We also owe a debt of gratitude to many martech vendors, who not only build the platforms on which we work, but who also produce a plethora of marketing education including classes, workshops, and certifications. However, with this great influence that martech vendors have over the industry, there are some challenges that deserve to be brought out into the spotlight. 

But let’s start by pointing out that martech vendors are not completely at fault for some of the issues explored in this article. It’s only natural to lead with your “best foot forward,” and the same can be said for martech vendors who are understandably trying to drive adoption of their products. Who among us for example, would share all our dirty little secrets on a first date with a potential partner? 

That being said, it’s time to take a hard look at the tough questions. It’s my hope that in this article you’ll be able to identify some of the weaknesses some martech vendors share — and how to avoid pitfalls when dealing with them. 

1. A lot of vendors excel at one thing, but are lacking elsewhere

Too often, martech vendors will tout being an “all-in-one platform” or a “complete technology suite”, but that is rarely the case. While some of the multi-billion-dollar firms will indeed have many robust tools under their belt, the vast majority of the almost 10,000 tools really only have one or two value propositions. 

A direct mail vendor, for example, will understandably make it a breeze to send gifts to customers in the mail. But they may also claim to easily drive social media engagement and referrals. To subscribe to said platform to drive those secondary metrics might be a mistake. Another example: An analytics vendor may make it easy to determine the efficacy of marketing programs, but will it be able to survey customers to find out which would work better? Would it be able to provide the creative to improve the marketing programs that aren’t working? Answer: Very unlikely. 

“I’m wary of martech vendors who claim that their platform ‘does it all in one solution,’ says one martech leader at a hyper-growth start up. “The truth is that many martech platforms are great, but there isn’t a one-size-fits all that will serve every business. Marketers need to trial and experiment with different mixes of tools to find the right combination to help them drive value for their target market.”

And this isn’t surprising, given the difficulty of building these sophisticated products and the engineering effort required to launch even one new feature. While we can cut vendors some slack on not having everything we could ever want in marketing in one place, we should be wary of vendors saying they will solve multiple pain points beyond their main value proposition. 

2. Many martech tools require a high volume of use to realize full potential 

Years ago, I met with a martech seller who pitched his product as a way for me to orchestrate hundreds of campaigns per month and aggregate the data in one convenient location for reporting. The problem? My team was only running five to six campaigns per month. Talk about overkill.

Many martech vendors offer a Ferrari of a tool when some of us only need a Honda Civic to commute to work. Statistically significant results from marketing experiments typically require large sample sizes of customer actions. Digital engagements usually require tens of thousands of interactions to conclusively say one tactic performs better than the other. And visually appealing dashboards don’t look so great when there are only a handful of data points being displayed.

The truth is, many martech platforms truly excel when they help marketers manage volumes that are too large to handle manually. 

3. Martech vendor ‘support’ will rarely be able to answer all of your questions

Many vendors will proclaim having “world-class support” or “white glove service.” In reality, they mean something closer to “respectful and timely customer service.” While vendor support are experts at their own platform and will look into any native issues, the same cannot be said about the tools said platform needs to integrate with, or issues that arise when data isn’t being passed correctly among systems. 

In addition, vendor support will not know about the unique objectives you may have. Ask any support representative “what is the best way to drive X for my business” and you’ll likely be met with silence, or vague answers about using their platform more. 

I have to qualify this section by saying that many of my interactions with martech vendor support have been pleasant, and I would highly recommend many of them to colleagues. The mistake lies in believing that vendor support will serve as a consultant or strategic advisor to help achieve your martech goals. Unfortunately, that benefit doesn’t come along with paying your martech bill. 

4. Martech will not fix bad content or bad marketing 

The most grievous error when it comes to buying martech is holding the belief that you can solve your toughest marketing problems by buying technology. Martech vendors often exacerbate the problem by claiming that their category of platform will change the face of marketing as we know it, and because of the arrival of this “innovative solution” the entire industry will change. While some categories such as marketing automation and analytics can at least aspire to that, the truth is that many Martech tools provide incremental value. 

“As much as the vendor promises, implementing a new martech platform is not a panacea that will automatically suspend the laws of marketing,” said Chris Willis, marketing ops leader at industrial tech firm Trimble. “The ‘Four Ps‘ still apply to you and if you aren’t considering them in every touch of your content marketing, you do so at the risk of your MarTech investment.”

