Tip 5: Capitalize on your vendor relationship
Consult the experts to get more from your existing investments
Vendors need to understand how their customers are using the tool.
Selecting and implementing the right tools is challenging enough. Getting your team to adopt new tools is another huge hurdle. That's because most employees use the tools and processes that they’re comfortable with and trust.
"It’s hard to break that cycle," says Michael Phillips, VP, Global Marketing at Altrata, parent company of platforms including Boardroom Insiders and Wealth-X. "Getting the ‘stickiness’ comes down to having champions within the organization, but also businesses being able to support their clients. They need to understand how their customers are using the tool."
The relationship any marketer has with a martech vendor will determine proficiency and utilization of that particular tool. However, this relationship is often neglected on both sides. Most marketers will have at most a monthly or quarterly meeting with a vendor’s customer success team. Sometimes the only contact there may be with a customer success team is when the product is malfunctioning.
Regularly communicating with vendors means being able to keep up to date with any new software releases and ensure implementation of them (instead of ignoring or forgetting about them). It can also tackle that utilization problem.
For instance, when searching for or considering a new personalization tool, speak to your organization’s existing vendors and ask about their capabilities. Perhaps they’re rolling out a new feature imminently or have an exciting product roadmap that will prove invaluable when it’s released.
“It could just be a case of sitting through a customer onboarding session and finding that you already have access to the capability you want,” says Murlowski. “It could be an upsell, a feature that you don’t have as part of your subscription today, but maybe you get it at a better price than sourcing something entirely new that you then have to integrate.”
Murlowski says customer success teams should be seen as real partners who can help marketers with strategy and buy-in internally: “Say to them that you’re hitting a barrier. Ask them for any resources that could help get your sales partners activated, or whatever the issue might be.”