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How to Think About Your Marketing Tech Stack

December 27, 2019 By Josh Hill

How to Manage a Martech Stack

How to Think About Your Marketing Tech Stack

At the 2019 Adobe-Marketo Summit, I had the pleasure of presenting thoughts on Martech Stack management with Kelly Horton of Docker. We presented several methods to help fellow marketing operations teams think about how the MOPs function works in the organization. We also discussed in detail how to manage the Marketing Technology Stack (MarTech stack) within the organization in a way to deliver business value and take the burden off of marketers.

Solving Shiny Object Syndrome

The reality is you will never completely stop this. Other teams will do what they want thanks to the power of the corporate credit card and cheap SaaS tools that solve one single problem. In particular, event teams seem to love trying tools because they can never quite get their perfect solution for smaller events. With 7,040 or more MarTech tools, there are a lot of point solutions.

Shiny object syndrome is rampant across many teams of course. I also tend to see this syndrome occur with particular use cases at least twice a year. Standardizing the Department and the Company on a single tool reduces overhead (training, contracts, data flows, etc.) as well as ensures a single admin can develop use cases faster. Here are the top three Shiny Objects to watch out for:

  • Event management tools from scanner apps to registration systems.
  • Schedule Meetings and Meeting Calendar tools. Sales can easily buy 12 of these without realizing the other 14 sales teams around the world already have 4 other tools.
  • Project management or Workflow management tools. Unless you’re a massive firm with a Project Management Office (PMO), you can easily end up with 4 or more just within a large Marketing team.

Ultimately, you have to know your organization’s place in the company as well as the stack. To reduce the impact of rogue apps that aren’t playing nicely, there are three easy steps to take:

  1. Map out your current stack
  2. Find solutions, vendors
  3. Manage the stack: follow a process

Step 1: How to Map Your MarTech Stack

There are dozens of ways to map the MarTech stack to display it to different audiences. Scott Brinker’s Stackies provide a lot of idea fodder. You may also want to go through a Migration Exercise or a Marketing-Sales Process review at least once a year to capture new requirements and understand organizational evolution before it outpaces your technologies.

Kelly Jo Horton provided this option, which is a solid, digestible systems diagram.

A close up of a map

Description automatically generated

You can use tools like Giphy, MS Visio, or Lucidchart to build these maps. I don’t recommend PowerPoint because it’s process charting tools are a bit limited.

For larger exercises, you may have to go full systems architecture. Here are a few ideas from a quick search:

Screenshot of Google Search for “Enterprise Architecture Systems Examples”

I personally prefer something along the lines of Kelly’s map as an overview for new staff and higher-level discussions with IT.

The next step is to use Swim Lanes and a Marketing-Sales Funnel process to map both actions and systems to understand the full funnel process. Ask questions like:

  • Who owns which systems?
  • What action is expected at each step in the life of a Lead or Account?
  • Which system takes an action if a Salesperson creates an Opportunity?
  • What should a salesperson do at this point?
  • Should marketing do something at this other point?
  • If a Lead or Account doesn’t proceed to Stage 5, should those people go to a Nurture?

Thus, you will have several MarTech stack maps:

  • Systems Level Map showing the connections between databases, tools, vendors, etc.
  • Funnel Lifecycle Map showing the Stages and Handoffs between teams
  • Funnel-Systems Map showing how each system manages parts of the Lead Lifecycle
  • Workflow-Systems Map showing how each team works at each part of the Funnel.

You will find all four helpful in managing the stack. Each one has a different role to play in internal discussions.

Type of Map What to Put in It When to Use it
Systems Level Map – Databases Tools
– Connections between systems
– IT
– Vendor management
– Data transfers
– How to move data around
– Identify gaps
Funnel Lifecycle Map – Sales-Marketing process
– Funnel stages
– Sales-marketing process and handoff discussions
– Updating processes
– Identifying requirements from teams
Funnel-Systems Map – Sales-Marketing process
– Funnel stages Attribution
– Vendor management
– Building funnel attribution models
– Change management
– Modifying key areas in the funnel or a CRM/MAP change
Workflow-Systems – Marketing to sales workflows
– Internal project management
– Sales-marketing process
– Use cases
– New vendor discussions
– Changing a vendor
– Designing a process
– Modifying a process
– Understanding what a team needs or wants

Once you have one or more of these guides, you can use them to walk people through various situations. Each can become a great training tool. I will walk new staff through one or more of the documents depending on their need. Then they can see what we have done and why we are there before making assumptions. We can then have a conversation about what they may see as a gap in the process or an area to automate, rather than focusing on a vendor.

Another tip – make new MOPs and SOPs staff members create one of these on their own. Most firms let these process charts go stale very quickly. As part of your process, a new staff member should update it. The benefits include:

  • New person meets all the key people they need to know.
  • New person sees a new way to display information.
  • New person understands the systems faster.
  • New person can make recommendations and take on ownership of useful projects that are “their idea.”
  • You now have an updated map.

Step 2: Finding Solutions, Not Vendors

Time and again, it seems marketers (or salespeople) get sold by MarTech sales vendors. Since most MarTech firms these days are point solutions, this is an interesting phenomenon to explore. Usually the conversation is something like:

Vendor Salesperson: “Hey, you want to increase MQLs (pipeline, opportunities, etc.), right?”

Marketer: “Yes, I do!”

Vendor Salesperson: “Great, we built this AI chat tool that increases MQLs 150%* so you should install it on your website, and it takes 15 minutes.”

Marketer: “Oh that’s great, just what I need, can you give me a demo?”

Vendor Salesperson: Let me hand you to our qualification Team…

New Vendor Salesperson: “Sure!” [shows demo of product, neglecting to discuss the excruciating details MOPs would want to discuss.]

Marketer: “Ok, how much and where do I sign?”

Marketer: “Hey, [website/MOPs/tech person], I bought this tool for a year that’s $15,000, please put this on our site today so we can get more MQLs!”

