Darrell, good to see you and welcome to the second growth podcast. I bet. Great. Great.
Thanks you. It's good to see you again Cassidy. Maybe it's been a year since we last talked. I don't know if like over zoom like this, but it's been great to see your content on LinkedIn.
I've been listening to this now new podcast that I've been really liking. It's great to be back. Yeah, I appreciate that. Yeah, it's been.
I was trying to think about that. It's probably been at least 12 months since we last chatted. I guess we call face to face. I don't know what you call this over zoom.
Likewise, I've been enjoying your content as well. I can continue to be prolific and have a mask quite a following. It doesn't look like you've been up to much outside of writing a book. So that's what I want to get into today and find out all about it.
So why don't we start with just that? Like what drove you to write a book? I mean, you have a day job at Amazon. Obviously, you're sharing a lot of insights and having a great time collaborating on LinkedIn and then you decided to write a book as well.
So I'd love to hear kind of how that manifested itself. Yeah, great question. I, you know, this book called the MarkTech Handbook is really about how to orient yourself in this vast, marked landscape of over 8,000 tools. I find that it's overwhelming for people.
It's confusing and it can be scary. And you know, this is, I think, a great sort of primer on everything, MarkTech, the way to look at it, but also it's my personal view and personal take on MarkTech strategy that I've developed over the years. And that's really, you know, I consider this a labor of love that I've been writing nights and weekends to produce this book. And on a personal note, this has been on my bucket list or something to do.
I'm a voracious reader. I find it is one of my favorite ways to learn. And you know, having a book out there is, I feel so excited that it's coming out that it's finally here. When did the idea for the book really formulate in your mind, meaning, you know, and maybe, maybe even take a step back a little bit and kind of walk us through, you have a remarkable career journey.
And you say this in a book, like, you owe a lot of your success to this, getting into MarkTech and like, what has it been able to do for your career? I'd love to kind of hear that story and the idea for the book, like, when did that start coming to life for you over the last probably, I guess, two or three years. So it's a good one. Yeah.
Well, here's a good one. So I've always wanted to write a book. I think it was either going to be on marketing operations, be to be marketing or on MarkTech. So the question of, should I self-publish or should I use a publisher was the one that really came to mind what I was really debating between.
And you hear all of the reasons of why having a personal brand is a good thing. But I think that when you see it, it makes all the difference. And because of the following that I've developed for my writing, for my ideas across, you know, I took a class on the side, I also write on LinkedIn and Twitter, I was fortunate enough because of that, as well as speaking gigs, to get approached by a publisher out of the UK. And these days, it's very difficult and to be able to partner with someone that's done this before, especially for a first time author, myself.
That's kind of how it came about. And then of those different topics, MarkTech, I think, was something that marketers and business owners everywhere really need some guidance on. So it helped focus my thinking. But I will say that this was very much a joint effort between me and my publisher, Cogan Page.
For those aspiring authors out there, having both a developmental editor and a copy editor is worth their waiting gold when you're writing. So I will say that. Yeah, I appreciate that. One of the questions I've always had was with your background, did you think about self-publishing versus going through a publisher?
And that makes a lot of sense after you've outlined it that way. The book is great. I've read through it. I love the structure.
I feel like I can hear you in the book. And even for myself, there's a lot of things in it. I took away. I love the perspective of how this was laid out and thought through.
But I'm curious, when in your mind, when you decided to write it, who is the audience? Who were you trying to kind of gear it towards? Was it a the MarkTech profession? Was it business leaders and CEOs who may not be in this day in and day out?
I'm just curious with your thoughts on when you think about people who are reading the book, who's it for? Yeah. Yeah. So this follows through to my audience too that I write to on LinkedIn.
I am a big fan of the practitioner. I'm a big fan of the people that get the work done. And I've always felt like when we talk about marketing operations, that they're the underdog often, that they're the people behind the scenes doing everything but then not getting the credit. So I think that this could be a personal love letter to them, but it is very much a handbook and a field guide.
It introduces, I think, a way to look at MarkTech in my own eyes as a way to sort of categorize and label and bucketize if that's a word, where the different pieces of your MarkTech stack go, what to think about when you're architecting a tech stack and then how to drive success with it. And I do think that business leaders can really get a lot of value out of this, but I'm hoping that it's one of those books that people will keep aside their computers as they're getting through this stuff. So that's what I was thinking when I wrote it. That's excellent.
