The state of martech 2021: a conversation with martech guru Scott Brinker
The martech landscape has been in a state of expansion for over a decade. Mapping this landscape (literally) has been the authority on all things martech, Scott Brinker.
Dreamdata’s CRO, Steffen Hedebrandt recently had the pleasure to sit down (virtually) with Scott to discuss unfolding trends and challenges within the martech space.
Over 30 minutes Scott covered topics ranging from his fascination with the emerging no-code landscape, the rise of ‘Big Ops’, and likely trends for 2021.
This post covers the conversation’s best highlights, including:
The fascinating rise of no-code tools
The challenge and opportunities of Big Ops
Some considerations on Covid-19
The martech landscape
Tips for breaking through the noise
The B2B Revenue Attribution space
No-code movement - exciting times ahead
The conversation kicks-off with Scott setting out his fascination with the emerging no-code movement.
[the no-code movement is] a generation of tools that lets non-specialists and non-experts be able to self-service a tremendous number of their needs. Whether it’s building an app, or making a graphic design, or running some sort of analysis.
Most readers have likely had some experience with tools such as Canva, Mailchimp, or even Dreamdata itself. But what does the no-code movement mean moving forward?
There are broadly three trends we can expect to see from widespread uptake of these tools:
An incredible boost in creativity and productivity. People who have never had this level of access or capability will now suddenly become empowered to drive projects previously handled by specialists.
A rethink on how we manage and govern organisations. That is, how to manage the “democratising effect” of so many people having so much power at their fingertips.
The good thing is that this is not completely unchartered territory. The new empowered environment is not too dissimilar to the initial martech wave of 10 years ago.An important change in market opportunities. Suddenly a product can address everybody and not just the specialists, as before.
In other words, by unleashing what was once restricted to a narrow set of specialists there will be a change in the commercial “spectrum of opportunities”.
Big Ops movement
Another developing trend being tracked by Scott and the chiefmartec blog is “Big Ops”.
Much like the tech, indeed as a consequence of it, ops roles within marketing (and outside marketing) have been evolving at unprecedented speed.
The sheer scale and speed of technology, data, and automation development is altering what organisations do and how they do it. This has meant that having an ops person managing this infrastructure and capability has become one of the pillars of how teams function.
If you look across the entire organisation, the spectrum of all these ops professionals, each within their own particular discipline, they also share a lot in common. I think that’s this idea of what I’ve been calling Big Ops.
Much like with the no-code movement (discussed above), the emergence of Big Ops presents both exciting opportunities and challenges.
On the one hand, it means businesses are better able to access the many and varied technological and digital developments.
On the other, it also means businesses need to figure out how to manage the rise of Big Ops within the organisation. That is, they need to ensure teams are able to maximise the utility of Big Ops.
Once again, this challenge, thankfully, is not entirely without precedent. Scott rightly draws parallels to Big Data, where businesses had to figure out how the enormous flow of data coming into the organisation could be used, and how teams needed to be adapted to make the most of it.
COVID-19 accelerating technology adoption
No conversation in 2020, especially one looking at trends, can take place without some form of reflection on the Covid-19 pandemic.
On the main, Scott sees that because of the crisis we’ll see a “shift towards a much broader, a much deeper adoption of digital touchpoints, both internally ... but also in how we engage with customers.”
Innovation across the digital space has seen significant growth over the last 12 months. And growth not “in spite of corona” but as a result of it.
This has been driven by the shift online in consumer behaviour. According to Business Insider, e-commerce has seen 16.5% growth in just 12 months - accelerating the global shift towards e-commerce by almost 5 years. Marketing, as most readers will know first-hand, has been hot on the heels.
This is not to mean that there will be no return to physical commerce and business. Scott expects that as we move past the pandemic, there will be a return to physical interaction. Yet, the digital lessons that have been learned, will also be taken forward.
We are going to see people coming back to the office. We’re going to see live events coming back because we’re social creatures; it’s how we work and live. But, I do feel all the lessons we’ve learned from this experience, we’re going to take advantage of those too. There will be more remote working than there was before. There will be more virtual events. More hybrid events.
This will no doubt mean further digital growth and innovation over 2021.
The ever-evolving martech landscape
Speaking about growth in the digital space, the discussion (inevitably) drew on the martech landscape for 2021.
Specifically, whether the growth during the pandemic (mentioned above) will see the ‘martech 5000’ count grow from 8,000 to 10,000 in 2021?
