EP 2 - What should be included as "Marketing Technology"

Hi, I'm Michael Hartman.

I'm Naomi Liu.

And I'm Mike Rizzo.

And this is OpsCast, a podcast for marketing ops pros and RevOps pros, created by the MoPros, the number one community for marketing operations professionals.

Tune into each episode as we chat with real professionals to help elevate you and your marketing operations career.

Hello everyone, welcome to episode 2 of OpsCast. Joining me today, this is Michael Hartman here in the warm, balmy state of Texas down in Dallas. Joining me are Mike Rizzo and Naomi Liu.

Hello, hello.

Hey everybody.

Welcome, welcome, and we've got an interesting topic and I see we've got several people already on joining us, so this is great. For those of you who are on, please let us know if you want to, want to talk or speak up, and I think there's a chat option, so if you want to chat us some questions that you want us to cover, please do. So a little background, I think today was kind of an— it was not quite impromptu, but something that was prompted by— I think I saw a LinkedIn post that someone posted about an article that Kim Davis had written in MarTech Today, and that article had to do with what is in MarTech, and it was prompted by a recent report that Cabinet M put out. called Marketing Technology Adoption Data, and it was a really interesting thing to see. And I think we've got some folks from CabinetM, so we'll bring them on shortly. But I think, you know, what prompted Kim to write this was that he was surprised that there were certain things in this report that people considered as martech that I think most of us initially probably wouldn't have thought of it, things like YouTube or project management tools like Jira and Asana and things like that. And just others that I think just on the initial thought, right, we wouldn't think were martech. But I think it really prompted some thinking. I know I've kind of got my take, but I'd be curious, like, to kick things off before we bring in anybody else, you know, Naomi or Mike, one of you, like, how did— like, what was your initial reaction to this report and kind of how has it changed any of your thinking about what is martech, what's not?

Yeah, you know, I actually shared this in the, in the community forum, right? When you, when you posted it on community.themorepros.com, my— I shared, you know, my reaction was like, what on earth am I reading? Like, my initial thought process was, why, why does this matter? Like, if the tools are doing the job, like, what, why does it matter what category they're lumped into or how the category is perceived. And then as I, as I dug further into the article, and saw some of the comments that came in in the forum, I realized that like, okay, from a buyer's perspective, and from like, from an invest— investment perspective, and you're thinking about like, buying tools at your organization, like maybe the category actually starts, starts to matter a little bit. And you're trying to understand like, how do I set responsibilities for these tools and all that stuff. But, but seriously, like, there's a part of me that says like, Hey, if the tool's doing a job and it's solving the job to be done well, then like that, I don't care if it's a sales tool or a data and analytics tool. Like, that's really all I care about is it solving the problem. But it was just, it's such a fascinating thing to even think about. So that was my initial reaction.

Yeah, and I would agree with you, Mike. I mean, I think part of it too is like what purpose versus intent, right? Like the purpose that a tool was built to solve a problem can solve the product's need to solve the problem. It's like potentially what someone's actually using it for can be 2 different things. We have our mobile phones now. It was built as a way for people to keep in touch and to call one another, but how many people are actually using it now to actually use it as a phone? I don't really call people. I just text or I use my phone as a camera. So it's like, what's the purpose versus you know, how people are actually using it can be 2 different things. Like people use Marketo as a marketing automation platform for the most part, but there's also people who are using a marketing automation platform to help support the support teams and pro services and to do contract renewals and things like that. Right. At that point, does it become something else or how does that work? Right. I think it just depends on, you know, your use cases and whatnot.

So.

Yeah, totally. It's funny that you bring up the phone thing. Last night I had this moment, uh, just like side note, I was walking out of my garage. I saw this flashlight, uh, sitting on my shelf. And I thought, you know, in a pinch, if I had to go downstairs and get a flashlight, at least I know where it is. And then I was like, wait a minute, my phone is a flashlight.

I actually use my, like, my phone as a phone the least, to be honest.

Right? Yeah. So, you know, it solves another job.

