Building Your RevOps Tech Stack

Why are 3rd party tools valuable for sales and marketing at a startup? What does a good technology strategy enable?

3rd party tools are more efficient than building internal tooling – third-party tools take the burden off of your organization. One employee typically manages a single internal solution—that same employee can likely manage several third-party solutions.

Good technology strategy leads to smarter decisions – the data you’ll get from your tools will allow you to look around the corner. Third-party tools allow you to set up your data to make use of it for forecasting and taking predictive actions. 

Automate manual tasks – a good technology strategy creates processes and automations that are impractical to handle manually.  This will save you money and time and help you create strong sales and marketing processes for future success.

What areas of sales and marketing can be covered with tooling? 

The areas of sales and marketing that can be covered with tooling include: 

• Core sales and marketing systems – CRM, marketing automation
• Sales Development – prospecting, data enrichment, auto-dialer
• Lead management – chat, attribution, and account-based marketing tools
• Sales enablement & Training – enablement & call analytics, and learning management systems
• Communication & Demo – live and recorded video
• Deal Management – contract management and CPQ/quote-to-cash
• Data & Analytics – analytics and dashboards tools
• Affiliate & Partner management – partner relationship management and affiliate tools

Core Sales and Marketing Systems

Tips for setting up your CRM

• Start early – get a CRM pretty quickly—you want to capture data as early as you can. You can start with HubSpot on their free version.
• Be thoughtful about integrations – a CRM can integrate with pretty much everything, but be smart about integrations. Figure out your goals and tailor integrations to hit them. Your ERP, marketing automation, and analytics tools can all have thoughtful connections to your CRM. 
• Beware overwritten data – if you have too many integrations, data will be overwritten because multiple different systems compete to write in a single space. Your CRM can and should integrate with the majority of your business, but you have to be really thoughtful about when and how the integrations work. 
• Sometimes best-of-breed tools are better than what your CRM offers – CRM providers offer a bunch of functionality but not all of it will be right for you—for example, Salesforce has sales enablement and email tools, but they’re not great at it.

Salesforce vs. Hubspot

• Salesforce is more robust but more expensive than HubSpot – Salesforce can connect with a lot more 3rd party vendors, those integrations are a lot easier and they’ll have native applications. 
• HubSpot is a good starter CRM for smaller businesses (less than $10M-$20M in revenue) – it is a lot cheaper and they have a free version, but you can’t get as custom in HubSpot. If you want to create a report across objects when you’re looking at an account and an opportunity, you can’t do that easily in HubSpot—the reporting isn’t as intuitive and pipeline management is overly complicated compared to Salesforce.

Tips for setting up your marketing automation system:

• Make sure that you have segmentation from your CRM 
• Decide how you’re going to house leads between marketing automation and your CRM
• Standardize an MQL identification process
• Don’t use the Lead/Contact Status field to identify MQLs. It’s small but makes a big difference when standardizing tracking.
• Use the web forms from your marketing automation for the simplest lead tracking

Tips for linking your CRM and marketing automation system:

• You need to decide how to link leads and contacts – marketing automation tools have a single object to look at a person and company record—in a CRM you have a lead and contact as your person object, then you have an account. So you have to decide how you create leads and update contacts consistently between your CRM and marketing automation.
• Whether you push everything from your marketing automation tool into your CRM depends on your stage and resources – if your sales team has the time and focus to follow up on prospects that aren’t hot, then push them through. But you want to have tracking in place to delineate lead scoring or it can get really messy. If you don’t have time to follow up on earlier stage leads, don’t push them into your CRM. 
• Avoid creating duplicates when old contacts re-engage – marketing automation should create new leads, but look to associate them with existing contacts (if appropriate) so that leads are flagged and worked, but you don’t have duplicates. 

Sales Development

Tips for setting up your prospecting & data enrichment tools:

• Get prospecting and data enrichment as early as you can – they provide a lot of value in finding prospects in your target market, filling out their demographic information, and supplementing your contact information for sales and marketing.
• Integrate any tools you use to store sales and marketing data – typically, this is your CRM and Marketing Automation. You want to be able to pull contact information directly into these to increase contact and outreach quality 
• LinkedIn Sales Navigator can handle prospecting but not enrichment – it’s a great tool to source prospects as almost everyone is on it, but for data enrichment, you need to combine it with other tools like ZoomInfo.

Use them for market strategy, not just prospecting:

• Marketing and ops can use these to build your TAM – these tools can help you gauge the number of companies and contacts within your target segments and ultimately build a rough TAM. 

Tips for setting up your outreach tools: 

• Integrate with CRM, other sales enablement platforms, Google Calendar, and dialing systems – this way you can send automated outreach, fill in fields to make emails more personal, and track and fulfill your outreach cadences and follow-ups.
• Make sure data quality is solid before you automate outreach – the information in there needs to be up to date and correct or else you might lose prospects with gaffes due to poor information input.

Tips for setting up an auto-dialer:

• Think through what sales & support need – Generally, your IT department selects a phone system for the company. To ensure the system supports a GTM function, make sure they are thinking through what sales & support need. Think about the ability to route through phone tree, set hours and a forwarding location for after hours, voicemail, transfer between departments, routing inbound calls to different queues based on local, etc. Also consider any integrations to a CRM or specific support tool, like Zendesk.
• Integrate with your CRM – that way, you can keep track of contact touches and have easy access to the contact’s outreach information—and easily see where they are in your funnel and other relevant details. 

Tips for selecting an auto-dialer: 

• Find a tool that caters to the team it’s using – most tools are better for either support or sales. Make sure you’re aware what your tool is designed best for and seek out systems that are good for it.
  • If support functionality is most important – typically what your support system offers if best (Zendesk calling software for example) or RingCentral works well generally. 
  • If sales is most important – choose a tool like Dialpad

Lead Management

Tips for setting up chat tools:

• Start by using your marketing automation tool – most of them offer some form of basic chat functionality natively for free or for a minor fee. These are easy to set up at an early-stage company. As you grow, you can look at something more robust. 
• Use a purpose-built tool when you have a chat queue manned by reps – start with a chat tool for customer support, then expand with another tool that works sales. 
• Typically, use different systems for Sales & Support chat – it could be the same tool but in my experience works better when they are separate, chat tools are built to support one motion over the other most often.

Tips for personalizing chat with data:

• Integrate with your CRM to send more tailored chat responses – you can get creative integrating your chat with your CRM and customizing messages you send based on tags in your CRM. 
• Use a data enrichment tool to identify who’s contacting support – a data enrichment tool like a reverse IP product can help you associate information about the chatter, so that you can personalize responses to them.

Tips for setting up your CRM for attribution:

• It’s important to correctly integrate with your CRM – integrate attribution with most of your tech stack (ad platforms, analytics tools, data warehouse), but pay particular attention to your CRM integration or it can get very messy. 
• Attribution is easier if you’re using lead objects – you’ll want a lead object to follow customers from the top of your funnel through to a closed sale.

Tips for attribution modeling:

• Clearly define attributions – attributions are very difficult to get right.  Start with a clearly defined and consistent system of attribution; understand your process and any shortcomings and consider that when you’re analyzing results. 
• For complex attribution, build your own models – most tools won’t allow you to get very complex on their platform, or to export data in a way that allows you to leverage it to build your own model. If you’re tracking influence or multiple different activities (e.g., partner, marketing, and outbound sales), it might be better to pull data straight from the sources and build your own model. 

Tips for selecting account-based marketing:

• Vet the geographic capabilities of your ABM tool – some tools can’t handle global marketing. If your company is planning to or already is marketing globally, find and select an ABM tool that can meet global needs.

Sales Enablement & Training

Tips for setting up enablement & call analytics: 

• Get enablement as early as possible, call analytics can wait – enablement can be as simple as using Google Drive for long-form documents, but you need to have a repository of sales enablement resources as early as possible. Call analytics are less crucial. 
• You need to standardize outreach and inbound before you get call analytics – standardization will help you gauge the quality of calls and provide feedback. If you’re a global company, make sure everyone is on the same page. 

Tips for selecting an LMS: 

• Find a tool that tests for retention – testing will help you ensure that whatever you just communicated was just absorbed. If you can measure retention, you can also tinker with and optimize the format and order of trainings.

Communication & Demo

Tips on when to use video tools: 

• Don’t force a video tool on an unwilling team – some reps are great sellers but don’t present well in a recorded video. If your team isn’t willing to use video messages or it hurts their performance, don’t force them to use it. 
• Video tools can be useful outside of sales – they’re great for communicating quick messages to a variety of different teams. Your org leaders can use it to quickly capture and communicate changes in processes or systems.

Deal Management

Tips for selecting a contract management tool:

• Integrate with your CRM for dynamic language capabilities – look for a contract management tool with the ability to dynamically change contract language based on how that customer is tagged in your CRM. 
• DocuSign e-Signature is great, but DocuSign CLM is horrible – Docusign CLM isn’t intuitive from an administrative perspective, it’s clunky, and not visually appealing for end-users to generate contracts. Pair e-Signature with a better contract lifecycle management tool.
• Evaluate the flexibility and complexity you want in your contracts and order forms – tools service varying levels of complexity. So if you do a lot of custom contracts, find tools that can help you create those efficiently, even if it’s more expensive.

