How to Optimize the GTM Tech Stack Management

A big part of Revenue Operations is managing the GTM tech stack. From creating users and managing security access to implementing operational initiatives, there are a lot of things that go into it. While the best way of managing the tech stack will vary from company to company, I believe there is a general structure that will work for most organizations (or at least, increasing the chances of success).

Chances are that at this point, you already have a specialized consultancy firm or admin in house to manage the CRM, which in most companies, is the main source of truth for any Sales, Marketing and Customer Success related data. Among other things, this person's responsibilities would include adding/removing users, managing access levels, creating fields and in more complex situations, automating workflows. However, as the company grows, it starts hiring other Sales Engagement vendors to automate and optimize Sales and Marketing operations. These tools - like Outreach, Salesloft, Hubspot, Marketo, Orum, Chili Piper, 6sense, etc - will be integrated with the CRM to make sure that the data flows correctly between both platforms and works properly together. Usually the administration of these tools are left in the background when compared to the CRM, since these are much simpler to manage and also because the CRM is already being managed by specialized professionals.

More often than not, companies choose to delegate the administration and management of Sales Engagement tools to someone from within the company which, in many cases, is the BDRs leader or SalesOps/RevOps person. That's mainly because, as said before, these tools are simpler to manage, do not require specific knowledge or certifications (like a Salesforce Admin), and also because having someone closer to the day to day operations usually speeds up implementations, since this person has more context on what and how things need to be done.?

Now, there are a few key differences between having a BDR leader or RevOps person managing Sales Engagement tools and it all depends on their profile and how aligned they are. Having a BDR leader managing Sales Engagement tools (or any other sales related person) may be beneficial since they have a much deeper understanding of the context and the reason why a specific requirement needs to be deployed. However, a down side of this approach is that - besides having to learn and understand the technical capabilities of each tool - it distracts the sales leader from her/his number 1 priority: coaching and hiring to optimize/increase new appointments and sales. On the other hand, a dedicated RevOps person will usually have a much steeper technical learning curve, but may not be as aligned with the business context.

Given this scenario, there are a couple of ways to optimize each team's roles and responsibilities to ensure minimal friction. The format that I've seen work the best is splitting the tech stack management and operations between both personas. While it may seem a bit chaotic at first, drawing a clear line between what Sales and RevOps are responsible for is crucial and easier than it seems if taking into consideration both upsides and downsides of the analysis done above. Since the Sales Persona has a deeper understanding of the context, he/she can be responsible for making operational changes in the tech stack, like creating sequences, email copy, building lists, changing reps from the booking rotators, etc. On the other hand, the RevOps person should oversee more administrative and technical aspects of the tech stack, like managing users, making sure integrations are working properly, creating fields, creating new booking rotators, etc.?

In this way, we can make sure to optimize each personas strengths, have less friction and speed up GTM strategies implementations.