What you need to know

• Marketers struggle to realise full value from their marketing technology investments due to a plethora of problems, most of them self-inflicted.
• Former NAB martech executive Satya Upadhyaya has partnered with Acoustic's Michaela Aguilar, ADMA and a clutch of marketing tech and CX leaders from organisations such as Southern Cross Austereo, IAG and Tourism Australia to help educate leaders on the challenges they will need to over come.
• Poor alignment with IT, a lack of technical expertise in marketing, a rip and replace mindset, and a failure to understand that the salesperson selling you software is actually there to sell you software not manage your procurement process feature high of the challenges list.
• And don't waste your time on huge marketing transformations unless you have got your data house in order.

When it comes to marketing technology, too many marketers have never encountered a problem they couldn't make worse by buying even more marketing technology. Current and former CMOs and Chief Customer Officers Mi-3 has interviewed over the past eight weeks as we examined marketing priorities as well as poor SaaS implementation management cite a plethora of problems including;

• poor alignment between IT and marketing
• a short-term rip and replace mindset to systems when times get tough
• not recognising that much greater investment needs to be directed into people and processes
• and the failure to recognise that technology vendors are there to sell you software, not manage your procurement process

Now, former banking and gaming martech executive Satya Upadhyaya who finished with NAB last week, has partnered with Michaela Aguilar Head of Business Partnership Ecosystem, APAC at Acoustic, to help answer the question of why marketers are often so bad at buying martech, and hopefully to help them make better future decisions. 

They have co-opted other leading marketing and customer executives to the cause including Cam Strachan, Southern Cross Austereo, Head of Data and Analytics, Dr Willem Paling, IAG, Executive GM, Customer Experience, and Manjit Gill, Marketing Technology Manager, Tourism Australia, along with representatives of agencies and implementers. Their practical ‘warts and all' insights and experience for the bedrock of a 10 week course for CMOs and other marketing leaders called the Marketing Technology Certificate that ADMA is running in August.

Aguilar’s time with Havas Media as its CX and data analytics head, and Upadhyaya’s stints at companies including Citi, Accenture and Star Entertainment, as well as NAB, means the pair brings brand, agency and consulting expertise to a subject that requires a deep understanding of technology, people, process, and data from all three of those dimensions.

Mi-3 asked Upadhyaya why the expectations between what marketers think they are getting and what they end up with often differs so markedly.

“A good point starting point would be that tech expertise in marketing is actually still missing," he said. "You don’t really have a go-to person within marketing who understands the whole marketing tech ecosystem and the different components involved.”

That’s compounded by on-going turf wars between IT and marketing over ownership and control, he suggests. “The other thing that is happening is that trust with IT is a problem because traditionally ownership and management of technology was managed by IT, and IT has not been able to relinquish that control. So a lot of organisations are really struggling with where does it actually stand, whether it's actually a part of IT or is it part of marketing?”

As to where responsibility should lie he has a clear view: The demand should come from marketing, and IT should facilitate that. Again, the challenge that you've got is that you don't have within IT anyone who speaks the marketing language, so the requirements are not clearly understood."

On the flip side, he says, when IT take the lead, marketers often complain that their colleagues have bought them a shiny new toy without actually understanding their requirements.

The business impact of poor decision making often first becomes apparent after the sales cycle has ended and the adoption process is underway. That's when organisations start to realise the techology is not a good fit for the solution they need, he says. Harvard Professor, Theodore Levitt, famously described this: “People don't want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole.”

Says Upadhyaya on marketer's martech conunudrum: “What they start looking at is okay, we need to buy a new solution because the existing solution is not fit for purpose. The reality is that they've not done due diligence on understanding what the existing solution can do. And how do you adopt, embrace and go forward with the existing solution that they've actually bought? Is that a people issue? Is that a data issue? Is that a process issue or is that an alignment issue within the ecosystem?” 

Sometimes marketers also bring a bad experience with a solution into a new job and that clouds their judgement, even though the circumstance may be very different, he says

“So technology decisions are based on personal preferences as compared to the user stories and use cases and the demands and the needs of the organisation to drive that forward.