And this is where I picked up as I went through it. I'm going through it and I'm like, listen, this is a chapter I would come back to if I need to make a decision on building a team at a new company or where do I go with my strategy or how to even structure it in terms of being able to articulate what are we doing and why we're doing it and what's the investment return on it. So I think you hit on a lot of that in the book very nicely. And the idea of it being a handbook is true.
Like you will flip through it once, but you're going to come back to it along your journey which I think is great. Let's dive into it a little bit. And what I wanted to get into is how you explain MarkTech to the uninformed when you think about that term. Yeah.
Okay, really good one. I really think that MarkTech is the software and platforms that businesses use to achieve their objectives around promoting, positioning, converting, and ultimately delighting their customers. So, and I like to define things without using the words in there, without using the name and the definition, which I find is very difficult to do because marketing is such a broad term. But ultimately, I think that MarkTech in short is just the technology that marketers use to get their jobs done to achieve their business objectives.
And one of the big things that I think that I really put into the book that I love to talk about are the pitfalls that people have. I think that most marketers are using MarkTech. So it's not like, hey, let's buy this book and then now we're going to start on our MarkTech journey. That's not a real thing.
Everyone's using technology already. So my favorite parts of the book were to say, these are the big pitfalls that you need to overcome. I'm happy to walk through those. But I'd love to know, Cassidy, from your perspective, you work with a lot of companies now and have in the past two, which one's your biggest pet peeve of when it comes to MarkTech?
What is the big mistake that you think that they're making? I mean, the one I see time and time again, I think it's the one you hit first in your book that you call it the shiny object syndrome. But I see most marketing teams have entirely too much technology of which they're not using or utilizing enough. I mean, a conversation with a gentleman or a new CMO who's kind of coming into a company and kind of surveying the land of his team and his stack.
And he had to get the who's who of technology and what he observed coming in new was a team who didn't know how to use it. And so we've all made that a stake. I got caught out before too and bought technology and realized, hey, listen, somebody needs to operate this and own it day in and day out. And both technically and from an administrative perspective, but also from a functional perspective, like how we're deploying this to run campaigns, for example, and so on.
And you find that your team's not trained and you haven't thought about that. You feel like a fool. And so I see this as a kind of a consistent theme throughout my career and talking about the talk and other marketers of to my technology underutilized. Underutilized.
Yep. Yep. Shelf where it's often called in the worst cases where marketers aren't using at all or people haven't logged in in the last six months. Well, I would say that that is one of the primary pain points.
I think one of my favorite ones, my favorite ones to hate is where their marketers are using or they build their martech stack like they're building a set of golf clubs, right? Where on the course, you might need a driver or a seven iron, a putter. You may need it sometime in the future. And you're doing this because it's sort of standard best practice where someone told them that this is a set of clubs that you need, right?
And we treat martech that way. Well, we need a CRM, we need a sales automation tool, we're going to need a data visualization tool, content marketing tool, you name it, you know, we need all of these things or we can't get our jobs done. And that is, I think, the really biggest mistake. And the answer to that, and I'm a big fan of starting on paper or starting on just a flow chart, is mapping your martech to business objectives.
And this is my favorite because business objectives are different for every business. You know what I mean? You might think it's all, they're all driving sales, but it's all driving sales in a very different way. You've got the startups that are trying to acquire customers really quickly with very little brand.
So they're doing a ton of outreach, a ton of community, a ton of grassroots stuff. You've got enterprises who are trying to keep their market share and really maintain the momentum and stability of these large teams, right? And then everywhere in between. So that I think is one of the biggest learnings is to figure out as a marketing team, what are you trying to do?
And then how does martech support and slot in to help you get there along that journey? So that one I think is my favorite to fall. What else do you have on your list? I'm curious, what's second, what's third?
And then come back to business objectives. I think this is a common theme throughout all of marketing, really, in terms of their ability to tie technology decisions and marketing strategy to business outcomes and strategy. Yeah. All good ones, all good ones.
