To stay ahead in a changing world, you need to keep evolving your software. That’s especially true when it comes to the value selling tools (or apps) that we build at Mainstay. These are apps that help companies drive sales by showing customers the business impact of investing in their products.
How often should you update your value selling apps? Choosing the right pace of change — known as release management — is crucial to the success of the app. Changing either too quickly or changing too infrequently can cause problems for tool adoption, user engagement, and overall sales performance. Not so fast
When you update your tools too often, it can overwhelm your sales teams. They may struggle to keep up with new features or interfaces, leading to frustration and tool fatigue. And since each new change demands time and effort to master, it can create a steep learning curve that can slow down the sales process. If updates are introduced too quickly, reps may feel like the tool is a moving target and lose trust in its reliability.
What’s more, rapid changes may introduce bugs or unintended complexities, affecting the tool’s performance and disrupting workflows. Unstable tools lead to reduced usage and missed sales opportunities. Worst case: The hassle of constantly relearning and adapting to new changes can erode confidence in the tool, causing salespeople to disengage or abandon the tool altogether.
Avoiding obsolescence
While evolving apps too frequently can cause problems, so can changing them too slowly. If you don’t update your value selling tools regularly, they can become obsolete. And if your tools don’t reflect the latest product features, competitive advantages, or market trends, they will fail to meet the evolving needs of both your sales teams and customers. This makes the tool less effective in communicating your value proposition, and salespeople may decide to stop using it.
Apps that don’t evolve with customer expectations or industry changes may be seen as irrelevant by your sales team. Without fresh content, new ROI models, or case studies, the tool’s value proposition can weaken, leading to declining adoption rates and disengagement.
Balancing act
We’ve found that the best approach is to make small, incremental changes that improve your app based on feedback and market needs. Your updates should be well planned, and you should provide clear communication about the changes to sales teams to give them ample time to adopt them effectively.
You should create regular feedback loops with your sales teams and customers to guide the pace of updates. This will ensure your tools evolve in ways that directly address user needs and market shifts, while avoiding unnecessary disruptions. Pro tip: include usage analytics as part of your tool to track how often it’s used and how effectively it drives outcomes (e.g., deal closures, sales cycle length). This can reveal if the tool is being underused or if updates are needed to make it more useful.
When introducing new features, you should also include training and support to ensure smooth adoption. By designing a thoughtful rollout, your sales teams can gradually adjust and incorporate updates into their workflows without feeling overwhelmed.
Conclusion
Release management is something our clients often have a hard time with. They either don’t keep the tools up to date or they are constantly changing them. The challenge is to find the right balance—making incremental updates that keep the tools relevant and effective, without overwhelming users or allowing them to become outdated.
By focusing on gradual, feedback-driven updates, and ensuring that communication, adoption, and feedback processes are aligned with the pace of change, organizations can maximize tool effectiveness, improve adoption, and ensure continued success in the sales process.
Have you experienced challenges when implementing a SaaS-based value management platform? Learn more about Mainstay’s Advisor Platform or contact us.
Dan Corcoran, Mainstay’s Chief Technology Officer, is responsible for empowering enterprise technology sellers to message value to their customers more effectively via innovative technology solutions. Dan’s primary focus is on Mainstay’s Advisor solution, a SaaS platform that leading technology vendors like Cisco, EMC, Google, Oracle, VMware and others use to help operationalize sales and marketing strategies that orient value messaging to customer-relevant issues.
