Marketing Automation and the Changing Landscape with Oren Greenberg

In this episode, host Eric Dickmann interviews Oren Greenberg. Oren is a growth marketer, On-Demand CMO, and Founder / Chief Growth Officer of the Kurve Consultancy in London. He helps startups and corporate innovation projects scale using digital channels. He has written for leading marketing blogs and has been featured in the international press.

In this episode, Oren shares his thoughts on content marketing, growth strategies, and the changing landscape for marketing automation technologies.

The MarTech Landscape Report can be found here: https://kurve.co.uk/VirtualCMOPodcast

Eric Dickmann can be found on Twitter @EDickmann and LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/edickmann and my website https://ericdickmann.com

Oren Greenberg can be found online at https://kurve.co.uk/ on Twitter @Orengreen.

Episode Summary: The episode summary can be found at https://fiveechelon.com/marketing-automation-changing-landscape-s3e14/

If you'd like to contact us with feedback or guest inquiries, please visit:
https://fiveechelon.com/podcast

For more information about Virtual CMO strategic marketing consulting services, visit The Five Echelon Group at https://fiveechelon.com
 
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Transcript

Carla: 0:01

The Virtual CMO podcast is sponsored by the strategic marketing consulting services of The Five Echelon Group. If you’d like to work directly with The Five Echelon Group and receive personal coaching and support to optimize your business, enhance your marketing effectiveness and grow your revenue, visit Five Echelon.com to learn more and schedule a free consultation.

Eric Dickmann: 0:24

Welcome to The Virtual CMO podcast. I'm your host, Eric Dickmann. In this podcast, we have conversations with marketing professionals who share the strategies, tactics, and mindset you can use to improve the effectiveness of your marketing activities and grow your business. This week, I'm excited to welcome Oren Greenberg to the podcast. Oren is a growth marketer and founder of the Kurve Consultancy in London. He helps startups and corporate innovation project scale using digital channels. He has written for leading marketing blog and has been featured in the international press. Hey Oren. Welcome to the virtual CMO podcast. I'm so glad you could join us today.

Oren Greenberg: 1:05

Eric. Thanks for having me.

Eric Dickmann: 1:06

This is great because you are now officially the second fellow virtual CMO that I've had as a guest on the show and to start things off today, I would really love it. If you could just give the audience a little bit of history on your background. I know that you're currently running curve over in the UK. And how did you get there?

Oren Greenberg: 1:25

Yeah. Sure. yeah, it's funny. We are there. And the on demand, same old virtual CMOs. Yeah. It's it's nice to see a parallel professional brother, sort of speak. Yeah. how did I get into being a CMO, I've worked for a lot of these setbacks businesses in the last 17 years. And then about eight years ago, I started my own consultancy. And since then it's hybrids consultants agency, and we do the strategy versus this is tactical delivery work. And now I work for some of these fantastic brands like Canon and Lenovo, HomeServe and investing corporates, but also I work with all the scallups. So those are my two primary types of businesses and they're very different, very funny, interesting mix to have two contrasting, What was the undertaking digital transformation and the others try to distract the former. So it's quite funny and yeah, so it's a lot of fun, very intense and very engaging. And then really, I just love working with them, really smart people and, that apparently desires be concentration on them tech companies. So I think that's how it ended up working with. And by that works with is over about 35 businesses now and BtoC, BtoB and list the different industries quite specialized in the SAS space and Syntec space but primarily.

Eric Dickmann: 2:31

It's so interesting because there's a lot in there, right? In terms of specialization. And the needs of a big business are very different from the needs of a young company, a startup. And one of the things that I hear over and over again, when working with a young companies, small startups, is that initially they're pouring all their resources into developing their product and service, trying to figure out whether there's a true market for it before they tend to spend a lot of money on marketing. What do you see as you're working with a lot of these younger, smaller companies?

