A bit of history: The enterprise ‘portlets’ race

This encounter reminded me of the “enterprise portal” era. Please indulge me while I look back to the late 2000s and early 2010s — a time most customers and vendors would care to forget but that still carries lessons today. 

Enterprise portals were supposed to provide a single, convenient interface into a potentially broad array of enterprise applications, displayed as separate blocks on a screen in a dashboard motif. The technology underpinning those individual blocks went by many names, but for now, let’s call them “portlets.” 

It quickly became clear that portal programs were fundamentally highly complex integration projects, so enterprises naturally sought to leverage pre-fab connector code. Vendors responded with portlet catalogs, and an arms race ensued. “We have 250 portlets,” a vendor would brag.

These portlets would vary dramatically in provenance, support, usability, performance, security and (crucially) technical underpinnings. A “portlet” was typically a reference instance of some Java or C# code somebody wrote for a single client implementation. More often than not, the code needed to be overhauled, sometimes from scratch. 

Vendors retorted — not unfairly — that problems often originated in how remote systems were configured rather than with the portal platform itself. Maybe so, but enterprises eventually got jaded about portlets. Amid other technology and business changes in the digital world, portal platform technology gradually fell out of fashion.

The new CDP connector race

Fast forward to today, and the world is coming to understand CDPs as integration environments (among other things). Every CDP selection team we work with strives to find vendors with pre-built connectors to match up against their incumbent platforms. Yet, nearly every CDP implementation finds expensive developers significantly modifying or rewriting those connectors.

CDP vendors are seemingly succumbing to the pressures their portal brethren endured. If customers value a diverse catalog of connectors, then as a CDP vendor, you must display many of them, ready or not. In CDP demos, connectors appear on the screen as neat blocks (with the connected platform logo appearing prominently) that you can drag around — almost like portlets! 

Well, not so fast. Like portlets, CDP vendor connectors may result simply from the output of a single implementation. More importantly, in some cases, a single connector cannot possibly address the complexity of the martech platform on the other end. 

Consider Salesforce Sales Cloud, mentioned above. The platform suffers from an problematic object model that most licensees contort or heavily extend. It can be like connecting to a very angry octopus. And Salesforce is by no means alone here. In such situations, a CDP vendor’s connector can only provide the basic scaffolding and leave the rest up to a developer. 

Is the enemy us?

Portals died out for another reason. If eyes are windows to the soul, portals were windows into enterprise intestines. A portal was only as useful as the underlying applications. Often, those applications were messy, lacked common content and metadata models, employed diverse access control regimes, exhibited different UX models and sometimes exposed low-quality data. 

At my company, we see a similar phenomenon with CDPs. Depending on how you scope a CDP effort (and different patterns are emerging here), the CDP may expose the immaturity of your broader customer data management regime — all the more reason to match any prospective CDP to your broader data architecture. 

Dig deeper: How to ID and organize data with a new CDP

Watch out for CDP vendors claiming to have diverse connector catalogs

As always, forewarned is forearmed. First, reconsider overweighting a vendor who claims to have connector catalogs that match up well against your stack. Among other reasons, simply moving CSV files around can solve many (non-real-time) use cases. When you need packaged connectors, specific integration experience becomes useful but doesn’t inherently hedge against substantial development in your future. The key is to find out how much development.

Hopefully, you’re following an agile CDP selection process that concludes with a competitive bake-off and a more technical proof of concept (PoC) with one or two finalists. A PoC is a great environment to test a few essential connectors. You’ll then come to understand the level of effort to overhaul where necessary — and that could be often.

Like their portal vendor predecessors, CDP vendors will promise “quick start” packages to accelerate an initial implementation. Don’t believe it. Once again, some delays may stem from the time you’ll need to get your own data house in order, but also, I can guarantee you that someone will be doing connector development, and this work gets measured in quarters, not months. Budget your resources accordingly.

The post The CDP connector myth appeared first on MarTech.

Since then, the marketplace for standalone journey orchestration engine (JOE) platforms has receded. A plateau in sales and numerous vendor acquisitions absorbed nearly all the independent JOE vendors. 

What happened, and what does it mean for you, the martech leader?

First, a bit of history

JOE technology has roots in the pre-digital era, where many “decisioning” platforms helped inform direct mail and telephony-based customer engagement.

Vendors like Infor, SAS, and Pega acquired and merged much of this tech into larger suites and slowly adapted them to the digital age.

Then the 2010s saw many enterprises undertake “customer journey mapping” projects, often led by external agencies conducting specialized workshops to uncover “as-is” and “to-be” customer journeys. 

The diversity of approaches to visualization, terminology, and even the definition of a “journey” should have been a warning that full-cycle orchestration would prove difficult. 

Not surprisingly, most of these projects led to more tactical, test-and-optimize projects at discrete touchpoints rather than systemic omnichannel overhauls.

Dig deeper: What is customer journey analytics and how are these tools helping marketers?

Promise and pitfalls

At the same time, a handful of independent, born-digital JOE vendors emerged. They served forward-looking enterprises seeking to provide a more coherent, omnichannel experience for customers. 