MOPs: “What is this tool? How do I turn this on? How does it generate MQLs exactly?”

Marketer: “Just do it and stop questioning me. It’s already signed.”

MOPs:  🤨 🙄

We’ve all been there. Maybe we’ve even done the reverse and had to sell a new tool to Sales or a Marketing team because the requirements changed, or the team changed while we were busy negotiating.

A Solution Based Approach to Marketing Technology Management

The Business Case or Use Case:

First, are you solving a real problem? Some refer to this as a Business Case. A good salesperson will use solution-based selling and questioning to help you build an internal case. Most of the time we skip all this and assume it will “work.”

In our all too common conversation with a MarTech salesperson, we use poor business case statements.

  • Install AI Chat thing – it’s great!
  • We need Vendor X because…
  • We need vendor Y because I don’t want to use spreadsheets…
  • We need an automated prospecting email tool.
  • Connect LinkedIn Ads for me.
  • Upload these leads I got from some place.
  • Build a nurture program for me.

We all do this, it’s okay to admit it and do better next time.

Instead of saying, “I need vendor X, because I used them at my last firm,” or “Vendor Y does automated prospecting for sales,” we need to speak in Use cases.

When you, as the MOPs leader, start asking questions about the vendor, the marketer becomes defensive or simply tells you they’ve already signed. This is not the best decision for the business.

If you are doing your job well, or perhaps your vendor’s salesperson is a true pro and helps you build a business case first, here’s what to do.

Instead, we should have a Business Case – are you solving a real problem? If you’ve come from the Product Management world, you may recognize these techniques.

Establish a Business Case Process

This is where being a bureaucrat is a good thing. Why? It helps funnel nervous energy and excitement about things into a process where we collectively understand a problem, devise a solution, and actively make it happen. Only a process can stop arbitrary decisions and frankenstacks.

You can use this process as a one person MOPs shop or with 50 people; it’s about the process, not the number of people.

  • Stakeholder Focus Groups

This is the fancy term for a series of meetings. Have a meeting where you ask the requestor to walk you through their needs.

Whiteboard everything.

Ask open ended questions and withhold any judgement or vendors you like.

  • What would your ideal process look like?
    • What would you want to have happen next?
    • Why do you think this tool will help?
    • Tell me more about…
    • Help me understand the problem you are having today.
    • In six months, what would your workday be like?

The steps can be in one meeting or several:

  • Bring together the USERS who will tell you use cases (and reality of daily use)
    • Bring together their managers who will tell you their goals
    • Bring the executives so you can align on budget and strategy

I can tell you from experience that a fast way to fail is to ignore executives in this process. One time, I negotiated a great deal, closed all the use cases, and thought I was pretty clever. When I went to get what I thought was final approval, I discovered I didn’t know our procurement process that well, and that I had four other executives to go through. Let’s just say that deal is not yet signed.

  • User Stories and Use Cases

User stories and use cases are product management techniques to help developers build features that solve a user’s problems.

The common method, often used in Agile, is:

As a [Persona], I want to [do something] for [this reason].

You can also call these “use cases” to prompt people into explaining what they are doing or want to do.
For example, an Event Marketer might say,

“I want to setup 1:1 meetings at the tradeshow.”

If you ask good questions, you can articulate the solution more clearly:

“We find 1:1 meetings between high level prospects and our executives (or salespeople) are very effective at advancing the sale. Many of these prospects will be at the show and it’s the only time to get their attention. My team needs a way to

  1. send an email to a prospect,
  2. have them click on a link,
  3. choose an open time on our Calendar.
  4. Then, that open slot will be filled for the Meeting Room and then the Account Executive for that Company.
  5. Calendar invitations will be sent to everyone involved automatically.
  6. We also need an easy or automated way to mark down if a person showed up for their meeting.

Once you know that, you can easily generate a process chart with more details like Fields, Databases, and potential systems that would make that process work in real life.

  • Five Whys

Taking a cue from Six Sigma, asking “Why” five times is another method to get at the core of what someone really wants.

With Five Whys, you can go from a baseless assertion to real business reasons to take action.

Example:

            Why did we forecast all our leads to come from SEM?

            Why is the forecast wrong?

            Why was SEM weighted to 100%?

            Why was the process not checking for obvious mistakes?

            Why was the attribution model approved by an intern?

  • Solution Based ROI Statements

A combination of methods is to work toward an ROI statement. What would an “AI Chatbot” actually do for us if we installed it? Is the juice worth the squeeze?

Always ask, “If we spent $X and 500 hours building this, what would we save or gain?”

  • AI Chat will free up 2 hours per day for 20 reps to work on SQLs and generate more qualified MQLs by 20%
  • Scale events to enable additional registrants without manual work.
  • Nurturing our opted in pre-MQLs takes about 120 days for a 3% conversion, but 90% of those go to SQL.
  • User Stories: As a marketer, I want to know how many registrants I have for Event Z with one glance, not go to 3 places that takes my team 3 hours a day.
  • Are you able to demonstrate scale, time, or money savings?
    • Would this process or tool allow you to build a Campaign in 30 minutes with perfect HTML across devices instead of 20 hours?
    • Or does it just shift work to a different team or person?
    • Automate away boring, tedious jobs such as
      • Data Enrichment
      • Data Normalization
      • Transferring Data
      • Transforming Data (calculations, remapping)
      • Recording Data
      • Sifting Data (from basic logic to fuzzy to “artificial intelligence”)
  • Does your firm have clear ROI thresholds? Should you?
    • For example, you want to automate a process that takes 2.5 hours/week.
    • The replacement tool that pulled the same data in one place cost $10,000/year or $833.33/mo. If the hourly rate for human time is $2.99 then $2.99 x $2.50 = $7.45 per week * 52 weeks = $387/yr. Therefore, there is no dollar reason to purchase the tool.
    • If your hourly rate is $15.00 then $31,200/year in man-hours > $10,000 for automation. Thus, buy the tool and allocate people time to better things.

