The increasing value of most martech vendors is the underlying data they create or augment. The activity log of Marketo is a perfect example. So much value and insight is locked up in one place – it’s what fuels much of the automation magic, but it can be used for reporting too, with a bit of work.
The problem is, while most vendors recognize the value of this data, they misjudge what their users what to do with it. As a result, too many martech vendors are focused on building their own answer to reports and dashboards, and not enough effort is placed on democratizing the raw data that they’re most valued for.
We’ve come a long way towards open systems, APIs, and a culture of integration rather than isolation in martech. But one of the last bastions holding us back is this redundancy in reporting solutions across our stack.
The reality, even if some marketing teams haven’t yet developed the muscle for it, is a single data story across all their channels and technology. It’s why the concept of the customer data platform, the “CDP”, has received so much traction in recent years. But it’s still nebulous idea for most marketers, no thanks to the fact that nearly every martech vendor is calling themselves a CDP, even if they have little to offer in the arena.
The goal is each of the useful data streams for our various systems: The email logs of our marketing automation tools, the product telemetry of our SaaS product, the contracts and sales data of our CRM, all in one cohesive home, and a reporting tool flexible enough to tell that complex data story across a unified persona.
In other words – we don’t need more siloed dashboards in our tech. We need more open, accessible data systems, and we need more expertise in data preparation and business intelligence in our marketing teams.