Avoid the Hype: Making Smart Choices in Marketing Tech

Outro VO  00:05

Welcome to revenue rehab, your one stop destination for collective solutions to the biggest challenges faced by marketing leaders today. Now head on over to the couch, make yourself comfortable and get ready to change the way you approach revenue. Leading your recovery is modern marketer, author, speaker and Chief Operating Officer at Tegrita Brandi Starr

Brandi Starr  00:33

Hello, hello hello and welcome to another episode of revenue rehab. I am your host Brandi Starr and we have another amazing episode for you today, I am joined by Brian Cooper. Brian has was most recently the vice president of digital data and demand teams at Juniper Networks. He has served on the board of directors for the Advertising Research Foundation, and the marketing Science Institute. Brian is a frequent publisher including an article titled Don't buy the wrong marketing technology in the Harvard Business Review and a book titled custom surveys within your budget. Prior to Juniper Brian served on the senior leadership team at Realty mind where he built a US West Coast presence for the company. Before joining reality mine, he was the SVP for the customer, employee and reputation practice for the western region where he was responsible for designing and overseeing research programs, maintaining client relationships, and managing a team of account executives, research managers and project managers. Brian, welcome to revenue rehab, your session begins now.

Brian Cooper  01:52

Thank you so much, Brandi.

Brandi Starr  01:54

I am so excited to have you today. I read your article in HBr. And just knew we had to have a chat here on the couch. But before we jump into that, I like to break the ice with a little woozy moment that I call buzzword. banishment. So tell me what buzzword would you like to get rid of forever?

Brian Cooper  02:19

Well, it's it's a phrase, but it's martech drives growth?

Brandi Starr  02:25

Ah, that  one is an interesting. I know the fundamentals of it. But why don't you like that phrase?

Brian Cooper  02:34

I think a lot of people get hung up on the shiny new objects and think that if I just get this piece of technology implemented in the organization, we're gonna see an uplift in pipeline creation or conversions or stickiness on our website, when the reality too is there's so much more complexity in an enterprise organization to be able to see improvements like that in your business.

Brandi Starr  02:54

Yeah, I actually prefer the phrase martech enables growth, because it is more of like the strategy and things that you want to do that leads to the growth and you do that through the technology. Because yeah, I agree with you holistically, people do think that buying a shiny, new, you know, piece of technology is going to solve all their problems. And that's just not the way that it works.

Brian Cooper  03:23

Really  well said, I'll I'll definitely leverage your phrase moving forward. I like that enabled, as

Brandi Starr  03:28

I say, you are welcome to I use that one a lot. Because you know, people do have those unrealistic expectations. Well, that's a great phrase, and it ties to our topic today. So I will say now that we've gotten that off our chest, tell our guests What brings you to revenue rehab.

Brian Cooper  03:47

It's a it's a marketing technology landscape and the complexity behind it. So when we put we published the article in July 2021. And I think in the article, we said that there was over 9000 different marketing technology products. And now today, I just look it up with over 11,000 martech products available to all of us, according to Chief martech.com. And so like as martech ref tech experts, we're inundated and influenced in so many different ways. It makes it really challenging for us. I can't count how many LinkedIn connections I get on a daily basis for some vendor trying to offer me a new new offering. Or what also really happens now too is is vendors will come when they're when they're soliciting us and they say here's a new unmet need that he didn't even know you had. And so they're creating this these new environments or products that are trying to address needs and it gets just difficult for us to figure out how to fit it in. I think we're caught up in everything like around everyone else bought it so I need to give it to my boss said I need to check out this particular tool. Our company has a big relationship with this vendor and we need to reciprocate our purchases. The other thing that we get so we talked about the shiny new objects are really are. The other thing that we get is the data from this tool is going to help us tremendously. What it's going to do for our inside sales organization is going to, it's going to lift their conversion rates as an example. And we call that data hoarding. And so when we have these things like shiny new object syndrome, or data hoarding, these are complex, these are real complexities that make building a Mar tech stack, are an effective one really challenging for us. And it leads to problems. In the end, we overspend and under use a particular product, and it causes friction within the organization. So this is all about trying to solve, solve how we build a great Mar tech stack.

