“Everyone within Publicis will become a data analyst, an engineer, an intelligence partner, with all the information they need at their fingertips to supercharge client growth.”

Publicis Groupe made that bold statement last week in a press release and presentation celebrating their performance from last year “after shifting from a holding company to a platform” and charting their course for their future in the age of AI.

Now, if you’ve raised a skeptical eyebrow to that claim, you’re in good company with most of the people I shared that with on LinkedIn and the artist-formerly-known-as-Twitter. But, hey, if the world’s third largest agency holding platform company can’t paint an audacious picture, you’d worry about their core competency.

But here’s the thing: directionally, I think they’re right.

Empirical evidence supporting that vision came with the release of Workato’s 2024 Work Automation & AI Index report earlier this week. Workato is a leading enterprise automation company that provides a low-code/no-code (LCNC) platform for automating processes and workflows across your tech stack. (Disclosure: I am an advisor to them and a co-author of their CEO’s new book, The New Automation Mindset.)

Using anonymized data sampled over 36 months from 1,055 customers on their platform, they captured the ground truth of what companies are automating — looking at over 82,000 automations — but arguably more remarkably, who is building those automations.

The big reveal in my opinion: 44% of all automated processes are built outside of IT.

Business ops teams — such as marketing ops, sales ops, revops — build 27% of all these automations. Non-IT project managers, product managers, app adminstrators (looking at you, CRM admins), build another 10%. And then another 7% of “other” builders, which I’ll guess as intrapreneurial power users. (I have a couple of them on my partnerships team at HubSpot, where we also use Workato, and it’s amazing what they can do.)

It’s also notable that these non-IT builders — who are experts in their domain, but at least organizationally are not experts in IT — aren’t just automating simple processes in their function. They’re tackling complex automations too.

“Scores of 1-3 are simple, point-to-point integrations with 1-4 steps. They contain no logic, and interconnect simple SaaS applications. Complex processes (4-6) involve conditional rules, logic, looping, data transformations, and cross-reference data. Sometimes they involve batch processing. Highly complex processes involve a combination of SaaS, on-premise, ERP, and enterprise applications. They often contain 30+ steps, with conditional rules, advanced transformation, humans in the loop, and more.”

Now, I know there are a few cynics skeptics out there who think non-IT people using LCNC tools is a recipe for disaster. We could have a vigorous debate over the relative value of domain expertise vs. IT expertise when it comes to implementing digital operations within a business function. But instead of rhetoric, let’s look at data:

If business teams implementing their own automations was going to create a train wreck, you’d expect to see that show up in the first year, when those business builders are least experienced. Or at least the first two or three years, right? Things would go pear-shaped, and the CIO would drop the hammer, “Look at the mess these amateurs created! We’re taking over.”

But that’s not what the data shows. Quite the opposite. On average, after having 31% of automations built by the business in Year 1, the organization leans into that model even further and has 41% built by the business in Year 2. By Year 3 that number is up to 48%.

Keep in mind, this is not an IT versus business situation, with the two different sides using competing tools. They’re all unified on one common platform — a quintessential example of a workflow-layer aggregation platform — that is almost always owned by IT. Empowering these business teams is part of IT’s strategy.

As Workato notes, “IT is evolving into a player-coach role: 56% of automations are still built by IT personas, but IT is also being tasked with governance and guidance for the 44% handled by business teams.”

Can we have both empowered domain expertise and good IT governance harmonized? The evidence here suggests yes.

The really exciting thing about this? This multi-year data from Workato only includes the effects of generative AI at the tail of the time period analyzed. Last year, they released a natural language copilot to empower builders even further — as well as a governance framework and academy course to teach it. A year from now, we’ll see the emprical impact, but I bet it will show an acceleration both in total automations as well as the percentage of business-led automations.

Speaking of generative AI, the Workato report also includes interesting data about where organizations are incorporating generative AI into their automations:

48% of the use cases are in revenue operations, with an additional 12% in customer support and operations. The most common of those use cases is with conversation intelligence — summaries, sentiments, next steps. These have been some of the most time-consuming and error-prone manual facets of managing the customer journey. Intelligent automation here is clearly a huge win for both companies and their customers.

So let’s circle back to where we began, with Publicis’ bold aspiration.

The facts are that businesses are rapidly increasing the scale and complexity of their digital operations. They’re empowering more and more people outside of IT to shape and adapt pieces of those digital operations that are closest to their work. The Workato report didn’t cover the democratization of analytics directly, but a significant number of their use cases involve intelligently distributing data to enable more context-specific analytics. That might not make every employee a data analyst, but it’s sure going to enable a lot more people to productively use self-service analytics in their jobs.

Admittedly, Martec’s Law still holds: there’s going to be a ton of difficult organizational change required to harness the innovation this technology now makes possible. But that’s why this is such an amazing time to be working in martech and marketing operations.

The post Every marketer a data analyst and an engineer… delusion or destiny? appeared first on Chief Marketing Technologist.

To regular readers, it’s no surprise that I’m bullish on ecosystems. I’ve long advocated that platform ecosystems solve many of the challenges of an ever-changing, highly-diversified martech landscape. It’s also what I focus on at HubSpot, with the company’s ecosystem of technology partners. (So, yes, I’m biased. But that doesn’t mean I’m wrong.)

In my post earlier this month, I explained why platform ecosystems are powerful as an engine of innovation. Today, I’d like to highlight the remarkable impact ecosystems can have on a company’s go-to-market performance.

But first, I want to emphasize that I’m not just talking about software platform ecosystems. When it comes to go-to-market opportunities, many different kinds of businesses have an ecosystem of complementary products and services that are related to their business. Anything that influences your customers in how or why they select, use, or get value out of your own offerings is potentially part of the ecosystem around your business — whether you acknowledge it and actively manage it, or not.

McKinsey, who studies these things at the macroeconomic scale, estimates that a full 1/3 of the world’s economy will be driven by “integrated networks” of related businesses — to the tune of $105 trillion (that’s trillion with a t) — by 2030.

It’s worth contemplating just how broad your own unearthed ecosystem may be.

Activating other companies in your ecosystem is usually done through partnerships. Classically, the majority of these are sales “channel” partnerships. But as Jay McBain — the world’s leading analyst in this domain — has pointed out, there are often many other potential partners who assist and influence sales and customer success, beyond the one partner who executes the purchase transaction.

All of them have potential to be harnessed in ecosystem sales and marketing motions.

HubSpot, Partnerships Leaders, and Pavilion just released a joint report on The State of Partner Led Growth, surveying over 200 marketing and sales leaders about how they leverage partnerships in their go-to-market and the performance impact they see from it. The results are pretty eye-opening.

The chart at the top of this post has the key takeaway: 80.5% of marketing and sales leaders who aren’t directly in partnerships themselves (the light teal bars) report that partners are becoming a more effective channel in reaching their audience.

A full third of them (33.9%) said partners were becoming significantly more effective.

That’s remarkable because most marketing and sales channels are fighting noise and entropy that make them less effective. From demand generation in marketing to outbound prospecting in sales, the hill keeps getting harder to climb. So to have a go-to-market channel that is accelerating in its performance is noteworthy.

By the way, on the dark teal vs. light teal bars. Many partnership teams report into sales or marketing or the broader revenue org. So we segmented the responses from those leaders directly owning partnerships vs. those who don’t. As you’d expect, partnerships people tend to report a more optimistic view. The non-partnerships leaders bring a more objective lens, so I view their responses as closer to the ground truth. (That said, it is interesting to see where and by how much the two segments diverge in their opinions.)

