Taming the Martech Chaos With Anita Brearton

Note: This transcript has been edited for space and clarity.

Rich Hein: Hello, and welcome to CX Decoded by CMSWire, where we explore the technologies, people and practices defining the next generation of digital customer experiences. I'm Rich Hein, editor in chief of CMSWire, brought to you by Simpler Media Group. CMSWire is the world's leading publication focused on digital customer experience and modern marketing. Our mission is to keep you up to speed on all the latest information, trends, news and best practices from the world of customer experience, digital marketing and the modern workplace. Come and join our growing community at CMSWire.com. I'm joined by my co-host, Dominic Nicastro, who also happens to be SMG's senior reporter. Dom it's great to be here with you today.

Dom Nicastro: It's good to be here with you today.  

Rich: Thank you, Dom. Dom, you know, today's marketers, they've got a lot to deal with, not the least of which is their martech stack, which is what we're going to be talking about today. There's monolith, there's best-of-breed, but I think we can agree that you know, most organizations put together a number of technologies to enable their marketers. But the sheer number of those different offerings is crazy. And the constantly-changing technologies, it's just turning everything into chaos. I mean, you've got integrations, differing technology choices, changing organizational needs, and, you know, that's really just scratching the surface.

Dom: Our listeners will hear that term a lot today, Rich. They'll hear martech, short for marketing technology. And let me start with a number today. It's 120. So, Rich, 120, according to one report is the average number of marketing technology tools used by marketers. Let me say that again. 120, according to a Progress Software report, anyway, last fall. So that's pretty recent report, you know, and it is a vendor, too, but that's about 117 more tools than me as a reporter, Rich. I use email, Slack and a web content management system.

Rich: You know, Dom, I jump back and forth in my role. My passion is editorial, but I do spend a lot of time working with marketing. And, you know, I thought I used a lot of tools as head of content, but looking at that number, that seems crazy. I'm somewhere just under 50. But you know, we all we see Scott Brinker's famous Martech Supergraphic. Now, I think there's more than 8,000 marketing tools out there. And that was last year.

Dom: At this point anyway, as of the recording of the podcast, which is a little bit before it when it airs, and people have access to it, no, it's not out yet. And Brinker is kinda not sure. Scott Brinker that is, he's at HubSpot, but he's also well known for his independent research on marketing technology. He hasn't put it out yet. You know, frankly, he's not sure what he's gonna do this year. It just keeps growing and growing. It's just become a monster.

Rich: Yeah, I mean, he's gonna have to make it like a wall-sized diagram. The good news is today, we brought someone in who spends her time helping marketers tame all that chaos, Anita Brearton. She is a longtime CMSWire contributor. And she's also the founder, CEO and co-CMO of CabinetM, which, for those who are not familiar with it is a marketing technology, discovery and management platform. Anita, thank you for joining us today. It's great to have you here.

Anita Brearton: Well, thanks for having me. I'm happy to go anywhere to talk about martech stacks.

Dom: Nice. Anita, we thought we could start with giving a little bit of background on yourself, your organization, kind of what it does, and how you came to taking on this bear of helping organizations manage their martech stacks?

Anita: Yeah, great. So I have to say I am a long-time marketer. And when I say long-time, I've been in marketing since before there was martech. So that's how far back I go in marketing. And, you know, we didn't start CabinetM to manage martech stacks. The problem that we thought we were solving is to create a location where people could go and discover marketing technology tools, and then connect with vendors in a warm contextual environment. And at the time we started the company, I think common wisdom was there were about 1,000 martech tools, so that was several iterations of Scott's landscape drawing ago.

But when we did the market validation and started talking to marketing teams, people would say to us, yes, we need help with that. We need help finding technology. But the bigger problem we have is, we have no ability to manage the technology we have. And in fact, we're not even sure what the organization is using. And so our biggest problem is that we can't move forward because we don't know where we are. So, we can't buy products because we don't know hat's already in place. And that became the genesis for CabinetM.

And so today, we have a platform that follows the technology lifecycle, all the way from discovery to, as I like to say, discard. And it gives people the ability to manage their tech, and map their integrations. And you know, you started this podcast with the number 120. I will tell you, we have companies managing their tech stacks on our site, with 250 and more, tools in their stack. And our database is today at 15,000 products, with 2,500 in the backlog of companies and products in Europe that we don't have on the platform.