Interestingly, the customer data platform (CDP) market — which emerged simultaneously — grew to become a multi-billion dollar arena with dozens of plausible alternatives.

Yet, the JOE market never really took off. Why not?

First of all, omnichannel journey orchestration is more complicated than it looks. An enterprise specialist might imagine themself sitting at a complex control panel, adjusting dials and knobs to optimize outcomes.

But it turns out that modern customer engagement can be as complicated as nuclear controls, and require comparable levels of education, training and risk reduction. 

For JOE technology to work, you need to have at least three things in place, and none of them are easy:

• Comprehensive, unified and accessible customer data. Almost no firm has this, though everyone is working on it. Sometimes JOE vendors would build in mini-CDPs just to accelerate this process, with predictably poor results.
• Performant, reliable, customizable, bi-directional connectors to your most important customer engagement touchpoints so you can adequately listen and respond. The term “reliable connector” should give you pause.
• Interdepartmental strategy and governance to figure out and then execute your tactics across numerous channels: media buys, web, apps, messaging-oriented campaigns, ecommerce, and customer service. Often, we see marketing take the lead here, but this is an enterprise-wide endeavor, and those are hard.

A changing market

After initial excitement, the JOE market plateaued.

Salesforce dropped its reseller agreement with the largest indie JOE vendor, Thunderhead. Acquia quietly dismissed its JOE partner, Kitewheel. 

Other suite vendors like Adobe and Acoustic only have limited investments in omnichannel orchestration as they focus more on outbound messaging platforms.

Most pointedly, all the major JOE independents have gotten sold off, primarily to “CX” (read: customer listening/service) vendors like Medallia and Qualtrics. 

Here again, the contrast with CDPs feels apt. CDPs have become almost a “cost of doing business.” In most cases, the large enterprise needs to deploy one. 

Yet JOE technology has remained more aspirational, requiring a tougher return on investment justification. Recent M&A activity seems to indicate the most profitable thing JOE technology does circa 2022 is to reduce both customer churn and costly call center volumes. 

The future of journey orchestration technology

This story doesn’t have a sad ending. The need for journey orchestration is not going away. 

While marketers may remain enamored with outbound, message-oriented campaigns, consumers are less optimistic about the resulting deluge of emails, texts, and in-app messages. 

The listen-and-respond motif of journey orchestration platforms will become even more critical as firms transition to subscription-like models that emphasize maximizing lifetime customer value.

Meanwhile, a growing set of CDP vendors is adding lightweight orchestration services to their platforms.

At first, we at Real Story Group were skeptical at this CDP+journey coupling — proper separation of concerns and all that. Yet, we’ve learned that decisioning seems to want to reside close to data. 

Some of our clients find this bundled approach a useful introduction to a complex opportunity.

They are already moving more heavy-duty artificial intelligence and machine learning operations lower in their data stack (where they can be more closely governed). Putting a light, data-centric orchestration layer on top could present a simple way to leverage some of those models.

In any case, decisioning and journey orchestration are not going away. Instead, they’ll take more time to mature on both the vendor and enterprise sides.

Larger questions revolve around where these services will reside in your future stack. And for that, you have many choices.

The post Whatever happened to customer journey orchestration? appeared first on MarTech.

But what about the teams that actually run and leverage those platforms? How should the people who manage and run martech be organized? Where should they fit in the larger organizational structure?

I’ve long believed that organizational design for martech constitutes more of an art than a science, but perhaps that’s just because I’ve never seen a large and clear enough data set from which to draw useful conclusions.

As a first step towards better research in this area, Real Story Group invited our MarTech Stack Leadership Council to share and critique each others’ organizational models. I can’t describe the details because these sessions are confidential, but the high-level discussion was fascinating, and some patterns emerged, which I’ll share below.

A trend toward global

RSG Council member organizations are larger enterprises, usually with an international or global footprint. Over time, I’m sure you’ve witnessed the push-and-pull dynamic between globally central control vs. local autonomy for digital. Council members indicated that Covid (among other factors) has lately pushed the pendulum towards centralized operations.

One general theme was: “Centralized platforms, with local expression.” This means every business line or region might use, for example, the same outbound marketing platform, but deploy campaigns locally. For some this was the only way to scale during a period of intense growth in digital customer touches. It also creates space for an overall compliance framework and ops team to support ever-expanding local privacy regulations.

Applying the chart above, the more foundational the platform, the more likely you can successfully apply it globally. As you get closer to the customer (i.e., move up the diagram), the more local teams may need their own capabilities, e.g., for outbound campaigns and messaging, or social media management. 

Growing operational control 

The trend toward centralized platform management also extends to product management. Here again, individual marketing and customer-experience execution teams may vary in how they use a central platform, but most RSG Council members have carved out a core team defining the stack, and — critically — setting individual platform roadmaps.

This often requires central martech teams to serve in a consultative way. We saw several models for executing on martech centers of excellence. Some Council members have marketing services organizations, similar to or combined with internal agencies, often working with a centralized DAM/omnichannel content platform, outbound marketing platform and/or CDP. 

