How Technical Debt Affects Your SaaS Business
Modern businesses rely on software and digital tools for operations, data, communication, metrics, and beyond. Sometimes, these tools overlap and create redundancies or data conflicts. At other times, they break during critical projects and create chaos.
While quick solutions are tempting on tight deadlines, they can also evolve into long-term big problems or failure at critical moments. The result can lead to an insane loss in productivity with a trickle down effect like poor lead generation, lost sales and data corruption. All of which could be avoided with better planning. As they say, “Slow and steady wins the race.”
Defining Technical Debt
The result of these technological breakdowns creates “Technical Debt.” The term refers to choosing a fast and easy, “good-enough” fix instead of a comprehensive solution that scales with your business.
In the long-term, these small compromises can snowball into big problems that slow down production, reduce product quality, and undermine consumer trust.
As businesses become increasingly digital, technical debt has become a term for tech-related problems that start as shortcuts and become major organizational flaws.
For example, a small eCommerce brand may choose a free POS solution, spend a year mastering it, and then discover that it lacks critical features they need to scale up to the next level. This reality results in wasted time, missed opportunities, and a higher labor cost.
Fortunately, SaaS businesses can reduce the negative impacts of technical debt with a strong revenue operations (RevOps) strategy.
Technical Debt in Businesses
As technology advances and companies grow, organizations naturally take on more technical debt. New solutions emerge that didn’t exist before. Digital tools fail at critical moments and need to be replaced. Company mergers create a need to synchronize data across different platforms. Siloed teams use different software for similar purposes.
The most common sources of technical debt are rushed production and tight budgets.
When projects have tight timelines and little margin for error, small problems get added to a list of issues to tackle later. Over time, small issues become cracks in the foundation of major projects that can bring entire initiatives crumbling down.
Competition for resources and restricted communication between siloed teams can lead organizations to purchase suboptimal tools that contribute to incomplete or inaccurate data. When startups make big decisions with insufficient data, they lose opportunities, customers, and revenue.
As many organizations grow in scale, they lose their grasp on synchronization. Like a game of “telephone,” carefully laid plans can have botched executions due to conflicts of purpose, data, and process. Bad technical debt is the enemy of revenue generation.
Technical Debt in Marketing
Technology in marketing is a double-edged sword. Opportunities abound to build communities around products and services and to maximize top-of-mind awareness in the digital space. However, every marketing tool requires a different strategy and process. Every platform has an audience with different preferences and needs.
Google, Facebook, and LinkedIn Ads all have different best practices and interfaces. Also, the strategy for each must be executed, evaluated, and budgeted separately.
Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, Snapchat, YouTube, and TikTok all feature different types of content and host different communities. Mastering and leveraging each platform requires a specific investment of time and resources. Sometimes the strategy for one platform can conflict with the strategy for another, resulting in lost sales and confused customers.
A sophisticated RevOps strategy will synchronize and simplify marketing efforts by streamlining communication between siloed teams and integrating the extended cost of rework and redundancy into long-term scaling plans.
Technical Debt in Data
Technology in data management has grown incredibly advanced. As a result, many startups gain their competitive edge by optimizing their data and flows. Some solutions boast excellent reporting, but clunky data management. Others offer slick EDI integrations but are known for being riddled with bugs. Some possess excellence in many areas, but also come at a high price.
As SaaS businesses balance their plans to scale against their budgets and estimated profits, they sometimes seek to save money by purchasing cheaper tools. Sometimes, that choice results in big wins that increase profit by eliminating unnecessary costs.
However, it’s more common for cheap and easy solutions to backfire in the long run, resulting in unforeseen labor and opportunity costs. In worst-case scenarios, technical debt can result in significant profit losses that sink projects and scare off stakeholders.
Several common issues can arise from cheap data solutions:
Botched Data Migrations
When organizations rely on different software with similar purposes, they sometimes have to execute large data migrations. These data transfers take a lot of time to organize, test, and manage — and they don’t always work. Sometimes prices map as quantities, vendor names show up as product names, and sales history maps to the wrong SKUs. When data migration failures meet tight deadlines, chaos ensues.
The best way to avoid botched data migrations is to minimize their necessity. The best tools offer multifaceted solutions to revenue generation so that your company can store most of your critical data in one place. These tools also have strong security measures and efficient data backup capabilities to prevent catastrophic data accidents.
