Simplifying your Sales tech stack

In the modern world, we want everything to be automated. We want our lights to turn on automatically, and the geyser time to be set to save time and money. Frankly, those are practical uses where technology has come in and changed the way we do things. The same can be said in business. We have moved from a paper world where everything was written and signed on a piece of paper to a world where if you can’t sign digitally, it feels like a task.. I even asked a colleague the other day why we still have a printer in our office (it barely gets used).

Where did this all come from?

In all this innovation, we have become used to new products and technologies popping up and offering solutions to problems we didn’t know existed. A credit card is all you need to get signed up, they offer free trials and fancy demos and wow you with the time you will save and, likely, throw in a story about AI as a cherry on top. So we sign our companies up for all this tech and try to get some buy-in from our teams. We have seen this at MO Agency a few times, where tech is brought in and we train our team on it, but we lose the adoption piece quickly because it adds another layer of complexity to a fast-moving world.

How do we simplify?

Countless posts on LinkedIn promote a bunch of tech in those “The tech stack we use to scale to $1 million in a year” posts. They then go on to build a flow chart showing how the tools all integrate and how they all fall in line with one another. They each do different things well, and therefore, we need them all.We then go out and test all the tools that we have effectively been sold, and some of our teams end up using them, and some don’t. So then we lose half the buy in and the rest of the team cannot live without the tool. This is often the case with different departments, for example.

So, how do we limit this tech?

Before you buy, do your research. Build a business case for what you believe this tool is going to be. A good old positives vs negatives. Talk to your team about what challenges they are facing and what they believe the fixes to those challenges will be. Then you are going to need to check on your core systems and what functionality they can give you. It could even come down to changes to your business process and how you measure things.

A good example of this at MO Agency is the tools that we used previously to find email addresses for prospects that we wanted to buy from us. The name of the specific tool is not important, as there are a ton out there. The problem with the tool was not that it didn’t integrate with HubSpot; it did. It found all the emails and LinkedIn information, and it linked with some other stuff we were using at the time.

The problem was not with the tool itself, it was with the way we approached selling. We wanted people to buy, we wanted them to open a few finely crafted emails or answer a LinkedIn message and immediately want to work with us.

Our approach needed to change, and so did the tech. We didn’t need it anymore, and we slowly downgraded until we reached a point where we could get what we needed from the free version. The sales philosophy was changed, and that has brought in far more leads (and steadily) than the tool ever could have. What did we change?

• We looked at how prospects were buying
• Changed our approach
• Leveraged the tools we had
• Remained patient
• Trusted the process
• Got buy-in from our team
  
  

When we look at the technology we bring in, we need to look at what is going to make our day-to-day easier, smarter and better.

Solidify your processes

The tech you have can’t help you fix your process if you don’t have one. You need to look behind the technology and do some research into the process. Without a process, you are going to have a tough time, even with the right technology. These processes are going to help you get the buy-in from the team that is going to use the technology. Without that, it will become a money pit sooner than you think, especially if you have bought the yearly license fee and there are no downgrades available.

Question the technologies you already have and their purposes. Who would be upset if you no longer had them? What do they do for us, and put reports in place to measure their effectiveness? Looking back at the previous example I gave, if we could measure the source of all our deals as this prospecting tool and measure its ROI against what we are spending, then we could potentially justify keeping it, but we need a process in place to do this.

Another way to see what tools you use is to scale them down to their most basic forms for a while and see who uses them. We found this with SalesNavigator licenses. We had licenses for all of our sales team members (they are not the cheapest either). One of the team complained that the reason they couldn’t get to the same volume was because they didn’t have access to Sales Navigator. It turned out that a high-performing member of the team had the tool and didn’t know how to use it. She had found a way to use LinkedIn without it. So we scaled back the tool drastically, and it had little effect on sales. What ended up happening is that we could stop hiding behind the excuses and “busy-work” and get stuck into what needed to be done to propel us forward.

I am not saying don’t use tech, but you should be willing to cut it out as quickly as you signed up for it. Do your research and make a decision based on your process and how it fits with your current tools.

Keeping things simple

There are other aspects to keeping your tech stack simple that make sense. We deal with clients daily who want to move from various systems into HubSpot. In that move, we are often looking at data that needs to be synced or imported. 99% of the time, it is a mess, information is missing or is incorrectly captured, or we find that someone has imported a bulk list into the CRM just in case they needed it. This turns everything into a disarray. Those contacts end up sitting for years, and nobody ever does anything about them. They were used to show that someone was busy.

You likely already have one source of truth; it’s the most common reason for data to be stored anywhere. Build a tech stack around enhancing that source of truth. If it doesn’t enhance the process or make the source of truth more accurate, then why is it there?

In addition to this, make sure that there is a review process in place to manage the active users and how many licenses they are charged for. Tech these days all follow a similar payment structure. The base is cheap (often free), and then you pay per user. When users are no longer at the company, the tech should be reviewed. This can help save some money in the long run.

Technology testing:

The tech that we want to keep is the tech that can offer the most value. Set out clear objectives for new tech (this can apply to existing technologies as well). Have clear objectives for what the system is meant to achieve and make sure that you are able to measure it effectively. Report on this and review it as often as you need to. Then have a hard rule to get rid of anything that provides little value. Report on what value was added and what could have been done better. You will then know if you need to buy something better (if possible) or if it is needed at all. Think of this like a probation period for a new employee. You need to make sure that it can deliver on what it promised.

In Conclusion

Technology is backed by marketing and sales teams that know how to make it seem valuable, it gets implemented and forgotten about and ends up costing companies thousands a month. The value of these systems needs to be carefully considered and measured to make sure that we achieve the optimum level of return for what we buy.