This trend has not come without push-back. Nevertheless, greater centralization and growth of formal martech operations can bring a solid business case, especially around efficiency. It can provide faster time to market, asset and campaign re-use and formalized lesson-capture. Centralized ops can also bring faster time to value when entering new markets. “This is the only way we could get to scale across markets,” observed one stack leader.

This doesn’t mean that these run in a vacuum. In nearly every case study, we saw a steering committee representative of broader institutional stakeholders, including IT, enterprise data, and key adjacent services, like sales and/or support. 

Enduring friction points

Several points of friction endure for centralized martech teams, and different Council members addressed them (or not) in different ways.

Should martech teams embed or partner with IT? At RSG we tend to see a mix of both models. Marketing teams still struggle to manage and retain heavier-duty (often back-end development) talent. Also, systems integrators often prove essential for heavy-lift projects. 

A similar dynamic arises around analytics. Marketers need ever-faster reporting and optimization cycles, with reference to non-marketing data (like sales transactions). This function tends to straddle marketing and BI departments, not always comfortably. Savvy teams are building internal data analytics skills, but may not have access to all the data or tools this requires. 

On the plus side, there’s a growing consensus around savvier enterprises that AI/ML is best considered an enterprise concern. Prudent martech leaders will remain cautious about having potentially immature AI/ML services embedded in marketing and engagement platforms.

Inevitably, martech operations encounter the limits of centralization. The pandemic has spawned more cross-functional teams (a good thing!) and any large enterprise will experience waves of localized initiatives. 

The picture below is from a Council member org chart. It shows how the central team has to increasingly serve an interwoven set of other initiatives and tiger teams. Adaptation from a central core of capabilities becomes the watchword, as strategic martech operations respond to shifting tactical needs. 

Conceptual convergence, descriptive diversity

At one session, eight Council members presented org structures and another 20 commented on them. I was struck by the diversity of visual representations, even if members seem increasingly aligned on the substance of where they’re going organizationally.

It’s possible we still lack a common vocabulary — and certainly universal visual metaphors — for describing these issues. Still, I’m certain we’re going to discuss more on this topic when Council meets in person (finally!) in September. In the meantime, I hope you found this summary useful, and feel free to share on LinkedIn if you’d like to continue the conversation.

The post How is marketing operations evolving? appeared first on MarTech.

It was clever, maybe even revolutionary. The company changed its name from InfoOffice to RedDot Solutions and joined the numerous European WCM vendors which migrated to North America in the early 2000s. 

But there was a problem. In-context editing was quickly mimicked by nearly all WCM competitors not named Drupal, and RedDot lost its unique selling point. After middling growth RedDot was acquired by document management vendor Hummingbird before making its way to the content management retirement community known as OpenText. 

I recall one of my take-aways was: Never name your product after a feature.

What does this have to do with headless?

I’m going somewhere with this…really, I am.

Fast-forward a decade to the 2010s to find a new wave of (mostly) European WCM vendors emerging with another important innovation: Completely decoupling content management from content presentation and delivery. To be clear, separating content management from experience management wasn’t new. What made it a big deal this time was a tsunami of investment funding, a simple moniker (“headless”) and alignment with newer architectural models – all packaged into modern, cloud-native platform offerings.

Headless platforms were a fresh take on the problem of how to supply content to multiple different environments, especially the many new customer-facing web and mobile applications. Traditional WCM platforms didn’t do that very well, if at all. They managed your content and then served up your “website.” Not good enough.

The headless plateau

The people selecting the headless technology for a company are more likely to be IT than marketing. As a result, most vendors pitch themselves explicitly to them. This frequently doesn’t end well for business-facing tools, and indeed at Real Story Group we often see serious adoption problems with headless WCM platforms. 

Here’s the challenge: Content managers spent more than a decade trying to win control over not just content authoring, but also experience management. Pushing the marketplace, they ultimately won capabilities like easily-modifiable template and page componentry, dynamic previews and self-service testing/personalization subsystems. With headless they lose all that. Appeals to “don’t worry your little self about what the content looks like” can feel condescending.

Want an anecdote? An architect at a large global firm had selected a well-known headless WCM vendor for a product marketing team’s public website. Unfortunately, his business stakeholders rejected it. Their business unit produced mostly long-form, top-of-the-funnel thought leadership, with content dictating quite arbitrary layout choices – which they wanted to control. The new headless platform favored short-form, “chunked” content with minimal preview, along with page assembly in a remote application they couldn’t touch. They rebelled. 

When the architect called the headless vendor with his dilemma, the salesperson coached him to “teach his marketers about multi-channel publishing.” Well, that didn’t work. They just needed a simple way to produce micro-sites featuring rich articles, arbitrary page components and responsive design frameworks.

The future is hybrid

A modern enterprise, particularly a large one, needs to support multiple publishing models. Some are surely headless; e.g., sending marketing content to your ecommerce platform. Others are more coupled, for a variety of reasons. There’s a wide spectrum here. RSG frequently sees enterprises that made major commitments to headless solutions now having to support other WCM platforms as well. 

