Effective tech stack management can be a game changer for your company’s go-to-market teams. When you find a new tool that will improve workflows, data accuracy, and collaboration, everyone benefits. But getting your leadership to give the green light can be a challenge.
Leaders are still wrapping their minds around how to support ops teams, so they need some convincing to understand the value of the tools that you want to use. Here’s how to make your case and show them that you’re not just looking for another shiny object to play with.
Clearly articulate the problems new tech will solve.
Define the two or three problems that the tech will solve for you. Now, why are those important for you to be successful in your role? Remind leadership that your role is responsible for implementing the processes they expect other teams to follow. If your department isn’t enabled to set up those processes, the revenue engine slows down.
Oftentimes, leaders misunderstand or downplay the causes of data quality issues, making it harder to keep tech debt in check. The more that tech debt accumulates, the harder it is to correct in the future. Show how purchasing a new tool will help you address the sources or tech debt and manage it effectively on an ongoing basis.
Tie it to your boss’ goals.
Revenue leaders are under immense pressure to meet goals for revenue, productivity, and customer retention. Show how new tech will help improve their job performance.
Here’s a few examples of goals you can use to support your purchase decisions.
Goal: Increase revenue and productivity. Investing in operations has proven to increase sales productivity by 10-20%, allowing the sales team to focus more time on engaging with prospects and closing new business, instead of hunting down data or performing manual tasks.
Goal: Increase MQLs and SQLs. Better data quality enables better lead segmentation and routing. With accurate data, you can engage leads with the right messaging and timing for both outbound and inbound efforts.
Goal: Shift to virtual selling. Buyers like the digital buying experience. Operations is responsible for standing up the processes and tech needed to ensure that virtual selling is possible. Show leadership how important it is for those tools to work together to quickly build a scalable virtual selling operation.
Goal: Improve customer retention and upselling. Customers need to be engaged and nurtured from the time they make their purchase. Pulling that off requires a collaborative effort from customer success, sales, and marketing, and getting their systems and processes to work together requires continuous change management. Any tool that helps you manage complexities across the entire go-to-market engine will impact revenue, including new sales, retention, and upsell.
By speaking to their goals, you’re not just asking for a tool that makes your job easier, you’re providing a solution that makes your boss’ life easier too.
Demonstrate the urgency.
Depending on your company’s discretionary spend levels, you may have to get signoff from multiple layers of leadership and they don’t always understand the urgency or purpose of buying a new tool. Make it tangible for them by tying the tech purchase to an upcoming project.
Show how the project can go off track without it, and demonstrate how it will impact future work, too. That puts the onus on the stakeholders to remove roadblocks and keep the purchase process moving.
Help your salesperson help you.
When you’ve found tech that you like and made it past the budget gatekeepers, the last thing you want is to be hampered by surprise red tape. Informing your salesperson about the process up front can keep the buying process on track.
Speak to your colleagues about their experience buying technology with a similar cost. Find out if your company requires IT or security reviews, how long they take, and what information they require. The salesperson can proactively help you address questions or process concerns that may come up.
If you have a procurement team, you need to let your salesperson know up front. They often are responsible for negotiating the cost of the contract. If you ask for a discount prior to them getting involved, there may not be enough margin left to work with.
Explain the risks of not making the purchase.
Outline the impact of failing to make the purchase. Show how inefficiencies and poor data quality will ripple throughout the department. Without the right tech stack, sales and marketing teams create their own workarounds and silos. As time goes on, they become further entrenched and it’s harder to make corrections or improvements in the future.
Ultimately, it pays off to drive efficiencies among all of your customer-facing teams. High-performing companies invest 1.5 to 2.0X more in sales operations resources than their peers. The investment is driven by the goal to integrate all customer-facing teams to make the customer experience seamless.
As you consider tools that help you break down silos and give operations confidence in the data and systems they use, we can help. Sonar helps operations run more seamlessly by making it easy to identify and support process, communication, and documentation.Request a demo to learn more.