Building a martech stack is a culture change, not just a tech one
I read many articles and listened to many podcasts about building a good marketing technology stack. There are countless reviews for various tools, lessons learned around implementation from user groups, and best practices for when you should adopt specific tools.
Most martech research and thought leadership does so from a primarily technical perspective. Of course, that makes sense. Many implementations are technical! Getting a new martech product stood up takes a highly specialized skill set to get it right.
What's overlooked too often, in my opinion, are the people.
What cultural impact could this new tech has more broadly?
We focus on getting the new tech to stand up to how your pressing new buttons work. And that's important!
But it's easy to overlook that there are humans that will use that tool. Even people who aren't users of a new device could have their day-to-day impacted in a way that could affect their performance and ability to get things done and (in dire circumstances) affect their overall engagement with work.
The Road To Failure Is Paved With Good Intentions
A lot of marketing tech is bought by companies to make something more effortless, more powerful, or to simplify some process. It's an exercise in efficiency if done well. Even technically flawless implementations can fall flat if there isn't cultural buy-in.
This new tool is intended to make someone's life easier. Even some new platform is designed to help a salesperson do their job in fewer steps… it's still a significant change for that person.
What seems natural to you because you've been so close to the process will feel weird to someone else. Your new tool to make something more operationally efficient may cause something to be more inefficient because someone will have to re-learn how to do their job.
Even if you are making something better, you may still need to explain the value-add.
Learning In Real Life
We've flipped our entire tech stack in about 18 months at Womble Bond Dickinson. We re-platformed our email marketing system, improved our account-based reporting, flipped how we organize thought leadership online, implemented a new relationship tracking system, and re-platformed a CRM.
That's much significant change in a relatively short time.
As a digital director, many of the needed updates were evident to me, but I also benefited from these changes being a core part of my job and career path. We built a similar martech stack at my last job from the ground up. I had the advantage of having seen this movie before.
A good chunk of our marketing and BD team had not.
Sure, now they had a LOT more customer data at their fingertips…but what should they do with it now? We can't collect data for the sake of collecting it.
We had overhauled our email marketing system - but why are the email templates so different now? How is list management changing as a result?
Sure we simplified our data collection approach with our CRM re-launch…but what about that one little feature someone liked about the old system?
I will say, our marketing technology stack is in a much better place than it was before. We are outpacing many big law firms in our approach to digital strategy. In the last few months, I have fielded calls from others at larger firms than ours asking about lessons learned.
That won't be enough for our success.
Without diligence educating everyone on our team about the why of our changes, how it impacts them or how our new changes could help them be even better at their jobs, all those new shiny tools make no sense. They won't be effective.
Those digital marketing projects that would sound impressive to other digital marketers on LinkedIn won't drive business results - and ultimately fail.
I've learned in real time that staying in my lane too much isn't broadly helpful to the firm. You have to skew toward over-communication regarding technical changes, field questions, educate your broader team, and be mindful of your potential blind spots along the way.
Even the most tech illiterate team member could raise a point that makes you re-think an aspect of your project—varying perspectives matter.
How To Build a Successful Martech Stack - Culturally Speaking
1 - Bring others in early, before the buying process: It's easy (and honestly more convenient) to keep the buying process small out of the gate. It's faster and feels more efficient. I took too much of a move fast and break things approach to re-platforming our email marketing at WBD last year. I relied too much on my experience for decision-making and stayed in my silo. That change was bumpy.
Learning from that experience, when we re-platformed our CRM, my team spent three months doing stakeholder interviews with attorneys, BD, and marketing folks in the firm to see our actual needs before we started the buying process. Throughout multiple stages of our implementation process, we consistently brought people into various stages, collected feedback, and tried to figure out where my team may have blind spots. We also over-communicated where we were in the project in meetings and kept everyone up-to-date as best we knew how.
2 - Communicate the Why: It's not enough to show the improvements you are trying to make. Give the why. Use evidence. "Based on stakeholder interviews, we consistently heard ____, so we are trying to address that by _____." Nobody likes disrupting their way of working for no apparent reason, no matter how good the intentions are. You can't make everyone happy, but you can at least communicate intent and how it affects the greater good as best you can.
3 - Under-promise. Over-deliver:
Avoid the temptation to throw an overly ambitious timeline out of the gate to look good in a meeting.
Be honest.
Put together achievable project timelines and, in your mind, leave some room for error for things to go sideways along the way.
Even with this conservative approach, our digital team at Womble has hit implementation timelines much faster than what's typical.
Also, don't over-promise capabilities. Please don't make it sound like the new tech you are implementing will change lives. Explain the changes simply. Make them sound practical because they should be. You aren't doing a keynote at Dreamforce. You're not selling a new iPhone. You're implementing a new tool to make everyone's life a little easier in the long run and help drive more results for the business. It's okay to get excited about the change! Please don't make it sound like your new tech will solve all the world's problems.
4 - Eat the elephant one bite at a time: yes, we've changed much at Womble regarding digital marketing tools. There's a LOT I still want to improve and add to our tech stack.
That said, I'm a huge proponent of taking a crawl-walk-run perspective. I like to avoid trying to boil the ocean and improve everything. Find one martech challenge that can be addressed, be laser-focused on that, and allow that new thing to be another piece of the foundation for more significant changes down the road. Don't half-ass two things, whole-ass one.
Building a Martech Stack is Hard. Often Expensive. But Fun.
Building a marketing technology stack is hard. It takes a lot of thorough research, intentionality, and a specialized skill set to get the most bang for your employer's buck and avoid unnecessary redundancies in capability.
It's a lot of work.
However, you still have to get out of the weeds and see the impact on the people around you. Whether helping a salesperson get better leads or a recruiter get better candidates, part of doing your job well makes other people's lives easier, not more difficult.
Have you been part of building a tech stack? What have you seen go well? What hard lessons have you learned that I didn't include here?