I like that you thought of it, Naomi, as a camera, because I remember the first time my family and I went to a place in Colorado that was— we didn't know was going to be outside of cell coverage. It basically became an alarm clock and a camera, and that was it. My initial thoughts were a little bit surprised, right? And I think that was normal. Like, just initial reaction was like, wow, I can't believe these people have these other things that they're considering martech. But then I took a step back and I thought, you know, 2 general thoughts. One, I've had in my own— like, I didn't have to been able to use Cabinet M, but I've kind of had to manage all the different things that I had in a martech stack, if you will. And I thought about it. I was like, I had several things that would've also been on that list that most people wouldn't think of as martech. But a big part of that was because I had to manage a budget. Like, I paid for it outta my budget, so it needed to be somewhere where I could track it. So that was one. So there's just sort of a practical day-to-day manager kind of thing. The other was kind of going back to some of our conversation from episode 1. And if you haven't, if you're new to this podcast and haven't listened to it, go listen to it. It's like, just what is the definition of marketing ops and martech and things like that, it's still so fluid, I think, that the fact that there are all these other things in there, in this report, shouldn't be a surprise. So why don't we do this? I see we've got Cheryl Schultz. I'm gonna bring you on the air, Cheryl, so get ready. Cheryl, nice to have you. Cheryl's from Cabinet M.

Hi.

And we'd kind of love to get Thoughts from you guys and how you, like, what your reactions were to the report when you initially kind of generated the data out of your user data.

Yeah, so thanks a lot for the conversations we've had and for all the commentary. We were actually surprised by all the commentary around this, but actually we weren't surprised by the data because we've been watching marketing operations teams for a long time build their stack on our site. And we actually built the directory, um, on CabinetM up to about 8,000 or 9,000 products. Now there are 15,000 products in there, and the additional products we crowdsourced as people were building their stacks, they asked us to add them. So we have, we cast a very, very wide net when we think about what martech tools are in a stack. And I think it's important actually to differentiate maybe between what is martech and what's in a martech stack, because we see sales enablement in stacks, we see ad tech in stacks, we see creative tech in stacks, and anything that a marketing operations team uses to do their job every day is inside that stack. And, you know, Michael, you and I had a side conversation But one of the examples I gave is some of our clients are large retailers and they have branded credit cards. And the platforms that manage those cards need to connect to loyalty platforms and rewards platforms and your email platforms and your, you know, personalization platforms. And so, you know, that sits in the martech stack. alongside of those products, but they're in different layers of technology. So, so to us, the data that we were mining made a lot of sense, but it definitely surprised people who have had this view of martech being martech. You know, we see the lines blurring between martech and sales tech. I've been speaking to lots of revenue operations leaders over the past few months. And someone actually took me through their stack last week and showed me the tools they were specifically responsible for and the tools that martech, you know, was responsible for, but they're all managed in the same tech stack. And I think that's important to make note of.

Sure, so I think you brought up 2 interesting things that we hadn't really touched on. One is, I think probably Naomi, Mike, and I all come from sort of a B2B background, and I think you're touching on the whole B2C space kind of has its own set of challenges. I think that's one. The other, it's interesting you said, what is martech versus what's in your marketing stack or martech stack? I think that's an interesting distinction because I know in the article that Kim wrote, I made a note that somebody Frans Reimersma. I'm sure I'm butchering his name, so apologies. He said something like martech, he used the term technology for marketing, which I think is a little bit towards what you're talking about. Is that how you all are thinking about this now at Cabinet M? Is it martech in the kind of definition like I think that Kim was thinking about and that we all came to it from is one thing that's different from Like, what are people actually tracking that's part of their technology stack to, you know, some of it is probably core martech and some of it's maybe not what we think about.