Oren Greenberg: 3:01

Yeah. I had a case like this the other day, where there is a lot of money. And what was interesting, is there the core audience of the core market? They cracked it. They had amazing retention. And, the clients were over the moon, but the problem is the total addressable market they had was quite small. And that when they then raise a very sizable ground, I think it was a round. And then they realized that took them to where they are now is very far from the growth they need to achieve as a VC backed business. So to go from. 700,000 a month. MRR to, a hundred mil revenue to 10 mil a month. And it's quite a leap. And the number of customers you need to service obviously is, Assistant has as a larger, you need like a dozen customers to several thousand customers and they realized the total addressable market on which the basis there isn't, the money is too small, but they never did that analysis up to that point. So now they're pivoting. The business after the around, which is not what you want to read you the air, and this is a fuel for accelerating the growth. And I think what happens early stage businesses. I think it's better to understand the addressable market, how big it is rather than raise money under the premise. You're gonna hire him as a smart people and figure it out. Because that doesn't work so well from what I've seen, it's very difficult to figure out product market fit while you haven't launched team. That's growing with us as different opinions. And then the business tends to go in lots of different directions and focuses is diluted. And I think, ambition, you I'm really big on ambition. I like what you have is just people. I'm very ambitious myself, but this ambitious is realistic. And I think it's important that ambition. Doesn't exceed the re realistic constraints, because I think that. The emotional anxiety and stress and on the founder is tremendous. But it also doesn't get the roads that were a certain confidence as a team. And then you start losing good people. They've learned a lot about their business. They leave as the cost of that is horrific to the business to take a hit on that. So that's him, I've seen a few of those now, and I've also seen the flip side. I've seen businesses, where, or the stage of my career. I was employee number 15. They grew to a thousand employees and two and a half years. And that was one of the like a unicorn. And businesses in the UK, not many of them how that, and I was very fortunate to ride that wave and see ya. I'm not saying it's all gloom, but if you think about how many unicorns exist in the world, I think it's somewhere between 84 and 130 now. And she's saying because it's like a hundred and let's say 150 unicorns. How many businesses are there? Tens of Indians. Wait a second. That's not a good audit. So the audit becoming escape thing, crazy. Pinterest, Twitter, Facebook, et cetera. Other against here. And I think in a four, there needs to be a tempering of realistic expectations. I'm very big on building sustainable businesses, profitable businesses. I'm not necessarily a big believer in them. And trying to become a unicorn business. I'm not fond of this as a concept. I think it's really about market opportunity in the competitive forces. And I think if you have an amazing opportunity of a best in class product, then go far and do that. But, and it has to be realistic and that's based on data and research, not ambition. And I think that's what, that's the key point I'm trying to address here. Is having vision is immaterial without the data to back it up. And I see a lot of founders, they don't really do the proper research, but they're very ambitious. So I would recommend against doing that. I think, there's a reason there's market research. There's a reason. This is a specialism in a competency. As a reason, big businesses invest so much money into that area.

Eric Dickmann: 6:28

I love that you brought up product market fit, because I think this is so key, especially for a lot of younger companies, because my experience working with founders is that they always think that they have something that is a completely new in the marketplace, but you just said what I believe so strongly in that what's usually true is that it's not completely different in the marketplace. It's a variation of something that already exists. And what you have to do is you have to build a best in class product. You have to do something that truly differentiates your particular take on a product or service because there just aren't that many truly game changing ideas or products out there.

Oren Greenberg: 7:08

Yeah, I think that is, there's two aspects of this previously. I think you could build a successful business, just doing an amazing job for sales and marketing and having an average product. I don't think that's. Aplicable in the world we live in anymore. The reason is the disintermediation of, players. So I think now people are going direct to consumer and then businesses are going direct. And then one guys relying on the agency. It just scales of economy. So I think the way people buy, and this is the mediation is a significant, and that's the first thing I was saying. Also relying on salespeople on Sonic purpose. Change now content marketing is really critical in the buyer's journey, especially in B2B and that's becoming progressively more important over time has to be seen. That's the first consideration. The second is. I just think that. The way. companies actually structured. I don't think they have authentic innovations from what I can see. Yeah, and I think, yeah. I think that kind of key second conservation has reviews. So nowadays you go to TripAdvisor, reviews you to go to Google, reviews and that innovation that you're expecting to see in the product. If that's not real, it's going to be reflected in those reviews. So people are gonna. The owner of the founders, I speak to the kind of No, if you just do a great jump in sales and marketing, and it's you just, if people experience the product, they're going to leave a review, reflecting their experiences, the product. And that says a marketing can't manipulate or change that it's really hard to gain these systems and it's like growth hacking or like really creative solutions. It's just nonsense. Like you can't build. A sustainable business is based on recurring revenue. If you don't have happy customers is so reliant nowadays and what they read all the customers experiencing testimonials or reviews that you comedy fake that. And then I reckon in terms of businesses I come across, I'd say one in 20 to one to 25 is the authentic key innovating today. I talked to one who's authentically innovating. They have unique IP and technology. So the scientists 12 years to develop. And I was blown away because it's sustainable. It's very on trend. And it's And I was just like, wow. Yeah. I'd love to work with you because I think that year, not only as a value aligned, you're doing something good that benefits people, but also. You're going to be commercially very successful because you're solving a real problem in the market. Just need to find that right fit. so yeah, I think it's just rare. I don't think, I think it was really hard. I think. what. if your intrepreneurial, you're not the scientist, who's going to do a PhD and mechanical bioengineering. And I think the truth is if you think of how many multimillionaires, even there in the world, They actually technical engineers by background. No software, developer as you think about Stripe, you think even about him mosque or you think about other businesses it's actually engineers. that the background is building products and they built it from scratch themselves. And they're very successful as a result. And I think we're moving away from a sales and marketing led world to a product I'd world. And I think product led marketing product marketing. Particularly important and functions are growing rapidly. And I think that's where a lot of the growth is gonna come from. A lot of VCs recommend that full of technology based businesses. Now. The first hire for that to be a product marketeer and a specific talking about sassier, I'm always seems a bit or very different in B2C.

Eric Dickmann: 10:14

I think it's interesting that you're working with both SAS companies and you mentioned FinTech as well. Because when I look at the landscape, you have a lot of legacy software companies that are still struggling in the move to the cloud. because of their huge investment in older technology, younger companies often have an advantage there because they can build for today's technology right now. And the same is true in the financial services space, right? You have a lot of big players there who have invested, billions of dollars over the years and their infrastructure, but now all of these FinTech innovators come up and they can create these truly innovative solutions very quickly. And they're out innovating the big players who have a lot more resource than they do. what do you see as some of them unique kind of marketing challenges for some of these legacy players, these bigger businesses.

Oren Greenberg: 10:59

Yes, I've worked in some of them. And having worked in a few banks and I've also worked with another, the FinTech. So I can really delineate, I think, one of the banks I worked in, they had the five layers of risk. So to answer the, I remember like getting a PDF a truth, took me three months. And it was like a marketing piece of collateral. And, this is the barriers because of risk and compliancy and processes and systems limit them. The truth is they are more secure and more robust than these new contenders that are coming to play. And kinds knows evident when you see like a wire cards go, boss saw I remember a lot of the fintechs in the UK a few months ago, they couldn't make payments because one of the core foundational players is they will learn to this one player in the supply chain and they went bust and the banks working fine. I'm not saying the banks doesn't have problems as well because of the legacy issues and they do. But I'm just saying that this is all really. A like for like comparison and that's important to understand. So also the pros and cons, the pros of the banks and the fact they have so secure and the legacy issues is also the common. The fact that they're very slow and they adapt as quickly. so I think it's a really interesting complexity. I think there's two components. One of them is a technology stack and the archaic nature than how it's been those top of the stack of Domino's over the years. But the second is a cultural component of the cultural component is a relationship. So the businesses and corporates I work in so that the people that worked there 10, 15, 20 years, and what happens is they get very conditioned the way that they think, and they adapt to the company culture. And copra to generally risk averse and I'm relatively slow. And I think the cultural transformation that I see. is really challenging. and people are struggling to adapt. So there's a few things. It's a skills shortage. Does it lack of digital skills, especially for people who've been doing something offline for a very long time. It's very, it's a steep learning curve. And then, the cultural component and attitude is another thing it's like, why do I need to change the way I do things? Why do I need to learn these new tools? And then the third is actually just the shortage of really great tools. there's the fragmentation in the marketing tech landscape or no. Across all of the other tools, design tools, product tools. The interpretive management tools and there's a lot of fermentation there. Isn't a one tool that does everything really deep, that everyone's happy with. Everyone is using 20, 30, 50, a hundred tools in that business. And a lot of the times these tools don't integrate well. So now you have this metal layer of tools that could connect other tools, and then you have metal tools, and those tools by that connect the pipe into those tools. And it's really hard. The supply chain for the tech stack is a great intricate, and just learning and understanding that while you're trying to do your normal day job, which is already doing 10, 15 things, people are overwhelmed and then you're getting 150 emails a day. So you're the one because of the frequency of communication and the needs to, for everyone to disseminate information, to work with agile, and then everyone that she works less. Agile because no one could absolve and be aware of like 5,000 other people in there. So I think that the startups and benefit not just from the speed because of the lack of archaic systems, a smaller teams, it's one of the teams can communicate more effectively. They don't have to include some of the other people in the periphery. So they have a few different competitive advantages. I'd say it's the only competitive advantage speed is the only advantage. It doesn't have the relationship doesn't have any infrastructure. And so we'll do they really have to just have speed and they need to capitalize on that.

