Why Entrepreneurs Must Grasp Functionality Evaluation and Device Buying
In a previous article I described six basic skills for marketers working with marketing technology, including the first three: generalized understanding of the system, tool management And architectural vision.
This article focuses on the next two interconnected skills: capacity assessment and tool acquisition.
Once marketers understand how customer data flows across different martech platforms and develop a strategic view of how these platforms work together, they can effectively assess the capabilities of different tools and guide the companies in the appropriate procurement process.
The capacity assessment skill involves:
Evaluate the value of tools and suppliers. Identify those who can solve specific problems. Determine how they fit into the overall marketing technology stack and architecture.
The tool sourcing competency focuses on building relationships with vendors based on business needs and the martech landscape. Marketers should:
Make sure contracts include essential features. Help procurement teams (or their equivalent) understand why these platforms and features are needed, how they integrate with other tools, and where feature overlap is either beneficial or redundant.
Dig Deeper: 5 “to do’s” when reviewing your martech stack
Why are these martech skills important for marketers?
By developing and honing these skills, marketers can:
Help define which tools/vendors could solve problems or create opportunities to improve customer communications and marketing processes. Work closely with other teams involved and leading these efforts (i.e. IT and Procurement) to ensure the right marketing problem is defined and considered throughout this evaluation phase. Be the facilitators of these martech vendor relationships, helping to involve the appropriate stakeholders on both the vendor and customer side and ensuring the process is initiated correctly, along with other important stakeholders and owners.
It is important to note that this knowledge does not require technical expertise. Instead, marketers need a strategic perspective that allows them to understand the capabilities of martech platforms and how these capabilities can effectively support the procurement process.
Dig Deeper: The art of negotiating with martech providers
Questions to Help Marketers Get Started
Do the capabilities of martech platforms align with the organization’s goals? If so, is the purchasing team aware of this alignment? Is there feature overlap between multiple martech platforms? Although some overlap can be beneficial, excessive redundancy can increase costs and complicate procurement processes. Do the different platforms offer the necessary capabilities to improve customer communication and marketing processes, taking into account the overall martech architecture? Are these capabilities and their potential positive impacts clearly defined during the procurement process? Is the procurement team informed about which capabilities are essential versus which can be considered “nice to have”?
Dig Deeper: Winning the martech procurement process
Next Steps for Marketers
Marketers should participate in discussions about martech platform capabilities to ensure they align with how customer data is collected and used for activation, engagement, and conversion.
They are well placed to help procurement understand what features should be included in contracts and the benefits they can bring to the company’s marketing processes. This collaboration can also help demonstrate the ROI of these platforms.
Dig Deeper: Aligning martech with your business strategy: your plan for success
Contributing authors are invited to create content for MarTech and are chosen for their expertise and contribution to the martech community. Our contributors work under the supervision of the writing and contributions are checked for quality and relevance to our readers. The opinions they express are their own.
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About the author
Ana Mourao is an experimental marketer with extensive experience helping large, complex B2B2C companies make CRM and digital marketing decisions with incomplete data using an experimentation framework. She is passionate about applying this framework to enable large organizations to make informed and effective CRM and digital marketing decisions, even when data is incomplete. Ana successfully led the selection and implementation of a customer data platform, established compliance and data governance protocols, and collaborated with data science teams and other key stakeholders to provide information and impactful activations. Additionally, she is a lifelong learner and is a certified professional in Growth Leadership, Marketing Leadership, Retention and Engagement, Negotiation, and Web Analytics.