Brandi Starr  05:39

I love that. And I was just reading an article, you know, every year, this time of year, we start to see all of the articles about where his spend going to be in the next year, and who's increasing on what and decreasing on what, and, you know, the trend is showing that spend on martech is decreasing. You know, last I've seen, you know, there's different studies that show different data, it doesn't seem to be a huge decline, but there is a decline. And so this is a very timely topic, in terms of this is something that I think lots of our listeners and heads of marketing are faced with in you know, how do we cut tools? You know, what do we buy? Do we just not buy anything, all those sorts of things. And so before we dive into that, I believe in setting intentions, it gives us focus, it gives us purpose, and most importantly, it gives our audience an understanding of what they should expect from our discussion. And so what's your best intention? What would you like people to take away from the discussion?

Brian Cooper  06:44

I'd like people to walk away with a framework that enables everyone to build or redesign or construct the right martech stack for themselves, the simple framework that we have, which we'll get into, okay,

Brandi Starr  07:00

perfect. So let's start with talking about some of the challenges in the how do we got here, or get here. And I know, I follow the, you know, martech, what used to be the martech 5000. You know, I follow that graphic every year. And it used to be that you could clearly see every, you know, logo with the naked eye without zooming. And now it looks like you know, a map of Europe. And so I think that one of the problems that I'd like to hear your take on is the fact that there are all these new things, there's all the new categories. And and and so a lot of heads of marketing really struggle with what do I need in order to be effective or to enable that growth. And so they get into that over purchase. And so I'd love to hear you dig in more on why that happens. Because I know you see it and you hit on some of that earlier. So I'd like to go a little deeper there.

Brian Cooper  08:04

Yeah, so So what why did why does a poor Mar tech stack eventually come into place? I think that there's so there's, in the article that we wrote, there's two primary principles. There's a shiny new object syndrome and data hoarding, shiny new object can manifest itself in a few different ways. Think about a large enterprise organization that has Field Marketing distributed throughout the world. In one market, you might say hey, this ABM technology is good for us. And then in another market, say in the US, you say actually, this ABM technology is better for us. When in reality, the two ABM technologies are 80% the same but people want to customize them. It compounds costs in that sense across the board. So you're not only paying for the out of pocket costs, you're paying for probably for some services costs, you probably have opportunity costs in terms of people having to support those in multiple places. You're switching Well, if you if you ever consolidate or if you've been expanded you, maybe there's potential switching costs exists there too. And so you have as some decisions are made in a distributed fashion. That's one of the reasons that leads to complexity. So think about it from an organization perspective. A lot of organizations do have larger organizations do have a martech specialists who looks after the MAR tech stack and others to give anyone guidance. If you're big enough to handle that definitely do it. Sometimes other organizations are relegated to IT management and that's totally okay too, as long as they can help you construct what's needed in terms of the overall system for marketing organization. So organizational construct, watching out for the shiny new object syndrome, data hoarding. data hoarding element is everybody saying, Hey, this is amazing data. I mean, everybody's been enraptured with intent data for so long. Long we've gotten great use out of it in the past, there's no doubt about that. But thing vendors will come in and suggest that it's, this is going to change the game. And I'm sure that they have use cases in which it does. But the challenge with data in general is, is you actually got to do something with it. And so once you get the technic, as you're thinking about the technology, make sure you have that plan in place to figure out how you're going to use the technology even as it comes to data. Is the data going to be? What is data going to be used for? And how is it going to connect with other systems? A lot of people don't remember the ecosystem. That's another element to like all of these pieces of technologies have genuinely have API's now. And they were they're required to connect with another piece of technology, are you set up and ready to make that happen to that's a part of that that's part of the plan that needs to be in place, there's all these little nuances that can just just create frustration or challenges that aren't thought of it. Thus, a well thought out martech processes needed a methodology?

Brandi Starr  11:03

Yeah, and that's one thing that we recommend often is when you're looking to purchase a piece of technology, you got to have these conversations before you buy it, like what does it need to be integrated with? Can it be integrated, whether out of the box, or you know, an open API? What data can we get? Can that data be used outside of the system? Because I think that's one limitation that a lot of people find is there's this great data that exists within a technology. But it's set up in such a way that it can't be married to data from other systems, and therefore it's less valuable. And then based on you know, who needs to have access to the data? What are they going to do with it? And I think these are often conversations that aren't happening on the front end, and therefore aren't a part of the decision criteria when choosing tools. Have you seen that as well?

Brian Cooper  12:04

Yeah, absolutely. And I think another you may think of another thing that's adding complexity to all of this, too, in terms of whether someone's evaluating things like another element about martech, that's happening today is the choice between single stack and best of breed. And finally, after I remember when Oracle came in, so they had a single stack in 2016. And finally, now they, you know, there's Oracle, Salesforce, and there's Adobe, pretty much, they've got the martech suite for the most part. And what's happening now as it relates to data integrations within the single stacks, is they don't always want to play nicely together, as you get beyond like, the web platform or the marketing automation platform and the Salesforce or the CRM, Salesforce platform, the CRM, as you get down further into, say, the CPS, the CPS don't like to talk with each other, you got to plan that out and be ready for that, that outcome, depending on the decisions that you want to make.

