The Problems of a Multi-Layered Go-To-Market Tech Stack
Insights Insights Everywhere, Not a Drop to Consume
TLDR: Too many siloed tools = too many disparate insights = more noise less signal = poor business performance, frustrated ops users, ops shelfware. Integrated RevOps stack with comprehensive RevOps insights can declutter the chaos and tune your tech stack for better business performance.
The go-to-market tech stack in today’s enterprise is abundant. Many may argue that it is bloated. Businesses now need to contend with a variety of systems for an assortment of tasks. A 2017 report from ChiefMartech indicated that the average enterprise was using 91 services just for marketing technology. While everyone’s core operational machinery includes CRM (Salesforce, Dynamics, Hubspot) and a marketing automation platform (Hubspot, Marketo, Pardot, Eloqua) most organizations will have a varied mix of other martech and sales ops tools including SEM/PPC, retargeting, ABM, chatbots, social media management, webinars, web content management, sales enablement, sales engagement, conversational intelligence and so on. But this abundance comes with downsides.
Visibility blindspots
Forrester Consulting recently released survey findings where 90% of revenue decision makers found the technology for revenue management and billing lacking. Among their top barriers was lack of strategic alignment across the business, time spent reconciling mismatched data between systems and a lack of integration between tools.
Unsurprisingly, using separate tools for different operational tasks creates information silos. Since each of these tools operate in isolation without being aware of the functioning of others, there are blindspots into critical functions and decision makers may find it hard to reconcile the operations of their individual departments with overall organizational goals. Individual revenue-drivers too work with their own perception of goals and success, and do not have access to the big picture.
Insight storm
A miscellany of tools inevitably leads to “alert fatigue”—a state where a surfeit of disparate insights from unintegrated tools becomes noise rather than information, making it impossible to prioritize and extract actionable insights from a sea of data.
For example, your marketing automation system may indicate that campaign A produces more MQLs than campaign B. But your SDR and sales engagement product (Outreach, Salesloft, etc.) may signal that MQLs from campaign A are less responsive than campaign B. Your Web CMS may show that a specific asset A was the least downloaded asset from a landing page. But those that did download asset A may have done so further down the sales cycle.
In a world of too many insights from too many tools, how do you sift through the haystack to find the important needles? How do you reconcile conflicting insights? And how do you piece them together to get to the larger story?
It’s no wonder the same Forrester study found that 73% employees in revenue-driving roles (who were not revenue decision-makers) found their tech stack frustrating. Gartner too calls out in their 2020 Marketing Technology Survey report that marketers are only making use of 58% of their martech stack.
RevOps: Making Revenue the North Star
What businesses need is a consolidated strategic approach—with tools that enhance visibility into their own systems by unearthing insights that allow functionally-segregated operational teams to align and drive towards the same goal.
RevOps is a holistic strategy that aligns marketing, sales, and customer success towards the singular goal of revenue optimization. Bringing multiple ops teams under a single decision maker (directly or virtually) and making them accountable to a common set of revenue-oriented KPIs is but the first step of the solution. It is also important to make sure the information and insights drawn from the various disparate tools underneath this function can be realigned towards this common set of revenue metrics.
RevOps Intelligence
Wouldn’t it be great if a layer of “RevOps intelligence” technology were available to bridge the gap between isolated operational tools and this end goal. While allowing the individual tools to operate unchanged in their area of specialization, these RevOps intelligence tools could close the information and understanding gap at the higher level. They could apply data transformation, analytics and AI to develop a single source of truth for the entire organization to draw on. They could reconcile across the underlying data sources and component-specific insights to arrive at a higher-level of wisdom on the state of RevOps and enable data-driven decision-making and effective story-telling for the organization.
With this new layer of intelligence tools, the RevOps owner could gain access to the relevant metrics and KPIs that enable data-driven decisions. This is true data-driven operational transformation. With these tools,
- RevOps leaders can automatically track revenue conversion end-to-end from lead to opportunity to order, and drill down, intuitively, by specific type of customer, lead persona, or touchpoint.
- Marketing can optimize marketing campaigns with the goal of maximizing ROI all the way to revenue.
- Sales can spot patterns and outliers in their pipeline, and leverage all go-to-market hands on deck to consistently close forecasted revenue.
- Customer success can unlock hidden revenue from existing customers and maximize customer lifetime value.
By strengthening organizational clarity around revenue-oriented insights and allowing teams to take ownership of revenue, RevOps intelligence tools can help you improve business performance, by accelerating pipeline, growing revenue, and improving employee productivity. Their meaningful, actionable insights can help marketing ops in identifying higher ROI campaigns for investment, sales ops with more accurate sales forecasting and sales teams with improved individual coaching and benchmarking of sales reps.
At the end of the day, RevOps intelligence tools will help businesses rediscover meaningful insights in an age of inundation and noise in the go-to-market tech stack — eliminating the clutter, and allowing businesses to grow without hindering themselves with silos and fragmentation.
BigLittle Is Helping Empower The New RevOps
At BigLittle, we are helping define and build this future of RevOps. We are the Intelligence and Orchestration layer for RevOps teams and can track and triage all revenue processes end-to-end across marketing, sales and customer success operations. By working with and at a level above the operational tools, we can help RevOps teams to avoid alert fatigue and insight storms by streamlining revenue processes across sales, marketing, and customer success.
Get in touch with us to know more.