Eric Dickmann: 14:07

One thing I'm consistently fascinated with is in the financial services space, especially, that would be a case where I would say. That a lot of the big banks, truly view that they have a unique and a differentiated product. And I think most of us would argue that they absolutely do not. Maybe there are some corporate products or investment products we certainly saw with the financial crisis years ago that some of those were innovative products that ended up causing a lot of problems. But I think by and large people would look at something like a financial services institution say you don't really offer anything unique. You offer savings and checking and certificates of deposit. where they're really differentiated is on their service levels. And how people perceive their interactions with those organizations. Do you see that often in companies that you work with as well is it's not so much the product or the service It's really the service levels that they've established.

Oren Greenberg: 15:00

So I'm going to delineate here and the product they sell, the way, the deployment of that product, and then the service. So if you just started the product. if you think about a financial institution, sending loans, all banks to get loans, all sending the same product, which is cash, which is money, which is actually very commoditized, right? The value of money is very low. So they're all sending the same commoditized product. So how are they differentiated? And the answer is then not, but the way that you access that product, how fast is it? How efficient was it? And how was that experience? Was it a mobile first experience that you have to go through a 20 page form online on your responsive website and that experience of how you access it, even though it's commoditized is the differentiating point. And then the next layer is the services layer. It's if I have a problem with the product, do I have an issue? How fast are they? How responsive are they? How helpful are they? How easy is it for me to access? if I'm getting rerouted through six different countries in Southeast Asia, between Vietnam and India to talk to different representation, the different geography's different times zones to try and resolve my issue. And I spent nine hours on the phone. I'm exhausted exasperated. I'm going to go switch to the bank. So I think for that, definitely. I think there's also a big, a big winning point for the US a very customer centric in a way that European countries. We'd like to think that they aren't really the us has a highest standard of expectation as a customer and businesses adapt to meet that in Europe. It's a bit more relaxed, like where we're stronger in other areas. But customer service is not the best in the terms of, and I think what's really interesting is, businesses look at customer service is as a cost and by outsourcing it to a cheaper a country that affects the PNL. But what they're really doing is compromising the longevity of the brand perception of the loyal customers, because their outsourced it to someone who doesn't, who's not necessarily as good as someone who would be local. And then that's something that I've seen definitely in FinTech, in the UK with different service providers and how they provide that level of service. And I think a lot of it actually comes down to the tools that the customer service operators actually use as well. So it goes back to the technology stack and how integrated that they do is how easy it is to access. Cause if the rep is like typing on the records for customer, and that takes two minutes for that page to load, that affects the experience for the customer. But he also experiences and then the rep gets frustrated and then like how many, aggravated or agitated customers. Can you deal with him the day before you had the motivation? Is this so customer service is it's really the most, one of the most important functions in the business, but it's also one of the most undervalued in the sense that it's just really difficult. I was very like, what do you do if there's a problem in the products and you have an influx of calls because of the technical issue and the competitor on the strain and the business. I don't think there's an easy way to solve this. I think it's like every other part of the business. Excellent people and excellent processes, excellent systems excellent and planning. And then, yeah. Not trying to do too many things at the same time, radical focus, specialization. It's probably positioning. Are we really building a business like a car, And cars have 60,000 components. And if you missed the fuel time is a car. So I was gonna get for me to be just one item of the 60,000, sorry, 30,000 components. Do you got 29 and 1,999. Is it still going to be able to drive in the answer's? No. And a business kind of operates the same, except, you can drive and wonky car. We'd like, the wheels onto the inflated and the gear is the kind of sticky and. and you go in. You got to decide what is the most important feature for your customers when they're buying this car? and how are you different than all the other cars that customers trying to buy? And the truth is you can't have the best wheels and the best of both. And the best windscreen and the best, like everything you can, but then you'll Porsche. And then the truth is, if you look at your market, share between Volvo and Porsche, you see the difference. And the reason is there's very few people who can buy a product that's a good, so instead of trying to beat the best at everything, just be best of the thing that's most important across your competitive set for your customer type. And that niche thinking as a business Rose, I start to diversify because they wanted to get mitigated risk, but we're actually doing a strategic compromise and them then, the cards fall and the business collapses. And we see that a lot. And I think the reason that these big businesses collapse is because they're just nobody focused. If you look at what Steve jobs had done with Apple. And then I think there's a few other businesses that do this. Starbucks is when the CEO's came in and the business was in disarray. It was because it had too many skews into many product lines and they cut all the crap and they just focus on what's most essential and important. And then just became best of that, whether a specific line of products, rather than having too many products. And I really think it's a difference between your mindset. Are you thinking where the biggest, so you thinking about the best. And I think nowadays, if you care about that, Revenue. Great. It'd be the biggest, if you care about profit and bottom line, think about being the best. And I don't know about you. I run a business for profitability in hope I have enough of vanity, so that's yeah, that's my kind of business logic.

