Tip 1: Conduct an audit of your martech stack
Inventory leads to insight
It’s easy to blame the tech, but the problem is probably the strategy.
"If your ABM program is working and is scaling, then I think you have a good argument that your tech stack works," says Miller. "If your ABM program is completely failing, it’s easy to blame the tech but I would argue it’s probably your ABM strategy," says Miller.
If your organization is seeing inconsistent results across ABM programs that's when you need to investigate the tech.
A technology audit will give your marketing team a better understanding of what tools the organization has, how many of them are used and by whom, what tools are legacy, and what tools are consistently down for maintenance. In many cases, organizations find that they already have the right tools, they just haven't operationalized them correctly. Perhaps you are using only a portion of the capabilities a platform offers, or perhaps only a handful of marketers have a license – or the know-how – to use them when the whole team could benefit.
At a time when marketing budgets are under intense scrutiny, anything that isn’t showing ROI could be cut – including your tools. "Everything you do has to be measurable," says Anne Murlowski, VP of Digital and Performance Marketing at Terminus, an ABM and intelligence platform. Your audit will not only identify gaps in your capabilities, but it'll highlight the tools that are essential to the ABM operation and the tools that are being underutilized. This is a crucial step.
"In some ways, the tech side of things is the easiest piece of the puzzle. We get so distracted by the technology piece of it that we don’t fully appreciate how much organizational effort you need to really get value out of these investments," says Brinker, whose role at Hubspot is to help manage and improve the platform’s partner ecosystem – i.e. how it integrates with other solutions. “Integration has been a huge problem in the industry.”
In the next section, we'll look at how your organization can improve its implementation by involving the marketing operations and revenue operations team.