Do you REALLY need all those apps?

How to fight tech debt in your marketing tech stack

Do you fight tech debt? For most of us, this is the time of year where we are evaluating program results, planning for the next year, and making a case for the budget to cover new investments. Are Are you considering whether you could add to your budget by slimming down your over-sized martech stack?

According to Chief Martec, the average small business [500 or fewer employees] has 172 apps. Mid-market companies [501 and 2,500 employees] have 255 apps, on average. And new apps are being added monthly. These 2023 figures are up dramatically from just one year ago, while utilization and adoption of each app is down.

During the recent RevOps HubSpot User Group focusing on CPQ solutions, one participant, Frank Loughan (VP, RevOps), asked whether or not this type of functionality could be built into an existing solution rather than buying yet another app.

Frank made a case that he didn’t want to have one more thing to manage, one more integration, and one more investment in his budget.

Since then, there has been a lot of talk about minimizing technology debt. What is tech debt? LeanIX outlines the following four types of tech debt:

• multiple, redundant applications supporting the same business capabilities
• overly customized applications requiring ongoing maintenance and updates
• legacy applications serving a specific business purpose that are no longer supported by the vendor
• outdated versions of supported applications

In short, it’s the result of multiple “quick fixes” that may have made sense at the time but are no longer needed.

How can you assess and remedy your bloated tech stack?

Companies often start by trying to document all of the tools they have. This sets off all sorts of alarm bells about cost and tech stack complexity.

Here are seven steps you can take to get your arms around your tech stack:

Step 1: What are you trying to achieve?

Write down your demand generation, lead management, sales enablement, and other objectives. This exercise should be very top-level instead of mapping out current processes step-by-step. You may find it useful to work with an outside expert who doesn’t have a stake in the results.

Step 2: Are your technical processes in alignment with your goals?

Once you’ve outlined your team’s goals, it’s time to look at the processes around these objectives.

For example, your goal for demand generation may be to generate and send 50 new marketing qualified leads per week to sales. Processes might include:

• Building a demand generation campaign and providing sales enablement tools to support the sales team
• Adding new contacts to your database and running them through nurture and scoring programs
• Notifying sales about new MQLs they’re receiving and how they communicate back about the quality of those leads
• Tracking campaign attribution to closed-won opportunities

Step 3: What can your current CRM and marketing automation platform actually DO?

The next step is to take the processes you just wrote down and compare them to your core technology - marketing automation and CRM. Approach both with fresh eyes. Are there new functions available since you first adopted these platforms? Are there ways you could implement more of your processes in one place? Having a deep understanding of what is possible with your current core stack and what your primary goals are will direct how you can rebuild your operations in existing platforms. You may need to get a little bit of help here if you don’t know the ins and outs of the technology or updates that have been made.

Step 4: What apps do you currently have and WHY?

Once you have all that documented, you can now document all the tools you currently have in your technology stack. What role does each app play in your processes? Can those apps be replaced by your core marketing and sales platforms?

Step 5: Who uses what and why?

Have lots of conversations and interviews. You need to do this because merging some of these applications could be a cultural change for your organization, and people may not want to let go of what they’re currently using. Additionally, there may be specific reasons why a particular solution was adopted.

Some of these conversations will require that you share your vision of the trimmed tech stack, why it makes sense, and (importantly) the benefit that it will provide to the person who “owns” the apps that you plan to eliminate.

Step 6: Create your migration plan.

Plan how you will migrate processes to your core (or consolidated) solutions. What information is needed? What documentation? How can you engage those people whose processes are going to shift? Even if these changes require a number of months to implement, it’s important to map your migration and get buy-in and support from leadership.

Step 7: Celebrate early and often!

Once you start this process, celebrate the small wins as you tighten up your tech stack. If you’re in marketing or revenue operations, this means you’ll have more time to think about how things work rather than managing integration between multiple tools.

If you need someone to talk through this process with or do all or parts of it for you, we are here to help.