I think buy-in is a really common one. And I break buy-in into a couple of different parts. One is the executive leadership or buy-in having a sponsor for the tool, you know, someone that knows and understands and is a proponent of the investment itself because the investment in the martech will undoubtedly grow over time. Whether that's number of seats, whether that's database size or just the annual fee is going to increase, but also the number of people you need to manage it.
And then sometimes consulting fees that you need to do are integration fees. So that costs going to grow and you need executive sponsorship to make sure that's supported over time. And then buy-in also comes down to the stakeholders. Is there an adoption and training plan to make sure that the salespeople know how to log in, that marketers understand how to build reports in the tool?
And almost, you know, one of my favorite ways to do this is for each tool in your tech stack to actually have a red, yellow, green rating system, you know, green being, we're good to go. 80% plus adoption rate and utilization rate. Yellow is not so good and red is, you know, we should probably be getting rid of this. And then companies should have, martech managers should have a plan to increase each of those levels as a ghost to make sure that it's all green.
So I think that that's one of my other favorite pitfalls to really avoid is that the buy-in piece. One thing I've also observed as you were talking is that is do we ever get rid of technology? I mean, you have it in your book that we should and it's logical. There's going to be some points in time when you've done the red, yellow and green, you look at the red and you're like, okay, well, we're not using it.
We don't need it. Let's get rid of it. Can you actually see marketers getting rid of technology? Yeah, you know, I do, but it's not a clear cut.
It's, you know, I liken it to like a bad breakup, right? It's messy. You know, it's not just one day someone says not working out. Usually, you see all of the symptoms.
First of all, you lose executive sponsorship and that happens when there's a reorganization or a new CMO comes in. So all of a sudden, executives don't really understand what this tool is. Then I think you lose, you start losing the users. People find other things to do.
People realize, I don't have to use this and I wasn't really generating value or I don't know how to use this. So I'm going to do it on my own. And then finally, at the very end, I've been on the tail end of this myself is the owner of the tool goes to renew the contract and they're finding that they're not really getting the support they need to justify this sometimes multi-million dollar investment. So for most smart tech, the deprecation ends up being kind of messy, unfortunately, and very costly.
And that's why, you know, so much time and resources are put into renewing a tool that we're not really getting our wife from. So that's why I really caution marketers to really be thoughtful when you're building your tech stack and especially be thoughtful when you're adding things on. That's the part where you really need to start to put on your pros and cons sort of hat. You look at it from a lens of what's the long term plan for this going to look like.
So I would say that's what I've seen in practice of sunsetting or deprecating more tech tools. One of the things you did along those lines, I like how you framed the types of technology and I love you to kind of elaborate on this. And the way I kind of read it or heard it was like there's kind of core platforms, of which was just a few. It depends on if you're small, medium or large or kind of where you are as a company.
And then you kind of have these value added platforms and tools. And then you give the audience a little bit of taste of how do you think about structurally a Martec stack, maybe in that terminology, what that means or how everyone would think about outlining it. So take us from a few questions on this. We have 8,000 tools.
There's some fundamental pieces of technology we need to place first, second, third. And how should I think about that as a company or as a marketing organization? Yeah, that's a good question. So I'm going to speak about B2B just because it's more simple in this context.
So let's talk about B2B for a second. Now, regardless of the 8,000 tools, all the variety of different technologies, there's some core things that marketers need to do and need to be able to do. They need to engage their customers. They need to work lockstep with sales to drive leads along the sales cycle and ultimately into happy customers.
And they need to report and analyze to make better business decisions. Those are three core things that they really need to do. And you'll find that there's platforms that support that. And without those core platforms, you are almost like cutting out one of the legs of a chair or a tripod.
You know what I mean? You're not really able to do your job. You might get fired, especially if you're a marketing leader. You're not supporting these things.
But for those of you familiar with the industry, this isn't going to be a surprise. But engagement of customers happens in some sort of marketing automation or advertising tool. Alignment with sales has to be integration with the CRM, customer relationship management platform. And then reporting analytics has to be some sort of data visualization, data warehouse, all of those different types of things, or potentially CDP, but that kind of makes it together.
