Chris Golec, Founder and CEO at Channel99 discusses how modern B2B marketers still struggle with optimizing marketing outreach protocols despite their access to a wide choice of martech in this quick chat with MarTechSeries:

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Take us through your biggest martech learnings from your time in the industry?

When I started in the industry, marketing technology was dominated by consumer and B2C models aiming to solely increase volume. Demandbase took a very different approach. The primary reason I started the company was to help B2B marketers target only the businesses that can buy their product and eliminate 90% of the noise. Hence the term account-based marketing, or ABM.   

Yet, despite the advent of ABM and numerous other advancements over the past 15 years, B2B marketers are still challenged today to understand the quality and economic efficiency of all their channels. My biggest learning is that despite decades of innovation, B2B marketers still struggle to focus their investments on reaching and engaging ONLY the people and businesses that can buy their products. 

Tell us more about Channel99 and what inspired it?

The inspiration behind Channel99 is to finally solve measurement and attribution for B2B and to provide a platform for AI and machine learning to identify opportunities for campaign adjustments or a shift in budget to maximize pipeline impact. It’s all about identifying waste, reinvesting in growth, and dramatically improving operational efficiency by eliminating the labor that used to be required for managing campaigns.

Take us through some of Channel99’s latest enhancements?

Until now, the Achilles heel of B2B attribution has been the inability to measure view-through engagement. In fact, 80% of B2B web traffic arrives without a traceable click, all of which traditionally gets into a bucket labeled “Direct”.   At Channel99, we recognize that many of those visitors likely saw an ad, read a social post, or maybe received an email, and then visited the web site, all without clicking. That’s why we have developed view-through technology to detect the actual source of this traffic. We use “smart pixels” that get placed in ad creatives across the internet, and on LinkedIn, we have integrated with a new Company Intelligence API that allows us to draw relationships between when a company reads a social post and then subsequently visits the web site. Because a huge amount of high value engagement can be properly attributed to LinkedIn, this is a substantial leap forward, with a potential to transform  ROI and other KPI’s by 50-90%.

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What stands out for you regarding the current state of martech, given this fast evolving space?

Naturally, the answer is AI. However, most applications of AI thus far in the martech space have been in content marketing, with the end goal of increasing productivity.   While that is valuable, I believe AI will have a much bigger impact on the execution and optimization of marketing investments.   In the long run, this is a much bigger opportunity for companies as it will increase sales pipelines for less money, reduce labor overhead, and allow for faster execution.

What would you tell today’s B2B marketers about attribution tactics and data?

If B2B marketers do not measure their view through attribution, they will be making decisions with only ~10% of the information that’s currently available. With this data gap, they’re flying blind, and putting their teams and AI-powered analyses at a tremendous disadvantage.

As martech evolves and the typical scope of work for a marketing team changes in tandem with it: how do you feel the future of marketing will start to look like?

It will not be long before all the various marketing technology and media platforms will be connected to Gen AI (via MCP servers) allowing automated workflows to create, launch and optimize campaigns to maximize sales pipelines. Not only will ROI improve, but the operational efficiency will skyrocket by eliminating many tasks that now happen between clients and agencies. Some roles will become more strategic, and others may go away entirely.   

Some last takeaways you’d share with everyone in marketing and martech?

The martech sector is on the cusp of unprecedented innovation over the next few years, with the potential to far outstrip any advancements delivered over the past decade. Additionally, the growing interoperability of different technologies will continue to slash inefficiencies and help marketers focus on the levers that drive real results. Thanks to these advancements, the days of re-packaging marketing results to bolster KPI’s or drive variable bonuses will soon be behind us.

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