It’s no secret that businesses are looking for any and all ways to reduce costs in the current economic climate. Signs of a slowing economy have forced many companies to take a hard look at their expenses, in particular how their technology costs are affecting their bottom line. According to the latest Salesforce State of Sales report, 94% of sales organizations plan to consolidate their tech stack in the next 12 months.
A tech stack refers to the combination of software tools and digital platforms that a business uses to build and run its applications and systems. A typical tech stack might include a database management system, a programming language, a web server, an operating system, and various other tools and libraries. While having a diverse range of technologies can provide businesses with more options and flexibility, it can also lead to complexity and inefficiency.
In today's digital age, the amount of technology available to businesses can be overwhelming. Companies must use cutting-edge technologies to remain competitive, but these technologies often come at a price.
According to internal data collected by TechCrunch, companies are overspending on their software by nearly 30%. With 66% of sales reps stating that they’re overwhelmed by too many tools, companies are looking for ways to reduce their tech stack while also driving organizational efficiency.
Reducing technical bloat is an important part of staying ahead in the tech game while minimizing costs. Whether you're a small business or a large enterprise, Salesforce offers cloud-based technology solutions that can meet your needs from a single platform. With its robust set of features, integrations, customization options, and centralized data management, Salesforce can help you achieve your business goals and improve operational efficiency.
In this article, we’ll take a look at:
With companies scrambling to find ways to cut costs, technology budgets are a major area of concern for many businesses. Even though it can be difficult to track and understand which technologies are truly benefiting your business, not doing so can lead to massive inefficiencies and overspending.
So how do you make more informed decisions about your software spend? Start by evaluating your needs and getting feedback from staff before scaling back your software.
Create a list of all of the tools your company uses on a daily basis, the cost of each tool, and when each license renews. Update this list quarterly so you can see which licenses you’re not using and which tools may need to be removed from your list. Making a list is also a great way to see what processes are supported by tech such as sales and marketing.
Before you start reducing your tech stack, it’s important to evaluate your needs to ensure that you’re not eliminating any essential services or functions without replacing them. Take stock of what you need and make sure that each tool is bringing something valuable for your business instead of just adding bulk or bloat.
The best way to determine what’s working and what’s not is to ask your team members directly. Get with your sales reps to see what tools they’re utilizing each day and which ones are more cumbersome than helpful. If you have the resources, conduct a formal audit to help you determine which tools support specific processes.
A more in-depth option is to measure the effectiveness of each tool in your tech stack with a cost analysis based on productivity. This can provide valuable insights such as which tools are contributing to your sales pipeline and if they’re negatively impacting your bottom line.
Software licenses can add up over time, particularly for cloud-based SaaS tools. Evaluate which licenses are necessary for employees to have access to, then adjust accordingly. Consider only offering licenses for services that specific departments use or scaling back on the number of licenses purchased in order to cut costs.
Do you have multiple web hosting accounts with different service providers? Verify that all of them are being used and scale back where necessary in order to save on hosting fees. In some cases, it makes more sense to consolidate multiple accounts into one account with a single provider in order to cut down on overhead costs.
When it comes time to choose providers for certain services, look carefully into the selection process and verify that they offer not only good customer service and tech support, but also adequate security measures so that customer data is well-protected from theft or other malicious activities online.
Salesforce is a powerful customer relationship management (CRM) platform that can help you improve operational efficiency and drive customer success. Instead of relying on multiple technology systems and software, with Salesforce you can manage all of your business processes in real time from a central location.
From sales to service to marketing and more, Salesforce offers solutions for all areas of your business and can reduce your company’s tech stack by allowing you to:
One of the biggest benefits of using Salesforce is its ability to consolidate all customer data into a single platform. Salesforce provides a centralized platform for managing customer data, which means you don't need separate tools for tracking leads, managing customer information, or analyzing data. This can help you avoid duplication and errors in your data, and ensure that your team is working with the most up-to-date information.
Salesforce offers various tools and features that enable you to collect, organize, and analyze customer data, including customer profiles, purchase history, communication logs, and social media interactions. By consolidating all of this information under a single roof, you gain a 360-degree view of your customers, allowing you to provide better customer service, personalize marketing campaigns, and make informed business decisions.
Salesforce's flexible and robust integration capabilities make it a powerful tool for businesses looking to integrate with third-party applications. By leveraging these capabilities, businesses can streamline their workflows, improve data accuracy, and gain insights into their customer interactions that can drive business growth.
The Salesforce AppExchange is a marketplace that offers a wide range of third-party applications that can be integrated with Salesforce. These applications can help you expand the platform's functionality without adding to your tech stack. You can use integrations to connect Salesforce with other tools, such as marketing automation software, accounting systems, and analytics platforms. These applications can be easily installed and configured within the Salesforce environment, allowing you to extend the functionality of Salesforce to meet your company’s needs.
Salesforce offers a powerful set of APIs that can be used to integrate with third-party applications. These APIs allow businesses to exchange data between Salesforce and other systems, automate workflows, and build custom integrations. The benefit of using APIs is that they allow your company to access valuable information or software capabilities without the need to invest additional resources, which can save your business time and money.