User Stories and the 5 Whys are great ways to dive into what a marketer is actually trying to do. I also like walking through an ideal scenario as a process to help envision what a Solution would do and how we might build it.

What does a Business Case Look Like?

Once you have gone through the exercises above, you will be able to create a one-page document, or a couple of slides to summarize the Problem, Solution Options, ROI, and Recommendations to an executive.

Problem Statement: our chat tool on the website means we need to have 24/7 coverage, but our sales team can only be on from 7am EST to 4pm EST, which means we lose several business hours in Europe and West Coast. Our calculations show that each hour we receive 10 chats, 5 of which become MQLs, and 2 go on to Opportunities within the month, with at least 1 sale that has an ASP of $5,000.

Solution 1:

So, if we could stay open 24/7 (168 hours) instead of 9 hours x 5 days (45 hours), we could get the following:

  • 123 more hours
  • 1230 chats
  • 615 more MQLs
  • 246 opportunities
  • 123 closed sales * $5000 = $615,000 expected revenue per month.

And I’m not even calculating per week and cohort analysis here. The chat tool itself costs $15,000 a year at this volume and it will take about one month to install and train the AI to collect MQLs properly.

With that much money, we could even hire one or two more people to cover more hours to assist the AI and close faster.

The ideal scenario is then to request a 3-month proof of concept to see if such a lift really occurs (or what the lift may really look like).

Now, that’s a business case. There could be other options as well. Executives love to have two options, so they feel like they had input and “guided” you and “added value.”

Success of Every Tool is Your Responsibility

As a MOPs (or SOPs) leader, any tool you agree to install is ultimately your responsibility whether it was your decision or not. Ideally, the Business Case process reduces risk to the firm by clearly identifying the Who, What, Why, and How of solving the requestor’s problem. Then you will understand how to install the tool for maximum benefit.

Why do MarTech Failures Happen?

While this could be a long post on its own, there are a few clear ways vendor failure occurs.

Failures are likely to occur when:

  • Business Process wasn’t defined first, so the implementation becomes messy and the vendor is blamed.
  • No buy in from users or executives so no one feels they have to use it.
  • Overpromised and underdelivered in time period.
  • Onboarding and training met too much resistance and people “blamed” the vendor instead.
  • No one to use or manage the tool.
  • Vendor was decided without discussing why the vendor would help (see Executive Playbook).
  • Vendor Name becomes synonymous with the Process it helps to manage. Once people decide they hate the process and the process means “Vendor X” that Vendor will be cut loose eventually, even if the tool could have been modified to meet peoples’ needs.

Success occurs when:

  • Business process before RFP
  • Ensure vendor is fully vetted.
  • Ensure migration plan is very detailed and you have the integration documentation. Drop any vendor who can’t show this to you before the contract.
  • Consider professional services to temporarily help.
  • Vendor Name Does Not Equal Process

Step 3: Managing the RFP: Salespeople, Negotiation, and Procurement

In the example above, we saw how a fictional, but likely sales conversation goes with a MarTech vendor. In order to mitigate fast and poor decisions, your process included an internal component to understand the Use Cases and the ROI Business Case.

Now that you understand what you want, it’s time to go out into the marketplace to see who does what and how they talk about it. I’ve written about this before in the Marketing Automation Vendor RFP Process. Here’s a quick summary of an RFP-Feature Table.

What we want Feature Vendor 1 Vendor 2
Save time on meeting setup Show rep’s calendar to the Lead x ✔︎
Click to Schedule Link to Rep’s calendar ✔︎ x
Show calendar in an email Show calendar in an email ✔︎ ✔︎
Low cost per Lead Per lead pricing $50/meeting $500/mo. no limit
Take people out of online chat AI chat script x ✔︎
Route to correct sales rep Connect to SFDC Take down info to send to rep ✔︎ x
Knows Lead Reps SFDC API or Package ✔︎ ✔︎
Push data to Marketo for deduping REST API ✔︎ ✔︎

Work the Process to Make Better Decisions

Remember to establish a process and work with Finance and Legal to understand the procurement process at your organization. It’s all too easy to bypass the rules and end up crashing into another team’s process that you must follow.

Being a Bureaucrat is easy! Here are some examples. Your organization likely has fewer or more steps. Smaller firms may condense these steps or let you make more decisions, especially for those monthly single point SaaS solutions that take credit cards.

  1. Have the Business Case
  2. Understand the ROI
  3. Get Executive Approval
  4. Vet vendors
  5. Sell the vendor to the people who matter, including executives.
  6. Set aside budget.
  7. Requirements vs. Reality of Vendors
  8. Plan the Migration with Stakeholders
  9. Negotiate the Terms with the Vendor
  10. Executive Approval
  11. Purchase Order
  12. Privacy and other Legal Review
  13. Security and IT Approval
  14. Renegotiate Terms as needed
  15. Business Term Review
  16. Legal and Privacy Approval
  17. Contract Approval
  18. Sales Order or SOW Approval
  19. Start working!

How to Negotiate with a Vendor

Again, hundreds of books on negotiation are available. The key tips with software vendors boil down to these.

All negotiation experts will tell you that unless you understand your own positions (your Business Case and limits) you will find it hard to make your best decision. Remember, you can always walk away if you discover the internal situation has changed.

Both vendors and marketers should read this article about Working with MarTech Vendors.

Step 4: Managing the MarTech Stack Lifecycle: Add, Subtract, Expand

There are three things you can do with a MarTech stack (or revenue stack):

  • Add – buy a new tool to automate or enhance capabilities.
  • Subtract – remove unused tools, or tools that will be replaced, or tools that are no longer needed.
  • Expand – leverage an existing tool more through use of new features.

The devil, of course, is in the details. How do you decide to Add, Subtract, or Expand within the MarTech stack? The methods I discussed above are how you make better decisions about your stack.

