Keeping up with the latest in sales and marketing technologies can be a full time job. It feels as if a new platform hits the market everyday, claiming to be THE must-have solution to optimize a part of your funnel or fulfill a new reporting need.
Obviously, you can’t use them all. But which ones should you pay attention to? In this post we’ll cover the current growth stack we use and give insight into the tools we believe to be best in class for fostering growth and scalability. Let’s get started.
But Wait…
To understand the tech platforms necessary for your growth stack, you first need to identify the reporting goals for your sales and marketing teams. If you know how you want your data to be visualized in the end, you can make a far more accurate decision about which combination of platforms are right for you.
What are your teams responsible for delivering? What are their KPIs? Your stack should be built around achieving those goals.
Our Growth Stack
HubSpot, Salesforce and InsightSquared make up the base growth stack we use for business intelligence. Your growth stack will likely look a bit different, but be sure that the platforms you chose can be well integrated together.
We picked Salesforce as our CRM because it's a robust tool that can be aligned with our sales process AND it integrates well with HubSpot if configured correctly. Our marketing and sales teams use HubSpot for a lot of things, but in the end it all boils down to lead generation and nurturing.
InsightSquared sits on top of Salesforce and nicely ties everything together. Its leadership reporting tool handles and visualizes all of the data we need in one place. That way, not only leadership, but the entire team, has visibility into important business-wide metrics used to make accurate decisions.
Enrichment and Acceleration
Once you have your base growth stack in place, there are a host of lead enrichment and sales acceleration tools you can leverage to further bridge the gap between marketing automation and the day-to-day sales process. These tools will let your employees focus on what’s important and hand off some of the more manual things (sorting, searching, segmenting, etc.) to automation.
Lead Enrichment
The work within your marketing automation platform is geared toward capturing as much information as possible from leads to aid the sales process. While form strategy and digital body language are great places to start, it often takes further manual searching from your sales team to get the full picture. A lead enrichment tool uses automation to capture that information from the web (LinkedIn, email signatures, etc.) to give you the added information necessary to convert more leads. Below are three best in class lead enrichment tools, any of which will make a great addition to your stack.
- HubSpot Insights (Built in with HubSpot)
- LeadGnome
- Data.com Prospector
Sales Acceleration
Currently, there is a big movement toward implementing sales acceleration tools that allow sales reps to run their own campaigns. Your sales team likely understands the wants of your leads far better than your marketing automation platform ever could.
A sales acceleration tool will allow each sales rep to build a cadence with their leads by launching small campaigns. Your marketing team can still create the assets and help train the sales team on best practices, but each sales rep will ultimately determine the correct workflow to use on a case-by-case basis. Consider one of these sales acceleration tools to better nurture your leads.
A Final Word on Reporting
With all of the tools across your growth stack, data can easily end up living in a lot of different places. You could pay a business analyst to spend time coercing your data and updating reports, but that's not a scalable solution. Instead, implement a reporting platform that can be easily integrated with the platforms your data already lives in.
A platform like InsightSquared will pull all of your relevant data into one place. Its reporting dashboard gives all of your employees real-time insight into the metrics you determine to be important. And for the leadership team, InsightSquared provides the reports every business owner needs right out-of-the-box.
Determine your reporting goals and then use a well-integrated tech stack to enable your employees to focus on what's important: growing your business.
Are there any platforms in your stack you can't live without? Send us a message! We'd love to hear about them.
Tag(s):
Demand Generation