Why not have both instead of either/or? Well, many (though not all) traditional WCM vendors have come a long way in making their platforms headless-enabled. These older systems are rightfully criticized for not being all the way there. But these hybrid platforms are gaining in the marketplace. Part of the reason is because they often embrace capabilities most “pure” headless vendors have eschewed. Things like multichannel preview (very hard, but very useful) or single page application editors.

Many headless vendors have put themselves in a box. Having embraced an architectural model with near religious fervor, they’re unable to adapt to a more ecumenical world. I’ve been privy to some internal discussions at headless vendors on these topics, and from afar it sounds like a debate between true believers and heretics. 

WCM logo landscape on a complexity spectrum

In RSG’s WCM vendor evaluations, we categorize platforms primarily by complexity. Architectural models – along with business and license models – are important but still adjunct discriminators. So, as the diagram shows, we mix headless vendors in with other competitors. It’s tempting, though, to create a separate “headless” box, because those vendors do seem on a bit of island here.

I don’t know any WCM vendors that have actually renamed their platforms with “headless” in the title. But the lesson of RedDot remains apt. Headless is a feature, not a holistic solution. I believe the future lies with hybrid WCM platforms that can support a range of use cases.

The post The future of headless web content management appeared first on MarTech.

What five things do you think will remain unchanged about marketing technology in the next ten years?

The question made me pause because usually I receive queries about what will change, as martech leaders try to “skate to where the puck is going.” In a fast-paced martech world that affords too-little time for reflection, it’s useful indeed to think about continuity, among other reasons, because it can help focus your energies and keep you from wasting time chasing ephemeral fads.

So herewith are my top five predictions for enduring trends.

1. Primacy of customer data

Effectively managing customer data is table stakes for prospect and customer digital engagement. Most of us haven’t been doing this very well. Getting on top of customer data management will likely become a decade-long (or more) pursuit.

At RSG, we advise many large enterprises on CDP evaluation and selection. The nature and scope of these projects vary widely, but one theme remains constant: Implementing a CDP just exposes long-latent structural problems in the way you’ve been collecting, processing, securing and managing customer data. This work is hard!

Moreover, the coming years will make it even harder. Security risks are growing. Regulatory compliance is stiffening. Consumers and their advocates are (rightly) pushing for better norms and transparency around how their data is collected and used.  

2. Still figuring out personalization

I have been on the front lines of advising and sometimes implementing personalization technology for twenty-five years now. The dirty little secret in our industry is that everyone talks about personalization, but very few enterprises actually do it in a methodical way.

For most of you, it’s been a five-steps-forward, four-steps-backward endeavor. Measuring the effectiveness of personalization remains difficult, and despite breathless vendor case studies, many if not most pilot projects here fail to achieve meaningful ROI. Part of this relates to customer data deficits noted above, but other challenges revolve around customer unpredictability and mistaken assumptions about what the person on the other side of the screen really wants (as opposed to what you think or wish they would want). It shouldn’t surprise you that many consumers find personalization efforts creepy or hackneyed.  

This is not a blanket indictment of trying to tailor more effective user experiences. The best organizations systematize test-and-optimization cycles. Segmenting customers in cohorts can make messages more germane.  Prioritizing business use cases really helps. But given the resource overhead, one-to-one personalization has not yet found its magic bullet.  

So here again, we’ll be spending a decade figuring out personalization. I suspect that, for most of you, slow and steady will win the race. 

3. Content is king

As a journalist in a previous life who now taps out research reports for a living, I’m biased towards the power of good content. However, it seems like the commitment to crafting excellent content among the large enterprises RSG advises tends to wax and wane over time.  

I’m not sure exactly why. Clearly, content is central to any effective user experience – just ask any UX designer. Yet good content can be expensive to create and complex to manage and re-use in an omnichannel world. Some AI adherents boast that new platforms can solve the former challenge of content creation. Pro tip: They cannot.  

With respect to content management, we’ve come a long way, but many challenges endure.  Too many enterprises over-rely on agencies for content creation and lose a lot of intellectual property along the way. Traditional web content management platforms are really bad at omnichannel content management. Component content management is essential in a customer-centric world, but it’s as hard to manage now as it was twenty years ago.  

Fortunately, some new technologies and approaches are emerging, and some enterprises are getting smarter about content supply and demand chains. Still, ten years from now, the successful digital transformers will have gotten content right in the interim.

4. Highly-fragmented markets

New martech markets will evolve over the coming decade. Some existing vendors will fold or consolidate. But I guarantee one structural continuity: In any given market, you will confront a plethora of choices. In general, this is a good thing, though it can cause vertigo for enterprise technology buyers (hint: apply design thinking to your tech choices).  

I’ve written elsewhere in these pages why these markets remain so fragmented. The cost of new-vendor entry keeps falling, and cloud models tend to reduce supplier risks. Despite recent contractions, we live in a world awash in investment capital, and the next decade will see it continuing to gravitate to martech. At RSG, we’ve tried to focus on the most important 160 vendors for our enterprise subscribers, but it’s an ongoing challenge.  

This doesn’t remove risk calculations in your supplier choices as much as juggle them. You might end up with a “zombie” vendor. Your supplier might prove finicky and radically adjust roadmaps (we’re seeing more of this in the CDP space). So you will likely still have many good and bad vendor choices, but likely fewer catastrophic ones.

5. Suites vs. best of breed

Today martech marketplaces are characterized by suite vendors purporting to sell collections of platforms (see the center of the map above) versus more focused, “point solution” suppliers. It’s an old story in the tech world and increasingly germane in the marketing space. 

At RSG, our research and anecdotal experience suggest that savvier enterprises who build their stacks one service layer and component at a time see better results. They’re also less apt to be bullied into making poor decisions.  

But the debate endures and I think will carry over into the 2030s. That said, you might see a new class of suite vendors emerging.  Today Adobe, Salesforce, and to a lesser extent, Microsoft and SAP offer manifold marketing and digital experience solutions. I’ll go out on a limb and guess that over the next decade, they will all accumulate (even more) technical debt and become the IBM and Oracle of the 2030s.  

But the “suite” bundle will remain attractive to martech leaders looking for shortcuts to thorny integration problems, so I’ll also guess that a new crop of vendors will take their place.

The post 5 enduring trends in martech appeared first on MarTech.

These are the questions asked by many digital marketers frustrated with their enterprise-sanctioned Web Content and Experience Management (WCM) system. They may have previously used WordPress for a personal site or blog, or had an external agency build a microsite for them on WordPress. In either case, publishing’s a snap in this simpler environment than their enterprisey WCM system.

WordPress is not for everyone. It’s becoming richer with each passing year, but still lies more on the product end of the product vs. platform spectrum, and — like all technologies — WordPress has at least as many weaknesses as strengths. So for many organizations, especially larger enterprises, WordPress may not offer a good fit for general purpose WCM services, even if it’s an exceptionally productive blogging and micro-site offering.

What they really mean

But you can’t criticize your colleagues for wanting to go the WordPress route. I believe that in many cases, it’s really a way of telling you something else. Probably something very important:

• “Our repository is too big to navigate easily.”
• “We have pointless workflow or approval processes.”
• “Our rich text editor is buggy.”
• “I can’t create microsites without IT intervention.”
• “I can’t easily add or move widgets.”
• “The site’s structure is too locked down.”
• “Our page structures are too locked down.”
• “Our content model is overly complex.”
• “Our external marketing agencies can’t deploy sites on our platform.”

Maybe WordPress isn’t the answer

These symptoms often reflect less a deficiency in your enterprise WCM platform itself and more a failure to implement the solution in a way that empowers marketers. If so, then the lesson for you is not necessarily to license WordPress but to embrace simplicity and configuration-over-customization in your systems and processes.

Yet, this also means that digital marketers and developers need to embrace abstraction, for example, rather than creating fifty different widget types in your enterprisey Web CMS (because you can). I’ve seen costly WCM platforms deployed with separate content types for a particular page component where the image appears on the left versus the right. This is crazy!

Better to have five or 10 different widgets available, with the ability to easily set configurations for each instance to move the image around.  

The other reason some marketers like WordPress is that their external agencies like WordPress. Typically, an agency doesn’t want to deploy on a platform they don’t know very well.  So they ask their enterprise client: “Do you want to deploy quickly?” You know what the answer to that is!  

So expedience wins out and some new campaign site gets deployed outside your enterprise infrastructure. In many cases, you’ve abandoned personalization, analytics, ecommerce integration and other important features: short-term gain, long-term pain. 

And maybe it is

At RSG, we’ve helped some of our subscribers adopt a two-speed approach. They sanction both an enterprise-heavy WCM for certain core digital capabilities and adopt a hardened WordPress instance (ideally in the cloud) for things like perishable microsites or agency-driven campaign sites.

These symptoms often reflect less a deficiency in the WCM tool itself and more a failure to implement the solution in a way that empowers marketers. 

The key here is to create clear rules around when to use what. That one-time campaign site can morph into a complex, re-usable environment. You will want to carefully meter just how much bespoke development you want to invest in any WordPress estate (hint: as little as possible).

Having two sanctioned WCM platforms is not always ideal, and we only recommend it with caution. In some cases, though, the alternative is worse.

A final word

WordPress might have a place in the enterprise. But some of you will need something more powerful for your main enterprise WCM platform, particularly when it comes to advanced capabilities like back-end integration, content sharing, component content management, personalization, globalization and injecting content into transactional environments (aka “headless” mode).

Just remember that with power comes complexity. The savvy enterprise will prioritize implementing a platform in such a way that it empowers marketers and editors.

If you’d value the input of a neutral, third-party advisor on your digital technology decisions, drop me a line.

Real Story on MarTech is presented through a partnership between MarTech and Real Story Group, a vendor-agnostic research and advisory organization that helps enterprises make better marketing technology stack and platform selection decisions.

The post Is WordPress really the answer for all businesses? appeared first on MarTech.

