Are You Managing Your Technology Or Is Your Technology Managing You?

By Perry Rearick, Chief Editor, Follow Your Buyer

Are you managing your technology or is your technology managing you?   

In the early stages of our buyer’s journey for technology solutions, we’re learning about the problems it can solve, and we begin forming our expectations around our own problems.

We begin envisioning what our business might accomplish and how our lives could be improved with the right technology. Perhaps it can automate repetitive activities, organize workflows, add transparency to sales activities, or interpret data to help us better understand our buyers.

But somewhere along our buyer’s journey we often find we’re no longer in the driver’s seat. The technology, supported by near-mystical demos, takes over. The clarity we had when we were focused on what technology can do for us is forgotten and we find our decisions being steered by the technology itself.

Once adopted, we discover that the organizational and workflow changes are so significant, that most of us don’t fully employ the technology and never realize its true benefits. 

I’m not saying that technology should not drive behavioral change for the better. It should!

But we can lose sight of the initial problem we were trying to solve with the technology. The problem may still exist, but it has been deprioritized by bigger problems like we’re spending a lot of money on a solution we don’t use.

So, when you are seeking a technology solution to overcome a business problem:

-keep your original problem top of mind throughout your buyer’s journey.

-use the technology to assist you in understanding and refining the problem.

-use the technology to reveal additional issues that may exist. 

Put the technology to work for you, not the other way around.

--Perry