A new article on
Marketing Land reports an interview with Jep Castelstein, who is a leading independent martech technical architect and has worked on some of the world's most complex martech implementations. His opinions of the future of martech unsettled the author, but seemingly not inaccurate.
Castelstein reckons that CRM will cease to be the center of the universe:
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"Many GTM teams today see the CRM (such as Salesforce.com) as the source of truth. But smart marketers know that it's all about customer data, and how they are using products or services. That information is typically stored in a data warehouse."
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The author says that the vast majority of companies look to the CRM as their system of record, holding customers' account information and revenue data. Sales, marketing, and finance departments refer to the CRM as a source of truth. Yet, most of the high-value usage and intent data doesn't sit in the CRM - and that stuff is important. The future marketing automation and email platforms will not have databases.
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"Well if you think about it, it's redundant to have the same data in your data warehouse, your MAP and CRM. And these different systems are often missing chunks of data. Remember that even leading MAPs today lack functionality when it comes to data analysis and management. My prediction -- the future MAPs will be built to hook directly into the data warehouse."
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Jep is referring to the daily syncing and updating of data in multiple places.
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"If the MAP is integrated directly to the data warehouse, marketers can build their targeting on real-time data, and the campaigns can be deployed faster. Oh, and don't forget about better security."
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Castelstein also says that time and money investment in data synchronization will triple. That's because, increasingly, marketing is involved in pulling together disparate data between platforms to get accurate views of the customer and to leverage the information in online and offline engagements.
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"We've seen huge investments in companies like Workato and Tray.io - Huge. Marketers sorely need help getting data synchronized across platforms, and that will only continue as the amount of touch points and engagements grow. Marketers today think they are data-driven, but I would argue that they are just scratching the surface. They are using data from basic events such as website visits, forms fills and email clicks. The real, high-value data points are intent data and product/service usage data."
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There are a lot more insight and comment in the original article, so I strongly recommend heading there to have a read!
