A successful martech stack allows you to automate marketing and sales business processes in a way that you can efficiently report on the funnel and make future decisions on budget allocation. A successful stack will allow each type of marketer and salesperson to work on campaign storytelling and relationship building, rather than analysis.

As you become more experienced in Marketing Operations or Marketo, your martech stack will grow in complexity, or just the number of vendors. You will be constantly peppered with automated outreach emails from vendor salespeople. How do you evaluate if your stack needs help or if you even need some of these tools? What happens when another marketer buys a tool without discussing it with you and expects you to now lead the implementation?

Here are some tips to help you with these situations.

Ask the Right Questions

I would say two or three times a year, I ask myself, or my team, if the martech stack is working well for us.

• Are there tools we no longer use?
• Did a new tool essentially supplant another?
• Did anyone actually shut that other tool off and cancel it?
• Are we getting the best deal at renewal time?

Depending on the answers and pain level, we can prioritize work to improve the day as well as acquire more customers. I will ask a few more questions:

• Can it handle our current volume?
• Is it creating work or taking away work?
• Is it collecting the data we need now and in the future?
• What’s the pain level (or How much would I gain/save by making a change?).

For example, I’ve encountered the question, “Pardot or Marketo?” from many people directly and in the Marketo Nation. When I ask them more about their question, it turns out that they were using Pardot for a year or two, and then reached a certain volume of campaigns as well as database size (usually 30k+) and felt Pardot wasn’t quite meeting their needs anymore.

Similarly, I’ve had a situation where we were running Events out of Marketo. The Events team wanted to provide a certain on page experience and workflow to their audience. When we discussed it more deeply, it turned out Marketo could support that if we spent a bit of time building a better page and Marketo Program Template.

Later on, as requirements and volume changed, we explored an Event Platform as a Martech stack change to enhance our abilities and experiences for the audience. Naturally, we ensured the new platform worked closely with Marketo and our data processes. 

Adding and Removing Tools

Again, it’s about asking the right questions. There are a lot of good marketers and sales people like you and me working to convince colleagues at other firms that our tools will solve problems. The challenge is that you may not really need those tools – today or ever. Unless you go through a proper RFP process which include Requirements Gathering, it will be hard to evaluate a purchase (or a no decision).

Over the years, I prioritize projects based on cost-benefit, which in Martech means “Will this automate away work and scale up things we need?”

A good example is Blog RSS to Email automation. For smaller firms or firms that are used to Mailchimp or ESPs, this is an obvious, easy win: get our blog/newsletter automated. But at some companies, the benefit may not be that large compared to the effort. If your database is complex or the blog subscriber level is low, automation isn’t going to solve much, and it will cost more to build out the system than you save in time.

Similarly, you may want to remove technologies due to cost or overlapping features. If a vendor is pitching a tool that overlaps with another tool, perhaps that’s an opportunity to rip out an old technology and reduce a leak in your budget. Some tools are just so old in the Stack, no one remembers why they are there.

Ultimately, there’s a time and place for many tools, it may not be today, and it might have been yesterday.

As your business (or organization) grows or evolves, your martech stack needs to keep up.

Which Teams Should be Involved?

MOPS isn’t an island and over the past ten years, marketing operations has been seen as a bridge to Sales. With more and more teams using similar tools like Sales Email Automation, everyone needs to talk to each other to balance priorities and requirements. We all want the business to grow and teams to succeed. The only times we have challenges is when our teams are misaligned (read: we don’t talk to each other).

Talk!

• Core Team: MOPS, MOPS Leadership
• Business Owner Team: for Events, the Events teams or leaders.
• Budget or Finance if it’s over a certain threshold.
• IT or Product: a large project may involve IT for a security review or integration assistance.
• Legal: with GDPR and other concerns, the lawyers should review every contract.

Ultimately, it is best to check in with multiple teams as the vendor or project grows in size. I don’t think you need Finance to buy a Zapier subscription, but you might need Finance if you do a multi-year Marketo subscription.

Shiny Object Syndrome is the biggest problem facing Sales, SOPS, MOPS, and Marketers. Vendor salespeople are very happy to work email and phones until they find someone willing to run with the ball. That person may bypass MOPS and other processes because they feel the pain the most or were easily persuaded.

