You Ask, I Answer: Prioritizing Your MarTech Stack?

In today's episode, Ted asks, how do you prioritize building an organization's Martech stack? How do you build a foundation that you can add to over time? It's a really good question. The biggest challenge for a lot of companies when they're building out their marketing technology stack is uh dealing with constraints that they have, particularly in their environment. So most companies have uh a major tech provider of some kind.

You know, uh you'll hear people say, like this is a Microsoft shop, a.NET shop, or Google shop. Um, and that major technology provider can provide uh uh some guidance but also some constraints on what you can and can't have. Uh that's not to say that you know marketing can't work with multiple platforms, certainly plenty of organizations do, but to increase the uh collaboration, uh to reduce uh the headaches that come along with compliance and audits, uh, it is generally a good idea to be aligned with whatever your company's major tech provider is, especially if your industry is a more highly regulated industry. You may not even get a choice, right? If you are 100% Microsoft shop, you may be using Microsoft Dynamics as your CRM, even if you know Salesforce is considered the the gold standard in your industry.

The so the platform and the environment provides one major constraint. The thing that to do next after that is to do a thorough analysis of your marketing operations funnel. Now, if you remember, customer journeys are how we look at essentially marketing to consumers, whether they're B2B or B2C. But from an operational perspective, we still have a funnel. We still have to have a funnel because you can't just have people working on things willy-nilly.

You do have to have some sense of order. So uh you want to do an audit of your operations funnel and figure out where are your biggest gaps in terms of technology? Where are you seeing a lot of inefficiencies? Where's your head count? Um, where is your performance lagging?

And most of all, if you look at your funnel numbers, where is your biggest fall-off, right? Is it lead generation? Is it demand generation? Is it uh awareness? What's what's most broken in your funnel?

Now you can't just go out and start buying things, but you do want to have that mapped out. I mean, maybe put it on a whiteboard in a conference room or something, and just every stage of your operations funnel, have what the performance numbers are and what technology pieces you have in place. The next thing you want to audit is data interchange and interoperability. So of the pieces you have, how interoperable are they? Do they have good APIs?

Do they have robust data export? How well do they play with others? What kind of integrations do they have built in? The more interoperable piece of software is, the more likely it is that it's going to be a good and long-standing part of your operations funnel. The more of a walled garden a piece of software is, the less likely that you should be uh spending a whole lot of time with it.

Once you've got that operations funnel whiteboarded out, and you've got your little post-it notes detailing the performance of each piece and stuff, then it's time to start looking for vendors to patch the holes. Where are the things that uh you you have the biggest gap? That's gonna be your your budget priority because you can't buy everything all at once. Um, and you're gonna make a list of vendors in that space, and in that particular space, whether it's let's say, for example, it's um prospect nurturing, uh, you see you have marketing automation software that helps with that. You're gonna make a list of what its interoperability features, what is its data interchange features, what kind of API does it have, what kind of data export does it have, and ultimately, um, how compatible is it with the rest of the stack.

That's gonna be a key part to understand how pieces map together, and again, you want to focus on the interoperability because you may change pieces downstream. Right, you may be on, say, Microsoft Dynamics today, but in a year, uh sales is moving to Salesforce.com. You want a piece of software that is in your marketing automation section that is compatible with both, as compatible with as much as possible, um, so that when the time comes to change it out, it's not a big deal to essentially pull the plug from one CRM and plug it into another one. If on the other hand you have a vendor that is uh narrowly tuned to one piece of uh tech downstream, that could be a problem, right? So you want to have that map laid out, the connections between layers, because remember that uh there's some tools like Google Analytics.

Google Analytics plays mostly well with others, but it more than anything mandates others play well with it because of of its market position. So things like setting up user ID, um, you want a marketing automation system that's robust enough to connect back upstream as well, those interconnections between nodes in your Martex stack are are the defining feature of what you will and won't be using. So that's the process. After that, it's vendor selection time, it is uh RFP time, uh, and it is evaluating the vendors and making sure that they do what you want them to do. W again with that focus on interoperability.

I literally cannot say that enough. Um, it is the most important thing for making sure that you have a platform that you can build on over time. Vendors, some, not all, spend a lot of time trying to lock you in, trying to make it easy to onboard and difficult to leave. Take a look at the vendors that you currently have, take a look at the vendors that you're evaluating in the marketplace and ask yourself how easy is it to swap this piece of technology out. The best pieces of technology in your Martech stack will be the ones that it would be the easiest to replace because again, of that strong interoperability.

The vendors that try to lock you in, those are things that you want to try to avoid because if you do need to change upstream or downstream pieces of technology in your stack in six months, a year, two years, and you've become so dependent on one vendor that it doesn't play well with others, it's gonna be very painful to make a change. So even though vendors have sort of a self serving incentive to make it difficult to leave, in your selection process, look for those vendors that make it easy to leave, um, knowing that that will actually work in their favor because if their technology is good, you you won't want to leave. But if if you need to swap out for some reason, it's not you're not completely locked in. Those are all criteria for selecting Martech vendors in your stack. Um So that's the the summary.

First, figure out what your constraints on your environment are. Second, do a funnel operations analysis to figure out where the gaps are. Third, evaluate the partners you do and have already and how interoperable they are. And fourth, select partners to fill the biggest gaps with an eye towards interoperability. Um it's tough and it will take a long time.

And there will be some uh less good choices you've made over time. Um that happens. Uh Zapier or uh if this then that can help provide a little bit of digital glue. You want to try and avoid that as much as possible because it just complicates things. If you have follow up questions about this, please leave them in the comments box below.

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