Let’s look at a few other data points as to why partners are seen as more effective.

Quality leads are the bloodstream of B2B marketing, where “quality” is in the eyes of the sales org by their close rate. The majority (55.6%) of non-partnerships marketing and sales leaders say that partner-sourced leads close at a higher rate than the average lead. A third (33.3%) reported that partner-sourced leaders are significantly (26% higher or more) likely to close.

This goes beyond just sourced leads to also influenced leads. When non-partnerships sales leaders were asked which factor has the biggest impact on a prospect’s purchase decision, prior to speaking to the sales team, trusted agencies, consultancies, and tech vendors were ranked #2, only behind opinions of people in the buyer’s own professional network.

Given this data, it would make sense for marketing to look for opportunities to bring more partner-sourced or partner-influenced leads. One way to do that is through co-marketing programs and campaigns.

While co-marketing motions aren’t as common — for reasons we’ll dig into in a moment — the data suggests that they are more effective on a number of important dimensions:

For brand awareness, engagement rates, conversion rates, lead quality, and the lifetime value (LTV) of those leads, co-marketing campaigns outperform the typical marketing campaign.

The one criteria on which they don’t is customer acquisition costs (CAC). In some of the qualitative interviews conducted as part of this report, the concern of a “planning tax” was raised as a reason why co-marketing is less frequently pursued and view as more costly (in time and effort as much as hard costs).

This makes sense. Coordinating inside one’s organization can be challenging enough. Coordinating across multiple organizations even more so. But this is where I see an opportunity for marketing operations and a growing field of partner-oriented marketing technology to help systematize and optimize more ecosystem marketing motions. The space around 2nd-party data martech is evolving rapidly, and given the statistics in this report, the opportunities for leveraging it effectively are quite promising.

There’s a bunch more data in this report, which you can download for free, as well as fascinating interviews with CROs, CMOs, VCs, and GTM-experts from BCG — whew, that’s a string of acronyms — on different facets of running effective partner-led growth.

The post Breaking through the noise getting harder? Here’s one marketing channel that’s getting more effective appeared first on Chief Marketing Technologist.

I’m excited to announce a new book coming out this summer, The New Automation Mindset: The Leadership Blueprint For An Age When Anyone Can Automate Anything With AI. Written by Vijay Tella, CEO of Workato, with contributions by Massimo Pezzini and myself, it offers a framework for harnessing automation as an engine of innovation, not merely efficiency.

When you think of automation, what comes to mind?

Most people would say automation is having a machine perform a task that otherwise would have been done manually by a human. The key benefit is efficiency. We automate tasks that a machine can do more quickly, more accurately, and more continuously. We automate tasks to save money by swapping labor costs with a fixed investment in a machine.

That definition isn’t wrong. But it is out of date and misses much of what’s now possible.

That view of automation is rooted in the Industrial Age. And while computers and robots have dramatically expanded the range of tasks we automate beyond classic manufacturing, the way we think about automation hasn’t advanced nearly as much.

We live in the Digital Age, but our approach to automation is often still anchored in the mental models of the Industrial Age. Fixed automations, dictated top-down, for a small number of high frequency tasks, rolling down a linear conveyor belt. It’s a factory mindset.

But we’re living in a time of interwoven digital ecosystems, both within our business and beyond our walls, that are more about highly networked interactions.

It’s more fabric than factory.

The biggest constraints we face in harnessing the full potential of automation today? Our own self-imposed limits of how to apply it.

Vijay, Massimo, and I wrote this book to give you a new automation mindset to break free of those limits, to instead offer a digitally-native view of automation that will help you out-maneuver and out-innovate your competition.

It’s framed by three new ways of thinking about automation.

Plasticity: A Growth Mindset

The most powerful difference between the physical and the digital is malleability. Atoms are slow and expensive to reconfigure. Bits, on the other hand, can be instantly rearranged, at near-zero cost.

We’ve inherited much of our current thinking about process management from the days when process was all about atoms. People and things moving in the physical world. We designed processes to optimize those moving parts. But since implementation of processes — or later changing those processes — was expensive, we didn’t think of them as particularly flexible.

In fact, the rigidity of a process was a feature, not a bug. “This is the process” were comforting words. Follow the process. Don’t deviate from the process. We eliminated variance. And that was — and still is — a benefit.

But variance and adaptability are two very different things.

Eliminating variance with a fixed, repeatable process gives us internal predictability. It’s like a deterministic function, such as y = x + 1. Every time you plug in x = 2 as the input to that process, you’ll get y = 3 as the output on the other side.

But it does nothing about external predictability, of which there’s very little these days. We are operating in an environment of rapid and continuous change, dramatically accelerated by AI. Technology, competitive dynamics, and — most of all — customer behaviors and expectations are continually shifting around us.

Whether those changes are a threat or an opportunity largely comes down to adaptability. How quickly can we adapt our business to new circumstances?

Adapting our business means changing our processes. It doesn’t work to have our old process of y = x + 1 take x = 2 and suddenly output y = 5. That would be chaos!

Instead, we need to swap out y = x + 1 with a different process. Maybe a slightly modified one, y = x + 3. Or maybe an entirely new one, with additional steps and multiple variables, y = 2x² + 5z + 7. (Okay, no more math equations, I promise.)

We still want this new process to be as predictable as the old one. But the key is that it’s a new process that’s been adapted to new circumstances.

And here’s the beautiful thing: because almost all of our processes today are — or can be — digital or digitally-orchestrated, they are extremely malleable. It’s bits, more than atoms, flowing through them.

To harness the power of that malleability, you just need two things:

1. The technical ability to reconfigure your digital processes on-the-fly.
2. The willingness to make those changes at the speed the technology makes possible.

Modern enterprise automation software gives you the first.

The second is achieved by approaching process management with the same principles applied in agile software development.

Instead of once-and-done, big-bang implementations, we should approach process development as a living thing. Develop processes in a more incremental and iterative fashion. Use outcome-based feedback loops to guide ongoing improvements. Empower small teams to nimbly create and adapt process automation — both to optimize their own local workflows and to help shape global, cross-organizational ones.

Don’t resist change. Design for change.

The first way of thinking in an automation mindset: think continuous adaptation.

Democratization: A Scale Mindset

We often say that a business is its people. Their talent, drive, imagination, and heart are what brings a business to life. Human capital is by far the most precious capital we have.

But when you think about it, it’s more accurate to say that a business is its processes.

Processes are how our people interact with each other, with our customers, with our partners. Processes are the means by which individuals come together as teams, teams come together as companies, and companies come together as ecosystems.

People are the who in our business. They’re the crucial source of our what and why.

But process is our how. How our people work together. How they engage with customers.

Any collaboration between two or more individuals inherently has a process. Now, that process could be intentional or improvised. It could be reliable or erratic. It could be fast or slow. It could be enabling or constricting. It could be delightful or frustrating. But it is a process.

A business consists of thousands — even millions — of such processes, small and large. Collectively, these define how the business operates. And in turn, this determines the experiences its customers and employees have. The sum of these processes really are the business.

Recognizing this leads to two conclusions.

First, process is the way we harness the talents of our people to deliver amazing experiences to employees and customers. Nothing is more frustrating to them than being stymied either by rigid processes that aren’t adapting to changing circumstances or by undefined “dark” processes that are improvised and inefficient, holding them back, tripping them up, dragging them down.