Marketing technology must be evaluated by MOPS and other technically oriented people to ensure there is a good fit in the stack and the vendor does everything they claim. I’ve seen a lot of projects completely fail because they were driven by misinformed business owners who failed to ask questions internally. Likewise, it is a bad move for MOPS to purchase a tool like Sales Engage without bringing in SOPS and Sales for evaluation.

Establish a Documented Technology Evaluation Process

With a written document and trained stakeholders, you can avoid most pitfalls and shiny objects by enforcing a process. Perhaps it is a formal RFP process that internal stakeholders can submit to when there is a need or new vendor. A few recommendations:

• Gatekeepers – if the process isn’t followed, who can block a signed contract? Whose approvals are required before next steps?
• Submission Process
• Questions the team will ask.
• Which teams should be involved based on the tools and budget?
• Does the requestor understand the level of work?
• How can we evaluate the level of work to implement and change existing processes?
• Is this a business process change or just an automation?
• Do we already have this tool? Why won’t it work?
• Is spending less the right choice? Cheapest vendor may cost more in the long run.

How are you managing your stack?

As we’ve all heard, Marketo was finally acquired by another tech company: Adobe.

This happened on the eve of Dreamforce, which exiled Marketo years ago when Salesforce acquired ExactTarget-Pardot. Since then, Marketo and its allies have spent their marketing dollars across the street at Jillian’s as well as carefully keeping the Marketo-SFDC sync alive while slowly disentangling from Appexchange.

That has taken years.

For all of the people looking at the acquisition as Good or Bad for users, customers, or Adobe’s customers, I would say “It won’t matter for a long time.” The ExactTarget-Pardot acquisition of 2013 slowly became Salesforce Marketing Cloud, yet somehow Pardot is still essentially a separate product. And didn’t Pardot only recently become fully integrated with SFDC? Adobe itself hasn’t exactly integrated previous purchases like Neolane and people still call Adobe Analytics, Omniture.

We are now five years after the Eloqua and Pardot acquisitions with not a lot of innovation in Marketing Automation from the original big vendors. The interesting innovation has been on the periphery:

• Sales Engagement Automation from Outreach, Salesloft, etc gave Salesforce and Marketo a run for their money on key Marketing-Sales alignment and lead nurturing.
• Post Sales Automation is surprisingly still limited both in terms of vendors (Gainsight), and Support Tool Integration with SFDC Cases
• Data processing is a giant mess of point solutions that all do cool things.
• Web Personalization is really dominated by a small group of large vendors.
• Third to First Party Data is still not integrated with Marketing Automation in a fluid way.
• Privacy laws aren’t driving the innovation I expected to manage permissions, instead it is focused on cases (OneTrust)

Thus, I don’t see this acquisition as changing anything meaningful in the short run for users or customers of Marketo or Adobe. Acquisitions and the strategies behind them usually take years to play out, let alone be successful.

I would say that the “innovation” from this acquisition will not be in features, but in integrations to Adobe’s offering. I would be very surprised if Marketo receives investment to innovate in the areas I mentioned above.

Dom Nicastro of CMSWire, wrote an article about the “10 Ways the Adobe, Marketo Acquisition Will Impact Marketo’s Users.” The structure is interesting, so let’s review the some of the issues he brought up and why I think the short to medium term won’t matter at all for most of us.

Near Term – What Will Change

In my experience with tech acquisitions as a user, almost nothing will change other than the logo…at least in the first year or so.

Adobe Native Connectors with Experience Cloud, Advertising, Analytics, and Magento.

Integrations are a good thing and it is always disappointing when platform groups cut each other off due to competitive reasons. Now Marketo will be able to talk to Adobe Marketing Cloud products in a more seamless way. A native Activity Log and the resurrection of Anonymous data access via Marketo Munchkin tied directly to Omniture would be an incredible leap forward for many organizations, especially B2C.

Of course, to do this, we will see a change in the roadmap, but not the “Vision” for Marketo.

Connector Vendors will lose out

As Adobe and Marketo use direct APIs to integrate first party and third party data, expect middleware vendors to lose out in 1-2 years.

Marketo will likely abandon development on personalization tools

While that sounds bad, it may be a great thing. Marketo has lagged behind on a seamless user experience for its personalization tools because they were from an acquisition that had limited investment for several years. The good thing behind this is if Adobe’s AI and testing suite are substantially better, there would be ways to integrate this with Marketo, to the great benefit of Marketo users.

