RevOps Co-op Weekly #6 - GTM tech stack mistakes to avoid, enterprise edition
Enterprise companies have process maturity and larger budgets on their side, but they're prone to clinging onto inefficient processes and overlooking new, more innovative technology.
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8 GTM Tech Stack Mistakes to Avoid - Enterprise Edition
If you’ve been following our series on go-to-market technology stack do’s and don’t, you’ll notice there are some themes. The universal truths that carry across startup, growth, and enterprise organizations are:
Mismatched data definitions across departments lead to chaos
Unaligned goals across departments lead to chaos
Making a system difficult to use leads to lower adoption (which we could argue leads to chaos due to lack of data collection)
That being said, there are variations in the source of the problem. Startups are finding their way by inventing processes, system workflows, and frequently changing systems according to what fits their need (and what they can afford). Growth companies are working through growing pains by refining processes, fixing configuration that was often meant to be temporary, and building a more sustainable data strategy.
Enterprise companies have process maturity and larger budgets on their side. That said, they are prone to clinging onto inefficient processes because “that’s how it’s always been done” and overlooking smaller, more innovative vendors by adopting systems their experienced employees have already used.
Companies that have innovative RevOps technology professionals willing to think outside of the box and constantly challenge the status quo are likely to adapt quickly to market changes.
Don’t Forget: Garbage in, Garbage out (GIGO) Is Real
There are some great marketing attribution, sales forecasting, and customer engagement tools out there. One of the biggest missteps we see in larger organizations is the assumption that a spendy tool will bolt onto existing technology and spit out better information than you were getting on your own.
This is only true if you’ve invested in a data management tool that deduplicates, merges, and automatically associates your data. You’ll also need to integrate all relevant tools, which means translating data that uses different identifiers into a universal language. This takes a lot of time and skill, but it’s the only way you’ll get insights rather than misleading metrics.
Do Think Hard Before Making Your CRM the Single Source of Truth
You can do a lot with a CRM, and it will give you a lot of great information (provided adoption is good). However, it doesn’t make sense to integrate every field of every system with your CRM. Your sales team won’t care how much digital ad spend goes into a given campaign. Your customer success team won’t care whether a promotional item was delivered on time.
Smaller organizations may force all users to be in one system and keep everything in a single location. Even they won’t typically integrate LinkedIn data or Google analytics information.
The easier you make your CRM to use, the better your data will be in the end.
Do Standardize Your Data Definitions!
As we mentioned above, inconsistent data definitions can cause major issues. This was my major motivation for embracing a move to Revenue Operations after years in sales, marketing, and customer success organizations.
Creating a standardized definition and centralized reporting system frees analysts from the burden of proving their superiors right and frees them up to focus on adding strategic value. They can spot patterns and dig into why something may be happening, and even come to the table with potential solutions.
Don’t Outsource All of Your Reporting Capabilities
Business Intelligence teams are amazing, but it’s not possible for everyone to be an expert in everything. The BI team should either allocate a resource dedicated to your department to learn the business processes and context or allow an analyst on your team to dig into the data. Preferably the latter due to ad hoc needs with a quick turnaround time.
Don’t Forget: Automation Doesn’t Always Solve Problems
Usability, management support, and compensation are the three pillars of system adoption. Without adoption, your data has too many gaps to be useful. If pushing them into using a single system doesn’t work, leadership should either decide to find a tool that will be adopted or allow multiple points of integration (for example, Outreach integrated with Salesforce and an email plugin to catch interactions not logged in Outreach).
Don’t Let Operations Impede Customer Satisfaction
During launch meetings, our most intense debates were about making our internal processes easier versus streamlining the customer's experience.
It’s tempting to require a great deal of information to progress an order or to push implementation earlier in the sales cycle. Is it better for the person doing the information to gather the data? Will something be lost in translation? Will the implementation specialist just have to go back and ask more questions?
Always weigh customer satisfaction more heavily than internal efficiency. You may still opt to streamline your process, but the tradeoff has to be worth it.
Do Know When to Hold ‘Em and When to Fold ‘Em
A lot goes into making a system scale with the business. It can take a great deal of personal innovation and investment. Which can make it difficult to see when it’s time to throw out your legacy system and make an upgrade.
The pain of switching systems is pretty steep, but if adoption is dropping off and you’re hearing of other systems making traction in the market, it’s worth investigating your options.
When it comes to marketing automation platforms, there are a few that function pretty similarly. If the rates are climbing and your existing system is a bit of a mess (let’s say the existing platform doesn’t allow you to delete custom fields and you’ve had it several years), it may be worth making a change.
Do Remember: Bigger Isn’t Always Better
Being part of a large company makes it easier to see how large organizations get complacent. If they have a large deal of market share and what they’re doing is profitable, it’s easier to stay the course than make changes that may or may not go over well with the existing customer base.
The same can be said of large technology vendors. While some are known for continuously innovating, it’s not the general rule. Smaller vendors can be scrappy and are more willing to work with companies (let’s be honest, especially large companies) to meet their unique requirements.
🐦 This week in #RevOps Twitter
#Truth 💯
Salesforce “launches” Revenue Cloud…or should we say renamed CPQ?
Good reminder - speed is key…how quick is your lead response time? 🏎
📚 Your curated #RevOps reading list
Revenue operations vs. sales operations - what’s the difference?
Many companies already have a sales operations team that is responsible for increasing efficiency within the sales department, but not all companies may be familiar with revenue operations (RevOps). Revenue operations could drive efficiency and revenue growth across the entire company.
The main difference is that sales operations primarily focuses on sales, while revenue operations focuses on multiple functions, such as finance, marketing, sales and customer service. When a company incorporates revenue operations, the sales team can focus on sales, while the revenue operations team can perform the behind-the-scenes work of collecting and handling data.
The 2021 Lead Generation Prospecting Strategy for RevOps
So what are the best channels to identify B2B leads in 2021? As you probably know, in B2B, referrals are the preferred channel for generating leads. Some favorites include your prospects industry associations, industry directories of suppliers and B2B industry supplier databases, SEO optimized educational content combined with smart lead generation paid campaigns. This also needs to take into account the average cost per lead for different B2B marketing channels.
For example, consider industry associations to get to a targeted member by asking for an introduction. Getting introductions through your LinkedIn connections guarantees a 30% positive reply rate and a 3 to 4 times higher win rate. Any channel can work if you know how to connect and do it in a smart way which is usually much simpler than you believe.
Is your lead follow up working? An experiment by Workato
We all do it…follow up with leads…but how do we know if it’s working? Workato tested the lead follow up strategies of 114 companies, and learned that:
Less than 1% of companies sent a personalized email within 5 minutes
Companies in the Sales industry responded the quickest
Even Lead Routing Tools don't hit the 5 minute mark
Companies using chatbots performed better
Funl is an operating system for your GTM team that provides end-to-end, full funnel analytics and insights that keep marketing, sales and customer success teams aligned and working seamlessly together.