Choosing the right MarTech functionality // Brandi Starr & Mike Geller — Tegrita

Quotes

• “It comes down to what you want to achieve. What is the job that needs to get done and if you’re going to evaluate a platform, a solution, or a plug-in, you would want to take in a proof of concept. That will give you an opportunity to test out its features and functionalities to see if what was promised is actually delivered.” - Mike “Vendors love to put features in everything and anything that they can but the reality is that just because there’s a feature, it means it’s a good feature or a well-developed feature. It could be just barely enough there to call it a feature to begin with. Its capability can also be overstated in a sales cycle.” - Mike “There are two things we’re talking about here. One is, I’ve got a gap in my MarTech stack and I have identified another solution that I think can fill that gap. So first we ask, is this actually a usable tool?” - Ben “I use the example of Monday and Airtable.com where my team made a transition from using Airtable to Monday because we wanted the additional feature of a task list. To be honest, everybody loved Airtable. It was seamless and it was intuitive. We went to Monday.com, it’s alright. It works. The tool just isn’t as usable as the one we are using, it just has a little extra functionality.” - Ben“You have to really look at the long-term opportunity. I don’t think it is worth switching just for some incremental improvement. Any technology that you are acquiring, you should be able to grow into it.” - Brandi“It’s like buying kids’ clothes. You tend to buy them a little bit too big and let them grow into it because they grow so quickly and that is really how businesses operate now. Companies are growing fast, things within marketing change even faster so you want to make sure that your strategy can evolve, your process can change, and that the new thing that you’re going into will still be able to support that.” - Brandi“There is no clear answer. It is going to depend on the company and the way that they market. Because one of the platform solutions could be perfect for one company, having it all end-to-end in one solution and for one company working with 20 small vendors that you can integrate together may be more advantageous.” - Brandi “One of the things that I always say is, don’t focus on best in class. Focus on best for you. Best in class just means there is some analyst that had said that technology is great. That doesn’t mean they’re saying it’s great for you.” - Brandi“Everyone has a cloud and the wonderful illusion they try to create is that everything in their cloud is seamlessly integrated and everything works well. The reality is that these have been acquisitions made and very little has actually been developed in-house. It takes years for those acquisitions to be evolved so that they are interconnected between each other.” - Mike“Don’t fall into the platform trap. But also going back to doing that proof of concept, take a look at that 8,000 options out there.” - Mike “There’s actually 8,000 companies listed but there’s only 7,000 as there were some duplicates. We did some data analysis.” - Ben “Figure out the objective of this tool. Do a dry run because switching is always going to be more painful than doing the dry run which is not necessarily always free or painless but it goes a long way to verifying your decision and your choice.” - Mike “I think there is also a hybrid model here where you are looking at platforms that are meant to be connectors for a point solution. To me, that’s really where Hubspot has grown to not just be one single platform meant for everything but allows you to connect all of the various other technology.” - Ben “It goes back to value. How much value is this going to provide? This is a question that needs to be answered before the technology is purchased. If the technology is doing something that saves time that doesn’t have a clear ROI then the budget doesn’t really matter. You need to understand what value you need to drive to understand what is an acceptable cost.” - Mike “Mike hit the nail on the head. I read a lot of industry study where CMOs are alloting this percent of their budget to marketing technology, how is the budget shifting between people and technology. These are all hot topics and it’s interesting to read but at the end of the day, that percentage doesn’t matter.” - Brandi“I know that ROI on marketing technology is one of those things that are kind of elusive but you should at least be able to place some level of value and impact on any technology that you have.” - Brandi