Marketing TechnologyMarTech Conference Day 1: throughout the day updates

MarTech Conference Day 1: throughout the day updates

Throughout the day updates from day one of the MarTech Conference 2018 in Boston. Notes, highlights, and key quotes from mainstage keynotes.

Updates, highlights, and key quotes from the MarTech Conference in Boston today, October 2, 2018. For shorter, live coverage, find us on twitter @ClickZ.

Breakfast keynote: achieving operational efficiency, getting your tech stack and process right.

How do we take that large North Star of marketing and make it tangible for today? How do we start small? Simplifying the tech stack.

How have you been able to combat the common problem of disconnection between people, tools, and processes that many marketers experience?

Try to really understand how you’re working as an agency. Monetize your own time. Show where you’re being more efficient in-house, then pull your partners in.

What advice would you give to any other brand to focus on operational efficiency? Plan. The hardest thing is to take time out of your day to think about the future.

Main stage keynote: Scott Brinker,Martech in 2019: the new, new rules of marketing”

If I could sum up marketing’s mission for you in two acronyms, it would be CX and ROI.
And you know what you get when you combine those two? Lacroix. If you can sell water at a 95% markup, you’re doing marketing pretty well.

The new, new rules of marketing (operations).

The citizen technology movement. Costs are going down and accessibility is up. We’re shifting from discipline experts –> domain experts –> power users –> users –> ambient / automatic. We used to have to rely on IT, then it was marketing technologists. Now we’re on the cusp on just regular marketers being able to do these things.

Focus: tension between centralize and decentralize, automate and humanize.

The risk is losing the humanity. We need to champion marketing empowerment. We need to pull levers for empathy and intuition. We can still do customer visits. CX anomaly detection.

The question with the rise of all this martech becomes not only can we do this, but should we do this.

66% companies don’t believe they have the skills to make use of their marketing technology. 

4 key takeaways:

  • Design for change. Future happening very quickly, design for adaptability.
  • Agile marketing.
  • Red teaming.
  • Open mindset.

Mainstage keynote: @mobonner, Monique Bonner of Akamai, “Developing a martech strategy that serves your customers & business”

4 key points:

  • Communicate vision and benefit
  • Shore up the foundation
  • Find inefficiencies
  • Think outside your four walls

We wanted to rebuild our martech foundation. We realized key aspects of our website were turning away customers.

When we dug in, we realized our phone numbers on our website were routing to the wrong countries, with people who never answered their phones.

So we brought in new leadership, reevaluated how we do things, and in 3 months changed drastically.

We had to focus on shoring up the foundation — could be data, could be skills, could be people not in the right places.

Example: for a lead to get to a salesperson, could take 5 manual handoffs, over 2 weeks, with 0 quality checks.

We used a company called Integrate, which uses API integration to plug in leads from anywhere.

All of a sudden we were up to 0 manual handoffs, in under 24 hours to get to sales, and saving $1m in using leads we already had instead of buying them from partners.

Focus on quick wins — using Lattice and Bombora to empower sales development reps. Over a period of 60 days, noticeable increases.

Realized that our partners, such as tech and sales, didn’t have the same tools or ecosystems as we did — they couldn’t drive the same opportunity. So then we partnered with IT and sales to implement tools for them.

Focus: needed to think outside our own four walls.

Mainstage keynote: Shiva Mirhosseini of Aetna, “The inevitable convergence of marketing & sales technology”

Example of her grandfather, an Aetna customer, and “a dashing young man of 93.”

He told her, “You know Shiva, I don’t quite care about all those reminder emails you guys send me. I’d much rather have all the information I need. I’d much rather talk to a friendly rep. I’d much rather know that my heart can keep up with my spirit.”

Realization for her: He really doesn’t care about all that transactional exchange. He just cares about having a human experience.

Tech has grown so much, so fast, for so long. It’s a rosy picture, isn’t it? Let’s examine that.

  • S&P 500 companies have grown 2.5%
  • Nasdaq companies have grown 10%
  • Salesforce.com 30%
  • Martech sector 10%

Worldwide investment in digital transformation expected to reach $2 trillion by 2020. 

Customer expectations have evolved. Our model has not adapted.

Example of CX: the iPhone box takes 7 seconds to fall out to reveal your product. Why? They want to build your anticipation of that shiny new technology — they want it to be that much more satisfying.

