When it comes to implementing your martech, it can be easy to get bogged down by all the complexities. Kavita Singh shares Adam Sharp’s insight on evaluating your martech, while redefining how you look at your ‘stack’.
Framing the role of the CMO
In the world of marketing, everyone has an opinion. Having a clear understanding of your role in marketing and being able to translate that to your boss and stakeholders is going to be essential. As the CMO, definitions will help simplify your role. Adam Sharp presented five key roles of the CMO.
- Positioning and purpose: Positioning your brand and products while keeping the customer’s purpose in mind.
- Growth Culture: Being able to look beyond revenue for growth and focusing on the organisation’s competencies and capabilities.
- Insight and innovation: Making the actual time to create innovation for customers
- Customer stickiness: Internal challenge of maintaining that relevancy and lack of disruption
- Defining the job of the tech you hire: Understanding your tech and being able to bring it back to the business
Ditch the term ‘tech stack’
We’re so conditioned to refer to our ‘tech stack’ but Adam suggests not using this terminology, especially if your technologies aren’t integrating or running together. In a Gartner study, ⅔ of martech marketers say they’re not happy with their martech stacks right now.
Adam says: “Oftentimes, a lot of language is about filling the funnel, however there’s about 11 other functions your martech can do and it’s your job to find those four or five other functions and stick with them.”
For example:
- smarter revenue
- improved CX
- data compliance and governance
- sales enablement and ABM
The reality is that your martech can be utilised for more than one function and should be used to its fullest extent to avoid using 50 different technologies in the market. In the end, it’ll just create a mess.
Adam mentions that at Clevertouch, they try to narrow down their tech with three principles: if your technology doesn’t connect, simplify and inform, do ask yourself, why you’re implementing the technology in the first place. Once you have your techs, ditch the term tech stack and focus on connecting the ‘spine’.
Clevertouch simplifies this because they believe there are 4-6 core technologies, and the CMO should focus on them and ensure they are integrated to support the organisation.
These 6 core technologies include:
- Strategic content management platform
- Content management system
- Marketing automation
- Sales enablement
- Customer relationship management
- Business intelligence platform
After you’ve aligned your tech spine, you can look at the second generation tools, which Clevertouch has coined ‘Arterial Technologies.’ These include tools that are important to the business, but can only be achieved once the spine is established.
These tools could include: video conferencing, data enrichment platforms, intent data tools and CX tools.
