I can’t remember the last time I evaluated a tool and couldn’t for the life of me understand how it integrated with the rest of my RevOps tools.
After all, RevOps is perceived differently depending on the goals and priorities of the company. For some, it’s about enabling sales and marketing teams to make better decisions. Elsewhere, it’s about identifying and removing roadblocks that inhibit GTM inefficiencies and pipeline goals.
And in both cases, RevOps ultimately carries the burden of tying up your GTM function to a predictable bottomline of ROI and growth.
Choosing the right tech stack can give RevOps the direction it intended in the first place
One of the biggest GTM problems that RevOps function needs to solve is contextualizing siloed and disconnected marketing, sales, and support data.
Without the right RevOps tech stack, understanding revenue bottlenecks and optimizing inefficiencies for better outcomes can be time-consuming for the speed at which companies are trying to move.
If you’re a RevOps leader trying to transform your company’s customer-facing efforts, you’d want to run your team like a Product Manager for GTM personified!
That’s why choosing the right tech stack for revenue operations weighs heavily on your bottom line metrics. And we’re going to help you choose the right tools for your unique use cases, budget, processes, and goals.
So, how do you think about your tech stack?
Before we dive head first into the different tools, let’s take a step back and try to plot:
- all the different ways your prospects can interact with you,
- all the GTM teams in your organization that might engage with them, and
- potential areas where you can remove blockages.
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Different Ways Prospects Can Interact With Your Brand
The buying process has changed in today’s world and most people don’t buy products like we originally thought by first consuming TOFU content, then MOFU, and finally BOFU before converting. The buying process is non-linear.
So, without getting into specific tools or categorizing them by stages, I’ll quickly add a non-exhaustive list of specific mediums and channels where a prospect might engage with your brand:
- Google Ads
- LinkedIn Ads - especially if your ICP hangs out a lot in LinkedIn
- Facebook/Instagram Ads - seriously, who isn’t on Facebook or Instagram?
- Twitter - it’s weird to call it as X.
- Your website - Duh!
- Organic social posts by your employees on social media.
- Your newsletter
- Your long form content - Do people have comments in their posts, nowadays?
- Videos and podcasts that you might be posting on YouTube and social media
- Review sites like G2 or Capterra
- Outbound sequences that your sales team is sending
- Engaging on communities and at events
- Your product
Different GTM Teams Who Might Engage With Your Prospects
This one is pretty straightforward:
- Your Marketing team,
- Your Sales team,
- Your Customer Success team, and
- Your Customer Support team.
Potential Areas Where You Could Remove Blockages In Your GTM Motion
If you look at it as a journey, without going into very specific metrics, there are three things that we know moves the needle by a ton:
- Responding to prospects in less than 5 minutes, both from customer support and from a pipeline generation perspective. This means, actively qualifying new prospects so your sales team isn’t manually qualifying them.
- Enabling prospects or customers to talk to the right person instantly. This means, routing your prospects and customers to the right teams and people in a jiffy.
- Uncomplicating processes and tactics that often end up increasing your sales cycles or reducing conversion rates. A simple example would be asking yourself if you really need 6 form fields in your demo request form.
So, how do you combine all of this and build a blueprint for your GTM team? Let’s break it down, shall we?
RevOps Tooling on a conservative budget (Starting at $200/month)
If you’re working at a startup and just getting things going, you probably have a relatively small budget.
At this stage, your goal should be about setting the foundation for future growth. That means, you likely don’t need a sophisticated system that lets you track every single touch point your prospect has with your brand.
The set up we’ll cover here will allow you to:
- See who is visiting your website
- Let you track them on a CRM after they submit a form
- Book meetings with prospects instantly
- Support prospects as and when they ask questions
- Track numbers on a dashboard
Let’s start with the CRM at the centre because that’s where all your contacts and deals get stored. Before you begin setting up this entire flow, make sure you have the following definitions sorted across your organization:
- What’s an MQL?
- What’s an SQL?
- What’s an Opportunity?
Ideally, you shouldn’t be messing around with this definition too much, if not at all.
From the above flow chart, clearly there’s a lot happening between the CRM, Analytics tool, Ad networks, and your Dashboarding.
Let’s unpack that, shall we?