Rich: Yeah, those are some pretty unbelievable numbers. The martech scene has exploded. But before we get into some of the ways that marketers contain this chaos, we wanted to level-set a little bit on the martech scene here. If you wouldn't mind, Anita, you've seen the evolution of the Brinker Martech Supergraphic: 150 solutions in 2011; 10 years later, 8,000 solutions. What is the takeaway for marketers from this evolution other than that graphic gets more and more difficult to read every year?

Anita: Yeah, I think we're now at the point where it's impossible to read. But it has to become very artistic. So it's a nice art piece for people to have on their walls. I think the takeaway is not what you would necessarily think. It does not represent this explosion of growth in the last few years. Because what it really represents is the surfacing of technology that has been around that people just didn't know about. So and I think we're still doing that. It was always bigger than we thought it was. There will always be innovation, because as long as human behavior changes, and we as humans interact in different ways, and on different channels, there will always be a need to innovate the technology that reaches and connects with those human beings. So we're going to continue to see innovation. I remember when we started CabinetM somebody told us, "Oh, well, you know, within five years, they'll only be five martech companies." Yeah, well, that has not proven to be the case.

Dom: Yes, there's five of them, you know, in the downtown Boston area. That might be accurate.

Anita: Exactly. And then the other thing that none of us have tackled yet, are these niche products. We found one that surfaced about two weeks ago, and that is a marketing automation platform just for automobile dealerships. Who knew?

Rich: That brings up a great question to me. I mean, we're talking about the amount of solutions that are actually out there, martech solutions. But could you tell me just a little bit if you know, off the top of your head, how many categories of different martech technologies are we actually talking about, or if you're just talking about the top-level ones?

Anita: So on our site, we have 500 different categories, and I think that's probably a good number. But I think one of the things that has been a source of a lot of discussion lately is what actually is martech, what gets included in that martech bucket? And so the way we define it is that it is anything that is used to create customer experiences, or to acquire, engage and retain a customer, or that supports those activities.

So in our realm, when we see the stacks being built by our customers and users on the platform, you'll see productivity tools included, as well, because they're using those to manage campaign activities and marketing plans. So I think the definition is really broad, and it encompasses sales, tech and adtech. But it does add a level of confusion. There's no nice, clean way to look at this market.

Dom: Not at all. I'm wondering, Anita, looking back to something you said earlier, you said you were marketing when there was no marketing technology. How in the world did you ever communicate with your customers? It must have been impossible.

Anita: Well, here's what I'll tell you, though: it was a lot easier. Because you only you only had direct mail, events. So I wish I had kept my marketing calendar from those days. The calendars I had, they all fit on one small spreadsheet, and today, oh my gosh, it's so complex. You've got all of this technology, and you're using it to connect with customers. But then you start to layer on top of that: people want this technology to be predictive, so they want it to tell you what a customer's behavior is likely to be. And then they want you to adapt on the fly the marketing materials that get sent to that customer and then they need them to be personalized. So just the layers of complexity are astonishing.

Dom: How do you kind of look at how they actually manage their martech stacks, like suite vs. best-of-breed and then homegrown? That's kind of like the three things we see at CMSWire: you're either this large suite like you're Adobe, that's your mothership, and you play off of that. Or it's Salesforce and that's your mothership, and you play off of that. These large marketing clouds are trying to convince marketers that's the way to go, obviously.

But then you have the best-of-breed story. We throw in stacks together, there's no really one mothership, you're not locked into a huge vendor with all those issues that go with that.

And then there's the homegrown one, which seems kind of rare. But you actually build out your own martech stack with your own team and your IT team, your engineers, your marketing technologists.

So the question I'm getting at is what's the conversation like in the industry? Like what's been successful for organizations? Is there still that whole suite versus best-of-breed fight? Or is that over?

Rich: I would also add to that, a question that I have a lot of times is, is there really a monolith anymore? Is there really one organization that can do everything?

