Martech enablement series: Part 9 — Bringing it all together!

Welcome to Part 9 of “A Nine Part Practical Guide to Martech Enablement.” This is a progressive guide, with each part building on the previous sections and focused on outlining a process to build a data-driven, technology-driven marketing organization within your company. Below is a list of the previous articles for your reference:

• Part 1: What is martech enablement?
• Part 2: The race team analogy
• Part 3: The team members
• Part 4: Building the team
• Part 5: The team strategy
• Part 6: Building the car
• Part 7: Insights, intelligence and integration
• Part 8: Executing martech enablement

In these previous parts, we looked at how your martech team is parallel to an automobile race team. We spent time investigating how a race team constructs their crew and then builds a strategy for winning their individual races and the overall series.

We also looked at how they build the car and supporting technology to win their races. All the while, I drew a comparison as to how this is a successful approach for building a martech team in your organization, identifying this process as “martech enablement.”

Now, we can reflect on the process and look at ways to evaluate your overall progress in maturing and transforming your organization.

The end in mind

When I first starting sharing about martech enablement in Part 1 of this guide, I discussed the terms “digital maturity” and “digital transformation” and the pressure that marketing organizations are facing to deliver on these ideas. I went on to discuss how being mature and transformed are destinations for your organization that are reached through incremental change.

As you’ve proceeded through this guide, I’ve outlined the incremental steps that, if followed, will ultimately lead to digital transformation within your marketing organization. Frankly — though I’ve rarely mentioned it throughout this guide — martech enablement is primarily about organizational change.

It begins with a mindset shift; then that shift is put into practice, and the organization adapts to support your martech enablement efforts.

Small, incremental organizational change through insights and actions is the martech enablement process that ultimately results in maturity and transformation. Let’s review that process.

Reviewing the martech enablement process

As I’ve outlined in this guide, there are two basic components of building a race team, and correspondingly, building a martech-enabled marketing organization: a strategic component and an execution component. Neither of these really end as you continue to mature. You must be constantly refining both, as they inform each other.

Strategy informs execution, and the results of execution inform strategic refinement.

Strategic components of martech enablement

In performing the strategic components of martech enablement, you will:

• Build and improve your team
  • Part 3: The team members
  • Part 4: Building the team
• Create and continually refine your martech strategy
  • Part 5: The team strategy
• Create, expand and maintain your martech stack
  • Part 6:  Building the car
  • Part 7: Insights, intelligence and integration

Execution components of martech enablement

Creating an agile marketing process is at the core of martech enablement execution. Allowing your team to make incremental improvements to your marketing efforts is the foundation of martech enablement.

It’s all about insights and actions, as I shared in Part 1 of this series. The part of the guide that covers execution is:

• Part 8: Executing martech enablement

Lastly, keep score!

As I work with CMOs, one of the clear values they want to see visually is the incremental progress their organization is making. Keeping a scoreboard that the entire marketing organization can view is a way to communicate that value. I briefly touch on this in Part 7 of this guide. This isn’t about key performance indicators (KPIs), but key progress indicators.

As you develop your martech enablement strategy, envision stages of growth for your organization. If you need a baseline, several well-known “digital maturity models” are freely available on the web to be used as a framework. Within those stages, keep score and share progress indicators. Below are a few examples of maturity progress indicators I’ve seen offer value to marketing organizations:

• # of marketing experiments performed
• # of new insights identified
• # of cross-functional initiatives executed
• # of technical barriers removed
• Internal productivity survey scoring
• Marketing org confidence scoring

Any way you can measure and communicate the maturity progress of your martech enablement process will benefit in creating buy-in and momentum to continue the effort. Keep score of your transformation progress; it will keep the team moving forward.

Wrapping it all up

It is with a bit of sadness that I share that this is the final paragraph of the martech enablement series. I want to thank all of you who have been diligently reading this guide as it progressed, and I invite anyone who wishes to continue the dialog on this area of great passion for me to feel free to reach out to me through Twitter (@peterladka) or LinkedIn. Thank you all so much for reading, and happy martech enabling to you!