Prospect Tech Stack v.1
Hey y’all -
If this is your first time reading, and an artisanally written email (without ai), electronically placed (without payment required) in your inbx once a week, smash that subscribe button rn:
Let’s get into it.
For the last decade, I've been an early adopter of the latest sales technologies - as a user, a buyer, an investor, and a builder.
And right now, there are two very clear trends with sales tech: 1) there are SO many more tools today, than there were 5 years ago (it's become increasingly difficult to navigate the ecosystem). And 2) the GTM playbook is evolving (so, the tech stack needs to evolve to support these changes).
I've been slowly putting together a new kind of "Market Map" to help make sense of the space. (Things like the "Martech 5,000" is basically useless at this point).
→ My goal is to be *opinionated, but unbiased.*
Here are a few other of my thoughts as I'm developing this new market map:
1/ I have no skin in the game.
You'll notice, my company, Groundswell, is not on the market map.
2/ I want it to be data-driven.
Meaning, I don't want all 5,000 vendors on here, but only the ones where the market has deemed them to be taken seriously - my current working definition of "serious players" is any company that has ~at least $500K in (annual) revenue.
One caveat: I want to include some promising up-and-comers who may not be at $500K in revenue yet (but I predict will be). This is "the alpha."
3/ This market map is *only* focused on Prospecting (SDRs and full sales-cycle AEs).
So, you'll notice it doesn't include other AE-focused technologies like Mutal Action Plan, Pipeline Forecasting, E-Signature, etc.
4/ This market map started off as a visualization of how to "architect" a modern sales stack.
When I was doing ops/enablement for the BDR Team at Zoom, I spent a non-trivial amount of time making sure all the different tools in our tech stack played nicely with each other.
This image is an attempt to show how to architect your tech stack, visually, using the "jobs to be done" framework.
I hope that I can develop this over time and it will help *separate the signal from the noise.*
Let me know in the comments what other technologies should be added to the Prospecting Stack "market map.”
See you next time,
B.