Do you find the sheer number of technology-powered tools available to support your company’s operations overwhelming? While the promise of improved efficiency and revenue growth is enticing, many revenue leaders are finding that their tech stacks have become fragmented and difficult to manage. Tools that once seemed to offer the perfect solution can quickly become sources of frustration—overlapping features, disconnected data and misalignment with business goals. The problem isn't just the cost of new technology; it's ensuring that each tool fits seamlessly into the wider business strategy.
In this article, we'll look at how the rapid pace of technological change is reshaping the competitive landscape, and how revenue leaders can take control of their tech stack to streamline operations and drastically improve ROI.
How the Tech Landscape Usually Works
When new technologies emerge, it’s often the larger corporations—think Google, Meta, or Microsoft—that can afford to invest in the latest innovations. This gives them a competitive edge, allowing them to dominate the market while smaller companies struggle to keep pace.
However, as technology advances manufacturing methods also improve and core technologies become more affordable for smaller businesses. This, in turn, allows them to invest in advanced tools, such as cloud servers, enabling them to compete more effectively. These smaller businesses can be more agile and aggressive in their strategies, allowing their products to catch up with the more established competition on the market. The reduced costs involved in their setup also often allow them to be competitively priced, meaning they pose a real threat to larger corporations.
This shift has forced larger companies to evolve. Often these companies will look to acquire small startups or build ecosystems around their core services. For example, lucrative marketplaces as in the case of Apple or Google act as strong incentives for startups to focus their efforts on becoming ‘bolt-on’ products that live within the Apple and Google ecosystems. This strategy allows large corporations to maintain control of potential competition and even take a cut of their sales.
The Rise of Generative AI – Reversing the System
Generative AI has disrupted the tech landscape in profound ways. With significant funding flowing into AI startups, these companies have gained the resources to scale quickly, posing a challenge to even the largest players in the market. Unlike traditional companies that are built to sell, these AI startups are building for the long term—aiming to dominate their respective markets.
Their strategy is simple but effective: they make their tools widely available, gather vast amounts of data, and use it to improve their AI models faster than ever. This shift has resulted in a role reversal where companies like HubSpot and Apple are now licensing technology from startups such as OpenAI and Anthropic, rather than controlling their own ecosystems.
The rise of generative AI and its data-driven approach has reshaped traditional industry dynamics, empowering new players to take on and even surpass long-established market leaders.
What Does This Mean for Your Business?
The explosion of new tools, apps, and platforms has created both opportunities and challenges for businesses. Startups are offering agile solutions—such as enhanced CRMs (Customer Relationship Management systems) and AI-powered tools like those based on OpenAI technology.
However, many of these tools offer similar functionalities since they rely on the same underlying technologies. The true differentiator lies in how thoughtfully these tools are integrated into your business.
How to Choose the Right Tools for Your Organisation
When evaluating new tools, consider the following:
- Human-Centric Functionality: Does the tool meet your specific needs, or is it a one-size-fits-all solution (like ChatGPT)?
- Customisation: Can it be adapted to suit your workflows?
With the surge of new technologies, many businesses find themselves grappling with complex, disjointed tech stacks. Choosing which tools to keep and which to replace can be a daunting task.
Best-in-Class Tools Don’t Always Lead to Alignment
Many businesses fall into the trap of adopting “best-in-class” tools through a “rip-and-replace” approach. While each tool might excel in its specific function, this often leads to a fragmented tech stack—where tools don’t work well together, features overlap, and service-level agreements (SLAs) between teams are poorly defined.
As businesses grow, their needs evolve and tools that once served their purpose may no longer fit. The continuous cycle of acquiring standalone tools only adds complexity to the tech stack.
Instead of replacing expensive tools without a clear strategy, businesses should take a holistic view, aligning their tech stack with overarching revenue goals. To do this, organisations need to take control of their technology, ensuring it is cohesive and integrated across all business functions.
The Transformation Engine: A Holistic Approach to Tech Integration
At Innovation Visual, we follow a cyclical, flywheel approach that enables businesses to rapidly deploy technology and drive revenue. This process is built on four key stages:
- Build
- Enable
- Activate
- Report
By adopting the flywheel approach, businesses can enable rapid technology deployment, empowering teams to utilise tools through data-driven campaigns. This allows businesses to measure the effectiveness of their sales and marketing activities and further optimise the tech stack based on feedback. The more resources invested into the flywheel, the faster it spins—driving significant revenue and growth.
Build
The first stage focuses on scoping and implementing integrations, migrating data between platforms, and developing essential documentation. This phase also includes creating Entity Relationship Diagrams (ERDs) to ensure both your organisational and data structures align with your tech stack.
Enable
Enablement unlocks the value within your data and technology. This stage involves implementing SLAs, providing training for your teams, and driving process change within your revenue systems.
Activate
Unlike many other agencies, Innovation Visual offers in-house services that focus on activating these tools to deliver tangible value. This might include running campaigns to engage prospects and customers or setting up automated marketing nurtures to streamline customer interactions.
Report
The final phase involves assessing the impact of these actions. We deliver data-driven reports to help your team understand the effectiveness of your sales and marketing activities. These insights inform further optimisation of your tech stack and strategy. The more resources you invest, the faster the flywheel spins, accelerating revenue growth.
How Do You Know Which Technology to Embrace and Which to Replace?
To ensure successful technology implementation, businesses must first define their goals and desired outcomes. From there, they can work backwards to identify the technology solutions that align with these objectives.
It can also be invaluable to bring in an external team to assess your current systems and processes with a fresh, unbiased perspective. At Innovation Visual, we specialise in analysing systems, data connections, and team alignment. Our approach is people-centric, ensuring that technology works in harmony with your team’s needs. Technology and people must be aligned in a frictionless way to ensure success, allowing your team to focus on what they do best—driving revenue.
The People-Technology Alignment
For technology to truly succeed, it must be aligned with your team. A tool is only as powerful as the people using it, which is why we believe in taking a human-first approach.
Successful technology adoption depends on several factors:
- Ease of use
- Efficiency
- Relevance to daily tasks
- Training and support
- Integration with existing systems
By prioritising these elements, we ensure that technology enhances your team’s capabilities and drives business success. When your team feels empowered to use the tools effectively, the technology becomes a powerful enabler of efficiency, innovation and growth.
Get in Touch Today
The true power of a tech stack lies in its ability to complement your people. By prioritising your team’s needs and ensuring they are trained and supported to use the technology, you can unlock its full potential. A tech stack that is fully embraced by its users can transform how your business operates, driving efficiency and innovation.
If you want to scale your business, improve efficiency, or generate more revenue, our team is here to help. We’ll work with you to audit your current systems and build a roadmap for your tech stack that aligns with your business goals. Book an audit of your tech stack today to get started on your transformation journey.
