Building a Tech Stack to Grow with Your Business
A plethora of 8,000 technology tools exist. Each tool likely created with the intention of making experiences, processes and transactions more simple, efficient, and integrated. And yet for many reasons getting a handle on these tools that have the promise of being truly helpful and even game-changing, is often unruly for any business.
Building a Tech Stack to Grow with Your Business, an in-person Twin Cities Startup Week (TCSW, #TCSW21) event presented by Adam Stewart, Denamico CMO, addressed the challenges of selecting and implementing technology tools to create a “tech stack” -- term that’s defined as a group of technology-based tools that help businesses to operate effectively, market efficiently, and enable sales and service teams to provide an optimal customer experience. He didn’t gloss over common and problematic customer experiences and internal team hurdles, evidenced by lack of a tech stack or when tech decisions go bad.
Denamico’s vision in their role as a Diamond Tier HubSpot Solutions Partner is to connect people with processes, data and tech to create operational alignment and amazing customer experiences. Adam noted how stellar operational alignment and communications among typically disparate teams can greatly improve experiences for employees. If using technology effectively (proper integration, training, culture) can make employees’ lives more fun, rewarding, and valuable, businesses can also check the talent attraction and retention box.
On the flip side, poor operational alignment means a business is not sharing data or gleaning behavioral data through the customer life cycle. They’re not learning or using the platforms and technology for insights, calculated risk-taking, and growth. Processes don’t exist or they’re not documented or consistently followed. Time and money are wasted on tools that overlap or remain unused due to lack of employee incentive or training.
With this background knowledge, Adam walked the audience through the process to build a tech stack.
STEP 1 Complete the Digital Acceleration sheet. It requires an honest assessment of how your company ranks from digitally embarking to digitally accelerating.
STEP 2 Prioritize your business requirements. Check out the Rate Your RevOps (revenue operations) tool on denamico.com. It’ll have you looking at tech integrations, CRM, your website and more. Important side note: Forming a revenue-operations focused group with leadership, employees, and an outside consultant can streamline this work and address common roadblocks in this process.
STEP 3 Audit your current tech. This process includes pulling stakeholders together, listing software across teams, and identifying redundancies and gaps.
STEP 4 Evaluate solutions. Consider platform solutions vs best in class, costs, and usability, for example. Start with a CRM tool. Obviously.
The 45-minute event wrapped up, leaving attendees with ways to think simple, yet holistic and be growth-minded and people-focused in any integration. I personally loved the idea of a RevOps team and wanted to explore that more, especially because of the incredible amount of time employees in siloed ways review, recommend and purchase technology. Thank you for entertaining our questions and sharing your expertise, Adam!
Three cheers for an actual in-person event hosted by Denamico, a TCSW Resource Partner, during Twin Cities Startup Week! It was great to see people although masked, follow a speaker in full view as he animatedly moved about the room, and exercise those face-to-face networking skills.