There is another consideration: the lifecycle stage of your organization and its ability to use the tools in the workflow. You can read more about these issues in the MarTech Maturity Model.

For example, if you want full funnel visibility with Channel-Offer attribution so you can see which assets are working and in which places, don’t expect that on day one. Even if a magic system spit out the data, does anyone know what to do with it?

The same goes for a lead gating system like Predictive Scoring. Marketing may think it’s great that they are using “science” to make better decisions, yet Sales goes by their gut; they don’t trust this new filter and think it will ruin their pipeline.

In other words, don’t put the cart before the horse.

Scott Brinker discusses the idea that a MarTech Stack, or even areas of it, are akin to building a product. As we saw above, the techniques used to make better decisions about Processes and the Tools to support them are essentially software product tools. I’m not sure I always think about it in the moment, however, it is a helpful guide when you consider that your goal is to enable another team to do their job better with a set of tools.

Adding to the Stack

Adding is usually the easiest and most fun part of managing your stack. Follow the steps above and find the best fit for your team. A few more things to consider:

  • Future Proof – will this work for a year or grow with us?
  • Integration Points
  • How it really works.
  • Can we do a Proof of Concept or would it be too much work?
  • Adoption Plan: what’s your roll out plan? Are you sure regular users are going to be ready or will they sabotage this? Adoption is your best defense against Resistors and Executive Playbooks. Adoption helps the vendor lock you in too – and this is why your vendor needs to support your efforts.

Subtracting from the Stack

There are three questions to ask before Subtracting or Switching vendors:

  1. Why does this tool exist?
  2. Who uses it?
  3. What is its value?

You would be surprised how often no one knows who owns a tool. It’s just “been there forever” and now you have to trace the connections and data to see how vital (or not) it is to automation or a particular person. See the slides below for more details on the steps.

  • Does this tool duplicate features of another vendor?
  • People who ran it left?
  • Does it connect to something?
  • What might break if we turn it off?
  • What’s the contract say about shut off?
  • Do we understand how to remove it?
  • Did we speak with everyone who might be remotely affected and get their approval?
  • Did we back up any data or do we have a rollback plan
  • Did we discuss the shut off with the vendor? Did they have alternatives?

In the extreme case, you may not have any idea who owns it or what it does. The person who bought it moved on and there isn’t a clear data flow or dependency. In that case, biting the bullet and turning it off may be the only way to find out. Best case: nothing happens and you save some money. Worst case: you pulled out the wrong Jenga block and kicked off a random process that now clogged the sync or overwrote 1 million records. Be careful!

Upgrading or Switching Vendors

Ultimately, you will outgrow a vendor at some point. Perhaps they stopped keeping up with competitors. Perhaps they are best used at a 200-person firm and not a 10,000-person firm with larger data needs. Just like letting someone go, it’s a good idea to keep your vendor’s salesperson in the loop and give them a chance to discuss your new requirements.

I’ve written and spoken about how several marketing automation platforms are great for startups or certain situations and to recognize when your firm is ready for a Marketo or other MAP. I’ve seen a few companies buy too much MAP, waste money, and then downgrade for awhile.

Sometimes that $50/mo. tool that’s “good enough” and gets used a few times a month, but that no one loves is the right tool to stick with. The alternative power solution may cost $2,000/mo. and take months to install and takes a highly trained person to run. Are you sure it’s worth “upgrading”?

Another consideration is how will this change the organization? Are you sure this change is to support organizational growth or change? Or is this going to cause change that will make it harder to roll out?

As we saw with the rise of Marketo and Eloqua, vendors can persuade us that our processes should change to get with the times and accelerate revenue. Always be sure this change is in line with executives and other teams. The rise of MAPs was a catalyst for B2B marketers to become more disciplined and up level their departments, but it wasn’t always a smooth transition.

Building a Martech Stack to Make Your Marketing Sing from Josh Hill

Filed Under: Marketing Technology

Martech Stack Assessment Tips

November 27, 2018 By Josh Hill

A successful martech stack allows you to automate marketing and sales business processes in a way that you can efficiently report on the funnel and make future decisions on budget allocation. A successful stack will allow each type of marketer and salesperson to work on campaign storytelling and relationship building, rather than analysis.

As you become more experienced in Marketing Operations or Marketo, your martech stack will grow in complexity, or just the number of vendors. You will be constantly peppered with automated outreach emails from vendor salespeople. How do you evaluate if your stack needs help or if you even need some of these tools? What happens when another marketer buys a tool without discussing it with you and expects you to now lead the implementation?

Here are some tips to help you with these situations.

Ask the Right Questions

I would say two or three times a year, I ask myself, or my team, if the martech stack is working well for us.

  • Are there tools we no longer use?
  • Did a new tool essentially supplant another?
  • Did anyone actually shut that other tool off and cancel it?
  • Are we getting the best deal at renewal time?

Depending on the answers and pain level, we can prioritize work to improve the day as well as acquire more customers. I will ask a few more questions:

  • Can it handle our current volume?
  • Is it creating work or taking away work?
  • Is it collecting the data we need now and in the future?
  • What’s the pain level (or How much would I gain/save by making a change?).

For example, I’ve encountered the question, “Pardot or Marketo?” from many people directly and in the Marketo Nation. When I ask them more about their question, it turns out that they were using Pardot for a year or two, and then reached a certain volume of campaigns as well as database size (usually 30k+) and felt Pardot wasn’t quite meeting their needs anymore.

Similarly, I’ve had a situation where we were running Events out of Marketo. The Events team wanted to provide a certain on page experience and workflow to their audience. When we discussed it more deeply, it turned out Marketo could support that if we spent a bit of time building a better page and Marketo Program Template.

Later on, as requirements and volume changed, we explored an Event Platform as a Martech stack change to enhance our abilities and experiences for the audience. Naturally, we ensured the new platform worked closely with Marketo and our data processes. 

