The Marketing Operations Strategist - 14,106 martech tools and counting...what does it mean for you and your career?

Thanks for joining me for the second edition of my newsletter! 😄

Let’s get right into it. 👇️ 

In Today's Issue:

• 14,106 martech tools and counting…let’s discuss

• Recommended book of the week

• Learning resource of the week

• Helpful AI tool of the week 🤖

• What I’m up to/what I’m studying

• AMA: Dear Sara ✍️

• What else do you want to hear about from me?

14,106 martech tools and counting…let’s discuss the latest MarTech.org report and what it means for you

Scott Brinker and Frans Riemersma recently released their research on the state of marketing technology in 2024. They point out a few interesting trends that might have you wondering, “What does this mean for me and my career?” Let’s talk about it.

Scott and Frans highlight the growth and lack of consolidation within martech, even during this tough market.

Here are their takeaways:

What does the lack of consolidation mean for you? It means we must:

1. Stay agile in our knowledge and not specialize too much in any one platform

2. Learn how to build (or purchase middleware/hire engineers) and manage integrations

3. Be able to pick up and learn new tools quickly

4. Track our time/productivity carefully and use it to rally for more resourcing to support more applications, if needed

Scott and Frans say:

I like their martech crash course suggestion, but I would add a layer — look at the kinds of companies you want to work at, and figure out which tools that they are using. Focus on those vendors first.

I believe there are so many point solutions because the main martech vendors (think: marketing automation platforms) have failed to innovate. They have largely remained the same, creating room for new vendors to come in with specialized solutions for an ever-changing market. This is why it is important to not “just be a HubSpot person,” etc.

I think we see the “center of the martech stack” vary between CRM, CDP, and MAP because these solutions have also failed to innovate enough — this, and you don’t want to weigh down 1 system with too much data or too many processes. Because of this, we often see companies keep marketing data inside MAP, sales data inside CRM, and consolidate data in either a CDP, data warehouse, or a combination of those. These companies are trying to play to each vendor’s strengths.

The GenAI report does not surprise me, as Jasper.ai, Gong, and other content/sales automation tools are definitely the most talked about B2B use cases. Money tends to gravitate towards sales solutions first, as saving a salesperson even 1 minute can have a very high return on investment.

What questions do you have for me about AI? I’ve been tracking vendors and use cases and can dedicate a newsletter to that, but I’d love to hear if you have any specific questions for me to consider/respond to.

Recommended book of the week:

Learning resource of the week:

Helpful AI tool of the week 🤖

ChatGPT for technical assistance

Most people use ChatGPT for scenarios that are too simplistic, like quick questions. Try using ChatGPT to help you with SQL queries, Google sheet regex, and more! While ChatGPT can be a great assistant for technical questions, the unpaid version does have a greater propensity to hallucinate an answer when it is uncertain. Learn about hallucination and best practices here. Check out the tool here.

What I’m up to/what I’m studying

This week, I’ve been continuing to hone my first marketing operations course! Lots of recording and re-recording. 😅 But I’ve been having a few folks go through the draft and am getting great feedback, so I’m excited at the progress thus far. On a personal level: I got to see Tegan and Sara in concert (they are even better singers in person!), and am going to see the movie I Saw the TV Glow! I’ve become a huge fan of A24-produced movies, working my way slowly through a list and loving the experience. 🎸🎥

Dear Sara ✍️

New to marketing operations? On a team of one at your company? Shy/introverted? Wish you could ask a question to an experienced marketing operations professional, without them knowing who you are? Here’s your chance! Submit an anonymous question to me here and I’ll answer a new question in every issue.

Here’s my answer to a question from last week:

Dear Reader,

This is a great question, and an area that many marketing operations professionals struggle with. When we are typically understaffed, how do we advocate for ourselves and our time? How do we find the time to think of larger ways to make strategic impact? Here are my tips:

1. Make sure you are tracking and documenting time spent on tasks. Once you have the foundation built in a tool like Asana, you can set up reporting and look at prioritization etc. This can help you justify more headcount, if you are always buried in high priority work. If it’s low priority work, that’s a different conversation…you might be able to automate some of that work or decline it. You also can identify and consider opportunities where automation may be able to help you save time on low-value, repetitive tasks.

2. Be proactive about your 1:1s with your manager. If you are tracking the work you/your team is doing, set up a dashboard or report you can walk through with your manager to talk workload, prioritization, etc.

3. Manage your calendar aggressively and visibly. Carve out dedicated time for deeper thinking on your calendar, and stick by it unless there is a true emergency.

4. Look at company or departmental priorities and come up with strategic work that could help support those goals. For example, if you keep hearing that website performance is down, see if you can create a project plan with goals to support a POC of a tool like Drift. Bring great ideas to your manager and leadership…even if they don’t immediately take you up on them, it helps with your credibility as a strategic partner.

None of these suggestions are silver bullets, but, together, they can help you regain control of your time, build credibility, and make the case to get more strategic thinking capacity.

What else do you want to hear about from me?

I have a bunch of content lined up, but I want to hear from you — did you enjoy this issue? Is there anything specific you’d like to hear my take on? Please do reply to this email with any and all feedback! 😄 If you enjoyed this issue, please refer your friends by forwarding this email/sending them here!

Til next time,

❤️ Sara