Have you ever been cruising down the road, brain in full-focus mode, deeply lost in thought, and suddenly you hit a speed bump that “pops up out of nowhere?” The hit is so jarring you feel like you crash-landed on Mars, which forces you to slow to a crawl making you alert as a 5-alarm mocha buzz.
In this blur of a sales world we work in, speed bumps are the bane of our sales existence. And sometimes, we’re really good at (unwittingly) creating self-inflicted speed bumps, speed bumps we unintentionally lay down when we think we’re making the right decisions for our business. (Physicist Richard Feynman warns us that the first principle of thinking critically is that you do not fool yourself - and you are the easiest person to fool).
An example we often see is with those who make decisions for their sales and marketing tools based on the wrong criteria or a limited set of criteria.
Distributors or suppliers will make decisions based on cost-savings, at the expense of not realizing that the future growth they could achieve would dwarf their current sales model, thereby making “cost savings” a moot point because it’s based on a fixed set of costs today, versus a growing set of variables.
And since we’re only solving for problems today, it causes short-sightedness which prevents us from solving for bigger problems tomorrow, hence, the speed bumps that we inadvertently create for our future.
For our sales and marketing tech stack, we should never evaluate our tools through the lens of, “Will this decision will save us 10% in time or money today?” But rather, we should see our sales and marketing tools through the perspective of “will these tools help us grow to 10x our size tomorrow?”
This is what we should ask of our systems that power our business, do they facilitate 10x growth?
In our first article in this series on the modern tech stack, we asked you to complete a small exercise, listing all of the tools that power your business. Now, in this post, what we want to do is ask a vital question about your modern tech stack, particularly your sales and marketing tools: Do they allow you to grow to 10x your size now, and to qualify this, ask, “Does our current stack comply with the three I’s?”
Are they built to work in harmony? Are they seamlessly working in collaboration with one another or are they stitched together like a patchwork quilt?
It’s okay that you have stand-alone, best-in-class systems to power your business, but do they mitigate their power by living outside of a cohesive workflow for you and your team?
Take sales presentation tools as an example. Some distributors will design all of their presentations in PowerPoint and photoshop but that entire presentation now lives outside of the sales workflow. Or, they will create a project management system that functions outside of their ordering system. These stand-alone systems that live outside of your ecosystem aren’t supported by all the other systems. This creates a silo effect for your ops, requiring far more effort from your team but more importantly, these stand-alone systems starve (rather than feed) sales.
It’s like growing a self-sustained garden to support the independent gourmet restaurant you own. You can prepare fresh meals each night but instead of harvesting from the garden grown right outside your kitchen door, you’ve created best-in-class gardens all over town so that when it comes to simply fetching produce to create a meal, you have to drive all over to achieve your results. Yes, you can still create a beautiful meal, but you’ll create far fewer meals than your competitor restaurant down the road, whose garden is in one easy-to-use, symbiotic ecosphere.
If you are going to build a modern tech stack based on best-in-class systems, then the one thing that you want to ensure they do is integrate, ie, feed (and not starve) one another.
For some of us, our ops that power our orders and our CRM are either one-in-the-same or are cross-integrated, but the question for us should be: Does our system enable sophisticated interaction among team members? And does it allow us to personalize the sales process with customers (ie, share detailed data about clients) that leads to strategic insights?
In a previous series, we talked about how the client has changed throughout the pandemic and how their needs have not only expanded, but their expectations on us to deliver real return on emotion, engagement, and experience is now magnified. Everything about the way we sell has become more complex: the services we’re providing (hello, kitting and shops), the client’s needs, and even our team interdependence.
The sales role is no longer the primary responsibility of one person, it is a shared role powered by teams. More interaction requires (inter)dependence and shared intelligence - which leads to smart selling. Our sales and marketing tools should facilitate ease of interaction with one other as well as become an easy place to share customer insight.
Speed is the one skill we cannot afford to squander. Slow systems = slow progress. From our email marketing to our CRM to our ops, all of our tools should share information and ignite the sales process. This is where the 10x factor comes into play, by ensuring we have the most modern, up-to-date tools for our teams that work in harmony and allow for sophisticated interaction that fuels quicker sales.
If we’re using a best-in-class ops system for orders but we have a barely functional CRM or a convoluted email marketing system, or our shops are not integrated with our ops system, then we’re creating speed bumps on a freeway. Our competitors will be able to run twice as fast, always enabling them to be further along.
From our first exercise in the series, we had you list your tech stack, all the tools that power your systems. To close out this series, we want you to take that same list and determine your “I” strength by creating a graph like the one above.
Place your ops system in the center, and on the periphery, all the tools that power your business, from your shops to your marketing tools like Hubspot and Mailchimp, to your accounting system, research system, taxes, etc. And to determine your “I” strength, draw lines from those systems that integrate and interact with one another. The systems that stand alone, outside of your ecosphere, are the self-inflicted speed bumps we inadvertently create when we build our tech stack.