In general, that’s a good thing. You want to make sure you have the right technology, platform fit and supplier fit, especially for something foundational to your stack. So take your time, and do it right. Here’s how.

Understand the marketplace

It’s an understatement to describe the CDP market as “fragmented.” RSG evaluates nearly three-dozen vendors, with more added each quarter. This breadth speaks to the rising tide of interest that’s floating so many boats and the breadth of capabilities that potentially fall under the CDP label.

There are, of course, many ways to slice and dice any tech marketplace. Perhaps the biggest distinction among CDPs is how a platform is more engagement-oriented than data processing-oriented. Or, roughly speaking, a business versus infrastructure platform (more about that below).

We separately break out the biggest “suite-dependent” vendors into a separate category because our research finds they carry the most significant risk for you. This is not unusual in martech.  

Understand your architecture

Indeed, that breadth of potentially available capabilities –  reaching from deep-tunnel data routing, cleaning and transformation, possibly to more front-end services like email messaging and real-time personalization – makes the CDP marketplace unusually wide.  

So what matters here is the specific set of services you want to render unto a CDP, and which you want to (or already) accommodate somewhere else. Consider this handy chart from my colleague Apoorv in his recent MarTech piece.  

In that article, Apoorv analyzes various build vs. buy scenarios but concludes that your customer data modernization journey will include ample build and buy for the typical enterprise. Budget accordingly.

Prioritize your scenarios

Explicitly or not, vendors tend to focus on a limited set of use cases imprinted with new technology and then persist as true strengths. It’s not like you can’t stretch a platform to go where it doesn’t want to, but that takes time, money and scarce developer talent. So you want to make sure that your use case priorities align with your CDP vendor’s strengths.  

Below find ten canonical scenarios that RSG uses when critically evaluating CDP solutions.  Again, vendors will argue they’re good at many if not most of these. Pro tip: the typical CDP vendor is only good at three or four. 

And while you’re at it, make sure to catalog your true internal capacity to leverage this new platform – particularly around customer data unification and identity resolution, which in many cases will need to take place underneath any packaged CDP solution.  

Take an agile approach

CDPs represent modern technology, so you should take a modern, non-waterfall approach when selecting one. You can read more about this agile approach from an earlier column, but for now, I’d like to stress the importance of testing any platform before you go ahead and license it.  

Sometimes, when working with large enterprises, team members are surprised that they can test-drive martech platforms in general and CDPs in particular. Well, you can, and you should! If a vendor pushes back, drop them from your list. We like to structure week-long sprints with ample business and technical training, ideally separately with two finalists – a.k.a., a competitive bake-off.  

This is easier to do with a CDP than you might think, though it does take some work. Compare that level of effort with the cost of making a bad choice. Also, bake-offs are going to foreshadow the potentially ample organizational change you’ll need to effect for success in any CDP deployment.

Negotiate hard

In any martech procurement, you should negotiate early and often, and not just when you’re down to a single finalist (and have therefore lost much leverage). Unfortunately, over the past year at RSG we’ve seen substantial shifts in CDP vendor pricing. The short story is that it’s becoming more complicated and more usage-based.  

This can lead to strange conversations where vendors ask you to calculate fairly fine-grained usage projections long before you’re prepared. As usual, I’ll encourage you to push back. Ask for a menu of prices and flexible fee structures that align more with value than data throughput.  

This is a hot space, so vendors lead with more aggressive pricing. But even more so, in this young market, vendors want to grow quickly and gain share. Negotiate aggressively.
And let me know how it turns out!

Real Story on MarTech is presented through a partnership between MarTech and Real Story Group, a vendor-agnostic research and advisory organization that helps enterprises make better marketing technology stack and platform selection decisions.

The post The right way to select a CDP appeared first on MarTech.

Oh, the lessons we learned!

The most important finding, though, was that spreadsheet-heavy, waterfall-based selection methods just weren’t cutting it anymore. So we started counseling a more agile approach grounded in modern concepts around user-centered design, empirical testing, iterative adaptation, and cross-team participation. In short: design thinking.

Eventually, my colleague Jarrod Gingras and I encapsulated those lessons in a book, “The Right Way to Select Technology” (Rosenfeld Media), from which I’ll share some of the most important lessons and tips here.

Most important lessons

Before getting into specific tips, let’s review three meta-lessons.

1. Tell < show < test

Vendors love to talk about what their technology can do and will readily discuss case studies. They will show what their platforms can do as well, but this typically entails canned demos, and it falls to you to map their relevancy to your needs. You need to perform hands-on testing no matter the toolset before making any final decisions. In other words, never skip a bake-off.

2. The biggest-name vendors often have the most technical debt

Some of the most prominent martech vendors today have been around for some time, and their systems — including those they acquired — are getting long in the tooth. To cover for this, they get very aggressive about marketing, sales and, uh, “analyst relations.” They become less enthusiastic about in-depth technical and functional vetting. That doesn’t mean you should exclude big-name suppliers; just that you should not short-cut any diligence. And never allow yourself to get bullied.

