Over the last decade, b-to-b sales, marketing and product organizations have brought in a lot of new technologies that have helped them reach new audiences, achieve revenue goals, and conduct business in new and exciting ways (think Web site personalization and nurture streams). However, even when these groups have worked on their organizational alignment through shared vision and goals, those efforts rarely extend to technologies themselves.
SiriusDecisions research shows that highly aligned b-to-b organizations achieve 19 percent faster revenue growth and 15 percent higher profitability than other organizations – and technology is a key driver of those gains. By contrast, procuring technology with little or no regard to alignment increases confusion, frustration and duplication, and it can even negatively impact customer experience and revenue.
So you need to align your infrastructure – but what is an aligned technology infrastructure? It’s a collection of technologies that are selected and architected in such a way as to effectively execute on core sales, marketing and product processes, measure the results and achieve collective goals. You want to drive alignment in technologies that exhibit a medium to high degree of criticality to business processes and are distributed across multiple groups. But doesn’t that cover everything those organizations do?
One word: focus. Sales, marketing and product organizations share several processes and capabilities, such as lead management, persona development and messaging, and the customer lifecycle. The best place to start is large overarching processes or capabilities that cut across two or more of the aforementioned organizations. From there, you can audit the processes and uncover technologies that are shared or siloed within these groups.
To help pick this select group of technologies, focus on the following three criteria. If a technology meets one or more of them, it should be considered a priority for alignment:
In future posts, I’ll discuss what needs to be in place to make sure your technology procurement decisions are made with alignment in mind to help you prevent another technology hangover.
Jacques is a Research Director in the Technology and Services practice at SiriusDecisions. He brings over 15 years of technology research, application and implementation expertise and insight to SiriusDecisions. He has proven success in account management, research and analysis, content development and delivery and communications and collaboration. Follow Jacques on Twitter @JacquesBegin22.