Second, the sheer number of all these processes makes it impossible to dictate them — much less optimize them — top-down. You must enable talented people throughout your organization to create and adapt the processes that they’re closest to. It’s the only way to address the first conclusion at scale.

And here’s where things get exciting.

The rise of low-code/no-code tools and now generative AI in enterprise automation has dramatically changed what talented people throughout your business can do. They can now create and automate digital and digitally-orchestrated processes, and they don’t have to be software engineers to do it.

These tools let business people express how they want a digital workflow to work through an intuitive, visual user interface or even a natural language chat UX. They can “program” a process to be automated — without having to know a programming language. These tools take care of the underlying technical mechanics for them.

These tools enable a much wider set of people to automate processes in their work. As a result, the total amount of automation in our business can grow significantly.

These automations can be implemented quickly and inexpensively — and continually be adapted — without getting bottlenecked behind other, unrelated teams and projects. And they can tap the specialized experience and expertise of the people who are closest to the work being automated.

It democratizes the power to innovate throughout your company. Nearly anyone with an idea for how a process can be automated and improved can bring it to life. And that’s empowering to teams of all sizes, in all corners of your business.

Instead of being stuck in a poor process, they can invent a better, automated one.

This democratized adaptability and innovation can be your secret sauce.

As venture capitalist and no-code pioneer David Peterson eloquently said, “When the person who feels the pain is also empowered to build the solution, the result is magical and utterly unique.” Enabling such bottom-up invention at scale, forged by talented individuals at all levels within your organization, lets you out-innovate your competition across hundreds and hundreds of processes, small and large.

But you’ve got to enable it and encourage it.

The second way of thinking in an automation mindset: think democratized invention.

Orchestration: A Process Mindset

Yet perhaps the greatest way in which automation differs qualitatively today is the ability we have to dynamically orchestrate processes that span many different tasks, teams, and systems.

You can still automate an individual task. But now you can also automate whole sequences of tasks, which combine together to perform larger functions. It’s like individual atoms bonding into bigger molecules, and those molecules coalescing into complex objects and lifeforms.

This is possible because essentially all of the apps and services we use today can be controlled through APIs in the cloud. Or, for legacy software that doesn’t have an API, we can deploy AI agents that simulate human inputs and outputs — and then control those AI agents through an API. (This latter approach has been known as robotic process automation.)

Picture every function in each of your apps and services as a little digital Lego block. With an AI-powered automation platform, you can assemble any combination of those Lego blocks into any process you can imagine.

Like Lego blocks, you can rearrange them any time. You can embrace continuous adaptation.

Like Lego blocks, almost anyone can build things with them using a low-code/no-code or natural language AI interface. You can enable democratized invention.

But the truly giant leap forward is that you have complete freedom to assemble these digital Lego blocks in any pattern you want — regardless of which apps or services they reside in.

You’re not restricted by the boundaries of an individual app.

You’re not restricted by the boundaries of teams or departments either.

For that matter, you’re not even restricted by the boundaries of your firm.

You can mix-and-match any combination of functions, from any app or service, anywhere in your organization or beyond it. You can leverage any data, anywhere within your network, to feed into and control these assembled processes. You can synthesize workflows that aren’t simply linear. They can run multiple tasks in parallel at the same time. They can conditionally branch to different actions based on any decision logic you want.

It’s more than automation. It’s orchestration.

For example, consider everything that’s required to onboard a new employee. Add them to your HR system. Get agreements signed and filed with legal. Set them up on your payroll service and arrange direct deposits for them. Configure a new computer and get it delivered. Program their access badge and their single sign-on credentials. Create their email account. If they’re working in sales, create an account for them in your CRM and assign them proper permissions. Queue up training sessions for them in your learning management system. Email them a welcome kit. Physically send them some groovy swag. Update employee directories and org charts. And so on, and so on, with different steps criss-crossing a wide variety of systems and departments.

All of that can be orchestrated through your enterprise automation platform. Some steps should be sequenced in a specific order. Others should happen in parallel to speed up the end-to-end process. A bunch of decisions need to be made along the way — as many as possible made algorithmically. The whole experience should be personalized and delightful for your new hire. And that process should run consistently, efficiently, and reliably for every new employee.

By orchestrating your whole employee onboarding process with enterprise automation, you also gain incredible transparency into it. Every step along the way is tracked. You know exactly which steps have been completed and when — and which ones still remain to be done. Everything is monitored for errors or exceptions, delays or deviations. Everything is instrumented to give you insight into its performance and opportunities for improvement.

Nothing falls between the cracks. In a complex, distributed process, that’s immensely valuable.

Employee onboarding isn’t the only thing that looks like this. Campaign operations in marketing. Quote-to-cash in sales. Case-to-resolution in customer service. Data pipelines and dashboards. Digital product development and deployment. The list goes on — and is expanding rapidly.

The more digital your business becomes, the greater need there is to keep all the different parts of your operations aligned and synchronized in real-time across traditional boundaries.

But this capability, once you have it, opens up a wide frontier for innovation. You can invent automated processes that go far beyond what was possible with their manual forerunners, unconstrained by any organizational or technological silo that may have been a hurdle in the past.

The third way of thinking in an automation mindset: think boundaryless orchestration.

Innovate the Future, Don’t Automate the Past

Continuous adaptation. Democratized invention. Boundaryless orchestration.

These are the pillars of an automation mindset that takes full advantage of what the technology is capable of today. It lets you apply automation as more than a tool for productivity. It becomes a tool for creativity.

Want the full story? Pre-order The New Automation Mindset: The Leadership Blueprint For An Age When Anyone Can Automate Anything With AI for August 29.

The post Three pillars of The New Automation Mindset, for an age when anyone can automate anything with AI appeared first on Chief Marketing Technologist.

Okay, so martech-tacular isn’t a word. It isn’t even a very good portmanteau. But it’s what I’m feeling as I prepare for a full month of spectacular martech adventures.

The 1st Tuesday in May is Officially #MartechDay

First up is the brand-new Best of Breed Marketing Summit that Frans Riemersma and me are hosting on #MartechDay, Tuesday, May 2. If you haven’t yet signed up for this free event, register now. It’s a full day of talks by some of the brightest people in marketing, martech, and business transformation that we’ve worked with over the years.

We’ll be unveiling the 2023 marketing technology landscape — want to take a guess as to its size? — and delving into three of the biggest trends shaping the industry these days: generative AI, a universal data layer, and composability. We’ll also host the 2023 Stackie Awards, with 36 terrific entries this year from Verizon, Casey’s, IBM, TIAA, Nationwide, Philips, Sargento, The Washington Post, and more.

Frans and I will also conduct a series of candid fireside chats with leaders from our five premier sponsors, ActionIQ, Flywheel Software, SAS, Snowplow, and Uptempo. These are companies on the forefront of shifts happening in data and composability in martech — and how to manage marketing in this new environment effectively, efficiently, and responsibly. No fluff or sales pitches. We’ll ask the questions we know you want real answers to.

Register to join us for even one or two sessions — or for the entire day. (If you register, you’ll also be able to catch any of the sessions you missed on demand afterwards.)

Embarking on a Martech European Tour

Two days after #MartechDay, I’m on a plane to spend the next three weeks touring Europe and giving a series of talks and workshops in Zurich, Milan, Hamburg, Copenhagen, and London.