Yeah, so, you know, so I would say that that's a good summary, but, you know, part of the issue is that these platforms, regardless of what you call them, martech, sales tech, ad tech, you know, they're sharing data and the data's flowing between them. and they're integrated in some way. And you need to account for all of that to make sure that all of the programs you're running are actually running right. And so, you know, someone earlier, I think, you know, I think, you know, Mike, you said that, you know, who cares, right? If it's what you need, you know, to market, then let it be there. And we agree, right? And we agree because on Cabinet M, Organizations are building their stack, right? So we have over 700 stacks of what we consider to be research-worthy data, right? We anonymize it, we aggregate it, and then we present it. And in the early days, we were surprised by what people were putting in there. But now it's 2, 3 years later and we see it all. And even when I'm speaking to a marketing ops person team for the first time, And I'm talking about the database, I always say to them, and you'll also find, you know, Asana and Trello and Jira and Slack. And the reason it's there is people are putting it into their martech stacks. So, you know, we're actually seeing that as opposed to making a judgment on it.

Yeah. Yeah. I, and, and, you know, what's interesting is like, um, what, because it's in the stack, right. And, and I like the distinction that you made at the beginning of, of when you came on, Sheryl, of like there's the martech stack and then there's marketing technology in and of itself. And what's in the stack may be inclusive of things that are sales tech or data and analytics tools or project and resource management solutions.

Yeah.

And I think that's a really clear way to think about the differentiation between kind of what this article was talking about. And by the way, for those of you who are listening in, if you go to the show page, the article is linked there. So you can kind of dive into that a little bit more. But I think making that distinction is super helpful. But as I think about, you know, the internal kind of buying committee and when somebody, if, for example, my boss, or, you know, was to come to me and say, hey, like, what are the marketing tools that you need to be able to fulfill on your job? Like, I would probably refer to that as marketing technology, right?

Yeah.

And I would just lump that into like my martech.

Yeah.

Category, which is like super, super important to ensure that we like secure the budget and like all the resources we need to be able to effectively run our campaigns and our programs. And that may include things that are outside of the traditional scope of, of like marketing tools, quote unquote.

Yes.

So I understand the importance of like trying to categorize these things. But like, You know, and I see, and I see why it blurs so easily.

Yeah.

So, cause I need to secure budget.

No, it's so true. And it's, it's interesting because, um, you know, we actually, we have a number of different partners and they're all, um, very different in terms of the clients they serve and what they're trying to do. And one of them is an agency that supports creative operations. Okay, and I never really, you know, I didn't really think about creative operations living inside of marketing technology or alongside of it. And, you know, what we found in dealing with those, you know, those customers is that, you know, they're using Workday, right? So what's Workday? Is Workday a martech tool? Is Workday a— You know what I mean?

Or they're using—

they're using— so that's what they're using for, you know, the client stuff. But Workfront, you know, it just lives in the middle of their stack, but it touches that martech stack in big ways. And, you know, and so by being exposed to all of these different, you know, um, real stacks, it really gives us the opportunity to, you know, have that very wide view And, you know, we've had some interesting discussions over, you know, the last year about, you know, about the database, right? Because it's big, right?

Yeah.

It's 15,000 tools. And if you go into it, there are over 500 different categories that these tools are indexed into. But here's the really crazy thing. As many products as are in there, every single time we bring a new company onto CabinetM into one of the enterprise subscriptions, we end up with another 10 to 30 products in the database and they span all different categories because that's how they're thinking about it.

Well, so it's interesting that you bring that up. And I know we did talk about this, Shel, before, and I am still sort of, I literally like right before we got on here, just heard about a report and it talked about the number of SaaS applications by company size and kind of other, But the enterprise, which I would guess is, you know, by employee count, you know, if you go to 10,000 above, they typically at a, at a that size company have over 1,400 SaaS apps somewhere in, in the enterprise. And my guess would be a big chunk of those are going to be marketing ones or sales-related ones. So it's, it kind of is not a surprise that you're getting a ton of those added on.

Yeah, so the interesting thing is, you know, to that point, is we, when we look at our average, you know, stack size, you know, our smallest clients, you know, will have like 50 products in their stack. But, you know, we see stacks, and by the way, this is for what they define, right, as their martech stack. But then at the high end, you know, you're looking at over 250. you know, different products. And what's very, very interesting also is that, you know, there are some companies who, when they bring in, you know, procurement or they bring in IT, you know, those people are like, oh yeah, we should be doing this too. And the reality is that, you know, in some cases, you know, martech marketing is sharing resources with IT, right? Think about, you know, the implementation of Salesforce. You know, it's touched by a lot of people in the organization. Who owns it? Where should it live? So I think that what we're seeing is, you know, marketing operations truly coming into its own. And I loved the last episode, okay, for that reason, because, you know, everybody's trying to figure out, okay, how do you define this? But, you know, marketing operations is coming into its own. You know, organizations— it used to be that large organizations started with a person, then a team, But the truth is some not so very large organizations now know they need that resource internally to manage all the technical resource in order to execute their programs. So, you know, so I think we're gonna continue to see some trends. We're gonna continue to mine the data, by the way.

