MarTech Talks #3

00:00 - 3:50 - Intro

3:51 - 4:30 - Scott's Influence in MarTech

4:31 - 7:00 - How to take advantage of the growth of MarTech

7:01 - 9:30 - Portuguese MarTech Landscape

9:31 - 12:20 - MarTech Trends: Commerce, Big Ops and No Code

12:21 - 20:00 - Metaverse, NFT, Blockchain and Web3

20:01 - 23:50 - How to develop an AI strategy in business

23:51 - HubSpot Benefits

Aproveite as Últimas Tendências Tecnológicas

1.Expansão do Mercado MarTech: Scott Brinker refere-se ao crescimento exponencial do MarTech, de dezenas para mais de 10.000 soluções tecnológicas. Ele alerta as empresas para priorizarem ferramentas alinhadas à sua estratégia em vez de acumularem soluções sem uso adequado, pois a eficácia depende mais da integração e do uso real das ferramentas do que da quantidade.

2. Colaboração entre Operações (Big Ops): Scott introduz o conceito de “Big Ops”, que representa a colaboração essencial entre operações de marketing, vendas e dados. Esta coordenação entre departamentos é fundamental para que o MarTech se integre de forma eficaz à restante infraestrutura tecnológica da empresa.

3. Ferramentas No-Code e a Economia Criativa Interna: As ferramentas no-code são apontadas como facilitadoras, permitindo que profissionais de marketing, sem conhecimentos de programação, criem apps e gráficos e façam análises. Scott considera que este tipo de ferramentas democratiza o marketing digital, promovendo uma “economia criativa” interna nas empresas.

4. Inteligência Artificial (IA) e Automação: A IA no MarTech possibilita automações importantes, como o envio de e-mails no melhor horário e a análise preditiva. Brinker recomenda que as empresas invistam em ferramentas de IA com uma visão estratégica para o futuro, evitando aquelas sem um roadmap claro de desenvolvimento.

5. Preparação para Web3 e o Metaverso: Embora tendências como Web3 e NFTs estejam numa fase inicial, Scott aconselha as empresas a manterem-se atentas. Mesmo que o impacto prático ainda seja limitado, ele considera importante que as empresas estejam preparadas para uma eventual transição digital.

6. Integração e Experiência Coesa na HubSpot: Scott explica que a HubSpot pretende oferecer uma experiência integrada e simplificada para os seus clientes, permitindo uma transição eficiente entre CRM e ferramentas de automação. Esta abordagem visa tornar o processo de marketing mais coeso e intuitivo.

(0:06) Welcome to Martech Talks, the Aliminal podcast that brings you interviews with business leaders who are at the forefront of the digital transformation of marketing and sales departments, so that your business can also grow in this new technological era. As a specialist in Martech, liminal has been able to improve the marketing and sales results of several companies, ensuring the conditions for the success of business in the new digital era. With liminal, you will have access to skills that will make the analysis, design and implementation of marketing and sales strategies and operations.

(0:41) All this supported by technological systems such as CRM, automation and marketing analytics. Create your digital business ecosystem with liminal.

(1:00) Hello and welcome to the third Martech Talks podcast by liminal.

(1:06) Our guest today is none other than the godfather of Martech, Scott Brinker. Welcome Scott. Thank you.

(1:14) Thank you for coming to our podcast. Thank you for having me. It's a pleasure to be here with you.

(1:20) My pleasure. So happy to have you. Vice President of Platform Ecosystem at HubSpot, co-founder of Chief Marketing Technologist blog, chiefmartech.com, with over 50,000 readers, amazing.

(1:33) And he analyzes topics at the intersection of marketing, technology, management. Scott launched the Martech Conference, co-founded Ion Interactive, a software as a service company that pioneered interactive content for global brands like Cisco, Microsoft, Dell. Amazing.

(1:54) And the company was acquired back in 2017. He also co-wrote the bestselling book, Hacking Marketing, and he co-authored the article, The Rise of the Chief Marketing Technologist, published in Harvard Business Review. And of course, Scott is the creator of the marketing technology landscape, which went viral for mapping the growth of the marketing technology industry from a hundred vendors to 10,000 at the moment.

(2:25) What an incredible journey this is. And well, we've discussed this at our previous podcast with your partner in this venture, Franz Rehmerzmer. We also had a small bit of work at Liminal contributing to the Portuguese and also Spanish landscape, which was a pleasure for us.

(2:54) And so, Scott, congrats on, congratulations on all these achievements. Oh, wow. Well, thank you.