So these are kind of like the bread and butter, almost like a macro nutrients that you really need for a thriving marketing organization in the same way that the human body needs protein carbs and fats, right? Now, everything else is really when the customization comes to play. Because if your organization like AWS, for example, runs thousands of events, well, then you need a marketing platform to be able to support that scale. Otherwise it's going to be chaos.
If you are heavy across social media marketing tools are going to be, you know, your cup of tea. And then the same thing you said for content and tools meant to orchestrate different types of content and education. So I think that that's different for every business and in the largest organization, you can use all of them. But the idea that there are core things, core technologies that every business needs and then you add on tools based on your specific bespoke needs, I think, is a really interesting way to look at and to frame MARTech.
Other than, you know, the typical way people go and the typical way people do this is they look at these fancy MARTech stacks visualizations that they see on Google and they say, whoa, look at all these tech stacks. Look at all these tools. We need each of these, which flavor of these do we need, right? Again, going back to that golf club example, you know, we need all of these different set of clubs in order to even play and that's not true at all.
I love that explanation. One of the things that I've observed is that outside of the core platforms, the marketing automation platform, I have a CRN, I have a way to access data and report on it. When it comes to the others, I find that there's this pull to do what other people have done. This is where the shiny object comes in.
At the time when we should be making decisions on additional tools tied to business objectives, we tend to be looking to our peers to be like, what's the quickest hack in order for me to like have some magical success? How do we resist? How do we feel like how does the marketing team resist that beyond the staples in place? But like, do I need anything else?
How do I decide that? What should be the structure I go through, the line of the business to the technology, that's a really good question. The key mistake here is thinking that there's a tool out there or a magic solution that's automatically going to fix your marketing. One of the best examples that I can think of is poor content or low quality content.
It doesn't matter what you buy. It's not automatically going to make crappy content good and that's just the short of it. By the way, there will be a hell of a tool. If there was one, they can make crappy content good.
I'm ready to address that one when it comes out. Just keep me posted to be here or anything. I think that we started at the beginning, right? We're mapping Martec to business needs.
This is one of my favorite ways of doing it is one way is to think about the customer experience. It could be stakeholder experience, but for example, let's just think about the end user that comes across their site. We want them to, as they come to the website, we want them to have a personalized experience and we want them to be guided to a place where they interact with our company somehow. That could be downloading something that could be engaging with the chat box.
That might be a way to schedule automatically their call. We take that end experience in the shoes of the customer. You come across a mockup website, then what do you do? Then what do you do?
Then what do you do? You map that out on a journey. Then when you have those plots, those stepping stones to what you think based on your research and your talking to customers is an ideal customer experience, then you start asking the question, okay, for step one, do we have the technology we need to do this? Do we have a website there?
Can it be personalized? Guiding them to a correct place? Do we have the tools there? Getting them in front of a chatbot or automatic scheduling?
Do we have the tools there? Really figuring out what the end goal is before pulling the trigger and doing it, I think is the best way to go. The way that I think marketers really miss most of the time. Yeah, I like that a lot.
I was going through this just the other day with my team. I like to think of it as like what are the blind spots in that journey? Meaning we're making some assumptions about what is happening, but we don't know. Or what is the friction or bottleneck in that journey?
And how do we put our finger on it and figure out how we remove that friction or bottleneck in order to make the process more pleasurable? I really like how you outline that. How do you see the pivot into the team structure? And I'd love to hear how this evolves in that.
MarTech has become such an important piece of the marketing kind of organization and the company really. You have an interesting perspective of what that team looks like and how it grows and scales as a company scale. So I'm looking to kind of just outline what are the different, maybe start with the roles the jobs that be done within the marketing team or in the MarTech team and how does that all the time become more specialized? Yeah.
So I really like this question because there's a really strategic and almost consultative approach that you can take to structuring your team based on the size and then sort of scale and how fast you're growing maturity wise as well. Because one of my favorite things to do is to grossly simplify things at the very beginning. Because if you think about who manages the MarTech stack at a micro startup, you've got maybe one or two marketers, they're really wearing all the hats. So that is your MarTech team.
You know, the people that come up with the creative, the branding and the campaigns are also the ones that are going to be using the tools to deploy to customers and then to measure, monitor and ultimately, ultimately, optimize based on the feedback. So at the beginning, you have a very easy way to figure out what's going to happen. Now, as you grow, what happens is you can add on additional people based on these specific jobs to be done, like you said, or functions. And the functions really of MarTech are really the functions of marketing operations.
