Why Speed Isn’t Always the Answer
Uh oh. It happened again. We bought the new software designed to fix all of our problems—from lead distribution to nurture and more. We put a quick plan into place, had a small team implement it, then launched. Why isn’t it handling all of our delays, miscommunications, and mysteries in the data?
It’s a common pattern we see across both OEMs with distributed sales channels and other businesses, including dealers. A new software purchase is a big investment, and everyone wants to get the most out of it, immediately. But rushed implementations often lead to inefficiencies, poor integrations, and technical debt—debt that stacks on top of the remaining inefficiency and poor integrations from the last time this happened. What could possibly be going wrong?
Fear not. We’ve got practical advice on how moving slowly at this point gets results way faster, and we’ll show you a practical plan that can make your next tech integration—or even the old ones mired in technical debt—much more successful.
The MarTech Trap: Investing in Tools Without Strategy
Most companies only use a fraction of the capabilities inside their marketing technology. Some studies estimate that more than 40% of organizations use less than half of their CRMs’ abilities. Based on what our team regularly sees in client platforms, that seems correct. Why is that?
Here’s what usually happens: a company purchases software to solve an immediate pain. Before buying it, they don’t audit their existing software(s) to see if they already have a tool that could solve the problem. They also don’t look at the other capabilities and features available in this new software. Ultimately, they’re investing a ton of money in a single feature that may already be available in software they already have. Once the new software is in place, companies don’t spend the time to bring other features online, or to connect their related systems and processes so they work together. And what’s worse: they don’t train around them at all.
This usually results in the immediate fire being put out, and a future fire being kindled somewhere else. And those new fires aren’t always spotted right away. Rushed implementations lead to broken processes, corrupted data, and other unintended consequences that might not be detected for weeks or longer. Let’s be clear—buying new software and solving a narrow problem often leads to more trouble than not.
The Cost of Rushed MarTech Decisions
That trouble takes the following forms:
- Technical debt
- Operational inefficiency
- Financial implications
Technical debt is a fancy way of saying that the more systems and processes you have in place to run your sales and marketing functions, the more time and resources it takes to manage them. Updates take longer, new features or solutions are more complex to integrate, and problems can take longer to identify and resolve. Furthermore, the longer the system must be maintained, the more it takes to keep it solvent. Finally, technical debt can also be accrued when custom upgrades prevent necessary updates like security updates or new versions which can’t be implemented because they remove or invalidate those custom-coded solutions.
You can imagine some of the impacts to operational inefficiency. When something breaks, it has an impact beyond marketing. Sales may be affected for both internal teams and external partners. And this leads to issues in reporting, inventory management, lead delivery, and more. The greater the complexity, the greater the chance for disruptions.
And as we’ve pointed out, you have to maintain the investment: a team to manage and optimize the platforms, make necessary updates for privacy and security concerns, add and train new users, etc. Or, like too many organizations we’ve seen, you don’t pay to maintain the investment, which only leads to more expensive issues later. The bill to update and optimize even one platform can be quite expensive if it has been ignored for years, but this is often the first order of business when a new team comes on board, and wants to change existing processes to more efficient means. The long-neglected software becomes an anchor, both from a speed and a cost perspective.
This doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t invest in a technical solution. Instead, it means you should plan accordingly for integration, maintenance, and management, and understand the complexities of doing so. The decision you must make when considering new software purchases is in when and how to pay these costs—upfront and ongoing, where they could be mitigated and spread out over time; or in the future with costly clean-up or break-fix projects; or in completely scrapping an old system and starting anew.
How to Build a MarTech Stack That Works for the Entire Organization
Thankfully, most organizations can avoid costly MarTech mistakes with some relatively simple approaches:
- Start With the End in Mind: Define the full scope of needs, not just short-term fixes. Get the big ideas on paper, list what exists today, and define what the future must look like. Challenge assumptions aggressively to create a comprehensive picture of what’s needed—and consider if it’s worthwhile to imagine not just the solution you need today, but the one for where your business is going.
- Cross-Departmental Alignment: Sales, marketing, and leadership (and any other teams that will use the software) need to collaborate before making a tech decision. Furthermore, you should consider the implications to your distributed sales network, especially with data and reporting integrations. Nothing is more frustrating than having an awesome new solution that many can’t use because it’s too sophisticated, or because the tools that others rely on are incompatible with it.
- Avoiding Tool Overlap: Audit existing tools to determine if new investments are necessary. Consider if new solutions might replace not just the places where there are problems but other pieces where redundancy might exist and cost savings could be found.
- Don’t Forget Process: Defining how to use the new technology and training around it is also essential for getting maximum return on investment. Consider too the expanded lens here—how does one part of the system impact another, change a process or need a new approach.
