How do we know?
On June 1st, 2023, I participated in an EGA webinar with experts from Sales Hacker and Demandbase on how marketing and sales buyers make tech stack purchase decisions. We went into the webinar knowing that 37% of sales leaders and 29% of marketing leaders said the most helpful information when making a purchase decision was “implementation or deployment information,” according to our 2023 Buyer Insights Report.
Inspired by the results from the report, Colin Campbell, General Manager at Sales Hacker, decided to test just how important implementation support was for those of us in the business. He took to LinkedIn and polled his network.
“Would you rather have 1) a free sales tech stack but with no implementation help or 2) a full price stack with implementation and onboarding?”
He brought the results to our webinar: 77% of respondents voted for the full priced stack as long as it came with implementation support.
All of us on the webinar found these results incredibly fascinating—not to mention incredibly helpful for marketing and sales tech companies to know! As soon as the live discussion ended, I went to see if my network would respond the same. I posted the same poll as Colin.
77% – the exact same results Colin got. Seems like buyers are in agreement—your tech just won’t work the same way without expert implementation.
There’s a hefty amount of dissatisfaction out there with marketing and sales tech. Iron Horse found in their survey of B2B tech enterprise marketing leaders that 54% reported their marketing stack did not effectively support personalized marketing, for example. However, we’re doubtful that the problem lies solely with the tech.
You see, we know companies don’t always use their tech stack to the best of its ability. Gartner reported that marketers only use 42% of their martech stack capabilities—even lower than 58% in 2020—suggesting that the problem may not lie in the tech itself, but how it’s being used (or not).
Our two data points on implementation support suggest companies are starting to recognize this problem. There are two main issues here. 1) Many companies lack internal expertise to implement and integrate tech stacks in the most optimized way and 2) the cost of not doing so is too high.
Just because you have employees who have worked with the tech before doesn’t mean they know how to implement it. I know how to use a stick shift. I don’t know how to install one.
If you’re currently evaluating whether you have the internal expertise to implement a new piece of tech, consider this: Internal expertise means you have someone who has worked deeply with that specific technology but also understands the rest of your ecosystem. And yes, hopefully they also have experience actually integrating that tech into a similar ecosystem.
As Colin said in the webinar, tech is such an entrenched part of our workflows now. If we’re not using the tech to its full potential, our workflows are not working. It’s not just about wasted potential and poorly spent investment, it’s about completely missing opportunities and suffering real business consequences.
It’s a vicious cycle. If you don’t invest in expert implementation, you’ll continue to see lackluster results, causing you to forfeit the initial investment in that tech in search of a better one. Which still won’t work well if not integrated and deployed effectively.
Again, it seems like marketing and sales leaders largely already know the answer.
Budget for implementation support.
However, changes need to happen before you ever make any new tech stack purchase. First, take a good look at your current tech stack to make sure you’re actually tapping into its full potential and using all relevant capabilities. Second, make sure your business requirements are driving your tech stack decisions and not the other way around.
Once you’ve decided that yes, you do need new tech and you’ve decided which one best aligns with your business requirements, invest in adequate implementation. But also make sure learning about your current platforms is a regular event, including revisiting current capabilities and learning how to use new ones. If your tech provider doesn’t offer deep execution support with your go-to-market strategy, seek out expertise from third party service providers with lots of experience working with that tech.
It’s pretty straightforward. If you’re selling martech or sales tech, make sure you’re offering a robust, comprehensive implementation and deployment service as well. It’s literally making the difference for buyers between your product and other company’s products (and preventing churn down the line).
Buyers: Adjust your budgets to include adequate implementation and deployment support. And adjust your mindsets around purchasing martech and sales tech to make sure it aligns with your business requirements and is used to its full potential.
Suppliers: Provide the best implementation, deployment and integration services in the market.
Put it together and what do you get? Much more successful (which means satisfied) users and much less technology churn. And everyone goes home happy.
