B2B SaaS companies are embracing Revenue Operations (RevOps) business methodology to align their go-to-market (GTM) teams.
A LeanData survey revealed that about 57% of companies are implementing RevOps.
This shift isn’t a fad. It came from the need to improve GTM processes (marketing, sales, and customer experience) and grow scalable revenue.
When starting out, companies often struggle with RevOps, especially when it comes to optimizing their tech stack – a core pillar of RevOps.
Most companies use a handful of systems, with each department working on separate platforms. This fragments the data across the revenue teams, making it difficult to analyze customer experiences and deliver personalized experiences.
If you’re currently struggling with tech stack pains, keep reading. In this guide, we’ll discuss the tools to consider when building an optimal RevOps tech stack.
Before we begin, there are two points we need to make clear.
First, you do not need to invest in all of the tools mentioned here to build a successful RevOps engine.
This list is nothing more than a robust framework to provide ideas. Your business and its needs are unique. We recommend you have a RevOps lead or team that’s responsible for your tech stack.
Second, throughout this blog, we will recommend some of the best tools in the market. In full transparency, we are proudly certified partners with the following solutions:
We believe it’s our responsibility as a RevOps agency to partner with the best solutions in the industry and be certified to implement, onboard, administer and optimize these tools for our clients.
Let’s jump right in.
Before anything else, it’s important to step back and get a bird’s-eye view of your GTM teams and their requirements.
Here’s what your tech stack should include:
Additionally, you’ll need the following solution-specific tools:
In the end, the main goal of RevOps is to centralize all the tools and data, and get everyone aligned.
A powerful customer relationship management (CRM) platform can provide most of the aforementioned solutions in one place.
However, factors like budget constraints, fractured processes, and buy-in may present hurdles.
A well-built RevOps tech stack plays a central role in GTM growth, impacting main KPIs like customer churn, account relationship score, revenue per employee, and beyond.
Now that we know which “areas” to focus on when building an optimal B2B SaaS RevOps tech stack, let’s take a look at the specific solutions you should consider:
A customer relationship management (CRM) software is a tool that gathers all the data of your leads and customers in one place for everyone to see, tracks interactions, and helps manage your company’s relationship with them.
As stated earlier, a CRM can help automate and centralize some key GTM processes, and is a must for any growing B2B SaaS company.
Here are a few of the key functionalities your CRM should perform:
An end-to-end CRM, like HubSpot, offers tools that help revenue teams at all stages of the customer journey, including lead generation, nurturing, pipeline management, service, and a whole lot more. Hubspot’s platform is a RevOps game changer and is getting better every day. HubSpot’s CRM is also free, but you will need to pay to add its Marketing, Sales, Service, Operations Hubs or CMS.
Salesforce is also a great solution. The biggest difference between HubSpot and Salesforce is that HubSpot’s platform is more robust off the shelf, while Salesforce’s solution is more customizable.
Some more popular CRM systems include Zoho and Zendesk.
To be more efficient, your marketing team needs help automating and executing their day-to-day tasks.
The following tools can help with that:
An all-in-one solution, such as HubSpot’s Marketing Hub, may help eliminate the need for separately implementing these solutions. It also has a host of other tools.
This falls under marketing automation, but deserves its own spot on the list.
A decent lead generation software should allow you to:
The HubSpot marketing tool mentioned above offers all of those features, and more.
Sales tech is exploding - and for good reason. Identifying buyers at the right time is extremely challenging and providing them with a comfortable experience that converts to a new customer is invaluable.
There are solutions that are dramatically transforming businesses. The tricky part is figuring out which sales solution is best for your team. Some options are full stack while others are more niche.
Communicate with your sales team to understand their needs and process to figure out which solutions is best.
SalesLoft is a wonderfully robust option, RevOps.io is excellent for product-led growth companies, and Ebsta helps build relationships and predictable pipelines using revenue intelligence.
Let’s also give a shoutout to meeting scheduling tools in this section. They make sales engagement much easier on the customer. These tools - Calendly, ScheduleOnce, and HubSpot - automate and streamline the booking process, which drastically improves the customer experience for B2B SaaS prospects.
As you know by now, RevOps is all about the data. But data is complex and difficult to cleanse, organize, and optimize. GTM teams also need solutions that aggregate vital lead and customer data from sources and empower that data to make life easier for your teams and drive growth.
With solutions like LeanData, HubSpot’s Operations Hub, DataLadder, you can create a powerful, customized data machine that will send accurate leads to the best sales rep for that prospect and at the right time. These solutions are a must!
Customer service software provides a platform for your customer success teams to receive, manage, and track customer support tickets.
It allows them to:
Some popular help desk tools include those by HubSpot, Zendesk, and Zoho.
Messaging tools include a customer messaging or inboxing software that allows your CX team to interact with customers.
It also includes a chatbot that allows you to cater to customer queries. The nice thing about chatbots is they can replace your forms and serve as a more organic data capture opportunity.
HubSpot’s CRM offers a shared inbox feature that connects all major channels of conversation (email, website, and social media platforms) and a chatbot that serves your website or Facebook Messenger.
To reiterate, you need a solution to integrate/connect your tools together.
This is important because it aligns with the RevOps best practice of centralizing and streamlining your tech stack.
When it comes to middleware, Zapier is a popular choice.
When building a powerful RevOps tech stack, B2B SaaS companies face many hurdles along the way.
Here are some of the most common challenges, along with tips on how to overcome them:
A lot of companies are deeply invested in legacy solutions they've used for quite some time.
Not only is it difficult to transition the data, but they may also be locked into agreements.
That being said, you don’t have to - nor should you - rip everything down, start over, and opt for a single solution to create an optimal RevOps tech stack.
In fact, we recommend optimizing the stack slowly and transitioning to RevOps over a couple years at minimum.
Bringing internal changes can be difficult, especially if people have been using the same processes and tools for a while now.
Changing tech stack is no different.
If internal teams have been using the same solutions for a while, it may be difficult to get buy-in from them to embrace new software. On the other hand, maybe they’re the ones pleading for a change.
In either case, the solution is the same: start with understanding their current problems. Your RevOps team is the ones responsible for taking those problems and identifying the best solutions for you. Once improvements are identified, it’s time to educate your teams on how it will make their lives easier.
Lastly, your customer-facing teams shouldn’t be the ones implementing, figuring out how to onboard themselves, or optimize the solutions. Rely on your RevOps team. They ought to be responsible for all of that. They should also coach the teams on how to use the tools properly.
Another common challenge is that it may be difficult to understand exactly what’s needed to set up and implement an effective RevOps tech stack in a B2B SaaS company.
You might face trouble figuring out your exact requirements and shortlisting tools that can:
For this purpose, use your RevOps team to run a comprehensive tech stack audit to understand where you stand, what tools you already have, how they’re performing and helping teams.
The key is to take it slow. Rome wasn’t built in a day, nor should your RevOps engine.
Focus first on building your ideal customer profiles (ICPs). Then focus on aligning your teams and mapping your customer journey. Once you’ve completed those objectives, identify the data points you need to track the performance of your teams and customer experience.
It’s important to establish a baseline. Once the baseline is in place, it’s time to identify gaps, iterate your process, and start figuring out the software changes you should make.
If you need help auditing your tech stack, feel free to ask us for help. We consult businesses on identifying the best-suited solutions based upon unique requirements and existing technology.