Get Your Stack Together: The Ultimate Guide to Revenue Tech
In today's fast-paced and highly competitive B2B landscape, having an effective revenue tech stack can be the difference between thriving and merely surviving. Your ‘RevTech’ stack acts as the backbone of your business operations, streamlining workflows, enabling data-driven decision-making, and ensuring collaboration across teams. However, building a robust revtech stack requires a strategic approach that aligns with your business goals, target audience, and overall go-to-market strategy.
Understanding the Importance of a Revenue Tech Stack
A revenue tech stack refers to the collection of tools and technologies designed to support and optimize your revenue-generating activities. This includes marketing, sales, and customer service (it can also include product and finance functions, but that’s outside the scope of this article).
These tools play a crucial role in attracting and nurturing leads, closing deals, and fostering long-lasting customer relationships. A well-designed revenue tech stack can provide valuable insights, automate repetitive tasks, and facilitate cross-functional collaboration, ultimately driving growth and profitability.
Marketing Tech: This can include tools for email automation, digital advertising, SMS marketing, events & webinar platforms, as well as tools for advanced segmentation and personalization.
Sales Tech: The main focus for sales should be the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platform, along with tools for prospecting, dialing, demoing, forecasting, pipeline management, and AI-driven analytics.
Service Tech: This should include a platform that integrates seamlessly with your CRM, offering a complete view of customer interactions and enabling proactive support.
Building Blocks: From Foundational Tools to Advanced Solutions
Whether you’re a startup or a company just starting to build your tech stack, you should begin with foundational tools that offer a solid base for your business. Solutions like HubSpot, for instance, provide a comprehensive suite of essential features, including CRM, email marketing automation, and social media integration. These tools can serve as a launchpad, enabling you to establish initial processes and workflows.
As your business grows and your needs become more complex, you may want to explore more advanced and specialized tools. CRMs such as Salesforce and marketing automation tools such as Marketo offer more enterprise-friendly features. Intent data and account-based marketing (ABM) platforms like Demandbase and 6sense can provide valuable insights into buyer behavior and account-level engagement, enabling more targeted and personalized marketing strategies. Additionally, tools like Braze can enhance product integrations and facilitate behavior-triggered communications throughout the customer journey.
There are a myriad of tools out there now, just look at Scott Brinker’s MarTech Landscape - it has over 14,000 tech products on it this year! While this can be confusing and hard to navigate, the key is to always focus on what you need to drive your business and only add new functionality if it’s going to help you achieve your goals.
Tech Stack Integration Models
One complication when it comes to standing up revenue tech stacks (or any tech stack) is how the data will be housed and shared between platforms. This is vitally important because it can affect the speed of automations, the accuracy of your data, and the capabilities you have available. While data integrations are a whole topic unto themselves, it can be simplified down into three general models:
Isolated Model: This model represents the least efficient approach, where tools operate in silos with minimal integration. While marketing automation may connect with the CRM, other systems remain isolated, resulting in inefficiencies and missed opportunities for cross-functional collaboration and data-driven decision-making. Unfortunately, this is where a lot of organizations find themselves. If this is where you are, you need to fix it, and I can help.
Distributed Model: In this setup, individual tools communicate with each other through direct integrations. Your marketing automation platform syncs with your CRM, which syncs with your customer success tools, which coordinate with your analytics platforms, etc. All the tools are connected together, through each other. This approach is relatively easy to stand up, and if done well, it can ensure data is flowing between systems, but it has major drawbacks. There is no “system of truth” for all data, so field-level rules have to be complex, and the chances of duplicate data, system confusion, and manual mistakes is high.
Centralized Model: This is the optimal setup, but it takes a strategic approach to build it out. A central repository, such as a customer data platform (CDP) or a data lake, serves as the single source of truth. All systems, from marketing to sales and customer service platforms, feed into and pull from this centralized hub, enabling a holistic view of customer data and insights. When done properly, this can have a flywheel effect, and lead to massive efficiency gains while ensuring your data remains as clean and accurate as possible.
Aligning Technology with Teams, Strategy, and Objectives
Ultimately, the goal of all of this is to help your business meet its goals and grow. In order to do that, you have to ensure that your revenue strategy, go-to-market plan, and company-wide objectives inform your technology choices. Begin by maximizing the potential of your current tools before considering new additions. Continuously assess the alignment between your tech stack, team workflows, and strategic direction, making adjustments as needed. Your tech should be serving you, not the other way around.
Before I finish, here are a few tips for building an effective Revenue Tech Stack:
Avoid the "Shiny Object" Syndrome: Resist the temptation to constantly chase the latest tools or technologies. More tools do not necessarily equate to more value. Ensure you are fully leveraging the functionality of your existing tools before seeking new solutions.
Conduct Regular Reviews: Periodically review your tech stack to identify underperforming or redundant tools and ensure that you are not paying for unnecessary features. Base your decisions on your evolving business needs and strategic direction.
Invest in Training and Support: Ensure your team receives comprehensive training on your current tools, enabling them to unlock additional features and leverage integrations effectively. Proper training and support can often solve perceived problems without the need for new tool acquisitions.
By taking a strategic and aligned approach to building your revenue tech stack, you can create a seamless and efficient ecosystem that supports sustainable business growth, fosters collaboration, and drives revenue generation. If you have any questions about your revenue tech stack or want an outside opinion of how things are setup at your company, let’s talk.