Despite heavy investment in tech, many B2B organizations struggle to show related business impact due to implementation, integration, and adoption issues. It’s time for revenue technology management to be elevated as a strategic capability to drive sustainable business value from tech.

My Penchant For Indulgence Is Sabotaging My Summer Beach Plans

Finally, we are beyond that phase at the start of each year when people bang on about New Year’s resolutions. Now I can get back to not trying to fool myself that I’m going to transform the dad bod into something moderately acceptable on the beaches of Italy this summer (good citizens of Italy, you have been warned). Instead, I can focus on what I do best: indulgence, such as tucking into the massive Toblerone chocolate bar that my wife gave me for Valentine’s Day, which I’ve been patiently consuming, one chocolate triangle at a time — sooo good.

When It Comes To Tech, B2B Companies Have Had Their Own Challenges With Indulgence

Like me, many B2B companies have spent recent years overindulging in various technologies to support the revenue engine. Technology has been critical in supporting B2B growth by enabling new capabilities and improving efficiency, but tougher economic conditions require new approaches to technology investment. It’s time for revenue tech strategy to get beach-ready. Sporadic tech indulgence has left many sales, marketing, and customer success functions facing an increasing range of technology challenges. Systemic tech management is a core element of successful revenue operations, and companies need to bolster these capabilities to navigate such challenges and consistently deliver business value from technology.

Tech Stack Challenges Expose Tech Management Capability Gaps

Ad-hoc tech investment has exposed a range of gaps in how technology is managed in their organizations. Investment in tech has been frequently driven by the need to close go-to-market gaps within each function, resulting in overly complex tech stacks made up of point solutions with mixed levels of integration. Owners of technology are also finding that much of the tech that they have invested in have increasingly overlapping capabilities within and even across functions and processes. Key functionality remains undeployed or underutilized because of resource constraints, unrealistic assessments of organizational readiness, and poor user experience.

A Changed Economic Reality Requires A Different Approach

In a tighter economic environment, fine-tune your investment strategies around tech by looking at tech needs from a role-based perspective and being ruthless when it comes to realistic assessment of likely value realization. Be rigorous in connecting tech investments to business objectives and outcomes to demonstrate consistent business impact and value. In talking with customers, I’m seeing a renewed focus around simplification to counter the reality of sustaining a broad range of acquired and developed technology that eats into resource capacity and cost. All these needed efforts, however, must be grounded in a considered and comprehensive technology strategy, rather than just a series of further ad-hoc and short-term actions.

Strengthen Your Tech Management Capabilities To Deliver Greater Business Value In Tougher Economic Conditions

At Forrester, we are placing a renewed focus on revenue technology management as a key capability within and across revenue operations functions (in any configuration). Forrester has just launched our new Revenue Technology Management Framework, which will be followed up by a range of related research guidance throughout the year to help clients elevate their tech management capabilities and deliver greater value from tech investment. This research guides tech owners in B2B go-to-market functions to expand their tech management capabilities beyond just effective delivery of technology initiatives into a more strategic view of technology management that includes tech leadership, portfolio management, increased agility, and governance of tech. Check out the new framework here, and consider registering at B2B Summit North America in Austin in June, where we’ll be exploring revenue technology in detail.