When to start using CPQ/Quote to cash: 

• Use CPQ tools if you have multiple product lines with multiple products under each – most SaaS companies don’t need a CPQ tool; it costs too much and requires too much upkeep. CPQ tools begin to make sense if you have a very complex buying process.
• You might be able to handle CPQ with your contract management tool – I call this the CPQ-not-CPQ build, and it’s using your contract tool if it has easy point-and-click configuration to create dynamic contracts and integrate with your order forms. 
• Beware of Salesforce’s CPQ tool – Steelbrick (Salesforce’s CPQ tool) isn’t even used internally by Salesforce; even though it’s well known, avoid it.

Data & Analytics

Stages of data analytics maturity: 

• Stage 1: Bridge the gap to a data analytics team with a tool like Atrium –  if you don’t have a data team and need more robust reporting than your CRM provides. Tools like Atrium are plug-and-play, cheap, and can be set up without additional ops help. They help you track rep performance metrics, activity trends, pipeline conversion trends etc. Without a data team, you’ll run into accuracy issues; but it can be relied on for a directionally correct baseline. 
• Stage 2: Build out a data warehouse and a data engineering team – this is a big investment, but eventually you need to build out a full data warehouse and team. This will give you more comprehensive insights and improve data accuracy. 
• Stage 3: Build out a Business Intelligence tool – you need to have a data team to build out a BI tool. A BI tool is a necessity to make full use of your data. 

Deciding on dashboard location: 

• Put sales dashboards wherever reps spend their day (typically your CRM) – even if another tool has more elegant dashboarding, put dashboards where the sales team can readily access them.
• Be aware of licensing – you need enough seats in your team dashboard tool for everyone to see them. 

• Put company-wide dashboards in your BI tool – and integrate them with most of your business. Your BI tool is a centralized, purpose-built location for collecting and analyzing data from across your business. If you’re presenting data upward, use your BI tool to connect sales data with other pieces of the business.

Affiliate & Partner

Tips for setting up PRM & Affiliate tools: 

• Salesforce is complicated to set up but allows for more complex use cases – building out PRM functionality on Salesforce requires technical resources. If you only have a simple use case, all PRMs integrate with Salesforce and get up and running faster. 
• Consider pairing your CRM with a PRM and/or Affiliate solution – you can track the people (partners/affiliates) in your CRM and then use PRM or Affiliate technology to run the overall program.

What portion of your sales and marketing budget should you set aside for tooling? 

An early-stage company should be careful with tooling spend – it’s really easy to buy every tool to solve all your problems. If you do that, you end up overspending. So try to be more frugal early on until you have an informed view of whether the tool you’re using is necessary. 

Try to problem-solve with in-house tools – if you already have a tool with similar functionality similar to your needs, evaluate that tool’s viability first. There isn’t a fixed percentage of your budget to set aside for tooling, but you should be making informed and responsible decisions around tool procurement. 

What resources can you refer to when evaluating and selecting your sales function tooling? 

Evaluate tools using:

• Peer reviews – on sites like Gartner, or from people in your network. Reviews are the baseline for evaluating a tool and getting educated on the available options. 
• Any blog posts the company has written about competitors – these can be very informative—they can give you a side-by-side comparison of the tool versus other options on the market.
• The vendor’s security situation – how is their data stored? How are they capturing and collecting data? This is a huge component in making a decision.

Seek solutions to your problems, not just tools you know and prefer – if you have a bias towards certain tools, keep in mind the specific needs of your organization–you might end up selecting tools that weren’t your favorites coming in. Find tooling solutions that can support you for 2-5 years. 

What are the most important pieces to get right?

Set up a good foundation of processes before starting with automation – a lot of people overcomplicate their toolset and immediately want to automate every step of the entire marketing and sales funnel. Don’t worry so much about automation at first, worry about nailing the execution and tracking of each step in the funnel. 

Develop a clean and well-defined pipeline tracking system – messy pipeline tracking can really set you back. I’ve seen companies track MQL vs. SQL in the contact or lead-status field and expect reps to move it; then if a lead becomes an MQL again, it erases the previous rep’s progress. Make sure you’re not tracking multiple metrics in one field. 

Your customer journey should guide your tech stack—not the other way around – think about your customer’s buying process and then build your tech stack to support that and the users that are actually using the tools. 

What are common pitfalls? 

Over-automating – the right level of automation improves efficiency and you won’t need to unwind things. Over-automating creates unnecessary spend and messy, duplicative, and tangled processes. 

Integrating your tools with your actual product – when people try to integrate their actual product with their CRM, it always ends up creating a mess. Your product might have a different data model than your CRM that needs to be melded together—everyone ends up hating it. If possible, use middleware and not an API. They breakdown as the business grows and the quicker the business is changing the quicker it breaks down.