How should you be thinking of your integration strategy with over 7000 MarTech vendors? How do I think of an ABM MarTech strategy? Whether you are a B2B CMO or an aspiring one, these are key areas to consider in your integration strategy based on our experiences over the last decade.

What is important to know about your Martech integration? 

• Clearly define with your stakeholders what the ultimate business outcome is (use case).  Is it a better customer experience?  Better reporting?  Less heavy lifting on manual tasks?   Then figure out an integration strategy.

• Be aware.  Many vendors will err toward saying they integrate with platforms or defer to saying ‘it is on the roadmap’ because it’s an important sales objective to overcome.  There may be different degrees of integration that may or may not meet your use case.

• Trust but verify.  Vendors may err on quickly saying they solve your integration needs to meet your key objection.   

What should you ask your prospective vendor? 

• Review your use case with the vendor to make sure they understand what you are trying to accomplish business wise.

• Ask to talk with customer references on an identical use case integration.  Do a secondary check with vendor neutral consultant agencies that specialize in the areas of integration to triangulate the risks. (This will sound somewhat self-serving, but many vendor neutral consultants don’t have a horse in the game of integration).

• Check on PII (personal identifiable information) impact/compliance in an integrated scenario.   With GDPR and soon the upcoming California vote on CCPA, it is prudent to know how your data is being treated in systems, whether in the cloud or storing ‘at rest’.

Why do you see integration rising in importance — even above things like price and ease-of-use?

• Customer Experience:  in the post-Covid world, b2b marketing leaders are planning for a more integrated digital experience for their prospects/customers.  Greater client satisfaction leads to greater retention rates and right now, retention is very meaningful to business.

• Reporting:  The single biggest failure of non-integrated systems is reporting.  It becomes impossible to report on business impact of marketing and make business decisions when islands of reporting and islands of non-integrated technology exist.  CMOs lose credibility when non-integrated strategies and disparate reporting exists.

• Cost & Scale:  There is a strong need for an orchestration of platforms to save on people costs rather than having people do the same routine activity.  Integration enables automation to scale.

What are you finding working in your integration strategy?