A wobbly RevOps tech stack not only affects operational efficiency but also impacts your customer experience. In a highly competitive market, where customer expectations are continuously rising, failing to evaluate and optimize a tech stack can result in lost revenue opportunities.

It's crucial for RevOps leaders to continuously evaluate their tech stack. Failure to do so risks wasting valuable resources on tools that don’t align to corporate objectives. To be effective, RevOps leaders need to move away from ad-hoc evaluations to structured, measurable approaches that consider and connect the entire GTM motion. 

In this article, we’ll talk through three ways to substantively evaluate your tech stack and align your resources to your goals more efficiently. 

1. Evaluate tools against company-wide goals and initiatives
2. Conduct an end-to-end RevOps tech stack audit
3. Research emerging technology that will scale with your business

Want even more insights into navigating RevOps tech? Check out our complete Master Class with RevOps experts Art Harding, Marc Maloy, and Craig Rosenberg here.

Successful evaluation starts with defining and understanding your company's corporate objectives. These are typically big, top-down initiatives aligned to company-wide, “North Star” goals and OKRs.

Make a list of high-priority company objectives, then consider how and if your tech stack aligns with those goals. Key questions to consider: 

1. ROI: Is your tech stack generating the revenue value needed to justify the cost? 
2. Budgetary priorities: Keeping budgetary constraints and company-wide goals in mind, what tools will drive the maximum impact for your revenue goals? 
3. Gaps in tooling: Are you missing a tool that would accelerate a key OKR or business need?

Prioritizing Evaluation: Understand Short/Long-Term Goals and Pinch Points

To effectively prioritize where to focus, it’s also important to understand the difference between short-term and long-term company goals, and how your current RevOps tech stack drives those goals. 

Short-Term Goals

When evaluating your tech stack against short-term goals, focus on meeting immediate needs. Look for potential quick wins that address gaps in tools and improve performance against quarterly goals. Additionally, measuring short-term ROI can help identify which tools are working best right now, and where there’s room for improvement.

Long-Term Goals

With long-term goals, think about both scalability and future-proofing. Assess whether your tech stack has the ability to grow and adapt as your business expands. Consider ongoing cost, maintenance, and upgrade paths associated with any piece of current technology. 

As with short-term goals, using metrics like long-term ROI and value creation potential is essential to understanding where to best spend your budget. 

Pinch Points

Finally, look for crucial pinch points in your current system against these corporate objectives, the underlying data, and short/long-term goals. Pinch points can refer to bottlenecks where your current customer journey gets bogged down, hand-offs that create data inaccuracies, or other sources of inefficiency with tangible impact. 

As Marc Maloy, Glint’s CRO, puts it:

“Look at the entire system of how deals happen, and optimize for these pinch points. It's almost like you're walking around the process with your little oil can, and you're putting a little drop of oil at any one of these pinch points that get in the way of a fantastic customer experience.” 

To conduct an initial RevOps audit, take a data-driven approach that includes relevant teams beyond your own. Start by creating an audit checklist to assess the performance of your technology. Here are some steps to follow:

1. Identify high-priority metrics that align with OKRs, such as lifetime value (LTV), net recurring revenue (NRR), or net promoter score (NPS).
2. Articulate how current tools in your tech stack might relate to or inform these metrics.
3. Regularly analyze and compare performance against these metrics month-over-month, paying close attention to areas of underperformance.
4. Take the time to investigate the underlying causes of underperforming areas.

It's important not to rush through this process to save time. An effective evaluation may take several months to thoroughly assess the issues that arise month after month.

Next, engaging with relevant teams is essential. For example, if your focus is on LTV, engage with your Sales and CS teams — the people who directly use the tools in your RevOps tech stack often have the most valuable insights and feedback. Ask these teams about inefficiencies they encounter, their likes and dislikes about current processes and tools, and how the tools perform in practice compared to their theoretical functionality. Pay special attention to inefficiencies, usability, user experience, and articulated pain points.

Craig Rosenberg emphasizes the importance of a holistic RevOps perspective for success, noting:

"As a result of thinking about things from a RevOps perspective, we have the ability to look at the business and think about the data flows as they go from one end all the way to the other. It's a coalition across all go-to-market. And ultimately, one of the key end results is truly intelligence-led decision making and true delivery of a seamless customer experience.”

Evaluating Cost vs. Benefits 

It might also be helpful to conduct a cost-benefit analysis to evaluate the maintenance costs of your current system against the benefits it provides. To do this, establish a threshold for when it becomes more beneficial to replace your existing system. Then assess whether the current system meets the crucial requirements for continuing its use. 

Don’t be afraid to cut losses. If there are places you think could truly benefit from a change, don’t fear sunk cost fallacy, and don’t be afraid to note them.

To augment your current stack, start by conducting research into RevOps technologies built for SaaS 2.0. Think through what these new solutions can provide in terms of streamlined customer journeys, advanced visibility, and customer insights. This research will illuminate current areas that need improvement and the best potential enhancements.

It’s also important to perform stress tests to evaluate the performance of your RevOps tech stack under different conditions. Consider factors like seasonal fluctuations, staffing levels, and workload spikes. This will help identify vulnerabilities and potential areas for improvement, which you can then map onto your research about state-of-the-art tech in the field. 

Next, consider the scalability and future readiness of your tech stack. Does your tech wish list leverage emerging technologies (such as AI and other cutting-edge solutions)? Will it be able to handle continual updates to processes, learning, and business adaptation as the market moves? Does it have, and will it continue to have, robust compliance with data protection, privacy, and security standards?

To effectively evaluate potential new solutions, you must determine if your new proposed tech stack can effectively support your company's growth and expansion plans. You want your tech to be flexible enough to scale with you, across multiple sales motions, pricing strategies, and product configurations — think two to five years ahead of where you currently are. 

Most importantly, when evaluating what might be worth a future expenditure, it’s vital to take a customer-centric approach. Evaluate how your tech stack affects the customer journey and how improvements might enhance their experience. 

For example, consider if delays in contract renewals, or difficulties in accessing your products might impact customer satisfaction — and to what degree. Determine if adopting a new solution could provide further insights or streamline customer interactions with your company. If the answer is no, do some retooling or additional research until you find a solution that can.

The RevOps tech stack is one of the most instrumental aspects in creating (or destroying) company efficiency. And yet, many RevOps teams default to coming at the issue in pieces. Instead of looking for a holistic alignment with company goals, current business operations, and/or the technology available today, they rely on piecemeal process changes without real measurability.  

With these three frameworks, your team can take a more holistic approach to your tech stack and better justify decisions on tooling. These steps will help improve focus on advancing the efficiency of your operations and enhancing your customer journey across the entire quote-to-order-to-revenue process.