Brandi Starr  12:56

Yeah, and also with the history of various acquisitions from some of those larger companies, in many cases, like data from one versus another actually play better, you know, I think about Oracle and Salesforce, like when before Oracle owned it, like with Eloqua, as a marketing automation platform, it was built to integrate with Salesforce. And so if the data flows better, and that integration is more seamless, then Salesforce has now with its own marketing technology platforms, but of course, they don't tout that and people don't think about it. And so there is that mentality for her there was for a long time that if we buy within this one, you know, vendor, that everything is gonna work, you know, seamlessly together. And the fact is, most of these large entities have grown by acquisition, and don't always make the effort to, you know, reverse engineer how these things are going to play well together. They just say they do. Well. So another thing that I you said that I want to go back to is you talked about people making technology decisions based on previous relationships or existing relationships with other areas of the business or even popularity. And I think a lot of times at least what I see is that happens quite often when there's influence from various teams outside of marketing. So the evaluation is not just about marketing's needs, what have you seen in terms of like, how people are getting into that trap of making decisions based on relationships or what's popular?

Brian Cooper  14:46

I think I'm the relationships there's a few different angles to that. If you work for a large enterprise organization and you're buying from an Oracle and Adobe or Salesforce or something, there is an expectation around reciprocate. Question. And so sometimes you'll get top down pressure, almost everyone needs a marketing automation system. Now that top down pressure might force you to use the marketing automation system that you didn't prefer. So be it like, I think as long as it fits, you know, marketing automation that's almost universal. But there are other ancillary tools that come in. And now these single stack providers actually do have, as long as it fits within the construct of where you're trying to develop your system. No issue with that. But you do have to deal with that. That kind of relationship. I think others you know, especially like, if you're in, if you're in the technology space, there's all sorts of investor relationships and push that start to happen from from that angle. I do think the shiny new object around like, hey, everybody's using it. That's a problem too, right? That everybody's using it, I gotta jump after it. And so you just got to take a step back and say, like, what need Am I trying to solve before you actually go after and do it, things are real, I mean, this, Hey, they're all marketers, too. They're trying to make sure they're peddling their products and getting us to adopt them. And if we've got everybody talking about, that's a good thing for them. But as a user of it, just take a step back and use the process that we'll discuss and understand the needs that you guys have within your own business.

Brandi Starr  16:18

Well, that's a perfect segue into talking about the framework, because I always like to sort of, you know, set the stage around, like, what is like what's wrong, like what's not working. So now talk about your framework, because I really, you know, love the approach to making better choices with marketing technology and helping to not buy the wrong things.

Brian Cooper  16:41

Absolutely. So remember, if it's easy to remember, it's the three D framework, so deconstruct, decompose and design. And so the idea behind it is, is to take these three elements and build a plan around these three elements. What is deconstruct me, deconstruct means, deconstruct the buyers journey, everybody can define their buyers journey, however you want. So awareness, consideration, preference purchase, is interest, decide, engage whatever you want on your funnel. And basically, you put those at the top of the columns in an Excel table, if you'd like. And so let's just stay awareness, consideration, preference and purchase. That's the deconstruct the decomposes. What are the major tactics that you try to use at your organization, in order to drive someone through the buyers journey. And so you might have something like, our major tactics are called Mark marketing emails, or Salesforce tracking, or a CRM tracking system, or some sort of customer advocacy or customer engagement system, those are very big blocks of things that you need, then now you've created a table, now you start designing, and within each one of those cells, you start to put in what technologies will solve that portion of the buyers journey. So you've got the customer or prospect in mind, and associated with a major tactic that your business is trying to drive in. So then you can start filling in the classes of technology, once you get the classes of technology, it's up to you from a procurement perspective, like who you want to evaluate, and all of that good stuff. But one of the important steps in the design is not just to make sure that you put the technologies in there, but it's to make sure that it's connected appropriately for what you need within that overall framework, from a data perspective, from an API perspective. And so just making sure it's connected, so it's pretty simple 3d, deconstruct, decompose and design.