There's a lot of similarities where you have platform operations, you have campaign operations, we actually building and deploying of campaigns, business intelligence and analytics, which is figuring out how we're going to report on all of the campaigns that we need to, all the way up to revenue and overall business reporting and then making better decisions upon that. So, you know, the analytics falls into that category and then product and engineering, which is essentially building out additional functionality to the tools and then enable it, which includes training, training and adoption and then governance as well. Now, I've been in the spot where a single person does all of those things, you know, and you just kind of have to divvy up your time. And then I think based on how you grow, that will determine the type of team that you need.
And I will say that just from talking to colleagues and then interviewing people from the book, what you see earlier on is a building out of campaign operations, you know, people that are logging into the social media tools, they're logging into the event tools, they're logging into marketing automation and they're actually building campaigns. The other ones start to follow after that, meaning you hire on a person, an analyst that focuses specifically on reporting, you hire a marketing automation administrator, perhaps, maybe you hire someone that has a data engineering or data science background to manage the CDP and how everything flows together. But always keeping an eye on the core functions that you need to get done will help guide you as you grow. Yeah, I really like the breakdown and I really like the idea of thinking these as functions that need to be done, even if you have one person, because I will set you in the right mindset as you move forward and scale the team.
I think I like to think about this marketing in general, like, you know, somebody's running campaigns, somebody's doing product marketing, it could be the same person, somebody could be doing marketing operations at the beginning, it could be the same person, but those are three different functions being done by one person that allows you to think about how you scale that out for time. But I think I really thought was spot on is product and engineering. I don't think this gets thought about enough, but I'm going to make a statement and you disagree or agree. I don't think this gets thought about enough when we think about marketing technology and operations, that you are in essence building a product and you're engineering that product and across multiple pieces of technology to run a marketing or revenue system for lack of better terminology.
And I would speculate or assume this comes with a roadmap and develop resources and outsource capabilities for people to build it or having somebody in house to build it with the tools that you outlined in this book. Do you find most skip this or do you feel like this is getting more commonplace versus still kind of early in marketers thinking this is a product and engineering function as well? That's a good question. I think that it's already happening and it's just that marketers may be not looking at it or defining it in that way.
If you're putting together a suite of tools to accomplish business objectives, that's really a product based or product driven approach, whether you're coding or not. And I think the main difference is that many marketers anyway that approach this, they're not doing it via code. They're doing it via integrations, connecting tools together. And sometimes a little bit of code, especially if you're using the local no-code tools like a Zapier, for example.
So things like that is happier. Now at the enterprise side, this very much takes on a more traditional product and engineering definition because when you have the resources available, the question of build versus buy becomes very real. It becomes, well, we actually have this offer engineering talent to build this ourselves. So what do we do?
Do we buy this tool and accelerate our time to value or do we build our own and it's going to be bespoke to our needs and we'll have full control over the roadmap? So those are the sort of questions that I think are going down. I have a question for you. So especially in your time now, you know, running growth for refined labs, I see this big focus and I'm fascinated by it and I went along.
Big focus on this, the brand side, the content side, the generating interest, the branding piece. When you think about branding and when you think about marketing as it really should be done, do you see a sort of less dependence on technology then to manage the functions of day to day since it's not as sort of digital as we've been traditionally thinking about it? Or does it just change the set of tools that you need to help better manage a different type of marketing approach? I'd love to hear kind of like, if you thought about that, what do you think about that?
Yeah, I've observed this. I've definitely thought about this. I think it changes how you use core tools and it changes your prioritization of additional tools and we'll explain what I mean by that. I think in many ways, when I think about the philosophy we work with our customers on and you know, how I ran it at past companies, the CRM actually becomes essential, even more essential.
The relationship between marketing and sales is paramount in this kind of motion of like building category and brand and how does that translate the revenue because you're losing some visibility at the upper end and tracking, let's call it when it comes to what there's something working or not. But you need to see that ultimately where it matters in the CRM. And so one of the big pivots that marketers need to make is the things I use to measure myself to and goal myself to evolve to at the end of the day, this needs to be able, I need to be able to see this come out in terms of pipeline and revenue more so than maybe I had in the past. So we see that the flip side is I see less importance on the marketing automation platform.