After chilling with Frans for a few days in Amsterdam and seeing some of my HubSpot colleagues in Ghent, I’ll head to the ZHAW School of Management and Law outside of Zurich. On Thursday, May 11, I’ll guest lecture an executive class, spend some time at the university’s MarTech Lab — how could I not? — and then participate in a Swiss Martech Night with professors Dr. Marcel Hüttermann and Dr. Brian Rüeger, along with Swisscom executives Patricia Gross-Gonzalez and Simon Stanovic.

From there, I’ll head to Milan, where I’ll be collaborating with IAB Italy and Gianluca Carrera for “The Ultimate Martech Masterclass” on May 16. This is an invitation-only event, so you will need an “in” with the IAB to attend. But there’s a possibility of a wider audience AMA later that evening. Check with iab.it for more info.

Next, I’ll be doing a martech briefing in Hamburg on Monday, May 22, hosted by Janus Boye of Boye & Co., sponsored by DXP platform Kentico. You can sign up here. We’ll then hop over to Copenhagen and do a second briefing there at the Imperial Hotel on Tuesday, May 23. We’ll be joined by Astrid Illum of DFDS, Miika Nimelä of Inchcape, Michael van Dijk of APS IT-diensten, Roel Kuik of Aviva, Delfin Vassallo of Uponor, and Jan Havel of ACTUM Digital. It will be quite the martech soiree in the happiest city in the world. You can sign up here.

Finally, I’ll close out the month by keynoting the AntiConLX Global event in London on May 25, hosted by the amazing Carlos Doughty. I’m honored to be speaking alongside many of the legends who’ve inspired me: Jill Rowley, Tom Goodwin, Kevin Kelly, Neil Patel — and my brother-in-martech Frans. Carlos always produces an epic event, so it’s definitely worth attending if you can. You can register here.

I hope to see all of you virtually on #MartechDay, May 2. And hopefully get to meet many of you in Europe over the rest of the month.

P.S. If you’re wondering how I can spend a whole month traveling, given my full-time role as VP Platform Ecosystem of HubSpot, it’s because HubSpot gives employees a 4-week sabbatical on every 5-year annivesary of their joining the company. How cool is that?

“So you’re using your sabbatical from a martech company to… go talk about martech?”

I know, I know. But this is what I love to do. Some people golf. Other people dive. My passion is martech. Hanging with a bunch of marketing and martech leaders, discussing the future of our rapidly changing industry, all while enjoying the beauty of Europe in May? That’s my idea of a dream sabbatical.

The post From #MartechDay to a European martech tour, May will be martech-tacular appeared first on Chief Marketing Technologist.

If you’re working in marketing operations, life is probably pretty good. 74% of marketing ops pros say they’re somewhat satisfied or extremely satisfied in their roles. Over half have been promoted or taken new jobs in the past year. And on average, they make about 25% higher salaries than other kinds of marketers in their organizations.

Not bad for a role that used to be considered the “island of misfit toys” a decade ago.

Our latest 2023 Martech Salary and Career Survey, jointly produced with the team at MarTech.org, reveals a largely positive view of marketing operations roles — who we lovingly label as marketing “maestros” for the work they do in orchestrating the people, processes, technology of the marketing department.

These marketing maestros earn an average salary of $152,339 — compared to $124,174 for general marketers. (Most participants in our survey were based in the US, so in other geos your monetary mileage may vary.)

The one dark cloud on this profession’s otherwise sunshiney career news is that, once again, we found significant disparity between salaries for men and women. On average, men in martech are paid 24% more than women.

Now, that gap is smaller this year than the 30% gap we saw last year. And the gender gap for Director+ roles has shrunk to 5%. So at least it’s turning in the right direction. We were also encouraged to see that men and women were now promoted at an equal rate this year, compared with a 14% gap for women last year. But we’ve still got further to go.

Another finding that I found interesting was how relatively few martech professionals had a degree in engineering or computer science — less than 10% overall. The vast majority of respondents had degrees in business, marketing, economics, arts, or liberal arts. You don’t have to be an engineer or a software developer to be a technology leader in today’s world.

So what do these non-engineer marketing maestros do?

Martech Responsibilities for Marketing Ops Maestros

The most common responsibility in marketing ops roles: researching and recommending marketing technology products (81%). They may not spend a lot of time on that mission, but it’s a key part of their job.

I found it interesting that 64% of marketers also said this was part of their job too. Which as technology continues to be more and more democratized, isn’t necessarily surprising. But it’s another data point showing that despite the forces of vendor consolidation and stack rationalization, marketing teams are still onboarding new technology.

It’s a wild-but-true stat: on average, companies add 6.2 SaaS products every 30 days.

The next top 4 responsibilities for marketing ops complement this tech proliferation:

1. Train and support marketing staff on using marketing technology products (80%).
2. Design and manage internal workflows and processes (78%).
3. Integrate marketing technology products with each other (77%).
4. Operate marketing technology products as an administrator (73%).

Monitoring data quality (64%), architecting the overall martech stack (63%), integrating with non-martech systems (63%), consolidating duplicative martech (63%), and monitoring martech performance and SLAs (61%) round out the top 10.

What martech tools are marketing ops maestros working with?

Well, ha, spreadsheets continue to be the most common “martech” tool that both marketing ops maestros and general marketers spend 10 or more hours a week working in. The next three most common categories of tools frequently used in marketing ops are:

1. Marketing automation/campaign management (62%)
2. Project management (61%)
3. CRM or customer data platforms (57%)

But while most of these are very tech-focused responsibilities, it’s impressive to see that what most marketing ops maetros see as the most rewarding aspects of their job are demonstrating/proving a positive impact on the business from martech (61%) and supporting other people in marketing who need to use marketing technology (60%).

Yes, half of them (50%) enjoy keeping up with changes in marketing and martech. If you don’t love change, this probably isn’t the career for you. And successfully solving technical issues with martech software is a source of satisfaction and pride (54%).

But managing a team — hiring, training, supervising, developing, and retaining talent — and working across departmental boundaries, such as with IT or sales, was also rewarding for more than 1/3 of them. At its best, marketing operations is the art of human collaboration in a digitally wired world.

And with the next generation of martech innovation already happening at an accelerated rate around us, the opportunities for these maestros who blend the best of marketing, technology, operations, team development, and organization-wide leadership are only going to grow.

Learn from Marketing Ops Legends for Free on May 2

On Tuesday, May 2 — #MartechDay! — Frans Riemersma and I will be hosting a free online Best of Breed Marketing Summit that will feature presentations from some of the true legends of marketing operations:

• Darrell Alfonso, Director of Marketing Strategy & Operations at Indeed.com and author of The Martech Handbook: Build a Technology Stack to Attract and Retain Customers, giving a talk on Achieving Strategic Marketing Operations.

• Mike Rizzo, Founder & CEO of MarketingOps.com, the #1 community for marketing operations pros, giving a talk on What It Takes to Be a Marketing Ops Pro with the best advice he’s curated from hundreds of marketing ops leaders.

• Jill Rowley, a.k.a. “The Mother of Marketing Automation” and GTM Advisor at Stage 2 Capital, engaging in a sure-to-be-lively discussion with me about The New Rules of Go-To-Market in the age of “nearbound” marketing.

• Dr. Debbie Qaqish, Chief Strategy Officer at the Pedowitz Group and author From Backroom to Boardroom: Earn Your Seat with Strategic Marketing Operations, giving a talk on how to Build Credibility Through Marketing Ops.