(3:00) A very generous introduction, my friend. We're so happy to have you. Now, you don't know this, Scott, but your work has changed and influenced my life in an unimaginable way.

(3:15) Because 10 years ago, when I started to follow you around 10 years ago, and in your work, I was inspired so much that it led me to become an entrepreneur and create Liminal. And I want to thank you and honor you for giving me the trigger, knowledge, information to embark on this. It's been the most exciting journey I've ever done in my professional career.

(3:42) Thank you. Thank you very much, sir. I'm so happy to hear it.

(3:46) Yeah. Help contribute to what you're doing. Yeah.

(3:50) I wonder, how conscious are you of the influence you've had in shaping the market industry, You know, I'm happy whenever I hear that, you know, people have found it useful. It's certainly a space that I've been passionate about for a long time. And yeah, it's really exciting to be able to connect with that passion with others as well.

(4:13) Amazing. Amazing. Let's talk about the MarTech landscape.

(4:18) And well, I've said since first published the Martin Technology Landscape, you know, has grown the number of marketing technology solutions map on it as expanded exponentially. What advice would you give to business leaders out there on how to take advantage of these opportunities that this growth in MarTech vendors brings to SMBs? Yeah, I mean, it is definitely a two edged sword. You know, on one hand, you know, all this innovation and all these companies that are competing with each other in many ways is a wonderful thing for SMBs, because as an SMB now, the sophistication of technologies that you can get at a very affordable price is really impressive.

(5:05) I mean, it's game changing compared to what it was even five years ago. You know, so it's wonderful to have that, you know, on the other hand, because there are so many products in the market. It's also challenging very often for people to find the ones, you know, that are relevant to them.

(5:23) And so what I usually recommend is, first of all, it's not about the amount of technology you have. It's about how well you use the technology you do have. So you're much better off, you know, having two or three or four core products, you know, that you're learning to use really effectively, you know, in your go to market, you know, vision and operations, you know, than to like, oh, you know, have a huge stack.

(5:47) Stack size does not matter. But yeah, I mean, the other thing I always recommend is talking to peers, because there is a certain amount of variance from one industry to another, one geographic region to another, you know, and so as a marketing leader, if you just engage with more and more of your peers, often they can be some of the best source of like, OK, what are the tools that they're using, what they've enjoyed, which are ones they tried that they felt maybe weren't as good of a fit, you know, requires a little bit of networking, you know, to plug into that. For sure, for sure. Great advice. (6:30) Have you looked at the Portuguese MarTech landscape? And because it amazed me last year when we did the accounting for the first time, we had 100 and now we have 120 MarTech vendors here in Portugal. And, you know, Portugal is a fairly small country, but fairly known for its the quality and sheer number of technological startups that are now unicorns, for instance.

(7:00) OK, what do you think about our MarTech landscape here in Portugal? What do you think is most notable? Yeah, I think it's wonderful. I mean, first of all, like this broader trend is really important. Like there was a time where, you know, most technology or software that people felt like, oh, OK, this is, you know, where the big players are coming from.

(7:23) It was all Silicon Valley, you know, and that was actually a very constraining model. And what's happened, you know, over the past, it's steadily increased over the past 10 years, but you've certainly seen an acceleration in the past five years where actually great technologies and great companies are coming from anywhere in the world. You know, and this makes a ton of sense because, yeah, you know, not everybody like lives in the Bay Area, you know, like you have, you know, brilliant, passionate entrepreneurs and engineers, you know, all over the world.

(7:57) And that we've now finally reached the place where from a combination of like funding sources to, you know, go to market mechanisms, you know, that essentially you can now launch a great company from anywhere and win the respect and, you know, engagement with the market. And I think that's a that's a wonderful thing. So I sort of look at Portugal as, you know, sort of just one example of that.

(8:21) You know, the country was just a tremendous amount, you know, of innovation happening across the tech sector. But yeah, certainly from, you know, the MarTech landscape for the country that you helped create there. Yeah, you just see this, you know, blossoming of insight and talent.

(8:40) And it's cool to also be in a country where you have so many customers of that, too, because you get that very rapid feedback as you're developing these things and then take them in a more, you know, global market. Yeah. And also because we are a small market and small economy, many of these startups, when they start, they aim for the big markets, UK, United States.

(9:02) And that makes them also, you know, achieve greatness in many instances in a short matter of time. It's great. Now, at the beginning of this year, I read very carefully one of your articles at MarTech, you know, forecasting the big MarTech innovation teams for this year regarding commerce, big ops, no code.

