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High-performance and well-being leadership is more business-critical than ever. In today's future-of-work world, the days of managing teams via only your sales or martech stack are gone. Instead, this new world requires a foundational stack of solutions to sustain and intelligently scale company and employee performance.
That foundation and the technology stack you use to implement it is what we at LEON call the Performance Tech Stack.
A performance technology (perftech) stack is a collection of technologies used by front-line managers and directors to optimize and augment team performance, well-being, and business function growth. These technologies streamline employee experience, day-to-day business performance, and learning and development operations.
Many studies show that most employees are either disengaged with their job or have had their mental health impacted by their careers.
This problem is so significant that over 51% of tech professionals report being diagnosed with a mental health condition, 71% of tech workers said their productivity is affected by a mental health issue, and 57% of tech industry employees reported burnout.
Yet even understanding that this problem exists, we're spending more than ever to "optimize" our technology stacks on a business function level - with almost zero dollars budgeted to build a foundation of intelligent support and care for our teams.
Take sales teams as an example; Aragon Research predicts sales engagement will be a $5.59 billion market by 2023. Likewise, data Bridge Market Research estimates sales intelligence will be a $4.89 billion market by 2027. And 360 Research Reports projects sales enablement will be a $3.08 billion market by 2026.
And what about marketing? A recent report collaboratively produced by BDO, WARC, and the University of Bristol, estimates that the worldwide spend on marketing technology is $121.5 billion.
While these tools are necessary for growth - and they are part of the Performance Technology Stack - we fail to realize that without a holistic commitment to improving our teams' foundational health, resilience, and culture, the impact of these tools is virtually lost.
Layering on new technology, skills and coaching products, and tools designed to "optimize" a stressed-out, un-happy team is a recipe for team burnout, employee dissatisfaction, and turnover.
Using the aftermentioned Performance Stack, you create a base that gives you insights, services, and strategies on how best to support your people and the foundation to build team performance and skill on top.
The Performance stack allows you a holistic model for improved employee well-being and sustainable team growth.
Below, we'll share everything you need to future-proof your teams for the new future-of-work era. You'll learn the ingredients of a winning modern performance tech stack, how imbalanced and underperforming stacks are missing a few key concepts, and how to optimize your stack through a proven framework. Let's dive in.
The benefits of future-proofing your Performance Tech Stack for the new future-of-work era are apparent. But many teams – especially those in the enterprise space – worry that adding well-being and employee experience to their tech stack and stealing it from the hands of HR will be costly and inefficient.
What's missing is a foundation that can help front-line managers build an environment of care and support, allowing all the other layers of your Performance Stack to be used to their most significant potential.
This foundation allows you to manage in a holistic and human-centric way while building better, higher-performing teams with larger skill-sets and lower turnover.
In an ideal world, we'd be able to give you a one-size-fits-all performance stack that could work for any team.
But the reality is that your business is unique, and how you operate will impact which technologies you might find important and how you use them.
As we mentioned before, establishing a foundational base for your performance tech stack is critical. Less important is the exact technology or brand.
So in this example, we'll start by breaking your performance stack down into three key stages:
While there can be multiple sub-phases within the above, we've chosen to structure it this way for simplicity.
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Whether you're a sales manager or a VP of Product, one thing's for sure: you have probably struggled with team burnout, mental health, D&I, and alignment issues.
This post covid world has ushered in a work environment where everything matters. From understanding and managing workload, protecting your people against burnout, and creating an inclusivity environment, the setting in which we manage people in this new world has forever changed.
What front-line managers need and what they don't have now is a way to manage these hard-to-understand metrics.
The People section of the performance technology stack acts as a base or support structure for the other stack levels. Much like in sports, this foundation helps solidify the functionality of a team so that the top two layers - workflow and upskilling - can be improved and optimized.
But a performance technology stack starts with super-powering your people, which is what our first collection of tools will cover.
When it comes to driving well-being and performance, LEON's data collection, Growth Window reporting, Playbooks, goals, and well-being marketplace are the leaders here. They provide resources to help support employee well-being, but they also assist managers in making better decisions - using machine learning - on how they support or challenge their people. In addition, LEON can be purchased at the team, business function, or company level, making it accessible to any leadership level.
Alternatives: Lattice, 15five, Whoop, Gympass, Modern Health (but not all in one)
Lattice: Performance Management
Lattice labels itself as a performance platform, using such tools as employee engagement surveys, learning, and goals to better help managers improve performance, engagement, and development.
Alternatives: LEON, CultureAmp, 15five
15Five: Performance Management
Much like Lattice, 15Five is a performance platform utilizing surveys, goals, and one on ones to better manage people. But also, like Lattice, 15Five
Whoop is a wearable company that uses heart rate variability data and integrations to understand the physiological strain of work and sleep pattern disruption. Each employee must wear a whoop band for data reporting and actioning.