That's what we expect.

Yeah, yeah, and put it out there.

And I appreciate that you referenced the first episode. Thanks for listening, Cheryl. We appreciate that. But also, I was, I was like, what, you know, again, selfishly thinking about like stepping back a little bit from what, what, you know, MoPros is on a mission to do that I kind of revealed in episode 1 was, you know, trying, trying to figure out like, what is a certified marketing ops professional? And to that end, like this, this is yet another piece of evidence that points to the importance of understanding how to work collaboratively across what I, what I refer to as, you know, quote-unquote party lines, right, between departments. And this is evidence of that, right? These stacks cross these departments constantly. And so, you know, we need to define what this means as a marketing ops professional, and then, as a, as a collective group in this community, really stand for that and breed excellence around, around this whole subject of, you know, working together and cross-functionally and all that stuff.

So. Yeah.

On that topic of party lines though, like something that I've always been curious about is especially as like martech and sales tech kind of blends together and there's a lot of crossover. Are you guys seeing that a lot of teams are coming together to evaluate technology when you're putting out like RFPs or business requirements and things like that? Like who's leading it, for example? Like if you're doing something like, if you're evaluating a tool that can fit under both umbrellas, are you seeing a lot of like cross-department Collaboration to do these evaluations and who's leading it? Curious about that.

You want to jump in? I'm happy to jump in.

Yeah, I'd say go for it, Cheryl.

Yeah.

Well, here, I'll share this. I'll just share this. Like, we have, in our organization, we have someone that's been appointed to kind of overseeing all business systems and technology and trying to understand how they work across the org, right? And so there's someone that essentially, you know, it's not procurement, right? It's, it's someone who's quite literally trying to understand the function and purpose of the tools and ensuring that we're not duplicating, right? There's no reason to have a Calendly and a HubSpot Sales Pro subscription, right? Because, because it has the same functionality. So, so he has that responsibility of trying to consolidate systems and create efficiency. So for what it's worth, we actually have someone responsible for that, which I don't think every org necessarily has, but I could be wrong.

I think on our side, we don't have that person, or at least not someone who would necessarily know, you know, the super technical ins and outs of, you know, what a tool does or doesn't or what the needs are. And so that makes it very important that, you know, our marketing ops team and our sales ops team are very tightly aligned, right? Because then we're kind of going at certain tools together and it's not just something that will benefit the marketing ops team, for example, but it has to also benefit, you know, like it's especially as all these tools integrate into each other, right? Because there's always going to be a downstream effect, things that will plug into Salesforce or plug into Marketo or all of the other tools that we have in our, in our war chest are just going to impact each other, right? So everyone needs to kind of make sure it all plays nice.

Yeah. So I actually see that as a trend going forward. You know, I see business operations. In fact, I have a longtime prospect that I spoke to earlier this week and, you know, they are a company that has made somewhere between 30 and 40 different acquisitions in the past few years, sort of crazy, but true. And in each case, they need to rationalize the tech stack. And they just put, they took marketing ops, which was working for marketing, created a business operations team, and MOPS now reports to that business ops team. So go ahead.

I think that's really interesting because I've started kind of going— because as there's the trend of revenue ops that— and not revenue ops where it's really just sales ops, but the one that looks across the different revenue teams— that I've kind of gotten to the point where I would tell people, if you were asking me where should that roll up to into an organization, I would not say marketing or sales or customer success if they have that, but it should roll up to you know, a COO or a CEO level, because it's otherwise, it's not gonna, you know, gonna get the attention it really deserves.

Yeah.