Willis continued: “Expecting an implementation of new martech to drastically improve your marketing is like putting a cup of coffee on a table with unstable legs expecting that it will not spill. The same is true of your marketing strategy and content.”

When it comes to marketing strategy, especially content strategy, technology won’t solve your problems. Effective marketing strategy requires a deep understanding of your target market, unique value proposition, positioning and messaging, and constant iteration and experimentation. Martech vendors can help with many of those learning objectives, but the big mistake is thinking that deep strategic work will be done by buying a tool.

5. Implementing martech doesn’t automatically generate results 

Another pervasive misconception is that buying martech will magically create leads, pipeline, or revenue. If a martech vendor isn’t careful, they can paint the picture that their platform will somehow drive business results without context or effort. 

“Technology isn’t a substitute for strategy or data hygiene,” said Amy Goldfine, founder of MarketingOpsAdvice.com. “For example, if your company wants to do account-based marketing, your first step should be to develop an ABM strategy that both marketing and sales agree on. Then you need to get your CRM data organized. Only then should you consider technology vendors to support your strategy.”

Part of this is a misunderstanding of what martech does in general, while part of it is a misunderstanding of what each tool does. Marketing automation is a great example of this. It helps facilitate and streamline lead generation, lead management, and lead nurture, but it doesn’t generate results from thin air. By implementing marketing automation, you can improve your results in these categories, but your business will still need effective marketing deliverables such as events, reports, and guides to fuel the fire. 

6. Martech has a scaling problem 

When martech vendors claim that their product will help you scale your marketing activities, they usually refer to an increase of between two and five times the size of your current operation. Almost all vendors will neglect to mention what happens when you scale your campaigns 20 or 30 times.

For those unfamiliar with working with enterprise size databases and campaign volume, this should help provide some context. Large increases in data and activity immediately impact system performance, and you’ll notice symptoms such as long loading times in the UI, and even longer report generation times.

In the long run, the major impact you will see is technical debt. Technical debt is the extra work teams have to do to fix or maintain a solution that wasn’t built for long-term or for scale. Most martech vendors don’t have a way to easily update thousands of assets, such as landing pages, emails, or videos, that need to be updated when the business is growing fast. 

Dig deeper: Sometimes the biggest vendors impose the biggest risks

It’s not a panacea 

In summary, while martech does helps marketer move faster and scale, many make the mistake of thinking martech is a panacea. There are many pitfalls when it comes to selecting the right solutions to power your marketing.

Make sure to get a first-hand account of potential tools from your peers, not just from the businesses selling them. 

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Martech leaders agree that martech professionals and marketing operations are the unsung heroes of the marketing department. But in speaking with them, we learn that the problem of underappreciation doesn’t fully rest on the shoulders of marketing leadership. The issue is multi-faceted, and when asked the question “What are key things you wish martech teams knew?” the responses are quite insightful.

While you may not hear these points out loud or in one-on-one meetings, it’s important to understand the perspective of martech leaders and how they think the problem should be addressed. Here are five key things martech leaders wish you knew.

1. The perception of the martech team has to be shaped, and it starts with you

The team that owns martech (typically marketing operations) has not always had the best reputation. Other teams have thought of them as the “order-takers” or the “button-pushers,” or even the IT of marketing, another obstacle they have to overcome. While many practitioners complain about this and jump from role to role, hoping the next company will be a different story, they often overlook the proactive steps they can take to change this perception.

Where to start? Start by making sure your current projects are tied to the business’s top priorities. If they aren’t, reprioritize, or find ways to link them indirectly if you must.

Make sure the projects you are working on are top priorities for the business. If not, find out how to link them, at least indirectly. Also, emphasize the downsides or negative impact if these projects are not put in place.

Find an opportunity to show off: most martech professionals may hide behind their technology, but this is the opposite of shaping perception. Put together a quarterly business review, schedule a presentation or start a biweekly newsletter highlighting all the great results martech generates.

2. Understand the dangers of opportunity cost

Here’s an interesting analogy: pretend there is a mix of bills spread across the field, in increments of 100s, 20s, fives, and ones. With limited time, which bills do you go after first?

Unfortunately, many martech teams spend their time working on projects worth fives and ones versus those worth 100s. This example brings stark reality to the meaning of opportunity cost: spending time on something with little value at the expense of pursuing something with higher value.

Nick Bonfiglio, founder and CEO of Syncari, says it like this: “Focus on quality over quantity every time.” To his team of martech operators, he says, “you can test programs that generate engagement, but what I want you to really focus on is initiatives that drive qualified opportunities. Spend your time on projects that will create opportunities with an above 25% close rate minimum.”