Not that it goes away, you just use it differently. It's what I mean by that in a kind of traditional sense where I'm getting a lead in say a lead is equal to a contact. Then I'm putting a lot of heavy work into my map in order to nurture, engage that person until they're ready to buy. When you think about a brand world, what you're doing is you're trying to do a lot of that in a ad platform or on a social network, that education and then kind of let your website do the heavy lifting when it comes to people's interest in education.
And so where I think the tools become more important are the creative suite of tools that you're using to build content, use video, get your message out organically or through paid media. The way you tell the story using kind of content and those various creative assets becomes paramount when you're brand building. The message to design so forth and so on. So the tool set kind of changes rise in the past.
So I was like, heavy marketing automation was kind of a primary tool. I live in a CRM because you had to line it up, modest data analytics and you know, you did a lot of writing blogging and so forth and so on. This new world is I saw my map, but I'm using the CRM in kind of maybe a warehouse and data in a new way. And then the content I create is all video interactive, much more high-end in terms of kind of experience for the customer, for the prospect.
Does that make sense? Yep, yep. I love that. I love that.
And what I'm hearing is, you know, it's not so much a we're not utilizing Martech anymore. It's more of it's a shift. You're shifting to a different set of tools or maybe you're using the tools differently because the marketing has changed a little bit. And there's a shift toward media, there's a shift toward publishing, there's a shift toward audience building.
And I agree with that. I think that one of the problems that Martech faces and then marketing in general, I think space is especially, you know, if you look across what's happening on social and across the discussions is this idea of these false dichotomies. And here's what I mean by that. It means that, hey, everything is about being able to attribute every dollar of investment to some sort of ROI outcome from marketing.
Or hey, it's not about attribution at all. It's about audience building and, you know, people talking about you and the value of your customer's C and it's nothing about attribution. And you find this idea of this either or false dichotomy everywhere. And I think that I have a couple of thoughts on this.
One is they're definitely not true because it's always some sort of balance of both that really happens because even if you can't quite measure your, you know, every single dollar of your marketing investment, you do have to treat marketing like a business and you do have to report on the results and the progress that you're making towards your goals. And that is always done through numbers. I mean, they're never done through, and they're not any company that I've been in. If you sit down with the finance with your finance resources or you sit down with your leadership, that's never really done through screenshots or like nice anecdotes, right?
They're always done through numbers. So I think that's something that people always have to remember. And then secondly, I think the other big reason why there's these big false dichotomies throughout the marketing industry is that it makes more of a buzz if you take a strong stance or if you choose that hill to die on, it's much more interesting, right? And no one likes the answer of, well, it depends.
And the truth is that it does. It does depend. So that's something that I think that I've been thinking and reflecting on a lot about is this idea of false dichotomies. And it's oftentimes not really either or, as always, these shades of gray that make our work complicated but fun.
Yeah, I would agree with that. And I would say we marketing has always been difficult to measure, but it needs to be measured. So maybe what I want to try to get at is like, we need to move from a world where we thought we could attribute every single action to some impact on the business versus what you've said is that's not what leadership wants to see. Leadership wants to see is in its totality, am I spending efficiently to generate a return on investment?
And that return is in did I sell more stuff? So by doing things as a marketer at every stage of my of the journey that are moving me towards a more efficient and higher return on investment in terms of business performance. If marketers can take that attitude, boards and CEOs will understand that it's more when marketing tries to say, listen, I did one thing, how much revenue that one thing generate? And we know that's not how the world works, right?
In terms of this day and age. And I was reading through the book and I loved how you use the LinkedIn surveys. And there was a point there where you asked one of your surveys, how do people learn about martech strategies, make priorities, learn new technology, and you know, half the people learn from each other, they're peers. And so when you think about that as a marketer, and this is something we talk quite a bit about in this company, like this is just a reality.
Like I'm going to learn by talking to Darrow about what I should do for marketing technology. I'm not going to marketing technology vendors anymore to figure out what I need to do for marketing technology. I'm going to the people I trust. And so in essence going to be always be hard to measure.
