Martech Masterclass Series - Need to Improve Martech ROI? Leverage Your Tech Partners’ Expertise

B2B marketing technology (martech) is a rapidly growing area of marketing. By 2024, martech spend is projected to hit a whopping $8.51 billion.

As such a crucial element of any marketing organization, it shouldn’t come as any surprise that technology is seeing an increase in budget and scrutiny. More and more, martech is enabling marketers to brainstorm, plan, and execute everything from campaigns to analytics. Yet, marketers everywhere are struggling to wield their martech platforms with full efficiency.

We’d bet that every single marketer can relate in some way to this scenario: At your bi-weekly meeting with your martech partner, your team looks around at each other and says, “So…what should we talk about today?” Not exactly the peak of productivity, is it?

Despite being the crux of so many marketing activities, martech management takes on a surprisingly passive role in most marketing organizations. However, it doesn’t have to (and shouldn’t!) be that way. Marketers can take on a more proactive role in their martech management with one simple change: Involving their tech partner fully.

As part of our Martech Masterclass series, this article breaks down four tips for leveraging your partners expertise to get the most out of your martech purchase. You’ll improve ROI, set yourself up for success, and have more productive tech meetings to boot. As a bonus, we have videos from each of our partners' CS leaders to tell you a bit more about what they have to offer!

See Your Tech Partner As a Vital Teammate

One of the most common errors we see martech owners make is withholding the big picture from their tech partners. Instead, try telling your tech partner exactly what you’re trying to achieve and let them help architect the solution with you. Even if your vision doesn’t involve their technology from end-to-end, knowing where you’re headed will give them a better starting point for helping you understand how their technology can help along the way.

Remember, your tech partner works with tens, if not dozens, of customers whose needs most likely line up with yours. They have a lot of experience to draw on, so don’t discount it! If your particular customer success manager doesn’t have the right experience for what you’re trying to achieve, they likely have colleagues who have encountered a similar problem before with their own customers.

Plus, your tech partners are incentivized to help you succeed. Martech partners are technical experts, driven by results for their clients, and want your relationship with them to grow. You spent the money, but it’s up to you to make sure you get the most out of it.

Keep in mind that this information sharing should happen over a series of meetings. It should be an ongoing conversation you keep up, rather than a one-off strategy-sharing meeting. Creating and including your tech partner on your organization’s martech committee is a great way to do this.

Help Your Tech Partner Understand Your Complete Martech Ecosystem

Not sharing your complete martech stack with each one of your tech partners is a surefire way to end up with a reduced ROI, multiple tech platforms that don’t work well together, and a frazzled team stuck trying to manage them all. An ongoing practice you should create with your tech partner is sharing your complete tech with them—including whenever something new is introduced (or removed) from your martech ecosystem.

Once you’ve shared your roadmap and goals with your tech partner, sharing your tech stack can help them introduce you to integrations, features, or other best practices for getting the most out of your tech investments.

Taking inventory of your martech stack beforehand is a great way to examine your functionality needs and existing workflows. What does this look like in practice? Here are a few ideas:

Determine use cases for your tech partner to review and brainstorm. For example, this could look like referencing the list of possible expansion areas you made during your tech audit that we discussed earlier in our Martech Masterclass series. If you’re unsure, your tech partner can help you think through additional use cases.
Use your quarterly business review meetings to discuss their product roadmap and additional features that are coming down the line, and how they might integrate with your current martech stack.
In bi-weekly meetings, keep your tech partner up to date on use case adjustments and solicit their advice in figuring out where their technology fits to meet your changing needs.

Share With Them How You Will Prove ROI

With so many emerging technologies between various tools, marketers have their work cut out for them when it comes to gathering, analyzing, and presenting accurate and actionable data from their martech platforms. Indeed, there is a large skill gap in this area. Among martech leaders, 64% agree that their teams lack the technical expertise to increase the use of their martech stack, despite taking on more martech ownership.

This is a crucial part of the conversation because most martech platforms vary in cost from tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars each year. Come annual budget time, every marketer has to prove the tech was worth the investment.

While your tech partner is not responsible for proving the ROI of your investment, they are there to help you gather the data you need. Our Martech Masterclass series will dive into this in greater detail in Q2 and Q3, so stay tuned to learn more.

In the meantime, here are a few tips when it comes to using your tech partner to help you gather data:

Share your data goals with your partner so you’re on the same page.
Assign your partner to report on certain metrics so that you can check in on them monthly, quarterly, and annually.
Analyze your performance with your partner and brainstorm ways to improve together.

Doing this can help your partner become more invested in your performance, as well as educate you about the best ways to leverage the platform to prove ROI down the road.

The Key to ROI is Use Cases. Your CSM can Help!

Finally, leveraging your tech partners is all about successfully creating use cases to implement it. While your partner might know a bit about the other technologies they integrate with, how you stitch your martech together is based on the use cases you define. It’s your job to create them, and change them, over time as needed.

Indeed, many marketing teams buy technology first and then figure out how to use it later, or buy a piece of technology with only one use case in mind (even though there might be much more to the tool than they even realize). Intentionally defining use cases helps you determine the best workflows, tools, and execution strategies for your technology—all things that will improve your technology ROI over time.

But don't take our word for it...hear it from the customer success leadership from:

Demandbase

Drift

Outreach

PathFactory

Sendoso

For more on martech mastery, follow along with the complete series at https://go.inverta.com/martech-masterclass.