Insights from our Webinar ‘Mastering Your Tech Spend’

4 key takeaways from our talk featuring Gong’s Chief Evangelist, Udi Ledergor

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The process for managing your tech stack has never been more complex. From deciding on what tools are worth your company’s investment to actual procurement and implementation of those tools, understanding the purchasing process and how to best manage your tech spend at any size company is pivotal to your success as an organization.

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To tackle this topic, we spoke with two industry leaders - Udi Ledergor, Chief Evangelist at Gong, and Amnon Mishor, CTO at Gynger -  who have collectively managed millions of dollars in tech spend, to share insights from their firsthand experience.

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In their recent discussion, “Mastering Your Tech Spend," hosted by Drew Olsen, Head of Go-to-Market at Gynger, the duo gave tips and pointers for decision makers across four main areas:

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• How to determine which tools you want to adopt
• Should you take a top-down or bottom-up approach?
• Understanding the job of all your business partners - and why that matters
• How to justify your tech spend

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Missed the webinar? Below are four key takeaways from this enlightening session.

How to determine which tools you want to adopt

There are a few factors to consider when selecting your software. First and foremost: what business priority or KPI does this help to solve? If you can’t answer that question, chances are it’s not a worthwhile investment. Does this new tool play nicely with the rest of my tech stack? If not, it will be a headache for your team to implement and will likely become more trouble than it's worth. Does it meet compliance and security requirements? There are some really interesting tools out there, but your commitment to your customers' data security takes precedence and some tools just won’t make the cut from a compliance standpoint. 

Should you take a top-down or bottom-up approach?

As a rule of thumb, both Udi and Amnon are in favor of a bottom-up approach to adopting new tech. The employee who is in the weeds will know better than anyone what their needs are and where they’re seeing a gap. The questions to ask yourself are: is this coming from a genuine place of need within the team? Start with a pilot with one or two people: are they actually using the tool? If usage is high, that’s a great litmus test for how impactful the tool will be when rolling out to the larger team.

However, some instances necessitate a top-down implementation and that cannot be avoided. For example, with a new HR tool or project management software, that cannot be piloted on one person - it will have to be mandated at the top and utilized by the whole team in order to be effective. 

Understanding the job of all your business partners - and why that matters

Chances are there will be multiple stakeholders in choosing what tech you adopt as an organization. Procurement, your CFO - they are not your enemies. “Put yourself in their shoes,” Udi explains, “What would make it super easy for them to just stamp this and move it along? Explain why you need something and why it's helping you hit your goals.”

 Learn what they are measured on and find commonality. If you can explain your thought process in terms of shared business goals and frame your ask in the language of common KPIs you’ll be much more successful in convincing internal stakeholders that the tech you’re asking for is not only a solid investment, but essential to furthering the business.

“Talk to me about the ‘R’, everyone always talks to me about the ‘I’ but no one talks to me about the ‘R’”. Udi shared this great line that his CFO, Tim, at Gong likes to say. Put differently, broaden the conversation so you are speaking in a language of mutual benefits and not simply one-sided requests.

Justifying your tech spend - what’s the ROI?

Some tools are very simple to measure. Udi gives the example of a marketer buying an A/B testing tool. A few months down the road, you should be able to see whether the tool helped you improve your website conversion or not. 

But some tools are not as easily measured. If you think about things like your CRM, payroll, development tools - those are things that are integral to the business but cannot necessarily be measured by a dollar in dollar out approach. Going back to the shared, universal business goals - see how you can tie it into your collective KPIs even if you cannot place a concrete ROI figure on it.