Marketer vs Martech: A Broken Stack Means a Broken Team

Last updated: January 11, 2023

+85% of marketers report that technology challenges between departments have caused problems in developing personalized customer experiences

f you’ve been keeping up with our Marketer vs Martech series, you might remember that over 95% of marketers aren’t personalizing on a one to one level — and 69% of those folks attribute that to friction in their martech stacks. And, these tech-troubled marketers aren’t far off base. Fractured, disparate software can lead to gaps in customer data and therefore result in a myriad of experience issues.

And, these fractures harm not only customer journeys, but your marketing team as well. The time spent trying to connect and repair a broken tech stack has taken down some of the best teams and has stalled brilliant ideas. This is because we all have an individualistic way of looking at problems. Email marketers are going to view these issues very differently from a data scientist, who will, in turn, feel differently from marketing leadership.

FRACTURED TECH DRIVES TEAM FACTIONS

The key to keeping great cross-functional teams together is getting martech that aligns with your goals. Point blank, not all tech is created equal, and not all platforms will suit your needs. While one might suit a content marketer’s needs and another might please engineers, both might not meet the needs of the team at large.

Firstly, align your goals. Make sure the entire team is clear on what shared goals need to be met and how each sub-team’s micro-goals help to achieve larger ones. This goal-setting process will help ensure open collaboration is an integral part of how your cross-functional team operates. Becoming a truly cross-functional team will set your business apart from the 1/3rd of marketers who report their team members are being heavily incentivized to improve their own channel performance, rather than building and improving cross-channel functions.

This isn’t helped by the fact that 85% of marketers note technology problems, or fractured tech, between departments leads to major issues with delivering personalized customer experiences.

DATA ROADBLOCKS AND DYSFUNCTIONAL ORGANIZATIONS

Without cross-functional teams leading marketing initiates, things can go awry from the very start. The basis for every marketing output is solid data collection and analysis. Most non-cross-functional organizations still use different platforms on varying teams to collect, store, and analyze data.

Without identical, unified views of customers across an organization how is any team member supposed to deliver accurate, personalized experiences to consumers? The foundation for amazing Amazon and Netflix-esque marketing begins with cohesion.

Teams need to be cross-functional and data needs to be holistic and an identical source of truth for everyone within a business. But, there’s something else that’s needed to take raw customer data and transform it into 1:1 experiences — data activation.