Insights From a B2B Marketing Expert on Getting the Most From Your Martech Stack

Pam Didner discusses how to optimize your martech stack and sync up with your sales team.

Everyone is frustrated by martech. That’s a given, according to Pam Didner. 

We had a lively conversation with Didner, a B2B marketing thought leader, on how to choose the right tech tools to execute marketing campaigns. We got a plethora of insights, much of it belying conventional wisdom. But Didner knows of what she speaks, having spent time in the marketing trenches with Intel, Southwest Airlines, 3M, Sunstar, Cisco, TE Connectivity, and many other leading global companies. 

Martech is so broad, and marketing itself is so squishy; everybody does it differently. The number-one rule is that you can’t compare yourself to others. You have to look inward, not outward.

Pam Didner

B2B marketing expert

Keep reading to learn how to get everyone on board for martech success at your organization. 

3 key factors to achieving martech success

Knowing which martech (marketing technology) to invest in is tough. “Even for me,” Didner says. 

Her advice: Break martech buying decisions down into smaller pieces.

She advises looking at three distinct pieces, that when pulled together, will help you assemble and optimize your martech stack. 

1. Choose your channels and plan your marketing campaigns

With your objectives top of mind, identify specific channels for achieving them, and then, Didner says, “create marketing campaigns within those channels. It all starts there.” 

For example, you may decide on a campaign of quarterly webinars driven by a series of nurturing emails, with the objective of increasing the visibility of your CEO. “Great – now you’ve got both your channels and your campaign for achieving your objective,” she says. 

2. Build processes and choose tools for those processes

Next, set up the specific processes for your email and webinar campaign and identify the tools you’ll need to support them. 

First, build workflows showing how emails will drive traffic to a webinar registration landing page, and how people entering their data into the landing page get the webinar login details. And here—not before—is where you start to make martech decisions. 

Which platform should you use for the webinar? For the landing page? How does the data coming from the landing page tie into your marketing automation tool? What tools will you need to integrate that data? How will you link people to the webinar once it’s live? 

Didner stresses the necessity of selecting martech tools that are compatible with your marketing automation platform. “If your marketing automation tool doesn’t support webinar registration, you’ll need to use another tool,” she says. "But the data from your registration platform must be able to flow to your marketing automation tool. If it doesn’t, you’ve set yourself up for a lot of complications."

3. Measure your progress toward your objective

Then comes data analytics. You need to be able to slice and dice the data you collect from your registration page numerous ways. How many people have registered? What are their titles? Organizational levels? Industry? 

The important part, again, is whether you can integrate the data from the various systems you are using. 

“When you get the data on 600 registrants, can you correlate that information with what’s in your CRM [customer relationship management] system?” Didner asks. 

How to get in sync with your sales team on martech

Focusing on the three factors for success can also be helpful when attempting to align marketing with sales. 

A continuing sticking point for marketing professionals is that sales and marketing teams are working at cross purposes. Marketing tends to take a long-term attitude, whereas sales is very much about now. Sales thinks in terms of accounts, while marketing likes to create personas. 

“When marketing has a lead, we like to nurture them. We want them to be aware of our products. We focus on long plays,” says Didner. "And the salespeople are like, 'What? You're not the buyer? Let me talk to the next person.’ They are hunters. They have a completely different mindset.”

Think like a salesperson

Don't necessarily expect salespeople to meet you halfway on this. “You might have to go further than they do, even 70% of the way, to meet them,” warns Didner. 

And many sales organizations simply won’t get the benefits of marketing at all. “They are not going to meet you anywhere,” she says.

Here is where being proactive actually works. Your first step is to understand the sales team’s objectives. “Dig in and get information from them, to determine what you can do to help them,” Didner says. “Sometimes they simply need marketing content. Sometimes they need templates. Sometimes they want help with account-based marketing.” 

Whatever that is, you determine the channels, the campaigns, the processes, and, finally, the martech tools you will use to make that happen. 

Integrating with CRM is non-negotiable

It's important to understand that your sales team lives and breathes their CRM system. Therefore, it’s essential that your marketing automation platform and your CRM solution are seamlessly connected.

“It took me three to four months to do that for my own company,” Didner admits. “For larger firms, it can take even longer. Many marketers get very frustrated just trying to get over this particular hump.”

When you finally get the data flowing, then you need to consider how to communicate insights and results to the sales team. They don’t want a spreadsheet with 20 columns of data. “You need to make it relevant to them,” Didner says.  

Do you send information via email? Do you bring it to a sales huddle? Or present it in front of an all-hands meeting? “You must think, how do you share that information so that it's most beneficial and useful to the salespeople?” she says.

Why being proactive about martech can be difficult

At some point, inevitably, a key question arises. Can we proactively address all our martech needs? Should we upgrade our marketing automation system in anticipation of needing additional functionality for our future campaigns?

Say your current email database can manage up to 100,000 people. No problem, you think—you’re currently only at 50. But then within six months, you hit that 100,000 limit, and suddenly you need a new tool. 

Even if you, the marketer, are ready to act before that crisis point, “the reality is that very few executives will say, ‘okay, let’s spend that $20,000 now to get ourselves ready,’ until they—and everyone else—is feeling some pain,” Didner says. “Especially with today’s economic uncertainty. 

So what should trigger a martech upgrade or a purchase?  

Typically, the entire organization will be feeling massive growing pains. The sales team will be struggling because the current processes are not helping them close deals. HR cannot keep up, because more and more marketing professionals need to be hired to support campaigns. “And your CEO is being pulled in five different directions,” says Didner. “You’ve hit a tipping point. That’s how you know.”