Anita: Yeah, that's the right question. Because there isn't. So the answer is, you know, it's all of the above, right. So I think best-of-breed is always the case; people will choose best-of-breed when they can. Now, the companies that choose to go with the big solution providers, and Adobe is a great example, and they're busy gobbling up lots of different martech products; they've just bought Workfront, they bought Marketo. Companies can commit to those monoliths, but then sitting around the edges are still all of these small best-of-breed products. And I think that will continue to be the case, because it's really generally not those big behemoths that move quickly and innovate quickly, in response to new channels and different types of environments.

Just over a year ago, we didn't know anything about Clubhouse, now they have 10 million subscribers. Everybody's scrambling to figure out how they leverage that for marketing. And that's the sort of stuff that lends itself to innovators being really quick on their feet and producing technology that helps take advantage of those things.

But I want to touch on the homegrown technology, because I think for us, that was a big awakening. It is not unusual, in fact. I would say it's probably the norm that most companies have somewhere around 20% of their stack that is homegrown stuff. And we actually shared a space in a building. There was a TripAdvisor company in the building that we were in, in our last offices, and 95% of their martech was homegrown, which just just blows the mind. And it's not just little things. We've talked to big companies that have built their own CDPs and built their own email platforms.

Rich: On CMSWire, I can tell you, I've seen some of the same things, looking at subscription services, looking into different organizations that do that. I was surprised at how many of them had built a homegrown, and technically I guess that's martech as well. And I always think that that's the most difficult way to go. But I suppose at the end of the day, that's how you get exactly what you need to.

Anita: Exactly. And I think some companies do it for scale. And because they can achieve a greater scale at a better cost than using something off the shelf. And then other companies very much view their marketing technology as a differentiator and believe that it creates competitive advantage. And that becomes the driver for building it in-house.

Dom: It's so powerful. The other day, Rich, I think you might have been part of this conversation with our team, I suggested a word change in a platform that we use, because it's a word that we talk about all the time as humans. We use it on our team so commonly, but then someone else came in and said, if we change that word, it's going to blow up our marketing automation system. I'm serious. That's a true story.

Rich: Yeah, it's integrated with other systems, that if you change that one piece of nomenclature, then work would have to be done on all those systems to figure that out.

Dom: And the systems would be confused. And the outcomes would be different.  

Rich: But yeah, you're absolutely right. It's complexity on top of complexity, which, Anita, is one of the reasons we brought you here, and we're gonna get into now some of the ways that marketers can actually tame this chaos and get more out of their martech stack. So if you wouldn't mind, let's talk a little bit about some of the things you shared with us. One of the things that you mentioned was stopping the organic expansion of the martech stack; low-cost products have just made it super easy for anybody with a credit card to sign up and start using something. I think this has actually aided into shadow IT as well. So what are your thoughts there?

Anita: Yeah, absolutely. The swiping of a credit card for low-cost tools is so problematic for a couple of reasons. One, there's a natural tendency; marketers love the shiny new thing. So what is the bird that like shiny new things? Is it a magpie? I think if it is a magpie, we're all magpies. We're all attracted to the shiny new thing. And then somebody puts the pricing out there, that's $4.99 a month or $9.99 a month, or 30-days free trial, just enter your credit card here. And so what happens is, you know, people start using these tools, they play with them for a little bit, and then they forget about them, and never cancel. And so what starts to happen is costs just go up exponentially. We call those zombie products. And there are lots and lots of those hiding in organizations.

And just a quick funny story. Probably a couple of years ago, we were on the phone with a potential customer. I won't say their name, but imagine they're a multibillion dollar computer company. We're going through our spiel, and I get to the bit about swiping credit cards, and I stopped myself because I thought, oh, no, this is a big computer company, they won't have this problem. But, as I stopped myself mid sentence, they're like, "Oh, yeah, you're absolutely right, we just had to cancel all the corporate credit cards last week for this very reason." So people swipe everywhere.

So first, it's a cost issue. And then the next issue is security and compliance data compliance. The poor folks in InfoSec, and IT are not sleeping at night worrying that somebody has swiped a credit card for a new tool, nobody's looked at the security around it. And there's the potential to expose customer PII. So you've got that problem. And now with all of these privacy, compliance regulations that are coming into being, you have to look at that. And I don't know if everybody understands, but with some of these privacy regulations, and data compliance regulations, you're responsible for your entire data supply chain, so you're responsible for what your suppliers do. So if you don't know who your suppliers are, that's a problem.