Buyer beware

For her part, Aguilar calls out the behaviour of technology vendors, and the failure of brands to understand the motivation behind that behaviour.

“Clients need to understand that the job of a vendor’s salesperson is to sell technology. It's not their job to do the client's procurement. So obviously they put the best foot forward to sell as much as they can. It's up to the buyer to assess, is it fit for a purpose? Is it what I need? Does my team have the maturity to operate it? What does my roadmap look like? And this is the problem.”

She told MI3 Australia that marketing is more aligned to the experience, and often lacks the capabilities to assess technical issues or deep architectural challenges.

“It's the vendor's job. They're just doing their job to get as much money out of the client. There is not enough money for training, implementation to actually get the job done. And then you have million-dollar investments sitting there not being used.

“When I work with clients, I say, do you really need this? All right, now, what is the state of your data? Start small. What is your use case? Don't buy the software first and retrofit your use case. Understand your client, the customer experience you want, what is the goal and what can we start. What’s the small piece we implement and work with that can be measured and operationalized. And rather than do this monolithic project, do it bit by bit by bit and become better and grow it.”

Upadhyaya adds, “The vendors don't explain very clearly the concepts of integration, assimilation, coordination of different systems.”

It’s a common refrain among marketing leaders, as Andy Lark the former CMO for organisations such as Commbank, Dell, Foxtel and Xero told Mi-3 recently. “The real problem with SaaS software today is that we look at the [multiplier effect] of the SaaS software. Vendors are very good at selling you their instance — but getting their instance to work is a completely different thing. And that incremental cost for some CRM platforms, who I won't name but you can guess who they are, are between eight and ten times the license fee. "Marketers walk into this. They're like, 'Well, I thought I was paying this much for my CRM software, but I'm now paying eight times more than that in aggregate annually just to run and operate it."

Or another example, a long term CMO with experience in both for profit and not for profit sectors who spoke anonymously so they could share their experience freely recently told MI3 of an implementation where they were assured the two modules of Adobe software they purchased as part of the core marketing stack were integrated. It cost that well known brand $50k to learn they should have read the fine print more closely.

On the flipside, some marketers are getting it right, building out programs to understand the ROI of both their overall martech investment on the business and individual campaigns - Norths Collective's GM of CX, Brand & Innovation Rob Lopez mapped his martech ROI strategy in an Mi3 Podcast and feature here.   

Data, data everywhere

Another area where both Upadhyaya and Aguilar find common cause is on the failure of many marketers to understand how critical it is to have their data house in order before embarking on big software-heavy transformations.

According to Upadhyaya, “Technology just is just the skeleton. You need to attach muscles to the skeleton and the data is actually the muscles that basically forms the shape. Because you can have the architecture, you can have the technology, but the data is not flowing through.”

"From a customer perspective technology can do nothing without the data.”

And technology can not be considered in isolation, says Aguilar. “I've worked for years in services. I was a partner of Oracle, Adobe and Sitecore, the lot. It happens over and over again. Too much money is spent on software and not enough money is spent on people and processes. And then the issue you have is the data. Unless you have your data sorted, your data cleaned, your golden record, there is no point in investing millions of dollars in software because the way you activate your plans will not work.”

Misaligned

Many of the issues flagged by Aguilar and Upadhyaya track back to a lack of alignment between IT and marketing. That’s something Teresa Sperti, founder at Arktic Fox and co author of the recent Digital Marketing in Focus report, and herself a former CMO, can attest.

“Alignment in part is driven by leaders – if the leaders of both functions are not actively working together to share plans and drive alignment then this is where the issue starts."

She says this lack of alignment at a strategic level often also creates the friction. “IT teams, like marketing teams, are faced with a lot of competing priorities – without clear alignment at a strategic level it makes it harder for teams to make trade-off decisions.”

Echoing Upadhyaya’s earlier point, Sperti says: “The rise of martech has meant many marketers now have a much bigger seat at the tech table and this wasn’t historically the case. If there is ambiguity within the roles each function needs to play and the decision-making rights, that can result in teams trying to move in different directions.”