TMW #194 | How to make friends and influence Martech buyers
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How to make friends and influence Martech buyers
Martech buying decisions can make or break careers but so many Martech purchases end in failure. Why is that? And who is influencing these decisions?
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Guess what percentage of digital transformation projects fail.
20%? No, you’re Arctic-tundra cold.
40%? Nope, still way off base.
Surely not more than half? You’d be wrong again.
The magic number varies depending on the source, but it’s almost always higher than 50%: Gartner says a whopping 80% of digital transformations fail. McKinsey takes a broader view across all types of transformations, estimating a 70% fail rate.
So, if there’s such a high chance of failure, surely investment in digital transformation has tapered off? Wrong again. According to the IDC, worldwide spending on digital transformation projects has been growing consistently over recent years… and is forecasted to grow more.
Digital transformations can fail for all sorts of reasons, but the most fundamental reason is poor decision-making.
And if you’re sitting there all cozy thinking that you are a marketer and this is not your problem, then think again. A lot of digital transformation involves marketing teams and Martech, and they’re not doing much better in terms of buying decisions.
90% of CDP owners don’t think their current CDP meets their needs. Average Martech utilization fell to 33% in 2023. 79% of marketing executives say that they are using less than half of their stack.
Ok, fine – not everything can be attributed to bad decision-making. But it’s fair to say that whatever decisions are being made aren’t leading to Martech success. So, what’s wrong with the Martech buying process?
Welcome to the shit show
Let’s just get this out on the table: Martech buying is not easy. It’s a fraught process with a lot of variables, and quite frankly, it’s enough to send you crazy. In the words of one buyer – via our buyer intelligence partner Alium – it’s a “shit show.”1 💬
The first problem is the sheer breadth of choice, as I explained in TMW #193: Is vertical the future of Martech?
“The Martech industry is a mature industry now saturated with platforms, with most of them being horizontal platforms: Chiefmartec’s latest Martech Landscape Supergraphic lists over 14,000 products. Even the smallest sub-category – Account-Based Marketing (ABM) – has 31 different vendors.”
Buying Martech is a long and arduous process. 69% of marketers spend at least 6 months researching before committing to the buying process. Even after that buying cycle formally kicks off, 58% of marketers take another 6 months or more to make a decision. That’s a long time to keep stakeholders engaged.
And it’s not just one or two people that marketers need to bring along for the journey. 76% of Martech purchases involve 5 or more stakeholders, and 34% involve more than 10 stakeholders. In big enterprises there can be folks from all sorts of departments involved: other marketing teams, finance, IT, operations, procurement, HR, sales, product, and even the CEO.
The other key challenge in Martech buying processes is pressure.
Marketers get pressure from above to adopt new tech all the time. In recent years, it’s been CEOs putting pressure on marketers to adopt AI tools. Before that, it was CDPs. Before that… well, there’s always been something.
Marketers also get plenty of pressure from vendors. This is borne out in a recent survey by Chiefmartec, which listed the top things that Martech vendors do that annoy buyers. Look away now if you’re a Martech sales rep…
Outside of internal stakeholders and the Martech vendors themselves, there is a smorgasbord of different voices in the Martech space that all have varying levels of influence on Martech buying decisions. I’ll cover that later in this essay; first, let’s talk about Martech buying sins.
Forgive me CFO, for I have sinned
Martech buyers are risk-averse and overwhelmed, and this is only getting worse. Matt Mitchell of MonetizeNow describes this as FOMU: Fear Of Messing Up. A clear sign of this is shrinking shortlists: 33% of SaaS buyers used a shortlist of just 1 to 3 vendors in 2023; that figure rose up to 49% in 2024. Because of FOMU, buyers commit several buying sins – or as Jonathan Sherry of Alium describes them: Dumb ways to buy.
The bottom-up approach
The first is the bottom-up approach. In the words of the Harvard Business Review, this is when “rather than starting with the objective of solving a business problem—such as how to drive customers along the path to purchase—[marketers] begin with what is available or being sold to the company,” which often leads a lack of alignment that can kill adoption and any chance of achieving ROI.
