Congratulations to the team at Sales For Life for pulling off a fantastic event yesterday in San Francisco. Their Digital Growth Conference was packed with amazing speakers, great people from marketing AND sales, and tons of great insights & best practices to take back to the office.
I had an opportunity to speak in the afternoon on marketing technology, and specifically a handful of key strategies to ensure a company’s specific marketing technology stack is optimized and customized to their precise needs. You can get a copy of the deck below, but here’s the highlights:
1. Start with problems and outcomes
Look at your current sales and marketing strategy and processes. Where are the bottlenecks keeping you from growing faster? What are doing manually that could be automated or done more efficiently? What outcomes are most important to you that you’re not achieving yet today? Work to prioritize your martech needs with the answers to these questions in mind first.
2. Measure impact & ROI
I highly recommend having a set of success metrics for every individual tool in your stack. Know what’s expected of it, and watch those metrics over time to ensure they’re giving you the return you need.
3. Establish requirements up front
One of the biggest mistakes companies make with new marketing and sales technology is buying without a plan to implement. Do you know up front what resources are required to be successful? Not just to launch but to support those tools? This goes for people, content, training, etc.
4. Work with IT
Sure, most of the martech tools promote that they can be implemented without IT. But anytime you introduce technology into your company, if something goes wrong, IT is going to get blamed for it. Even if you end up implementing on your own, treat IT as a partner and endorser of what you’re doing. Things will got a lot more smoothly internally as a result.
5. Integrate with existing systems & processes
Do not let new technology operate in a silo. It’s the fastest path to creating more work and less efficiency in your organization. This is a slippery slope, and new technology on top of un-integrated systems tends to have a multiplying effect on inefficiency, frustration and usage (or lack thereof).
6. Practice the OODA loop
Observe, orient, decide and act. You very likely won’t get everything right the first time. Make adjustments as necessary, both after launch as well as moving forward, with those objectives in mind.
7. Quarterly business reviews
Many of the best martech managers do quarterly reviews of their entire stack. Companies add features, other tools become obsolete or compete with other components of your existing stack, etc. You should be reviewing tools for results on a regular basis, but at least quarterly do an audit of what you have, what you need, and where possible clean house to make your martech stack leaner and more efficient.
8. Be deliberate
Take your time. Don’t let the new shiny object distract you from focusing on the right strategy, the right objectives, and the right implementation and support plan for every component of your martech stack. Your people and your managers will thank you for it!
Full deck from yesterday is below:
