Have you ever balanced your marketing budget at the end of the quarter or the year and caught yourself wondering, “I’m paying for all this martech. But what am I actually doing with it? How do I ensure I’m getting the most out of it?”
If so, you’re not alone. Despite marketing teams dedicating over half of their entire budget on martech and in-house labor, 42% of martech stacks go unused. The solution? Taking inventory of your martech stack using a systematic and organized approach.
In this blog, we’ll break down Inverta’s 6-step process for inventorying your martech stack.
1. What Are Your Goals & Functionality Needs?
The first step to taking inventory of your martech stack is to get clear about your marketing and sales goals. After all, if you don’t know what you’re trying to achieve, it will be difficult to know what provides value or not.
After goals have been outlined and delineated, determine what technology functionalities exist to meet those goals. A few great starting questions to ask between the sales and marketing organizations include:
- Is there duplicate functionality?
- Is there functionality that isn’t well adopted?
2. Decide How & Where Martech Fits (or Doesn’t)
Next, determine how technology fits into your overall marketing strategy. Remember, strategy and technology complement each other. Considering one before the other can land you in two scenarios: You have a fully fleshed out strategy but have no idea where to start, or you have a few marketing tools you use aimlessly without a clear end goal in sight.
Deciphering how technology and strategy coexist will help you decide which tools to keep and which to sunset.
3. Map Your Data Flows & Integrations
After deciding what tech to keep or to get rid of, the next step is to map it all out. This means making a visual representation of all the data flows and integrations that your martech brings to the table in order to build a single view of customers and accounts.
Why? This will help you know which sources take priority as well as see where any gaps from the previous steps still exist. Here are a few methods to visualize your martech stack:
- Vendor category map of all the tech products you currently use.
- Customer journey map of how a customer moves through stages such as, “discover, consider, buy, onboard, and grow.”
- Back-end vs. front-stage map to show which tools enable the team’s efforts that the customer doesn’t see vs. what the customer does interact with directly.
Role-based map where you map which person on the marketing team owns what technology and where roles overlap.
4. Build a Maturity Model for Future Growth
Now that you know exactly what you have and how it plays into your strategy, it’s important to consider the future of your martech stack. At Inverta, we call this the Martech Maturity Framework.
A maturity model outlines a clear path of where you are and where you want to be. For example, a framework could start by contrasting the capabilities, people, and processes with the technology required to achieve several increasing levels of digital capability: Operational, Digitalized, Connected, and Intelligent.
As your organization matures, you’ll have a framework to follow that keeps your martech organized and utilized the whole way through.Tip: Build your maturity model according to your organization’s goals and needs. Avoid comparing functionality parity with competitors or peers. Otherwise, you might end up with more unused tech and less budget to go around.
5. Outline Your Tech to Team Roles
An important but often overlooked step of taking inventory of your martech is considering the governance, or usage, component. After all, technology can introduce risks — security or otherwise — that are important to avoid.
Document how each tool should be used and by whom so it’s clear to all users on your team who owns the tech and who will implement it. That way, you not only avoid security or bandwidth issues but also make it clear to end users which tools are available to them.
6. Train Your Team on Using Your Martech
Last, but certainly not least, it’s paramount to ensure that all staff is trained on how to use your selected martech tools. This may look like upskilling current employees or simply hosting frequent training sessions to ensure everyone is on the same page.
At Inverta, we help our clients through these steps in order to create a martech vision and roadmap. If you’re interested in learning more about how we can help you use technology more effectively, contact us here.
