Simon Daniels has led the marketing operations rhythm section in several rockstar CMO backing bands. Inspired by a chat with him on the podcast, Ian Truscott shares that you should love the one you’re with when it comes to marketing technology.
During episode 37 of the Rockstar CMO Podcast, I chatted with Simon Daniels, of Percassity Associates, who is a marketing operations consultant advising marketing leaders on the challenges with data technology and process. We discussed marketing technology, and he shared his experience of organizations perpetually churning their marketing technology.
But should they?
In the spirit of this issue’s theme, which coincides with the Thanksgiving holiday in the US, of giving thanks and getting together, I’m picking up on his point that maybe we should “love the one you’re with”.
The technology platform upon which we have built our customer databases, sales, marketing processes, and digital experiences are often blamed for poor adoption, performance, and processes, often unfairly as it’s actually the poor implementation.
In my own experience, earlier in my career representing content management vendors as a pre-sales consultant, I had the experience of meeting a new potential client who was interested in some specific functionality that they claimed their incumbent vendor could not do.
Having recently changed employer and had worked for their incumbent vendor, I knew this was not true. Their current platform could do what they needed. It had just been implemented so badly that they couldn’t get it to work.
Daniel shared his own experience working with a client’s CRM platform, coming across fields that had been created in the database for reasons that had been lost in time.
Which is what happens. Not only is technology often implemented badly, but over time the implementation collects a plaque of short-term bandaids and fixes that start to stifle its adoption, makes it difficult to work with. Before you know it, there is a groundswell of opinion that the whole thing has got to go.
Recently I have seen the very same thing with a client’s Web Content Management system; it was an old implementation that, over the years, a simple platform had turned into a Frankenstein of a thing, and the business believed it had to go.
Simon’s advice on the podcast was that we should consider re-implementing what we have, start with a clean slate, take the lessons we’ve learned about the platform, and not migrate to a new system, migrate to the one you have.
And, love the one you’re with.
You can listen to the whole episode here:
[buzzsprout episode=’6483436′ player=’true’]
Simon Daniels is a Marketing Operations consultant advising marketing leaders on the challenges with data, technology, and process.
Simon has honed his craft during a career that includes Wood McKenzie, Gartner, Progress Software, and T-Mobile and now runs Percassity Associates, providing fractional marketing leadership and consulting.
Photo of the love heart graffiti by Jon Tyson on Unsplash
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