A key to spurring revenue team growth is a sales tech stack that scales and supports the transition from scrappy startup to hyper-growth enterprise. Technology has to provide efficient and effective solutions, and it must deliver a positive return on investment.
During the recent webinar, The ROI of Lead Routing for High-Growth Enterprises, LeanData and its community of revenue team professionals was honored to hear part of the Alation growth story from Krishna Shah, Senior Marketing Operations Manager at Alation.
It’s a story chock full of lessons learned that are important for every go-to-market (GTM) team to consider.
Newly minted “unicorn”
In June of 2021, Alation; a leader in enterprise data intelligence solutions including data search and discovery, data governance, data stewardship, analytics and digital transformation, announced it closed a series D funding round of $110 million, with an overall valuation of $1.2 billion.
The company had risen to become, in the parlance of today, a “unicorn.”
However, Alation is not an overnight success story. It took almost 10 years and a lot of difficult work for this quickly growing startup to rise to unicorn-level status.
Aggressive growth objectives
When Krishna joined Alation in 2018, the company was at approximately $10 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR). But, its marketplace value proposition suggested it was just getting started.
The company set its growth objectives to double in revenue, year-over-year. To accomplish that, Krishna needed to develop driving GTM processes and build a supportive sales tech stack to expand the pipeline of opportunities to fuel this ambitious growth.
Krishna had inherited a sales tech stack that covered the bare basics – a CRM and a marketing automation tool used primarily for email. From there, she started building.
Building a solid foundation
With an accountability to manage the tech stack and processes to support Demand Generation and other Marketing functions, Krishna set off to build a solid tech foundation centered on the pillars of automation and integration.
The tech tools, in turn, empowered Krishna to develop core foundational processes for lead management, lead qualification, lead scoring, attribution and so much more. Fast-forward 3.5 years to present day, late 2021, and Krishna and her team now have 38 separate tools in the tech stack, handling a myriad of duties such as lead routing, account-based marketing (ABM), deduplication, reporting, sales engagement, attribution and more.
Scalability
Like many GTM teams, Alation depends primarily on an inbound motion, but the marketing operations function also supports outbound and hybrid motions as well. In particular, Krishna needed to support Alation’s sales development representative (SDR) team.
Building the sales tech stack, it was important each tool be 1) effective at overcoming a problem or seizing an opportunity, 2) efficient and drive a positive ROI, and 3) able to scale, not only driving Alation’s rapid growth, but scaling alongside as volumes dramatically increased and motions became more complex.
Measuring costs & benefits on the road to ROI
Catch the recorded webinar on demand as Krishna talks through scaling Alation’s tech stack to drive and support its revenue growth objectives. It’s an interesting story on sourcing, deploying, measuring and continuously improving,
Additionally, for further insights into GTM operational challenges and the ROI associated with automated solutions, please refer to the eBook, Measuring ROI with Lead-to-Account Matching & Routing.
