Lessons I've Learned Building a Martech Stack
I’ve had the chance to have a heavy hand in building a martech stack for two enterprise B2B organizations so far. ClickZ wrote about some of my change management lessons learned at Womble Bond Dickinson and LMA’s Strategies & Voices recently profiled me and Bill Turner (Womble’s Chief Strategy Officer) about our firm’s approach to building a tech stack.
There’s no singular way to approach this. Every company is different. Every team has varying needs, skill sets, and technology gaps.
Not recognizing that is where a lot of folks can get hung up.
Best practices and case studies on new martech setups aren’t meant to be instruction manuals. They’re there to help you learn from other people’s mistakes - not be checklists that excuse you from doing the hard work of thinking strategically.
What we’ve done at Womble is fairly unique based on my own experience and conversations I’ve had with marketers in other law firms. I’m not saying we have the best tech stack out of other ALM Top 100 firms - but we have what’s best for us right now. And have built it in such a way that it positions us for more productive growth in the future.
There are three main takeaways in any article or case study about our team that could apply to other marketing ops folks - or anyone looking to make a change.
Take Time To Discover What People Need (Not What They Think They Want)
When I started working more on CRM at Womble, we had an approach that seemed pretty straightforward. The goal was to build out a system that our attorneys could easily access and launched broadly across our firm (which in our case would be ~400 users on day one…not a small deployment).
A series of events took place that gave us the time and opportunity to re-evaluate that approach. So a colleague and I went on a virtual listening tour of sorts, asking Partners and other Of Counsel at the firm:
How they used client data
How they kept it up-to-date (or preferred to keep it up-to-date)
How they preferred to access it in the future
What we came away with was learning that deploying several hundred CRM seats would have been a waste of money, and time and would likely lead to frustration.
Why spend tens of thousands on a tool that we were going to have to force people to use? And then have to train several hundred people who were already busy enough serving clients?
We took the feedback in our listening tour and made a recommendation to re-platform to a more flexible, less legal-centric CRM tool and only launch it to our Client Development team. Then, we invested in additional tools to provide attorneys with quicker access to client data and easier onboarding.
Start Small and Scale
This is something Bill and I emphasized in our interview with Strategies & Voices last week. It’s also the approach we took in launching an employee social media advocacy program a couple of years ago.
We always try to start with a small focused group of people.
This helps us fine-tune the product implementation we’ve adopted, discover onboarding blind spots, and grow advocates for the tool once comfort levels increase on whatever tool we’re putting into play. This approach doesn’t scale up as fast in terms of increasing seats or users of a program. But it does help us scale more effectively.
It’s like the “fast isn’t fast…smooth is fast” mantra applied to marketing tech. Developing advocates for the new tech helps you scale more quickly. You are only troubleshooting a dozen or so issues at once instead of hundreds. You also have that team of grassroots early adopters to help their co-workers. Over time, adoption can increase faster because you’ve laid a solid foundation.
This also applies to tech features. Don’t unleash every capability a product can do on day one. Introduce your team to a smaller set of features and add on as you go.
User adoption, like marketing in general, is a constant tension of trying to do well in the short term while laying a solid foundation for long-term success.
Don’t Burn Everything To The Ground
There is a real temptation to move fast and break things when building a tech stack. You want to kill the old ways of doing things and build the future (or something like that). Before you do that, consider the words of GK Chesterson:
Don’t remove a fence until you understand why it was put there.
This goes back to discovering needs. There may be technology or processes in place that are tempting to tear down but need to be there for reasons you aren’t aware of. I know in my own experience, some needs seemed silly to me. BUT I didn’t have legal industry experience and did not have the institutional knowledge that other peers did. Had I done everything exactly how I would have personally wanted, I would have likely stepped on avoidable land mines. More importantly, I could have eroded the trust of other people that I needed as new tech advocates, killing the success of our program.
Your Tech Is As Only As Good As Its Adoption
No new marketing tech platform is worth the money if nobody uses it. Self-awareness of where your team is at technologically speaking can help you better right-size your tech stack for your needs today. Sure, you need to build a roadmap for the future (it is marketing technology after all). But if you don’t set your teams up for success with the tools you have today, that roadmap becomes less of a plan and more of a pipe dream.
More on the Subject
Last summer I had the opportunity to speak on a panel with Argyle Forum titled “Stack Attack: Making the Most of Your Martech Stack.” It dives into the issues I outline above but features insights from other people considerably smarter than me on the subject. If you’re into this kind of thing, check it out! It’s almost a year old but I think it still holds up.