Video Transcript

Hi there, Dustin Clark, Senior Director of Strategy here at Element Three, I want to talk to you today about MarTech challenges. When you’re thinking through making a technology change, whether that’s for marketing or sales technology use, usually you’re looking at a large expense, usually looking at a lot of time. And most organizations, I don’t know of any organization that has gone into a technology decision thinking, I want to screw this up, but it’s amazing how many of them do.

And one of the things I want to consider sharing with you today is this idea of typically when we’re doing marketing technology we’re responding to a pain, right? The sales team wants more information or the marketer wants to be able to see what happened before somebody came into our database and then transfer that information over to the sales team.

You’re thinking through the right things and you’re solving the right problems. But in a lot of cases, organizations don’t stop and do that root cause analysis where they’re reacting to the pain, but not thinking through a layer or two deeper and what might be causing the pain. And so they’re implementing a technology solution that solves the immediate pain, but might actually be increasing difficulty or different steps. They’re going to have an impact of solving that long term, whether that’s solving the immediate issue or the long term impact of what that looks like. Typically, a lot of technology decisions are made around chasing the holy grail of marketing in closed loop reporting, right?

We know a lead came in here where they close here. We know how much money revenue that that lead contributed back to the organization. We can do our ROI analysis and all that stuff, which is a noble goal to have. But again, in that root cause analysis, are we considering all the things that need to be considered in order to make an appropriate decision when it comes to our technology?

The second consideration, maybe two out of the three that I want to talk to is the idea of change management. As soon as you’ve made that technology decision, you’ve added workload to your marketing team or to your sales team. There’s new processes they’re going to have to adopt. There’s new things they’re going to have to do to set up websites, emails, whatever the content might be, so that your automation system or your CRM, or even some of these data aggregators and integrators can take that information and put it in the right spot. And typically, when you have any type of technology lift like that, you’re going to go through the change management curve, right where we get to the trough of despair.

Everybody’s excited and then we have to implement this thing. We have to learn how to use it, and then it sucks. Some people will go right through that and get out on the other side, but you want to be careful and monitor your team how you’re managing the people that are going to be using these technologies because there are going to be people that get stuck in that trough and you need to be able to recognize
how to help them through that. What training is necessary. How do we reinforce that
this technology decision is going to make our lives easier?

It’s going to suck in the short term. Like, let’s be clear, it’s going to suck in the short term. But in the long term, what’s the payoff going to be? The last thing there that long term is how do we future proof this? I don’t know how many organizations I have seen have gone into a technology decision and saying, we’re solving this for now. This is almost going back to that root cause analysis you’re solving for your sales process. Now you’ve invested technology, and so many people take the approach of like, we’re going to get it done. It’s the destination, not the journey.

No technology or software implementation is the destination. It’s always the journey. And if you’re not either thinking through, what do we need to do in five years and how does this technology help us five years from now or ten years from now,or even three years from now? If you’re only thinking three months from now and then your sales process changes or a target changes, or you have to add in new information that you didn’t plan for, depending on how big that technology investment is and the different platforms that it’s integrated with.

You’re talking you could be talking about thousands of dollars of refactoring, how your technology works, not just the software that you bought, but the other softwares that it interacts with your website. So many different things, right? And then of course, you could say, Well, we’re not going to do that. We’re going to change our sales processes, try asking the sales guy to change, right? They’ve got a way to do it. They’ve got a way that they know how to sell.

So how are you thinking through how this technology is going to be relevant to our audiences, our future audiences, our future sales? You’ve got to think through those things upfront before you go make that investment because I would rather see organizations make the investment five years down the road and make it for where
they’re going than where they are today. Because as a marketer, as a consultant, it sucks to have to tell somebody that the new toy that they just bought and signed up for and got implemented isn’t going to work where they’re going. It works for today. Was it going to work down here?

How is it going to work out here? How is it going to work with this new audience that you’ve never sold to before? So slow down to go fast. When you’re thinking about your technology. You want to solve these problems, but it’s OK to live with the problems a little bit longer to do that root cause analysis to think through how we’re going to train and support our team through that change management curve and even more importantly, to think about where we’re going in the future so that we can right size the technology. And even if we’re not right sizing the investment, we’re understanding how we’re integrating that technology so that we don’t have to refactor every three to six months. We know that we’re committing to a plan and we’re going to be able to use that technology in the timeframe available.