Best of LinkedIn: MarTech Insights CW 02/ 03

00:00:00: This episode is provided by Thomas Holgeier and Frenis, based on the most relevant LinkedIn posts about MarTech from calendar weeks two and three.

00:00:07: Frenis is a B to B market research company helping enterprises gain the market, customer and competitive insights needed to drive growth and success.

00:00:17: Welcome to the deep dive.

00:00:19: Today, we are opening up the hood on strategic B to B marketing.

00:00:23: We've been going through a whole stack of LinkedIn posts from the second and third weeks of twenty twenty six And if I had to sum up the vibe in one word, I think it would be sobering.

00:00:33: sobering is the perfect word for it.

00:00:35: You know usually at the start of the year the conversation is manic.

00:00:38: It's all by this new AI scale this growth hacking.

00:00:41: right but looking at these sources It feels like the industry is waking up with this collective headache.

00:00:46: The focus has shifted completely from acquisition, you know buying more tools to just clarity.

00:00:52: Yeah,

00:00:53: it really feels like the era of tool sprawl is officially ending.

00:00:56: We aren't impressed by the size of the tech stack anymore.

00:00:58: No,

00:00:58: we're terrified of it.

00:00:59: Exactly.

00:01:00: The theme that's just screaming out from these posts is that we need to move from these Franken stacks to execution excellence.

00:01:08: It doesn't matter what you have.

00:01:10: It matters how well it's running.

00:01:11: And honestly, for most companies right now, it's It's not running well.

00:01:15: Okay.

00:01:15: Let's start right there.

00:01:16: a theme one stack strategy and the return of ROI discipline.

00:01:21: We saw a lot of chatter about the the sheer bloat in the system

00:01:24: a ton.

00:01:25: Oh, Barry Rodriguez really kicked this off.

00:01:27: He was calling out early-stage B to B founders But I mean this applies to the enterprise too.

00:01:32: Oh for sure.

00:01:33: He pointed out that companies are just sitting on these spendier stacks than they need and it's a drain on focus not just the budget.

00:01:41: spendier is a very polite way to put it.

00:01:44: Rodriguez suggests what he calls a no-nonsense audit, which sounds standard.

00:01:48: Everyone says you should audit your stack.

00:01:50: But his approach is pretty aggressive.

00:01:52: He's talking about mapping the stack, checking usage logs, and then doing something that makes most marketers sweat a little.

00:01:59: The pause test.

00:02:00: The scream test.

00:02:01: I love this because it's so practical.

00:02:03: You don't just ask people if they need a tool because of course they'll say yes just in case.

00:02:06: Always.

00:02:07: You actually test pausing it.

00:02:09: And if business continues as usual, if nobody screams, well, you found pure margin.

00:02:13: You just cut it.

00:02:14: It's bold.

00:02:15: But Christine Warrell added a layer to this that I think is even more important.

00:02:19: It's not just about saving the monthly subscription fee.

00:02:22: Right.

00:02:22: She argues that tech sprawl creates data inconsistency.

00:02:27: Right.

00:02:27: Every new tool is a new silo.

00:02:29: world's point is that the more tools you have, the more glue you need to hold them together.

00:02:35: And that glue is usually what, expensive human time?

00:02:39: Fragile API connections?

00:02:40: Yeah.

00:02:41: And you end up with low adoption and high support costs.

00:02:44: You're just managing the stack instead of marketing to customers.

00:02:48: So if the problem is bloat, what does the solution look like?

00:02:51: I mean, consolidation is a buzzword, but Javier Revivas actually brought some receipts.

00:02:55: He did.

00:02:55: He mentioned he's cut forty percent of marketing tools at companies he's worked for.

00:02:59: Forty percent.

00:03:00: I mean, that is a massive number.

00:03:02: In most places, if you suggested cutting forty percent of the capability, people would panic.

00:03:07: They'd think performance would just

00:03:08: tank.

00:03:09: But Viva says performance went up.

00:03:11: Because Clarity creates speed.

00:03:13: He outlined his three-tool stack.

00:03:15: He basically argues that to win, you really only need three core pieces of infrastructure.

00:03:20: Okay, what are they?

00:03:21: A customer data platform, a CDP.

00:03:24: to unify the data, one orchestration platform to send the messages, and one analytics view to see what happened.

00:03:31: That is incredibly stripped down.

00:03:33: I can already hear the objections like, but what about my specialized webinar tool?

00:03:36: What

00:03:36: about my social listening tool?

00:03:39: Yeah, and those are fair questions, but Viva's point.