Yep. Yeah. And I'm glad that they're moving in that direction. And I'm glad that they're moving in that direction of an early days of martech.
We really only had the vendors to learn from pretty much, you know, they're the ones created in technology and then they would teach us how to use it because that there wasn't much other ways to get our work done unless we did it manually. That became sort of our curriculum, you know, what the martech vendors taught us. But over time, I think that many of us have implemented things exactly like the martech vendors said to and implement them. And we came up short, we came up short with results.
It didn't drive the revenue that we were hoping that it would. And you know, some of us didn't get promoted, some of us didn't get a bonus, right? So we went back to the drawing board and said, Hey, you know, how are you all doing this? It appears.
How did you figure out this? And then after comparing notes, we found that we weren't following the instructions the way the martech vendors said they would. So I think that that's a really big deal, which sort of leads me like to this other, leads me like to this other question or other thought that I've been thinking about. And it's that the martech in general as an industry is very meta, right?
Because martech vendors are selling to marketers and teaching them how to do marketing, right? So there's this interesting circle of stuff to do. And like what's really funny, what's really funny sometimes you'll see in a list of logos for martech vendors is you'll see they list each other as it's case. So I've always found that quite fascinating.
I've always found that as something to really kind of take into consideration when you're thinking about what you really need and what you don't. And yeah, I'd love to hear, you know, from your point of view too. What do you think about the bias that happened there? You know, what do you think about this sort of self fulfilling prophecy that people do by saying, well, this is how marketing should be done.
By the way, you should use this type of martech tool to do it, our platform. Yeah. It's a little bit dirty when you think about it in terms of, you know, I agree with you, there was a point in time when the only advice you got on how to do marketing were from marketing vendors or martech vendors. What I'm optimistic about is I think even with all the digital technology we have, it's creating a world where we're moving back to like the fundamental principles of marketing, which haven't necessarily ever changed, right?
Like this segmentation, targeting, positioning, messaging, brand building, category design, like creating awareness and consideration with your audience, for what you do and how you can help. I mean, in many ways, I feel like there's a period of time over the last 10 or 15 years, we got away from that as marketers. And it was all about just getting people into the machine of technology so they can automate and run a cadence or a process. And we're starting to see the cracks of that not working.
So we're kind of like a flight back to quality marketing. Yep. At least I like the thing there is. It's a back to the basics.
It's a back to the basics approach. I get so sad when I think about people that, you know, maybe haven't really studied marketing from the heyday and good marketing is good business. And that's really what you think about it. And if you study the very marketing basics, it's all about the product.
It's all about the price. It's about how customers get to the product, what they think about it, what they feel about it. It's what they do after they get it. And it's that age old problem that most people think that marketing is just the promotion side of it when it's really not.
It's really just the business. And that's what I hope to achieve with the book. To simplify marketing, help marketers orient themselves around, hey, what am I trying to do? And how is Martech going to help me get there?
And one of my favorite ways to simplify anything is to just drive it back to, hey, what if I was just one person running this business? What would I do? Of course, we're going to think about how we're going to get products and services in front of customers. Of course, we're going to measure sales.
Of course, we're going to think about how much brand awareness we're getting. You're thinking about all of that because you want the business to grow. So yeah, just going back to the basics. Good marketing is good business.
Period. Good marketing is good business. I love to end with just your thoughts on the future. Let me kind of tee up a question there.
And that is, I'm in a believer that I assume maybe you are too, that future marketers will come out of marketing operations and or at least have a strong understanding of how technology can be leveraged to drive marketing and drive business. I don't know yet if that's materialized and I love your kind of thoughts on it. You probably have a wider scope of seeing kind of the career path of people in Martec. You starting to see them become marketing leaders, CMOs, CROs, et cetera.
And you still make way of a ways to go and kind of the journey of the career of this persona. Yeah, that's a fascinating question. I think I really do see operations folks as the future business leaders. I see marketing ops as the future CMOs.
I see revenue ops as the future CROs. And I think that it's because of the exposure to the different sides of the business. It's because of the understanding of what it really needs to take to get things done versus keeping your head in the strategic cloud so to speak, that you're closer to the ground. And you're also closer to the customer.