Rich: I think that's a great point. Dom and I have done podcasts in the past on the growing legislation around customer data and privacy. And this issue, the one you're talking about here is super important, and it's getting bigger, it's not getting smaller. And as the martech ecosystems get larger, there's potential customer data in places, a lot of times I think organizations don't even know. And with this legislation, you kind of have to know where this data is because you have to be able to scrub it and remove it and tell people what you're doing with it and how it's being used. That is something that really needs to be top of mind for CMOs everywhere.

Dom: So going on No. 2, Anita, audit for redundancy. You feel that's a big one that marketers can look at to kind of tame the martech stack?

Anita: Yeah, absolutely. So first, you shut down the credit card swipes. And then next you get an inventory of everything that is being used in the organization. So one of the things that we found is that users of our platform within 6 to 12 months, reduce their tech spend by 20% just by dealing with redundancy, but that magic, as much as I would like everybody to be on the CabinetM platform, that magic can be obtained in very simple ways, which is just making sure that you are auditing and tracking everything that's being purchased.

So here's what we see. We see redundant contracts. We had a client, and they had five different contracts with Marketo. There's money to be saved in consolidating into one contract. So it's contract redundancy.

Then the next thing is product redundancy. We had another customer who told us they had nine email systems, including one they'd built themselves. Now, there's a case to be made for having more than one email system. It's hard to imagine why you need nine. So then you get through that. And just doing those two things alone will shrink your stack, and save you a lot of money.

And then the next place to tackle is redundant functionality. So here's what happens. Somebody buys a marketing automation system, and they become a basic user of that platform. And then they're comfortable with it, and then somebody dangles a shiny new object. And so they're off and running toward that shiny new object, and they never ask if their marketing automation system could perform the same function as the shiny new object. So what happens is, you end up with lots of redundant functionality where if you'd stood back and said, "Oh, if this is the use case, what do we have internally that will address this already?" And you should only be looking for new technology when you don't have something that addresses it.

So I think the data is out all over the place that companies only use 15% of the capabilities of their platform. I think Gartner has some numbers about the percentage of utilization of the elements in the martech stack. But it's pretty shocking.

Rich: Yeah, I mean, I definitely agree with your point there. I mean, I think that there's a lot of redundancy in the products. I think there's a lot of unused, untapped technology that goes on there. And one of the things I think that organizations aren't necessarily great at is making sure that they're aligning all these marketing tools with their objectives. And sometimes, like you said, marketers are just overtaken by this new shiny object, and they want it without thinking to themselves, "How is this going to get me to my business objective?"

Anita: Yeah, absolutely. And if we go back to our earlier conversation, when we were talking about marketing without technology, back in those days, marketing strategy, and marketing objectives, led everything. Everything had to serve that. And I think one of the things that's happened over time, is that marketers have specialized because of all of this technology. You have people that are very focused on email marketing, and others that are focused on SEO, and somebody else is focused on marketing automation. And in that, with those specialties, and fragmentation, you can lose sight of strategy, and objectives. So you see all of this technology everywhere, and then it becomes unclear what is that technology actually being used to do?

And so I think, if you can start every quarter by reviewing your business objectives, and then the marketing objectives that serve those business objectives, and then look at the tech that you have in place and say, "OK, is everything that we're using, is it aiding us in accomplishing these objectives?" And you know, what we see when people actually take a look at this, by the way, there are a lot of specialist consultancies that have formed to help people with this exercise, but you can peel away a lot of technology by going through that exercise.

Rich: You've really got to create a detailed strategy and plan is what I'm hearing from you. Could you talk a little bit about how organizations can actually go about setting this up and getting this right?

Anita: Yeah, so one of the things that I think is really different about marketing technology is when you think about the marketing technology stack, the tendency is to think of all of these discrete building blocks. But the reality is, it is much more like a jigsaw puzzle. And all of these pieces tend to integrate together certainly at the center of the stack. You may have some outside products that don't integrate with anything, but for the most part, things are integrating together. So you have two layers of complexity.

And then you're looking at the performance of your individual products, and then you're looking at the stack as a whole. You have to have this rigorous process where you're working to your objectives and making sure that all your technology serves your objectives.

