For more than a decade now, we’ve been watching a tidal wave of sales technologies hit the market. Most of these tools are best-of-breed, designed to solve singular problems with a targeted feature suite. On the surface, this approach makes logical sense: if a software is dedicated to a single function, it’s more likely to do the job well. But as it turns out, specialization doesn’t always spell success.
For a long time, sales leadership has adopted a “just one more” mentality. Just one more tool, just one more action, and then we’ll be perfectly positioned to succeed. But this “just one more” mentality has ended up introducing several new steps that have tanked seller productivity over time.
Perhaps you’ve heard of the toggle tax – the mental burden incurred as we switch between platforms. Jumping from app to app, from tool to tool — it takes a cognitive toll, and the more we do it, the more we’re shunted off track. While best-of-breed solutions often offer more bells and whistles, are all those features really worth it when you consider the friction caused by just one more addition to your daily tech stack?
Time is the most precious resource sellers have today. You can’t afford to have them waste energy and precious time toggling between applications. Tech consolidation, giving them one place to work, is the answer.
The Dangers of a Dispersed Tech Stack
According to our research, 75% of organizations prioritize vendors who offer a suite of multiple products, and 70% prefer vendors that provide a single set of revenue data. Here’s why they’re consolidating their technologies in droves.
- Death by Data Silos If all of your data is sitting in different tools, it’s not working together to paint a complete picture of your buyer. As we previously shared, scattered data leads to misaligned teams, making it extremely difficult to collaborate towards a common goal. And the bigger your tech stack, the harder it becomes to collect this precious revenue data in one place.
- Rampant Inefficiencies
Sellers simply have too much to do along the path to closing a deal. If you want them to close more deals, you’ll need to find ways to eliminate – or at least reduce – the amount of friction in their day-to-day workflows. Each time a seller needs to switch between tools, there’s a cognitive toll and tax on their time. Before you introduce another tool to their process you must determine if the expected outcomes outweigh the added time. - Misalignment Across Revenue Teams
Beyond siloed data, sales tech sprawl can sabotage your revenue enablement strategy. With revenue enablement, all of your customer-facing teams should be working together to provide a consistent and valuable experience to your customers. To achieve this, your teams need to be operating from a single source of truth – for their content, for their data, and for their understanding of the customer — and that’s much easier to accomplish when they’re all working out of the same platform.
Why Less Really is More: The Benefits of Consolidation
As the scope of enablement expands from simply supporting sales to empowering all go-to-market teams, there are many jobs to be done and functions that now fall under this purview. From content management to revenue intelligence to conversation intelligence to coaching to value selling to training and more — it’s not hard to see why revenue tech stacks are prone to sprawl.
But when you factor in both the immediate and large scale impacts of sales tool sprawl, there is a clear inverse correlation between tech stack size and productivity.
According to our research, more than half of the organizations we surveyed (59%) are actively trying to consolidate their sales tech stacks. And when you dig into the opinions of our high-performers, we can begin to see why. More than half of high-performers (57%) said they see benefits in taking a platform approach to their sales technology. Fifty-one percent of high-performers said they want a unified set of buyer and seller activity data and 43% of them said they want to maximize their team’s efficiency.
Progressive sales leaders are starting to understand this inverse relationship between tech stack size and rep productivity and are actively looking for ways to slim down the amount of revenue tools. Consolidating your revenue tech stack can provide immense benefits, such as enhancing your team’s efficiency, reducing data silos, and empowering revenue teams to more effectively navigate today’s ever-changing sales cycles.
Now is the Time: Evaluate Your Revenue Tech Stack
Now is the time to take stock of the revenue tools in your stack and build a strategy for consolidation. Here are some points to consider as you go through the process, and some questions you should be asking yourself along the way.
Step 1
Take inventory of every tool in your current stack, how much you pay for it, the function it performs, and its impact on the customer lifecycle.
Step 2
Once you’ve outlined the scope of your revenue tech stack, evaluate the performance of each tool. Is each tool driving the expected outcome? How are these outcomes measured? Can you tie the tool directly to key sales metrics like win rates, frontline productivity, and deal velocity?
Step 3
Identify areas of overlap and potential impacts of consolidation. Do you have multiple tools that perform the same function? What would be the impact of removing one or more of those tools? Look for ways to improve processes, eliminate redundancies, make your frontlines teams more productive, and provide a smoother experience for customers.
Step 4
Let the consolidation begin! Build a roadmap of which tools you plan to offload and get ahead of upcoming contract renewals.
By streamlining your tech stack and adopting comprehensive platforms that perform multiple functions from one central hub, you can enhance your team’s performance and unlock the full potential of your revenue enablement efforts.
This is the fifth installment in our series breaking down the research and insights from our State of Revenue Enablement report. Stay tuned for our next post which will explore the power of GenerativeAI, or check out our previous posts:
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