No longer should we think about marketing goals or sales goals. We need to be thinking about customer success goals. No longer about leads or accounts, it’s about how we enable the customer to solve their problems on their terms. That’s what keeps them coming back. 

We look for partners that transform marketing and sales alike. You’re not just B2B companies — you should be thinking about the end consumer, and how you’re making their lives easier. Like my grandfather.

Analytics governs what marketing and sales do. It acts like a glue.

The one thing I’m still struggling with is how to build a customer-obsessed culture. From “why” to “show me how.” I don’t have the answers for this, but I know it’s a worthy mission.

Ask not what technology can do for me, but what it can do for my customers. We should do the hard work, so our customers don’t have to.

Mainstage keynote: @NeetiShukla. Neeti Mehta of Automation Anywhere, “Robotic Process Automation (RPA): What a marketer needs to know.”

I’m here today to give you a brief overview of robotic process automation: what it is, how it will transform marketing, and how it will impact your organization.

After 20 years of automation, majority of processes are still manual. Only 20% is being automated.

80% of processes are automatable. Maybe everything you don’t need to automate, maybe not economically viable, maybe not great CX. But if you automate what you can, more time to focus on customer. 

No need to change the processes, or change and train employees. Don’t need to find someone and train them. Robotic process automation allows you to enable humans with bots, and take care of that transformation.

Build your first bot in 20 minutes.

I would argue that automation is the only way to humanize. The data is basically driving us, instead of us driving CX.

If we’re using analytics weeks or months later, how much is that serving the customer? 

Business impact with digital workforce. Fewer people, more digital workforce, lower cost, more output.

Automating every process across the enterprise. Can do data capture, data enrichment, data validation, process, and reconcile, analytics and reporting.

We have to liberate the creativity of humans to get to the next level of what we can offer the world. That is what automation can offer us.

Algorithmic trading revolutionized the way business and trading industry work. RPA will do the same for data.

Industry agnostic, application agnostic, function agnostic. Anything that’s replicable and mundane. Your customers will expect you to process claims that quick. Expect that engagement.

This is the fourth industrial revolution and we must be ready for it.

Breakout session, Justin sharaf, @babblnbostonian, “Building and finding a marketing technology team”

If you go into an organization and the team members don’t realize that marketing tech goes well beyond Marketo and Eloqua, that’s a big red flag.

Breakout session, Lenati, “Design thinking + martech: the multiplier effect”

“We spend a lot of time designing the bridge, but not a lot of time thinking about the people crossing it.”

What is design thinking? A human centered approach to problem solving. Iterative process, delivers innovative solutions based on actual needs. Holistic, interdisciplinary, impactful.

All design has constraints. Desirability, visibility, and feasibility.

Design thinking process (as made famous by Stanford design school and IDEO): empathize, define, ideate, prototype, test.

  • Empathize: doing observational research.
  • Define: take insights generated and try to assemble them together into problem statements.
  • Ideate: super fun, sexy stuff everyone thinks out. Come up with as many ideas as possible. No constraints in this phase.
  • Prototype: should design it as if you think you’re right, like you actually got solution nailed. Design in such a way that you can actually test it with the end user.
  • Test: opposite. Assume you’ve completely failed and gotten wrong, trying to uncover where you got it wrong. Don’t lead the witness. Say “go and shop for X” on a website, watch what they do

What does this have to do with martech? “I have the optimal martech stack and everything is working perfectly.” Said no one ever.

Design thinking useful in 4 main areas:

  • Delivering the right CX: 60% marketers struggle to personalize content in real time
  • Choosing the right combination of tech
  • Building employee adoption
  • Defining the North Star
  • Turning the vision into reality

Great ideas don’t define a digital transformation. The execution of those ideas do.

Common pitfalls: lack of alignment on problem. Not interdisciplinary. Not feasible.  Not enough investment. Budgetary constraint.

Key take aways:

  • Desirable, feasible, visible
  • Customer and employee empathy
  • Cross functional participation
  • Process isn’t linear
  • Modify the process to work for you.

……..

Stay tuned for more updates from the rest of today at the MarTech Conference. For shorter, live coverage, find us on twitter @ClickZ.

Speaker presentations can be viewed here on the conference page.

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