• Danielle Balestra, Director of Marketing Technology & Operations at the global law firm Goodwin, sharing hard-won advice on how to be Ready to Onboard Marketing Technology to your stack.

…plus over a dozen other talks from martech industry superstars such as David Edelamn, Neil Perkin, Jay McBain, Scott Vaughn, Benjamin Bloom, and more. Frans and I will also be unveiling the 2023 marketing technology landscape and celebrating the 2023 Stackie Awards. (Last chance to enter your stack this coming week!) We’ll also be conducting candid fireside chats with experts from ActionIQ, Flywheel Software, SAS, Snowplow, and Uptempo on their state-of-the-art marketing technologies.

It’s going to be seriously fun #MartechDay. Join us for a little or a lot of the day!

Take a peek at the full program below and register for free here. Can’t make it live that day? Sign up and catch the recordings afterwards. It’s like a free MBA in marketing technology management.

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The first Tuesday in May is #MartechDay — a day to celebrate all the wonderful people working in the martech industry and the amazing practitioners who bring these capabilities to life in marketing organizations around the world.

On last year’s #MartechDay, Frans Riemersma and I released the updated 2022 marketing technology landscape and hosted the The Stackies 2022: Marketing Tech Stack Awards. Over 1,200 marketing and marketing operations leaders joined us online for those sessions.

This year, Frans and I wanted to do something bigger with the community.

Again, we’ll release the 2023 marketing technology landscape and host The Stackies 2023 (you are going to enter your stack, right?). But we’ve also invited over a dozen of the leading practitioners and martech experts that we know and love to give a series of 20-minute talks on the subjects that they’re most passionate about right now:

• David Edelman, senior lecturer at HBS and for CMO of Aetna
• Darrell Alfonso, director of marketing strategy & operations at Indeed.com
• Jill Rowley, GTM advisor at Stage 2 Capital and martech industry legend
• Neil Perkin, author of Agile Transformation and Building the Agile Business
• Benjamin Bloom, VP and martech analyst extraordinare at Gartner
• Debbie Qaqish, chief strategy officer and author of From Backroom to Boardroom
• Mike Rizzo, founder and CEO of the awesome MarketingOps.com community
• Jay McBain, chief analyst for channels, partners, and ecosystems at Canalys
• Scott Vaughan, legendary martech CMO and current GTM advisor at large
• Roger Beharry Lall, research director at IDC focused on mid-market martech
• Robert van Geffen, global head of digital marketing at Philips
• Hans Molenaar, director of the Beeckestijn Business School
• Danielle Balestra, director of marketing tech & operations at Goodwin
• Amber Sellens, digital marketing product line manager at Shell Energy

We’ve organized these talks into a free, mutli-track, online event for May 2 that we’ve christened the Best of Breed Marketing Summit. Our overarching theme is exchanging the best ideas across marketing and martech. It’s all about cross-pollinating across technologies, practices, industries, geos, skillsets.

Supporting this new Best of Breed Marketing Summit are five amazing sponsors: ActionIQ, SAS, Snowplow, Uptempo, and Flywheel Software. With each of them, Frans and I will host a fireside chat to dig into topics that they’re the world experts in. Composable CDPs. Responsible marketing in the age of AI. Mastering behavioral data in marketing. Marketing business acceleration. The amazing world of what’s possible for marketers in the cloud data warehouse today.

We’re also incredibly grateful to have Goldcast supporting our event by providing a super groovy virtual events platform, as well as our continued data partnerships with Clearbit and G2. (You’re going to be amazed by the analysis we’ll be able to share about the 2023 marketing technology landscape thanks to their help.)

All of this is completely free: register here to get full access to event — which will also give you the option to catch many of these sessions on-demand afterwards.

See you at the Best of Breed Marketing Summit on #MartechDay!

P.S. You’ve still got 4 full weeks to enter The Stackies 2023: Marketing Tech Stack Awards. Don’t miss this opportunity to get recognition for you and your team, as well as the vendors you love working with, by contributing your stack illustration to the martech community!

The post Join us for the new Best of Breed Marketing Summit for this year’s #MartechDay (May 2) appeared first on Chief Marketing Technologist.

15 years ago, sitting at a wobbly kitchenette table in our cramped apartment, on a frigid February morning outside Boston, I started this blog for marketing technologists.

Of course, at the time, almost nobody knew what a marketing technologist was. It sounded like an oxymoron. While there were certainly people already working at the intersection of IT and marketing, they were few and far between. Their roles were often ill-defined and underappreciated. But it was clear they were forging a future that was coming at us fast.

I related to them, as a strange hybrid with a non-traditional career myself. My parents had run a small ad agency, with my dad as an exacting copywriter. As a teenager, I developed — and marketed — multiplayer games for dial-up bulletin board systems (BBSes), a precursor to the Web. In the heyday of the dotcom boom and bust, I was the CTO of an agency building enterprise websites for marketing departments. And in 2005, I launched a SaaS product for marketers to build no-code (!!) landing pages and interactive content.

I lived with one foot in marketing, one foot in software engineering. And I loved it.

Today, there are 100,000’s of marketing technologists globally, thriving in careers that are celebrated and in high demand. It’s been a joy to have a front-row seat to the birth of this industry and the incredible evolution of marketing as we know it. I’m grateful and humbled to have been fortunate enough to play a part. I really do love this stuff.

So on this anniversary, I thought I’d share 15 reflections on martech and more that have stuck with me on this journey.

1. Intersections between fields are gold mines.

There’s value in deep expertise and specialization, for sure. But intersections of different disciplines are abundant in opportunities to cross-pollinate concepts and capabilities. Seek out opportunities to mix and mingle with professionals from other fields. Open your mind to blending ideas from hobbies and passion projects into your work. Combinatorial innovation unlocks infinite possibilities. Embrace the adjacent possible. (One of the most influential books I ever read on this dynamic was The Medici Effect by Frans Johansson.)

Hacking Marketing, my own book, was about the cross-pollinating ideas from managing software development to managing marketing. (The dedication to my daughter read, “Let your imagination always lift you beyond the limits of labels.”)

2. Heed the 10/90 Rule of technology and people.

Web analytics guru Avanish Kaushik proposed the 10/90 Rule in 2006: to have magnificent success, for every $10 you invest in tools and technologies, invest $90 in people and their development for harnessing that tech.

While I am sometimes mistaken as a martech tool nut — well, okay, I kinda am — I’m an adamant believer in the 10/90 Rule for companies to succeed with marketing technology. If there’s a law of gravity for martech, this is it. And I’ve witnessed hundreds of cases where companies leapt off a tall tech stack disregarding that law, only to experience a Wile E. Coyote splat shortly thereafter. Invest more in talent than tools.

3. Code is creative. Full stop. (Actually: full start.)

In the Dark Ages of a couple decades ago, technologists were pegged on one end of the career spectrum and marketers at the polar opposite. A popular misconception in marketing was that code was a purely analytical craft. Programmers were not “creatives” in their eyes. (Programmers had their own opinion of marketers that wasn’t particularly flattering either.)

Of course, this was total baloney. Coding is a quintessential act of creation. A copywriter weaves words, but a coder can weave worlds.

This is crucial to comprehend, because in the age of AI and no-code, marketers can increasingly wield the power of “code” themselves to create experiences. With huge leaps in martech innovation on the horizon, the range of experiences capable of being created is going to be breathtaking. (One of my more passionate posts was a 2016 letter to the editor of AdAge rebutting that “martech is so boring.”)