Salesforce can help your business streamline operations by utilizing a wide range of automation capabilities from a single platform. With Salesforce, businesses can automate their sales, marketing, and customer service processes, reducing the time and effort required to manage these tasks manually.
Salesforce offers a range of automation tools, including workflows, process builder, and flow builder, which can be used to automate repetitive tasks, trigger actions based on specific events, and create complex multi-step processes.
With Salesforce, businesses can also automate their data management, ensuring that customer data is always up-to-date and accurate. By leveraging Salesforce's automation capabilities, companies can improve their business processes, reduce errors, and free up resources to focus on more strategic tasks such as improving the customer journey and building customer loyalty.
Salesforce offers a multitude of customization options, which can help you tailor the platform to your business's specific needs. You can create custom fields, objects, and workflows to automate tasks and capture the data you need.
With its flexible architecture, extensive set of APIs, and various development tools, you can create custom applications, integrations, and workflows that are designed to work seamlessly with your existing Salesforce instance. This means you don't have to rely on separate tools or systems to manage specific tasks, such as lead scoring, sales forecasting, or customer segmentation.
Whether you're looking to automate manual processes, build custom analytics dashboards, or integrate third-party tools and services, Salesforce provides the tools and resources you need to turn your vision into reality. And with a vast community of Salesforce Partners to choose from, you can leverage their expertise and learn from their experience to accelerate your development process and build solutions that meet your unique business requirements.
As your business grows, your tech stack can quickly become difficult to manage. However, Salesforce is a highly scalable platform that can grow with your business. Whether you need to add more users, increase your data storage, or customize the platform further, Salesforce can accommodate your needs from a single platform.
As a Salesforce Consulting Partner, we’ve heard from clients time and time again that they simply “outgrew” their old CRM. For many small and medium size businesses, choosing Salesforce as their CRM may not have been the initial choice by the executive team or sales leaders because it’s incorrectly perceived as a costly product best suited for enterprise level businesses.
However, once their current CRM can no longer fit their needs, they end up choosing Salesforce because of its scalability and advanced features.
“If implemented and adopted correctly, Salesforce should increase the top and bottom line, paying for itself easily,” said Kelley Austin Managing Partner Hunter Austin. “Regardless of company size, the benefits of being able to manage the majority of your processes on a single platform are so powerful for both your internal team and external relationships.”
Instead of adding additional software (and costs) to your tech stack to meet the growing demands of your business, with Salesforce you can scale your business from a central location. No matter the size of your company, you start with the standard functionality that allows a small business to get up and running, while also providing larger companies with the ability to accommodate millions of users.
With companies looking to optimize their business processes by reducing manual tasks, it can be tempting to invest in multiple technologies and software systems. However, this drive to keep up with the latest technology can lead to an overlap in platforms, endless apps and software contracts, and sales teams that feel overwhelmed by the amount of technology they’re pushed to use.
Organizations are paying 20% more on cloud technology than they did two years ago, which means software is an area under heavy scrutiny when it comes to cutting costs. But it can be tricky for executive teams and sales leaders to determine which technology makes sense to keep and which systems are being underutilized by sales reps or marketing teams.
One of the biggest benefits Salesforce offers as an all-in-one solution is allowing multiple departments to work towards a common goal. With Salesforce, businesses can manage their sales pipelines, track customer interactions, and monitor key performance metrics all in one place.
From sales to marketing to customer service and beyond, every department at your business has access to the same data in the platform. This allows for true collaboration among departments by ensuring every person at your business has access to the same information and can see what each department is working on in real time.
Salesforce also provides a 360-degree view of your customers, which allows you to create personalized customer experiences and improve customer service without the need to manage a hefty tech stack. Instead of using a separate CRM to store customer data, a POS system to store purchase data, and an analytics tool to understand your social media metrics, with Salesforce all of this data is stored in one place.
This helps your business drive marketing and sales efforts, better understand your customers, and meet customer expectations where personalized experiences are now the norm — not the exception.
In times of volatility, business leaders need to make quick decisions about how their organization will respond to economic constraints. With technology being an area that many companies are looking to make cuts in, understanding how your tech stack affects your business’s operations and infrastructure is critical.
When you can identify how technology helps or hinders productivity, you can then make informed decisions on how to reduce risks, cut back on costs, and prepare your business for the future.
“What we often find when working with our clients, is that over the years different departments have requested access to various tools, and most companies make the purchase without analyzing their current tech stack to see if there are already options in place to solve the challenge,” said Austin. “That just tends to be the natural way of operation and it’s not until they work with a firm like ours that they understand how much money they could be saving and efficiency they could be creating.”
By using Salesforce to consolidate your tech stack, you can streamline your operations, reduce costs, and improve efficiency. Whether you're a small business or a large enterprise, Salesforce offers a flexible and scalable platform that can meet your needs.
With its robust feature set, integrations, customization options, and centralized data management, Salesforce can help you achieve your business goals while minimizing complexity and costs.
If you’re interested in learning more about what Salesforce can do for your business, get in touch with our team.
At Kelley Austin we're proud to provide tailored Salesforce solutions across a variety of industries. Our expert knowledge and many years of experience in all aspects of the Salesforce ecosystem have earned us high levels of satisfaction from our clients.
We're ready to find the right solutions for your industry today.