“Homegrown martech is like homemade pizza.” That’s the kind of quip I might have likely shot back a couple of years ago if someone asked me, “Should we build our own martech software or buy a packaged app from a martech vendor?” It’s not that you can’t make your own pizza at home. Anyone can. I have. But making great pizza at home? Eh. You need a combination of skills, ingredients, the right pizza dough, …
A few weeks ago, I read a white paper produced by Rackspace Technology, How Applications Impact Customer Experience. (Spoiler alert: in a digital world, applications are customer experience, so you’d better make them delightful. As a result, CX has become the top priority CIOs and IT. Yay.) Almost in passing, however, there was the chart above (I added the dotted line highlight). CMOs were ranked second-to-last as members of the C-suite who best understand the …
Last year, we celebrated Father’s Day here at chiefmartec.com by subjecting you, dear reader, whose esteem we otherwise value, to 7 really bad martech “dad jokes”. It was… well, possibly one of the least popular posts in the history of this blog. But as any seasoned dad-joker will attest, the lack of a positive response to a dad joke is an implicit invitation to double-down on further embarrassingly sad puns, innuendo, and wordplay. Challenge accepted! …
13 cringe-worthy martech dad jokes that are even worse than last year’s Continue Reading »
Fair warning: this post is pretty wonkish, even relative to my usual style. (Yikes.) Robert Metcalfe, the godfather of computer networks, famously stated that the value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of users connected. This became known as Metcalfe’s Law: The classic example is the telephone. When only two people had telephones, the telephone “network” had relatively little value. When 5 billion people have phones, however, the value of …
Metcalfe’s Mirror: Complexity in networks (P.S. your martech stack is a network) Continue Reading »
The phrase “system of record” has been bandied about in martech for years. In the absence of any other context, it’s usually assumed to mean the software that holds the authoritative (or “golden”) customer record. Most often in practice, this is a CRM. This is why illustrations of martech stacks often have a CRM product such as Salesforce, HubSpot, or Microsoft Dynamics visually placed at their center. (Speaking of which, the 2021 MarTech Stackies are …
A 2×2 view of systems of record in martech Continue Reading »
I recently wrote how martech stacks have arguably become virtual platforms. Even if you have a completely heterogeneous, “best-of-breed” stack, you likely have a set of products that work across your stack to provide cohesion, albeit each at a different layer of integration: Data: everything ultimately ends up in a “data lake” platform such as Snowflake Workflow: tools such as Workato and Zapier orchestrate processes across apps UI/UX: tools such as Slack provide a common …
Aggregation Theory applied to martech stacks Continue Reading »
Summer approaches! (Well, at least in the Northern hemisphere.) Fresh air, sunshine, and frolicking outdoors have never felt so viscerally appealing, after a seemingly infinite year indoors. I hope you get time to walk in the woods, roll in the grass, or dip your feet in the ocean. But there’s still work to be done! Marketing and martech continue to advance, adapting to the “new normal” of innovative digital customer experiences and digital business operations. …
Summer of Stacks: Opening the 2021 MarTech Stackie Awards Continue Reading »
The Great App Explosion can’t be stopped. But it can be harnessed. A couple of years ago, I proposed a model of 4 layers of app integrations with SaaS platforms. Advocating for better integration, for marketing apps in particular, I pointed out that not all integrations are equal. They vary significantly in how deeply they’re integrated. The 4 layers of integration that I described: Data — sharing data between apps, which is the most common …
Is your entire martech stack becoming one big virtual “platform”? Continue Reading »
The good team at Airtable, whom I featured in my MarTech keynote, Marketing Superpowers: How AI & No Code Transform Every Marketer into a Maker, recently published the Airtable Marketing Trends Report based on a survey of 300 marketing leaders. This was their overview summary: Despite investment in tooling and processes, marketers aren’t operationally equipped to build customer experiences at scale—and they’re punching in hours of manual work to make up the difference. So the …
Wait, more martech tools create more manual tasks?! Continue Reading »
Okay, I was just kidding on April Fools’ Day with hyperagile marketing. Apologies to any of you who spent the past week planking through your team updates. But I am excited to share with you some exciting news about real agile marketing adoption. AgileSherpas and Forrester just released their new State of Agile Marketing 2021 report, and it reveals an important milestone: for the first time, the majority (51%) of marketers surveyed reporting using agile …
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