CRM to Ad Networks: It’s a good practice to send data about prospects as they move from Lead to MQL to SQL to Opportunity to Closed Won to your Ad Networks. This gives your Ad Networks data to learn over time about the kind of leads you want and start optimizing for it.
Ad Networks to CRM: This integration is useful especially if you want to do any sort of last touch attribution. For example, when a contact gets created after they clicked on a Google Ad, HubSpot can immediately add properties to the contact to let you know that this specific lead was created after they clicked on a Google Ad campaign.
Demo Scheduler to CRM: Once meetings are booked from the demo request page, you’d want all the data to get synced to your CRM. This allows you to know immediately how many people requested a demo, how many of them have scheduled meetings with your sales reps, how many of them actually came for the call vs no-show vs cancelled, and also see which campaigns led to which meeting outcomes.
PS. We put together these two articles on creating reports like this for HubSpot and Salesforce. Check them out:
1. 6 HubSpot reports to connect campaigns to meeting outcomes and drive more pipeline
2. 4 Salesforce reports to track meeting outcomes
Analytics to Ad Networks: One of the coolest capabilities of Google Analytics is you can segment your traffic and send that data to Google Ads to run some very specific retargeting campaigns. Kinda sad that you can’t do this natively for LinkedIn Ads or Facebook Ads.
Ad Networks to Analytics: You’ll want to track how people coming in from different channels are behaving on your website. Simply setting up your Analytics the right way and using the right UTM parameters will help you easily uncover behaviour patterns of your users from different channels on different pages.
From CRM, Analytics, Ad Networks to Dashboarding Tool: While many CRM, ad networks, and analytics tools provide reporting, they often can’t combine data points from multiple sources to give you insights on your entire GTM efforts. That’s why it’s always a good practice to have a separate dashboarding tool to pull data points from multiple sources.
Recommended tooling for RevOps on a conservative budget
Now that we’ve got that out of the way, let’s talk about the tools we recommend for this flow for a RevOps team at this stage.
Side note: We recently had Matthew Volm, Co-Founder of RevOps Co-op community, as a speaker in our Masters of Revenue 2024 virtual summit, here are his recommended tool set:
- Zapier - To connect multiple tools together and pass data
- HubSpot - For CRM and marketing automation
- Scale Stack - AI Powered tool for data enrichment, prioritization & activation platform
- Notion - For project management and documentation
- RevenueHero - For automation and scheduling
CRM
There are a bunch of CRM tools today. HubSpot, Pipedrive, Zoho, Salesforce, and so many more.
Our Recommendation: HubSpot works wonders both as a CRM and as a marketing automation tool. It’s ideal at this stage because it’s simple to understand, requires little to no developer dependency, and easy to set up.
Analytics
Google Analytics is probably the most popular one. But there are other tools in the market like Plausible and Fathom.
Our Recommendation: Nothing beats Google Analytics (even if it’s GA4) in the early stages.
Ad Networks
This really depends on your GTM motion and what works for you. So, for the sake of this content piece, we’ll assume you do some combination of Google Ads, Facebook Ads, and LinkedIn Ads.
Our Recommendation: You know what works for your organization better than us. 🙂
Support
At RevenueHero, we’re big believers in support being a differentiator. Ideally, you’d want to quickly respond to customers. I mean in less than two minutes.
Our Recommendation: Go with something like an Intercom if your audience is big on live chat. Or if you can afford to use Slack’s Connect feature, nothing quite like it really.
Dashboarding
I might get some heat for recommending this as a separate tool when you’ve already got HubSpot and Google Analytics. If you want to quickly pull up data comparing your organic website visitors vs specific campaigns in LinkedIn vs your SQL growth rate, you’re better off with a separate tool.
Our Recommendation: Databox is incredibly good at dashboarding and helping you quickly create reports. It’s easy, intuitive, and doesn’t cost a bomb. We’ve also heard only good things about their support, which is always a big plus.
Demo Scheduler
When your prospects are ready to buy, you shouldn’t make them wait a couple of days before your sales team can reach out to them and try to book a meeting. You should be able to book a meeting with them instantly.
Our Recommendation: If you have only a couple of sales reps, HubSpot meetings or Calendly works just fine. It’ll help you book meetings directly from your website without having to follow up. However, both Calendly and HubSpot meetings come with their own disadvantages.
