2B companies. Activity and engagement analytics are the keys to assessing the health of a deal and the strength of the overall pipeline. There will…
Want to grow revenue faster? RevOps. Want to speed deal cycles? RevOps. Want to improve rep effectiveness? RevOps.
Let’s face it, RevOps is “the answer” to many of the top challenges B2B organizations face today. But are you set up for success?
Whether you are building a RevOps function from scratch or scaling your RevOps team, you may find yourself in the difficult position of navigating the vast landscape of 7,040 marketing tech and 950 sales tech solutions to build the perfect RevOps tech stack.
Watch the video Is Your Tech Stack Driving You To Revenue Operations?
The truth is, there’s no such thing as the “perfect” RevOps tech stack. As your RevOps function evolves through different levels of maturity, your tech stack needs to adapt accordingly to accommodate those changes.
It doesn’t help that many of those 8,000 products are point solutions, which means they address only one of your problems. It reminds me of what happens when you put a band-aid on an injury. You are back up running quickly, but only until the band-aid rips. Similarly, your point solution addresses one challenge but then often hits another roadblock requiring a different solution. Before you realize it, your tech stack has turned into a wobbly Jenga tower: off-balance and easily-toppled. So how do you know it’s time to pull the plug and do a restructure?
Signs your tech stack is misaligned and needs a revamp
- You have trouble finding your data. Your reps either spend hours looking for a specific piece of data, or cannot access the data needed because it’s under a different team’s management.
- You keep adding point solutions, which become ineffective as soon as a new problem arises
- You have siloed tools, with sales, marketing and customer each maintaining their own separate tech stack.
- You don’t have a defined review process, and each team decides on its own which plug to pull at what time (likely never!) There might be duplicates in purpose or functionality are possible.
How to turn your RevOps tech stack from wobbly to world-class?
When you think about your RevOps stack, focus on the foundation, while ensuring there’s the agility to evolve as your function grows. Your tech stack needs to be grounded by the same pillars of a successful RevOps function: data, insights, action and optimization. And keep in mind the rule of thumb in building a RevOps tech stack: you’re building to scale.
1. Data is the foundation. Data is the foundation of RevOps, making data capture the focal point of successful RevOps tech stack. One of the top concerns for RevOps leaders is the lack of visibility: only 25% of managers trust the data in their CRM. This means all the decision reps, managers and leaders make is based on limited—very limited—information that is not shared across the funnel.
The priority of a RevOps tech stack, therefore, is to ensure the undisrupted flow of ALL data across function, starting with Activity Data, which is the number one indicator of sales performance.
The issue is most companies have only 10% of their activity data—even those companies that have mandated data entry from reps or employed data capturing methods like sending to an email alias. Manual entry is taxing labor for reps, and whatever methods you are employing is subject to data bias. To capture the remaining critical 90%, you’ll want automated data capturing.
2. Turn data into actionable insights. Not all activity data is created equal. Having the right data at the right time brings you the agility to assess risks, coach reps, make adjustments at the moment. High-quality data even helps you look beyond funnel progression and goal mapping to correlate activity to outcome.
When building your tech stack, it’s important to assess whether your tech is capable of turning data into actionable insights. Machine learning is a powerful tool available to RevOps professionals today to make sure they have the RIGHT data that can propel their revenue growth without adding more point solutions to their tech stack.
AI-powered recommended Actions can put activity data into context, identify what reps are doing and what step is missing to propose the next best action to move a deal forward. With that, managers can spend their quality time coaching reps, discovering best practices and replicate changes cross-functionally to drive process improvement.
3. Not every problem requires an immediate solution. Good technology does not fix broken processes. It does not fix bad implementation, either. When a roadblock appears in your process, refer back to the RevOps maturity framework to find out which stage is not working properly. You’d be surprised how many point solutions you can get rid of working on the pillars of your RevOps function.
An overly-extended tech stack not only fragments your data but also makes it harder for cross-functional teams to navigate and communicate with one another. Resist the urge to jump to solving the problem by adding a new tool. Take a step back, look at your RevOps journey and identify the cause, not the symptoms of your problem. That’s how you can build and maintain a healthy, scalable RevOps tech stack.
You can find more advice and best practices in building and maintaining a RevOps tech stack from our Ramp panel discussion, Is Your Tech Stack Driving You To Revenue Operations? Watch the video here!
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