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Scott Brinker is the VP of Platform Ecosystem at HubSpot; Editor of the popular blog site Chiefmartec; and the author of “Hacking Marketing”.
Up until roughly a decade or so ago, most marketers felt ambivalent towards marketing automation. Too complex. Too hard to get help from IT. Not in their job description. But they certainly viewed it as indispensable for mail campaigns. So the technical work of pulling data, creating lists and targeting customers was usually left to a services provider.
All of that changed with the dawn of Big Data. Suddenly marketing automation became crucial for success. Even more so when omnichannel shopping became ubiquitous. Gartner famously predicted that CMOs would eventually outspend CIOs on technology. And sure enough, technology now accounts for the biggest slice of marketing budgets at 26%, greater even than media spending. Yet technological complexity remains the main barrier to progress, especially now that the principal mission of marketers is to make the customer experience as seamless as possible across multiple touchpoints and devices.
Marketing technology has certainly come a long way over the decades, evolving from the standalone CRM systems of yesteryear, to the monolithic enterprise marketing suites of not-so-long-ago, to the cloud-based platform ecosystems of today, when there is an app for just about everything, including apps to connect the apps. What hasn’t kept pace, however, is the technical acumen of marketers, no matter how digitally savvy they may be in their personal lives. Too few organizations have reached the stage of maturity where they’re graduating enough marketing technologists to take command of these wobbly “frankenstacks”. And too many marketers are still reliant on their IT staff to do the heavy lifting – the customization work, the application integration, the system connectivity, and so on.
Which is probably why marketers struggle to make optimal use of their current platforms, citing complexity as the top challenge. Nowadays most companies have opted for a single vendor solution as their marketing platform of choice, whether that’s Adobe, Salesforce, Oracle, SAS or any one of a dozen other competing systems. But as Forrester observes, these are still made up of “separate components, deployed simultaneously”.
Often these platforms have to be augmented by multiple point solutions, usually in the range of 5 to 20 different applications, which perform specialist functions such as social media management, sales enablement, event management, survey deployment and much more. And of course, these platforms also need to be tightly connected to various internal “systems of record” which store the precious source data. The integration of all these various systems has always been a challenge. No wonder then that the vast majority of marketers lack confidence in their ability to deliver a truly unified experience: it’s just too complex.
Recognizing the problem, the major martech vendors are broadening the scope of their platforms, seeking to natively integrate as many 3rd party applications as possible, connected through open APIs. The goal: personalization at scale. And making the integration of these disparate tools even easier are so-called “no code” development platforms that allow even non-technical users to create unifying processes across different applications using “drag and drop” interfaces.
HubSpot, the inbound marketing platform, is a great example of a hub-and-spoke system, with hundreds of third-party tools from certified partners, helping to make their solution one of the simplest to deploy with minimal involvement by IT for any small to medium-size business.
The Executive in charge of the Platform Ecosystem at HubSpot is Scott Brinker, best known as the wizard behind the Chiefmartec.com blog who specializes in demystifying the world of technology for marketers. His annually published Marketing Technology Landscape now features a total of 8,000 solutions, up from a mere 150 ten years ago when he first produced it. The author of “Hacking Marketing”, Scott is an astute observer of the fast-evolving technology business and was once a co-founder and CTO of a successful interactive content developer before selling it to Toronto-based ScribbleLive several years ago. His blog site Chiefmartec serves as a window on the intersection of marketing and technology for 50 thousand readers, a consistent source of thoughtful perspectives on the state of martech.
I began the interview by asking Scott why he chose to make HubSpot his new home.
Scott Brinker (SB): So I think one of the things that was very exciting for Ion is we’d gotten it over the 10 million ARR mark, which in, you know, I mean, SaaS businesses starts to become like a threshold where you’re demonstrating genuine product market fit. But I think myself and my co-founders, we were the classic entrepreneurial founders, and this was the first time we had a SaaS business that was hitting that rate of growth. And so yeah, what we were actually looking for was a strategic partner who would be able to bring to us a lot of just the scalability associated with building up sales forces and reaching broader markets, and so yeah, we had very high expectations that ScribbleLive was gonna be able to do that. For various reasons, ScribbleLive had a bunch of its own challenges that they ran into after the acquisition, nothing to do with Ion, I’m happy to say, but yeah, the story did not continue the way I’d certainly hoped it would.
But yeah, how I got into HubSpot was for this blog I’d been writing for a decade or so, of the Chiefmartec.com, one of the themes I kept coming into was this growth of all the apps in the martech landscape, right? I’d had that crazy chart. And believe me, that chart took off in ways that I would have never predicted when I began. But so one of the things that was really challenging for marketers was they had all these apps that were being created, but the major systems that they relied on, sort of their foundation of their martech stack, most of them didn’t have really good integrations with these apps, and so I actually spent a number of years complaining that hey, listen, I mean, it’s crazy. I mean, you should have companies like HubSpot, and Adobe, and Oracle, they should be, like, embracing this as a platform ecosystem opportunity and not, you know, like trying to just compete with all of it. Because I mean, you just can’t compete with all of the things happening there. So, I kept complaining about this loudly enough, and then the founders of HubSpot actually reached out and they’re like, “All right, well, you wanna put your money where your mouth is and help us make this, you know, more of a true platform?” And so yeah, for me, that was an opportunity to, you know, not just comment on the way I thought the industry should go, but at least with one company, be able to hopefully contribute to making that happen. So, it happened that the timing of that was at the same time that, you know, Scribble was acquiring Ion and so the transition just happened to work out well. But that was a year of many changes. [8.36]
Stephen Shaw (SS): As you mentioned, you’ve had your blog going, “ChiefMartec,” for over a decade. And, you know, I’ve been tracking you, I think virtually, that whole time. You’ve become the market’s de facto translator for marketers trying to helping them keep up with all of this technology. Was your motivation, just going back to that period, to help educate the general marketer on what the possibilities and potential were of this whole very fast evolving landscape? Or were you more interested at that point, in taking dead square aim at, you know, this new breed of marketing technologist that were starting to infiltrate the workforce?