Alternatives: LEON, Fitbit, Apple Health
Gympass is an aggregator of fitness and wellness services sold as a wellness benefit to mid to large-sized companies.
Alternatives: LEON
Modern Health is a preventative, end-user-focused mental health care platform for enterprise-sized companies.
Alternatives: LEON, Gympass
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In 2023, worldwide sales teams will spend over 6.2 billion dollars on performance-related sales tools, a 17% increase on 2021 projections.
Isn't it amazing how much attention (and cash) we pay to tools that make our teams that much more efficient and high performing, but in comparison, how little we think about what happens to the human being using those tools?
Usually, how we manage the people running these tools is precisely why we spend so damn much on them. But unfortunately, these tools are also the line in the sand if you did or did not hit your goal, make your 150 calls, or even if you keep your job.
The fact is, these tools have all the power. And they are valuable in helping us run a high-performing business, although, as this article attempts to explain, they should not be foundational. For that, we've put together a collection of tools that will help you improve the performance section of your performance technology stack.
Salesforce creates and supports customer relationship management (CRM) software that helps break down the technology silos between departments to give companies a complete view of their customer everywhere they interact with your brand.
Alternatives: Hubspot, Outreach, Salesloft
HubSpot is an inbound marketing and sales platform that helps companies attract visitors, convert leads, and close customers. It does this by bringing together a variety of functionalities and allowing marketing and sales departments to manage all their activities in one place.
Alternatives: Salesforce, Outreach, Salesloft
ZoomInfo is a go-to-market intelligence platform for B2B sales and marketing teams. The integrated cloud-based platform provides sellers and marketers with comprehensive information to help them find potential new customers.
Alternatives: Ampelmarket, Clearbit, Linkedin Sales Navigator
Drift is a cloud-based solution designed to help businesses automate sales processes by adding live chat windows to websites for increased customer experience and loyalty. Key features include chatbots, geo-targeting, offline access, proactive chatting, and transfers/routing.
Alternatives: Intercom, Outreach, Salesloft, Loom
Loom is a video messaging tool that helps you get your message across through instantly shareable videos. With Loom, you can simultaneously record your camera, microphone, and desktop and share that video to drive sales operations.
Alternatives: Vidyard, Zoom, Drift
Sendoso is the leading Sending Platform that delivers modern direct mail, personalized gifts, eGifts, and other Physical Impressions at scale.
Alternatives: Alyce, Reachdesk
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Sales training is a crucial indicator of sales rep success; it ensures sales reps have the knowledge to deliver sales results by streamlining product training, onboarding, standards training, and updating training materials.
Companies such as Gong and Chorus are minting money on the idea that Ai-driven and real-time coaching is the missing link to faster growth.
And in many ways, they are right. 26 percent of sales reps report their sales training is generally ineffective, while 28 percent report it is just "usually" effective – which means there's a ton of room for improvement.
This focus on coaching has led to a resurgence of the idea that managers are much more than chart chasers. Instead, they are coaches who have a responsibility to improve the overall capacity of their teams to perform.
And because of that, we've put together a collection of tools that will help you upskill your people to faster and wiser growth.
Gong: Sales Coaching and Development
Gong empowers customer-facing teams to take advantage of their most valuable assets – customer interactions, which the Gong platform automatically captures and analyzes. Gong then delivers insights at scale, empowering revenue and go-to-market teams to determine the best actions for winning outcomes.
Alternatives: Chorus, Ambition, Chorus
Chorus: Sales Coaching and Development
Chorus provides a simple, scalable solution to capture and analyze all customer calls, meetings, and emails to create visibility, drive process and behavior changes, and deliver bottom-line impact.
Alternatives: Gong, Ambition, Sales Navigator
BetterUp: Learning & Development
BetterUp is a mobile-based leadership development platform that brings world-class coaching, AI technology, and behavioral science experts together to deliver change at scale — improving individual resilience, adaptability, and effectiveness.
Alternatives: Seismic, Linkedin Learning
Seismic (Lessonly): Enablement and development
Seismic is a Sales Enablement platform built to help sellers find, share, and track the marketing content they provide to customers and prospects, help marketers manage all marketing content in one place, and gain insights into the performance of the content. With its recent acquisition of Lessonly, Seismic has expanded on its product offering.
Alternatives: Guru, Linkedin Learning, Outreach
To stay competitive in this day and age, your Performance Tech Stack needs to do more than drive efficiency. It needs to take a genuinely holistic approach to well-being, performance, and coaching that unlocks happier and healthier human beings and new revenue. A relentless commitment to the employee experience - on a team level - can be your strongest differentiation in the future of work.
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