And then the next natural piece is to say, "OK, well, all this technology is in service of our objectives. But, are we getting the holistic performance out of our stack that we need to achieve these objectives? And if not, is that because things aren't integrated properly or can't be integrated? Is it because the data is not getting from one piece of equipment to the next?"

So you really have to then go back to your data architecture and say, "OK, what information do I need to get from this place to that place, and what needs to happen to it?" And so once you've narrowed down your technology, then you can really dig into the data architecture. And it may be that you'll need to swap out some pieces of technology.

So another anecdotal story. I met with a CMO at an event and sat next to him at lunch. And he was a CMO for a very large digital agency, who had a whole department looking at the latest and greatest in marketing technology. And I said to him, "Gosh, you must have the best job in the world because you can look at new technology, because you've got a whole bunch of people that can actually evaluate and implement it for you." And he said, "Well, my job's awful at the moment. I joined the company, then they were using a CRM system that I didn't like, so I replaced the CRM system, put in another one. And then I found out that it didn't integrate with Marketo, which was already in place."

I'm thinking to myself, well, really, before you rip something out, you should have thought about that. And he said, "I just got a call this morning. And the only person in the organization that knows how to use the Marketo system resigned today. So now I don't know what I'm going to do. Because now nobody knows how to use Marketo, my CRM doesn't talk to Marketo. I'm $50,000 and eight weeks into a custom integration development. So no, my job isn't great."

So I'm thinking in my head nodding sympathetically. But I'm thinking, "Oh, gosh, why were you ever hired as a CMO, you created a mess where there wasn't one?" But anyway, but that sort of stuff happens all the time.

Rich: So it brings up a good point. You said that was a CMO you were talking to. When you talk about these types of audits, is this the CMO who should be you know, leading this charge? Or is this something that it gets pushed down to like the department level, and then they all report up?

Anita: Yeah. So you know what, that actually could be a whole podcast on its own, about the different roles in marketing. So more and more organizations are implementing marketing ops functions. And I think that makes sense. And marketing ops reports to the CMO, but kind of sits between the marketing department and the IT department, and they're populated with technical people. So really, they're the ones best served to do the audit.

But, I really believe that the CMO cannot wash their hands of the technology, and I think we see a lot of that where the CMO is like, "Well, you know, I'm worried about the campaigns and somebody else worries about with technology." With 30% of your budget now being spent on technology, you can't not worry about the technology. So even though you don't need to be a technology expert, as a CMO, you should understand what technology is being deployed, what it's doing for you what it costs and how it's performing. And you don't need to be deeply technical to understand that.

Dom: Yeah, and I wanted to mention, Anita, you cited that Gartner report about not using their stack. And I wrote two articles on that in the past two years. They came out with two reports and they found the same percentage in back-to-back years. My most recent article was Dec. 3 of 2020. So it was, Martech Stacks Are Being Underutilized By Marketers, How Much Does It Matter? They found 58% of their martech stacks full-breadth of capabilities., they're not using it, because they have trouble with cross functional collaboration. We talked about deal with a sprawling array of martech solutions, and lack a solid customer data foundation.

Anita: Yeah, absolutely. And you know, when you think about that, and you hear 58% of the stack is not being utilized, that means that you have paid money in some of these platforms people are spending a million dollars a year on. So you're buying something and you're not using it. And so that sounds bad. But what's really bad, is that all of that marketing technology rolls into the cost of customer acquisition, and so you're bloating your cost of customer acquisition, which in turn reduces your customer lifetime value. So with all that technology not being used you're impacting the bottom line of your company. And it amazes me that people are not connecting those dots.

Rich: Yeah, it's driving down all your KPIs. It seems like something that organizations would want to get a hold of immediately.

Anita: Yeah. And it's kind of weird to me. But it seems to me that marketing gets more of a free pass than other departments on technology and some of these metrics. And I think it's because, for so long, it was very difficult to measure what we were doing and in marketing,

Dom: We've had a lot of fun here with you Anita, we appreciate this very much. Let's get down to a final couple of things that marketers can do to tame the martech stack. And by the way, quick question, this advice you're giving? Is it pretty set in stone for small teams, large teams? Are these tried and true for how big your organization is?