4. Technology trends towards democratization. Ride the waves.

Back in the 1970’s — when Elvis was still alive and touring — people scoffed at the notion of “personal computers.” In the age of mainframes and not-so-mini minicomputers, the idea of a computer in every home and on every desktop seemed ludicrous.

You’ve probably heard the anecdote that today, the smartphone you carry around in your jeans is 900 million times more powerful than Apollo 11’s guidance computer. It’s also approximately 5,000 times faster than the CRAY-2 supercomputer of the 1980’s.

Nearly every technology innovation follows this pattern. We’re seeing it today with no-code tools imbuing non-technical marketers with technical superpowers. For entrepreneurs and practitioners in a domain, such as marketing, great opportunities are consistently found at the points where a technology crosses a boundary from a smaller specialist group of users to a larger, more generalist one. And you can see them coming from a mile away.

5. Amara’s Law and outsmarting Hype Cycles.

“We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.” This observation made by Roy Amara in the 1960’s became known as Amara’s Law.

Ain’t that the truth. We’ve witnessed this with the Web, e-commerce, mobile, big data, AI. The whole of field of martech is a cornucopia of examples from the past two decades. The metaverse and Web3 are the most recent short-run overestimations that are also long-run underestimated.

Another way of framing this phenomenon is Gartner’s Hype Cycle. Overestimating in the short run gives us the Peak of Inflated Expectations — and then we tumble into the Trough of Disillusionment. In time, we find Enlightenment. But if we resisted our back-to-back overestimation and underestimation instincts, the trough wouldn’t be so deep.

I wrote in 2018 that seeing through this pattern gives you opportunities to “beat the market” in how and when you leverage new technology.

6. Empirical data vs. survey data. Survey says…

I read a dozen martech-related reports every week. The vast majority of them rest on data that was collected from surveys. But as interesting as I find many of these studies, they often suffer from two flaws: (1) the answers people give are inaccurate — feelings more than facts — and (2) the people who answered the survey are skewed by selection bias.

Example of inaccuracy: ask people how many tools they have in their tech stack and they will almost always report a number that is much, much lower than the real number they get when they use a SaaS management platform to inventory their actual tool count.

Example of selection bias: a CDP vendor runs a survey about CDPs, but the respondents are mostly their own customers; if a high percentage report having implemented a CDP, that’s not representative of CDP adoption more broadly in the market.

Empirical data is much more accurate, and its selection bias — where did the data come from? — is usually more transparent. Automations people build in Workato is empirical data. Number of software products in G2 is empirical data. The martech landscape, year over year, is empirical data too.

Survey data reveals what people think. Empirical data reveals what people do.

7. The right picture is worth a thousand logos words.

The most surprising thing to me about the martech landscape has been its… well, crikey, its exponential growth! But the second most surprising thing to me has been how widely this hot mess of a logo casserole has traveled and how many people it’s influenced.

The biggest learning it’s given me — other than the triumph of empirical data over wild conjecture (e.g., people in 2014 claiming the ~1,000 mapped solutions would collapse within a couple of years; spoiler alert: that didn’t happen) — has been to appreciate how influential the right visualization can be in illuminating a complex subject.

Standard charts and graphs are useful and serve a purpose. But novel visualizations can help us see things in a very different way. My advice: sketch more, draw outside the lines.

8. Respect the “crazy ones” building in the trenches.

I don’t mind critics of the martech landscape. But it does bother me when people dismiss the entrepreneurs building these martech ventures. “All these products do the same thing.” No, actually, they don’t. Just because those critics can’t imagine how martech could be improved or innovated — even if only incrementally — doesn’t mean others can’t.

Now, most entrepreneurial ventures fail — in martech as much as any other field. So in a purely statistical sense, those cynics can justify their claims. But many of those ventures do succeed — some fantastically so — pushing the frontier of marketing forward. And in a very real sense, those winners emerge only through the crucible of continuous competition.

But beyond that, show a little respect for the people who are pouring their passion into building something. The odds are against them, but they have the courage to jump in the arena. The people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.

9. Antifragility — things that grow stronger with change.

Possibly the single most influential book on my thinking has been Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Fragile things are harmed by shocks and stressors. Robust things withstand them. Antifragile things actually get stronger.

Go ahead, make a joke about the martech landscape guy appreciating disorder.

But in all seriousness, the martech landscape is an excellent example of an antifragile system. Collectively, all these martech vendors competing with each other, responding to emerging technologies and changes in consumer preferences and behaviors, make the entire martech industry stronger over time. Individual companies will falter, but they’ll be superseded by evolutionarily “better” ones.

Open platform ecosystems are also antifragile for the same reason, as microcosms of a larger industry. Any one software company can only build so many things, in their own “opinionated” way. Ecosystems enable many different “opinions” to be expressed across a much wider range of capabilities. The ecosystem overall adapts to changes and different use cases at a remarkable pace, growing stronger as a result.

Even your own martech stack can be antifragile, if you design it using platform principles to adapt and grow stronger with ever changing apps, data, and use cases.

10. Conway’s Law and (my proposed) Inverse Conway’s Law.

Conway’s Law states that organizations design systems that mirror the organization’s communication structure. If three teams build a product, the product will probably have three distinct pieces.

More broadly, a software company will produce a product that reflects not only its internal team structure, but also its culture and philosophy. This is often referred to as “opinionated” software. That can be a good thing — if you like their culture and philosophy.

It’s one of the reasons I advise martech buyers to evaluate not only a vendor’s functionality and pricing, but also the behavior of the humans they interact with there. Their attitudes. Their ideas. The ways they communicate. This will be reflected in their software and the experience you have with it.

This is important because when we adopt a major software platform, we often adapt the way our company works to leverage it properly. I call this Inverse Conway’s Law: your organization’s communications structure will evolve to reflect the design of the systems you implement. Choose wisely.

11. Martec’s Law: you are the change you choose.

If there’s any “law” that I’m associated with though, it’s Martec’s Law: technology changes exponentially, organizations change logarithmically.

Coined in 2013, it’s not a law in any scientific (or legal!) sense, but a general observation. The greatest management challenge of the 21st century is navigating an organization through the rushing rapids of technological change. We can’t keep up with all of it. So we have to be intentional and strategic about which changes we embrace — and which we don’t. Developing organizational agility (and architectural antifragility) is a tremendous competitive advantage in this environment. It lets you change faster than your rivals.

The pandemic revealed there are sometimes opportunities to make a step-function leap in organizational change. Not easy, but the occasional “reset” in a company can be a powerful way to renew. (As the adage goes, “Never let a crisis go to waste.”)

As an interesting aside, apparently Martec’s Law influenced the Portuguese navy.

12. A sense of humor is a competitive advantage too.

Wrangling Martec’s Law, day in, day out, isn’t easy. Constant change can be a fascinating life of adventure. But it can also be stressful and exhausting.

One antidote I turn to is humor. The occasional indulgence in silly dad jokes (2020, 2021). Playful April Fool’s posts, such as my Microsoft acquisition, the unveiling of hyperagile marketing, or the ultimate consolidation of the martech industry. And even a bit of satire with more bite.

I’m not saying I’m any good at it. In fact, be warned, those dad jokes are truly terrible. But finding ways to bring some levity to all the serious work we do makes the journey more fun. And I believe we do our best work when we’re having fun.

It’s one of the reasons I am a huge fan of Tom Fishburne and his weekly Marketoonist strip.