It needs to be somewhat independent so that it can be looking at the overall benefit for the organization, not just one marketing or sales team. So I think that's really an interesting trend that you're seeing.

Yeah.

So Yeah, the other thing I'll say is, you know, I was on a, you know, I was on another, you know, virtual sort of MOPS panel listening in within the past couple of weeks. And it was interesting because there were 3 or 4 panelists, and in every case, they basically said they were reporting up to revenue ops or they were reporting into demand gen. So I'd be interested in what you guys think about that, because I don't I don't see a lot of, you know, MOPs reporting into demand gen. But that was new for me.

Yeah, that's where it's always been at Mavenlink. So I used to have that role. I'm no longer in that role. I'm a community builder for Mavenlink. But, but the person who's in that role is still on the demand gen team.

Interesting.

Yeah, it's just kind of always been there. But I would I would posit that the, the long-term benefits to the business would be for that individual to be much more closely, closely tied to other operational functions. Not, not that, not, not to say that he isn't, because he certainly is. But creating programs around that is probably pretty critical. But again, not on the team, so I don't know what they're doing these days.

But— Yeah, I think this, The study and this conversation we've had today, it reinforces my belief that the technology part is important, but what's more important and why the role shouldn't report into some subset of a marketing organization or sales organization, I would argue that it should be at the CMO or head of marketing level if it's going to stay in marketing, if it's marketing ops. But you've got to understand the processes that are How are you going to market? What are your goals? Are you heavy outbound? Are you heavy inbound? Are you a mix? Are you ABM? All those things really matter in deciding what tech stack components you really need.

Yeah.

Then add on top of that, it adds this whole other dimension of not only are you talking about those martech tools, but you're talking about the tools, what do you say, the technology for marketing, right? Or the martech stack, you actually have to have a really broad set of understanding about how all these different things work. And it also reinforces the— you know, I think probably all of us believe, right, that marketing ops has always sort of always been— maybe not always, but generally it's often underfunded and understaffed considering the number of tools that people are being asked to manage.

Yeah.

Yes.

And so I think this kind of report could help people who are doing that.

Yeah. Yeah, without a doubt. Yeah, that's interesting.

Yep. And I really like what— we tried to get Scott to join us. He said he was busy. But he— so I tweeted him last night, right? So very last minute. But I like what he talked about in terms of, I think on the article he quoted Training, whether it's internal training or learning management systems for educating customers, is part of marketing. HubSpot Academy, for example, lives in the marketing organization, and learning management systems technology obviously wasn't designed purely as martech, but it's an essential part of their martech stack.

Yeah.

And I think that, that speaks very clearly to, you know, there's a business objective, there's an outcome that they're trying to achieve, and there's technology that they need to leverage to execute on that vision. And then that That subsequently turns into, you know, the conversation of like ensuring that marketing operations or your technology owners are involved in the strategic conversations to best leverage the tools and resources that you've acquired or evaluate solutions to help accomplish those goals, right? And which, which kind of is a whole other topic of like, are you a technologist or are you kind of a strategist or do you straddle the line differently? And where do you sit in the kind of marketing ops hierarchy of your career development and path and stuff like that? So super fascinating. And I really, so far this has been like a tremendous conversation. I really appreciate it, guys.

Well, on the topic of like just, you know, investment in tools and people, like I, it just still boggles my mind every day how, you know, companies can invest 6, 7 figures into all the technology and then not invest in the people that's supposed to run it, right? Because the tools that you have at your disposal, they're only gonna be good as, you know, one, how they were implemented. implemented, 2, the people that are running them, and then 3, how much you invest in them to continue their education, to continue to uplevel their skills, because this stuff changes all the time, right? Like new product releases.

We're automating everything.

Totally.

Yeah, yeah. So here's a dirty little secret, okay? Most large organizations don't understand or know the complete skill proficiency of their teams. And what's fascinating is that we have a companion product called Skill Stacks. It's right in Cabinet M. Anyone who is an enterprise user can use Skill Stacks. But after organizations get their arms around the technology, what we try and direct them to do is actually get their marketers in so they can start looking to see who knows how to use marketing automation systems. How many Marketo, Eloqua, Pardot users, you know, do they have? Because you don't want to know that you only have one on the day that person turns their notice in, right?

