A few years ago, people managed intricate business procedures and reporting in email and spreadsheets. However, today there are numerous tools you can integrate into your GTM tech stack to offer your team support. With all the tools available, chances are high that you will find one or more tools that meet your needs.
Tech Mania or Paralysis
The significance of a well-structured technology ecosystem cannot be underestimated. Businesses can augment key systems, SEPs, MAPs, and CRMs, with other tools on the market to allow revenue-generating go-to-market teams to execute their tasks with ease. Today, numerous choices are available and choosing the right one can be difficult. With so many technological transformation around us it can be quite overwhelming. One one hand some businesses tend to throw new tech to the problem, on the other hand, some businesses cannot seem to make a decision. There are more than 150 sales tools on the market, so creating a structure to analyse new tools is critical to establishing a sustainable and scalable tech ecosystem that supports revenue teams and processes. Further, it also helps operations professionals maintain sanity. How can businesses know if and when they should adopt a new tool in their organisation?
How to Analyse a New Software Tool
You need a structured approach to firstly understand your business blueprint. This will help you understand how new technologies you plan to adopt will integrate into your stack and how they affect each other, or if they have similarities.
Evaluating your GTM Processes
How do you know you need a new tool for the GTM teams?
What is your current customer experience in their journey?
Do you observe market trends?
Do you struggle with poor tools in your current tech stack?
Before you even think about what tech to purchase, you should really first do a business process assessment, if you don't already have, of your buyer journey outlined in a flowchart format. If you don’t already have a use case catalogue for the business, then begin with a Google Doc or Sheet and list all the processes in your go-to-market firm. Consider layering your revenue operations. The first layer should be the customer journey followed by your business process and then the data flow and finally the tools or systems you have to support the inaugural three layers.
Understanding Your Business Processes
A collection of activities for your go-to-market team should be defined and documented. Your CPQ process or acquisition to on-boarding handover are examples of a GTM business process. Your sales motion is another process example. What inbound and outbound sales steps do you have in place? Did you know there are internal and external GTM processes, both of which are crucial when choosing tools? The mapping process can be challenging if you are doing it for the first time. However, it plays a huge role in tool analysis. You may choose a tool that supports your business processes with minimal struggle if you are lucky enough. But sometimes, you could struggle to ensure your business processes are ideal for the tool. Documentation is critical to the business process.
Understanding Your Data Flow
Most businesses forget that, when speaking of tools, you are also speaking about information, data, insights. What information is being captured in this tool and how you will extract (maybe through an integration with your CRM) is key to understand first. What is the current state of your data? If you are in a bad place, then often it is probably not the best time to get new tech in until you got a plan for how you are going to solve the issue.
This is probably the most challenging activity, but worth it once you have done it, as often any tech acquisition usually fails because the process of how to manage data collection, capture and how this is shared across the business is lacking.
Current Tech-Stack Audit
It is important to then first have a good overview of the tools you do have in place and how they are positioned against your blueprint. So, an audit of your existing technology stack in your company is imperative.
We created a simplified GTM Tech-Stack Audit Template for you to use as a starting point.
Market Research
Research helps you gather more details about the tool or potential tools you plan to implement in your company. This step should be fun and easy if you already follow the market. Online communities have independent slack channels dedicated to software and tools questions. This is where you should ask end-users questions about their experiences and use cases with the product.
Access a simplified Tech Vendor Assessment Template to get started!
Cost-Benefit Evaluation
This section is crucial if you want to buy in from others, specifically executive teams. According to Harvard Business Review, the cost-benefit analysis compares the estimated or projected benefits and costs affiliated with a project decision to establish whether it's sensible from a business outlook. If it makes sense, businesses should understand its implications for the organisation. The business process analysis step will be critical in this section, especially as you start highlighting your opportunities or benefits for this evaluation. There are numerous places to record this evaluation. However, you must capture the components to be tool agnostic. First, compare the current and the future state. This should incorporate the specific business processes, people utilising the tool, tools, cost, and integrations. Add your costs side by side for every tool to ensure users can see how it will stack up. Other factors to consider under this section include: is the tool new or a replacement? What costs are involved in its implementation? How long will the implementation process take? What will be the tool's positive or negative effects on upstream and downstream teams?
Recommendations
This is where you create your recommendation. You will determine whether the tool is worth your investment, and you will also have a structure and process to utilise when you analyse future technology stack changes.
Conclusion
The technology pool available for GTM teams is massive. There is a tool for everything, with all of them promising to boost the capacity of your go-to-market teams to generate more revenue. However, you must remember that the basis and key of your GTM operation are your business processes (and data management processes to ensure you can extract the right insights). You must assess your analysis structure, beginning with a business process assessment, current tech-stack audit, market research, cost-benefit examination, and recommendation. Besides saving your company some money, you will eliminate barriers because your systems will be designed to support your business processes.
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