13. Good artists borrow, great artists steal.

“Good artists borrow, great artists steal” is attributed to Pablo Picasso. Now, to be clear, I’m not advocating for plagiarism or copyright infringement. (Looking at you and your friends, dear DALL-E.)

But voraciously devouring smart thinking and creative ideas wherever you can find them, being inspired by them, and — with proper attribution — building on top of them is the best way to make progress. It’s the antithesis of “not invented here.” Stand on the shoulders of giants. And thank them for the lift.

Brian Solis’s Conversation Prism mapping social media and Terence Kawaja’s original adtech LUMAscape were key inspirations for the first martech landscape I created. A value chain model taught to me by Ducan Simester, my marketing professor at MIT, gave me a framework for evaluating horizontal vs. vertical competition in martech.

More recently, my view of aggregation dynamics within martech stacks adapts Aggregation Theory as defined by Ben Thompson of Stratechery.

14. Bias for action. Just do it. Ship an MVP.

Possibly the best career advice I got was from my discrete math professor: do something.

He was talking about strategies for making it through his notoriously hard exams. But really, he was talking about strategies for life. We rarely have a perfect plan with a guaranteed outcome in our line of sight. Waiting for one can leave you waiting forever. Doing something — anything — is often the catalyst we need to start a snowball rolling down the mountain.

This same advice has been repeated millions of times, in millions of variations. Just do it. Ship an MVP. Fortune favors the bold. A bias for action. Do or do not. The journey of 1,000 miles begins with a single step.

On that cold February morning 15 years ago, I could never have imagined the journey I would take with this blog. Along the way, I’ve tried hundreds of ideas — most of which fizzled or fell flat. But a few took flight. Like competition in the vast martech landscape, the ones that succeeded only emerged through the jostling of the many more that didn’t.

Have an idea? Not sure where to start? Do something, anything, and see where it leads.

15. Be grateful and pay it forward.

If we occasionally stand on the shoulders of giants, we continually lean on the shoulders of many friends, family, co-workers, teachers, advisors, community members, and even the kindness of strangers. This wondrous web of people in our lives is an incredible gift.

It would be impossible for me to thank everyone who has contributed to my long martech journey. You, dear reader, are one. But a few people I must absolutely call out: Chris Elwell for launching the MarTech Conference with me. Anand Thaker, Jeff Eckman, and Frans Riemersma for their collaboration on the martech landscape. Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah for letting me help shape HubSpot’s martech ecosystem. And super early advocates Jon Miller, Mayur Gupta, Jill Rowley, Laura McLellan, Gord Hotchkiss, Sheldon Montiero, Erica Seidel, David Edelman, Rishi Dave, Brian Kardon, David Raab, Jascha Kaykas-Wolff, Christopher Penn, Paul Roetzer, Ann Handley, Doug Kessler, and the late Wilson Raj.

Thank you.

One of the best ways to express gratitude to all of the generous people who have helped you: pay it forward. I’ll do the best I can.

Here’s to the next 15 years.

The post 15 reflections on martech and more from 15 years of writing chiefmartec.com appeared first on Chief Marketing Technologist.

In my previous post, I boldly predicted that we’re on the verge of a whole series of martech innovations: AI, composability, AR/VR, even, yes, “Web3”. While I agree with the pessimists that 2023 will be a challenging year for a lot of martech vendors, I believe this is more of a business cycle bump in the road, rather than the end of an industry. We’re just getting started.

But my real faith in martech’s growth ahead is the profession that is growing up around marketing technology management.

15 years ago, when I started this blog, most marketing roles and most technology roles — IT, software engineering — were on opposite ends of the career spectrum. They didn’t really understand or appreciate what the other did. A Dilbert cartoon from 2010 quipped that marketing was “just liquor and guessing.”

Today, it’s a very different story. A new kind of hybrid professional, applying technical skills in a marketing context, thrives. I’ve called them marketing technologists. They have varying job titles around marketing operations and marketing technology, from technical marketing specialist to full-stack marketing developer, from marketing automation manager to CRM administrator, from martech solutions architect to marketing software engineer.

There are many splendid varieties of marketing technologists.

For my inaugural post in 2008, I did a Google search for the phrase “director of marketing technology”. It turned up 7,520 matches. Maybe not bad. But for already being 14 years into the commercial Internet revolution, it seemed pretty sparse.

Today, that search generates 175,000 results, including a bunch of great job opportunities:

Keep in mind, if you’re reading this post some time in the future, January 2023 was a month of major tech layoffs. Yet firms — very well known brands — are still hiring senior marketing technology leaders. That’s a clear signal of a profession in demand.

With a little help from my friends (thank you, Alexander and Jaime!), we ran some recruiter searches on LinkedIn and found that ~150,000 people have “marketing technology” in their profile. ~680,000 people have “marketing operations” listed.

This is impressive when you look backwards at how far we’ve come.

But when you look forward and realize that there are approximately 333 million businesses in the world, that’s fewer than 1 martech/marketing ops pro per 400 companies. (And some large, smart companies horde dozens of them.)

Of course, not every business needs a dedicated marketing technologist. The state of the art in martech software is making it easier and easier for non-technical marketers to do plenty of digital feats of wonder on their own. (And, in all fairness, today’s generalist marketer is much more tech-savvy than their predecessors in 2003.)

Yet still, as companies grow and become more sophisticated, there are opportunities for them to leverage more advanced technical marketing talent to do things that are ahead of the curve — and ahead of their competition.

My best guess, shown in the adoption curve at the top of this page, is that marketing technologist careers have “crossed the chasm.” They’re not just for early adopter companies that have been digital leaders. They’re in the mainstream of the early majority. But I think they’re still less than halfway penetrated in the global business community.

I admit, this estimate is influenced by the many anecdotes of companies I talk to that still haven’t gotten their arms around marketing operations as a core pillar of their marketing capabilities. But it’s also based on the approximate ratio of martech/marketing ops profiles relative to the total number of businesses in the world.

Not coincidentally, it also lines up with this research from Boston Consulting Group interviewing ~2,000 companies on the current state of their “digital transformation”:

Most are still in the process of transforming. I’m willing to bet that in that journey, as they identify opportunities to significantly improve the efficiency of their marketing efforts and the digital experience their prospects and customers have with them, they’ll be seeking martech talent.

So as a first-order effect, I believe the future for marketing technology and operations careers is incredibly bright.

But as a second-order effect, I believe this is a tailwind for the martech vendor industry too. Many great martech products require a relatively mature marketing operations capability in order to fully harness the power of what they can enable. The more martech talent there is, distributed across more businesses invested in these capabilities, the larger the market for their technologies will be.

The post Tech layoffs? Great companies are actively hiring marketing technology talent appeared first on Chief Marketing Technologist.

Yesterday, my brother-in-martech Frans Riemersma and I gave a tour de force presentation of the current martech landscape as it stands at the end of 2022 (now officially over 10,000 solutions!), five major trends that we expect will shape martech and marketing in 2023, and a framework for managing it all in what is sure to be a highly “fluid” year ahead.

You can watch the complete 60-minute session on YouTube and also download the full 117-slide deck here.

As I shared yesterday, the first part of our presentation showed the new martechmap.com site — an interactive version of the martech landscape — that now lets you search and filter using data from Clearbit (approximate revenue, company size, and date founded) and G2 (average rating and number of reviews). We also used this enriched data in aggregate to analyze several fascinating patterns across the martech industry, such as the differences between average age, average rating, average size, and average adoption rate of the 49 martech categories.