00:03:41: And I think it's the winning argument for twenty twenty six is that the company's winning aren't the ones with the most logos on their architecture slide.

00:03:48: They're the ones with the clearest view of the customer.

00:03:51: If you have twenty niche tools but your customer data is fragmented across all of them, you're losing to the competitor with three tools.

00:03:58: who knows exactly who is in market.

00:04:00: That brings up a really tricky dynamic, though, about who gives you advice on this stuff.

00:04:06: Odd Morton Serns and had a post about.

00:04:09: agencies that I think every marketing leader needs to see.

00:04:12: Oh,

00:04:12: the conflict of interest issue.

00:04:14: It's a huge conflict of interest.

00:04:15: Yeah.

00:04:16: CERNs have warned about agencies that recommend tools just because they have a partnership or a certification.

00:04:21: It's

00:04:21: the classic, when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail problem, right?

00:04:26: If an agency is a platinum partner for a specific CRM, guess what they're going to recommend?

00:04:31: Yeah, whether it fits your business model or not.

00:04:33: Sernsens' advice is that your stack strategy has to be based on your needs, not the agency's kickback structure.

00:04:41: So if we're doing this ourselves, how do we evaluate what stays and what goes?

00:04:45: Kaylee Lewis offered a five-point framework, which is good, prioritizing data unification that aligns with vivas.

00:04:51: But I want to spend a minute on Bill Hobbitt's concept, because this felt like a real mental shift.

00:04:55: He talks about moving from thinking in channels to... layers.

00:04:58: This was probably my favorite strategic framework from the whole bunch.

00:05:02: Most of us, you know, we think in channels, I need an email tool, a social tool, a web tool.

00:05:07: And that thinking naturally creates silos.

00:05:10: Exactly.

00:05:11: Hubbub suggests we look at the stack horizontally in layers.

00:05:14: Okay, so break those layers down for us.

00:05:16: So layer one is content and discovery.

00:05:19: Just can buyers actually find your stuff?

00:05:22: Layer two is signal and audience intelligence.

00:05:25: Do you know who is actually looking?

00:05:27: Who's in market?

00:05:28: Who's in market.

00:05:28: And layer three is activation and orchestration.

00:05:32: So can you actually do something with that information?

00:05:35: I like that because it exposes the gaps.

00:05:38: Yeah.

00:05:38: You might have a great email tool.

00:05:40: That's layer three.

00:05:41: But if you don't know who to email because your signal layer is empty, you're just spamming people very efficiently.

00:05:47: Precisely.

00:05:48: And Hobbick's insight is that when these layers are misaligned, teams compensate by adding more tools to the wrong layer.

00:05:54: Oh, our open rates are down.

00:05:55: Let's buy a better email design tool.

00:05:57: When

00:05:57: really, you have a signal problem.

00:05:59: You have a signal problem.

00:06:00: You don't know who's in market.

00:06:01: You're just making the mess bigger.

00:06:03: That connects to a funny observation Scott Brinker made.

00:06:06: He noted the irony of all these smaller MarTech vendors cheering for consolidation.

00:06:11: Chuckles.

00:06:13: Yeah, it is ironic.

00:06:14: Brinker is basically saying, guys, just Do the math.

00:06:18: In a consolidated market, the small vendors are the ones who disappear.

00:06:21: It's

00:06:22: like Turkey's voting for Thanksgiving.

00:06:23: Exactly.

00:06:24: It just shows how powerful that narrative is right now.

00:06:27: Everyone wants simplicity, even the people who are selling the complexity.

00:06:31: Okay, let's shift gears.

00:06:32: We've talked about the tools, now let's talk about the people running them.

00:06:35: This brings us to theme two.

00:06:37: the evolution of marketing ops and RevOps.

00:06:39: This is so critical.

00:06:41: For years, MomOps was the fix-it team.

00:06:43: You know, the ticket takers.

00:06:44: Hey, my login is broken.

00:06:46: Or, hey, can you upload this list for me?

00:06:48: Totally.

00:06:49: But Mike Rizzo argues that era is over.

00:06:51: He describes ops as systems thinking under pressure.

00:06:55: He used this great analogy.

00:06:57: If you give an artist canvas and paint, they create art.

00:07:00: But if you give an ops pro a GTM stack,

00:07:03: it's different.

00:07:03: They have to handle all this nuance and trade-offs and logic that AI simply cannot handle yet.

00:07:09: They're designing the engine, not just changing the oil.

00:07:13: But are we actually letting them design the engine?

00:07:16: John Miller doesn't seem to think so.