Eric Dickmann: 19:40

I think it makes a lot of sense. And I think you naturally segwayed into a great conversation about automation and technology, because it's not so much the technology is good or bad. Oftentimes it's the implementation of this technology, how it's being used, how people are trained to use it. What the effects of our, on the customer experience. I talk a lot on this podcast about reducing friction in the buyer's journey to really enable people, to discover your products, to be able to buy them easily and then be able to service them, after the sale, because there is marketing involved in that entire journey. but as we look at the landscape, there have been so many incredible products that have come to market that have really made things easier. we're talking on a live stream today and we're broadcasting to multiple platforms at the same time, as well as recording a podcast. And this is all software that's relatively do. But when you look at the marketing automation landscape and all the tools that are out there, what do you see changing? It's just, it's so crowded.

Oren Greenberg: 20:41

Yeah. So what I see is, so actually he did this really interesting project recently. It's a collaboration with similar web and we took all of the different, MarTech players based on Scott, Brinker's incredible work with the new moon scape and then for graphics. It was all the 8,000 logos. And we looked at all the traffic to all of these different websites over the last three years to try and understand what are the trends and what is changing, what is happening. So it's a really interesting question. so I'm not going to reveal too much for the insight here, but I'm, hopefully you can share a link for people to register for the full report when we finish it in the notes. But yeah, some of the learnings that we saw was. With the fermentation is growing, but the total traffic isn't. So if the total traffic is stagnant, but there's a lot more competition. What does that mean for your business? it's getting more crowded. And that means you need to be a bit more pinpointed and focus on the value that you deliver and do a better job because you don't know when someone's going to come behind you and try and start eating up your market, share in your niche. And so I think it's, I think it's getting more complicated for the buyer to discern. What is the difference. If we thought about this new category, one of the fastest growing categories in MarTech by far the top five fastest growing is a CDPs customer data platforms. So at first I was at 16. I went to CDP is for those who don't know. And allows you to personalize their customer's journey and collate all the information about them from all the different touch points into one centralized place. that means is you can pay it at a better messages to them and understand their patterns of behavior. So you can increase personalization. I'm going live. We're moving towards increased personalization, even though there's conflicting evidence. SM Gardner did release a report recently that said that he thinks you're most will abandon personalization. If you talk to all the personalization tools, they have the exact opposite narrative. When they're saying it does attend a five X to 10 X growth in personalization. So I think they're both true sound personalization and this just doesn't buy on. Some of them will live and thrive and the answers to which ones deliver value to the customer. Personalization is done, but unnecessary. So I think there's a really interesting question about this increasing ornamentation of competition. So with CDPs, the grown massively, and if you look at them, There is no such thing as a CDP ready. So different CDPs have such a varied functionality. That's like a catchall umbrella. That's very broad and not explicitly meaningful. a CDP is different than a CRM because CRM captures customer records and notes for sales and customer services. a CDP doesn't do that. No CDP gets customer data. And as you just centralize it for me, channel personalization and then different. But if you look in the CDP market and trying to send the differences between them, it's a bit of a rabbit hole. And I think that's where the problem here is the customer is overwhelmed and the customer doesn't understand, which is the best tool. And it's very hard. So I think what's happening now is as it is more, the decision making committees are growing in B2B. There's more people that vote decision making process, and there's more fermentation. There's more due diligence required to. Find the right stack. And that's very difficult because it's not to say that people are staying in their jobs for a longer period of time, So if people are leaving their jobs and they've done all the due diligence at the research for that very skin, that tool, what actually happens when they start moving to another job. So I think the businesses are facing complexity. On buying and those, the sellers of facing complexity with selling and the fragmentation and Marty and marketing tech stack is very challenging for those businesses.