I think the gap that we're seeing today is that what we've been speaking about this whole time is connecting the technology to business and connecting the actual activities we're doing to profitable business outcomes. I think Martec operators and operations folks in general get to ingrained in the tech and they do things just for the sake of it, right? Back to what we need this club just in case. So I think that that's a major problem.
I also think that there's a little bit of a gap on the branding and creative side that I think that operations folks can easily fill. But, and this is a big but, I still think they're on track because I think that the days of commercial type, traditional type advertising, everything based on customer sentiment and that kind of thing, I think that that is slowly declining. So when CEOs and boards look for people to lead their marketing organization less and less, they're going to be looking at their track record of, hey, what did you do at the Super Bowl? Hey, what kind of huge TV spots did you do?
Hey, what kind of flashy social media viral campaign did you do? There's less and less of that and more of how did you drive our wide marketing? How did you run marketing like a business? How do you get your teams in order to produce marketing results in a scalable, repeatable way for the long term?
That's the question that I think are going to come in the CMO interviews of the future and operations folks are the perfect ones position to answer those questions in really, really great and smart, great track record based way. Yeah, I agree with that completely. I mean, that's what is missing today. I think a lot of marketing leadership kind of last generation is the inability to understand specifically how marketing drives business results.
I will say also kind of a tip for marketing ops people and the relationship with creative if they feel like they need some help there. And that is there's a reason creatives always ask for a creative brief. And the reason is because they want to narrow down the amount of uncertainty. So like the tighter the definition of the audience and the message and so forth, the more creative they can be.
These are a world, all that sits in technology and analytics. So an ability for somebody really understands the tech and the data, they go back and say, this is the audience that we need to target. This is who the people are. This is their pain.
Be creative is a great way to kind of manage the creative function without needing to be the person who actually writes a copy and designs the ads. So that's really what creative people need is the data is tremendously powerful in terms of building better creative. And that can be the way of the generation in order to kind of drive that those relationships. All right.
One last question. Future technology, like anything that you would love to see in the future, or you're excited about coming out that solves a business problem, that's hard to solve today. Hmm, you know, we're trying to invest. Shameless, you know, full disclosure, I'm an advisor to CinCari, which is a data unification and synchronization platform.
Getting your data the same unified, normalized and standardized across all of your platforms is a game changer. And most marketers can't do it and they can't do it without technical help. So that's why I've always put my time and energy into Cincarias, the platform of the future. So I think that's a really big one.
I also think that there's gonna be some sort of, and this could be like an acquisition that either Canva does of some of the other creative platforms, but how do marketers create great experiences without having to leverage all of the design, publishing, coding, resources? I think that I'm gonna make a major bet there that that's going to be, you know, a consolidated player will be a game changer for the future. And then I think that you're also gonna see a big vendor in the podcast, video marketing, social media space too, because I definitely see the work that you're doing at your company, my own work. I think B2B are starting to look at social and other media outlets as where they learn, you know, where they congregate, where their community is.
And the Martec vendors are behind the A-Ball, yet again, yet again, they're behind. So I'm excited to see something in that space too. I couldn't agree more with those three actually. I've lived the first one around data analytics.
And I would say the last generation of Martec has been great at automation. The next generation, I think, will be great at optimization. So think of that being kind of data-driven and MLAI, et cetera. And yeah, we live it every day in terms of like, how do you make it easier to scale the creative process for marketers who, you know, Adobe experts for lack of a word, Canva, JavaScript.
There's a lot of point tools. I agree with you, who's gonna step up and kind of put that together and make the life easier for the modern marketer? I love it. Yep.
Anything else we should hit on, Daryl? We'll be calling this a good time. No, no, I think it's always nice to catch up with you. Hope everybody grabs a copy of my book Available in the US August 30th available on Kindle now.
Love to hear your feedback. Good to be here. Yeah, thanks for coming on, Daryl. Smart Tech Handbook.
I loved it. It was a great read. And for those who are still listening, I'll give away five copies. So shoot me a connect with me on LinkedIn.
Shoot me needle at Cassie. I refine labs the first five. I'll buy you the book and send it to you. Daryl, thanks again.
My pleasure. Catch you on the next one. Thanks, Kathy. Take care.