Thanks for this insightful analysis. It struck me that after calling out the unsustainable proliferation of sales tech solutions in the stack you focused only on what: yet more new solutions for the stack? What about the evolution of the roadmap of existing solutions to take advantage of AI and who is making the most progress? What about diving deeper into the consolidation that is happening in the CRO office and who is emerging as must have? What about further consolidation through M&A and “platformization”? There is of course nothing wrong with introducing the readers to some great new solutions, but that is a bit incongruous with the premise that there are too many out there already providing only marginal incremental value.
Hey Michael - thanks for reading and the thoughtful questions you raise here. You are certainly correct that it seems incongruous to highlight new tools in a category as crowded as sales tech! Our feeling is some of these new AI-first tools will actually help CROs and sales teams consolidate their existing sales stack; in fact the more interesting opportunity is not only replacing existing software tools but also replacing the "services" element of sales (manual workloads, hours of SDR/BDR time, etc.). But you're right that existing solutions will also take advantage of AI; certainly Salesforce and Hubspot are doing so, and we fully expect they will continue to innovate here. This summary is by no means exhaustive, so we're excited to see how both incumbents and new players can reduce the sales stack "overload" :)
As a CRO for multiple Madrona companies over the years, I a can definitely identify with the problems in described the sales tool stack. Over the 2000's-2010's there was a huge amount of sprawl in the form of new overlapping tools of questionable value championed by some part of the GTM org or another. When DG or RevOps would come to me to sign off on another tool-I was asking things like "what does this replace?" "Will it be used by multiple groups?", "Walk me through the end to end process that this fits into". I wanted fewer tools, not more. While I agree that AI has the potential to all but eliminate some roles like SDR's and greatly improve the productivity and professionalism, of all sellers, there are also a lot of opportunities for tool platforms that accelerate the mid-funnel in active sales cycles. The mid-funnel, which covers the middle stages of the buyers journey, is where leakage is most expensive and conversion improvements are most impactful. Using AI to generate deal specific competitive positioning, ROI analysis, proposal generation as well as the timely delivery of stage-appropriate sales assets represent significant opportunities, IMO.
Thanks for this insightful analysis. It struck me that after calling out the unsustainable proliferation of sales tech solutions in the stack you focused only on what: yet more new solutions for the stack? What about the evolution of the roadmap of existing solutions to take advantage of AI and who is making the most progress? What about diving deeper into the consolidation that is happening in the CRO office and who is emerging as must have? What about further consolidation through M&A and “platformization”? There is of course nothing wrong with introducing the readers to some great new solutions, but that is a bit incongruous with the premise that there are too many out there already providing only marginal incremental value.
Hey Michael - thanks for reading and the thoughtful questions you raise here. You are certainly correct that it seems incongruous to highlight new tools in a category as crowded as sales tech! Our feeling is some of these new AI-first tools will actually help CROs and sales teams consolidate their existing sales stack; in fact the more interesting opportunity is not only replacing existing software tools but also replacing the "services" element of sales (manual workloads, hours of SDR/BDR time, etc.). But you're right that existing solutions will also take advantage of AI; certainly Salesforce and Hubspot are doing so, and we fully expect they will continue to innovate here. This summary is by no means exhaustive, so we're excited to see how both incumbents and new players can reduce the sales stack "overload" :)
As a CRO for multiple Madrona companies over the years, I a can definitely identify with the problems in described the sales tool stack. Over the 2000's-2010's there was a huge amount of sprawl in the form of new overlapping tools of questionable value championed by some part of the GTM org or another. When DG or RevOps would come to me to sign off on another tool-I was asking things like "what does this replace?" "Will it be used by multiple groups?", "Walk me through the end to end process that this fits into". I wanted fewer tools, not more. While I agree that AI has the potential to all but eliminate some roles like SDR's and greatly improve the productivity and professionalism, of all sellers, there are also a lot of opportunities for tool platforms that accelerate the mid-funnel in active sales cycles. The mid-funnel, which covers the middle stages of the buyers journey, is where leakage is most expensive and conversion improvements are most impactful. Using AI to generate deal specific competitive positioning, ROI analysis, proposal generation as well as the timely delivery of stage-appropriate sales assets represent significant opportunities, IMO.
Agree with everything, except the "eyesore" comment. :) "Eye Chart" has a better ring to it.