Every new martech integration or set-up requires its fair share of technical know-how, training and organizational alignment to ensure optimized output down the line. What exactly affects a company’s potential ROI or what really acts as a roadblock to a new martech set-up process? Let’s dive in…

With the martech industry expanding constantly at a rapid pace, global companies and marketing leaders are always on the lookout for better martech features or integrations that can help them scale their campaigns and drive faster results.

Proper integration of new martech is essential because it helps marketing teams and even salespeople or other customer facing departments to work within a healthier digital ecosystem within which everything about their prospects and customers is collected in a unified system. For globally distributed marketing and sales teams, it becomes even more crucial to drive better integration processes to ensure every executive across the hierarchy has the right access to the insights they need in real-time so that they can constantly improve and assess outreach and campaign performance.

Here are some of the common challenges that can affect the optimal working of any new martech platform that is introduced into a brand’s existing martech stack.

A Lack of Technical Know-how

A proper integration of any new martech system requires its fair share of technical skills. This is where marketing leaders need to identify the kind of profiles/skillsets they need to hire to build out their teams at an earlier stage, much before they look at expanding their martech stack or before introducing a new martech platform.

Better known martech providers (like the HubSpot’s of the world) will offer constant customer support to take their new customer through the process, thereby allowing marketing teams without base technical knowledge to still be able to set up the system and integrate it into existing formats/webpages/martech systems.

For marketers who feel that a stronger technical sense will be needed to drive better integrations and to keep things working well, hiring right or upskilling existing staff at an earlier stage can come handy.

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Poor Cross-Departmental Coordination/Adoption

Silos can break potential business growth. Seasoned marketing and sales leaders swear by the results seen when sales-marketing teams and other relevant departments are properly aligned through their martech-salestech systems and internal processes.

Cross departmental coordination and better inter-team collaboration is needed to drive output from any new martech-salestech system.

It is at this stage where marketing and sales leaders need to discuss more about the new martech-salestech system they are looking at investing into while setting down frameworks and processes that can easily help the company migrate data, allow both sides accessibility into marketing-sales data in a unified system while also aligning processes to have the right resources extract data points to present them as actual insights in a timely manner to drive future growth and impact.

When CMOs, CSOs, CROs, CTOs, CIOs work together to build strong frameworks with the aim of protecting their customer data and also driving marketing-sales efforts, it can positively impact future marketing and sales processes while also driving the end-to-end customer experience.

No Regular Updating of Martech/Salestech skills

Here’s the basic truth: the right martech and marketing process can drive marketing output and it’s pretty much the same rule when it comes to salestech.

But for this to happen, marketers and salespeople need to proactively upgrade their martech-salestech skills based on the kind of martech/salestech platforms currently deployed. For teams looking at investing into new platforms, adequate time needs to be given to teams to get them to upgrade their martech/salestech usage and knowledge about the new platform.

While fundamentals when it comes to using martech/salestech systems largely remain the same, each platform has its core offering and features that cannot be optimized unless the teams using it know how to set up and use those features to their advantage to drive actual growth.

End Note

For organizations looking to take complete advantage of their marketing technology and sales technology, marketing and sales leaders need to step in through various stages of the new tech adoption process to align integration and training models. Investing in a shiny new tool is just the first step but it’s not enough.

The end to end cycle involves a proper integration and implementation of processes keeping in mind the bandwidth that existing resources have. Disconnected martech and salestech systems can create silos and while new platforms, if used by just a small part of the organization can benefit one side of the function, the overall ROI and impact will never be realized unless there is a team wide training and complete integration.

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