Near Term – What Will Not Change

Marketo will continue to exist as essentially a separate entity under the Adobe umbrella. Acquisitions are complex and it will take time to re-brand as well as find the right places for Adobe to make its mark within Marketo. Adobe will ideally be careful not to alienate Marketo’s 6,000 customers and highly active userbase with massive changes. An expensive acquisition is not the place to drive unhappy users into the arms of Salesforce or Oracle.

I agree with my friends that Marketo will remain CRM agnostic because it has to. Marketo’s customers are still 80% on SFDC and no one sees that changing.

Performance of the Product

While Orion and the move to Google Cloud have helped many of Marketo’s performance issues for higher impact customers, I don’t see this changing in the near term. As some have pointed out in the article, Adobe may want to move Marketo away from Google Cloud. Yet, this just happened or is still underway. It would be very expensive for Adobe Marketo to switch again immediately. If they did want to move, they would damage the long term Google customer relationship as well as hurt every single customer who would no doubt experience system hiccups.

What I would love to see is Adobe Marketo take a hard look at their priorities and consider a backend rebuild that addresses the scalability issues larger firms and B2C firms have with trigger processing, database size, and load balancing.

Pricing and Renewals

Tony Byrne, CEO of Real Story Group, suggested that Marketo renewals could expect a higher increase when Adobe seeks to recoup its investment. This is certainly a possibility, however, Marketo is already well known for hefty renewal fees when the contract is up. I suspect people will only start to make noise about 6-12 months after the acquisition closes if Adobe goes this route. Ideally, Adobe won’t start to increase prices, rather they will provide actual value through improvements or additional plugins to ask for more money.

Initially, we should see a new pricing sheet and cross selling sales initiative once the deal closes. Just as Marketo offered Bizible demos after the Marketo Summit, we should expect to hear from our Upsell reps about “Adobe’s amazing offerings” and could they bring the local Adobe rep to the office? They won’t ask for more renewal money as long as you are adding on to your new Adobe contract.

My Wishlist for Adobe Marketo

Backend Rebuild for large scale rebalancing and B2C.

Investment is going to be key. If Adobe thinks it can starve Marketo of investment dollars and reap profit, it will be sorely disappointed when customers depart. And it would make sense to invest in scale for their B2C components like Magento and Advertising.

Native Integrations with Adobe’s existing product suite.

I hope so.

AWS style resource purchasing.

Allowing customers to purchase more speed will ensure investment in the backend and continued support from larger customers.

AB Testing Rebuild – make it a pro level and improve analytics.

I hate to say it, but the page and email AB testing in Marketo is terrible. There are no real analytics or management tools for more than one off AB tests. Pressing “Champion” seems to make all the data and emails disappear. This has to change if Marketo becomes a part of the B2C part of Adobe.

Invest in devops style transparency into the system for Marketing Operations pros.

System health is critical, even for smaller Marketo instances. Help us!

Don’t change too much too quickly!

Occasionally, a firm will send in its people from Corporate and make sweeping changes without understanding anything about the business, the people, or why customers buy. That never goes well. Do not do this.

What Could Change in the Long Term?

Platform

Scott Brinker of Chiefmartec focused on the Platform Ecosystem and that’s an area that Marketo and Adobe haven’t fully developed for themselves. Marketo does have Launchpoint, but this has undergone changes which have meant many point vendors vanished from sight. Perhaps Adobe will build Adobe Exchange or even look at their disaparate offerings as a mix and match, plug and play martech stack that can cross the B2C and AdTech to Martech boundaries. To do that, Marketo and Adobe’s consulting services groups would have to join forces.

Thus, what you may see is a central Sales and Consulting Group that will help firms organize Adobe’s offerings into custom constellation stacks, unique to each business. This sort of organization will take time to build and will make Adobe more like its rivals in this space.

The tighter integration of Magento ecommerce with Marketo may force the Product team to scale up the backend to support rapid data processing and personalization at scale. Ecommerce relies on speed and click to sales, while Marketo was built more for long sales processes, where seconds don’t count. If Marketo wants to be better friends with Magento, speed will matter more.

Marketo Summit – RIP?