Does that mean his team never experiments? Never tries anything new? Quite the opposite, the Syncari team reserves time for innovation. The key difference is they are judicious about the majority of their project work.

3. Translate martech success to business outcomes

Here is another problem that plagues martech teams everywhere: doing great work that their stakeholders don’t understand. Years ago, I spent an entire month migrating a lead routing system from a decentralized model to a single, centralized workflow. After sharing this accomplishment with the larger team, I was met with many blank stares.

What was I missing? I needed to explain how the project would impact their work and the business at large in simple terms. Once I shared how the new lead routing cut their campaign management time by 25% and virtually eliminated all of the lead management errors they were experiencing, they sat up much straighter and appreciated the work being done.

“Figure out what your work will unlock for stakeholders,” says Jessica Kao, director at F5. “This is what I tell my team: If you are building something or implementing a new tool, communicate how it will translate to more leads, meetings, pipeline and revenue. We might be doing the right things, but being able to tie it back to the business reason is the key to success within an organization.”

Like Jessica says, take a look at your work and explain how it will impact the business. Explain how investments in data will turn into better targeting and better personalization. Articulate how investing in a new platform will improve productivity by 20%. Translate martech work into business results, and you will be on the right track to martech success.

4. Team structure isn’t as important as vision, goals and accountability

Should you organize your team into a revenue ops team or keep sales ops and marketing ops separate? While there are varying benefits for each organization, the truth is that any structure you choose will fall apart without an overarching vision for sales and marketing success.

Here is the truth: at micro-startups, sales and marketing are naturally connected because the entire team is only a handful of members. At the enterprise level, there is a high volume of projects requiring specialization that may not need input from other groups as frequently as with smaller organizations, though alignment is always critical.

You don’t have to be in revenue operations to help sales. “I want my teams to know that it is important to empathize with sales,” says Thao Ngo, SVP of marketing at Allocadia. “Sales is laser-focused on their current deals and don’t have the time to read all of our marketing material. Make it easy for them: summarize key points, consolidate all resources for them in one place, and identify ways for them to hit their targets.”

So what principles should guide us when so many different structures can work? Leaders should set the organization’s vision and goals that are shared widely and operationalized in everything. For example, revenue goals should be set by both sales and marketing, approved by top leadership and broken down into sub-goals that each team commits to. Customer experience goals should be the same way – sales can look at referrals or upsells, while marketing may set CSAT or NPS goals.

Dig deeper: More on marketing operations from Darrell Alfonso

5. If you are constantly drowning in work, stand up and look around

What’s a common refrain from martech and marketing operations teams? That there is way too much work to do in too little time. How do martech leaders respond to this?

“It’s true that martech teams are busy,” says a top executive at a mid-sized SAAS enterprise. “But to be honest, everyone in high-growth organizations has too much to do. Effective teams will carefully weigh the different initiatives in front of them and focus their energy on where they can get the most return on their money and time.”

Unfortunately, while it is true that marketing operations teams everywhere could use more resources, many are spending time on low-value tasks.

My recent LinkedIn post on the importance of prioritizing high-value tasks at the expense of low-value tasks was met with general agreement, but there were one too many comments, such as:

“Well, what if my low-value projects turn into high-project later on?” and “It’s not all about the numbers, you know.”

To that, I can only sadly shake my head – any effective leader knows that low-value projects don’t magically turn into high-value projects, and those that do were not scoped and appraised correctly. It’s hard to truly look at your work, evaluate projects’ impact, and make hard decisions to determine what you will and won’t do. Making smart tradeoffs is an effective leader’s mark, especially in martech.

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Marketing operations can be a confusing subject. You will probably get blank stares when explaining marketing operations to someone else, especially if that someone is not in marketing or business.

In this article, I’ll try to explain marketing operations to people of different ages, with increasing levels of detail and abstraction. I’ll start with explaining the concept to a child, the I’ll more on to a teenager, a marketing graduate student, a marketing professional, and then an expert in marketing operations.

Tell it to the children

I’m going to tell you about marketing operations. Marketing is something businesses do to get people to want to buy their stuff. Think of commercials and big billboards. Now, pretend you received a flyer in the mail that has a picture of a teddy bear and how much it costs. That is called an ad, short for advertisement. Some marketing people come up with the idea for what the teddy bear ad will look like and what it will say.