Anita: Definitely. And, we didn't suddenly think of these things. We work with so many different marketing operations teams, and we're always asking them for best practices. And so this is kind of the collective wisdom of all of the great folks that we work with.

Dom: Cool. And so a couple of your last final objectives here for marketers to tame the martech chaos, and Anita, one of them is follow the data. Realize the full value of the stack, the individual components need to share data.

Anita: Having a data architecture is so foundational. You need to make sure that you've got some centralized place where the data is cleansed, upended and then shared back to the organization. And companies take different approaches. So CDPs have kind of come into their own. They've jumped the chasm of marketing jargon and our real products that are being built into marketing stacks, which is great. So there, you have a centralized repository of all of your customer data. And that becomes your source of truth.

But other companies designate their marketing automation platform as the source of customer data, and feed out from there. And then others distribute the customer data across multiple platforms, but they have a centralized data orchestration platform that makes sure everything is in sync and bits and pieces that are missing, get added and sent back out.

So there's no right or wrong way to do this. This is the way that works best for your organization. The only wrong way it's to not do it. Because if you are not looking at your customer data and leveraging that, then you are not going to be leveraging the best capabilities of your technology platforms.

Dom: Yeah. And this one kind of wraps into everything we've been talking about, it's kind of like the final OK, now let's put it all together. So you feel that a real strong way to to get this done right is to really introduce process?

Anita: So I always want to talk about this at the end. Because part of what this whole discussion really mandates is centralized oversight of technology, which gives people the heebie jeebies, people that are working in siloed organizations, it makes them nervous to think somebody is taking control and taking their budget away and doing all of that. Really, the best way to do this is to not necessarily restrict independent purchasing, but to create guidelines. What you want is the centralized oversight, it doesn't necessarily mean it has to be centralized purchasing, but you need process.

And I think the mistake that gets made is creating a one-size-fits-all process. So companies have a natural tendency to create approval processes for buying and evaluating technology, as if every platform was going to be a million-dollar investment. And then it just becomes onerous, and people just become renegades and find their way around the system.

So process is important, but process needs to be sized to the need. So is shouldn't be a one-size-fits-all. You just want a framework and boundaries. And you want tight process for the million-dollar piece of equipment or the equipment that's touching customer data. And then you want a much lighter process for small purchases or purchases that are independent products that don't integrate or don't deal with customer data. Otherwise, all of the things that we've talked about are doomed to failure because it is our human tendency to get around the system if it becomes too onerous.

Rich: Anita, it looks like we've just about come to the end of the podcast, but before we go, what are your key takeaways for our audience today?

Anita: First, your stack is never going to be done. You're always going to be continually looking at elements of your stack. We live, and I think this is one of the greatest things about our industry, we live in an industry of constant innovation. So don't get yourself completely wrapped up in, "This is my stack, I'm done with it, I'm walking away." So it's going to be always evolving. But the important thing is to keep your marketing objectives and the business objective of the company as your North Star. And if you do that, the other pieces will fall into place.

Rich: Anita we truly appreciate your time here today with us. We wanted to give you the opportunity to tell our listeners how they can best follow you and what's going on with you and your company.

Anita: So two things. One, we have a great newsletter CabinetM and we cover all the latest technology announcements every week, so subscribe to that. But the other thing that we have done, which came out of our COVID experience, is we have built a separate site called LibraryM that is a resource for anybody in marketing technology, and LibraryM, just think of it as a portal to all good things about marketing technology. So we are not inventing original content on LibraryM, we are just giving you the directions and the way to get to great podcasts like this one. We post lots of CMSWire articles and we have links to CMSWire.

Dom: And then Rich before you wrap up, I want to say that she's got some tremendous copy on our website, Anita Brearton does, and I want to point out one article in particular that she wrote, really in the heart of the pandemic, when it really started to take shape in March 2020, remember that time? She wrote Marketing in a Time of Crisis, it was like the defining piece for us, and how marketers are going to go forward in this crazy, scary new world. It was one of our best-read pandemic pieces, if you will. And then she wrote a follow-up to that about a month later Marketing in a Crisis, One Month Later, that's actually the title. So if you go to CMSWire and look up Anita Brearton you'll find all our articles there. So it's definitely worth your time.