In this video, Christian Pieper, Senior Product Marketing Manager at Mindtickle, talks about your tech stack and how to make it a finely tuned machine. He outlines how organizations should approach optimizing their tech stack by building its strength rather than simply trimming it down for the sake of it. Christian then shares why it’s important to carefully consider how each tool works with one another, prioritizing solutions, and ensuring each tool fits into sellers’ current workflows.

Key highlights

• Make the right cuts but don’t sacrifice too much. Everyone is under pressure to get the most out of their tech investments and for many, that means making significant cuts. However, sales productivity tools don’t end up on the cutting room floor just for the sake of shedding tools.
• Keep them connected. Point solutions do some things very well, but they are often in isolation. Ensure your tools are integrated and working in cohesion with one another, otherwise, you’ll struggle to get the adoption, usage, and results you want.
• Don’t disrupt seller workflows. Look at where sellers currently spend their time. Whether it’s Salesforce, email, or another engagement tool, make sure the tools are meeting sellers where they are and helping push deals forward.

In case you’d like to read these tips rather than watch the video, we’ve included the transcription below.

Video transcription

Hello, I’m Christian and I’m with the Product Marketing team at Mindtickle. I’m here to share with you three essential insights for optimizing your sales tech stack, right? This is a big priority for lots of organizations, probably for yours. We wanna make sure that you get the results that you’re looking for.

So number one, don’t just slim your tech stack, tone it. We hear this all the time: “We need to trim our tech stack. Make it smaller and simpler so we have less friction for our sellers.” And that’s super important. But think about it this way. You could take all the tech away and give them the simplest solution, but it wouldn’t get the outcomes that you’re looking for.

Make sure you aren’t sacrificing important capabilities in the process of simplifying your tech offering for your, for your sellers, right? Think about it from a fitness perspective. Yes, you want to trim. I know I do, but you also want to build strength or you’re not going to get the health outcomes that you’re looking for. You’re just gonna become small, weak, and shriveled, and we do not want that for your tech stack.

Number two, continuing with the anatomy metaphor. Look for solutions that have connective tissue. It doesn’t matter how strong a muscle is, right? If it’s not connected to other muscles and muscle groups by tendons and ligaments, you won’t be able to do anything with that.

It’s the same thing for your tech stack. You can look for point solutions, things that do one thing really well, but if they’re isolated, if they don’t share data and information and functionality and workflows with the rest of your solutions, then you just have really strong things working in isolation, and you’re going to struggle to get the results that you want for your sellers.

In fact, in the most recent, now, tech on sales enablement and automation, Forrester recommends a litmus test for point, solutions: Do they integrate seamlessly with everything else you’re using? If not, you might be better off looking for solutions that integrate better or are part of a native platform of comprehensive readiness tools. Otherwise, you may end up with something much less than a best-in-breed approach. Solutions that may work well on their own, but don’t cooperate to get the outcomes you want.

Number three, prioritize just-in-time solutions delivered in the natural flow of work. You need to understand how your sellers are behaving because while you can change it over time and you should try to optimize their behavior, you’ll get better results quicker from your tech investment if you find solutions that meet them where they are now and expand the efficacy of their natural sales motions, right?

So where are they spending their time? In the CRM? In engagement platforms? In enablement tools? In sales, content management libraries? Where are they spending their time now? And how can you find additional solutions that expand the value in their access to the information that they need within that natural flow?

So as you’re bringing something on, ask yourself: does this meet our sellers where they’re working? Does this integrate with email? Does it integrate with the CRM in the way that we need it to? If you focus on that, then you’re going to be giving sellers the power that they need, right when they need it, right where they are to drive real deals forward in the field.

And that’s really what you want. Those are our three tips for optimizing your sales tech stack, and I hope they help you out on your readiness journey.