Sophisticated RevOps Tooling on a moderate budget (Starting at $600/month)
By now, you’re likely growing. And your sales and marketing team is testing new channels and messaging.
At this stage, you’re building systems that can scale with your organization.
Ok, let’s unpack this one-by-one.
Part 1: From Website
Website to Deanonymization: Of course you’ll have some folks who might not convert from your website. Wouldn’t it be great if you knew who they were? We’ll add deanonymization tools on the website to know who landed on your website.
Website to Demo Scheduler: Similar to the previous set up, we’ll use this integration to make sure your prospects are instantly booking meetings with the right sales reps immediately after they show intent. This could be on a demo request page for most B2B SaaS companies or in-app for PLG use cases.
Website to CRM: We’ll use this integration to see which pages people visited before they shared their contact information.
Deanonymization to Analytics: We’ll use this information to segment data in our analytics tool to see which content our ICP folks read, which content drives more ICP fit traffic, and more.
Part 2: Sales, Marketing, and Support
Now that your website data is sent to the CRM, it’s also deanonymized and sent to your analytics tool, and you have an instant scheduler that qualifies and sends data to the CRM, let’s go deeper and unpack that flow chart some more.
There are a lot of things that still remain from the previous set up. So, without repeating what we had previously, I’ll cover what’s newly included in this set up.
CRM to Support: We send lead information like if the lead is an opportunity or customer back to support tools to make sure support reps are able to handle queries with extra care for certain extra special queries.
Support to CRM: Similarly, we send support queries back to CRM so sales reps are aware if a customer is constantly having troubles.
Audience Targeting to CRM: It’s getting harder and expensive for sales and marketing to reach their target audience. There are tools in the market that lets you quickly define your ICP and instantly send them todifferent sources.
Audience Targeting to Outbound Sequencing: We’ll use this integration for sales to run targeted outbound campaigns.
Outbound Sequencing to CRM: We’ll sync back email campaigns, who sent the email (set as contact owner), and any responses that we get back to the CRM, so that everyone knows what led a prospect to book a meeting.
Product Usage to Subscription Management and vice versa: If you’re in the subscription business, you’ll definitely want to implement a subscription management tool that easily integrates with your product so you can instantly charge and remove all the complexities associated with subscription billing and management.
CRM to Commission Calculation: We’ll use this integration to pull in data on how many closed-won deals a rep owns at any given time to calculate commissions.
Subscription Management to Commission Calculation: We’ll use this integration to pull in data on if the subscription is still active to calculate commission percentages for our reps.
From CRM, Analytics, Outbound Sequencing, Ad Networks to Dashboarding: We’ve got this set up so we can pull data points from multiple sources to get insights on our GTM efforts.
Recommended tooling for RevOps on a moderate budget
Now that we’ve got that out of the way, let’s talk about the tools we recommend for this flow for a RevOps team at this stage:
CRM
There are a couple of options here. Most organizations would switch to Salesforce if they haven’t already or stick with HubSpot. The catch with switching to Salesforce is two folds:
- You’ll have to train your entire sales and operations team on it.
- The costs
If you’re sticking with HubSpot, the good news is they’ve brought in massive improvements and updates that’s now fiercely competitive when compared to Salesforce.
Our Recommendation: If you can, stick with HubSpot. It makes life a lot easier especially if your marketing team is already using HubSpot.
If you’re looking to use HubSpot as your marketing automation and Salesforce as your CRM, don’t forget to check out this article on how to automate meeting activity and meeting outcome tracking in a HubSpot plus Salesforce setup.
Analytics
Google Analytics (even if it’s only GA4) is great in the early days. But as your sales and marketing efforts evolve and mature, you’ll need more sophisticated solutions in place that can track your users’ entire buying journey even before they submit the form.
Few good tools that are known this space:
Our Recommendation: We use Factors.ai internally at RevenueHero. It works well and as an added advantage also de-anonymizes website visitors through their partnership with 6Sense, shows if an account had a LinkedIn ad impression, and tells you if the account is looking at your reviews on G2.
Deanonymization
The market leader or the most popular ones are either Clearbit or 6Sense. There are other players like People Data Labs, Albacross, and leadfeeder.