(9:31) And I wonder, how do you see this trend evolving now that we are six months into the year? And what should marketing leaders do to keep their companies up to date with these exact trends? Yeah, you know, I mean, the world of MarTech is so large that there are so many things happening. It is definitely hard to choose, you know, what are a few of the trends that, you know, I would focus in on. And the three I sort of laid out at the beginning of the year of commerce, what I call big ops, which is sort of like this whole growth within marketing ops, sales ops, rev ops, like operations, you know, as a core function, you know, in modern digital environments.

(10:18) And then the third being no code, which I also take very broadly to mean, you know, not just people creating apps who aren't software engineers, but frankly, any general purpose marketer or business user who's able to leverage these tools to create things, whether it's, you know, graphics or videos or, you know, data analysis or, yeah, in some cases, actual little apps, you know, e-commerce, storefronts, websites. Yeah, just like, you know, so anyways, all three of these, you know, I think we six months into this see that, yeah, it's been incredible acceleration. You know, there are now more and more digital commerce channels, not just for B2C, but also increasingly for B2B as well.

(11:04) And there's a great opportunity for marketing ops and marketing tech leaders to be directly plugged into that. With big ops, right, we're seeing very much not only marketing operations, you know, continuing to become more popular, you know, and become more of a force inside more and more organizations, but the collaboration between marketing ops and other ops teams like with sales ops or, yeah, with data ops for like, how do we interface the MarTech stack into the rest of the data infrastructure that the company is increasingly using?And then, yeah, the no-code one is, right, I mean, we just see this every day. It's just there are more and more tools that let you as a marketer become this creator.

(11:53) You know, we talk about the creator economy outside of, you know, businesses. I actually think there's a really thriving creator economy that's happening inside organizations with these new tools as well. So I don't know, I'll double down on those three trends.

(12:09) Yeah, yeah. Well, amazing. Also, you know, this year is sort of a good economic year, but, you know, the forecast for the next years, at least here in Europe, because of inflation, tax rates and the war, they're not so good as what we are experiencing right now.

(12:31) Do you have any, you know, cautionary advice for marketing and MarTech leaders regarding what tools they should invest in thinking about all these trends? Yeah, I mean, particularly if we say, yeah, I mean, macroeconomic conditions now are definitely at the very least a, you know, like a cautionary flag. You know, I think this is actually a great opportunity for most marketing operations, marketing tech teams to perhaps invest less about acquiring new tools and frankly, invest more in their people of like, OK, let's make sure we really have developed the skills and the abilities to leverage the technology we already have. You know, let's really make sure we're focusing on not just the technical process of being able to do this, but how we how we get really creative in leveraging those tools to do remarkable marketing, you know, that attracts and engages customers.

(13:34) I think, yeah, just taking that time to invest in that is great. And, you know, if there's a particular gap, you find that there is, you know, a tool out there, you know, that can, you know, fit perfectly for it. I mean, by all means, you know, I think anything where there's a clear, you know, return on investment opportunity, I'm not saying don't don't spend on anything, but yeah, to be perhaps, yeah, just a little bit more reserved in making sure you're getting the most out of the tech spend that you already have before you grow that budget.

(14:05) I think talking about trends, we've all been flooded by what you called grand prognostications around the ideas of metaverse, NFTs, blockchain powered Web 3.0 concepts. And do you still is it still early for mainstream market tech, as you said, should these trends concern only big brands? And, you know, what is it that we can do to prepare ourselves for Web 3? Yeah, it's a great question, and I definitely don't have all the answers here. This is a this is a space that's very new.

(14:44) It's emerging. In fact, actually, NFTs, it's kind of interesting. Like there was a real peak of hype.

(14:53) That'd be the word for it. I have no disrespect intended. But like, yeah, you know, like interest in NFTs really peaked, you know, towards the end of last year.

(15:02) And then this year it went in the complete opposite, like, you know, that that that markets kind of, you know, dissolve. Now, that doesn't mean it won't come back at some point. I really do think a lot of these things like, you know, crypto technologies and even some of the metaverse, right, like we have all this cool stuff in the metaverse.

(15:22) If you actually think about the metaverse as, you know, you know, like Roblox and Minecraft and like these gaming environments that for certain types of products actually are phenomenal marketing channel. But sort of the broader vision of saying like, oh, we're all going to be working and living in the metaverse. We're not there yet, you know.

(15:44) And so I think Web3 and Metaverse and all this, they they probably are not going to be big forces for most companies here in 2022. My guess, and I'll just acknowledge this is an intuitive guess, could be wildly off, but I think it's going to be at least two to three years before we really see those technologies start to mature enough that they become deeply embedded in marketing for most companies. But I don't know, we'll see.

