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:

1. Willingness To Pay can only go so far: how much is too much to spend on the revenue teams?

2. Enter the era of Enterprise Super Apps: the desire for the one-stop-shop

3. 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