LS2019 Idea Exchange: Align Your Organization with Technology

I had the honor of hosting the Wednesday morning AA-ISP LS2019 panel that provided insight about how to align your organization with technology. Anyone who knows me realizes that “alignment” is one of my favorite topics. In this case, aligning with technology means we need to talk about people and process as well. The panel of inside sales leaders had several pieces of advice that boiled down to this gem:

“Bad technology makes you suck faster.”

The panel lineup had experience in both growth companies as well as large enterprises. Sharing their experience was:

Dharmesh Shah – VP Inside Sales, Vonage

Kevin Waterman – Center Director of Enterprise Sales, CenturyLink

Don Erwin – Head of Revenue, MixMax

Mike Mishler – Manager, Cloud Renewals and Inside Sales, PaloAlto Networks

[T]echnology is a tool and we must focus on alignment and implementation to maximize the investment. If you don’t you will waste valuable time and effort.


Kevin Waterman

Following are the key takeaways from this lively discussion.

  1. Know your goals. A growth company is going to have different stack needs and a different budget than a stead state organization.
  2. Include your stakeholders. Don’t keep out IT! You will need IT to help make your tech stack integration and deployment successful. Work with the CFO to develop an ROI target. Work with marketing and customer success to connect with their tech and their goals.
  3. Create a baseline.  Know where you are today so you can measure against that.  How many calls? How many SQLs? Appointments? Call duration? Quality?
  4. Clean up dirty data. Roadblocks including misdirection can come from dirty data, bad data, or incomplete data.
  5. Use data scientists to continually clean, build, and append data.
  6. Leverage Sales Ops, or “Inside Sales Ops” to manage the stack.
  7. You won’t be one hundred percent the first time. Test and iterate.
  8. Monitor and be willing to exit if it’s not working.

Thank you to AA-ISP for the excellent opportunity and my gratitude to the panel for sharing their insights and experience about how deploy a sales tech stack for success.

Kathleen Glass currently serves as a national Advisory Board Member and local President of the San Diego Chapter of the Global Association of Inside Sales Professionals and was voted 2017 AA-ISP Supporter of the Year.