Adding and Removing Tools

Again, it’s about asking the right questions. There are a lot of good marketers and sales people like you and me working to convince colleagues at other firms that our tools will solve problems. The challenge is that you may not really need those tools – today or ever. Unless you go through a proper RFP process which include Requirements Gathering, it will be hard to evaluate a purchase (or a no decision).

Over the years, I prioritize projects based on cost-benefit, which in Martech means “Will this automate away work and scale up things we need?”

A good example is Blog RSS to Email automation. For smaller firms or firms that are used to Mailchimp or ESPs, this is an obvious, easy win: get our blog/newsletter automated. But at some companies, the benefit may not be that large compared to the effort. If your database is complex or the blog subscriber level is low, automation isn’t going to solve much, and it will cost more to build out the system than you save in time.

Similarly, you may want to remove technologies due to cost or overlapping features. If a vendor is pitching a tool that overlaps with another tool, perhaps that’s an opportunity to rip out an old technology and reduce a leak in your budget. Some tools are just so old in the Stack, no one remembers why they are there.

Ultimately, there’s a time and place for many tools, it may not be today, and it might have been yesterday.

As your business (or organization) grows or evolves, your martech stack needs to keep up.

Which Teams Should be Involved?

MOPS isn’t an island and over the past ten years, marketing operations has been seen as a bridge to Sales. With more and more teams using similar tools like Sales Email Automation, everyone needs to talk to each other to balance priorities and requirements. We all want the business to grow and teams to succeed. The only times we have challenges is when our teams are misaligned (read: we don’t talk to each other).

Talk!

  • Core Team: MOPS, MOPS Leadership
  • Business Owner Team: for Events, the Events teams or leaders.
  • Budget or Finance if it’s over a certain threshold.
  • IT or Product: a large project may involve IT for a security review or integration assistance.
  • Legal: with GDPR and other concerns, the lawyers should review every contract.

Ultimately, it is best to check in with multiple teams as the vendor or project grows in size. I don’t think you need Finance to buy a Zapier subscription, but you might need Finance if you do a multi-year Marketo subscription.

Shiny Object Syndrome is the biggest problem facing Sales, SOPS, MOPS, and Marketers. Vendor salespeople are very happy to work email and phones until they find someone willing to run with the ball. That person may bypass MOPS and other processes because they feel the pain the most or were easily persuaded.

Marketing technology must be evaluated by MOPS and other technically oriented people to ensure there is a good fit in the stack and the vendor does everything they claim. I’ve seen a lot of projects completely fail because they were driven by misinformed business owners who failed to ask questions internally. Likewise, it is a bad move for MOPS to purchase a tool like Sales Engage without bringing in SOPS and Sales for evaluation.

Establish a Documented Technology Evaluation Process

With a written document and trained stakeholders, you can avoid most pitfalls and shiny objects by enforcing a process. Perhaps it is a formal RFP process that internal stakeholders can submit to when there is a need or new vendor. A few recommendations:

  • Gatekeepers – if the process isn’t followed, who can block a signed contract? Whose approvals are required before next steps?
  • Submission Process
  • Questions the team will ask.
  • Which teams should be involved based on the tools and budget?
  • Does the requestor understand the level of work?
  • How can we evaluate the level of work to implement and change existing processes?
  • Is this a business process change or just an automation?
  • Do we already have this tool? Why won’t it work?
  • Is spending less the right choice? Cheapest vendor may cost more in the long run.

How are you managing your stack?

Filed Under: Marketing Technology

Adobe acquires Marketo – Does it mean anything?

October 1, 2018 By Josh Hill

As we’ve all heard, Marketo was finally acquired by another tech company: Adobe.

This happened on the eve of Dreamforce, which exiled Marketo years ago when Salesforce acquired ExactTarget-Pardot. Since then, Marketo and its allies have spent their marketing dollars across the street at Jillian’s as well as carefully keeping the Marketo-SFDC sync alive while slowly disentangling from Appexchange.

That has taken years.

For all of the people looking at the acquisition as Good or Bad for users, customers, or Adobe’s customers, I would say “It won’t matter for a long time.” The ExactTarget-Pardot acquisition of 2013 slowly became Salesforce Marketing Cloud, yet somehow Pardot is still essentially a separate product. And didn’t Pardot only recently become fully integrated with SFDC? Adobe itself hasn’t exactly integrated previous purchases like Neolane and people still call Adobe Analytics, Omniture.

We are now five years after the Eloqua and Pardot acquisitions with not a lot of innovation in Marketing Automation from the original big vendors. The interesting innovation has been on the periphery:

  • Sales Engagement Automation from Outreach, Salesloft, etc gave Salesforce and Marketo a run for their money on key Marketing-Sales alignment and lead nurturing.
  • Post Sales Automation is surprisingly still limited both in terms of vendors (Gainsight), and Support Tool Integration with SFDC Cases
  • Data processing is a giant mess of point solutions that all do cool things.
  • Web Personalization is really dominated by a small group of large vendors.
  • Third to First Party Data is still not integrated with Marketing Automation in a fluid way.
  • Privacy laws aren’t driving the innovation I expected to manage permissions, instead it is focused on cases (OneTrust)

Thus, I don’t see this acquisition as changing anything meaningful in the short run for users or customers of Marketo or Adobe. Acquisitions and the strategies behind them usually take years to play out, let alone be successful.

I would say that the “innovation” from this acquisition will not be in features, but in integrations to Adobe’s offering. I would be very surprised if Marketo receives investment to innovate in the areas I mentioned above.

Dom Nicastro of CMSWire, wrote an article about the “10 Ways the Adobe, Marketo Acquisition Will Impact Marketo’s Users.” The structure is interesting, so let’s review the some of the issues he brought up and why I think the short to medium term won’t matter at all for most of us.

Near Term – What Will Change

In my experience with tech acquisitions as a user, almost nothing will change other than the logo…at least in the first year or so.