00:07:17: He wrote about the mom's bottleneck and this capacity trap.

00:07:20: The capacity trap is so real.

00:07:22: Miller points out that because the stack has become so complex, which goes back to our first point, the ops person is often the only one who knows how to use it safely.

00:07:31: So they spend one hundred percent of their time on tactical execution, building the campaigns, fixing the landing pages.

00:07:37: Miller asked a question that really stuck with me.

00:07:40: He said, if you freed up three hundred hours of tactical time, what strategic project would you finally tackle?

00:07:46: And that's the tragedy.

00:07:47: We have these highly skilled systems thinkers, and we're using them to fix typos and marquettos.

00:07:53: And as a result, companies are underinvesting in data governance and strategy, things that actually help you scale.

00:08:00: So how do we break the trap?

00:08:02: Justin Norris suggests we need to structurally separate the work.

00:08:05: Yes, the run versus change model.

00:08:08: Norris argues you have to explicitly separate run the business work.

00:08:12: You know, the reactive tickets, bugs, small updates from change the business work, which is the strategic building.

00:08:18: and you shouldn't have your lead architect doing the

00:08:20: run work.

00:08:20: Never.

00:08:21: Norris suggests using junior resources or maybe even external contractors for all that reactive stuff.

00:08:28: Free up your senior leaders to do the things CSERR listed as essential skills.

00:08:32: Which were?

00:08:33: Things like data management, compliance, and cross-functional alignment.

00:08:36: I mean, you can't align with sales if you're heads down building email templates all day.

00:08:41: Speaking of alignment with sales, Sabine Viderike had this.

00:08:46: this really counterintuitive point about friction.

00:08:49: We're all trained to believe that friction is the enemy.

00:08:51: Right,

00:08:52: make it easy, one-click, instant gratification.

00:08:55: But Vidreik argues for something she calls good friction.

00:08:58: She gave the example of replacing a generic contact sales button with a list of specific regional reps that the user actually has to read and select from.

00:09:06: Which sounds terrible from a UX perspective, right?

00:09:09: You're making the user do more work.

00:09:11: You are.

00:09:11: But think about the downstream effect.

00:09:14: By forcing the visitor to self-select, you eliminate the internal chaos of routing that lead.

00:09:20: You don't have a high-value prospect sitting in a general inbox for forty-eight hours while someone figures out whose territory it is.

00:09:26: So you slow down the click?

00:09:27: To

00:09:27: speed up the actual conversation.

00:09:29: Exactly.

00:09:30: That is strategic rev-ops.

00:09:31: It's looking at the whole system, not just the conversion rate on one form.

00:09:36: I love that.

00:09:36: Good friction.

00:09:38: Okay, let's move to our final theme.

00:09:40: We've cleaned up the stack.

00:09:41: We've empowered the ops team.

00:09:43: Now we have to talk about the fuel running through the engine.

00:09:46: Theme three, data foundations.

00:09:48: This is the unsexy truth that nobody wants to hear.

00:09:51: You can't have AI or personalization without the plumbing.

00:09:54: Grafiella Ellensburg put it perfectly.

00:09:56: Most content strategies fail because they are built on quicksand.

00:10:00: And quicksand is just bad data architecture.

00:10:02: Pretty much.

00:10:03: If you can't track your content as data, if it's not tagged, if it's not organized, you can't personalize it.

00:10:08: And companies are buying these expensive personalization engines, but they're just feeding them garbage.

00:10:13: Carm Charles had a metaphor for this that was pretty vivid.

00:10:16: She compared platforms like Adobe Experience Platform to a... particle accelerator.

00:10:23: Chuckles.

00:10:23: It's a great image, isn't it?

00:10:25: Yeah.

00:10:25: She says a platform like that acts as a particle accelerator for your data.

00:10:29: But if you inject chaos bad data into a particle accelerator, you don't get magic.

00:10:34: You just get scaled chaos.

00:10:35: You get scaled chaos.

00:10:36: It's a frightening concept.

00:10:37: Yeah.

00:10:38: She argues that true personalization happens at the point of data ingestion, not delivery.

00:10:43: And she said, ninety percent of implementations fail because they treat the platform as a beauty salon to mask mediocre data.

00:10:51: If you don't fix the ingestion, the delivery will always, always be flawed.

00:10:55: And it's getting harder and harder to ensure that ingestion is clean because the internet itself is getting so messy.

00:11:01: Phil Gamache brought up the dead internet theory.

00:11:04: This sounds like a conspiracy theory at first, but the data really backs it up.

00:11:07: There are reports showing that up to seventy-three percent of internet traffic is now bad bots.