3. Get clear about stack-fit

Martech stacks are evolving to meet the needs of an omnichannel world, and vendor strategies have shifted accordingly. This is a time fraught with both significant gaps and overlaps in your stack. For any new or replacement platform, get clear about where those services “fit” in the larger picture.

Top tips

Our book publishers encouraged us to conclude each chapter with a series of practical tips, and we ended up typing out more than a hundred all told.

For those that prefer quick reads, here are some of my all-time favorite tips:

• Be sure to articulate the costs and impact of doing nothing at all in any business case. In martech, stasis can become more costly than change.
• Never exclude diverse IT / DataOps stakeholders (systems, security, development, architecture, data analysts) from decision making: they represent critical interests and expertise.
• Conversely, never abdicate decision making just to IT, and place a businessperson to chair decision-making bodies. This promotes alignment with enterprise objectives.
• Take a candid measure of your internal abilities and resources, and gauge your organization’s appetite for risk as well as cutting-edge methodologies: know thyself before trying to change.
• Always start with the customer user experience and work your way back into enterprise systems, rather than vice-versa.
• Pay more attention to developing human-centered business scenarios than “checklist” requirements.
• In any RFP/tender/demo, ask “how” questions instead of “what” to better illuminate the inner workings of the toolset.
• Allocate time and resources in proportion to the criticality of this technology to your overall business success. If this is a “platform” in your MarTech Mall, then you’ll want to pay serious time and attention. Boutique supplier? Not so much…
• Give yourself and the vendor enough demo time, typically a full day.
• Avoid overly complex scoring methodologies to rate vendors, typically quite unscientific; instead, rank them according to your business objectives.
• Adopt and modify a “SWOT”-based decision analysis to fit your culture.
• Price and contract negotiations are an iterative process that you should start as early as possible.
• Never buy licenses for a potential future need, no matter how good a deal is proffered; instead, drag the buying process out over time: buy only what you need, when you need it, and in the order that you need it.
• Don’t underestimate “strategic intangibles” in considering overall fit. In particular, I encourage you to focus on the customer ecosystem around any platform. Do customers meet up in person or virtually? Vibrancy here is the best measure of future viability.
• Services firms can be critical to your success, so evaluate them with the same care and test-based approach that you vetted the core technology.

Hopefully, this gave your selection team enough food for thought to modernize the way you go about decision-making. If you’d like to see all the tips, find them in this series of posts.

Good luck. And ping me on LinkedIn if you have any questions.

Real Story on MarTech is presented through a partnership between MarTech and Real Story Group, a vendor-agnostic research and advisory organization that helps enterprises make better marketing technology stack and platform selection decisions.

The post Real Story on MarTech: Most important vendor selection tips appeared first on MarTech.

Of course, this approach makes sense. If you always target the status quo, what happens when digital marketing currents shift, as they constantly do? Consider: Who today wants to build a martech strategy based on third-party cookies?

At the same time, two decades in the analyst world has taught me that nobody — nobody — in our industry really knows exactly where the puck is going, at least not with Gretzky-like certainty. So the best you can do is strengthen your core to be able to shift quickly as the martech state-of-play evolves. Think of it as a kind of “pilates for your stack.”

Three exercises for your martech Stack

If we’re talking pilates, then what you want to do is focus on your core. Here are three important muscles to prioritize in 2022.

1. Customer data unification and management

Customer data platform (CDP) technology is hot right now, and for good reason. At RSG, we evaluate thirty vendors and climbing. But the industry’s dirty little secret is that many initial implementations offer only scant value amid a dearth of robust, clean, unified customer data. Enterprises that thought their CDP would provide the essential building blocks of customer data processing have, for the most part, come away disappointed.

In 2022, focus on your broader customer data enterprise “fabric.” You’ll find it a complicated but potentially very rich tapestry. But most importantly, you need to get the base infrastructure right: Ingestion, cleaning, stewardship and identity. The good news is that more than your marketing department needs this sort of hub as well. This short briefing explains some key architectural considerations.

2. Component content for an omnichannel future

There’s a similar muscle to build on the content side of your stack. If you are pursuing an omnichannel strategy — and who isn’t? — then you will need a reliable store of reusable content components. Not just snippets of text, but base image/media building blocks and relevant data, especially product data.

Where would you find the authoritative source for all these components today? Probably all over the place, and worse, mostly stuck in a single engagement channel like email, web, or ecommerce.

Prioritize getting a handle on all of these marketing assets and ensuring that you have a common metadata regime to classify (so you can find and manage!) the individual pieces. Unfortunately, the Omnichannel Content Platform marketplace remains nascent, but savvier enterprises are beginning to step into the pool.

3. Internal capacity

The martech capacity gap (see image below) predates COVID, but the pandemic has surely aggravated it for every enterprise. RSG vendor evaluations can help you with the hyperbole gap, but capacity is a more complex challenge. For example, nearly all the large-enterprise members on RSG’s large-enterprise MarTech Council have suffered talent shortages.