Our Recommendation: Get a data test done to see what the match rates are like for your ICP and industry before you settle in on one. Here’s a nifty tool by Syft, but you should ideally do a bulk data upload with one of the vendors you’re evaluating before deciding.
Ad Networks
This really depends on your GTM motion and what works for you. So, for the sake of this content piece, we’ll assume you do some combination of Google Ads, Facebook Ads, and LinkedIn Ads.
Support
The obvious choices are tools like Zendesk, Freshdesk, and Intercom. But the catch with these tools is people have to write in an email. And nobody really believes in live chat anymore. At least not as much as we all did a few years ago.
Our Recommendation: We’re big believers in good support being a differentiator at RevenueHero. We use Pylon to allow us to support our customers directly from Slack. If this is something that makes sense for your organization, we highly recommend it. This way, we’ve been able to enable the entire organization (yes, not team or a single person) support our customers because we can all see the entire conversation.
Dashboarding
At this stage, a simple dashboarding and reporting might not be enough. You might want to slice and dice the data and dig deeper.
Our Recommendation: If you’re someone who prefers pulling data into sheets and slicing data from there, definitely check out Supermetrics. You can set it up to pull in data at regular times so you always have the most up to date information. Alternatively, check out tools like Factors.ai and Hockeystack if you also want to look at the entire journey and attribution.
Demo Scheduler
At this stage, you’re likely running a bunch of campaigns. ABM, outbound, named accounts marketing, reps reaching out based on certain engagement. You want to make sure you are routing demos to the right reps based on CRM properties, route existing customers to CSM instead of AEs, and credit meetings back to AEs when no-shows happen.
Our Recommendation: RevenueHero helps you convert prospects from anywhere into qualified meetings, route them to the right sales rep using round robin or your custom logic, and handoff meetings to reps (Yes, I’m biased and couldn’t help it :)). Other tools in the market include Chili Piper and LeanData.
Subscription Management
If you’ve got a subscription business going, you know the complexities that come with selling globally. FX conversions, tax, pro rata, and so many other things.
Our Recommendation: Definitely don’t build it in house. Tools like Chargebee help you take care of all the complexities that come with billing and subscription management. They also integrate seamlessly with all CRM tools that make life a lot easier.
Commission Calculations
You’ll be paying commissions to your reps based on how active the deals are and the size of the deal. These calculations can get complex as you scale.
Our Recommendation: Tools like Everstage make it easy for you to create calculations and launch SPIFs easily to keep you sales reps motivated.
Audience Tracking
Ad networks are making it increasingly harder to target your ICP, especially on Paid Social. Tools like Clearbit, Metadata, and Primer are good options in the space that lets you quickly define who your target audience is and send that data to multiple ad networks for you to target them.
Our Recommendation: Irrespective of the tool, we definitely recommend running a data test to see which platform is able to give you better match rates. Ultimately, the more match rates you get the better your targeting is going to be and potentially driving better results for you.
Outbound Sequencing
There are plenty of tools in the market that lets you run outbound sequences. Tools like Apollo, Lemlist, Outreach, and Smartleads are good options.
Our Recommendation: Before you decide on a tool, make sure you have a couple of secondary domains to send these emails and have them warmed up. This helps ensure your emails don’t land in spam. And even if they do, they won’t hurt your primary domain. We use a combination of Apollo and Smartlead at RevenueHero.
Remove the guesswork out of RevOps by picking the right tech stack
The right tech stack can save your RevOps function by steering it away from being an ad-hoc recommendations group that generates reports and insights for sales and marketing’s requests. The purpose of RevOps is bigger than most orgs have put in practice today.
With a data-rich and GTM-first combination of a RevOps tech stack, you can:
- Identify bottlenecks in the sales process, talk to AEs and reps who take customer calls.
- Pick up feedback from customer success and support teams to give your product and GTM a reality-check about where you stand as a company.
- Unearth processes that move the needle during sales cycles and make it a playbook that contributes to your revenue growth like clockwork.
A lot of what we recommended is based on what we’ve seen several GTM teams implement. At the end of the day, it all boils down to knowing your GTM motion, the goals you’re trying to achieve, and building systems around that.
While the tooling recommendations are based on budget/company size, it might always be possible to do more with less or mix and match some of these tools. If you have any such recommendations that you would add to this, we’d love to hear from you on LinkedIn.
