In the same way, it is important to have a process for constructing, auditing, and rationalizing your marketing stack, it is important to have a process for adding new products to the stack. Without a well-defined process, you run the risk of wasting time, as multiple departments evaluate the same product, or as one team evaluates and qualifies a product, only to see their purchasing process stalled because another team identifies the need for something similar and wants to have their specific requirements incorporated into the work the initial team is doing.
While each company needs to define a process that aligns with their own business operations, there are some best practices to consider:
Once complete, make your stack visible as the single source of truth about marketing technology for your organization. Before anyone starts the process of looking for a new product, they should first see if products already in use could address their functional requirements.
Identify all stakeholders in the organization who are engaged in the development of product requirements, discovery, evaluation, approval, and implementation. Work together to define an efficient workflow for your company’s sourcing and approval process.
As you develop your own company’s workflow, it’s recommended that the process be defined in a way to accommodate different levels of product commitment. Evaluating and approving an anchor platform should follow a different process than evaluating a simple, nonintegrated tool for a single function.
Regardless of whether your organization has a centralized or a distributed purchasing process, it’s helpful to have an individual or team who has oversight of what is happening across the organization, so that requirements and activities can be coordinated across multiple teams. Increasingly, we see marketing operations departments taking on this role.
As part of the vendor selection process it is important to assess whether the tool’s value will outweigh its total implementation and support costs (license, people, process).
“When it comes to Martech we have a detailed process for analyzing each technology. The process includes:
o Defining the project charter—objective, goal, success metrics, project team and key stakeholders
o Conducting first-level vendor analysis
o Conducting first-round outreach to qualified vendors
o Conducting pro/con assessments of qualified vendors
o Short listing to the top 2 to 4 vendors, for onsite deep dives
o Security and risk reviews
o Partner recommendation presentation
o Partner decision”.
-- Stacy Falkman
“In addition to the normal product selection activities, our team includes an assessment of the people and processes that will be necessary to extract the value from a new tool or platform. Do we need incremental headcount? Should we outsource the operations of the new tool? Is training necessary to ensure the team can properly use the tool to deliver value? Tools don’t provide value by themselves.” -- Jeff Harvey
Jeff Harvey
Jeff Harvey Director, Marketing Technology, Red Wing Shoe Company