Mm-hmm.

And so, you know, doing that starts to inform what you need to do in terms of hiring, but also educating the people that you have in place. You know, it's critical to take care of those people. Because ultimately it rolls right up to your stack and how efficient it can be.

I'm also a big, I'm also a big believer in not just educating people that are directly touching the tool because there's always second and third degree people, right? You need to let them know what is the art of the possible, right? Technology adoption, because people that are not necessarily admins of Marketo, for example, but maybe they're content writers or they're, you know, lead development people who are trying to come up with strategy to get net new logos, like. They need to know what the tools can do so that they can work with the people who are actually doing the execution. So they also need to kind of be brought into the fray. Otherwise, that gap gets bigger and bigger, right?

Or at a bare minimum, be comfortable asking, you know, always asking, is it possible for us to do XYZ next, right? And just, you know, hey, there's this, like, thing that I'm thinking about, and I really need to try to reach this segment of our audience. How do you, how do you think we could go about doing that? Do we have the tools in place? And like, I feel like the majority of the time the answer is like, yes, there's probably a way to get there, but like, let's do it optimally without—

And how much time do you have? Because like, you need it by tomorrow.

Yeah, and not, yeah, not 30 minutes ago.

I can't, I'm sure there are times when I've had to say no, it's not possible, but yeah, almost always it's possible. But you're right, like, it's How, like, what's the right way to get there and do it? That's a different question. And I think that's where you also need, you know, to understand what your capabilities are, both in the technology and the people. Cheryl, that's an interesting thing that you brought up. And you want those people to get to be where they're consultative, right?

Yeah.

And I think this is a mistake actually that a lot of early-stage companies make, is that they bring in people who can do Salesforce, or they can admin Marketo, or they can admin all these things. That said, you know, they may not be in a position to go, oh, you know, I'm not going to just say, okay, someone says we're going to go do X, right, do this campaign to our customers, and then not realize how that may actually be hard because your data is a mess, right? So how do you— and knowing those kinds of things. So I think it's, you know, it would be beneficial for companies to kind of look beyond like, oh, we need somebody who's junior who's going to be hands-on, but actually like we need somebody who can You know, be that coach, kind of player coach maybe, to understand all that stuff.

Yeah, I love that. Steve, thanks for your contribution. Steve wrote in saying, marketing ops isn't just about tech and business, there's a people aspect too. MoPros need to also focus on product adoption and acceptance. They need to ensure that products are used and used well. They need to consider what happens when stakeholders leave the organization, what happens to the products that those stakeholders championed or fought for, etc. I totally agree with you. Actually, I've seen this executed beautifully. Shout-out to our guy, Harris, on our team in Client Success, who's in charge of our Gainsight platform. And he actually regurgitates all the information on the product releases and updates and distributes that out to the Client Success division to ensure that they understand the power of the tool that they have at their fingertips and what it can do for them.

Yes.

So I totally agree. Like, so he's just on the Client Success ops side of things. MOPROs also need to operate in that way too. So Steve, spot on. I appreciate that.

Yeah.

Well, this has been fun. You know, I think we always look to try to keep these around 30 minutes. You know, if anybody else has anything else to add or say, otherwise maybe we could wrap it up and—

Yeah.

Do a call for— we want to know what we want to talk about next. So if anybody has ideas and you're in the community, feel free to message us or message us on LinkedIn or tweet at us or whatever.

So if you, if you want to, you know, either join or provide ideas, the best way to do it is to, to go out and join in the community of the MoPros. So it's themopros.com, T-H-E-M-O-P-R-O-S dot com. Um, and if you want to kind of keep track of the episodes, you, you know how to get to this one, but also you can go to themopros.com/opscast. O-P-S-C-A-S-T. And you can check out past episodes. And if we're able to schedule those ahead of time in the future, we will do that. Sometimes we'll just spin them up. So join us when you can. And with that, I think we'll wrap. Thanks, everyone. Great conversation. Thank you.

Thanks.

Thanks, everybody.