Eric Dickmann: 23:57

Hey, it's Eric here and we'll be right back to the podcast. But first, are you ready to grow, scale, and take your marketing to the next level? If so, The Five Echelon Group's Virtual CMO onsulting service may be a great fit for you. We can help build a strategic marketing plan for your business and manage its execution, step-by-step. We'll focus on areas like how to attract more leads. How to create compelling messaging that resonates with your ideal customers. How to strategically package and position your products and services. How to increase lead conversion, improve your margins, and scale your business. To find out more about our consulting offerings and schedule a consultation, go to fiveechelon.com and click on Services. Now back to the podcast. We talked a little bit about your report and I'm glad you're going to share that with the audience once it's fully available, because I think it's a very interesting study. but if you were consulting with the business, would you say that the very first thing that they need to do is implement a CRM? Do you think that where, I guess what I'm asking is where do you think is that pillar that they should start to build their marketing automation stack from?

Oren Greenberg: 25:09

Yeah, it's a fantastic question. I think the foundation a little pillar, and I guess the way I see it for, from a marketing point of view is that you need to get your positioning in the market, right? You then need to get your branding, right? Is I need to get your messaging right. Then once, you know what I can, your audience, the messages, you're very clear on who you're going, where you're getting them from, like which channels. So you have your channel and you have the audience, your resources, your team deployment. Then you need to start defining your tech stacks, especially your missed four or five layers down and just do a marketing strategy. I want to actually see businesses doing is they put that number one to go. Let's get a HubSpot and then figure it out. And I'm like, what'd you think HubSpot does? And then it's like an ambiguous. It helps us with our marketing. Great. And what do you think it actually does? And they don't really understand how support's really good at like capturing leads and nurturing them. And effectively give you insight on who to prioritize for your sales team. That's really fundamentally what it does. It really well. It also does all the things that get us a bit of SEO. It does a bit of content marketing has like a basic CMS. It has a few other bits. But fundamentally the root of the benefit is this basic automation. And that's really built for scaling. Now, if you don't have product market fit, why do you need to tell this guy to enable scale? when I see is that businesses are trying to buy a the tech first, rather than really thinking about the solution, this whole thing. so I think the problem is variability on the type of marketing software that they need. Because, I've seen businesses buying very expensive kit believing they're going to grow into it. And then, and they couldn't get the internal team to buy in. So it ended up spending hundreds of thousands on the kit that the team just was reluctant to use. And then they ended up using kit. That was like a 10th of the cost. And Ikea was reading right from when they scale. But this whole fall away from that point that the timeline for growing into it's completely disconnected from where they are and I think that problem it's very variable. So I don't think there's a clear key pillar because also marketing automation is a very broad category. you can have really lightweight tools like convert kit or, convert flow, which is, it helps to capture leads and nurture and have basic email popups. I think that's marketing automation. But that's not like Marquetto pardult, which is like Salesforce or even Adobe, which is also marketing automation, but this costs you 50 X. And I think that problem is the businesses that are not clear a lot, Tool, because some of the businesses are really great job with marketing and sales. But then no sending the right tool to the business, the right stage. So then you. And that's a problem with that. I commonly see as well. I think it's specialists that they need an expert to help them navigate and figure out what is the right tech stack. But the problem is they need to have that as an extension of their marketing strategy. I also think companies spend too much money too much in the technology and I'm a technologist. I love it. Yeah. But I don't think a business should be spending more than 15% of their marketing budget on technology, but I should be spending distribution and they should be spent on the cutting through the noise and with a great creative and great content. And it shouldn't really be about automation and efficiency and reducing overhead because that's, even though it is a big cost, that's not where growth is going to come from growth. It's not going to come from removing unnecessary strain on your small team. It's actually going to come from getting more customers and doubling your revenue. And, I think the focus is in the wrong place. When people take about technology, I think technology's going to solve the problems that it doesn't really solve. yeah, so I think the core pillar, making sure you choose the right tech stack for the problem that you've got the business stage that you're in.