I think you’ll find the results of that analysis as interesting as we did. They also give some direction to where future entrepreneurial ventures in the space are likely to arise.

In the second part, we did a deeper dive into five major trends that we believe will be front-and-center for most martech teams in 2023:

• Generative AI & Personalization
• Activating Cloud Data Warehouses
• Ecosystems & Communities
• No-Code In-House Creators
• Web3 & Metaverse (although we think this will be an anti-trend in 2023)

And finally, in the third part, we presented a framework for dealing with this challenging martech environment by (1) managing the hype curve, which appears in multiple forms — almost fractal-like — in both the industry and your internal stack and organizational capabilities and (2) managing the journey of “productizing” marketing, from experimental projects to standardized processes to automated products.

But rather than read about it, we think you’ll find it more fun to hear and see it directly from our recorded event:

We want to thank again our sponsors SAS, Uptempo, Calendly, Goldcast, G2, and Clearbit. Their support has funded and enabled our research and made it possible for us to share the results with the martech community at no cost to you.

The post A whirlwind tour of the new martech map, major martech trends for 2023, and how to manage it all in the year ahead appeared first on Chief Marketing Technologist.

Ever see the miniseries From the Earth to the Moon? Great story about the Apollo moon missions. I’m pretty sure it was in one of those episodes that I most remember the impactful difference between “unit tests” and “system tests.”

Getting people on the moon required a huge number of different component technologies, many each breakthrough innovations on their own. But success depended on how well the entire system worked. All those components needed to be connected and coordinated. This was real systems integration, decades before we ever faced such challenges in day-to-day marketing.

Spoiler alert: getting the whole complex system to work right is really hard.

Marketing might not be rocket science, but as it has expanded through hundreds of digital apps, algorithms, agents, activities, automations, analyses, etc. — all moving parts in our Big Ops environment — the challenge of systems integration in our discipline has grown exponentially.

Latest Stats on Tech Stack Growth

Last month, writing about when martech stacks become too complex — an assessment that is relative to your martech organizational maturity — I mangled adapted Occam’s Razor to state Martec’s Razor: other things being equal, the simplest stack is best.

But to riff on Einstein too, a stack should be as simple as possible but no simpler. Refusing to add components that are essential to your company’s competitiveness isn’t a winning strategy. It would be like the Apollo missions ditching their guidance technologies because they were too hard to integrate. “Just kinda eyeball it, guys. It’s the big gray rock in the sky. You can’t miss it.”

The competitive drive for digital capabilities is why companies keep adding new SaaS apps to their stacks — even at the same time that they are removing others that are redundant or underutilized.

A new 2023 State of SaaSOps report published by BetterCloud, a more upmarket SaaS management platform, gives us some updated data on the average size of tech stacks at mid-market and enterprise companies.

The numbers, shown above, are more modest — and I believe more rationalized — than I’ve seen in similar reports in years past. Companies have ~130 SaaS apps on average. Within BetterCloud’s longitudinal data set, they’re still showing year-over-year growth from 2021. But my impression is that growth is leveling off.

Still, ~130 SaaS apps isn’t exactly major “consolidation” the way some people have been predicting it. These are rich, heterogeneous stacks. And that fundamental structure doesn’t seem to be changing.

In fact, if you look at companies’ tech stacks through the lens of their relative SaaS maturity — a different cut of the data from BetterCloud’s report — you will see that SaaS-powered workplaces, which have almost all their apps in the cloud instead of on-prem, have more like ~186 SaaS apps on average.

If we make the rough approximation that such SaaS-powered workplaces are further along in their “digital transformation” than others — I know, that’s a debatable generalization — we should expect that companies who are further behind will catch up. And will likely adopt more SaaS apps in the process.

Bringing “Shadow IT” into the Light

From a survey of 743 IT professionals in the BetterCloud report, 58% of them expect IT’s budget to grow in 2023. Where are they planning to invest? These are their top priorities with regard to SaaS management:

Optimizing SaaS spend — which is often code for “consolidating apps” — is in the list. It’s important. But other priorities are deemed more important. The top one: strengthen IT and business collaboration.

A big part of that mission is enabling different business teams to use the apps that they deem most effective in their work. Not in insulated silos outside of IT’s purview — what has historically been known as “shadow IT.” But with the right level of IT governance helping to address real problems and security risks with unmanaged (or undermanaged) apps.

Even the most independent marketing ops/martech professional will acknowledge that solving these challenges in a consistent way across the business is A Good Thing. Leaning into collaboration with IT on proper “SaaSOps” management can improve the lives (and careers!) of marketing ops teams — without hindering the growth and evolution of new martech capabilities.

Getting the martech stack connected into the fabric of the rest of the company’s broader tech stack helps overcome those governance challenges. But it also opens the door to deeper collaboration between marketing and other teams in sales, customer success, product, operations, etc.

Orchestration > Integration > Consolidation

For many years now, “integration” has been a hot-button issue in martech. MarTech.org’s Martech Replacement Survey published back in July shows that better integration was the second most common reason (24%) people decided to swap out an existing martech app. And when they picked the replacement app, integrations and open APIs were an important factor for 54% of those buyers.

The State of Martech 2022/23 report recently published by the Learning Experience Alliance (LXA) reinforces this fact: inadequate technology integration is still the main barrier to marketing technology investment and use today.

This persistent drive for better integration has become a strong motivator in the martech industry. It’s why the 2nd Age of Martech, which we’re now living in, is defined around platform ecosystems.

But integrating your tech stack is only the first step.

To really unlock the power of your apps and platforms, you need to orchestrate business processes across them. This requires both (a) visibility into these apps and (b) the ability to automate across them — two of the focal points for SaaSOps.

Such cross-app automation may be conducted by domain-specific platforms, such as CRMs at the center of customer-facing workflows. Or by enterprise automation platforms that span the entire business. (I think of these as vertical aggregation and horizontal aggregation patterns, respectively, in matrixed tech stacks.)

Digital orchestration is defined by the ability to reliably run app-spanning and team-spanning automations. It’s a higher order effect beyond task-level efficiency of classic automation, opening the door to new process innovation. The hard boundaries of intracompany silos start to become permeable and flexible in exciting new ways.

Such coordinated execution isn’t limited by the (virtual) walls of your company either. In the infinitely adjacent digital ether, we can now orchestrate activities with our second-party partners too. It’s why ecosystem tech is now one of the hottest categories in martech. And it’s why partner ops, the forgotten ops, is suddenly thriving.

Which brings me to the point of the graph at the top of this post.

A big reason why sprawling tech stacks can be so frustrating is because the costs of coordination across unintegrated and unorchestrated apps exceed the benefits those specialized apps offer on their own. Each app may be brilliant at what it does in isolation. But the whole point of a digitally transformed business is that our digital activities are not isolated, but connected together.

Wrangling those interdependent connections ad hoc or manually quickly becomes a mess.

To make a large stack effective, you need the ability to orchestrate the system as a whole. It’s partially a technical challenge, which is being addressed by a wide field of cloud-based automation and aggregation technologies. But it’s also an organizational challenge, which requires new thinking and cross-team collaboration.

Consolidation in your tech stack is good — as simple of a stack as possible, but no simpler. Integration across your tech stack is important too, as a necessary but not sufficient step towards orchestration. But orchestration is the rocket engine.

This is marketing’s “system test” on our journey from the earth to the moon.

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