(16:16) And especially, I mean, I believe that Web3 and blockchain as a general theme has the promise of trust and transparency, which nowadays is very it's a requirement that almost everybody has in their top of mind, because we've all been we've all seen the problem with, you know, Facebook in the past and so many other big companies spying on us. And maybe this is a good thing to start, start strategizing for a future and the future platforms in which your brand should be. Yeah, I mean, I think thinking about this stuff and paying attention to it, I think is useful.Right. I mean, again, the the number one challenge we have in marketing and certainly in Mardek is is change. You know, the world just keeps changing and evolving very rapidly.

(17:16) And you could argue this is maybe the primary directive, the prime directive, you know, for Mardek leaders is to make sure they're keeping pace with understanding that change,you know, and that doesn't mean necessarily like rushing in to adopt something at scale and when it's still early. But at the same time, it's also not dismissing things because they're early. It's like, all right, well, let's let's keep an eye on this.

(17:39) Let's make sure we understand it. And as use cases and the technology and infrastructure matures, yes, being ready and willing to say, hey, as as the use cases become clear, like by all means, let's let's adopt it. So, yeah, I definitely agree with you.

(17:57) Like thinking about it and paying attention to it is a really good thing. I would just make sure from a budget perspective and where you're putting your time and resources, you just make sure you're prioritizing with everything else that needs to happen. Maybe for a regular assembly company, the subject is not blockchain technology, but trust, transparency and maybe in the future use blockchain to address that.

(18:24) But right now, let's talk about trust. That's it. Also, a piece of technology that is disrupting and I believe, you know, much more and in the short term, all of our world as marketers, as citizens also is artificial intelligence, obviously.

(18:43) And in regarding that, one of my first pieces of advice to any company that is looking to start any AI based marketing pilot is to audit all the tools they already use and assess the readiness of those tools against the company's most wanted use cases. Assess what features already exist, what do you want in the future, the use cases, the requirements that fit the development of your business model and try to understand if the tools that you have, if they will be in place at that time and how those vendors are, what type of algorithms are they developing? You know, how are they training those algorithms? And because in the near future, any software products, especially in what concerns marketing and customer experience, obviously, this is my point of view, any software product that does not have a clear vision and roadmap for AI, it doesn't have a future and it will injure and slow down your business if you hang on to it. What are your views regarding this subject and what do you think is the best way for a CMO to develop an AI strategy for its business? Yeah, I mean, so one of the great things about AI is it's actually increasingly embedded in a bunch of the MarTech products we use, and sometimes the best AI is AI that's so seamless and how it embeds into those products that we don't even think about it.

(20:27) You know, I mean, like a great example would be something like, you know, like, say, yes, send time optimization on email campaigns. You know, I mean, it's a machine learning algorithm to like look across like the thousands of emails that are going to go out and basically be able to predict for different people in your CRM, like, you know, when receiving a particular message is going to maximize the open rates on that. Yeah, I mean, that's something that's like, you know, like a perfect machine learning algorithm, and there's just dozens, if not hundreds of cases like this all throughout marketing where it's not necessarily a big grand machine that tells us how to do all of our marketing, but in the actual execution of everything from like, you know, lead scoring to, you know, churn propensity of, you know, who we should be targeting messages to and how we should be shaping offers for particular renewals.

(21:22) I mean, all these things. I mean, like this is on the ground, like tactical execution that we're finding machine learning just being incredibly helpful for. And I think the thing is, like when you get machine learning like that baked into a lot of your market tools, it saves you, I mean, particularly for SMBs, they generally don't have the resource thing to be able to say, like, OK, well, we're going to have our machine learning team and our data scientists for this and the ML engineer for this other thing. It's like, you know, some businesses, you know, they can afford that in their model, but I suspect for a lot of SMBs, we're not yet at that point that we can have that specialized team. But if we can buy off the shelf commercial products that embed those capabilities, all of a sudden that starts to become accessible to businesses of any size. So I don't know, I guess my advice would be, it's kind of like the advice earlier on any sort of new technology is just really make sure you're looking at the use case.

(22:30) You know, what is it I'm looking for this thing to do? And particularly if you have some sort of quantitative metric that you can align with that objective, then you also have the ability to say, like, OK, this is how we are performing and executing this today. Here's this technology we're evaluating that we believe has this capability that we expect will have an impact on that metric. And to have the discipline to, you know, when you do bring that in or you run a pilot with it, you know, really be able to demonstrate that, yes, that capability, that feature, that AI functionality, we are able to correlate that to a meaningful impact on our business metrics that generally helps steer you to make sure you're you're getting value out of these.