Adobe Native Connectors with Experience Cloud, Advertising, Analytics, and Magento.

Integrations are a good thing and it is always disappointing when platform groups cut each other off due to competitive reasons. Now Marketo will be able to talk to Adobe Marketing Cloud products in a more seamless way. A native Activity Log and the resurrection of Anonymous data access via Marketo Munchkin tied directly to Omniture would be an incredible leap forward for many organizations, especially B2C.

Of course, to do this, we will see a change in the roadmap, but not the “Vision” for Marketo.

Connector Vendors will lose out

As Adobe and Marketo use direct APIs to integrate first party and third party data, expect middleware vendors to lose out in 1-2 years.

Marketo will likely abandon development on personalization tools

While that sounds bad, it may be a great thing. Marketo has lagged behind on a seamless user experience for its personalization tools because they were from an acquisition that had limited investment for several years. The good thing behind this is if Adobe’s AI and testing suite are substantially better, there would be ways to integrate this with Marketo, to the great benefit of Marketo users.

Near Term – What Will Not Change

Marketo will continue to exist as essentially a separate entity under the Adobe umbrella. Acquisitions are complex and it will take time to re-brand as well as find the right places for Adobe to make its mark within Marketo. Adobe will ideally be careful not to alienate Marketo’s 6,000 customers and highly active userbase with massive changes. An expensive acquisition is not the place to drive unhappy users into the arms of Salesforce or Oracle.

I agree with my friends that Marketo will remain CRM agnostic because it has to. Marketo’s customers are still 80% on SFDC and no one sees that changing.

Performance of the Product

While Orion and the move to Google Cloud have helped many of Marketo’s performance issues for higher impact customers, I don’t see this changing in the near term. As some have pointed out in the article, Adobe may want to move Marketo away from Google Cloud. Yet, this just happened or is still underway. It would be very expensive for Adobe Marketo to switch again immediately. If they did want to move, they would damage the long term Google customer relationship as well as hurt every single customer who would no doubt experience system hiccups.

What I would love to see is Adobe Marketo take a hard look at their priorities and consider a backend rebuild that addresses the scalability issues larger firms and B2C firms have with trigger processing, database size, and load balancing.

Pricing and Renewals

Tony Byrne, CEO of Real Story Group, suggested that Marketo renewals could expect a higher increase when Adobe seeks to recoup its investment. This is certainly a possibility, however, Marketo is already well known for hefty renewal fees when the contract is up. I suspect people will only start to make noise about 6-12 months after the acquisition closes if Adobe goes this route. Ideally, Adobe won’t start to increase prices, rather they will provide actual value through improvements or additional plugins to ask for more money.

Initially, we should see a new pricing sheet and cross selling sales initiative once the deal closes. Just as Marketo offered Bizible demos after the Marketo Summit, we should expect to hear from our Upsell reps about “Adobe’s amazing offerings” and could they bring the local Adobe rep to the office? They won’t ask for more renewal money as long as you are adding on to your new Adobe contract.

My Wishlist for Adobe Marketo

Backend Rebuild for large scale rebalancing and B2C.

Investment is going to be key. If Adobe thinks it can starve Marketo of investment dollars and reap profit, it will be sorely disappointed when customers depart. And it would make sense to invest in scale for their B2C components like Magento and Advertising.

Native Integrations with Adobe’s existing product suite.

I hope so.

AWS style resource purchasing.

Allowing customers to purchase more speed will ensure investment in the backend and continued support from larger customers.

AB Testing Rebuild – make it a pro level and improve analytics.

I hate to say it, but the page and email AB testing in Marketo is terrible. There are no real analytics or management tools for more than one off AB tests. Pressing “Champion” seems to make all the data and emails disappear. This has to change if Marketo becomes a part of the B2C part of Adobe.

Invest in devops style transparency into the system for Marketing Operations pros.

System health is critical, even for smaller Marketo instances. Help us!

Don’t change too much too quickly!

Occasionally, a firm will send in its people from Corporate and make sweeping changes without understanding anything about the business, the people, or why customers buy. That never goes well. Do not do this.

What Could Change in the Long Term?

Platform

Scott Brinker of Chiefmartec focused on the Platform Ecosystem and that’s an area that Marketo and Adobe haven’t fully developed for themselves. Marketo does have Launchpoint, but this has undergone changes which have meant many point vendors vanished from sight. Perhaps Adobe will build Adobe Exchange or even look at their disaparate offerings as a mix and match, plug and play martech stack that can cross the B2C and AdTech to Martech boundaries. To do that, Marketo and Adobe’s consulting services groups would have to join forces.

Thus, what you may see is a central Sales and Consulting Group that will help firms organize Adobe’s offerings into custom constellation stacks, unique to each business. This sort of organization will take time to build and will make Adobe more like its rivals in this space.

The tighter integration of Magento ecommerce with Marketo may force the Product team to scale up the backend to support rapid data processing and personalization at scale. Ecommerce relies on speed and click to sales, while Marketo was built more for long sales processes, where seconds don’t count. If Marketo wants to be better friends with Magento, speed will matter more.

Marketo Summit – RIP?

The chatter on LinkedIn from most Marketo users was “What happens to Marketo Summit 2019 – Las Vegas”? I have no idea. Since the deal won’t close for a bit and the contracts for both venues were already signed, I suspect we’ll see this happen:

  • Adobe Summit 2019 is also in Las Vegas and I bet will now feature a giant Marketo booth. Incentives may be offered for Marketo users to start attending. I may go next year since I will need to link up more with my colleagues in this area. What I do like about Adobe’s offering are the “Labs” which is precisely what I hope Marketo will add on to their events. The prices are similar, so don’t expect to see a lot of cross over in 2019.
  • Marketo Nation 2019 – since the contracts are likely signed and many Marketo users are looking for a repeat of 2016’s blowout in Vegas, Marketo will keep the Nation going independently just for 2019. We are a pretty vocal bunch that will need our own outlet. Expect to see a giant Adobe Experience booth now.