Now there are other marketing people, whose job it is to send you the ad in the mail, and also determine if the ad is doing a good job at helping the business sell more toys. These types of marketing people also do that for all types of marketing, like the commercials and big billboards, and advertising across the internet. These types of marketing people work in marketing operations.

Easy for teens

I’m going to tell you about marketing operations. Marketing is all of the activities businesses do to sell more of their products and services. Many think that marketing is simply making commercials, but today most of marketing is digital – think of ads you see on Google, posts you see from influencers on social media, and also emails from brands in your inbox.

Now, there are a lot of tools that marketers use to create marketing in all of these different places. These tools are typically online services. For example, marketers can use an online service to create marketing emails, and another service to create YouTube videos. Marketers also use these tools to track whether or not their marketing campaigns are helping the business sell more products. The marketers that manage these tools and the data that comes out of these tools work in a specific area of marketing – that area is called marketing operations. 

Harder for the marketing grad student

I’m going to tell you about marketing operations, which is a function within the marketing department. Marketing today is becoming increasingly sophisticated. A single offer can be deployed across a multitude of channels and platforms, and these activities generate an immense amount of data. Businesses use a variety of marketing tools and services to manage these activities. Some of these tools can be quite robust, and require a team of people to manage and operate. These marketing tools need to be connected together to help personalize marketing campaigns, track customer touch points, and unify data for analysis and decision-making.

The marketers that manage these tools tend to be tech savvy, and fluent in online marketing and data science. This function of marketing is known as marketing operations, and they manage the different tools, processes, and data to ensure that all marketing efforts are running in an efficient and profitable way.

Gloves off for the marketing professional

I’m going to tell you about marketing operations. This function manages the Martech stack, which typically includes a marketing automation platform (MAP), a customer relationship management system (CRM), a customer data platform (CDP), advertising tools, data services, reporting systems and more. They ensure these platforms are implemented and adopted correctly and that data is integrated across the entire Martech stack.

In addition, marketing operations ensures the outputs support various stakeholders, such as customer intelligence for a sales team, and revenue reporting for finance and leadership. The marketing operations charter often includes: planning and building campaigns, marketing system administration, data analytics, training and enablement, and building internal products and features to support the marketing organization.

Dig deeper: An in-depth look at marketing ops and marketing ops professionals

What the expert needs to know

Marketing operations today is rapidly evolving. What once was a function that owned campaign execution and the marketing automation platform, is now growing in scope as businesses become more reliant on digital and data. There are two paths emerging. The first path: marketing operations professionals dedicated to ensuring that marketing runs like a business, and is viewed as a profit-center rather than a cost-center. The data and process requirements for this undertaking are staggering, and marketing operations is shifting into a more strategic role to determine which projects are priority and which will yield the highest return-on-investment.

The second path relates to the overwhelming complexity marketing teams face, namely the explosion of platforms and the need to synchronize and unify big data. This path requires technical mastery, especially within the enterprise Martech space. Large technical problems require marketing operations experts to bring innovative solutions, simplify complexity, and often build custom products to operate marketing at scale. Today, the two paths are blurred, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see the bifurcation of two separate functions in the near future.

To sum up, marketing operations is sometimes a confusing topic, but an exciting one, that will truly shape the future of marketing profession, and business as a whole. Which explanation did you like best?

The post How to explain marketing operations at different levels: From children to experts appeared first on MarTech.

The martech industry is actually in a revenue bubble, like the dot-com bubble of 1995 and the housing bubble of 2008. And there’s no telling how soon it will burst. 

The revenue bubble happens when go-to-market teams, and the technologies they use, organize as one central group with one goal: Sales. The role of the chief revenue officer and the function of revenue operations emerged from this.

The problem? What started as a rallying cry for marketers to drive more impact has sadly devolved into a sea of sameness, with business brands that are eerily identical in how they look, sound, and engage customers. 

Before you get too upset, hear me out.

As a career B2B marketer, I’ve always been a champion of revenue. One of my favorite books is “Revenue Disruption” by Phil Fernandez, co-founder of Marketo. Every activity should lead to a sale! That was the motto. 

But the more I worked in marketing, the more I started to see that some of the best companies didn’t focus on revenue alone. There was more to their success, which we’ll explore in this article. 

Without revenue, what’s the point?  

Here’s why the revenue movement became popular. Marketers were tired of being treated like sales assistants. They were sometimes referred to as the arts and crafts department. I’ll admit, the revenue movement did a fine job in changing this perception.

