Marketing technology can make or break a business, especially with its endless intricacies. Managing partner at Sojurn Solutions Rebecca Le Grange and B2B ROI coach Philippe Ruttens provide their assessment of their own martech stacks. Kavita Singh reports.
What kinds of questions do you ask yourself when selecting what martech stack to invest in?
RLG: At our company, we work at an angle of ‘Does the martech that we select match and support our overall strategy and the customer experience that we are trying to create?’
What would be some reasons for upgrading your tech stack?
PR: Based on various global client environments experienced in funnel optimisation, demand generation and marketing automation, it has become clear to me that marketing and sales teams at most mid-size and large companies have a rather immature martech setup.
CRM (Sales tech) not really being synched or integrated with the marketing automation side such as, emails, sales enablement, digital channels, remarketing, social can be one main reason. Additionally, new audience engagement tools like chatbots and Drip seem to be underused, due to the lack of technical skills, team talent, bandwidth, lack of strategic vision or uncoordinated processes. Markets and competitions, UX, CX are all changing fast and need a fast, agile way of evolving your marketing and sales tech.
Which is your most useful piece of marketing technology in your stack and why?
RLG: We’ve used Eloqua for five years. We work in marketing operations and marketing automation so we do that on behalf of our customers. Using marketing automation for us is like drinking our own champagne. We need to use the strategies and tactics that we’re advising our customers to make in marketing. That’s not always easy. Some companies have huge budgets. We don’t necessarily have that. Automation is one of the best ways to streamline, and to still create a good experience for our customers and prospects but without tons of heavy lifting from our marketing team, and that’s where Eloqua plays its part.
PR: We use a strong CRM in place. A strong dual CRM, such as Salesforce or Hubspot – marketing automation combined with an aII-enabled set of tools, like digital marketing, chatbots, predictive analytics are key, this in combination.
Overall, how satisfied are you with the various martech systems you currently deploy?
RLG: We use Eloqua to underpin all our marketing and are happy with that setup as we believe it’s one of the market-leading platforms in the MA space.
I wouldn’t say that we don’t have areas for improvement, of course we do – the nature of martech is that you’re always going to be improving and enhancing what you’ve got in place. Certainly, for MA, we’ve got a good foundation and are making incremental improvements each month. For CRM, we our MA and CRM integrated, so it works well as we can align our marketing and sales efforts. For analytics, we use a combination of data from Eloqua, Google Analytics and CRM to provide a full view around the customer journey and interactions channels.
What are your main challenges regarding the deployment of your martech systems?
RLG: We have a pretty small growth marketing team across sales and marketing. One of the biggest challenges is that everyone has a lot of different responsibilities, and that means they don’t have tons of time to commit to things like enhancing individual systems and analysing the results. While we’ve done a solid job of setting up templates to aid efficiency (for example automated nurturing programmes), our team does not always have lots of time to analyse our different tools and think about how we’re going to optimise.
PR: One challenge is ensuring that the adoption and change management happens between marketing, sales, operations and IT departments. There needs to be communication, training, content and change management across all teams. By simplifying the setup and processes, you can start to ensure that deployment will be agile and adoption critical. Additionally, keeping that human element as a priority both internally and externally can be a challenge in itself.
Comparing your company to your three closest competitors, how does your management rate their business success currently?
RLG: If I were to say where we could do better, it’s probably thinking around how we can use our marketing tech investment to work harder for us, especially by taking advantage of ways to integrate the data sets between the different tools more fully. We’ve started on that journey but there are always ways to improve the level of integration between tools and how that in turn provides more comprehensive analytics.