Incomplete Tasks
Large organizations often run on tight schedules for supply chain, procurement, and invoicing. These tasks are frequently semi-automated and require input from multiple departments. Each additional step slows task completion and increases the risk of human error—or negligence. If a task has to cross five desks before submission, each layer of bureaucracy increases the possibility of failure.
Vacations, resignations, incomplete training, partial instructions, miscommunication, and even power outages can all cause delays in project completion. Unfinished tasks undermine customer trust and can bring an end or modification to existing client relationships.
A strong RevOps strategy will streamline your supply chain by maintaining data integrity, exposing areas of profit shrink, decreasing long-term maintenance requirements, and ensuring favorable customer experiences.
Minimizing Technical Debt with Strong RevOps
To avoid missed opportunities and profit loss from technical debt, many SaaS companies are implementing RevOps strategies to scale smarter, faster, and better. RevOps is a centralized operations strategy that takes a holistic approach to revenue generation, emphasizing communication and synchronization. In recent years, it has gained popularity due to flaws with traditional organizational operations that rely on siloed teams with different technologies, data, and processes.
The best time for your organization to streamline revenue operations is right now. Strong RevOps gives SaaS businesses the efficiency and edge required to capture larger markets while the competition drags their feet.
Businesses with centralized RevOps solutions drive more sales by incentivizing cooperation among teams. Teams with common goals benefit from open and effective communication, better product quality and customer support, and more sales.
To build or choose an effective RevOps solution, you need a plan that synchronizes purpose and process across your entire organization.
Synchronize Your Purpose
Teams deliver the best results when they’re aligned toward a common purpose. Conversely, a siloed team structure splinters an organization’s purpose. Choosing the right RevOps solution helps unify your company's goals across several departments.
For example, a business could have a goal to increase profit by 2%. When departments aren’t in synchrony, each section is pursuing its own ends, which can hurt a company’s overall growth. If the customer success team views the profit goal as primarily a sales problem, they’ll hand it off to marketing and sales, expecting them to attract new customers and close leads to meet that 2% metric.
Yet without a strong customer success strategy, the venture may fail at the onboarding and customer retention stages. That results in losing clients to churn, and profit goals could backslide as a result. A RevOps team takes in the whole picture: using a multi-pronged approach that includes increasing retention rates, upselling and cross-selling opportunities, improved lead closure, and higher sales, SaaS companies can meet goals without sacrificing quality in any department.
Synchronize Your Process
Teams work most efficiently when unified in their purpose and process. Procedural conflicts lead to inefficiency at best and personal disputes at worst. A quality RevOps solution helps coordinate procedures across several departments.
For example, departments may have conflicting processes that result in inaccurate data and reports. Sales may enter data that other departments can’t access, or didn’t know about, resulting in duplicate entries. If the customer success team tries to follow up with a client, they may have bad data that leads to a confused customer and negative experience.
Duplication of effort is about more than inefficiency -- it can disrupt daily business flow in profound and often unexpected ways. Data errors, poor sales performance, and dissatisfied customers often result from process friction between collaborating departments. Limited communication between team members leads to duplicate work and project errors.
A RevOps team will build procedures that integrate departments and reduce friction: Accounting will own specific tasks within ERP software. Marketing will own other tasks. Team members within each department will have open lines of communication to ask questions and prevent accidents before they happen. As a result, the organization will close more sales and maintain healthier client relationships.
Build Better Organizations with RevOps
RevOps is changing the future of sales and customer retention. Digital technology and global events are making communication easier and more important than ever before. As a result, organizations are leveraging RevOps as a competitive advantage to secure market share, win and retain customers, and satisfy stakeholders.
If your organization currently lacks the funding or resources to create an internal RevOps team, there’s still hope. Many outside organizations like Revvy specialize in providing centralized RevOps solutions for growing businesses.
By outsourcing RevOps to the professionals at Revvy, you can gain the benefits of organizational synchronicity while your team focuses on their critical task: delivering quality products and services to your customers.
An external RevOps solution will help with marketing automation, software adoption, data-driven decision making, tech stack consolidation, more predictable and shorter sales cycles, and more.
If you’re pondering the best time to integrate RevOps into your business, consider exploring it as an option sooner than later. The world is changing rapidly, and companies with centralized, holistic approaches to revenue generation are leading their markets.
