Technology can be a great enabler, but it can also become a burden for your business if you aren’t careful. As a CEO or CFO, you’re the expert of your business. You know how it works, what you deliver to your customers and what messaging is most effective. You also have an aerial view of how your organization’s tech tools work together to further your department goals individually and your business’ goals collectively.
4 Questions to Consider When Purchasing an New Tool
- Does the technology support current and future business objectives?
- Can it handle different buyer journeys, sales models and product lines?
- How will the technology impact current operations, and what are the potential risks?
- What is the expected return on investment, and how soon will the technology start delivering value?
But when your team heads give you a persuasive pitch about acquiring the shiniest new toy on the market, it can be difficult not to buy in, especially if competitors are already jumping on board. You don’t want your company to fall behind if this one piece of technology promises to maximize revenue and other KPIs.
You might say yes, only later realizing the truth behind the hype: Many platforms end up forcing your business into a rigid structure. The result? You often have to rip up everything you’ve planned to date, and even worse, have no room to evolve and change as every business must.
What Makes for a Poor Tech Acquisition
Let’s say your sales and marketing teams want to purchase a pre-sales demand generation platform. They carefully analyze what behaviors indicate genuine buying signals, determine which messaging works best based on the type of business, identify where prospects are in the buyer journey and decide when it’s the right time to engage sales. This groundwork is based on extensive data and strategic planning. From this, your teams agree on the correct buyer stages, engagement metrics and necessary processes to support your business goals.
However, someone on your team then gets excited about another new tool that they want to integrate into your demand generation platform. You purchase it, but instead of enhancing your demand generation efforts, the new tool forces your organization to scrap all the groundwork you’ve laid. It imposes rigid, one-dimensional structures and processes that don’t align with your existing strategies.
While both demand generation and the new tool may be are critical, blindly investing in technology that doesn’t support your established insights, buyer journeys and engagement metrics can be extremely detrimental. It can limit your visibility into potential opportunities and risks, ultimately causing you to miss out on key revenue goals and critical business objectives.
No vendor understands your business like you do, so why should you relinquish such fundamental control to them? Even so, this scenario still plays out all too often.
How to Be Proactive in the Tech Buying Process
Leaders must engage deeply with the buying process to make an educated purchase, but this doesn’t necessarily mean attending every meeting. Instead, your involvement should be strategic and focused on ensuring that decisions align with your organization’s broader goals and needs.
Start by asking the right questions. Inquire about how the technology will support multiple buyer journeys, predictive models and various business segments. Is the solution flexible enough to adapt as your business evolves? Does it integrate well with existing systems? Can it scale with your growth? These questions help you determine whether the technology at hand will serve your entire organization, not just a specific segment of it.
After meetings, it’s wise to request a thorough analysis or report that evaluates the potential technology against the organization’s requirements. This should include:
- Alignment with business goals: Does the technology support current and future business objectives?
- Flexibility and scalability: Can it handle different buyer journeys, sales models, and product lines?
- Impact assessment: How will this technology affect current operations, and what are the potential risks?
- ROI analysis: What is the expected return on investment, and how soon will the technology start delivering value?
As an executive team, review this analysis critically, making sure it provides a comprehensive view of how the technology fits within the business. Also, plan to establish metrics to monitor the performance of the technology post-implementation, so you can gauge whether it delivers the expected benefits and continues to align with the organization’s evolving needs as time goes on.
By being proactive in these ways, you can make informed purchasing decisions that not only meet immediate needs but also support long-term success.
As a CEO or CFO, your time is already stretched thin, and it can seem like the best course of action is to just sign off on the technology your teams excitedly present to you. Instead, press pause. Realize that every system you buy and implement will have ripple effects throughout the organization. As such, be thorough in determining the impact such systems might have on your business fundamentals, and whether they’ll be empowering your needs or handcuffing you from reaching success.
