Scott Brinker

I am Scott Brinker. I am the VP of Platform Ecosystem here at HubSpot and I am also Chief MarTech, the ChiefMarTech.com blog program chair of the MarTech Conference. It's been wonderful. I am so passionate, as you might have guessed, about the MarTech industry and how it's evolving. I think the thing that continues to surprise me is just how fast innovation keeps moving in this space. But the good news is I feel like marketers are getting more mature with their marketing technology. I mean, particularly as you start talking to mid-market and enterprise organizations, increasingly they have someone running marketing ops and technology. They're turning this into a real pillar capability of the marketing department. A few years ago, that was pretty rare. I think now, I would say the majority of companies I speak to at that level have some sort of capability like that in place, even if different stages in their journey. At least they recognize this as a part of what modern marketing is. A part of it is the technology, right? Just the selection of which particular tools we're using in our stack for different capabilities, making sure they integrate together, just some of the tech governance of that. But I feel that's really only about 10% of the work. The big challenge for companies is, okay, once I've got these tools, not keeping them hidden away in the marketing ops team, but how do you really train and empower the rest of the marketing organization to leverage these capabilities? Some of that's stuff like training, but even more so, some of it's just changing the way we manage marketing to empower frontline marketers to be more experimental, to take more initiative with some of these tools. It's a cultural shift as much as anything else. If you're spending a lot of time thinking about what new tools you can go get, you're probably doing it wrong, right? The focus really needs to be on, okay, what do my customers need? What are they asking for? What are the touch points? You want to keep your eyes open to some of these new innovations because ultimately they change customer expectations. But the real work here is about the marketing itself, the customer experience itself, and the tools. Again, a lot of great tools, lots of things that can help with this. If you're thinking too much about the tools and not enough about the customer and what your brand is actually delivering to the world, yeah, you're probably getting down a rabbit hole that isn't where you should be. This is a progression we see with so many things. It reminds me of the year of mobile. It was going to be the year of mobile and then next year and then next year and then all of a sudden it just is. I think video, yeah, it's clearly one of those things. It's fascinating. There's so many things that the technology has been there for so long. It's not like there's some massive new innovation like, oh my goodness, we could stream video to people. That isn't what happened this year. I think what happened was this combination of the early adopters have had enough success of engaging audiences. We're seeing this shift in audience behavior, audience expectation that people really want video. Now that we have it, it becomes a question of what's wrong with this company? That combined with I think just this greater, it's also the production tools, just the savvy, people being more comfortable with even as far as capturing video off of their smartphones and using that as the seed for what we would have thought of as raw content that is actually now very authentic content. It's a really good thing. All these pieces have come together where now you've got a critical mass of a company's audience wants this video content across marketing, sales, service. Then the people in the company generally are now feeling comfortable saying, yeah, we should produce that content. That doesn't take a PhD from film school to be able to do something valuable there. I'm always a little bit hesitant about the future predictions because this world is just changing so rapidly that almost like whatever I predict, there's a decent chance that's not going to happen. But there's going to be some other incredible new thing that happens that like, well, why didn't you see that coming? If I were to look at something like a parallel with video, to me, data. The volume of data and the different sources of data that we're getting now, not just across traditional marketing channels, but again, throughout the sales organization that's being instrumented, customer success, customer service organizations, they're connecting this data. The volume of data that a company now has access to about the entire customer journey is huge. But the degree which we're really using that data, really getting the clear insights of what's happening, being able to tailor how we're handling things for customers throughout their life cycle, not just a personalized email here and there. We've got a long way to go, but I think the technology and the data and the audience demand, all these things are going to converge where for 2019, I expect we'll see a pretty significant new level of sophistication in how we're using data across the entire organization. Again, part of it is making sure that the tools you have in marketing are now connecting with the tools of your colleagues in sales. Marketing ops and sales ops should be working hand in hand, but this other group on the other side of the company that we haven't talked to much, the customer success team, how do we get their data connected into this as well too? Then once you've got that data, how do you collectively look at these patterns of behavior for like, okay, where are our customer churn risks and how's that impacted by how people came in and who are our advocates and how do we turn that into something that we're growing the accounts there or we're influencing others, getting that, as Brian Halligan was talking about, the whole flywheel motion. This is real stuff that companies are seeing, but we're still in the early stages of figuring out how to instrument it and really run it from an operations perspective. There's a lot of big questions about what the future of managing an organization is going to look like because you've got this constant balance between, on one hand, specialization. There are things people do in marketing that you train for, you get experience with, you skill with, and someone who's doing sales calls might not have that same experience that you have, and that's fine. There's specialization, there's differentiation of different people in different roles, but on the other end of the spectrum, there's this need to want to find where are the common elements between them. How do we treat that customer journey as something that doesn't have these hard boundaries between departments, these sharp edges, but rather has something ... The handoff between marketing and sales isn't a once and done sort of thing, but it's this collaborative dance. Centralizing things that way, looking for the common shared elements, you've got to find some balance of the specialization, decentralization, and the common centralized pieces. This is new, where we're going to be figuring out the playbooks as we go. To me, it's fascinating. There are two big challenges marketers have, my humble opinion. One is the world just keeps changing so fast. If you're in marketing, you cannot rest on your laurels. You have to constantly be learning just what the new expectations are, the new kinds of touch points, the new things you can do. The other thing is, it's like we're constantly trying to balance these tradeoffs. The two I talked about in that model is centralization and decentralization. On one hand, we have a lot of opportunity to centralize things like common data models or common workflow models across departments. At the same time, if you centralize things too much, you lose the ability for people the edge of the organization to move quickly, to experiment, to take initiative. Part of what Marketing Operations needs to do is also find a way to empower people on the edge of the organization to do more things within guardrails, but under their own power. How do you have that balance between centralization and decentralization? I think there's another axis there, which is a lot of what we think of in Marketing Operations is automation. How do we find these things that we can automate or we can turn over to some sort of AI-based algorithm to do on our behalf for speed and scale? That's cool. There's a lot there, but one of the things we're realizing is there's also a risk that if we automate too much, if we pull the human out of the loop too much, we can lose touch with the customer. They can lose empathy. They can end up in these hardwired processes that are very unfriendly to them. There's no escape hatch. There's no way for them to say, hey, could I talk to a human being, please? I think this will be one of the missions for marketing is to try and balance like, yes, we want to automate, but we also want to make sure we're able to humanize and constantly look at all of our automation points to say, where can we add a little bit of the human touch in this and make sure we're not drifting too far apart from other humans in the loop. So again, it's like you want to centralize as much data and technology as you can, but at the same time on the edge, you've always got people like, oh, I want to experiment with this new tool. And so you want to let people do that, but then there's this thing like, okay, well, do you get to experiment with that tool or do you have to use the standard centralized tool? It is, and organizations are constantly wrestling with this. Framework wasn't that, oh, there's one quadrant in this centralized, decentralization, automation human that just pick this quadrant and you're done. It was more trying to just express the idea that we're constantly having to rebalance these, that there's no one set point for an organization. And a big part of marketing operations responsibility moving forward is to just make sure that that rebalancing is happening in a way that someone's paying attention to it. Someone's trying to make sure that we're not getting stuck in one place and shutting out the benefits of the other side of the spectrum.