Shiny toy syndrome
Shiny toy syndrome is a close cousin of the bottom-up approach. We’ve all been there: The CEO heard a vague story – *cough* Klarna *cough* – about AI supercharging a company’s ROI from marketing and wants you to implement something ASAP. Which company? What type of AI was it? What were their goals? Don’t hold your breath waiting for details.
Missing the forest through the trees
Another Martech anti-pattern is when buyers can’t see the forest through the trees. This is where the Martech buyer thinks too much about the “what” without considering the “how.” They do all the right things: collect use cases, break them down into user stories, prioritize based on business value, but they don’t think about how workflows will operate in practice, especially across different platforms in the Martech stack. It’s all well and good to have isolated capabilities, but if it’s a pain in the backside to use them, you’re going to run into adoption resistance.
The easy ecosystem choice
The next buyer sin is one that most of us will have felt pressure to submit to at some point in our career: The easy ecosystem choice. Don’t get me wrong – there are benefits to sticking with Salesforce, Adobe, or Microsoft if that’s your partner of choice: platform integration, consolidated vendor management, easier stack management, and standardized data models (sometimes). But there is so much possibility in the world of composability with best-of-breed point solutions. By taking the easy ecosystem choice, you’re missing out on a world of opportunities.
The wannabe clairvoyant
Up next we have the wannabe clairvoyant, who plans too far into the future. Of course, thinking about the future is an important part of buying Martech, but it needs to drive value in the here and now. Too many times, I’ve seen marketers think about what they “might do” at “some point.” If there’s no concrete, value-driving use case driving interest in a capability – or at least a roadmap to get to one – then don’t make it a major factor in your decision. The average tenure of B2C Fortune 500 CMOs is only 4.1 years… plan accordingly.
The quadrant junky
The final type of Martech buying sinner is the quadrant junky. These folks view the Gartner Magic Quadrant and Forrester Wave as bibles, deeming anything falling outside their matrixed grids as not worth knowing. They will only choose Martech that appears on these graphics. This is a symptom of risk aversion: No one gets fired for choosing the top-right Magic Quadrant, right?
This approach is fraught with problems. The unproven ‘pay for play’ accusations is one problem, but the bigger challenge is self-evident in the numbers. Take CDPs for example: G2 has 253 listings in the CDP category; there are only 18 unique vendors across Gartner and Forrester’s latest CDP landscapes. That’s only 7% of the total market! Sure, vendors have to meet a minimum revenue and growth threshold to make it onto the quadrants and many of them have good products, but there are so many great CDPs – particularly composable-first CDPs – missing from the list that could be more suited to the businesses out there shopping for one.
Renewal roulette
Martech buyer sins don’t just apply to buying new tech, it also comes into the equation for renewals. According to G2’s 2024 Buyer Behavior Report, the percentage of SaaS buyers that research alternatives at renewal time has dropped from 60% in 2023 to only 43% in 2024. The incumbents hold the keys.
The Martech buyer influence landscape
When it comes to buying Martech, there are so many different sources of influence out there that can directly or indirectly guide a marketer in their decision-making process and help to avoid the buyer sins.
These sources can be mapped based on the two most important criteria that marketers need to consider when they are seeking guidance for a buying decision: proximity and trust. Proximity refers to the distance that a source is from the unique circumstances of that buyer, whereas trust is all about the perceived independence and trustworthiness of the source.
The below is an extension of Chief Martec’s recent Martech buyer survey, which ranks different sources by helpfulness. This is not exhaustive, not every source fits neatly into these categories, and overlaps aren’t possible, but it’s representative of the landscape.
Let’s start in the top right corner. Independent editorial, research, awards, and events are perceived as trustworthy – at least that’s what we aspire to here at TMW – but are 30,000 feet away from a Martech buyer’s situation. These sources tend to be far-sighted, looking off into the future, trying to spot challenges, and opportunities for marketers in advance of when they need to know about them. They provide directional vision.
Trade media is also up in the clouds. It tends to include more sponsored content by Martech vendors, which reduces the perceived independence of these publications. Again, they’re usually future-focused and provide directional guidance for marketers.