The problem? The focus on revenue is short-term. 

And I may be biased, working for a company that obsesses over customer experience at the expense of short-term profits, but let’s look at both sides. 

Three powerful, durable spears pierce the revenue bubble. They are community, product-led growth and brand.

1. Community

Community is not, and never should be, about revenue. And while you can tie some attribution to community-led efforts, trying to extract money out of a community is inauthentic. Customers can smell inauthenticity. We’ve often seen members abandon communities that try to milk them for every last cent. We’ve also seen communities help skyrocket companies to become market leaders. Marketo and Salesforce are great examples, but there are many others. There are different skills and competencies required to grow a community, which revenue-focused operators may lack. 

2. Product-led growth 

Product-led growth refers to creating such a good product experience that users refer others, which becomes the primary method of adding new customers. The focus here is obsessing over user behavior and feedback, and implementing quick changes. A short-term focus on revenue (closing big deals) can be counterproductive to this effort. 

You’ve probably seen this first-hand in your organization. A team has dozens of planning and negotiation meetings with a vendor, only to discover that employees have already started using a different platform they paid for with their credit card. 

That’s not to say that enterprise sales and field marketing are irrelevant. Both can drive tremendous growth and awareness. However, product-led growth is tangible proof that there is more to the story than mere revenue. 

3. Brand 

Branding is the most obvious contradiction to the revenue movement. It’s incredibly difficult to attribute deals to branding. You can track branded search terms or ask, “how did you hear about us?” but much of the influence that brand has occurred without our knowledge. Branding is what happens when a buyer needs something at the moment, and your company is top of mind. Brand transpires when a buyer doesn’t make a rational decision based on facts but emotion. 

For example, I selected my car insurance provider solely because I liked the jingle “Nationwide is on your side.” Such a good tune! As a final example, take 10 seconds and think of your top three favorite companies. Got them? Now the question: Do you think they got to where they are today by aligning around revenue? 

The problem with every employee having the goal of revenue 

The problem with everyone having a revenue goal is that other critical aspects, such as customer experience, can fall to the wayside. Not to mention the historical examples of immoral company leaders who focused on revenue above the customer and drove the company’s reputation and stock price into the ground. 

But let’s take a practical B2B approach. Should graphic designers be given a revenue goal? What about corporate communications? What about legal and those who protect the security of customer data? And to take it a step further, if those roles do not have revenue goals, does that mean that those roles are unimportant? 

Here is where the revenue bubble begins to burst because if everything should be about revenue, nothing else matters. 

But other aspects of business do matter. And successful brands know that very well. 

How to stop the revenue bubble from growing and bursting

The solution to the revenue bubble is tension. Healthy tension, healthy debate and a natural, productive conflict that forces one side back into balance when it gets out of line. Should there be a revenue goal? Yes. But there should be a customer experience goal set in parallel. Customer experience can be measured by satisfaction, NPS, engagement, opt-out, and other indicators that show customers like (or dislike) your brand. 

Should there be a new sales goal? Of course. But in parallel, there should be a community-growth goal, a branding goal and a product goal not tied to sales. 

Balance your revenue goals with the customer experience and balance sales with your brand. 

To sum up, while companies have benefited from the alignment that the revenue movement has created, they need to be careful not to lose sight of the less measurable aspects of the business that can differentiate a brand in the long term. And while many operators are looking to revenue as the single answer to solve their business problems, the reality is that business, like life, rarely boils down to a single thing. 

The post Is martech in a revenue bubble and how soon will it burst? appeared first on MarTech.

What will next year, 2022 bring for marketing operations? 

Here are my key predictions. 

1. A rise in VP and director-level marketing ops roles

How many VP of marketing ops do you know? Marketing operations leadership roles tend to be in tech startups and firms in the marketing tech industry. But as the perception of marketing ops changes, larger, more established companies will bring on (or promote from within) marketing ops leaders to oversee this vital function.

A 2021 survey by BrandMaker showed that a top priority for CMOs is better tech stack integration, a key responsibility of the marketing ops function. As the need for marketing tech management skyrockets, 2022 will be the year more companies bring on marketing ops leadership. 

2. Formalized training for marketing ops

Companies are struggling to fill their high-paying marketing ops positions. Why? The demand for technically savvy marketers far outweighs the supply. There are two reasons for this: First, marketing ops has historically been considered “back-office work”, a perception that is rapidly changing. Second, there has been a large chasm of missing formal education and training when it comes to learning the core skills of marketing ops.