In the interview, Scott revealed the count hasn’t yet begun. However, he accepted that it wouldn’t be a surprise if the figure is now closing in on the 10,000 mark.
While there has been a lot of consolidation within the industry, as far as these large M&A deals, we continue to see all these really innovative start-ups coming into the space too.
It’s worth recalling that in 2011 there were just 150 martech tools available!
Interestingly, Scott noted that growth can be expected, to differing degrees, across categories within martech. Even the most established categories have continued to see innovation throughout the years.
Even in CMS … we’ve seen such a tremendous rebirth of innovation in the CMS space over the past few years. You know, all of these fun things around Headlist, Jamstack, cool new no-code ways for people to build things… So one of the oldest categories on that landscape is still thriving with new innovation.
This serves as an important reminder for all of us within industry to continue exploring new tools.
Not only might there be solutions to new emerging problems, but even where we’re already using something, we might be oblivious to new innovative players in the same category.
Breaking through the noise - Scott’s advice to new companies
The flip side to the proliferation of martech solutions is the very real risk of crowding within categories. This makes it increasingly difficult for martechs, particularly start-ups, to get heard amongst the noise.
Scott revealed he is very much aware of the issue and offered this advice for newcomers:
One of the patterns I see with companies that are really successful with [overcoming] this, are two things. One, they do actually clearly articulate their value.
I can say, having visited literally thousands of martech websites … it’s actually crazy how I visit some of these websites, and I’m a martech guy, and I cannot figure out what they do. I cannot figure out what the value is, which I mean is crazy. So the first step is, yes, figure out what you actually do.
The second step is this idea of being able to tie the story to some sort of transformation or evolution your customers are going through and really be able to help them with that. Not just from a product level but from the way they think about it, and from the way they’re able to harness the potential of these technologies.
Whenever companies can find that sort of narrative, they become a really trusted resource for their customers. That’s a really powerful way to break through the noise.
The B2B revenue attribution space
In 2016, chiefmartec.com featured this guest post on attribution by Sergio Maldonado.
Sergio’s contribution offered a cautious, even critical, appraisal of attribution. Highlighting in particular the challenges posed by variance in data when attributing, as well as the (in)completeness of the data.
Although some of the points Sergio raised may have been true in 2016, the progress in data gathering and processing since has markedly improved - not least thanks to growth in the CDP tools like Segment.
Scott’s assessment is:
It’s a much richer dataset, I think the models have a lot more efficacy taped today than they did in 2016. So I would highly recommend, I mean, it’s hard to imagine being in marketing now and not using some kind of attribution model to guide your strategic direction and your investments… But while I say ‘richer’ it’s still not a perfectly complete model.
Attribution platforms like Dreamdata are able to give companies a lot more transparency of their digital marketing (and sales) revenue generation activities.
Dreamdata for example, pulls together all relevant (and accessible) revenue data.
It does so by introducing a smart on-site behavioural tracking script and integrating all relevant commercial data from CRM, Automations, and Customer Success tools.
And while it is, as Scott points out, impossible to offer a perfectly complete model, the captured data generates a much, much more detailed and accurate overview of all revenue activities than hitherto possible.
This is especially true in the B2B space, where the complexity and length of sales cycles is particularly acute. That is, the multiplicity of digital touchpoints and devices, not to mention the length of the sales cycle, makes attribution through analytics tools (like Google Analytics) a non-starter. (see this great post on the limits of Google Analytics in the B2B)
So, it is only through attribution tools like Dreamdata, that trustworthy revenue data can be gathered and analysed to give as complete a picture as possible of their sales cycles. From which businesses can then analyse their efforts and make data-driven decisions on what to scale or scrap.
Companies like yours in many ways have helped save marketers from this explosion of all these innovative products that are out there, that are great, that give them all these capabilities. But, which, in order to really harness them effectively, have to be able to unify the data.
Why not see B2B attribution in action for yourself?
A little something about Scott Brinker
Scott is perhaps best known for his martech blog. Since 2008, chiefmartec.com has been trailblazing with leading content on all things marketing technology.
Not least among these is the Martech 5000 (now 8000+) chart, which has mapped the martech landscape annually since 2015.
But Scott, the Columbia, Harvard and MIT alumnus wears many more hats. He’s presently VP Platform Ecosystem at Hubspot, before which he co-founded and served as CTO at ion interactive.
In fact, Scott is a veteran entrepreneur, stretching back to his teenage years developing BBS software and dial-up multi-player games before the birth of the web.
You can stay up to date with Scott’s insights at chiefmartec.com
