In this blog, we’ll examine how tech can be an instrumental lever for doing more with less. We’ll help to break down the barriers that you are facing and recommend important changes to make the most of the tech you have on board today.

Ready to kick off with a bang? Let’s dive in.

3 Common Barriers to Tech ROI

According to a significant portion of marketing leaders, delivering return on investment is the top challenge in marketing today. Budget and efficiency are inroads to ROI, and you can get both by using your existing technology in a more strategic, coordinated way.

You’ve likely experienced one or more of these barriers in your organization:

• Point Solutions vs. Coordinated Ecosystem: You have a lot of point solutions in your tech stack when you need a coordinated ecosystem.
• Siloed Teams: Your teams are using tools differently or are unaware of what’s at their disposal.
• Misaligned Processes: Your underlying processes are not aligned to take advantage of your tech.

Spoiler alert: technology produces inconsistent results when underutilized or misused.

So, while your teams might be inclined to double down on what they already use tech for to try to improve volume or capacity, that may not be enough to get you the results you’re after. Instead, focus on getting the most out of your tech by breaking down the siloed ways in which you use it and making it one shared, consistent ecosystem that is standard across the team.

When people, process, and technology are aligned, your martech will help your organization drive innovation, agility, and experimentation—all while keeping your budget in mind.

People: Break Down Silos and Align Teams

With lofty MQL targets and marketing-sourced revenue goals, the demand generation team is laser-focused on getting volume and quality just right. On the other side of the house, marketing operations prioritize tech stability and execution.

Combine that with a myriad of other marketing functions with their own execution requirements, and the result is a bunch of disconnected activities: skilled contributors doing more of what they know.

A charter is an important tool to align teams and dissolve silos. The development of a charter is a shared imperative - all functions agree on their roles, responsibilities, and how to work together. Charter definition forces a shared view of success and acts as a “north star” to guide campaign development and execution through the lens of technology.

Together, the marketing function as a whole can help define shared KPIs and ensure that technology and tools are considered early in the campaign planning process. The result is a more integrated, connected technology approach that will be more automated, and responsive, and ultimately achieve better results.

Process: Gain Consensus on Terminology, SLAs, Planning, and Measurement

When we talk about campaigns, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Developing an integrated campaign planning framework that is supplemented with solid lead management and enablement while being rooted in healthy change management practices requires you to get all your teams aligned on where the organization’s revenue will come from. To do that, the teams need to agree on:

• A framework for how your campaigns are created, executed, and measured, taking into account the various team members and technology.
• A process to determine how leads are scored, routed, and dispositioned across sales and marketing.
• An approach to prepare, support, and help the organization embrace change, stick with it, and realize improved outcomes.
• Education and training for your team so they can leverage the tech to its fullest potential.

Skipping over these fundamental processes will leave your team unable to take advantage of what your tech has to offer, trying to do more of what they have always done to hit those increasing pipeline goals and more than likely falling short.

Technology: Understand the Art of the Possible

You could be a small or mid-market organization with 2-4 tools, or an enterprise organization with 200 - but it’s your organization’s ability to plan, execute, and resist reactivity that will have an impact on the value you derive.

A relatively “simple” stack that is thoughtfully architected, integrated into the way the team works, and closely aligned with the campaign planning process, will outperform a “complex” stack that is siloed, features-based, and with ad hoc usage.

To create an integrated, well-adopted ecosystem rather than a set of tools, an audit can help. An audit of your tech stack helps you clarify if you are using the tech to the best of its abilities rather than just for a particular use case, singular feature, or specialized team.

An audit can reveal:

• Additional features to use (and those features could fill in gaps to do more with what you already have. Improved utilization and better value? Yes, please!)
• Opportunities to expand use for broader adoption
• Areas of duplicate functionality and tools to divest

By auditing your tech stack (and training and cross-training your team on use cases for each piece of tech), you will discover that you can use the technology you purchased for your organization in more ways than you originally thought. And that’s a win-win for everyone.

Inverta Can Help

Most tech stacks are a result of purchases made by various leaders and team members throughout the life of a company. So while certain technologies were appropriate at a point in time in the company’s evolution, it may no longer fit or need to be used in a different way.

At Inverta, our team of seasoned marketers can cut through all the history that lives within your tech stack to help  break down what is needed, where there is duplication of features, and identify the technology that is underutilized in your strategy today! We can build out workflows to help you use more of what you already have, and make suggestions for  additional technology you may want to consider to increase your efficiency and take advantage of the latest technology and capabilities. From there, we can help put structures in place to ensure your tech stack stays current and when asked by finance to prove the ROI of these technologies, you actually can! 

Ready to maximize your marketing technology? Let’s talk.

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