A lot of companies buy a piece of technology but fail to get the most use out of it because they don’t really understand how it fits into their overall strategy, business process.
Sometimes it’s not about the best technology. It’s often about the “right” technology. Selecting the “right” tech for your organization is critical to manage budget and functionality to accelerate growth.
There are over 7,000 customer technology choices out there and every company will tell you theirs is the best fit for you. As a result, the only way to have a proper tech fit for you is to create a roadmap to understand what you can do right now and where you would like to be.
This means that smaller to mid-market companies can get a lot more out of their existing tech than you think. In some cases, the best approach is simply combining what you have with strong analysis and making incremental improvements through testing. This way, as your company grows and your operations expand, you may have the ability to take advantage of other technology down the line.
It’s tempting to pick the marketing tools with the most bells and whistles—or head straight to Gartner to choose the upper right magic quadrant. Neither is the correct answer. Instead, it’s important to pick the software that is right for your business. Instead of overinvesting in a high-cost program with every marketing automation and lead assistant known to man, work with your C-suite to pinpoint which types of software will help you penetrate a new audience or nurture the existing one.
Your CFO can provide you with recommendations on your marketing budget—and your CTO and CMO can inform you on what types of analytics dashboards, scheduling assistants, and lead management tools are appropriate for a business of your size and industry. If you start with a few essential products, you’ll have better control of how to scale them over time.
Principle #9: Accelerate Time with Technology.
We understand how to develop a good customer technology strategy and how to implement that technology within your budget. We are often called upon to provide RFP advisory leadership. In some cases, our partners actually will assist in the deployment of the technology. Bottom line, our goal is to enable your customer technology and remove the tech barrier.
These are some of the technologies we have experience deploying.
