Come make friends with Frans - the founder of Martech Tribe, all round CX genius. In his webinar '#MarTechFestDial Up: Driving your martech maturity - How to achieve journey orchestration excellence', we covered trends, customer journeys, next steps, and Frans' own personal gripes. Oh, and hold on to your hats - we're going atomic.
Finding himself in a classroom of CMOs, marketing managers and, possibly, the person sitting next to you, Frans found people asking the same question: "Am I the only one who has this trendy new tech, but it's just not working?" Oh, and the sigh of relief when he revealed to them it's happening to most people would be enough to turn the world to electric windmills.
So, it's all about the internal conversation before we start talking to the customer. Every division, every team, has their own set of skills, workflows and dynamics. So how do we integrate their data? Frans reveals we don't. At least, we don't at the moment. No-one is really owning one system, let alone the customer data, let alone the customer.
"To operate outside-in, we need to align inside out"
No, this isn't a quote from the Dalai Lama. This is a quote from him, Franz said, from right now.
Franz covers three key areas in his webinar:
- Three compelling Martech Trends
- Customer Journeys today
- How to find your next best action - Inside Out.
With Inside Out, he's not talking about the Pixar film. We promise there'll be far fewer tears, unless you just really love CX.
So, number one - trends. With the acceleration of Martech, the amount of tools per stack is also increasing. Tools have become atomised, as well as companies, and therefore more intuitive, so now systems that would require a specialist to run, now only needs the push of a button. So the power shift has moved to marketing.
Next up, Customer Jouneys. Funnels aren't that accurate. Sorry to all the funnel fans out there, but you've got to face the truth some time. Funnels miss out context, and situation. People assume they want to have more and more data, and therefore more and more technology. This high intensity focus on what the customer is doing right now is not addressing data and tech in the right way. Do NOT send your customer a "U Up?' text at 3am. It will not work. Frans asks, if you are not having the right conversations internally, how can you have them externally?
So how can we get out of this rut? Get out of flipping from one 'solution' to the next, from customer success, to support, to upsell, and beyond? Frans suggests little improvements across the customer journey.
And finally, we arrive at inside out framework.
Frans suggests just walking over to your colleague, to a team, or a department, and having a conversation. Not about football, or the weather, though those are classics, but to see that people are not aligned.
Frans offers a solution. Silos only allow you to track customers by channel. Funnels only allow for multiple channels. But journeys allow for cross channel tracking of customers. So how specifically can you address the customer? You have to admit to where you are with the company's capabilities by customer. For example, are you developing personas, customisation, or even individualisation, and then be willing to learn from the experts?
Each step upwards allows for more capabilities to open up. From content, to insight, to technology. Here's a handy graph detailing every part:
Here at Martech Alliance, or Martica Lyons as the transcription AI called us, we like to ask our speakers a couple of classic questions. They are: What's your biggest gripe, and What is your career advice for your younger self? Here's France's (AI again) answers.
"it's very easy to hide behind and say okay but we need this, this new tool and this button, we can't work because we don't have that report, really, think again. Think what you're really trying to achieve. And then, if technology will work for you. Then, you will only use the best of feature from that product, and not the entire suite, implement everything, and really sit back and hope for a miracle to happen, because it won't, it won't happen".
And career advice? "My younger self, I would have told. Please try every week for 30 minutes. One new tool. A tool that has a freemium offer free trial, just go in there, they don't. They won't stalk you, they will not harass you, with emails afterwards or phone calls, just try free to and figure out what it's trying to do, just a tool that triggered your attention"
"So you're easily and very quickly becoming an expert and conversational partner, which is very important because then tech can work for us. Otherwise it's just overwhelming us with more buttons, and that's not helping anyone, certainly not your customer, and your revenue"
Looking for other top marketers? Well, you're in luck. We've got the biggest and best names, just waiting to give you a run down on the latest innovations and ideas in martech today.
Click Here to find out about attending #MarTechFest Dial Up- completely free! Just for you, the person reading this. Because I like you that much. You're welcome. 😘