Brandi Starr  18:40

Yes, and I always love the, you know, the repeating letters, it makes it really easy to remember. And so I want to talk about deconstruct a little bit. Because, you know, as I thought about it, to me, like that is kind of the what I felt was the harder part. So we all know our journey. And so that's kind of the easy piece. But like, really, a lot of times when I talk to people, they'll say like, oh, well, we just use all these things across the whole journey. Or, you know, I mean, there's certain small things that, you know, it's like, if it's an auto dialer, like, you know, where that's it's like, that's one kind of piece. But like a lot of people really struggle to sort of think about their journey in that way. And so talk a bit more you know, about that thought process and how, you know, if I'm a head of marketing, and I'm trying to engage my team, to start to deconstruct what that journey looks like, help me understand like how I really do that.

Brian Cooper  19:50

So the, the deconstruct phase, is really think about how customers or prospects engage with your Major tactics at that particular buyers journey. And so in you use it really an in tandem deconstruct and decompose. So once you've just, it's just a matter of just simply putting the buyers journey out there. But what happens is you're going through the process. So you've got those two axes built, you start saying, hey, how does marketing automation affect the deconstruct or the buyers journey element. And marketing automation will generally be like an awareness consideration, you may or may, you may or may not stop at, say, like purchase or pref preference, you probably keep going. But at purchase, you probably saw purchase. And if you have something that engage after that might go into some sort of like customer retention or customer experience tool like Tango or Gainsight. And so at that point, you say, hey, the marketing automation tool is pretty big, like it's going to hit a big part of the buyers journey. But something like Tango insight from a customer engagement tool will actually take off at a different part of the buyers journey, you can get into specific things like, like event item, or I say like events registration, right, the event registration, you might only get it up, if especially if it's like a trade show, you might only say, Hey, this is an awareness building kind of thing. So I'm only going to put that there. And that's meant to designate some sort of value for you too, right? Like, sometimes these technologies like a CRM are gonna go all the way across. But sometimes they're just plugged in a specific box or so.

Brandi Starr  21:30

Okay, yeah. And that was what I was looking for. That was how I interpreted it. But I know sometimes it's hard to think about it that way. And then in the design phase, do you make any considerations? Like we talked a lot about data, in planning this out and designing? Do you put data in that conversation when you're thinking about it? Or are you looking more at just functionality and category of technology? Like how much? How granular do you recommend going on that design phase?

Brian Cooper  22:10

I'm a little biased, because I have a data background that I've spent a lot of my career doing. I think it's a necessity, for two reasons. One is because inherent to all technology platforms is some sort of data that it's processing. And in martech, as you're working across the funnel, you've got to somehow sync it with other tools. So is the data able to be passed? Like if you have an event registration tool, is that data eventually able to be passed into a marketing automation platform into a CRM platform? Because that's one element of data. So you've got to be able to pass it. But then the other element of data is, is the insights associated with it? Some might have more or less insights, simply that someone showed up to an event? Did they register for it? Did they show up to the event? Did they engage with you at the event? Those are like three things that an event tool can can provide you that kind of insights needs to go further downstream. So you can see how it's affected things like pipeline creation.

Brandi Starr  23:11

Yeah, and that that is, I think, the piece where, you know, again, people are not thinking they're thinking more just, oh, I need this category of tool. any gotchas in this process like any, you know, things that you know, if you're going to try and go through this exercise, anything that you need to like, have front and center, make sure that, you know, you don't make this mistake, or anything, any other considerations that we haven't talked about as people try to leverage this framework?

Brian Cooper  23:47

I think I think going one of the things I mentioned a little bit earlier is is don't let a vendor create the need for you. Like when they come and do their sales pitch, they've practiced they've rehearsed, they know what they're doing. In some cases, there's new industries being created all the time, like LLM as an example, which is defining new needs that we didn't know we had. Those are industry wide, but just be careful of the vendor pitches in terms of like how, how much they're did they create a need for you that you didn't know existed already? You gotta watch out for that one.

Brandi Starr  24:24

Yeah, and I have definitely seen lots of clients like fall victim to that. And then they get a tool and realize that it was overhyped in the sales process. So I think I would piggyback on your answer and also say, if you're going through an evaluation, ask the tough questions or specifics to your use cases, because sometimes that is how I think people get you know, fall for the hype, is, you know, there's all these shiny features that the vendor wants to talk about, and they may or may not be beneficial to you and it may be You know, glaring gaps in what you need that are in the fundamentals or some unique use case? That's that's really, really important. Yeah,

