My thoughts on the technology landscape
Over the last 8 years I’ve been lucky to join startups to help them build a scalable business. Normally I would be brought in around the $10M ARR mark with the mandate to double sales three consecutive years in a row. That’s an incredible ask of any company. At that stage the company undergoes metamorphosis on a number of fronts:
Product maturity: crossing the chasm from early adopters to middle adopters
GTM maturity: relying less on the founding team and more on new blood, the novus homo
Standardizing the sales process
Increasing efficiency in marketing’s ability to generate pipeline
Renovating the customer success engine
Aligning all GTM groups towards #onegoal
Inevitably at this stage of maturity, startups place an emphasis on scaling. Technologies play an important role in this transition. That means assessing vendors and determining which direction to move. There’s a clear opportunity for startups to build to fill these gaps.
So much so, that the technology landscape is overwhelming to grasp in its totality. A startup I advise asked me to put down a perspective on the landscape. I challenged myself to write down as many vendors as I possibly could by category. Here’s what I came up with.
Data enrichment: Clearbit, Seamless.ai, LeadIQ, LeadGenius, ZoomInfo, Cunchbase, LinkedIn SalesNavigator, Apollo.io
Marketing automation: Pardot, Marketo, Hubspot
Lead Routing: LeanData, RingLead, LaneFour
Sales automation: Salesloft, Outreach, Groove, Revenue.io, Salesforce Inbox, Lavender
CRM / CRM hybrids: Salesforce, Pipedrive, Hubspot, Microsoft Dynamics, Podio (Citrix), Monday.com, Airtable
Video meeting: Zoom, Google Chat
Call intelligence: Gong, Chorus
Document creation: Conga, PandaDoc, Proposify, Adobe
Electronic signature: Nintex, Docusign
Quoting: CPQ, Zuora, Dealhub
Contract management: Ironclad
RFP: Loopio
Customer Success: Gainsight, Catalyst, Totango, Churnzero
Workflow automation: Zapper, Workato, Integromat
Data automation / ETL: Syncari, Census, Syncari, Ringlead, Cloudingo, Fivetran, Stitch, tray.io
Commissions: Xactly, CaptivateIQ, Spiff, EverStage, QuotaPath
Communication: Slack, Microsoft Teams, Discord,
Calendar: Calendly, Chili Piper, Vimcal, Mixmax
Better data usage: Scratchpad, Dooly, Quip
Intent: Bombora, 6Sense
Enablement: Guru, Spekit, Highspot, LevelJump
Forecasting: Atrium, Clari, Kluster, InsightSquared, BoostUp
Try staying on top of the market. I think it’s impossible. I also think it’s impressive how rich the ecosystem is with options for revenue operators.
Here are my thoughts on the space:
Willingness To Pay can only go so far: how much is too much to spend on the revenue teams?
Enter the era of Enterprise Super Apps: the desire for the one-stop-shop
No Code and Low Code applications will help Super Administrators as the glue to operate across multiple stacks
Willingness to Pay can only go so far
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