00:11:12: Seventy-three percent.

00:11:13: That is that stack.

00:11:14: It

00:11:14: is.

00:11:15: So marketers are looking at their dashboards, seeing traffic spikes and making decisions based on that.

00:11:20: But if over seventy percent of that traffic is non-human, you're just optimizing your website for robots, not for actual buyers.

00:11:28: So Gamache says we have to start categorizing that automation.

00:11:32: By intent, yeah.

00:11:33: Because not all bots are bad, right?

00:11:35: Google is a bot.

00:11:36: Right, you want Google.

00:11:37: You want Google.

00:11:37: You don't want the scrapers.

00:11:39: But Andrew Smith pointed out an even creepier evolution of this.

00:11:43: It's not just traffic anymore.

00:11:45: AI agents are now filling out your

00:11:47: forms.

00:11:47: This one blew my mind.

00:11:48: Yeah.

00:11:49: So an AI agent fills out a contact us form on my site.

00:11:53: to sell to me.

00:11:54: Yes.

00:11:54: It used to be a human SDR copy pasting their pitch into your form.

00:11:59: Now an AI agent can fill out thousands of forms in

00:12:02: minutes.

00:12:02: So what do you do?

00:12:03: Smith advises using honeypot fields to catch them.

00:12:06: For anyone listening who isn't technical, can you explain how a honeypot works?

00:12:10: Sure.

00:12:10: It's basically a trap.

00:12:11: You put a hidden field on your form, let's say a box that asks for a fax number.

00:12:15: You then hide it with code so a human looking at the screen doesn't even see it.

00:12:19: But

00:12:19: a bot sees it.

00:12:21: A bot scans the code, sees an empty field, and thinks, oh, I better fill this out to be complete.

00:12:26: So if you get a lead where that hidden fax number field is filled out.

00:12:30: You

00:12:30: know it's a bot.

00:12:31: You can filter it out instantly before it ever hits your sales team and waste their time.

00:12:35: It

00:12:35: really is an arms race.

00:12:37: It absolutely is.

00:12:38: And this leads to the future outlook that Arun Kumar talked about.

00:12:42: He sees the CRM evolving by twenty twenty six into an enterprise nervous system.

00:12:47: That sounds pretty grand.

00:12:48: It does, but the logic holds up.

00:12:50: He thinks CRM will move from being this passive system of record to an active system that's powered by AI agents.

00:12:58: And because of that, he argues it shouldn't be owned by sales or marketing anymore.

00:13:03: Who

00:13:03: should own it?

00:13:04: It should be owned by the CEO as critical infrastructure.

00:13:07: Wow.

00:13:08: That's a big shift in ownership.

00:13:09: Yeah.

00:13:09: But Martin Key offered a bit of a reality check on the timeline for all this, didn't

00:13:13: he?

00:13:13: He did.

00:13:14: He reminds us that while AI is reshaping everything, this is a two to five year journey.

00:13:20: We aren't going to wake up tomorrow with a fully autonomous stack.

00:13:22: Not yet.

00:13:23: Not yet.

00:13:24: He emphasized composability modularity as the key.

00:13:27: You need to be able to swap pieces in and out as the tech evolves.

00:13:31: Which brings us right back to where we started.

00:13:33: Yeah.

00:13:33: You can't be composable if you're drowning in a Frankenstein.

00:13:35: Exactly.

00:13:37: If we connect all these dots, the stack audit, the ops strategy, the data hygiene, the message is clear.

00:13:43: The winners in twenty twenty six aren't the ones with the most powerful AI.

00:13:47: No.

00:13:47: They're the ones who've done the boring, unsexy work of cleaning up their operations so the AI can actually work.

00:13:54: Operating clarity over toolstraw.

00:13:56: That's the mission.

00:13:57: So for you listening right now, maybe the move this week isn't to buy something new.

00:14:02: Maybe it's to look at that tool nobody uses and finally hit pause.

00:14:05: Or go buy your ops person a coffee and ask them what they'd build if they weren't always fixing your bugs.

00:14:10: And

00:14:10: ask yourself, is your data a particle accelerator for value or are you just scaling chaos?

00:14:16: That is the question to chew on.

00:14:18: If you enjoyed this episode, new episodes drop every two weeks.

00:14:21: Also check out our other editions on account-based marketing, field marketing, channel marketing, AI and B to B marketing.

00:14:27: Go to market and social selling.

00:14:29: Thanks for listening.

00:14:30: Don't forget to subscribe.

00:14:31: We'll see you next time.