Bigger isn’t always better, especially when it comes to your sales/marketing/technology stack. There is a reason that many of the tools and equipment we buy today allow multiple functions. Efficiency is the main reason.
Think about an office equipment set up from 15 years ago. Remember how many tools it took to send and receive a contract? You needed to have a printer, a fax machine, a scanner, and maybe something else to make that happen. Now you can do all of the above from one app on your phone or computer. No paper is even necessary.
When it comes to your stack, think about it the same way. Does it make sense to have separate apps for email, phone, workflow automation, analytics, etc?
Effects on Rep Activity
The point of adding apps is to make completing tasks easier, but studies show that many times, it is having the opposite effect. The article "Sales Managers Are The Swiss Army Knives In Your Organization. Give Them The Tools They Need To Shine" references a survey commissioned by harmon.ie, where the results revealed that the so-called “digital transformation” of the workplace, fueled by a plethora of mobile and desktop apps, may be doing more harm than good for the average knowledge worker.
Some of the key findings from the survey:
- THE AVERAGE NUMBER OF APPS USED BY THE MODERN WORKER IS 9.39
- 43% believe that they have to switch between too many apps just to get basic work done.
- 67% believe it would be easier to focus on work if important information from all of their apps appeared in a single window.
- 70% don’t care which app they use as long as they can find information quickly and easily to get their jobs done.
- 41% can find all the information they need to do their day-to-day work just by opening a few apps. However, 35% said they have to open multiple windows to find the information they need.
Having to navigate multiple apps and multiple apps results in rep fatigue/frustration and cuts into the time needed to actually do the work. In many cases, the use of multiple apps results in a decrease of connectivity, efficiency and thus productivity suffers.
EFFECTS ON DATA SECURITY
To help you visualize, think back to the “telephone game” where one person starts a message then passes on to the next, then passes it on to the next, and so on.... By the end of the game, the message is usually not the same as it was when it started. The same thing happens with your data when you aren’t using native Salesforce applications.
The more third-party apps you have connected in Salesforce, the greater the opportunity there is for data to be lost or corrupted in translation and syncing. Each additional app you add to your stack forces organizations to go through a rigorous, time-consuming process of securing, implementing and connecting apps to Salesforce and to each other.
In the RiskRecon “Internet Risk Surface Report”, a study based on data from 18,000 different organizations with more than 5 million hosts across more than 200 countries, some of the key findings were:
- Among the organizations examined in the study, 84% host critical or sensitive information with third-party providers.
- Some 27% host assets with at least 10 different external providers.
- Overall, organizations were three times as likely to have high-value assets with severe security issues hosted externally versus those in-house.
- Some 35% of organizations were found to have high or critical vulnerabilities in data and assets hosted with external providers, putting those companies at risk for breaches, accidents, and the possible misuse of data.
- The typical company analyzed in the study maintains 22 Internet-facing hosts, but some of the firms were discovered with more than 100,000 such hosts.
KEEP IT SIMPLE SOLUTIONS.
For any company, but particularly financial services, healthcare and government entities where data security is paramount, less is more. It's challenging to find a single solution that does everything, so it is wise to do a stack assessment annually to see what apps you need and what apps can be replaced.
Salesvue’s application was designed specifically to reduce the number of Salesforce applications an organization needs by making multiple functions easily accessible in one platform and one dashboard. Salesvue provides email, phone/dialer and workflow automation solutions in one user friendly platform. In addition, Salesvue's analytics enable users to view easy-to-read reports on each of those activities separately and/or in combination to see how they correlate.
Salesvue is designed for Salesforce sales engagement and was designed to keep all your data in your Salesforce instance to prevent corruption or breach.
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