Your RevTech stack has been carefully crafted to support and facilitate your customers’ buying journeys. Only here’s the thing: Too many RevTech stacks are frozen in a different era, one much different than that of today’s digital-first B2B buyers.
Today’s B2B buyers expect (and deserve!) the world-class customer experiences they’ve become accustomed to in their B2C journeys. Yet, too many B2B providers act like they … just don’t care about the customer experience. It’s simply unacceptable from a customer experience perspective.
Think about that B2B buyer who is spending five- to six figures on a solution. All she wants is at least the same level of attention she gets when spending $50 in a B2C journey. Yet here she sits, waiting for a return message after clicking a “request demo” button, her budget figuratively burning a hole in her pocket.
And that’s how her engagement with potential vendors starts!
Uncover and Discover Clues Along the Buying Journey
Today’s digital buying journeys are chock full of data at every step along the way. That data provides clues — buyer signals — not only as to information about the buyers and the specific needs they have for solutions, but their intent, too.
Clues, er, buyer signals, are everywhere, and come from data points like site visits, blog post reads, content downloads, email opens, click-throughs, event registration, and more. If your prospective customers engage with just about anything on their buying journeys, data is left behind — like so many footsteps in the sand.
Your RevTech stack undoubtedly contains the tools that collect these buyer signals. Of course, the collection of the data is one thing. But collating, organizing, analyzing and acting upon data-driven insights is something else entirely. The sheer volume of buyer signal data points can be daunting … and it’s causing many RevTech stacks to burst at the seams.
Disconnected RevTech Stacks Hamper Revenue Orchestration
Many organizations fall short in acting upon their data. There tend to be three root causes:
- Companies may have the data, but it’s siloed, not widely shared, and inaccessible by others
- The data is somewhat dirty (inaccurate, incomplete, inconsistent, etc.) and requires cleaning
- Data isn’t put into the hands of the right people at the right time to act upon it properly
These all point at least partially to disconnected RevTech stacks. And disconnected RevTech stacks come with a considerable cost to your business.
Bad data kills efficiency. For example, bad data requires sales development representatives (SDRs) to compensate for incomplete data sets by researching leads. As a result, your sellers spend less time selling.
Bad data kills effectiveness. For instance, sales reps often engage less valuable, lower-priority prospects, leaving the most promising prospects to wither on the vine. At best, buyer journeys and your time to revenue is unnecessarily lengthened. At worst, highly valued prospective customers land in the laps of your competitors.
Signal Management Is a Hallmark of Modern Revenue Orchestration
Signal management surfaces priority buying signals and ensures they’re acted upon promptly. Seamless integrations within a RevTech stack empower revenue teams by stitching together best-in-class solutions to fuel your revenue engine.
One example centers around leads, those darlings of Demand Generation professionals everywhere.
Today’s leads wouldn’t be recognized by revenue teams just a decade ago. Now, they’re so much more than a name and email collected on a webform or an event scanner. Today’s best RevTech stacks deliver leads that are:
- Enriched with all the data your representatives need
- Matched to accounts and open opportunities in your CRM, and
- Brought to your attention instantly when intent data shows the time is ideal for outreach
As soon as those notifications trigger, the play or plays that will move leads further along in buying journeys are deployed. Some of those plays may be manual, like reaching out with a phone call, and others might be automated, like enrollment into a Sales Engagement Platform (SEP) sequence or cadence. It depends on the signal as well as your RevTech stack.
There are many, many more examples, and your go-to-market (GTM) flows only grow bigger and more complicated as your business scales, increasing the volume of leads, accounts and opportunities, and adding account-based motions, territories, products, business units — you get the idea.
How to Build Your Connected RevTech Stack
When looking at how to optimize your RevTech stack, the first task is to step away from looking at shiny, new solutions to add to it. There are sales tech stacks out there with upwards of 80 solutions in them, and that’s frequently where the trouble starts. Pain points aren’t eliminated by gluing on another disparate solution. They’re merely masked.
Here’s how to get started tuning your RevTech stack: Work cross-functionally to first define your growth goals, and then your strategies for reaching those goals over the short- and mid-term.
Start with the buying journeys of the personas within your ideal customer profile(s), or ICPs. Then, map out the logic of your GTM motions that address your prospects’ buying journeys.
With your process logic set, look for engagement touchpoints with your prospective buyers. Only now do you get to think about technology solutions!
Look to deploy solutions that not only collect buyer signal data from your customer touchpoints, but also use your custom logic and filters to evaluate. Then, ensure solutions integrate with one another to confirm buyer signal data flows freely and visibly through your processes.
Eventually those buyer signals need to move along your RevTech stack to where they are met with the best sales and marketing plays — which, by the way, will create even more buyer signals, which is why it’s important to get your RevTech right.
Summary
RevTech stacks are absolutely essential to empower a revenue team to grow and scale.
However, too many RevTech stacks are frozen in time. They were built for a different buying journey and they often contain a collection of disconnect point solutions.
Free your RevTech stack by focusing on moving data seamlessly throughout your customers’ buying journeys. In the end, your customers will benefit — and what’s good for your customers is good for your business.
