Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
"Suite Fatigue is the moment you realize you're paying more every year for less flexibility and less value." — Adam
Marketing was supposed to get simpler. Instead, it got more expensive, harder to operate, and increasingly rigid. Jacqueline sits down with Adam Greco (previously at Salesforce, Adobe, and Amplitude) to unpack the rise of "Suite Fatigue," the growing frustration with all-in-one marketing technology platforms that promised the world but delivered fragments.
They get into why this moment feels different, how renewal pressure and slow innovation are turning "one vendor" into a long-term liability, and why the data warehouse is increasingly becoming the backbone of modern marketing stacks. The big question underneath it all: if you were starting from scratch today, would you still choose the same suite?
Sponsor Brought to you by Hightouch — Went all-in on a big marketing suite but still struggling to get value? You're not alone. Our sponsor, Hightouch, spoke with 50+ enterprise teams and found 79% are frustrated by high costs, slow innovation, and rising complexity, often needing specialized teams just to keep things running. They'll share the full findings in a live webinar on February 12, plus what they're seeing from organizations updating their Martech stacks. Get the report and register!
Timestamps
01:05 — Suite Fatigue defined: when the "simpler stack" turns into a tax
10:57 — What people admit out loud vs. what they only say off-record
15:54 — The core symptoms: lock-in, slow innovation, and forced migrations
18:12 — The Franken-suite reality: shallow integrations + pay-to-play support
27:33 — Why speed to activation breaks first in legacy stacks
43:02 — "Okay, boomer." Can suites make a comeback?
53:08 — What to do next when the math stops working
Connect & Subscribe
Subscribe to Making Sense of Martech wherever you get your podcasts. Engage with the community on Reddit and follow Making Sense of Martech on LinkedIn, and don't forget to like and subscribe on YouTube.
Leave a review, share with your team, and send us your questions and confessions. We may feature you in an upcoming episode! Always feel free to email us at podcast@themartechweekly.com. QuestionsConfessions Reddit
Creators and Guests
What is Making Sense of Martech?
Unfiltered takes on the biggest shifts in marketing technology. We spotlight what matters, who's leading (or lagging), and what's next. In Martech, clarity is power — and we're here to deliver it.
00;00;06;17 - 00;00;22;21
Speaker 1
Welcome to the Making Sense of MarTech podcast, where we interview leaders and put them in the hotseat. I'm Jaclyn Friedman, founder of monarch and global head of advisory for the MarTech weekly, and I have a confession to make. I am a little tired. Yes, I said, look tired. It's a very old school YouTube reference because I'm not burnt out.
00;00;22;34 - 00;00;44;11
Speaker 1
I'm sweet, tired because the thing that was supposed to be making marketing safer and simpler is somehow actually more expensive, harder to run, and still not delivering the incremental value we were promised. Q in sweet fatigue. What is it? Why it's spiking and what the real exit plan looks like? And why is this happening? Marketing teams are being asked to do more with less, and the math is not my thing.
00;00;44;15 - 00;01;04;36
Speaker 1
Gartner says marketing budgets are flat 7.7% of company revenue again this year. At the same time, renewal dynamics are getting sharper, prices are going up, complexity goes up, and I keep showing up as a line item, and I have yet to see real outputs and outcomes from it. So if you're feeling like your sweet is less of a strategy and more of a tax, you're most certainly not alone.
00;01;04;37 - 00;01;13;48
Speaker 1
And with that, I would like to welcome our guest today, Adam Greco, the product evangelist at High Touch and one of the most recognizable voices in digital analytics. Welcome.
00;01;13;49 - 00;01;15;41
Speaker 2
Thanks so much for having me. Great to be here.
00;01;15;46 - 00;01;32;42
Speaker 1
Yeah, I'm so glad you're here. And let me do a quick introduction about you, because you're already well known but worth highlighting. So Adam's a longtime leader in the Adobe Analytics and Ometer space. He's helped thousands of organizations improve their digital properties through data and has held strategic roles at Salesforce and Amplitude. Just to brag a little bit.
00;01;32;47 - 00;01;42;12
Speaker 1
And lately, he's been hearing the same phrase from folks again and again suite fatigue. So now that I've got you here, let's jump in with some quick hits. What was the first martech tool you ever used?
00;01;42;14 - 00;01;58;41
Speaker 2
So I'm going to date myself a little bit here, but I actually was a Lotus Notes programmer. Many of your listeners may not even know of, but I used to build custom CRM. As before, this thing called Salesforce was around. And so that was my kind of big martech tool in the early days.
00;01;58;44 - 00;02;09;59
Speaker 1
That is a big deal because Lotus Notes still is a bane of my existence. Everyone. So I wanted to render for it. So I definitely have some. I bet there's some interesting core stories that you've got there, especially.
00;02;09;59 - 00;02;12;56
Speaker 2
When IBM bought them. Things got interesting.
00;02;13;01 - 00;02;22;27
Speaker 1
I can only imagine. Well, maybe that's for another podcast day. So similarly, what is a belief that you had in the martech space ten years ago that now is dead wrong?
00;02;22;27 - 00;02;40;05
Speaker 2
So I'll probably get some daggers for this. But I honestly, ten years ago was a big believer in kind of martech attribution. And you could do first touch and you could do last touch and. And I feel like as I get older and I work in more and more companies, I just have less and less faith that you really, truly can do marketing attribution.
00;02;40;05 - 00;02;46;02
Speaker 2
And I feel like the people who are selling you marketing attribution are kind of snake oil salesmen at this point.
00;02;46;06 - 00;03;03;44
Speaker 1
Hard agree. And also doesn't count like you had to think through. We no longer have tracking pixels in the same capacity, and cookies are not as easily trackable, so attribution model is broken based off what the original components were. So it makes sense and also wasn't ever really real.
00;03;03;49 - 00;03;04;38
Speaker 2
Yeah.
00;03;04;43 - 00;03;10;59
Speaker 1
TBD what is the most enterprise thing you've seen a company do in the name of safety?
00;03;11;01 - 00;03;32;43
Speaker 2
So I interpreted this a little bit strangely, but the weird thing that I saw is I've had a number of companies and clients and consulting firms I've worked with where executives were not allowed to fly on the same plane with each other because they were so valuable to the company. And it was all in the terms of not just safety, but also corporate safety and governance.
00;03;32;43 - 00;03;41;31
Speaker 2
And so I always found that very, very strange. But but that's probably the weirdest one, where, you know, you work at a political company when you can't fly with one of your coworkers.
00;03;41;33 - 00;03;59;41
Speaker 1
I have experienced that firsthand, being on a flight and I was sitting in the middle seat. Next to me was deputy counsel at a company I was working at. It was a large company, and he was very nervous. And I was like, hey, are you okay? Like for just for just getting on a, you know, cross-country flight, like, is everything all right?
00;03;59;41 - 00;04;19;14
Speaker 1
And he's like, no, everything's not all right. I need to take a Xanax or whatever. And I was like, wait, what's going on? And he's like, more than a fourth of the company is on this plane, and this is a complete governance nightmare. And we're about to go through a turbulent weather, like all this kind of stuff. And so that is a very real secure enterprise situation.
00;04;19;26 - 00;04;20;10
Speaker 2
Yeah.
00;04;20;15 - 00;04;25;48
Speaker 1
Yeah. Because yeah, if you lose a fourth of your company in one airplane, all of a sudden you lose a lot of value of your company.
00;04;25;49 - 00;04;42;04
Speaker 2
I know people who have worked at those companies, and then when they get married and have kids, the they split their family on flights. They won't all go together. Wow. Well, if the kids are with them, they will. But if they're without their kids, the husband and wife will fly in different flights in case something happened, which I was like.
00;04;42;04 - 00;04;44;21
Speaker 2
I never even thought of that. But a lot of people actually do that.
00;04;44;22 - 00;04;52;48
Speaker 1
I have never thought of it and now I will and I don't like it. All right. What's one tool you love but only recommend with a warning label?
00;04;52;57 - 00;05;19;45
Speaker 2
So my favorite tool, the tool I'd recommend is if you're in the B2B space is gone. I'm a huge gong fan and gong user because it's so powerful to be able to like scan through hundreds of sales calls. But the warning label I'd give you is it could be intimidate. So you have to really be prescriptive and you've got to really write good queries or search parameters so that you're finding the gong calls that you really want versus just otherwise.
00;05;19;45 - 00;05;34;35
Speaker 2
You could literally spend all day watching sales calls. But I think it's such a powerful tool because you get to it's like being in 20 or 30 sales calls, and you could do them in like an hour. And it's just a it's great to hear directly from customers and prospects like what their struggles are.
00;05;34;38 - 00;05;48;50
Speaker 1
I agree, it's it's an excellent tool. It'll be interesting to see how it continues with all the other platforms that are coming out, doing similar things along the way. All right. And last but not least, the question we ask everyone who is someone you admire, whether it's professional or personal.
00;05;48;51 - 00;06;12;48
Speaker 2
I'm going to do a professional one, and it's Jason freed from base camp so that Jason Freed and his partner wrote a series of books like rework and, Doesn't Have to Be Crazy at Work. And I really found that those books were really helpful. But also, they've written some amazing blog posts about how to start a company, and they're really thoughtful in that they really don't care what everyone thinks.
00;06;12;48 - 00;06;30;50
Speaker 2
They just do what they think is right. And they've never taken venture capital money, so they can they own their own destiny. And there's some really interesting lessons, and they're really good at bringing analogies in. So I've just been really kind of amazed by what they've done. And they're a small company, but they really kind of fought above their weight, if you will, for sure.
00;06;30;52 - 00;06;35;44
Speaker 1
I didn't know that they hadn't taken any outside investment. That is definitely unusual in a good way.
00;06;35;45 - 00;06;36;03
Speaker 2
Yeah.
00;06;36;03 - 00;07;03;37
Speaker 1
All righty. You've seen this industry from nearly every angle. And so I want to talk about what people are actually exhausted by and why now. And so this term sweet fatigue. It describes a growing dissatisfaction among companies using large marketing suites like Adobe and Salesforce, driven by rising costs, poor innovation, and complex, fragmented tools. As organizations face of under lock in and diminishing returns, many are gradually shifting towards more flexible, composable solutions built on centralized cloud data platforms.
00;07;03;42 - 00;07;30;42
Speaker 1
This transition is is expected to accelerate as viewer marketers prioritize agility and integration over the legacy benefits of all in one suites. And I know I've been a huge proponent for the past 3 to 4 years, and I've seen at scale the benefits. And so if we're to set the stage about the symptoms and maybe not what the vibes are elsewhere like, what do you hear when people are saying suite fatigue, they don't mean they're just mildly annoyed with a vendor.
00;07;30;42 - 00;07;38;46
Speaker 1
They mean we've been paying for years and we're not getting any incremental value. So if you give me a one sentence definition of what tweet fatigue is, hit me.
00;07;38;55 - 00;07;57;15
Speaker 2
Yeah. And I don't think you've done a pretty good job of summarizing, but based on the gong that we were talking about, listening a lot of gong calls, that's where I kind of heard this over and over. But I think if I had to boil it down, I just think of suite fatigue. Is that realization that your organization has gone all in on one marketing suite probably many years ago, hoping for synergistic effects.
00;07;57;15 - 00;08;18;45
Speaker 2
And but today you just kind of wake up and realize that you're paying a fortune for a bunch of products that maybe aren't as flexible as you want. They're not innovating as fast as you might want, and ultimately, they're just delivering less value each year and offering a sort of rigidity and complexity that you never thought you would have.
00;08;18;50 - 00;08;22;37
Speaker 2
But that's just kind of the summary of what I hear from a lot of the companies that I'm speaking.
00;08;22;37 - 00;08;34;40
Speaker 1
With that make sense. And it just goes to show synergy is never the words that you want. And often anything. What changed recently that made you feel like this is a trend and not just background noise?
00;08;34;40 - 00;08;40;43
Speaker 2
And I want to start off by saying like, I like sweets. Like I'm not like this anti suite person, you know, large. I mean you.
00;08;40;43 - 00;08;44;01
Speaker 1
Did work at a couple these different suite companies.
00;08;44;06 - 00;09;07;33
Speaker 2
Exactly. My company that I worked at Omnicare was bought by Adobe. I worked at Salesforce. And I understand the premise of like hey, I'm an executive and I just want to have that one throat to choke. You know, one vendor that I can, I can deal with. But I think that in talking to companies over and over, what used to be the general, you know, everyone just for fun likes to complain about vendors that could be like an Olympic sport.
00;09;07;33 - 00;09;33;05
Speaker 2
But I think that over and over, as I hear more and more companies, I started to notice this trend where it wasn't just a one off here and there. It was like a resounding, like groundswell of I'm more and more frustrated this year than I was last year, and now it just keeps getting more and more. And so I wanted to kind of dig into what's causing this trend and what are people saying.
00;09;33;05 - 00;09;54;50
Speaker 2
And that's where I started really diving into gong calls and and listening to the feedback and seeing if I could kind of boil it down. And that's where I decided to write a blog post about this, which I'll probably get some hate from my old friends. But I do think that there's these simple forms of fatigue. And if you think about it as like an illness, there's there's predefined symptoms.
00;09;54;50 - 00;10;09;48
Speaker 2
And that's what I wrote about in the blog post. And, you know, we can go into depth on that. But that's that's what I think is interesting is there's not just a one off here and there. You're you're starting to hear more and more. I'm seeing more blog posts. I'm seeing more and more people frustrated by this phenomenon.
00;10;09;53 - 00;10;20;30
Speaker 2
And I think it makes sense because people invested in these suites maybe ten, 20 years ago. And just like anything, you know, if you've a car this 10 or 20 years old, like eventually it starts to show its.
00;10;20;30 - 00;10;42;19
Speaker 1
Age, without a doubt. I'm super appreciative of this topic really being shed light on this. To your point, it's been happening. It's been happening in conversations across the board for a very long time, but now it is actually given a term and a way to think about it. And to your point, I see martech. I see us as really doctors in terms of what is going on with our systems and we diagnose.
00;10;42;24 - 00;10;57;48
Speaker 1
And so if anything, I think the analogy of symptoms is the best way to kind of describe what we're working with. And so I guess building on that, what is the first pain point people admit outloud. And what's the pain. They they only say when the calls no longer recorded I'm gone.
00;10;57;48 - 00;11;17;05
Speaker 2
Yeah. I mean, not surprisingly, the first pain point always tends to be around cost. These marketing suites, tend to get very expensive over time. You pay more and more for the products, and you kind of. It's funny, people have said to me multiple times, like, I got this contract for multiple products with the sweet vendor, ten years ago.
00;11;17;05 - 00;11;46;23
Speaker 2
We were paying this much and I don't know how it happened, but somehow ten years later, it's quadrupled. And they're like, in a lot of times people leave jobs and it was like, not one person who saw this. And it's kind of like that analogy or the story about the frog in the pot of boiling water, like no one would wake up that day and say, if I were to look at vendors, I'm going to pay this amount of millions of dollars today for this functionality, but you kind of paid less, and then it just kind of slowly creeps up and up.
00;11;46;24 - 00;12;08;58
Speaker 2
So that's the first one is, is cost. I think the things that they tell me when the camera's off is I don't feel like my marketing sweet vendor treats me very well. I don't feel like they love me as much as they love that next customer that they're getting, because they kind of almost like, take me for granted, and they treat me like an annuity.
00;12;09;05 - 00;12;34;53
Speaker 2
Like I'm expected to just continue to renew, even though a new customer of theirs might get all this love and attention. But it's like, I feel like even though I have rewarded them by being a customer for ten years, I don't feel I must feel taken for granted. And I hate to use this analogy, but it's almost like if you're in a relationship with a person, it's like, you know, when you're dating the first couple months, like it's all, you know, fireworks and everything's great.
00;12;34;53 - 00;12;42;14
Speaker 2
And then you get married. I've been married for 28 years. And so, you know, while we still have a great relationship, like it's a little bit different, you know, and.
00;12;42;19 - 00;12;43;24
Speaker 1
Honeymoon phase is over.
00;12;43;31 - 00;12;59;59
Speaker 2
Sometimes my wife and I take each other for granted, and we try not to, but it just natural when you've been in a relationship that long, and I think in a vendor relationship, like the customer always wants to be treated as if they're the only customer that that vendor has, and they tell me when the camera's off that they don't feel that way anymore.
00;13;00;10 - 00;13;22;20
Speaker 1
Yeah, it's really the philosophy of acquisition first or retention first approach is once you build up the credibility in a market, it's do you still only focus on highlighting things for acquisition, or do you actually care about engaging and retaining your current customers because they're the real moneymakers? Ultimately, yeah, but super helpful context to kind of understand what folks are saying and not saying.
00;13;22;20 - 00;13;44;48
Speaker 1
I mean, so many words and quick tip. I always like to think through because you particularly raised it when you've been at a company for either you've been on for a long time or you've had these contracts for years, decades, even. You need to go through an itemized list of that invoice or that pillow, because you will find a lot of things that you didn't know you were paying for, or a lot of duplicates even.
00;13;44;53 - 00;13;51;28
Speaker 1
And so it's always worth line by line. It's it's not fun, but it's definitely a good starting point for sure.
00;13;51;28 - 00;14;11;30
Speaker 2
Yeah. And I think the test that I always tell people is if you were to pick your technology today, forgetting about the past, like what did you do ten years ago, just clean slate. You are new at the company. Would you keep doing what you're doing today? Would you use the suite that you have today, or would you look for other tools?
00;14;11;30 - 00;14;35;05
Speaker 2
And I think most people, when they're honest with themselves, they know that they would go different directions. But I think it's the fear of unimplemented implementing tools that can be very complicated and how entrenched these tools have been. I think there's a politics aspect of, you know, no one ever got fired for bringing in a marketing suite. And if I go with something that's not one of these large marketing suites, like, am I exposing myself to risk?
00;14;35;05 - 00;14;52;30
Speaker 2
And so I think there's some of these factors that some times people aren't honest with themselves, but eventually they get so frustrated that with some of the symptoms that we'll talk about that they might say, you know what? Now it's actually worth it for me to maybe look at something else, if nothing else, to keep the marketing suite vendors honest.
00;14;52;30 - 00;15;17;17
Speaker 1
Without a doubt. And to the point of really the the increased pricing that is, is mainly probably one of the quickest things to notice where particularly living in this world where every major platform is openly raising list prices often, and I know I've experienced it, but Salesforce increased an average of 9% list price increases in August of 2023, and then another one two years later of 6%.
00;15;17;17 - 00;15;39;42
Speaker 1
And so this is just a continual backdrop of this renewal fatigue conversation that keeps happening. And it's not just that the price went up. It's a pattern. And renewals are becoming moments of leverage and not partnership anymore. And to your point, we want to be the only one in the room. We want to be the the singular customer client that you are working with and figuring this out together and be special.
00;15;39;42 - 00;15;54;52
Speaker 1
Not just, hey, by the way, this is how it works 9%. You're not getting anything out of it and nothing is changing. And it's it's it's a difficult thing. Before we dive into a fun game called System Check, I would love for you to outline what the symptoms are that you included in the article. Yeah.
00;15;54;52 - 00;16;12;55
Speaker 2
So I think the first symptom we talked about a little bit is price increases. So just paying way more than you originally expected. And along with that is if a customer is not getting value sometimes in weird cases, I've heard the vendors say it's actually your fault, not our fault. You know, blaming the customer.
00;16;12;55 - 00;16;13;26
Speaker 1
And.
00;16;13;31 - 00;16;32;49
Speaker 2
All. I think the second symptom we hear a lot about is vendor lock in, which is just feeling this kind of trapped nature that you just can't get out of your contract because you just are so committed. It's difficult to not renew. And the vendor knows that it's difficult for you to not renew because the switching costs would be so expensive.
00;16;32;51 - 00;16;59;03
Speaker 2
The third one we hear a lot about is just lack of innovation. Or sometimes people call this the for the never ending roadmap, which is a lot of times if you think of a marketing suite, it's kind of like a very large vessel that maybe can't turn as fast as maybe a smaller startup. And so sometimes they have a reputation of having slower innovation pace, but they have amazing presentations where they will show you all these cool things that are going to be coming at their annual trade show.
00;16;59;03 - 00;17;02;55
Speaker 2
But then sometimes if you follow up, not all those things actually end up coming.
00;17;03;06 - 00;17;05;55
Speaker 1
You know, they might be a little too forward of looking statements.
00;17;05;55 - 00;17;27;30
Speaker 2
Yeah, very visionary, but but some people call it vaporware. But it just, you know, sometimes it doesn't always do that come through. And I think I has been huge in that area. I think the next one we hear a lot about is just implementation and UI complexity. Just like if you use Microsoft Excel, which is a great tool, but over the last 20, 30 years, like it keeps getting more and more features and it gets so complex.
00;17;27;30 - 00;17;54;31
Speaker 2
And then eventually people just start using Google Sheets because it's just easier. But also like sometimes it could take months or years to implement some of these large marketing suites before you get your pay off. And that frustrates people. I think another thing we hear a lot about is forced migrations is like some sweet vendor might say, hey, we have this one product in our suite and we're moving to another version of it, and everyone has to move to it, and it's painful and it costs money to to move.
00;17;54;31 - 00;18;12;06
Speaker 2
It's higher priced and you got to pay consultants and like you're not getting any new value, maybe a couple new features, but you're really basically almost doing like a reimplementation and it really wasn't your choice. It's just the vendor decided that they came out with a new version. Oftentimes it's because it makes the vendors, you know, Cogs or, you know, cost of goods little better.
00;18;12;07 - 00;18;34;56
Speaker 2
The other thing we hear a lot about is just the idea that sometimes the interest sweet integrations that you're paying for, which is like product A and product B, which are in the same suite we're actually acquired, and sometimes they're not actually as integrated as you think. And you could see with different UI's and different URLs and so on where you're like, actually, I'm getting more of a basket of individual products versus a true suite.
00;18;34;56 - 00;18;58;49
Speaker 2
And even in like the Salesforce case where I work there, like they don't even sometimes change the product name. So like it's pretty clear that this is a, you know, MuleSoft by Salesforce is not fully integrated. And then we already talked a little bit about the customer support is just, you know, taking for granted. And sometimes we hear from companies that like if they have a problem a bug, they file a ticket and it goes into a black hole and they just never hear back.
00;18;58;49 - 00;18;59;14
Speaker 2
And then the.
00;18;59;14 - 00;19;00;07
Speaker 1
Answer's.
00;19;00;19 - 00;19;15;11
Speaker 2
Oh, you really want help? We have this great paid managed services that you can pay for. So these are just some of the symptoms that I keep hearing over and over in call. So like you said, there's different reasons for them. And we can go through and through the game. But but those are the main things that we hear a lot.
00;19;15;24 - 00;19;27;36
Speaker 1
Yeah. All right I want to put you to the test. So the options are either going to be economic operational or political. And we're going to start off with renewal price jumps clearly economic.
00;19;27;36 - 00;19;29;51
Speaker 2
I view that as just this is an economic decision.
00;19;29;52 - 00;19;32;29
Speaker 1
Yep. Inertia and or switching costs.
00;19;32;32 - 00;19;42;31
Speaker 2
Political people want to change but they can't. And they don't want to go to their boss and say that someone previous to them made a mistake and so on. So yeah, that definitely political.
00;19;42;31 - 00;19;45;26
Speaker 1
A great all right slow innovation versus best of.
00;19;45;26 - 00;19;47;10
Speaker 2
Breed. I think of that as operational.
00;19;47;14 - 00;19;50;43
Speaker 1
Without a doubt. All right. Bloat and consultant dependency.
00;19;50;48 - 00;20;01;42
Speaker 2
This one's a tough one. But I'm going to go with economic just because I think it does get expensive to always be reliant on the complex tools that require these complex consultancies.
00;20;01;42 - 00;20;17;30
Speaker 1
Agreed. And even though I'm a consultant, I don't think anyone should be fully locked in to having a consultancy in order to do your own job and use your own tools. It should be a helping kind of jumpstart catalyst, but not the long term solution. So totally agree. All right.
00;20;17;30 - 00;20;28;06
Speaker 2
Roadmap theater I think that's political. I think, organizations get sold on this vision, and then no one ever follows up to see if they actually achieved that.
00;20;28;06 - 00;20;31;24
Speaker 1
Vision upgrades that are actually right implementations.
00;20;31;24 - 00;20;45;31
Speaker 2
I think that's operational because suddenly you didn't have a project that you were planning on doing that you had to have resources for, and all of a sudden, your vendor phoned you up and says, you've got to move from version five, diversion six, and suddenly all the projects you want to do are put on hold.
00;20;45;45 - 00;20;51;20
Speaker 1
Yep. And nothing works where oh, you can't see on version five, but you just won't receive any of our new features.
00;20;51;32 - 00;20;55;21
Speaker 2
Exactly. And it might or might not sunset at any point in time.
00;20;55;35 - 00;20;59;52
Speaker 1
Exactly. All right. The Franken suite of integrations from acquisitions.
00;20;59;52 - 00;21;07;10
Speaker 2
I think this is operational but operational from the vendors standpoint. Like they should be doing a better job of integrating these tools.
00;21;07;10 - 00;21;11;40
Speaker 1
Totally great. All right. Last but definitely not least, pay to play support.
00;21;11;45 - 00;21;16;12
Speaker 2
Yeah I think it's more economic because you got to you got to pay you got to pay for support.
00;21;16;16 - 00;21;33;32
Speaker 1
It's, you shouldn't have to pay for help in my eyes. But here we are. All right. So we've talked through all the symptoms. I want to get a little bit more clinical and understand what's actually happening under the hood, and why this is just so hard to fix. So before we go deeper, I gotta know what is high touches tech stack internally.
00;21;33;32 - 00;21;38;54
Speaker 1
And what does it say about how you think about modern stacks and what they should be working with?
00;21;39;01 - 00;21;59;15
Speaker 2
Yeah. So High Touch is a company that tries to kind of, we say drink our own champagne, some people say eat their own dogfood. But, you know, a lot of our company does run on high touch, but we truly believe in kind of the warehouse, native composable approach. So we still use a lot of traditional tools. We have Salesforce for CRM.
00;21;59;15 - 00;22;19;24
Speaker 2
We use Omni for BI. We use HubSpot for a lot of our marketing tools. We use clay. I mean, we have all of the I'd say, you know, think of clear been the center of our universe is really our snowflake warehouse. And then the high touch tools that go around that. So everyone is using the same data for all of these different tools.
00;22;19;24 - 00;22;51;26
Speaker 2
And we have a preference for vendors that can operate in a composable manner because we just believe that if we're recommending this for our customers, like we should be able to do this ourselves. And ironically, I'd say that I've been to about 4 or 5 presentations where we're talking to a prospect and we're bringing our internal marketing team or marketing operations team to talk and show how we use our own product at High Touch, and it goes over better than any sales engineer could ever do, because it's real.
00;22;51;26 - 00;23;02;19
Speaker 2
And people can see that we're actually using our products and and our employees are really good at using our products. And we also, know a lot of the other martech products that are built around the modern data stack.
00;23;02;21 - 00;23;11;05
Speaker 1
I love to hear that. And also, you'd be surprised how many martech vendors don't actually use their own platform, which is always a fascinating one to me.
00;23;11;10 - 00;23;24;39
Speaker 2
Yeah, I worked at, when I worked at amplitude, we found out that one of our largest competitors was actually using our analytics product instead of their analytics product, which is just really funny. And there's lots of stories you hear about this in the industry.
00;23;24;39 - 00;23;42;10
Speaker 1
Oh for sure. It reminds me of that, like Microsoft and Apple, one where actually Microsoft had to use Apple for certain things and vice versa because there are different ways of going about things. Not to say one is better than the other, even though I am definitely an Apple household or I'm an Apple person, but my husband and I, we're a split household.
00;23;42;14 - 00;23;43;45
Speaker 2
Yep, yep.
00;23;43;50 - 00;23;59;30
Speaker 1
All right, I want to dive into a couple more questions here. So you in the article reference superficially integrated. And I would love to hear what does this look like technically like identity graphs data models, permissions APIs, back systems. Like what are we referring to here?
00;23;59;32 - 00;24;30;39
Speaker 2
Yeah, I think there's a general feeling when you're using a large marketing suite vendor, you can kind of tell when there's what I call breakage where you're using one product, but then you're in another product. And I think technically the way it manifests itself is oftentimes it's a different UI, but more tactically, you might, for example, build an audience in one tool and then you're in the other product of the same vendor and that audience isn't available.
00;24;30;39 - 00;24;51;25
Speaker 2
Or maybe it takes ten hours for that to be available. And you can tell that there's differences there because the audience builder in product A is different than the one in product B, or if you ever have to like, export a CSV file and then move it to another tool like that's a clear indication. But sometimes you you see different product names.
00;24;51;25 - 00;25;10;54
Speaker 2
I'm kind of the nerd that looks at the URL, and I can see like the original acquired companies URL still there. And then I'm moving to the sweet. So I think most of the vendors have done a decent job of trying to obfuscate and like, put a veneer on top of things. So it looks like it's the same UI.
00;25;10;54 - 00;25;36;34
Speaker 2
But the more you know about the product, the better you kind of know where the breakages. And I think the biggest sign that I found is there are people whose entire careers are built on how well they know the quirks of the marketing suites. And you can see this when you go to LinkedIn, like you might have someone who's Adobe architect is their title, and they don't work for Adobe.
00;25;36;34 - 00;25;57;23
Speaker 2
They work for a company that uses Adobe. And if you have to have a job title where your key value is, you understand, like how this one suite vendor works. Like to me that's a little bit problematic. That means like you're trapped because anyone should be able to work with any tool and not have to have like specific skills.
00;25;57;23 - 00;26;13;47
Speaker 2
And I think that's part of the reasons why some people at companies will always, even if they move to another company, they will recommend bringing in the same marketing suite because their career and their value is tied to that knowledge. And they're nervous, like, are they going to still have a job if they go with a non suite?
00;26;13;47 - 00;26;31;18
Speaker 2
And it kind of is a a weird little thing that happens between suite vendors and people who are experts. And I was like that because I was like the Omnia slash Adobe Analytics guru. And, you know, that old expression of all you has the hammer. Everything looks like a nail. It's if you talk to Adam Greco ten years ago, the answer was going to be Adobe Analytics for everything.
00;26;31;21 - 00;26;55;21
Speaker 1
Yeah. No, you're completely right. And that's how I, I think of these things as like sunk cost fallacies in a lot of ways where just because you've only learned this one platform, unless you truly are doubling down and you're a consultant only for those quirks, why wouldn't you want to learn other things? Because they're all very similar. They have their own quirks, of course, but yeah, it's a whole rabbit hole as it relates to certifications and whatnot.
00;26;55;21 - 00;26;56;19
Speaker 1
I got a lot of thoughts there.
00;26;56;19 - 00;27;12;29
Speaker 2
But yeah, and I think a lot like, for example, when I left the Adobe world and I went to work at amplitude, I think a lot of people were freaked out because they're like, wait a minute, this is the guy who wrote the book on Adobe Analytics. Why is it at amplitude? But like, I look at it as like, life is short, like, let's learn new things and take different perspectives.
00;27;12;29 - 00;27;16;35
Speaker 2
And, you know, I think you can do the same thing over and over for your whole life. It's kind of boring.
00;27;16;35 - 00;27;23;04
Speaker 1
I agree. I think staying curious is one of the most important aspects of life, not to mention professional life.
00;27;23;09 - 00;27;24;09
Speaker 2
Yeah.
00;27;24;14 - 00;27;33;36
Speaker 1
All right, shifting gears. What brakes first, speaking of life in real life, data quality, identity, governance or speed to activation?
00;27;33;36 - 00;27;56;35
Speaker 2
I think it's speed, the activation. And I think the biggest difference, if you ask me, you know, if you go with, you know, a large marketing suite or if you go with a different type of model, like a composable or more modern data stack, I have found that the speed activation is the big differentiator because it just takes a long time to implement a large marketing suite, and there's a lot of nuances.
00;27;56;36 - 00;28;15;41
Speaker 2
There is some power there, like there's some amazing features that are really, really cool, but it's just a long journey. And if you want to be able to to buy a software vendor and say, hey, within a couple weeks, I'm using my first audiences and I'm activating and I'm running a campaign like even I think even the large marketing savvy vendors would tell you that's not where they play.
00;28;15;41 - 00;28;31;17
Speaker 2
They're looking at a 3 to 5 year, ten year kind of horizon. So I think that's where it really matters. And some companies will decide. We're looking for, you know, we have a ten year time frame. We have a multi-year time frame. But nowadays it seems like business is moving so fast that people want to kind of get that speed much quicker.
00;28;31;24 - 00;28;39;02
Speaker 1
Yeah, I'm a big fan of in the sales process, being able to actually demo with your own live data and show the proof point as you're doing it.
00;28;39;02 - 00;28;53;58
Speaker 2
Yeah, we have that problem a lot in high touch because we'll kind of like people start using our product during the sales process and then like they start actually running campaigns and we have to like tap them on the shoulder and be like, you know, you haven't started paying guys for this. They're like, oh, I totally forgot.
00;28;53;58 - 00;29;10;42
Speaker 2
Like they just went. But I think if you think about what I hear from a lot of people with the large marketing suites is, you know, let's pull it into the CDP world. Where I live is like, you already have a data schema in your warehouse, but then you have to make a new data schema, because that's the way the vendor does it.
00;29;10;51 - 00;29;26;33
Speaker 2
Instead of using the data schema you have, you already have your data in a warehouse, but you need to put your data in a large marketing suite if you want to use it there. So it's like it's almost like you're duplicating a lot of the things that you've already done. And that all adds up to slower speed activation, for sure.
00;29;26;38 - 00;29;34;40
Speaker 1
And kind of building upon it. Like, where do teams waste their time, more moving data, fixing data, or arguing about what the data actually even means?
00;29;34;40 - 00;29;51;45
Speaker 2
Yeah, lately I've seen more around the moving of the data. I see people that are just like, we've got this data in our warehouse, which data do we think we're going to need in this tool or marketing suite or ESP? And let's just move that. And I think that's why I'm such a big fan of the composable model, because you don't even have to think about it.
00;29;51;45 - 00;30;03;46
Speaker 2
Just it's all there and pick the data that you want when you need it. But moving data around just seems like such a like a 20 tens thing to do that, like it just doesn't seem like work. We should still be living in that world.
00;30;03;48 - 00;30;26;33
Speaker 1
It's 2026. Y'all get it together. Yeah, yeah. Brought to you by our sponsors. If there's one theme that's followed me at every stop in my martech career, it's trying to get good data into the hands of marketers. That's why I'm so excited to tell you about our sponsor, High Touch, the leading composable CDP, an AI decisioning platform. Companies like Domino's, chime, Aritzia, and PetSmart trust High touch to power their data.
00;30;26;33 - 00;30;44;56
Speaker 1
And here's the kicker 90% of customers have a real use case live in production within their first week. That means you can implement a world class CDP in months rather than the usual years long headache. That's why top brands choose high touch to personalize every customer interaction at scale. See what high touch can do for you at high touch.com forms.
00;30;45;01 - 00;31;07;14
Speaker 1
And now back to the hotseat. Okay, I want to shift gears to talk about AI pressure because we've kind of alluded to it in some ways, but AI is just pouring gasoline on the need for usable and actionable data. And even Scott Brinker is 2025 state of the stack data showed 68.6% of orgs are already using gen AI tools, and that adoption curve is basically vertical.
00;31;07;19 - 00;31;26;48
Speaker 1
But we've got this paradox. Stacks are getting smarter, but the plumbing is still kind of the bottleneck. So can you paint the picture in plain English like warehouses as truth and that kind of warehouse data centricity with composable activation on top of what changes are needed for marketing ops next week if we're going to implement this.
00;31;27;00 - 00;31;47;10
Speaker 2
Yeah. So if we think about moving to a post sweet world, something has to take its place and you need to have a center of data and that's where I see composable as really an evolution. I think if we go back in time, many years ago, you had IT teams, they owned the data, and then you got the poor, lowly marketers who were begging for access to data.
00;31;47;10 - 00;32;06;58
Speaker 2
I need a marketing campaign. Who can I email? And it's kind of like what I see happen was happened is that marketers revolted and went to the other extreme and said, we're going to go get our own tools, whether that's a marketing suite or maybe like a packaged CDP, and we're going to just kind of give the finger to the AI team and say, we're going to own our own stuff.
00;32;06;58 - 00;32;29;32
Speaker 2
We can do our own things. We don't worry about it. But then you kind of moved to a world where now marketing has their data, and then the data and IT team have their warehouse. And like those two things aren't the same. And so now you've got to find a way to synchronize that data. And now that became really cumbersome in which data we do have where is it the right, is it the right wrong and so on.
00;32;29;37 - 00;32;48;05
Speaker 2
And that became a mess. And then, you know, composable architectures came around and said, well, what if we can just have the best of both worlds and say, you can have everyone uses the same data, and marketers have access to all of the data that they want, but in a way that it's already been governed by it in data.
00;32;48;19 - 00;33;05;23
Speaker 2
And that way when you go to your BI tool, when you go to your analytics tool and you go to your CDP, it's all the same data. So I feel like we went from like it owned everything to marketing, owned everything to then everyone trying to figure out how to get the two things they own to synchronize. And then finally, we're moving to this world where everyone is saying, you know what?
00;33;05;33 - 00;33;24;47
Speaker 2
The warehouse is the center of the universe, and we're going to just have UI's that sit on top of the warehouse. And some of them are for marketing, some of them for data. Somewhere BI. And I feel like that's where the industry is starting to finally agree. It's going to take a while, because some of these large fortune 500 companies are, like we said, are pretty entrenched with some of these old marketing suites.
00;33;24;52 - 00;33;30;04
Speaker 2
But I think that everyone, even the marketing suites, are realizing that composable is something they can't ignore anymore.
00;33;30;15 - 00;33;44;22
Speaker 1
I'm very grateful for it. And speaking of, if folks are going to stop ignoring what this term composability means, what do you see as the first product category people immediately consider to make that leap? Make that jump.
00;33;44;26 - 00;34;07;29
Speaker 2
Yeah. You know, it's interesting because when I work at amplitude, we tried to build a composable analytics tool, and it honestly didn't take off. But I think that and this is going to sound self-serving, but I really do think that the CDP space is the first space that's really shown the power of composability, because in order to be a successful CDP, the more data you have and the more access you have, the better.
00;34;07;29 - 00;34;29;04
Speaker 2
But I think there's like message gears and others that showed early on that, like, you could do email composable. And I kind of picture that in ten years we might be replicating the whole idea of a marketing suite, but it's going to be a composable marketing suite. And instead of one vendor owning every single application, it's going to be lots of vendors.
00;34;29;04 - 00;34;49;44
Speaker 2
And I think the consumer wins because the switching costs are so much easier and composable that if you're using an email tool that is warehouse native or composable and then you don't like it, you could switch to another one very easily because they don't have your data, they don't have your audiences. All of that is upstream instead of being tied in like the downstream multiple applications.
00;34;49;44 - 00;34;54;52
Speaker 2
So I think it's going to really help the industry and provide a lot of stimulus for competition.
00;34;54;52 - 00;35;17;20
Speaker 1
That's exactly what I think. But also but what about my locked in contract? What do you mean? Yeah, all those complexities that we've kind of alluded to earlier in the episode are coming to light here, where you sometimes get stuck. But yes, I think things are going to change for the better, particularly as we figure out what MSPs will play into and how that is interrelated with general integrations.
00;35;17;25 - 00;35;21;08
Speaker 1
If we're able to really plug and play that easily, it's an exciting future ahead.
00;35;21;08 - 00;35;39;35
Speaker 2
Yeah, and I think AI is actually causing us a little bit of a spark in this area also, because for AI to be effective, it should have one centralized data set to operate from. And if you have these silos of data, then you get hallucinations. It gets more complicated. So I think AI is becoming another driving factor for organizations.
00;35;39;35 - 00;35;44;12
Speaker 2
Centralize data, which then just naturally leads to a composable architecture for sure.
00;35;44;12 - 00;35;54;38
Speaker 1
And speaking of, I think some folks misunderstand the term composable and often see it as a nicer way of saying, congrats, you're now your own vendor and building your own products. And so I'm curious what your thoughts are there.
00;35;54;38 - 00;36;16;04
Speaker 2
Yeah, I always try to say when I say composable, I always say warehouse native with it, because I think warehouse native is an interesting way to think about it is I have a software product that does the things I want to do, but it runs natively off of the warehouse, you know, composable. It has become the industry term and high touch like helped kind of create that term.
00;36;16;18 - 00;36;34;48
Speaker 2
But I think if you don't store data in it and, you know, the architecture is such that it's very easy to switch to from one vendor to another and that you don't have to use every feature of a product that you could choose which features you pay for. All of that is kind of where the industry is going, but, composable can be tricky.
00;36;34;48 - 00;36;46;24
Speaker 2
But I basically kind of boil it down to, you know, flexibility. You don't have to store any data in it. The warehouse is the center of the universe. And once I explain in those terms, people are like, okay, that that makes sense.
00;36;46;33 - 00;36;59;06
Speaker 1
Yeah. And it almost sounds like the great unbundling and I, I guess I'm curious, how do you folks go about it? It's a very intimidating concept. If you've only ever been in a suite system.
00;36;59;13 - 00;37;30;49
Speaker 2
Yes, it is very scary. And I think in a weird way, the CDP is not the first tool that you would go with because it's the more complex, I think, especially, where I see people dip their toe in the water and they say, I've got this large marketing suite, but the one thing I'm doing is sending emails or messages or SMS to my customers, and for one reason or another, if they're not enjoying the tool from the marketing suite, whether that's like Adobe Campaign or Salesforce Marketing Cloud, there's tons of other vendors out there like breeze, iterable, and they say, you know what?
00;37;31;02 - 00;37;48;22
Speaker 2
I want to just use a different tool to send emails. And this seems pretty discrete. Like I can just I get my audiences into the email, the email vendor knows how to format the email, deliver it, tell me who's opening it. And that is one of the first ones that I see people make their move and they're like, wait a minute, the world didn't end.
00;37;48;27 - 00;38;12;00
Speaker 2
I'm using a different email tool than the one that goes with my marketing suite. And then they say, what's next? And it's usually driven by like what's most important to their business. But once they prove that they can move beyond the marketing suite, then they just open up. What other tools do we not like in our marketing suite that we think there might be a better, kind of better in class tool that we could look at?
00;38;12;08 - 00;38;30;12
Speaker 1
I love the way you framed it there. And if we're kind of take a further step back to the industry level here, like what kind of new lock ins are we going to be walking into if composability is the future? And, you know, we're not stuck with a singular suite where are we going to get stuck and have moats?
00;38;30;21 - 00;38;47;51
Speaker 2
Yeah, I think the the next lock in, for better or for worse, is going to be the cloud warehouse. Now, I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing, but I think that once you commit to a cloud warehouse, whether that's like a snowflake, Databricks BigQuery, like, I think you're going to be stuck there for a while.
00;38;48;04 - 00;39;11;03
Speaker 2
The good news is that most composable vendors work on top of all of the warehouses. So if you do switch from Snowflake to Databricks, Databricks, or Snowflake, like, yeah, there's work there, but it's not as bad as like moving to a suite. But I don't know if companies are going to be that alarmed by the fact that they're going to be locked into their warehouse vendor, because the warehouse vendor is one that they're oftentimes making a large investment in.
00;39;11;03 - 00;39;16;29
Speaker 2
And it's not easy to move from like one warehouse vendor to another, but it can be done for sure.
00;39;16;29 - 00;39;39;15
Speaker 1
I often think it's snowflake, and Databricks is world, and world is living in it at the moment. So it's going to be interesting when someone does decide, because there are unique differences between the two platforms. They're both have the same outcome. However, the way in which you set them up are very different. And so yeah, it's going to be interesting if and when folks start doing cross migrations and new competitors come on board.
00;39;39;15 - 00;39;58;05
Speaker 2
But what's interesting is I do see that a lot of the companies that are using marketing suites are sending the data from the marketing suites into the cloud warehouses also, because that's where they have all their data or as a backup. So what's interesting is they do have all of this data in the warehouse already, most of them.
00;39;58;10 - 00;40;08;14
Speaker 2
And so it's just really changing the kind of the front end that's sending the data into different vendors. And so there is a way to kind of step into that process for sure.
00;40;08;14 - 00;40;28;41
Speaker 1
And I do think you've got a uniquely skewed view in that the folks that are talking to you probably already are prepared for this versus a significant portion of folks are they're lucky if they have their segments, they're lucky if they're using SQL to figure things out. So there's obviously the different dichotomy and levels of maturity across different enterprise companies.
00;40;28;46 - 00;40;52;09
Speaker 2
Yeah. And the more that you embrace the composable mindset for the better you are. So for example, if most of your audiences are upstream in your warehouse, maybe being managed by like a composable CDP, like high Touch, then you don't have audiences in five different downstream tools. So there's not that much stress be they're not losing anything. It's better to have them upstream and just push them down.
00;40;52;09 - 00;40;58;39
Speaker 2
And if you switch a tool, you just push them down to a new tool instead of the one you had. So that's how you can kind of minimize your risk.
00;40;58;44 - 00;41;13;36
Speaker 1
Yeah, it's the plug and play Tetris nature versus getting stuck in certain blocks. Okay. Continuing the theme of really looking at the industry at large, if the Sweet arrow was about safety, what do you consider the new definition of safe for a fortune 500 CMO?
00;41;13;45 - 00;41;34;05
Speaker 2
Yeah, I mean, in a weird way, I don't know that the Sweet Arrow was about I don't think of it as a safety. I think of it as more like security, like you just risk aversion of just saying, I'm just going to everyone who I know, all my competitors are using this suite. So I'm going to just kind of, you know, keep up with the Joneses.
00;41;34;05 - 00;41;50;58
Speaker 2
And it was a little bit about efficiency, as I mentioned, job security, you know, not when you get fired for, you know, choosing riskier tool or perceived riskier tool, but I think in the future the key word is going to be flexibility. I think that's what people want because, you know, the economy could be great this year but bad next year.
00;41;51;02 - 00;42;11;45
Speaker 2
And I can't tell you how many companies I've spoken to said, hey, the economy's not doing great, but we have a $20 million a year contract with a marketing suite vendor and we can't get out of it. And if if you're worried that you might have a bad year or the economy could be bad, like it's great to be able to say, you know what, we could switch vendors anytime we want.
00;42;11;47 - 00;42;31;27
Speaker 2
We can go to a less expensive one. You know, we could do things a little bit on our own. So I think that flexibility is going to be the key in the future. And I feel like every year the business climate just gets like more accelerated, more crazy. And it's like no one wants the baggage of just carrying this, like multimillion dollar contract with you.
00;42;31;27 - 00;42;38;07
Speaker 2
It's great in the 90s when, you know, the economy was going great every year. But I think now it's just very tumultuous.
00;42;38;11 - 00;42;55;26
Speaker 1
Yeah. Every time I look at the news, I'm like, oh, all right, how is this going to impact our industry in addition. So I definitely agree with you there. And I mean, I'm looking at the quarterly earnings and reports for all of these large scale companies and you're right, things are not going according to plan from what they were hoping.
00;42;55;31 - 00;43;02;07
Speaker 1
And so I guess, what do you think has to be true for a suite to maybe make a comeback in the next five years?
00;43;02;07 - 00;43;25;22
Speaker 2
Yeah, I think it's going to be a little bit tough, to be honest, because I think that the younger generation has not had the same viewpoint, like like history that probably I have. And you know, you have like I think growing up the last 20 years, it was just everything was, you know, Salesforce or Adobe, but now you've got this like younger generation.
00;43;25;24 - 00;43;38;44
Speaker 2
I have kids, you know, in the 20s and like they don't have allegiance to these marketing suites and they're kind of looking at it through new lens being like, wait a minute, like that seems like boomer technology. Like, why am I using this?
00;43;38;51 - 00;43;40;29
Speaker 1
Probably not wrong.
00;43;40;34 - 00;43;56;31
Speaker 2
And and so I think it's going to be interesting. And I think like if I use Adobe as an example, like even on their creative side, like if you're a young person, are you going to go down the Adobe Photoshop? Or maybe you think like Canva and Figma are pretty cool and hip. And so I think it's going to be interesting to see.
00;43;56;36 - 00;44;14;28
Speaker 2
But I think that these marketing suite vendors, if they want to go composable, which is possible, they're going to have to re-architect their entire products. We'd get all of their customers for years. Who would be giving them all the data and doing it the way that you work in the marketing suite and say, no, now you're going to move to a warehouse centric.
00;44;14;28 - 00;44;37;47
Speaker 2
And I think that's going to be a really hard sell. Like it's I mean, you know, I wish I had all their customers, like, that'd be great. But I also think that sometimes those customers are going to hold them back because it's like the innovator's dilemma, like you can't change because you're kind of locked into these customers. But I think that this younger buyer group, who's going to come in and I've talked to a couple of companies that the CMO got let go because they weren't growing.
00;44;37;47 - 00;44;56;24
Speaker 2
They brought in a new, younger CMO who honestly, like, I'm on a call and I'm explaining what the Adobe suite does. They'd never really seen it. They're like, this is not like they've never worked at a company they came from, like digital native companies. They never worked at a company that used a suite. And then they're like, they look at the price tag and they're like, are you kidding?
00;44;56;24 - 00;44;56;52
Speaker 2
Is that like.
00;44;56;58 - 00;44;57;57
Speaker 1
Nothing makes sense.
00;44;57;57 - 00;45;14;21
Speaker 2
Here for like five years? And we're like, no, no, that's every year. And they don't understand it. And so that's what I think is going to happen is I think these suites will do a good job of keeping their customers. But I think what you're going to see is every year, you know, 5%, 10% are going to peel off.
00;45;14;21 - 00;45;30;20
Speaker 2
And I don't think they're going to get new customers at that rate, they'll sell to their current customer base and grow. But I think the new startups and the new big companies, the next Googles, like none of them are, I think are going to be using these tools. And then ten years from now, it's going to be interesting to see what happens.
00;45;30;20 - 00;45;54;04
Speaker 1
Without a doubt. And something we've kind of tiptoed around is governance. And you've argued that composable approaches reduce exposure because it's a little bit more plug and play. And so I'm curious where governance comes into play. And maybe it is no longer overseeing every single data point, like what gets easier and what's actually messier if you go about this new kind of model of thinking and approaching your tech stack.
00;45;54;04 - 00;46;23;05
Speaker 2
Yeah, I think in the modern world, like you want to collect customer data once, governance in once and then disseminate already governance data to as many places as possible. I think in the old model where you have maybe a marketing suite in a warehouse, you're probably collecting data multiple times. You might have an SDK from like let's say Adobe Stock, but then you also are sending different data to your warehouse.
00;46;23;10 - 00;46;43;28
Speaker 2
And I think that you've got to govern the data that's in Adobe. You've got to govern the data that's in the warehouse. And I don't know if you're putting all of the same checks that you're putting in the warehouse, in your marketing suite, or vice versa. And so I think you're just duplicating a lot of this work. But I think that the more forward leaning companies are just saying we're going to govern it.
00;46;43;28 - 00;47;04;29
Speaker 2
Once put in the warehouse and then use the kind of reverse ETL model out to these other places. But I think that what that forces people to do is get different teams to collaborate and work together. And that's what's really it's a weird thing, but I wrote a blog post about this that I actually think one of the coolest parts of composable is that it forces a conversation between different groups.
00;47;04;29 - 00;47;17;36
Speaker 2
And I'll give you an example. Let's say that you're a marketer and you need to build an audience, and you want to do a Google ad campaign to certain people were 55 years old, and unless six months or whatever, if you capture that data on your own, like you can figure out the data you need, build your audience and so on.
00;47;17;36 - 00;47;33;51
Speaker 2
But if you are doing that in a composable way, the marketing team has to work with the data team to say, this is the audience I need. Do we have this data and do we trust it? And then once they say, okay, we know the data you want, we will get it in the warehouse. We got to governance, and now you can use like a product, like touch to build that audience.
00;47;33;51 - 00;48;01;18
Speaker 2
Now marketing and data, they're using the same data for the same audiences and everyone knows it's governance. But I think that if you don't use a composable model, it's just all these different groups are doing different types of governance, and you never know if they're doing the same strictness of governance. And I think if you're like in the legal team, you could be really nervous that, like, you don't know what data is going into the marketing suite, but you know what data is going into the warehouse.
00;48;01;18 - 00;48;26;16
Speaker 2
And if someone says, I want to be forgotten because of GDPR, you have one place in the composable model to remove their data. But if you of your data in multiple silos now, you've got to move it once. But maybe it didn't get removed here. So then someone keeps getting emails when they're not supposed to. And so I just think ultimately composable in a weird way, is a little bit harder because you've got to get everyone to agree and you've got to get everyone to use the same data set.
00;48;26;16 - 00;48;45;29
Speaker 2
But I think the long term benefits are that your customer has a better experience, and you don't have that situation where you just bought a product, and then you get an email that says, hey, you might be interested in this product that you just bought. So I think when you the more silos you have, the more the customer kind of tells that you don't really care about them in a weird way.
00;48;45;31 - 00;49;03;03
Speaker 1
I agree. And it really just oftentimes what I experience with enterprise companies is they ship their org chart. You can tell no one is talking to each other and even clients of mine where they just they've never spoken to anyone in a certain department before. And I'm like, but what do you mean? Everything they do informs what you do?
00;49;03;03 - 00;49;37;08
Speaker 1
And it's really like connecting those bridges. And I think that's one of the beauty of the martech more ops kind of role. You get to be that an access point, but also that is the singular point of failure, and it just gets particularly highlighted in outdated forms of technology and suites. Yeah. All right. Taking it a little bit further back, really thinking macro here, Gartner forecasts that public cloud and user spending for 2025 is $724 billion, which is up from $595 billion in 2024.
00;49;37;13 - 00;49;57;50
Speaker 1
So that gravitational pull toward cloud centricity and architecture is only getting stronger and stronger. And in five years, what do you think teams will say when they look back on how did we tolerate all of this suite fatigue, all of it all at once. And really just data overall, it's a big question, a big concept. But I'm curious what your thoughts are.
00;49;57;52 - 00;50;17;45
Speaker 2
Yeah, this is a tough one. But I think an analogy that I would think about is since I'm really old, I remember the days where if you wanted to record a TV program, you had to put a VCR tape in and program a VCR that says the program starts at 8:00, ends at 9:00, and we just took that as normal.
00;50;17;50 - 00;50;36;39
Speaker 2
And then like TiVo came out and the DVR world came out where you're just like, here's a show if it's ever on record, it. And I look back now and can't believe how much work we went through to, like, manually record these things. And it's funny because I'm reminded by a lot of the stuff, by watching Stranger Things, which is like my childhood.
00;50;36;39 - 00;51;02;11
Speaker 2
So I think this generation is going to look back and I think they're going to say so let me get this straight. You had different departments of your company in each department, decided to collect different parts of customer data, didn't talk to any of the other departments, put it in different places, and you had a bunch of your customer data in an ISP, a bunch of it in a CRM, a bunch of it in a CDP, a bunch of it in an analytics tool.
00;51;02;17 - 00;51;24;36
Speaker 2
But none of those things talked to each other. And you just hoped that whenever you communicated on a with an ad on your website or an email that just it was going to all just kind of work out and the customer was going to have this great experience versus putting it all into one centralized place and getting everyone working from the same data set, and they're going to look back and be like, what were you thinking?
00;51;24;36 - 00;51;40;55
Speaker 2
And I think, you know, people like me will say, you don't understand. Like, we started using one tool from a suite vendor, then they acquired another one, and then we just started using that one, and then we started using that one. And we just kind of started building with the suite, and it just happened without us. Like really knowing it.
00;51;40;55 - 00;52;03;11
Speaker 2
And people left the company and knew people came. But the one thing that was constant was we always had Salesforce, always had Adobe, and it's hard to explain how we got here. But if you're an outsider looking in, I think people in five years are gonna look back and think that the suites were kind of crazy and that we actually like, we're paying for really an amalgamation of a bunch of acquisitions that instead of just using individual products off a warehouse.
00;52;03;11 - 00;52;36;38
Speaker 1
It's interesting the way you phrase it because yes, it's like, why would you go with this Frankenstein? And I think it's actually the biggest opportunity for upcoming companies that are really trying to compete with the Adobe's and Salesforce is to if you are going to acquire, make it so that it all works seamlessly, because I think that is ultimately at the core of it, the the downfall of suites is them not figuring out a way for everything to fully integrate and an easy, centralized place that you can also adjust accordingly and be flexible to your term.
00;52;36;38 - 00;52;41;57
Speaker 1
I think things will be a lot different for them if it was a different way of going about it.
00;52;42;02 - 00;52;50;21
Speaker 2
But you know what? It's a new generation, and I think what's great is that every generation looks at things and challenges it and says, do we have to keep doing it the same way we did it before?
00;52;50;36 - 00;53;08;33
Speaker 1
You know, it couldn't be more true in every capacity, but particularly in martech. Yeah, I definitely agree. Okay. What is something someone can do this quarter? It is Q1 is a new year. They have suite fatigue. What is the first thing you'd have them do Monday morning?
00;53;08;33 - 00;53;38;50
Speaker 2
Yeah I think the first step I would take is do an ROI analysis on your marketing suite. And I'm shocked how few companies do this. They think of a marketing suite as like piece of the furniture or a laptop. That's just like a sunk cost. But if you think about it, if you're using most of these marketing suites are SAS tools, so you're renting, you're not buying, and you want to make it's kind of like renting a house or an apartment, but the landlord's never making any updates.
00;53;39;04 - 00;53;55;42
Speaker 2
So what's your ROI of that suite. And so I would say, what is the amount of money that you're paying for the suite for the year? What is the amount of money you're paying for the employees who have to support the suite? Any external consultants you're doing, add all of that up and let's just say that's $10 million a year.
00;53;55;44 - 00;54;14;28
Speaker 2
Are you getting ROI from that? Can you point to particular cases where you have made more money from your investment in the marketing suite then you spent? And I think when most companies, I think they're afraid to do that, to be honest with you, because they're like, this is a sunk cost, but I don't think it should be.
00;54;14;28 - 00;54;37;06
Speaker 2
And I think you should challenge your marketing suite to, to to be able to provide that ROI. And then once you know that number and you say, okay, we're spending 10 million a year and we're making, let's say we we could point to 7 million. So in a weird way, we're losing 3 million a year. Look at a different architecture and say, okay, well, we already have this data in our warehouse so that we're paying for we're going to do that no matter what.
00;54;37;15 - 00;54;52;19
Speaker 2
So if we think about the applications we put on top of it, we say, okay, if we break our suite into the five functions, it does. If we looked at a competing vendor for each of those five functions, let's just go out and talk to a couple vendors and find out how much would it be for a new ISP?
00;54;52;19 - 00;55;11;00
Speaker 2
That's not the sweet one. How much would it be for a CDP that isn't the one that's in the sweet? How much would it be for a different analytics tool? And if you add all those up, then you can actually compare apples to apples. And I think that that's something that you really should do almost like on a 2 or 3 year basis.
00;55;11;00 - 00;55;32;13
Speaker 2
Like every couple of years you should evaluate your stack because technology changes, your employees change and so on. So that's the I think that'd be the first thing that I would do, because no one can really argue with, like, you want to make sure you're getting the most money out of the investment and instead of thinking of it as a cost, you're investing in software to help your business, and you should expect an ROI from it.
00;55;32;17 - 00;55;35;15
Speaker 1
Without a doubt, if you're not getting an ROI, why are you spending money on it?
00;55;35;25 - 00;55;36;24
Speaker 2
Yeah.
00;55;36;28 - 00;55;49;08
Speaker 1
No, I, I find that to be really helpful, an actionable way to think through this really kind of heady topic and also painfully heady, and that it's hurting everyone's heads if we're all having migraines about this.
00;55;49;13 - 00;56;08;47
Speaker 2
Yeah. And I go back to the thing I said earlier, and if you want to dumb it down to the simplest thing is like if you took a step back and you looked at how much you were spending on a marketing suite today, if you could wave a magic wand and it would be gone and you were going to buy it today, would you spend that much money for what you now know that you're getting from that suite?
00;56;08;47 - 00;56;16;38
Speaker 2
The adoption you're getting, the value you're getting. And if the answer is no, then now you can have an intelligent conversation about alternatives.
00;56;16;47 - 00;56;47;18
Speaker 1
Yep. I completely agree and kind of summarize the takeaways that I've gathered from all the things you've shared and challenges. One would be to have that audit run that suite fatigue audit for however long it takes to really identify cost usage, adoption, measurable impact, and really figure out what challenges you want to assess upon renewal, but also to your point and to kind of the quotes of understanding that there are different renewal and price changes every year.
00;56;47;23 - 00;57;07;46
Speaker 1
Use some forced upgrades, like a new migration you didn't ask for as a way to instead of auto renew, used as an exit ramp, or at least get an RFP out there to understand what the other options are and pricing options, and you need to break in the migration costs, of course. And then thirdly, really think through and piloting a concept of composability.
00;57;07;46 - 00;57;33;33
Speaker 1
And so having one audience and then thinking how that one audience informs one channel and one KPI, and where and how identity and government will break and who is involved so that it is a data engineering? Is it marketing? How many different kind of just loops are you creating internally in terms of not just fatigue and confusion, but also unnecessary miscommunications and and work across the board?
00;57;33;35 - 00;57;50;13
Speaker 2
Yeah. And I think another thing is funny is, when when I work at some companies, I tell them to do a survey within our company and like find out, do people really like the tools that they're using, or are they just being forced to use tools? And a lot of times the executives love the marketing suite because it's one contract.
00;57;50;18 - 00;58;01;00
Speaker 2
There's, you know, in their mind, oh, I just signed one contract. Everyone's happy, but they don't often hear the feedback from the people who are using the tools day to day. Are they really, you know, having success and enjoying using those tools?
00;58;01;00 - 00;58;20;08
Speaker 1
Yeah, no, that's a great take away as well because I always want to talk to the ground soldiers first because they know what's working and what's not working, whether they know how to kind of share it upstream. That's the harder part. All right. Well, Adam Greco, thank you so much for being here. One last question. Who is someone we should have on the podcast?
00;58;20;08 - 00;58;41;28
Speaker 2
Yeah, I would love to hear from Lauren Vaccarello. I don't know if you know Lauren. I worked with her at Salesforce and she's been the CMO of a couple companies. Our current company is AI company. I don't know how you pronounce it, actually. It's, Weka. Weka? I don't know which week I. Rebecca, but I have just always been impressed with Lauren.
00;58;41;28 - 00;59;04;01
Speaker 2
She's just a really great leader. She understands the martech space better than almost anyone. And, I just got to sit one cubicle away from her when she was managing all of our paid search when we were at Salesforce. And I've just been amazed to watch her career. And she's done a phenomenal job. She's on multiple boards and mentors people, but the best part is that she just tells it like it is.
00;59;04;01 - 00;59;08;27
Speaker 2
So, you could ask her any question and she'll give you a no B.S. answer.
00;59;08;29 - 00;59;17;06
Speaker 1
That's my kind of gal in the hot seat. The hotter the take, the better. Well, I would love an introduction. And with that, thank you so much. Where can folks find you?
00;59;17;10 - 00;59;29;42
Speaker 2
Yeah. Thank you so much for having me. You know, I kind of live on LinkedIn, so I've got, large, large network there. So anyone can come to LinkedIn, Adam Greco and find me, and, yeah. Happy to connect with anyone.
00;59;29;49 - 00;59;31;44
Speaker 1
Wonderful. Well, thank you so much.
00;59;31;49 - 00;59;36;29
Speaker 2
Thanks so much for having me. On.