Digital marketing has only been recently added to college curricula around the world, and you would be hard-pressed to find any class that covers marketing operations. A quick Google search for “marketing operations training” offers few results, none of which are part of an accredited business degree program. While there have been many paid training options for specific marketing platforms such as marketing automation, there has been a dismal lack of education around marketing operations as an overall function. This is an area that’s ripe for disruption and will soon change in 2022.

3. Marketing ops will overtake advertising ops

What’s the latest with advertising operations? While advertising has always taken the largest portion of the marketing budget, the function itself has not been trendy as of late. Today’s hype in B2B focuses on topics like ABM, community-building, and product-led growth. While advertising will continue to be one of the most effective ways to get in front of an audience quickly, it needs to be strategically aligned with other parts of the marketing mix to drive true impact.

According to Statisa, global digital advertising spend will rise to $645.8 billion in 2025. As more advertising ops professionals begin pushing to exert more influence on the business and more marketers start seeing how ad ops fits into the overall marketing organization, a solid place of this function seems to be merged with marketing operations. 

4. Account-based marketing will be owned by marketing ops

For many organizations, account-based marketing has seen a steep rise and a sudden plateau. According to Google Trends, search volume for ABM peaked in August 2021 and almost halved in volume by November 2021. Marketers are quickly realizing that many of the principles behind ABM, such as alignment, targeting, and hyper-personalization, are really just good marketing best practices.

Rather than hire ABM leaders, marketing teams will soon see that marketing operations can smartly fit ABM as one of the many strategies that marketing employs throughout the year. In addition, marketing ops has the data and Martech ownership that can really bring ABM to life.

5. Marketing ops will become the first or second marketing hire

When have organizations historically brought on a marketing ops hire? It’s typically been an afterthought – a reactive last-ditch effort to try to fix chaotic data and processes. But more marketing leaders are starting to see that facilitating tech and data is the key to scaling and optimizing marketing. Even Dave Gerhardt, former Chief Brand Officer at Drift, commented that were he to start over, his first or second marketing hire would be an operations professional.

The marketing teams that have brought in MOPs early are the ones winning today. They are reaping the benefits of the prior investment in tech and data, and are now seeing marketing work in a strategic, orchestrated way. 

6. Data privacy will become a marketing ops core competency

While already a top priority for enterprise organizations, data privacy will take a front seat in 2022. According to Capgemini, 48% of CMOs state that better compliance with regulations is a top business priority. Many marketers are struggling to understand how to make their campaigns operationally compliant in a way that protects customer data, and ensures their marketing adheres to customer consent.

Marketing ops professionals with this knowledge will be sought after, and data privacy will become a core competency for ops teams across the globe.

The common thread

The common thread behind all the predictions? It’s that marketing operations will continue to grow in size, scope, and importance as long as the need for marketing data and technology grows. The companies and individuals that invest in developing that marketing ops muscle will see big dividends in 2022 and beyond. 

Which of the 2022 predictions do you think will come true? 

The post 6 key marketing ops predictions for 2022 appeared first on MarTech.

What was the promise of this new category? That marketing automation would take away all the tedious, repetitive marketing tasks that marketers hated, freeing them up to focus on more creative and strategic projects.

Fast forward 15 years and the result is…well, not really that.

Marketing ops is still bogged down

“Today’s marketing automation platforms only automate a portion of marketing activities,” says Justin Norris, martech expert and Senior Director Solutions Architecture at Perkuto, who has spent the last 15 years working on and studying marketing automation. “Marketers (and especially marketing ops) want to build great things, but they are bogged down with excel sheet imports and cleaning up data.”

I sat down with Justin and over a “virtual coffee” while he shared with me things he loathed about the marketing automation industry — and what gets him out of bed in the morning.

In almost every sector, Justin has seen first-hand how marketing automation failed to deliver on its promise. “Marketing automation tools were supposed to become our always on, faithful servants. Then we discovered truth: that it was actually the other way around,” he chuckled.

But there is something new in the market that is changing Justin’s tune. He said that this new breed of technology makes him feel just as empowered as when as when he discovered marketing automation.

So what is it? It’s a new layer placed on top of marketing automation called Integration Platform as a Service (IPaaS). Let’s explore further.

Follow Perkuto’s MOPs Rundown on MarTech

Finally out of spreadsheet hell?

