Scott over at ChiefMartec just posted about the results of the 2018 Gartner Marketing Technology Survey, showing that now 74% of enterprises have martech managed by marketing, and 26% of organizations have a “dedicated martech leader and team.”
He looks at this as cause for celebration—evidence that martech is now a mainstream profession.
I don’t disagree that that martech as a profession has come a long way in even the nine years I’ve been working in it – but I think we’re far from mainstream. I look at that “26% have a dedicated martech leader” stat much more from a glass-half-empty perspective. How are so many enterprise organizations still lacking such a fundamental proficiency? That same report outlines that 24% of orgs manage martech, but without a formal team to own it.
Maybe I’m too hung up on semantics, but I think we still have a lot of work to establish legitimacy for the martech profession. The upside with this data is it’s a reminder that the market isn’t as saturated as I, and others in the SaaS industry bubble often imagine.
To co-opt Geoffrey Moore’s model, Gartner’s report proves we’ve got the innovators and early adopters on board—but we’re only scratching the surface of the early majority. The rest of that bell curve is yet to be tapped.
And that’s exciting to me.
