Prior to team existing who owned vendor selection? Also, how did you get the organization to align behind the martech team owning it?

Purchasing new tools was in the hands of individual teams and regions. If you had the budget, you could buy a tool. We lacked a cohesive vision and selection criteria. This siloed approach resulted in a lot of pain when certain requirements would come as a surprise late in the game. Moreover, our Procurement and IT teams were overwhelmed by the barrage of requests coming at them without global prioritization. That widely recognized pain was a big contributor to getting the business on board with the martech team owning new tool evaluations. Marketing leadership was 100% behind the idea, which gave us strong footing to begin with. 

We expected to be met with resistance. After all, each individual team was used to being able to do this on their own. But we were surprised when the primary reaction was relief. Our marketing groups realized they could not manage every part of the process effectively and were willing to turn the evaluations, and the navigation of our internal processes, over to our team. Additionally, for the teams who historically lacked a budget to purchase their own tools, the process gave them a path to seek out collaboration with other teams. Having the leadership buy-in, and the understanding of the benefit among the marketers, made rolling out the new evaluation process much easier. 

Seek Out “The New Marketer”
It’s a whole new type of marketer that is skilled at all forms of communication, but also has an inherent talent for all things digital. This person can login to your CMS, build a landing page, gain insights from analytics, work effortlessly across a number of tools, find creative ways to drive better engagement, track campaigns through a CRM, generate meaningful reporting, and use data to adjust strategies. This is the new superstar of marketing. Build your team around people like this. 


Invest in Technical Depth
Marketing today is much more than branding, messaging, and great design. It’s a complex time for marketers with more accessible data than ever in the history of humanity! Data provides insights-insights that will improve your decision making, optimize your channels, and increase conversions. You must embrace data. Which means, you must invest technically. A modern marketing team needs developers, front end designers, data analysts, and digitally-savvy marketers. Creating a strong technical foundation within the marketing team will prepare you to handle the speed at which technology moves and changes, while also putting you in a position to make data-driven marketing decisions.

An example of technology driving employment is the role of the data scientist, which was little known ten years ago but is much sought after today. Next year demand for data scientists is expected to exceed supply by over 50% worldwide, creating huge opportunities for those looking to enter this profession. 

It’s not only ‘experts’ such as data scientists that need to work alongside new technologies, the role of marketers is also evolving to include more technical aspects. With data usage becoming commonplace in modern day business, marketers are conducting simple data analysis themselves, as well as interpreting insights provided by data scientists through more complex analysis. Data is generated by real people and so requires a flexible human brain to comprehend it and generate the right insights – a task beyond the machines’ remit.

Instead of replacing job functions, tech developments should be used as tools to support marketing efforts. According to a DMA Awards survey, almost three quarters of marketers (74%) believe a machine can never replicate the creativity of a person, but marketers still need to be open to new technologies and adapt their roles accordingly.

Martech capability is essential, what can you do as a marketing leader to assure you and your team have adequate martech chops?

Look in the mirror – It’s difficult to lead a martech-centric team without being proficient yourself. 

Know what your team can do – Helping your team begins with an accurate assessment of where they are now relative to martech expertise. Good leaders know the strengths, gaps, and opportunities for their teams.

Be proactive about development – Building on the knowledge of where your team’s martech skills are today; a good marketing leader is proactive about developing martech skills. 

Practice continuous calibration –  All the previous points are in constant motion. New vendors and team members entering the mix, skills within the team are evolving, and the needs of the business continue to shift. Effective marketing leaders are highly-tuned to all these changes and commit to creating a culture where everyone is continuing to enhance skills, educate others and see where new martech-related opportunities exist.

They have also created explicit roles that deal with martech

1) US businesses are adding tech jobs at a fast pace. Coveted professions, such as application developer and security specialist, have seen impressive annual average job growth rates above 7% over the last five years. Professions related to the management and analysis of tech systems have grown at CAGRs above 3%. Both rates are well above the national average of 1.9%.

2) Tech wage growth has been lackluster—indicating that competition for talent is reasonable. Despite the large number of tech jobs added to the US economy, the average annual growth of mean wages for most high-demand tech professions has been below 3%. This is not too far off the national average of 2.0%, and considerably less than other non-tech professions that are in high demand, such as credit analyst (4%), pharmacy aides (4.9%), and personal financial advisor (7.9%).

3) The growth of tech graduates has been outpacing that of tech jobs. Graduation data from the US Department of Education indicate that the number of individuals graduating with tech-related degree and diplomas has been growing faster than the number of new US tech jobs.

Instead of asking for a resume from the candidate, you create a job description that shares the characteristics (not responsibilities or experience level) that you look for in a candidate. Ie. soft skills.

Then to test their hard skills, you create a job application that’s essentially a questionnaire with a series of job contextual questions. One of those questions is your filtering mechanism and you filter out candidates based off of the answer to that one question.

This method does two things:

It saves you time when filtering through tens or hundreds of candidates. One question for rapid filtering — not entire resumes or applications.
It leads you to find candidates who are best for the job at hand and who may have non-traditional job backgrounds. Your question will be designed to show if they have the core skillset needed for the role, not if they worked for a big company or went to a fancy school.

Most marketing and advertising executives expect to keep the size of their creative (nontechnical) staff steady in the second half of 2017. See the top in-demand positions and much more!

Here’s one useful sequence for growing a B2B marketing team from the first hire through a dozen employees (which can scale well beyond the $30 million revenue level).

The First Marketing Hire: Leadership and Growth

The Next Three Marketing Hires: Functions Difficult to Outsource

The Next Four Marketing Hires: Cook at Home or Order Out?

The Next Marketing Hires: Help at the Top

Digital marketing
Sales operations
Analyst relations
Customer experience

Role 1: Pay-per-click specialist

Role 2: CRO-focused designer

Role 3: Developer

Role 4: VA (virtual assistant) as data scientist

Role 5: Account-based content marketer

Marketers with digital job skills, especially in digital advertising & content, are most in demand by employers who are hiring. Also in demand: creative services and marketing operations. See more!

Centralization for more consistent “brand delivery”: Marketers are turning back towards centralized decision-making processes. 

Specialization to fill skill gaps: Many teams are moving away from the generalist structure (where team members are responsible for a broad range of marketing tasks) towards a stronger level of specialization (where team members are dedicated to a specific marketing task).

Customer focus for better customer experience: It’s increasingly common to see marketing teams organizing and basing their strategy squarely around how their customers do their jobs (B2B) or live their lives (B2C).

Marketing automation has become vital to scaling marketing campaigns, but it also means hiring a marketing automation team - and paying them. See this detailed breakdown of team roles and costs.

Doing so requires a greater focus from across and within the marketing organization, along with dedicated ownership, accountability and governance. Why? Think about a typical b-to-b organization’s focus on sales enablement. Is marketing enablement somehow less important? Of course not. The problem is that it just doesn’t exist today, and the CMO can’t do it alone. Just as the sales enablement discipline has evolved into a dedicated function ensuring that the sales team has the necessary skills and training, tools, processes, and programs, so too must marketing enablement. This new function will finally allow the CMO to make sure the b-to-b marketing team is at the top of its game every day. After all, change is the only constant.