Marketers and ops folks may pride themselves on being handy with excel, but everyone will agree that cleaning spreadsheets on a daily basis is a pain.

Why is this a thing? With today’s multi-level martech stacks, marketers often pull data from one system and load it into another. A common example that makes me cringe is downloading event attendees from a webinar platform, cleansing and formatting the data, and importing that data into an email or advertising management platform. This entire process must be repeated for every campaign. So much for marketing “automation”.

But there’s a new breed of platforms such as Workato, Mulesoft, Tray.io, Zapier and others that were created to address this challenge. These platforms fall into the category of IPaaS, and they can effortlessly and programmatically move data from one system to another without breaking a sweat. And that’s just the start. With the right coaching, some of these platforms can add leads to CRM with the correct assignment, alert reps in slack, update record data, use AI/ML to analyze customer information and categorize it, automate a range of business activities such as HR, invoicing, and more.

“For employee onboarding, we used to enter the same information into at least 10 – and up to 50 different applications. Now, its fully automated.” Says Jeff Sutton, IT manager for ChowNow, an online ordering system for restaurants.

IPaaS has also been referred to as workflow automation and enterprise automation, and many marketers have been singing its praises as the next generation of marketing technology. Some have even gone so far as calling it “marketing ops automation”.

True automation empowerment

Back to my conversation with Justin Norris – “I remember the first time I realized the power of marketing automation and what it could do. With a MAP synced with a CRM, I could automate customer touchpoints, normalize huge amounts of data, and hand leads off to the right salesperson – all in a programmatic way. I didn’t have to do anything. I felt like I was a builder, a creator, and I could use these tools to solve complex problems.”

As Justin’s experience grew, and as he started to tackle larger problems for more mature companies, that feeling of empowerment soon came to an end. The cause? Unfortunately, the entire business doesn’t run within those two systems. Martech is multitudinous, containing data warehouses, analytics tools, event platforms and much more. Marketing automation can’t touch these systems without a fair amount of development work. And so, the manual work of exporting and importing spreadsheets of data rears its ugly head.

But it turns out the feeling of empowerment for Justin would come back full force years later, when he started to work with IPaaS.

But to understand just what the feeling of empowerment is, we first need to look at what marketers love about traditional marketing automation in the first place.

Download Enterprise Marketing Work Management Platforms: A guide for marketers

The key component is called a “workflow”, which enables a marketer to perform an action when certain conditions are met. Think of an “if-then statement” followed by an action. I personally felt the power of this feature when I realized, with a single workflow, I could send emails, update any record in question, or even delete the entire database.

Justin discovered that IPaaS brought this idea of a workflow out of the marketing automation system and applied it across your entire tech stack.

“In Workato for example, these workflows are called ‘recipes,'” Justin explained, his voice was excited, as he was detailing a real passion. “These recipes let you to listen for an event in one system and trigger an action in another system. Or even multiple systems. No programming required.”

Here’s an example to flesh out Justin’s statement. Let’s say a prospect fills out one of your marketing forms on your website – with IPaaS, you could do four separate actions almost simultaneously. First, you can create the lead in Salesforce. Second, you can assign it to the correct salesperson. Third, you can add the lead to a sales cadence tool such as Salesloft for continual follow-up. And fourth you can alert the salesperson in Slack that a lead is ready for their review. All without needing a developer.

Dig deeper: Darrell Alfonso on four disruptive, uncomfortable, inevitable marketing tech trends

What does this mean for the industry?

I asked this question of Justin, and how he feels this will change the Martech landscape.

He told me: “I’ve been able to save clients a ton of time with IPaaS. I can pull email content from the blog into a MAP, and then personalize that email based on customer data. But it doesn’t really stop with just marketing. You could apply it to HR processes, recruitment processes, all different kinds of work flows.”

In hearing this, I’m truly astounded at the possibilities IPaaS can bring to the marketing ecosystem. The ability to save marketers time by skipping the spreadsheets is great, but the truly exciting part is empowering them to build solutions that were once impossible without engineering resources.

On the other hand, I can’t help but wonder how this feeling of empowerment is affecting other areas of business, and if this is how great IT organizations have always operated.

If I felt incredible excitement being able to automate repetitive, yet important parts of my work, why would this have to stop with just marketing?

The post Will the promise of true marketing automation finally be realized? appeared first on MarTech.