The chatter on LinkedIn from most Marketo users was “What happens to Marketo Summit 2019 – Las Vegas”? I have no idea. Since the deal won’t close for a bit and the contracts for both venues were already signed, I suspect we’ll see this happen:

• Adobe Summit 2019 is also in Las Vegas and I bet will now feature a giant Marketo booth. Incentives may be offered for Marketo users to start attending. I may go next year since I will need to link up more with my colleagues in this area. What I do like about Adobe’s offering are the “Labs” which is precisely what I hope Marketo will add on to their events. The prices are similar, so don’t expect to see a lot of cross over in 2019.
• Marketo Nation 2019 – since the contracts are likely signed and many Marketo users are looking for a repeat of 2016’s blowout in Vegas, Marketo will keep the Nation going independently just for 2019. We are a pretty vocal bunch that will need our own outlet. Expect to see a giant Adobe Experience booth now.

My big worry is that the DNA that made Marketo such a big brand for B2B marketers, and helped create the Marketing Ops function, will disappear. The vision and innovation could stagnate. Adobe could come in and make Marketo “do it their way,” causing disruption and confusion for customers and staff. Even if that does happen, the good news is creative destruction will ensure a new Marketing Automation platform would come along eventually and be even better.

Recently, I’ve written about how to work with vendors and your internal teams to produce optimal vendor selection, and thus optimal outcomes for your goals. The next step to staying relevant to your customers and ensuring your team tests regularly, is to embrace Agile Marketing. Putting agile into practice is pretty hard in larger organizations with existing technologies and hardened reporting flows.

The other side of internally baked processes is that vendor contracts and their needs mean limited abilities to be agile with vendors. If you want to test a bright idea or a new method with a shiny new vendor, it can be very difficult to bring them in, test, and then remove the if things don’t work as desired. Most vendors (including you!), want stable income streams of 12 months, with up front cash flow to invest in high growth. While many smaller tools are happy to do month-to-month at a slightly higher fee, many of the larger firms will not consider short term trials.

In fact, most platforms will only provide a “30 day trial” which isn’t all that helpful because implementation can take 3-6 months if done correctly. Only the most basic vendor swaps will be a good fit for free 30 day trials.

And if we take Agile to heart and look closely at Scott Brinker’s “4 Forces” model, we realize it becomes challenging to Decentralize and Humanize things internally or externally. If I want to provide regional autonomy with martech, I still need to setup rules and workflows the local teams can stay within as they iterate local programs. If an APAC martech vendor has a unique tool for local languages the regional team needs, I’d love for that team to take that on easily. But I want a way out after 30-90 days if we don’t see results we expect. Same for things like global AI driven Chat tools, or the latest exit-intent method of lead capture.

Thus, if we want to become agile, so must our vendors. Agile vendor relationships, contracts, and pricing are a big ask for providers and it is possible to achieve if both sides negotiate effectively. But I want vendors to go beyond one off negotiations. I’d like to see vendors of all sizes (not just the hungry new ones who will do ANYTHING for a logo), consider how to deliver pricing models that acknowledge Agile marketing and that relationships can come and go more easily than ever before.

And that might be ok! Recently, I’ve been working with a larger martech vendor with whom we had a small relationship years ago. Having that vendor two or three years ago wasn’t a good fit because the internal capability to use the tool was limited and our need for the powerful tool wasn’t there. So I had the contract cancelled to save money. Because that vendor gracefully exited, I was open to bringing them into the new RFP because we were now ready to fully take advantage of their powerful platform. The vendor acknowledged that our new programs were now more ready for their tool and that the relationship would be more fruitful. Vendors also need to perform better analysis of purchasers during the sales process to avoid churn, and be ready to reject business that will lead to bad cancellations if the purchaser just isn’t ready to be successful with the tool.

Vendors are often open to short term trials when the following conditions exist:

• Big enterprise tells them to do that or they won’t go forward.
• The vendor is small, new, and open to anyone willing to try in the hope of iterating to Product Market Fit + Long term relationship.

What if SaaS vendors were open to this from the start:

• 30 and 90 day trials at a limited volume and price.
• Fixed price setup help.
• 90 and 180 day contracts
• Only let people buy for 12 and 24 months after a successful 90 day intro.

Of course, there are times when this won’t work well for large scale projects. Those large projects are often done in phases or in select business units, however, and are equivalent to a smaller scale trial or implementation.

What sort of agile vendor arrangements have you worked on?