TLDR: Strategy defines your outcomes, tools help you achieve them. Connect the dots between strategy and tech to influence decisions with tools that contribute positively to your goals.
Each year brings a flood of new tools onto the market. So how do you know which is right for your business?
Strategy and technology ideally work in lockstep. One defines your outcomes, the other helps you achieve them. But this relationship gets tangled when your goals aren’t strongly defined.
In this Tough Talks Made Easy, we’ll cover how to connect the dots between strategy and technology. You’ll learn tips for:
a) having a productive discussion with your superiors that links goals and tools together, and
b) framing the conversation to relate your needs in MOPs back to the strategy.
Strategy is your foundation
Martech is going through a vendor boom that shows no signs of slowing down. As tech evolves to address more capability gaps, it’s tempting to see the purchase of a shiny new solution as a way to gain a competitive edge.
But tech doesn’t solve problems or set purpose by itself.
Without addressing a clear need for your business, any new tool is like a Ferrari without a racetrack. Powerful, expensive, and wasted.
Strategy is the foundation for all the actions you take, goals you work towards, and places you invest as a business. The outcomes that leadership targets should cascade downwards into a series of smaller goals and define the kinds of tech you consider bringing on board.
Your CMO’s top priority is continuous revenue growth. Your Marketing Manager might want to achieve that by increasing qualified leads. In that case, a solution might be a lead management tool that improves your grasp of lead behavior. The insights from which lets you tweak the customer journey in the right places to bring in more leads and create growth opportunities.
Bottom line: Whatever piece of tech you choose must complete a clear throughline between top-level strategic priorities, relevant performance targets further down, and tools with the capabilities to achieve those aims.
That alignment is how you frame the relationship between strategy and technology for your boss. Leadership wants the tools you use in MOPs to support their aims—this isn’t possible without a thorough sense of purpose.
Ask your boss to share:
- definitive priorities per quarter and year (and their boss’ too)
- how particular performance targets contribute to them, and
- the need a new piece of marketing technology should fulfill. I.e., are we trying to reduce costs? Increase growth? Work more efficiently?
With that understanding, you can advise on the right piece of tech for your circumstances.
And, if you need help defining your strategy and best practices for a technology platform, we can help.
Take a need-driven approach
Any decision your business makes on tech acquisition needs thorough involvement from MOPs. As the person likely to manage a new tool, you’ve got a window into the current strengths and challenges of using your marketing technology stack.
Make your case to leadership: You have the knowledge to assess whether a solution is truly the right fit for your needs. Here’s where you explain the evaluation process.
Your boss might be insistent or excited about getting a tool on board, but you need to know how the capabilities and quirks of a particular technology suit your business before you buy it. That’s going to take time.
How to buy time: Gather feedback from users and internal teams, explore trials and demos, and assess how well a tool integrates with your stack and fits your business model—these steps are all crucial for your business to make the right decision. In other words: they’re time well-spent.
Sometimes, the answer isn’t a new tool at all. If leadership wants to achieve a particular outcome, encourage them to think about how you can accomplish the same ends with your current stack.
Are you utilizing all the features of your toolset? If there’s potential to meet performance goals by using the same tech in different ways, that’s a cost-effective way to bring tech in line with the strategy.
Bring the message home: Allowing MOPs time and space to make a thorough evaluation of what technology offers your business, and really taking that assessment on board, increases your chance of spending only on the tools that advance the achievement of your strategy.
Speak strategic language
If you want to ensure your leadership team is on the same page as you about how strategy and tech support each other, you’ll likely have to play ‘translator.’
People at various levels of a business speak in different languages, so when approaching your boss (and their boss) about tech, frame the gritty tech details in the context of big-picture strategic objectives.
Is your reporting taking too much time? Are your processes and systems not syncing as well as they should? Could your data insights be faster or more sophisticated?
When you speak with your boss, clarify how those issues impact the top-level outcomes—revenue, growth, productivity.
Position your day-to-day tasks as part of the broader strategy, and it’ll send an important message to leadership: making tech decisions that benefit your work directly feed the overall goals of your business.
Choosing the right technology for your circumstances, and aligning your strategy and tech together, takes some important conversations.
Whatever guidance you need, Revenue Pulse is here to help.
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