As for analyst reports… TMW CEO Juan Mendoza explained it best in TMW #164 Gartner and the authority economy:
“The accusation here is that Gartner and Forester are paid for their analysis by CDP vendors, and therefore their work is untrustworthy. At this point, it’s like a folk story that continues to be shrouded in mystery. I’ve yet to see hard proof of a pay-to-play attitude to these vendor rankings. But many people seem to believe that Gartner’s analysts are heavily biased towards the vendors with the cash.”
Next up, we have buyer intelligence, which takes on a few different flavors, with varying degrees of usefulness. Sites like G2, Capterra, and Trustpilot have moderators that try to ensure the authenticity of reviews, but these sites rely on reviewer honesty and can therefore be gamed. This is directionally useful, but it’s more focused on users rather than buyers, and there is a lot of noise among the reviews.
Other platforms like Alium and Martech Tribe take a more hands-on approach by conducting in-depth interviews or surveys with verified brand-side marketers, asking searching questions to wheedle out the truth about how buyers think, feel, and act.
One of the key insights from Chief Martec’s buyer survey was that the most trustworthy source of information is by far and away friends and peers. After all, friends don’t let friends buy bad Martech. This can be facilitated by formal communities like MarketingOps.com or Martech councils such as those put on by the Real Story Group. For some, the 21st-century Rolodex – LinkedIn – will suffice.
Another source of information is packaged consulting and education. Think templates, process docs, educational content, frameworks, and masterclasses. The documents produced by these sources tend to be passed around and re-used for years after they are created, so they have a lasting impact on how marketers approach Martech buying.
As we get closer to the buyer, we start to see their direct partners show up. Consultancies, agencies, and systems integrators can have varying degrees of trustworthiness depending on the particulars of their business.
Some consultancies have partnerships with big vendors, which can undermine their independence in buying decisions. Other consultancies steer clear of implementation and delivery and focus on stack management only, which removes vendor partnership incentives. Some agencies are great partners and will give an honest opinion on a particular platform; others will only recommend platforms which they’ve got the badges for. Likewise with systems integrators.
Last but not least is vendors. Vendors get a tough rap, but they are the closest to the buying decision as they’re creating the solution that’s being bought. Naturally, this makes them as biased as can be (although I have seen a few maybe-too-honest sales engineers in my time). The content and events that vendors produce are not always tailored to single buyers and are biased by design. Sales engineers are more trusted despite the obvious incentives. Sales reps are an important part of the process, but as per Chiefmartec’s research, buyers find them annoying.
So that’s the landscape as we see it. It looks like there are plenty of resources out there to make a good decision, so why is that not happening more often? Shouldn’t knowing the sins of Martech buying mean marketers can avoid them?
Paint with all the colors of the wind
There’s such a broad range of resources out there in the Martech space. The problem for buyers isn’t a lack of knowledge; it’s finding sources with the right balance of trustworthiness and proximity to their circumstances.
And that doesn’t have to be only one source. As Disney’s Pocahontas said: We need to paint with all the colors of the wind. Every source on the Martech buyer influence landscape is valuable in some way for marketers. The skill is discerning which sources add context to your decisions, and which sources actively guide those decisions.
None of this is intended as a critique of any of the categories or sources across the landscape. I consume information and data from every single category of buyer influencer out there, and they all provide unique perspectives and useful information. Even vendor reports that suggest outlandish things like “99% of marketers say they need a [insert vendor’s category here]” can have nuggets of gold buried within them.
Marketers will have to take the bull by the horns and be brave to overcome risk aversion. But, if they can do that AND find the sources that have the right balance of trust and proximity to them, they can start being more confident in making Martech decisions that lead to success.
💬 Insights from Alium, The Buyer Intelligence Platform:
- “Any tool that we buy, the headache is just coordinating with different teams... There's a lot of people involved before we buy something. Too many people have a say in it. So, the buying process is extremely slow. I'll give you an example. We bought [platform]… and it was a shit show. It took us a year or so to buy it or even more. And then once we implemented it, it took us three, four months to train the different marketing teams… Then after three months of training, people used it for a month or so… and then nobody used it.”
Airline | $10B – $100B revenue | 10K – 100K employees
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Stay Curious,
Keanu Taylor
Make sense of marketing technology.
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Want to share something interesting or be featured in The Martech Weekly? Drop me a line at juan@themartechweekly.com.