Building A Change-Friendly Ecosystem To Deliver Martech Transformation

Why martech transformation is hard (but worth it)

In a digital world, martech transformation has become a must-to-undertake journey for most enterprises and that’s no surprise given the impact digital has on business growth. However, preaching digital and enabling a digital-first culture are different things. Martech transformation is about tech, but more so it’s about humans. Digitalisation is more than just leveraging technologies. For this reason, change doesn’t necessarily happen when an organisation adopts new tools, it happens when an organisation adopts new behaviours and ways of achieving its business goals. The shiny, vision-setting decks often present martech transformation propositions in very bright light. However, in reality, this process poses some very expensive resources and technical challenges to overcome.

Change brings disruption to the business and pressure on CMOs to juggle two different beasts: their business as usual work and the digital innovation station. This juggling act of multiple priorities and workstreams might feel like building your own submarine while trying to keep your boat afloat - the very boat that’s carrying all your workforce, talent, and ammunitions. 

With 7,000+ martech solutions available in the marketplace, it might seem like marketers should have no limit to what they can achieve. However, getting access to technology and making technology work for your business is not the same. Even though marketing leaders are spending 26% of their marketing budgets on martech, according to Gartner’s CMO Spend Survey 2019-2020, CMOs are struggling to connect their marketing to their business outcomes, even in an age where everything is ‘trackable’. This happens because martech transformation spans beyond platforms. You need to further invest in people, processes, and programs to see a return from that initial tech spend. In fact, Gartner research shows that 29% of marketing leaders indicate that training and upskilling existing martech talent is a major impediment to their martech stack effectiveness and ability to innovate.

Here’s a visualisation to show the martech transformation journey, its key components, and blocks of success.

How to make martech transformation easier

If you’re managing change at the enterprise level, you might know the challenges that come with the alignment between your tech investments and the marketing strategy. But if you’re still wondering what it really takes to build a change-friendly ecosystem, here are some tips.

• Embrace the fear of change and find a path to move forward

Fear is a taboo in business and a real blocker to growth. This fear might be fed by various factors such as un-collaborative environments and cultures, lack of leadership buy-in, siloed teams, lack of skills and/or resources. Regardless of the trigger, fear is not an ally to innovation and progress. Not only can human capacities truly flourish in an atmosphere free of fear, but a fear-free environment can become the ultimate competitive advantage. As Amy Edmondson suggests in The Fearless Organization, psychological safety is the key ingredient for creating high-performing, resilient workplaces to enable innovation and transformation. In addition to psychological safety, companies need to develop the ‘digital stoicism‘, or ‘the ability to turn the obstacle upside down’, when ‘bad’ becomes a new opportunity. This is a key skill, as it takes resilience, patience and business instinct to see success with martech.

• Build harmonious relationships between CMOs and CTOs

In the last decade, martech has been passed on like a burning ball from CTOs to CMOs and back again without clear instructions, especially with the added complications and changes made by GDPR. These exchanges cost organisations years in delays to innovate and optimise the customer experience. IT once cited as a major detractor of marketing in 2017, is now reported as one of marketing’s major supporters, based on the recent Gartner research. This relationship has evolved in the last few years as Scott Brinker reports that the 10-year war between marketing and IT is over.

Considering the sophistication of the martech stack today and the fluidity of the customer journey, it’s clear that to achieve martech success CMOs and CTOs really need to be partners, not strangers. In practice, we see this inter-departmental friendship championed at any level in the organisation as realising the benefits of martech for the first time might feel more tangible to the users rather than to the builders in the organisation.

• Go slow to go fast

The martech world has always been one of change and speed. And who doesn’t like speed? However, all too often when it comes to martech transformation the tendency is to focus on the deployment of a new tech quickly at the cost of strategy and long-term vision. 

You are probably thinking why on earth would we want to go slow; isn’t martech supposed to make us go faster?! The real question is; do you want to go fast or far? And how many rapid digital transformations have you seen or heard of at the enterprise level? You can rapidly change pieces of the puzzle, but would you call that a transformation?

There is no such thing as buying the most expensive tech on the marketplace and expecting rapid digital transformation to follow. You can throw as much money as you like at the problem, no tool in the galaxy will make you innovative or transform your company. If your data isn’t accurate, then the potential of personalisation is compromised. If your core tech is not working, then a shiny new tool will only complicate the setup, and with the recent increase in buzzworthy tech such as AI — it is harder than ever to properly leverage tech without getting the foundation right.

Collecting digital products does not equal martech transformation and because the solution isn’t necessarily more technology (especially not more underutilised technology), I recommend taking it slowly, and ensure that the digital culture is the right one before you build too much technical debt. 

Conclusion

Martech transformation is not easy and with any change, it needs to be managed. Making change simpler and faster, (and not avoiding it), should be the direction for an organisation seeking to future-proof their martech capabilities. 

A change-friendly environment makes room for platform adoption and championship, it encourages experimentation and failure but most importantly, learn from it. A key step in accepting this is unless you change your processes and ways of working, you’re not changing much. This mindset will help to set the scene for institutionalising the new best practices and the new operational efficiency that the new tech provides.

The organisational impact that new tech can have on the business as a whole can be extraordinary. Martech is the catalyst, the chance to accelerate change, in a more intelligent way than previously attempted.