A robust revenue tech stack is essential to the predictable, efficient modern revenue organization. A vision for an interconnected and composable technology stack forces leaders to centrally manage the proliferation of data, address quality standards, and unlock the end-to-end hyperautomation and analytics use cases each business unit needs to meet its objectives.

Productive revenue technology strategies that hit growth targets share three attributes:

1. Bringing together a cross-functional coalition of stakeholders to share end-to-end data and systems and workflows to optimize end-to-end visibility into the business
2. Designing a revenue technology stack that is composable to meet the needs of various business units or segments, eliminates mundane technology work and is easily adopted by frontline sellers
3. Striking a balance between rapid-impact/high-adoption technology now and strategic transformational projects

The bottom line: Accelerating the revenue technology transformation is more important than many sales leaders may prioritize today. Outpace your competitors by taking advantage of this opportunity to make a name for yourself as an agent of growth and transformation.

To grow revenue in today’s sales landscape, chief sales officers (CSOs) must acknowledge that sales reps are no longer the channel, but rather a channel to customers, and must shift their mindset from leading sellers to leading selling on behalf of the organization. Making this shift will require understanding how and why customers are using in-person and digital channels, and reallocating resources to improve customers’ experiences across all buying channels.

A go-to-market strategy that reflects buyers’ preferences and is built around creating a low-effort, confidence-inspiring buying experience is a competitive advantage in today’s distracting and complex business environment. This requires commercial functions to work together to engage with customers throughout the entire customer life cycle, and employ a unified approach to target, pursue and service customers in a way that makes it easy for them to purchase and quickly recognize value. 

The bottom line: Allocate resources to the direct and indirect routes to market that are best positioned to meet buyers’ needs. 

Meeting growth targets requires sales leaders to adjust their approach to sales force design and deployment to reflect today’s buying realities. This requires taking a holistic look at all aspects of sales force design, including sales role definitions and resource allocation, in a way that aligns with how customers engage and buy. Furthermore, sales leaders must continually monitor sales effectiveness and productivity to proactively address issues and inform future design decisions and investments.  

Hybrid and virtual customer engagement knows no geographic boundaries. Aligning top talent with key opportunities has become much easier and more crucial. Specializations within the commercial function such as customer success, sales development, engineer and value analysis roles, along with the employment of indirect partners, become more scalable resources to be deployed as linkages between disparate functions and elusive customers. Seller skill and the will to engage virtually and digitally are imperative to recruiting and hiring efforts. 

The bottom line: Manage the cost of sales by taking a balanced approach to the structure, size and deployment of the sales force.

The updated north star goal for revenue-generating leaders should be to strategically accelerate revenue growth by redefining commercial strategy with orchestrated customer engagement. Orchestrated customer engagement synchronizes key junctures of buyer interactions, involving multiple individuals within a singular buying group across commercial touchpoints. This synchronization promotes consistency and alignment throughout the buying group. In addition, it allows suppliers to aggregate and automate insights that lead to better data-driven decision making. Also, it enables sellers to engage stakeholders directly who, in an analog world, would likely be inaccessible. To this end, CSOs and their teams must deliberately collaborate with commercial functions — such as marketing, sales, service and even IT — to cultivate a buyer engagement ecosystem that allows for staged consensus building, direct buyer enablement and unified execution through the effective use of technology.