Today, a surprising 37% of purchased marketing and sales software never gets used (Software Usage Report by 1E 2017). Many users find themselves stuck in the implementation swamp, a term which we’ll get into. Billions of dollars are going to waste as many marketing and sales teams fail to commit to the software that is being used to run our businesses.
" 37% of purchased marketing and sales software never gets used"
Software Usage Report by 1E 2017
This figure is on the rise, which means that an even higher percentage of purchased software is either never used or is not used to its full potential. It’s important to take a step back and evaluate whether you should continue using the tool and really get to the bottom of why you’re not seeing the value you expected when you made the decision to purchase it. The average enterprise uses 91 marketing cloud services. At some point, with all these tools, we will reach a point where we start asking ourselves “are we wasting our money on this tool?”.
In this blog post, we’ll highlight 3 key lessons on how you can get the most out of your marketing and sales technology and make sure you don’t waste money on your tool.
Lesson 1: Beware of sales utopia
Let’s start with the root of the issue and why we end up questioning if we’re wasting our money. A lot of us fall into what I call the ‘sales utopia’ mindset where we think that buying software is going to fix our problems. A lot of people have been taken through a demo of a tool they like the look of and have been shown a case study of another company using it flawlessly. They’ve been sold the idea of the perfect tool.
This can apply to any major sales or marketing software that you might be using but let’s take HubSpot as an example. People then think that by purchasing HubSpot, it will automatically make them a great inbound marketer. Or if they buy HubSpot, it will instantly make their sales team effective. This is not the case, and you have to consider that it will take hard work and a lot of effort for it to be successful.
Lesson 2: Expect the implementation swamp
After seeing what the tool is capable of, you’ve gone through with the purchase and start using it using it for the first time without realising the amount of groundwork that’s needed to set it up. You need to go through a lot of technical settings (like DNS, sub domains, email configuration) which may mean raising tickets to get your IT team involved with the technical set up.
Or maybe you’ve completed the implementation phase, but you later realise it’s not performing like you want it to. You start to lose momentum and the sales utopia mindset starts to diminish. Here is when you are getting stuck and hit the implementation swamp.
It’s then easy to get discouraged and slow down as it is a huge amount of work to set up our tools to the point where we can use them effectively. You start to wonder why the tool isn’t working for you – as it seemed to be the perfect case study in the beginning. My advice here is to put in the hard work to make sure you get through the implementation swamp. It is unavoidable but the hard work will pay off and will lead to success. Which leads us onto our next lesson.
Lesson 3: Conquer the swamp and see real world success
How do we reach real world success and get past the sales utopia and implementation swamp stages? There are 4 ways of conquering the implementation swamp:
- Educate and Engage (train hard)
Engage with user communities. Go above and beyond the standard onboarding and tutorials – learn more about the tool and how to use it to its full potential. Ask questions, troubleshoot, suggest ideas and requests, respond to others or even share a hack. Become an active user if you want to get the most out of the tool you’re using.
- Think Outside the Tool
It’s also important to take a step back and dig into your marketing, sales and web strategies and make sure that outside of whatever tool you’re using, you have effective inbound strategies. Think beyond the tool to your goals and strategies and then use the tool to implement these. The tool alone without a strategy will not lead to success.
- Ask for Help
It can be a daunting process trying to figure everything out, especially if you’re a lone marketer or salesperson. Don’t give up. Follow the mantra ‘leave no question unanswered’. Tools have support teams and communities. It’s a chance to learn from the people around us who have also gone through or are currently going through, the same process.
- Own It
Ultimately, what it all comes down to is owning it. You have to have an ownership mentality. If you want to be successful in the tool that your company is investing in, you need to set the goal of being the subject matter expert in that tool.
So above all, you may not end up being the most perfect, pristine case study. Maybe you will and that’s awesome. But when you take ownership of your tool, push your organisation to create goals and understand how the tool is going to help you execute that by becoming an expert, that’s what will drive real world success.
Do you want to know more? Are you stuck in the implementation swamp and need help to get out? If you are based outside of the Nordic countries please contact us at IMPACT, otherwise contact Brightvision directly here.
You can also watch the webinar “How to get the most out of your marketing & sales technology” on demand here:
