Seattle has got a lot of potholes, especially this time of year. There was one I remember every day on my way home from work. It turns out, most potholes don’t get fixed unless someone calls it in (there’s a pothole hotline).

Yet every day for weeks I’d simply swerve around the pothole to avoid it. Then one day it gave me a flat tire, and the next day I called the hotline. It took about a week, and the pothole was patched.

Our lives are filled with potholes that can be addressed now or put off until later. And to decide, we’ve got to ask two questions:

1. Is this easier to fix than I’m imagining?
2. If I wait, does this issue become worse?

If the answer is “yes” to either – It’s probably time to call the hotline.

Any time I prepare something to be published – an email, a presentation, or one of these blogs, I’ll look it over carefully for typos and other issues before hitting the big red button. And invariably after publishing, I find some obvious issue I somehow missed. The issue is attention and focus. Over time our minds become accustomed to the work, and start to take shortcuts that miss normally obvious errors.

A way to break this cycle is to make the work unfamiliar again.When reviewing your writing – change the appearance of the work – the font and size, maybe even the color. This helps trick your brain into treating the material like it’s new. It helps teases the issues to the surface.

It certainly isn’t perfect—I’m sure I missed some typos in this very post. But it’s worth a try.

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If you’ve ever used a Kindle, you may have noticed the “other people highlighted this passage” message as you read. It’s similar to how Medium handles its highlighting feature. It serves to call out what other people found popular, presumably to help you identify the key points and quotes from the book.

But by highlighting popular passages, this simply reinforces those same passages to receive even more highlights.

Other than seeing what other people thought was profound, I don’t think this social sharing of highlights does much good. 

Reading should be about forming your own opinions about the work – the availability of these highlights instead has you leaning on what others found valuable (or rather, what others found others found profound). 

Rather than simply reinforce what’s already popular, you can fortunately disable this functionality I’ve discovered. Just go to Settings > Reading Options > Highlights and then disable the “Popular Highlights” option.

Not everything in our world needs to be loaded with social recommendations. Here’s to a more focused, independent reading experience. 

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.

Some video games like to force the player to watch every cutscene between the gameplay. They’re unskippable.

And it’s infuriating. If I’ve already played the game before, or if I just want to get to the action now, let me skip it.  It’s amazing to me that even in 2018, this practice is still pretty commonly found in major video game releases.

But it’s super common in B2B marketing too. We design our lead lifecycles and nurture programs like they’re this linear, step-by-step path that every customer must flow through exactly as designed.

Yet when we view the data, customers are going from point A to point Z, skipping all the carefully designed steps in between. Though you may have crafted an ideal experience for your users – they are most likely indifferent to it. They’ve got their own priorities.

Instead, we should be building flexible experiences that work out of order. Don’t build nurtures gating off high value resources until the next email send – feature your best additional content with each interaction. And by extension – stop measuring nurtures as if sending every email in the stream is the ideal scenario. If a lead wants to burn through your content in an hour instead a month and convert- that’s not a failure on the nurture’s part – it’s a byproduct of allowing flexibility into your processes.

So when you’re building your next marketing experience – make sure to account for the people who want to skip the cutscenes.

You can use the red squiggly spell check errors in your documents to correct typos, or to improve your computer’s dictionary.

But you can use them as a flag. Something to call out confusing or esoteric language. After all, if spell check doesn’t understand some branded phrase or co-opted marketing term, then what’s to expect the reader will either?

We marketers love to geek out with inside baseball terms, and then wonder why we’re not always taken seriously or understood by our colleagues in the rest of the company.

So we’ve got two choices. We can try and look smart with big, complicated language, and then complain when our work is lost in translation. Or we can prioritize clarity and simplicity with our writing. Maybe it means a temporary ego-hit, but if you’re doing work that matters, isn’t being understood more important than looking smart?

Fun story – when I joined one of my previous companies, I discovered our generic inbox was getting a ton of emails from major league baseball teams every day. Hundreds a day. Someone had signed up our inbox email for every team’s entire subscription center.  There’s 30 MLB teams, and each has a subscription center (behind a login, no less) that looks like this, so you can probably imagine the volume of email we were getting. 

And I see this echoed in B2B companies all the time. While most are not behind a login, these subscription centers still end up bloated and confusing. But someone at the company thought all these subscription options made perfect sense (and they probably do to an insider).

But they’ve forgotten there’s a big difference between how they internally categorize email, and how their audience does.

By adding a ton of options on your subscription center, you might think you’re offering choice and control, but in reality you’re ending up with a confusing jumble of options that no one except your email marketing team understands. And least of all your customers.

It’s a good idea to build separate subscriptions for truly distinct streams: parent/child companies, wildly different product lines, or distinctly branded initiatives. These all feel different for your subscribers, which is the only scenario a big complicated subscription center ever makes sense.

And if your email program doesn’t have those exceptions? Then stick to the basics. Giving choice and control for your subscribers is important – but don’t confuse “more options” with “better”.

Sirius Decisions recently coined this term—it’s when marketing teams buy tech to fill perceived holes in their “stack”, and ending up with a bloated corral of tech that doesn’t integrate well, has too much overlap, nonexistent documentation, and a shoddy implementation. 

But it’s no surprise why we end up in this predicament.

The peer pressure, either from coworkers, colleagues, or even research groups like Sirius Decisions tell us we need X, Y, and Z to run a successful marketing organization.

We don’t want to look like a stodgy team unwilling to adopt new tech. No, we want to be seen as the innovators of the organization. 

We’ve got a surplus burning a hole in our budget, and that shiny new personalization tool is looking mighty appealing right about now.

I’ve certainly suffered from categoritis—it’s hard not to when you work in a space where everyone is excited about the idea and potential of the tech, but doesn’t always have a great vision for how all the dots connect to make it a reality.

The ideal path, no surprise, works like this:

1. Identify the key challenges and pain points of the business.
2. Develop a strategy to tackle them.
3. Select technology (if appropriate) to make it happen.

Categoritis, is of course this same process, but in reverse. So the next time you’re looking at exciting new piece of tech, ask yourself what’s truly driving this decision. Are you you looking for solutions to solve a problem, or are you finding problems for your solution? 

I wanted to share an interview I recently did on the Martech podcast. It’s a career story, and I spend a lot of time discussing my rather unconventional path to marketing ops and tech (Incidentally, IS there a conventional way to get into this crazy profession?). I also share somekey lessons learned in marketing-sales alignment, the division of responsibility between marketing ops and the rest of marketing, and more.

I had a lot of fun on the show, and I’d recommend the Martech podcast for some of the other great guests Ben has already had on the show. Please check it out, and let me know what you think!

I recently came across the concept of “machine assistance” to describe when the strengths of machine learning are merged with the strengths of human intelligence and creativity. In other words – it’s an alternative to the vision of a pure AI-marketing world, where the “automation” in marketing automation comes full circle. Machine assistance instead argues the ideal dynamic is more of a partnership than a winner-take-all battle.

I find this path a lot more interesting, mostly because it personifies the blend of art and science that drew me to marketing to begin with. Besides, I’ve never put much stock in the fearmongering about AI completely eliminating marketing jobs – there’s just too much nuance and creativity required for AI (at least in its current state) to succeed in all aspects of marketing.

Marketers are already over reliant on “best practice” to guide their every move– a pure AI play will only lean more into this. Yet it’s often the weird and unconventional ideas that break the mold of sameness that so much of marketing seems to fit in these days.

Maybe I’m wrong, and maybe I’ll regret this opinion someday, but I certainly hope not – I don’t want to be a marketer in a world where AI is the only player. That sounds like a pretty boring game to play.