Seems simple, right? Maybe, but these elements might happen relatively quickly, or may take a long time to define, align, and create a clear path of victory around the decision. Complexity arises when you’re considering multiple options. You shouldn’t shy away from the right approach, though, due to speed or complexity. Quite the contrary—these are signals that the impact of decision is likely farther-reaching than expected, and a signal that proper alignment and planning are even more important than for a small, niche tech purchase.
Enterprise vs. Niche Solutions: Making the Right Investment
Part of the challenge within your MarTech decisions can be how big the vision, budget, and solution set needs to be. The reality for manufacturers in outdoor recreation, boating, commercial vehicles, and others is that there’s often a push-and-pull between affordable, purpose-built niche systems and high-powered, feature-rich enterprise solutions.
This often arises in Lead Management—where “traditional” CRMs are built around the assumption of an in-house sales team, not a distributed sales force. These tools often assume all parties will have access to one platform, rather than different systems for dealers. Manufacturers with distributed sales networks often don’t have this luxury—dealers have legacy systems, sometimes ones that are more sophisticated than the OEM has or needs.
Approaching the right fit for your organization isn’t always easy, but knowing what to consider can help. Look at the pros and cons of each option. Here are some general rules that are a great place to start for comparing enterprise versus niche solutions:
- Enterprise Solutions: Long-term stability, deep integration, but high cost and complexity.
- Niche Solutions: Specialized functionality, lower cost, but risk of future limitations.
Consider what parts of your tech stack must be bigger and more robust, and what can be smaller or more nimble or niche. With tools like Make, Zapier, Funnel.io and other integration tools, there’s more than one way to make systems work together. But don’t forget that technical debt footprint—more systems means more break points, more security and privacy risks, and more maintenance and management costs.
Practical Steps to Future-Proof Your MarTech Stack
Here’s some hard-earned advice around how we’ve seen the greatest success with MarTech implementations and long-term use. The following, in conjunction with the considerations around planning and alignment mapped out above, can help you maximize value and minimize disruptions with your MarTech stack—not just the next purchase and implementation, but with the maintenance and management of your existing systems, too.
- Map Out Business Needs, and How Technology Serves Them: Create a comprehensive technology roadmap that aligns with marketing, sales, and leadership goals. Combine a Roadmap for implementation with a Blueprint for how the systems work together, and be sure to consider existing state and future states as part of this planning and documentation.
- Slow Down the Implementation Process: A phased rollout may prevent tech debt. Consider finding stakeholders both internally and externally that can help test and try out the systems and provide feedback. These insights can be valuable in ensuring smooth transitions between phases, uncovering unknown issues, improving training, and ultimately increasing buy-in and adoption of new technologies.
- Train Your Team Before Go-Live: Some of you are laughing, and some are crying, but please—plan for comprehensive training before launch. Understand that you will have a group of early adopters and enthusiasts, as well as the naysayers and slow-to-adopt crowd. Create plenty of opportunities and channels for feedback, support and troubleshooting.
- Evaluate Regularly: The job’s not complete after launch and training. Even if no challenges arise, there will surely be opportunities to optimize and improve the new system and existing ones. Ensure you’re reviewing all of your tools and systems in order to help them remain effective over time. This is also an opportunity to keep your Roadmap and Blueprint updated—they are incredibly useful tools as living documents, especially when new partners, systems, vendors, etc. come on board to your organization.
- Look at AI, Automation, and 3rd Party Integrations: Finally, there may be high-powered improvements in new and existing systems right within your grasp. There are ways to solve technology challenges within and outside of your MarTech systems. Investing not just in future-ready tech but also technologists can optimize existing systems and help avoid unnecessary complexity.
The Speed Paradox
The bottom line is that the businesses that take the time to build the right MarTech stack see faster, more efficient marketing and sales execution in the long run. It may be counterintuitive to slow down in order to go fast, especially when things are broken and painful. But be sure to get all of the right people involved, beyond sales and marketing but also finance, operations, IT and more, to make the right decisions and set yourself up for success. The value of getting it right pays far more dividends than the value of one fire put out, only for creating future fires to fight.
How does your stack measure up today? Whether you’re considering a new purchase, need to optimize existing systems, or just haven’t taken stock of the environment of technology and processes in a while, it’s always valuable to take a step back and assess your current stack. There’s efficiency and profit to be found in these investments, so ensuring that they’re working well should be an imperative for the organization. It might sound like “beeps and boops” to some, but building a fine-tuned engine and keeping it humming makes the outside of the race car all the more enjoyable as it speeds around the competition.
