Building tool agnostic skills - a formula for success
Building tool agnostic skills - a formula for success
Alphabet + HubSpot Rumors got you thinking?
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Any news involving a heavy hitter in the CRM/Marketing Automation space spreads quickly, and last week was no exception. Rumors spread quickly that Alphabet, Google’s parent company, was considering making an acquisition offer of inbound marketing pioneer HubSpot.
The information originated from a reliable source, opinions were varied, and the memes were the best part.
While the rumors are just rumors, and the general opinion is that such a deal would never make it past any sort of regulatory scrutiny, it did get the collecting Marketing Operations mindshare spinning into overdrive.
On one hand, marrying HubSpot’s extensive capabilities and customer focus with Google’s powerful advertising channels and cache of ALL sorts of personal and business-related data does seem to be an ideal pairing, but on the other hand, well - I’ll just leave this here.
Of course, this all is putting the cart about 10 miles in front of the horse.
In general, though, it does open up some interesting thought exercises to explore. Let’s suspend disbelief for a few months and explore some of the Operational truths that continue to be relevant in the face of the ever-changing vendor landscape.
More tools, better career options
The ability to apply principles and knowledge in a variety of tools is gaining importance relative to single tool expertise. What does that mean?
It means hiring managers will be more interested in someone who can apply a strategy in a variety of tools. Knowing which buttons to push and which specialized features to utilize is an important foundation, but operations will be expected to be fluent across a wide and varied set of tools in each role.
Being able to translate specific business needs to the tools you have available will become a crucial skill for anyone looking to progress in their career.
Understanding how various tools complement each other and being able to leverage them in a cohesive manner will set apart top performers on any Operations team.
With a broader skill set that transcends individual tools, Ops pros can navigate their day-to-day roles and better deliver a solution tailored to meet specific business objectives. Adaptability and versatility are essential.
What’s next for those who have specialized in a single tool, or a small set of tools?
Personally, I would take advantage of the need others have for your hard-earned experience. Sharing what you know on LinkedIn, in a newsletter, or even in a paid course or other offering could be a great way to capitalize on all of your hard work.
In my experience, some of these individuals typically come from more of a fulfillment background, rather than a strategic one. They gained their experience on the job and excel in teams that focus heavily on executing requests from other teams. They may not have taken the time to fully develop their strategic skills.
It makes sense to experiment with taking the initiative to develop a business case or proposal for a problem or opportunity you’ve identified, solicit feedback, achieve a mutual understanding, and then proceed with a well-defined construction in the tools themselves.
Going through this exercise will help you begin to strengthen your strategic approach. You can further refine this idea by also building some prioritization into the exercise.
Data is front and center - do you know how to use it?
Data is moving to its rightful place of significance in the Operations realm.
I’m not talking about reporting, attribution, and analytics, though those are still critical functions that the team must be prepared to deliver.
I’m talking about the essential element of every Marketing campaign, the fuel for every effective qualification conversation and demo, and the key input into every renewal - prospect and customer data. That is, the data that lives inside of the tools you manage.
“We’re a data provider” is the marketing/sales tech version of a running scene in any movie Tom Cruise stars in - it’s inevitable and comes up every time.
Which raises the question, where does all the data these providers are selling all come from?
Managing these providers and the data they offer is becoming more of a critical task for many Operations teams, as well as determining how to marry this third-party data with your own first-party data.
As data accessibility becomes more ubiquitous and data privacy becomes more nuanced, being able to wrangle the data in such a way that you can create a specific, relevant audience to target with marketing campaigns and sales outreach is going to require more thought, strategy, and expertise.
We haven’t even touched on the enablement aspect.
How are you ensuring that product marketing is aware of the audiences you can target?
Is your demand-gen team able to target these audiences on all of their channels?
Do SDRs have access to quality enriched data?
Are you including third-party data in your scoring and prioritization workflows?
The list is extensive. You’ll find that there are fewer tool-specific items included, as the work and strategy is increasingly required on the data side.
Wrap Up
It will be interesting to see if there’s any truth behind this rumored Alphabet/HubSpot conversation.
All of the other “major” players in the Marketing Automation and CRM spaces are highly capitalized:
CRM/Marketing Automation:
Salesforce/Pardot: $292.25 billion
HubSpot: $33.95 billion
Marketing Automation:
Adobe/Marketo: $217.33 billion
Oracle/Eloqua: 343.29 billion
CRM:
Microsoft: $3.16 trillion
Alphabet: $1.90 trillion
A $40 billion market capitalization is impressive, but it is significantly lower in comparison to the other players in the space - a merger with Alphabet would instantly propel HubSpot into the second highest position, for what that’s worth.
It’s interesting that a CRM/Marketing Automation tool has potentially caught the eye of the decision-makers at Alphabet. While it’s one of the most significant lines of business in the GTM tech world, it’s not among the most interesting or innovative products at this point. Perhaps it’s a testament to the work HubSpot has been doing to be perceived as more of an equal to Salesforce.
It would be disappointing if the key motivation behind the purchase was purely to pad the balance sheet, but it seems to have been at least partially the situation with other similar acquisitions.
Eloqua seems to have all but vanished, despite holding a special place in my heart because it was the tool that I first used as I was growing into an Operations role. I hardly hear it come up in conversations with peers or on LinkedIn.
You could argue that Marketo has continued to improve and release new features since the Adobe acquisition, but I’m still undecided as to whether or not it’s going to be sustainable, and if they’re really making a significant difference for the day-to-day user.
I am in the minority, but my belief that Marketing Automation tools will begin to lose their place of prominence in our tech stacks is still strongly held, and only getting stronger as I look at how go-to-market approaches are evolving in real-time. I could be wrong, at least on the timing.
Either way, it’s a good reminder that change can happen unexpectedly, and it can be disruptive if you’re not prepared for it. It’s a good time to take an inventory of your personal skill set and your team’s tech stack as well. Look for ways you can be prepared for what the future may hold.