Marketing Management

tl;dr — The State of Partner Ops and Programs is a “must read” report for martech. A month ago, I wrote about how channel, partner, and ecosystem tech is one of the hottest categories in martech today. As businesses become increasingly interwoven with each other in serving customers in a digital world — where nearly everything can be adjacent to everything else — a whole wave of new opportunities for innovation are opening up. The …

Partner Ops: The forgotten ops that’s suddenly thriving in the ecosystem era Continue Reading »

Apologies for the lull in posting. I took a long, much-needed family vacation — almost entirely digital-free. I’m now back in the saddle, recharged and reenergized about all that’s happening in martech. With a huge backlog of cool things to share with you. Here’s the first… Enterprise automation company Workato (disclosure: I’m an advisor to them) recently released their 2022 Work Automation Index. It’s not a survey, but rather the aggregated data from 900 of …

What are we automating in marketing and martech in 2022, and who is automating it? Continue Reading »

Half of martech and marketing ops professionals received a promotion in the past year. More accurately, half of the 426 respondents to our 2022 Martech Career Survey, run in collaboration with the team at MarTech.org, reported receiving a promotion within the past 12 months. But still, that’s impressive, and speaks to the incredible growth and demand for talent in this field. Overall, salaries grew 23% since the last time we surveyed them in 2019. These …

The latest data on martech and marketing ops careers, and an ode to spreadsheets Continue Reading »

“One of the things that doesn’t get talked about as much as it should in martech is the gap between the technology that is installed and the skills that exist in the organization.” In a recent interview I had with Anita Brearton, CEO of CabinetM, this was one of the points she was most animated about. “Stack utilization is a huge issue. You build these big, complex stacks — are you getting your money’s worth? …

The real build vs. buy question in martech is around talent, not technology Continue Reading »

There’s a day for everything. Bubble Wrap Appreciation Day. Sword Swallowers Day. No Pants Day. But there’s no official day on the calendar to acknowledge and celebrate the martech profession and all the wonderful, talented people who work in it. Not to take anything away from National Artichoke Day, but I think marketing technology and operations pros are far more deserving of recognition than those thorny, bitter greens. So let’s rectify that. Frans Riemersma of …

#MartechDay: The 2022 Martech Landscape, State of Martech Report, Stackies, and more Continue Reading »

Bain & Company recently conducted a martech survey with 100 major consumer products companies. They evaluated these companies’ maturity on 30 different martech capabilities, including enablers such as martech product management and governance practices. They identified the top 12% of those companies as “leaders” in their martech capabilities and the bottom 19% as “laggards.” You will hopefully not be surprised to learn that the leaders have mostly gained market share in the past couple of …

It’s not the size of your martech stack, it’s your range of use cases Continue Reading »

As with crime and politics, if you want to reveal the real plot in marketing’s evolution, follow where the money is going. Hmm. That’s probably not the most flattering of metaphors. Okay, scratch that image. But it is why I always look forward to Gartner’s annual CMO Spend Survey report. Allocation of budget is a CMO’s way of “voting with their wallet” for what they think is most important. Grab a copy of The State …

Follow the money: CMO budgets for martech and marketing operations Continue Reading »

Surveys are nice, but they have their limitations. They’re swayed by who participates (selection bias) and the way those participants interpret your questions in their own minds — which varies wildly for reasons a psychologist would be best suited to explain. The results can be directionally useful, but they’re not “facts.” The ground truth is what people actually do, not what they say they do. So I was thrilled to see the new Work Automation …

What are we automating in marketing and sales? A lot Continue Reading »

The good folks at BrandMaker recently released a study of CMOs and their perceptions of The State of Marketing Operations. In short, marketing operations has risen from being “an overshadowed marketing function that worked in the background to solve internal pains” to “an integral part of the marketing organization.” (And there was much rejoicing.) 70% of the CMOs surveyed reported that they have a dedicated marketing ops team at their company. 66% of those teams …

The State of Marketing Operations or Can’t Find a Better Martech Continue Reading »

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 …

Are CMOs falling behind with martech? The C-Suite thinks so, and they may be right Continue Reading »