Has martech disrupted B2B marketing?

The birth of marketing technology has brought great possibilities to the marketing department.

That was in the early 80's. The internet was booming, the cloud was clouding, and Adobe and Salesforce were innovating. And martech was about to turn the world upside down.

I'm a recent MBA graduate with a computer science background and spent two years in software marketing at IBM. I had just been hired by Red Hat, a thriving startup open source company.

“Hey, kid,” they said. “We just signed up for this Eloqua. We need you to set it up and figure out how we're going to use it.” We were Eloqua's first customers. That's where my marketing automation adventure began.

At the time, we were doing everything with little guidance from the playbook.

• lead magnet.
• Lead capture form.
• Lead scoring.
• Lead ranking.
• Lead routing.
• Lead nurturing.
• Track prospect activity on our website.

It was empowering. Additionally, marketing now receives special respect in board meetings.

SiriusDecisions, an analyst firm now part of Forrester, entered the conversation and pioneered the marketing funnel that became a staple of B2B marketing for the next 15 years.

• MQL (Marketing Qualified Lead).
• SQL (Sales Qualified Leads).
• SAL (Sales Authorized Lead).

Marketing and sales have never been better aligned. You won a promotion. Bonus has been claimed. Lead generation is at an all-time high. In the marketing space, a new sub-niche has emerged around the ecosystem of marketing automation tools such as Eloqua, Marketo, and eventually HubSpot.

For a while, all was well in B2B marketing. However, the situation gradually began to change.

Marketing automation timeline

Water flows.However, grease corrodes

Was it enough to just build a pipe and ignore what was put in it? We built the pipe to facilitate efficient pipeline generation. We enjoyed the speed and scale of the pipes. However, management started demanding more from us. “Go faster. Drive more. Volume, volume, volume.”

Martech promised:

• scale. Massive persuasion. Massive sales.
• speed.
• efficiency.
• Attribution (track everything).

Then came disillusionment.

Potential customers become disillusioned with the bait-and-switch scheme of handing over their email address for ransom and end up being forgotten about in the nurturing email.

Sales became disillusioned with bait-and-switch marketing that drove up lead quotes for the month, while sales struggled to get into the pipeline and ended up losing ground because most of the leads had no buying intent. could not be obtained.

Even though marketing isn't magic and you could never create demand out of thin air, upper management changes their goals every quarter, resulting in overall increased efficiency, more leads, more deals. Marketers became disillusioned as they demanded increased volumes.

CFOs, CEOs, and investors have become disillusioned with the promise of sales forecasting models such as marketing automation and predictable revenue. (popularized by Salesforce's Aaron Ross) promised demand generation with the coin, a promise that the marketing team ultimately failed to deliver on.

shift

In 2024, marketing and martech professionals are at a crossroads. We are challenged to do and deliver more with less. We need to be more efficient than just the efficiency improvements we've been working on for over a decade. Instead of “more leads,” you now have “more leads with true purchase intent.”

The problem is that technology alone will never deliver efficiency. This is where artificial intelligence comes into play.

Over the past year or so, nearly every SaaS vendor has started touting AI at the heart of their systems, even if it's sometimes been smoke and mirrors. But in 2024, there are certainly some very exciting AI technologies coming out legally. Are we about to repeat the same mistakes as markers?

Marketing automation brought us an exponential level of innovation and efficiency 18 years ago. AI is now ensuring we do it again. Is that enough? There’s a reason it’s called marketing technology. Marketing comes first and technology supports it. We are in danger of giving control to AI-driven technology and handing over the keys to AI to do the marketing for us.

We are at a crossroads. And you need to make a decision. Are we markers or engineers? Technology will forever be part of our work. All we need to decide is whether we want to serve technology or serve customers.

Digging Deeper: Jay Mandel — Looking to the Future of AI

5% drive efficiency

There is a dire need for martech for the 5% of buyers already in the market. We need to reduce friction and accelerate the buyer journey. We need to get them the information they need as efficiently as possible.

Find 95% effectiveness

To engage with the 95% of prospective buyers who are not yet in the market, you need better answers.

(ICP: Ideal Customer Profile.)

Email nurturing and lead scoring alone are not enough. It was there in 2005, but not now.

If you could redesign your marketing technology from scratch, what would it look like? How would you design your marketing technology to serve the 5% of your ideal prospects who are already in your market? Is it prospect and pipeline centric? How do you use marketing technology to serve 95% of your ideal prospects who aren't currently in the market and may not be for another year or so? Do you design it around the audience and sales in some way?

We'll explore that in a future article.

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