My big worry is that the DNA that made Marketo such a big brand for B2B marketers, and helped create the Marketing Ops function, will disappear. The vision and innovation could stagnate. Adobe could come in and make Marketo “do it their way,” causing disruption and confusion for customers and staff. Even if that does happen, the good news is creative destruction will ensure a new Marketing Automation platform would come along eventually and be even better.

Filed Under: Marketing Technology

Agile Marketing and Agile Vendor Contracts

September 2, 2018 By Josh Hill

Recently, I’ve written about how to work with vendors and your internal teams to produce optimal vendor selection, and thus optimal outcomes for your goals. The next step to staying relevant to your customers and ensuring your team tests regularly, is to embrace Agile Marketing. Putting agile into practice is pretty hard in larger organizations with existing technologies and hardened reporting flows.

The other side of internally baked processes is that vendor contracts and their needs mean limited abilities to be agile with vendors. If you want to test a bright idea or a new method with a shiny new vendor, it can be very difficult to bring them in, test, and then remove the if things don’t work as desired. Most vendors (including you!), want stable income streams of 12 months, with up front cash flow to invest in high growth. While many smaller tools are happy to do month-to-month at a slightly higher fee, many of the larger firms will not consider short term trials.

In fact, most platforms will only provide a “30 day trial” which isn’t all that helpful because implementation can take 3-6 months if done correctly. Only the most basic vendor swaps will be a good fit for free 30 day trials.

And if we take Agile to heart and look closely at Scott Brinker’s “4 Forces” model, we realize it becomes challenging to Decentralize and Humanize things internally or externally. If I want to provide regional autonomy with martech, I still need to setup rules and workflows the local teams can stay within as they iterate local programs. If an APAC martech vendor has a unique tool for local languages the regional team needs, I’d love for that team to take that on easily. But I want a way out after 30-90 days if we don’t see results we expect. Same for things like global AI driven Chat tools, or the latest exit-intent method of lead capture.

Thus, if we want to become agile, so must our vendors. Agile vendor relationships, contracts, and pricing are a big ask for providers and it is possible to achieve if both sides negotiate effectively. But I want vendors to go beyond one off negotiations. I’d like to see vendors of all sizes (not just the hungry new ones who will do ANYTHING for a logo), consider how to deliver pricing models that acknowledge Agile marketing and that relationships can come and go more easily than ever before.

And that might be ok! Recently, I’ve been working with a larger martech vendor with whom we had a small relationship years ago. Having that vendor two or three years ago wasn’t a good fit because the internal capability to use the tool was limited and our need for the powerful tool wasn’t there. So I had the contract cancelled to save money. Because that vendor gracefully exited, I was open to bringing them into the new RFP because we were now ready to fully take advantage of their powerful platform. The vendor acknowledged that our new programs were now more ready for their tool and that the relationship would be more fruitful. Vendors also need to perform better analysis of purchasers during the sales process to avoid churn, and be ready to reject business that will lead to bad cancellations if the purchaser just isn’t ready to be successful with the tool.

Vendors are often open to short term trials when the following conditions exist:

  • Big enterprise tells them to do that or they won’t go forward.
  • The vendor is small, new, and open to anyone willing to try in the hope of iterating to Product Market Fit + Long term relationship.

What if SaaS vendors were open to this from the start:

  • 30 and 90 day trials at a limited volume and price.
  • Fixed price setup help.
  • 90 and 180 day contracts
  • Only let people buy for 12 and 24 months after a successful 90 day intro.

Of course, there are times when this won’t work well for large scale projects. Those large projects are often done in phases or in select business units, however, and are equivalent to a smaller scale trial or implementation.

What sort of agile vendor arrangements have you worked on?

Filed Under: Marketing Technology

Siftrock Advances Email Reply Automation

August 1, 2018 By Josh Hill

Lead Owner Routing with Spokesperson

Email continues to be an important channel of communication for both salespeople and marketers at B2B firms. Every year, we hear about “the death of email,” yet we are all still using it. And with the resurgence of the cold email from Account Based Marketing & Sales vendors, email is even more active.

email-is-dead

According to firms like Campaign Monitor there will be 2.9 billion email users in 2019. According to Radicati, in 2019, 246.5 billion emails will be sent per day, and of those 128.8 billion are B2B messages. Roughly 20% are marked as spam. And since email is, and is perceived, as a “low cost” channel, we will continue to use it, even when a lot of people complain.

Hypothetically, if 1.5% of those emails generate a reply, that’s 3.69 billion emails to sift through!

I’m pretty sure most of us aren’t sending all the emails, so let’s say you send 10MM nurture and cold prospecting emails per month attempting to generate more leads. All of these emails “come from the rep” but the reps don’t want all of that Out of Office or unsubscribe junk. They aren’t going to sift through 150,000 emails per month to find the 5,000 that matter. Leads—and money—are left on the table.

It’s no surprise that managing the replies from all of that email is more critical than ever for a marketer running prospecting campaigns or other email nurtures. With spam clicks ruining scoring and privacy enforcement increasing, you must check your replies. Last year, I wrote about this topic a few times, including a how-to on Siftrock, a reply management vendor. Siftrock has expanded its feature set since then.

I’ve also had a chance to consider additional use cases and we’re going to go through Siftrock’s 2018 enhancements in this article.

Attribution and Replies

If you are a Marketo user, you have probably created an Email Send program where the whitepaper is in another Program. When the Lead fills out the form in the Other Program, that program gets a Success attribution, while your Email Send did nothing.

As a pre-cursor to using Siftrock’s new Reply Bot, you can mimic automation using Marketo to obtain Attribution as well as trigger other emails based on replies. Earlier this year, my friend Ed Unthank of Etumos wrote an interesting guide on using Program Statuses in Marketo to track and attribute email responses.