Brian Cooper  25:08

exactly. And, you know, seeking the there's also an element to this for I've been talking about it from the client side and what to expect that but there's also an element for the vendor side and what clients can expect. And how would I think about this, if I was on the vendor side of the equation equation. And I would say, you know, there's an element of consultative approach is to so find the gap in your prospects business and try to see how your product your solution meets their needs, that would be quite helpful, because it helps them helps your customer or prospect, pitch the product internally a little bit a little bit better. And then it aligns to this map or this framework, and then also to understand, like the switching and opportunity costs, so it's not just about the out of pocket costs for these products, it's like there's you might have to give up doing something else, which is your opportunity costs, or the switching costs in terms of services, right services are a real big thing when it relates to CMPs, marketing automation. And when we go through those things, those things can take a year, which means a lot of services. And so those are, I guess, those are some things that I watch, I say, hey, vendors watch out for this. And then also, this is a gotcha on the on the prospect and customer side, I was thinking about it from the vendor side, which is, don't tell me it only takes two weeks of the product. It never does not no large enterprise organization is always takes on longer. So don't get on the customer prospect side. Don't get caught up in the timeframe. Make sure you figure out what's actually real for your instance, itself seems like it always takes longer on the vendor side. But let's be realistic about how long it actually takes.

Brandi Starr  26:41

Yeah,I've definitely seen that as well. Like certain things. It's like, oh, yeah, you're up and running in a week. Well, how do you define up and running? Yes, because there are some platforms that literally as soon as you create it, technically, you could use it. But you know, not really. So yeah, so I liked that and even thinking about and it was, I liked that you brought up from the vendor perspective, because we do have heads of marketing from software companies that our listeners and, you know, something I thought about when you were talking is, I don't know, and I've been a part of a lot of technology evaluations, like a lot of our clients will have us in that process to be kind of an objective, third party in evaluating the tools. And a lot of vendors don't often ask what other technologies are in the stack. And so to your point in identifying where that need is, to me, that seems like a huge selling potential when you know what else is in the stack and how you play well, or not? With those things, being able to say like, here's where we fit that you don't have something there.

Brian Cooper  27:55

So that's an additional idea that, you know, I don't see often, think that's great point. And I think that I would be willing to bet that at a certain size organism, certain types company, the marketing organizations are mature enough in which they either have some sort of Excel spreadsheet saying, here's the stack, or they have published a map online, that'd be the largest organizations, where as a vendor, you can go and check those things out. And I think that goes into the point of also consultative selling, which is okay, I understand what your pain is, here's how ours will fit into your map and overall, 3d design to make sure you have the right system.

Brandi Starr  28:29

Yeah, no, I love the ideation. I'm like, as you're talking, I'm like, oh, there's this and that. And now is, those are my favorite guests, when you know, we can just kind of spit ball ideas. And so talking about our challenges is just the first step and nothing changes if nothing changes. And so, in traditional therapy, the therapist give the client some homework, but here at revenue rehab, we like to flip that on its head and ask you to give us some homework. So I always like to ask for your one thing. So if what you have said has resonated with our audience, what's the first step for them? Where do they start in, you know, avoiding the hype and making better marketing technology decisions?

Brian Cooper  29:16

I keep it really simple. I'd say check out the article in Harvard Business Review, it's July 2021. Don't buy their own marketing tech review that if you like it, and it makes sense, just start leveraging it. It's a simple framework, we've got a lot of good feedback from it. And that would be the one thing I'd recommend.

Brandi Starr  29:35

Awesome. Well, we will make sure to link to the article. So wherever you are listening or watching this podcast, check the show notes and we will link to the Harvard Harvard Business Review article. Because I do think that that's a great starting point. I think any sort of self assessment or way that you can start to you know, break these things down within your team is always a great place to start. And then then you can develop a plan of where you go from there. Awesome. Well, Brian, I have enjoyed our discussion. But that's our time for today. But before we go, how can our audience stay connected with you?

Brian Cooper  30:16

I would recommend connecting with me on LinkedIn. Check me out Brian Cooper on LinkedIn, and you'll be able to find me. Let's connect and have a conversation. Awesome.

Brandi Starr  30:24

Well, we will make sure to link to your LinkedIn as well. And thank you so so much for joining me today. And thanks, everyone for joining us. I hope that you have enjoyed my discussion with Brian. I can't believe we're already at the end. We'll see you next time.

Outro VO  30:46

You've been listening to revenue rehab with your host Brandi Starr. Your session is now over but the learning has just begun. join our mailing list and catch up on all our shows at revenue rehab dot live. We're also on Twitter and Instagram at revenuerehab.live. This concludes this week's session. We'll see you next week.