Over the last few years, I’ve taken a some flak from our finance department about how much we spend on SaaS applications for demand gen. It’s roughly one third of our overall demand gen budget. In a nutshell, here are some of the vendors in our martech stack:
Marketo – Hubspot (blog) – Demandbase / Spiderbook – Infer – Uberflip – LeanData – Bizible – ZoomInfo – RainKing – SwagIQ (PFL) – InsideView – LeadGnome – Captora – ZenIQ
Invariably, they all ask the same question “Are all these tools really necessary?” I answer this intriguing question with the following analogy:
One hundred years ago, if you wanted to operate a sailing ship like a clipper or schooner, you would need one hundred men. You would need:
- Men to rig the sails
- Men to load and fire the cannons
- A man up in the crow’s nest looking out for land (or enemy ships)
And finally,
- A captain to command and control the vessel.
I recently read that today’s modern combat ships can function with as few as four (4) people:
- One man/woman on propulsion
- One man/woman on munitions
- One man/woman on navigation
And finally, a captain to command and control the vessel.
What does that mean for marketing (specifically demand gen) departments?
ANSWER: I don’t have one hundred people on my marketing ship. I have four. I am competing with organizations that have three times that number. In the case of Oracle/IBM/SAP, ten times that number. That means I need to use computerization and automation to turn my small but mighty marketing ship into a battleship.
I wish I had one hundred marketers at my disposal.
In the absence of that, I’ll take a kick-ass martech stack. Boom!