(23:20) One of those companies, one of those off the shelf vendors that is incorporating AI and machine learning use cases and tools is exactly the brand that we are seeing on your background, HubSpot, and it's been doing it in a very steady and robust way for the last years. Now, in 2017, you've been appointed as vice president of platform ecosystem at HubSpot. Scott, tell us about your role there at HubSpot and how you've been able to influence the evolution of this software that is now at the center of more than one hundred and forty K customers worldwide, right? Yeah, yeah, well, I joined HubSpot because, well, I've known the founders for a long time, but it was really, you know, this this explosion I saw in the market tech industry of just, you know, we went from a few hundred tools to literally thousands of tools.

(24:22) And this isn't just MarTech, the same thing's happening in sales tech and, you know, all sorts of, you know, pretty much every discipline. But for all this incredible innovation that is happening out in the market, the challenge that I saw just time and time again was marketers were having a really difficult time getting these things to work together. And this is a problem that is solvable.

(24:46) You know, this is the whole point of having like platforms and platform ecosystems, you know, is if the platform has, you know, the right sort of open extensibility, if it has programs in place to work with other companies so that they can integrate seamlessly with that open extensibility and then collectively you're able to start to go to the customer base and be like, hey, listen, any of these sets of products that you want to use with this platform, you don't have to worry about somehow custom integrating them. They come integrated out of the box. In fact, here are the use cases of how they work together.

(25:21) That was very much the vision. And I feel like at HubSpot, we've definitely made progress. I'll be the first to admit.

(25:28) I think there's much further we can go. But yeah, I'm very excited that both HubSpot has really embraced a platform philosophy, but also incredibly grateful for all the partners we work with who have also agreed to prioritize saying like, yeah, let's make sure these products work really, really well so that when a HubSpot customer gets product X, the experience of using both of them together is just magical. Yeah, yeah, that's a fact.

(25:57) And also, you know, recently in the last couple of years, I believe, HubSpot has repositioned itself not just as a marketing automation platform, also as a CMS platform, but mainly as an easy to use all in one CRM solution. And please correct me if I'm wrong, you know, going head to head with strong competitors and market leaders in the CRM space, such as Salesforce and Microsoft, obviously. Why should a company that already uses Salesforce, for instance, consider migrating its CRM to HubSpot and what are also HubSpot long term goals in what concerns to market size and share in CRM space? Yeah, well, again, this goes back to like, what is the upside of having so many companies in the market space, ultimately from a marketer's perspective? The upside is that competition is good, that competition is healthy, you know, and so I would say, yeah, you know, for a Salesforce customer who wants to evaluate HubSpot, look at it and, you know, I might like to take a, you know, free trial.

(27:09) There's a freemium approach to it. Like you start using and you say like, okay, for the features I want, the things I, the use cases I have, what is the experience like, you know, for me and my team using this product and what are the economics of this? What is the price of it? You know, and compare and decide if you think Salesforce is the better solution for what you do. Hey, this is, this is why it's an open competitive market.

(27:33) If you think HubSpot's a better solution, it's great that you now have that choice. You know, so I think, yeah, again, I would give the same advice for HubSpot as I would give essentially to any MarTech product, which is, you know, understanding enough about how you would use it, where you would see the value, you know, both from an economic perspective and from an experience perspective and make the decision that you think is best for your business. Right.

(28:01) So Scott, this is all the time we have left for our first podcast, I'm sure. And you are welcome to come back again. And we are very, very happy to have you here, Scott.

(28:17) Thank you very much for coming to our podcast. Thank you so much for having me. When are you coming to Europe or to Portugal? Let's make something together.

(28:26) Yes. And I've not been to Portugal for many years, but I love Portugal. So hopefully soon.

(28:33) Let's make it happen. You'll be my guest. So thank you.

(28:39) Thank you very much, Scott. Once again, this was the third edition of Liminal's MarTech Talks podcast. Liminal is the first Portuguese company that specializes in strategic consulting and MarTech operations.

(28:52) We've been able to help our clients to grow through marketing strategies and technologies such as CRM, automation and business intelligence. In this podcast, we will continue to bring you interviews with business leaders that are at the forefront of the digital transformation of marketing and sales departments so that your business can also grow in this new technological age. Thank you very much for being with us and I'll see you on the next episode.

(29:22) Thank you.