Minami Rojas
A guide to outline the 4 key factors to consider of building vs. buying product-led sales tooling. Hint, the real question is do you need pipeline and revenue now or can you wait 10+ months?
As revenue goals loom and headcount is constrained, sales teams are leaning more than ever into tools, data, and systems to help uncover pipeline faster, improve pipeline performance, and increase rep productivity.
This is where the rise of product-led sales has stepped in.
Product-led sales is simply using product data as a core part of the sales strategy. Reps can use product data to better understand who they should target, build a compelling business case, and determine what message will be most effective. In the end, this helps reps generate more pipeline and close deals faster.
While it may sound simple, translating product data into actionable workflows for sales teams is a technical and operational hurdle, which is why we built Endgame. Oftentimes, internal options require complex pipelines, heavy resources to build, and long-term requirements to maintain.
In order to determine whether to build vs. buy, it’s important to understand the core components of the tech stack that is needed for product-led sales. The stack consists of:
The TL;DR is that there are four key factors to consider when deciding whether to build or buy a product-led sales platform:
We’ll walk through the questions you should consider, as well as walk through common ways “build” options fail. So let’s get into the details!
One of the key factors to consider when building a tool is the amount of internal resources needed. With a product-led sales platform, the work touches many organizations across data, ops, and sales with many hands needed to support.
The initial build responsibilities will sit within RevOps, Data Science, Data Engineering, and Product. At a high level the jobs to be done include:
If partnering with a vendor, 95% of those responsibilities are reduced with the main resource requirements internally to be initial integration and then to act as a partner to help drive strategy forward.
Another factor to consider when building vs. buying is beyond the resources – does your existing team have the expertise you need to build the right tool?
The worst case scenario is your internal team invests time into building a solution and it ends up discarded because either it isn’t built for reps to easily incorporate into their workflow or it doesn’t produce the right insights to drive revenue impact.
When building a product-led sales platform, you want a team that understands best practices in approaching data, has experience with the challenges in solving the complexity combining product data with CRM data, and most importantly deeply understands the wants and needs of the end user: sales.
Retool is a platform that enables teams to build any kind of tool, so our first instinct at Retool is always to solve problems by building solutions in our own product. However, this is not the right approach when the problem being solved is one that we are either not well positioned to understand at a deep level or which is not going to be a differentiator for our business. The Endgame team thinks about this problem every single day and I want to benefit from their experience. There’s no question in my mind that we would do an inferior job by trying to develop and maintain this functionality internally.
Once the tool is built, the work doesn’t stop there. Another key factor to consider in build vs. buy is who will continue to maintain the solution in year 2 and year 3? Maintaining the tool long term comes in two forms of work; data observability to notify on call when things break, and managing feedback and improvement requests.
A huge consideration in building vs buying is data. Who will take on the important responsibility to ensure data reliability from raw data, through pipelines, into rep workflows?
Within a product-led sales workflow, many things can impact your data reliability:
Building in-house not only requires a team to be on-call, but a team to be able to evaluate the quality of data and make changes as the business evolves.
On the other hand, a product-led sales platform is built to flex and grow with your business with data observability notifications and on-call set up, a data platform to automatically sync new data, and ML models that learn and adapt with sales and pricing and packaging changes.
What’s the impact of not maintaining data reliability? Unhappy reps and unhappy customers. Reps are using outdated information to target the wrong users for the wrong play. Best case scenario; a rep reaches out to an account to drive expansion but they aren’t adopted so don’t respond. Worse case scenario; a rep reaches out to an unhappy customer to drive expansion and the customer gets upset and churns. Worse worse case scenario; reps lose confidence in the tool altogether and it’s been a long and expensive journey to shelf-ware.
Identifying who is responsible to “product manage” the tool is an added cost when building internally. Managing feedback and feature requests can come in multiple forms such as:
Working with a vendor, you will have a partner whose #1 job is to help action data requests, address questions, and incorporate requests into future releases.
Most importantly, user feedback is the lifeblood of a vendor helping drive future roadmap vs. internally is added work and resourcing constraints for your internal team.
When deciding between building or buying a solution, thinking about how your needs will scale and how they will be supported in the future is an important consideration.
When building internally, you have the benefit of a custom-made solution for your own team. This means:
When buying through a vendor, you have a partner that lives and breathes the ability to solve this problem. This means:
Endgame is a really helpful partner to have to gut check our product-led sales strategy. That was where Endgame stood out compared to other products trying to do the same thing.
The most important factor to consider in the build vs. buy conversation is time to revenue, the core reason behind this investment. On average, building in-house can mean 10-12 months before seeing revenue impact.
Building in-house takes time and for a solution that requires cross-functional alignment, resources, and enablement, no matter how big or small the team there is always a time element. Interestingly enough, the enemy of revenue or more specifically revenue goals is time. The longer it takes to find a deal, create an opportunity, and close a deal the further and further away the reality of achieving quota becomes.
Buying a solution can reduce time to revenue by 3x with your team seeing pipeline impact within 1-3 months and revenue within 4 months.
That’s why when determining build vs buy, it’s important to consider each phase and how much it adds to your time to revenue. The key phases are:
At the end of the day, revenue goals aren’t going to be delayed. The decision comes down to a single equation; the total opportunity cost of resources and revenue to build a solution vs. the cost of buying a tool.
If you are still considering building in-house, review the guide to launching product-led sales to walk through each step you need to take to launch product-led sales for your revenue teams.
However, we believe strongly that partnering with a vendor is the best way to leverage your team’s time, open up internal focus for higher strategic objectives, and lean into a partner who can help scale based on the expertise and insights of the entire market.
Our team built Endgame after repeatedly building in-house solutions that were 20% effective and knowing that revenue teams deserved better. Our product-led sales platform is built for revenue teams and designed to reduce complexity and requirements for RevOps and Data teams.
Interested in partnering with us? Contact us today and we’d love to chat!