The Risks of GrowthTech Bloat

This is the second in a three-part series.

In the last article I outlined what GrowthTech bloat is. But why is it important?

Sure, we’d all like to use software that works perfectly. But is that realistic? The business has other, more important priorities than this. Why bother trying to fix something that is low priority?

The risks are hidden, but they are huge. In explorations with many clients in the past 3+ years, we’ve seen the following impact:

1. Huge drain on valuable organizational time and budget. Imagine you took the time and money your company had to spend using these systems. If you could find efficiencies, then apply the people and budget to other areas, what other things could your company achieve?
2. Reduced ROI of overall marketing and sales spend. There are fixed costs to running ads, creating content, or paying BDR salaries. Sales and Martech Bloat creates a “leaky bucket” that, when fixed, helps ensure these dollars get the return you expect.
3. Poor, disconnected customer experience. How can you deliver a good experience if you don’t know what your prospects and customers are doing? Getting clean data from connected endpoints is crucial to help you evolve how the experiences you can provide.
4. Slower organizational resiliency and growth. Think of effective revenue operations as an arms race. Your competitors that use sales and marketing software effectively will simply outperform you.
5. Poor employee experience and higher turnover. You can’t attract and keep the best people if your sh*t doesn’t work. Part of the reason I left one job was that their systems were horrible; it impacted the confidence and trust I had in my employer.

Why is Sales and Martech Bloat happening?

It’s usually more than just one thing. Sometimes the software is mismatched and incapable of doing what the business needs to do. Perhaps it hasn’t been set up correctly, or users aren’t trained to use it. Systems might be siloed, overlap, or disconnected. Not following a best practice years ago can have a snowball effect, leading to issues the company is struggling with now.

The fact is: many in-house teams typically aren’t equipped to set up, use, and evolve sales and marketing technology. They are too busy marketing, selling, or keep customers happy. And the sales and marketing software providers usually only answer general helpdesk inquiries.

We believe Sales, Marketing, and Success teams deserve better than to put up with GrowthTech Bloat.

Instead of bogging down in-house teams, scaling companies need revenue operations experts to unblock roadblocks and align platforms, process, and people. That’s typically where we come in.

As sales, marketing, and revenue operations professionals ourselves,?the Inflectiv team has?seen the good, bad, and ugly of growth technology inside companies.?We’ve had to live through implementations, and we’ve had to live with the technology well after it launches.

Stay tuned for our next post about how you can solve GrowthTech Bloat in your company.