The knots have it – untangling unwanted complexity within your RevTech stack

From birth onward, the knot, in all its literal and metaphorical forms, plays an integral part in our existence. From the twist of the umbilical cord giving us life to symbolically tying the knot at our wedding, each knot serves a purpose. Whether good or bad, knots usually become more frequent and complex as we age. Just try to stretch your shoulders after a long day in front of the computer. Ouch! That knot between your shoulder blades isn’t just a nagging pain; it’s a symptom of being irritated, overtaxed, or just out of whack.

The same can be true of your RevTech solution/ecosystem, especially as it ages and becomes more complex. If the best way to remove a troublesome knot in real life is through careful planning and good processes and practices, like stretching daily, then why (k)not try the same strategy to untangle your RevOps technology, people, processes, and data?

Identifying the knots tying up your RevOps technology, people, processes, and data

Technology, like any tool, is only as good as the person or team wielding it. But poorly integrated or duplicative technology can do more harm than good, even in the most skilled hands. So if yours is like most companies, the knot tying up your Revenue Tech (RevTech) stack isn’t the fault of any individual technology, but of how you’ve combined, integrated, and deployed them. Left as-is, these technologies will continue to suck up hard-won budgets that would be best spent elsewhere. At worst, the poor integration will fragment your system, leaving individual applications and platforms cut off from one another and you and your team with a single-pane view instead of the holistic, full-funnel visibility you need.

Your people can be tied up in knots as well. Symptoms might include siloed groups working in isolation from one another, or multiple teams and individuals stepping all over each other, doing double-duty work under unclear objectives. In the current economic climate, inefficient use of human capital is a waste few companies can afford.
Processes can also have knots, causing breakdowns in your systems and making it impossible for people to do their jobs effectively. Consider misrouted leads, growing colder by the second, or an API allotment misspent on the wrong calls, leaving critical data out of date. The longer you leave these knots, the more tangled they become, resulting in increased downtime, contacts with the wrong owner or account, and so on —all of which have negative impacts on your business and revenue.

Your data is also susceptible to knots. The biggest culprits are inadequate hygiene and data quality processes. With a bit of practice, poor data quality is pretty easy to spot: incomplete and duplicate fields, along with clearly stale or inaccurate entries, are the most blatant offenders. As anyone in ops can attest, bad data is the enemy of productivity and has hijacked countless teams with far more important things to do than manually cleaning records or root-causing output errors. Bad data is also detrimental to data enrichment, as the correlation between data quality and match rate is well established. The negative downstream effect of bad data on everything from segmentation and personalization to targeting and nurturing is enough to tie even strong stomachs in knots.

The solution you might (k)not expect

If this entangled metaphor of a post has taught us anything, it’s hopefully that a tangled, unwelcome, or difficult knot can be as disruptive at work as it is at home. But not all knots are bad: there is a whole class of intentional, strong, and practical “good” knots that we rely on every day. In his excellent ebook on the technical art of knot tying, A Few Good Knots & Bends and Hitches, knot master Forbes Pettigrew defines the knot as “an intertwining or complication of the parts of one or more ropes, cords, or strips of anything flexible enough, made for the purpose of fastening them together or to another object, or to prevent slipping, and secured by being drawn tight.” If we accept this as the definition of a “good” knot and extend the metaphor a bit further, we can easily apply it to the ideal RevOps platform.

Ideally, just as in an ideal rope ladder, the key characteristics we’re looking for are strength, flexibility, and security. Strength gives us the processing power and scale to replace the loose collection of disconnected apps and systems with a single, automated data orchestration layer, abstracting the knotty complexities from integration and preventing the data and process slippages that can tie up even the most skilled RevOps teams. Flexibility provides the ultimate interoperability and the capability to test different models, assignments, and rules using real data in a safe sandbox environment, eliminating the production errors that can’t be fixed with Ctrl-Z. Finally, security gives us the safe cloud environment that eliminates siloes, facilitating full alignment across teams and complete visibility throughout the funnel, giving everyone from ops teams to executives the insights needed to make good, data-driven decisions.

Getting started

Painful knots don’t typically disappear on their own. In most cases, an ignored knot will just get worse until something breaks. Just as you shouldn’t ignore your personal pain and wait for your neck or back to give out, don’t neglect operational knots tying up your Revenue Tech (RevTech) stack.

Replace the loose tangle and “bad” knot of poorly connected systems with a single, clean, and strong “good” knot that ties your entire RevTech stack together by seeking relief in a RevOps orchestration platform. It might also reduce your stress and eliminate those other pesky knots keeping you from being as productive as you’d like. If a RevOps orchestration platform can take care of your and your company’s knots and make things easier and more efficient for all in the process, then why (k)not give it a try?

Learn how a RevOps automation platform can untie the knots in your RevTech solution: download the RevOps Automation Platform buyer’s guide.

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