Eric Dickmann: 28:33

I think what you said is so important because marketing tools, marketing tactics are not the same thing as a marketing strategy. And you really have to have that overall strategy, understand what you're trying to accomplish, what your goals are in order to know what tools do I need, what tactics do I need to implement? And I would agree. I've seen so many companies invest large dollars in tools, but you have to have the resources to run the tools. You have to put information into the tools. You can't buy a Facebook ad without creating the ad. You can't, use an inbound marketing strategy without creating marketing content. There's a lot that goes into it, a lot of pieces. And so often it seems that people jump to the tool without realizing what you have to feed the beast in order for it to actually provide any value to you.

Oren Greenberg: 29:23

because it's also easy to understand that tangible, you can log into it. You can say people are using it. you can understand the benefit, but the problem is like our audience targeting audience creative, assessing it. It's intangible. And. People have a hard time buying intangible. we want to see something concrete, where am I spending money on them? A lot of it is actually because we're consumers, we want to buy something that's tangible. And ironically we buy, if you think about some of the, one of the most valuable assets in the world. Argue, and it's probably one of the least valued. And that is a book. You can learn so much from a book, but what is the cost of the book, a fiver or a tenner? It's interesting. It's packed with insight and it can change your life. It can transform your business. You can transform your personal life. But it's very low. And I think it's actually an anchoring of a misunderstanding of the value of strategy versus execution. That's where the confusion is. And what I see businesses doing is executing the law. They're just executing on the wrong things at the wrong time, in the right direction. Usually with the wrong people, using the wrong tools, and then they come to me and they say, I don't wanna sound while we don't manage it to get a result. And then I'm like, you got the wrong people. Tools. Yeah, we gotta fix all of this. and the reason is I think it's this specialist. I think people just don't understand how specialist is in 16 different types of marketeers, that 7,198 pieces of marketing tech. That is different tiers with different needs, for different types of businesses, to sometimes specialist tools for different businesses. And I had one business. I remember they said them, for three. Intercom is crap. And I'm like, really? No, it becomes a pretty good tool. it does what it says on the 10 and the ESCOs robust functionality. Yeah, we can do this and this I'm like, you're trying to get it to do something. It doesn't do. It's If you'd like, It's really a bad tool because it doesn't know what a screwdriver does. I'm not sure what to say to that. It's like you're using the wrong tool if you expecting to have to do with a screwdriver does. And I see that very common is that they don't actually, haven't done enough due diligence in house to realize what the tool does and doesn't do. And because they underestimated how complex and specialists. And marketing automation is very specialist.

Eric Dickmann: 31:18

and we talked about this as well before the call, but with all of these tools out there and the marketplace, just getting saturated there, probably isn't going to be longevity for all of them. Because there are a lot of things that do a piece of what you want, but not everything that you want. And there's room for consolidation for some of these tools to come together and say, you do this piece and we do this piece, but you need both pieces. So let's combine this into one tool. I can really see just in my own marketing stack and the kinds of tools that I invest in. I wish that certain things would come together as opposed to being in separate tools and with all of these players in the marketplace. There can't be room for all of them. Longterm. Don't you in envision a lot of consolidation.

Oren Greenberg: 32:00

I actually have a number and the number's roughly 43%. So 43% of the ones that are going to die off. And, yeah, a lot of them it's really hard out there. I think people underestimate the complexity and difficulty. And you go KRN, but what you get that number from? And the answer is if it website traffic isn't consistent decline for the last three years, the probability of them recovering is only 2%. So you've got data to validate the number of recovery. Once you manage to go off and then they go down and then how many managed to go back home again? Over three years, only 2% of the ones who have a consistent decline managed took her car. I counted the Kevin Spacey effect effectively. Yeah. It's such a big boon to your career or your problem is you're coming back from that as module. So I think the probability of recovery is very low, but so many of the websites and MarTech have a decline in traffic as definitely skew the ones who were big. They have much better growth and bathrooms and the ones who are small, they're very volatile. So some of them might haka Griff, and then a lot of them actually stacking it. And a lot of them are declining. And I think it's way grant. Are you and why, if you solidified your position in the MarTech landscape, like I think HubSpot. Is a very good face. I think Marquette has is a very good space. I think there'll be no, the ones who started 15 years ago, Salesforce they're in a good space, but. If you're brand new, you effectively, it's a question that you just don't know what the chances are you managing to make it or not? It's just very hard risk. And, I think that's no, I need. Savvy VC investor or a startup founder knows the odds are stacked against them, but it's still up for the challenge, which is really not on the admirable. I think it's, I think it's fantastic. But also on a practical level, VCs, it's one of the most effective investment vehicles and sources of returns. And the reason for that is that it works, they only get one or two of the customers that they've invested in the businesses. become a unicorn. But they compensate for the losses of all the other businesses on. and it's such an effective investment vehicle. And I think it's very, it's a very practical one cause they obviously yields results. So I guess that's my view on. Then, this kind of, yes, that will be consolidation. I think. We started doing some additional work to figure out what consolidation looks like. And I wasn't, I was surprised by how small to actually lost like the number of businesses there's from initial data. As much as consolidated as I expected. I think it's a very fragmented space meeting, lots of little nichey and needs. And I think just like the GDP in the US when you have some gigantic businesses, but like more than 60% of the GDP is businesses with less than five or 10 people or something. Mom and pop shops. And the same is probably reflected in MarTech where it's a lot of small businesses catering to very specific niches of specific audiences. And it isn't as big. We just have a skew because of how we're consuming news and our visibility and access to the landscape. And the, if you think about martech, you're going to think about YouTube ads or LinkedIn ads, or you didn't think about Cora. B to B, or you're going to be thinking about Unbounce or HubSpot or Marketo marketing automation or, landing page tools and email marketing tools like auto pilot, et cetera. And I think, there's just a lot of them. So it's hard for the brain to come to formulate the image. I think why it's called work is so fantastic. And then the work that I was doing was really trying to understand who's winning and who's losing, and then, enabled people better tools to select the vendor. But also help vendors understand how they are the competitive set that they're in. And I was very curious, both from a vendor perspective and from a buyer's perspective, how to enhance the amount of data they have to make budget decisions.

Eric Dickmann: 35:13

one of the reasons that, you and I know I offer services like virtual CMO on demand CMO services is because marketing is truly complicated. There's a lot going on here. And the idea is for businesses who need help putting together a strategy to know where to make those investments in technology, to know what kind of campaigns and tactics are going to be effective for their business to help them find that product market fit and they're available market space. These are the kinds of things where we can help out. And it's so nice to have a conversation with you about this stuff, because I think it's so important for so many businesses to consider how services like this could be a benefit for them.

Oren Greenberg: 35:52

Yep. I agree.

Eric Dickmann: 35:53

Hey, I want to thank you Oren for being on the podcast today. I will make sure that we have all of your contact information in the show notes so that people want to take a look at that report when it comes out. they can do that and also find you online. But I do appreciate you being here today. This was a great conversation and I look forward to seeing the full report myself.

Oren Greenberg: 36:12

Great. Thanks so much for having me.

Eric Dickmann: 36:16

Thank you for joining us on this episode of The Virtual CMO podcast. For more episodes, go to fiveechelon.com/podcast to subscribe through your podcast player of choice. And if you'd like to develop consistent lead flow and a highly effective marketing strategy, visit fiveechelon.com to learn more about our Virtual CMO consulting services.