I don’t have any magic wand to wave here that will close this resource gap, except to encourage you to keep working to create an attractive workplace for martech specialists. What you want to avoid is over-reliance on an outsourcing strategy. First of all, martech integrators are also short-staffed too, but more importantly, you want to keep and maintain as much learning and expertise in-house so you can move quickly as the puck gets passed around.

The case for not overskating

In some enterprises, I see the “future puck vision” justify over-buying complex marketing technology, ultimately undermining the very speed and agility you seek.

The thinking goes like this: “We probably can’t handle this advanced technology today, but in a couple of years, we’ll get there, so let’s license it now, and maybe it will push us to become more proficient.” Of course, in two years, the puck will have moved even farther. Or, to put it another way, if you can’t master an overly complicated martech platform now, you will only find it all that richer (read: more complex) two years hence. So you end up perennially behind.

RSG always advises looking at vendors representing differing points on the complexity spectrum. Ideally, you can find the right match with a system that stretches you a bit yet won’t go underutilized. Meanwhile, any technology supplier should constantly be innovating themselves, so in all likelihood, the simpler solution you adopt today will get enhanced over time. Careful diligence in a structured selection process can uncover whether that vendor or open-source community is skating towards the ever-moving puck at a pace and direction that works for you.

Real Story on MarTech is presented through a partnership between MarTech and Real Story Group, a vendor-agnostic research and advisory organization that helps enterprises make better marketing technology stack and platform selection decisions.

The post Real Story on MarTech: Where is the puck going in 2022? appeared first on MarTech.

A new generation of zombies

I won’t opine here about whether we’re living through another tech bubble, but as a marketing technology evaluation firm, at Real Story Group, we do see quite a few “zombie” vendors: not quite dead, but not fully alive either. As a tech customer and martech leader, you’ll want to be on the alert for zombies in your portfolio.

Two decades later, the situation has changed a bit. I see a new generation of undead tools and vendors, less because they bulge with IPO cash, but rather because they’ve aged to a point where they subsist off profitable maintenance streams (usually supporting legacy systems in environments where customers cannot easily switch out) while keeping R&D to a minimum. In some cases, cloud-based delivery models help sustain younger zombies because they can more readily marginalize their expenses relative to revenues.

This potentially becomes an important consideration because major industry analyst firms typically lag in their vendor assessments and can stamp an imprimatur of vitality to an otherwise declining player. Consider the case of the Interwoven content management suite—one of Forbes’s “undead” in 2002. Forrester and Gartner lauded the firm for more than a decade, even as licensees labored under mountains of technical debt. Most of the Interwoven portfolio still wheezes away at OpenText, its fourth domicile in ten years.

Senior living options

OpenText itself is a kind of multi-tiered senior community for aging software platforms. It purchases older solutions, sets them up with independent apartments, then transitions them through assisted living, hospice care, and on to what the tech community quaintly calls “sunsetting.”

OpenText is not alone. This business model has also attracted the likes of Verint and Upland in the marketing tech/customer experience space. Typically these roll-up vendors will have one or two home-grown platforms, but mostly they purchase older toolsets on the cheap, cobble them into “solution bundles,” limit future development to bug fixes and centralize back-office functions.

This model is great for investors, and in some cases, you, the licensee as well. Any high-functioning community needs to deal with aging members. Just understand that — despite what a sales rep may tell you — their platform is not going to innovate substantially and will increasingly struggle to integrate with newer parts of your stack. At best, you sustain very good support.

Other models

Some zombies carry on solo. Consider the former IBM marketing technology portfolio now gamely trying to survive at Acoustic and HCL. Or Sitecore’s flagship “Experience Platform” web content management system, which has been given a three-year prognosis. These are platforms you leave, not license afresh.

Meanwhile, some open source projects subsist on an “age-in-place” strategy, where their communities keep them alive, albeit not very active in the world.

And what about younger zombies? They’re out there, sometimes with structural problems hidden behind venture-boosted coffers. Tell-tale signs include declining volumes of new licensees, reduced headcounts, and higher-than-average churn rates. Even in the vibrant customer data platform market, where RSG evaluates nearly three-dozen platforms, some vendors have plateaued. Note Upland recently acquired CDP vendor BlueVenn. You’ll see more in the next few years.

In nearly all cases, though, the vendor tends not to disappear entirely, and this gives you time, typically measured in years, to adapt and respond.

What you should do

Most martech zombies aren’t lethal and are unlikely to eat your stack. Though left unaddressed, they can create an increasing drain on your resources—and staff morale.

When you identify a zombie, you typically need not rush to the exits, but you do need a replacement plan for the long run. One key consideration is where the solution fits in your “Martech Mall.” If it’s a boutique solution, perhaps adequate support (if you can get it) is all you need right now while you focus martech innovation on more vibrant platforms.

On the other hand, for an anchor platform in your martech mall, you’ll want to make active plans to replace any zombie. And under no circumstance should you license a zombie platform for a new implementation. What’s been your experience? Let’s discuss on LinkedIn.

Real Story on MarTech is presented through a partnership between MarTech and Real Story Group, a vendor-agnostic research and advisory organization that helps enterprises make better marketing technology stack and platform selection decisions.

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