Account Based Replies & Lead Owner Reply Management

For me, this feature and enhancement, helps make prospecting email automation easier than ever. In the past, your email would come from the rep’s email address using Lead Owner Email Address (or a variation for Siftrock).

One method, which I use, is to map the “Reply” domain to the real domain for my company’s reps. Siftrock then has a rule for certain email replies to forward that Human reply directly to the rep just like this. One method to do this is to create a Formula field in SFDC to create a mapped reply address just for Siftrock (which I explained in my previous article).

Siftrock Dynamic Routing

A couple of caveats:

  • When using Marketo, still cannot connect the SFDC Sales Owner Email Address in Siftrock due to some API limitations. May be available in future.
  • You will need to use the formula field workaround to create a second field with the mapped Reply Email Address.

This is a workflow which can be enabled using Siftrock Skills. Let’s say you have a cold outreach program as part of your ABM strategy. You have one rep per Account-Company-Domain.

Then you automate emails “from the Lead Owner” using the Sales Owner Email Address token. Siftrock is smart enough to map the Reply Email to the Lead Owner (see below).

That’s neat and easy to setup. But what if you have other Nurture Programs or emails which aren’t mapped as clearly to a Lead Owner? What could you do?

  1. Setup a Skill to route domain replies to specific reps. That’s ok if your TAM is small.
  2. Allow replies to a Spokesperson Email Box to see the matched Lead Owner via Marketo and route accordingly.

Lead Owner Routing with Spokesperson

Email Reply Bot Feature (Beta)

Over the past year, martech has added more intelligence AI bots to handle use cases:

  • Website chatbot to engage and hand over highly qualified leads to Sales (e.g.; Drift)
  • Email scheduler replies, (eg: Conversica).

What if you could embed such an AI in Marketo and have someone reply to Marketo emails and have Marketo take a specific action?

Siftrock thought of that.

Now in beta testing for Gmail only accounts, Siftrock can integrate with OAuth to send from your accounts. For example:

  1. Send Marketo Lead Owner Email Address email, inviting someone to an event.
  2. The Email copy says, “just reply and I’ll register you.”
  3. The Recipient says, “Sure,” or “Not this time.”
  4. Siftrock sees that reply, and auto replies based on the Yes/No conditions.
  5. Siftrock could trigger a Confirmation email using Add to List or other methods, including just replying and letting the person know we’ll handle it.
  6. Siftrock passes the data to Marketo as Add to List and/or fields, allowing you to trigger (or batch) more information with the Added to List trigger.

While I’ve been skeptical of AI as a cure-all, this particular use case can make Marketo (or any MAP), more powerful and a serious alternative to Sales Email Automation. Rather than purchase an entirely redundant Sales Automation Email Tool, you can now help Sales run outreach campaign at scale and ensure that Replies are properly handled.

You can also help the Audience avoid cumbersome Forms and CTAs – just “hit reply” and we’ll handle the rest. Remember, Forms create friction and the old

Send Email > Click Here > Fill Out Form > Get More info

process is increasingly restricting growth for many of us, especially with Spam Bots ruining click scoring.

webinar-register-reply

Pretty cool, right?

Because then you create this in Marketo:

add-to-list-bot

And now your audience doesn’t even have to click to fill out a form!!

Who said email was dead? Make it USEFUL.

Privacy and GDPR Compliance

Compliance was my initial reason for purchasing a reply management tool, since it was challenging to keep up with Unsubscribe replies. Marketers, however, cite Reply Mining for New Contacts as a justification for Reply software. With the advent of GDPR, you may need to reconsider your approach to mining replies. Here are workflow considerations you should discuss with your Legal Counsel, as this is not legal advice.

Human Replies:

Since a person replied, this may be viewed as consent for a salesperson to reply, however, I would personally be careful about assuming an opt in for marketing purposes regardless of the respondent’s country.

Data Access:

Siftrock only sees the email reply and email address. That email reply will contain personal information in most cases.

New Contacts and Data Mining:

Siftrock retains this capability, as it is very useful. Mining EU records will put you at a great risk of fines. Instead, consider collating such replies and evaluating them by both Geography and Scenario. Creating new records for non-US persons should be carefully thought through before automating the workflow.

The suggested Actions should be approved by your legal counsel before you implement them.

Scenario and Reply Type Location of Respondent Action
Left Company US Auto flag Left Company to Owner

Create New Contact(s)

OOO US Auto flag OOO to Owner

Create New Contact(s)

Human Any Forward to Owner
Unsubscribe Any Auto unsubscribe
Left Company – Non Customer Not Active Non US ·      Auto mark as Left Company

·      Flag to Owner

·      Ignore new contacts

Left Company – Non Customer Active Non US ·      Auto mark as Left Company

·      Flag to Owner

·      Collate New Contacts and discuss with Sales in case there is a legitimate reason to Contact (existing Opp, etc)

Left Company – Customer Non US ·      Auto mark as Left Company

·      Flag to Owner

·      Send New Contacts or Auto Create and Route (but do not Opt In)

OOO – Non-Customer Non US Flag to Sales
OOO – Customer Non US Flag to Sales

Forward Email to Sales

Data Deletion and Retrieval:

Administrators may respond to Deletion or Download requests under GDPR through the Data Privacy panel to Remove Contacts. The feature also records the deletion history in case of audit.

gdpr-delete in siftrock

Other Things to Keep in Mind

  • Remember – noreply@ is a bad experience and will get you in the spam box faster.
  • Public Domains: you can tell Siftrock to ignore domains like “hotmail.com” or internal domains when creating new contacts.

Overall, Siftrock’s 2018 updates move the product forward with welcome add ons. With the Bot AI on the way, Siftrock will support the customer experience and lead generation even more.

Interested in automating your replies? Sign up here. [Affiliate link to support this site].

[Disclosure: I was given a trial account for this How To and have purchased Siftrock for an employer. Contains affiliate links.]

Image Credits: Screenshots; Siftrock slides.

Filed Under: Marketing Technology

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