His views on the future of martech startled me. They were discerning, uncomfortable…and right on. That’s why I wanted to share them. I have to preface this by saying that Jep is referring in these comments to mid-large enterprises – many clients he works with might be considered industry leaders.

CRM will cease to be the center of the universe

I was shocked to hear this, but upon examining trends and my recent experience, I found it made complete sense. “Many go-to-market teams today see the CRM (such as Salesforce.com) as the source of truth,” Jep said. “But smart marketers know that it’s all about customer data, and how they are using products or services. That information is typically stored in a data warehouse.”

The vast majority of companies look to the CRM as their system of record — here you have customers’ account information and revenue data. Various departments like sales, marketing, and finance all refer to the CRM as the source of truth. The current strategy is to integrate a marketing automation platform, such as Marketo or Pardot, into the CRM in order to build targeting and trigger off important events.

The problem? Most of the high-value usage and intent data doesn’t live in the CRM. This data is gold — you can get much deeper insights from product and usage data than you can from revenue data.

It’s also easier to mix and match data from different sources in a data warehouse. Marketers can more easily build real-time, dynamic segments, and action data in a more agile way.

The future marketing automation and email platforms will not have databases

I found the next prediction to be a big mind shift for me, and probably a hard one to grasp for most marketers today.

“Well if you think about it, it’s redundant to have the same data in your data warehouse, your MAP and CRM,” Jep explained. “And these different systems are often missing chunks of data. Remember that even leading MAPs today lack functionality when it comes to data analysis and management. My prediction — the future MAPs will be built to hook directly into the data warehouse.”

MarTech Live: How experts are managing marketing automation

Jep is referring to the daily syncing and updating data in multiple places. This is a huge lift, especially for companies generating thousands or even millions of interactions a day. Imagine having to wait till lunchtime to have accurate marketing data, and then being constantly disrupted by discrepancies between the systems.

Next, MAPs lack the data analysis and manipulation capabilities to build complex segments. “If the MAP is integrated directly to the data warehouse, marketers can build their targeting on real-time data, and the campaigns can be deployed faster,” Jep said. “Oh, and don’t forget about better security.”

As a long time advocate of data privacy, this one hit home for me. The “security” Jep refers to is the imperative for marketers to protect customer consent, from both businesses and malicious actors. For many, marketing grinds to a halt when introducing new platforms and data processes because of the risk of data exposure. Enterprise marketers would breathe much easier if MAPs did not store customer information, but leveraged the data warehouse as their primary database.

Time and money investment in data synchronization will triple

Data synchronization refers to the flow of data between multiple systems. Increasingly, marketing is involved in pulling together disparate data between platforms to get accurate views of the customer and to leverage the information in online and offline engagements.

“We’ve seen huge investments in companies like Workato and Tray.io,” Jep pointed out. “Huge. Marketers sorely need help getting data synchronized across platforms, and that will only continue as the amount of touch points and engagements grow.”

While Jep mentioned that we’ll see more investment pouring into data companies, he also pointed out that we’ll see new directives from leaders to hire data talent and shift time and resources to these important initiatives. Full disclosure, I have joined Syncari, a data automation and management platform, as an advisor because I am fully vested in the belief that data synchronization and management is an untapped opportunity. 

Marketers today aren’t actually using data to do good marketing – but they will start

This last one was a punch in the gut, but I knew it to be true when I heard it.

“Marketers today think they are data-driven, but I would argue that they are just scratching the surface,” Jep explained. “They are using data from basic events such as website visits, forms fills and email clicks. The real, high-value data points are intent data and product/service usage data.”

Ouch. But again, spot on.

Typical marketing automation deployments are set up to target customers who download content or click an email. But how much does that really tell us about their needs, timeline, and perception?

In reality, marketers are extrapolating a great deal when determining customer intent from those basic signals. The better signals? Intent data from other platforms and product usage data from proprietary systems. Some even rank these signals above surveys in gaining insight about their customers. Rather than asking for customer sentiment, you are observing their actions – what they are willing to invest their time and energy in.

Read Scott Brinker’s 5 martech predictions for the 2020s.

Proving value

I found my interview with Jep to be enlightening, albeit at times uncomfortably so. But it made me remember that marketing and its technology are meant to provide value, and to find shared value for both the customer and the marketer. This overarching theme is meant to weave these predictions together, and brings much weight to their validity.

Will this be the future of Martech in the next 3-5 years? What do you think?

The post 4 disruptive, uncomfortable, yet inevitable martech trends appeared first on MarTech.