Martech 2030: Where Enterprises Actually Are, & What's Coming for Your Stack | Tony Byrne (Part 1)

00:00:01.200 — 00:01:11.820 · Jacqueline Freedman

Welcome to the Making Sense of Martech, where the rabbit hole goes deeper than the headlines. This is a show that pressure tests ideas, not just platforms. On the hot seat today, we have Tony Byrne. Tony has spent 25 years warning us not to trust futurists because nobody holds them accountable. Sounds very prescient right now.

But then he wrote a book called MarTech 2030. So today we hold him to it. A little bit about him first. Tony is the founder of Real Story Group and author of MarTech 2030: A North Star for Success in the AI Era. He started the firm as CMS Watch in 2001 on a single bet: work only for technology buyers, never for vendors.

Today, RSG advises enterprise buyers including IKEA, Unilever, and Capital One, and evaluates about 150 platforms across 10 martech marketplaces. Before that, he was a journalist and ran an engineering team at a systems integrator. There, he saw the gap between glowing analyst reports and what implementations actually delivered.

That gap became the business. Welcome, Tony. So glad you're here.

00:01:12.020 — 00:01:17.260 · Tony Byrne

Jacqueline, it's great to be here. A long time admirer of yours. So happy to to be on this pod with you.

00:01:17.660 — 00:01:40.100 · Jacqueline Freedman

Yes. I've been waiting for this moment to finally have you on. And for those who have not purchased it, definitely make sure to check out the book. It is excellent. And we're gonna dive into some of the topics together. But first, some rapid fire before we really get into the architecture of the future, let's see how you handle a faster clock without any diagrams.

00:01:41.580 — 00:01:43.380 · Jacqueline Freedman

What was your first martech tool?

00:01:43.420 — 00:02:07.430 · Tony Byrne

It was actually an email marketing tool we were trying to build in 1998 at that systems integrator that you mentioned. I think we had some funny name for it. Like Send It or Shove It or Blast It or something like that. And it was, wow, what if we just put an interface on top of something and a database of email addresses, and then let people send, you know, their newsletters out.

And we never took it to market. We prototyped it, and it looked great.

00:02:07.430 — 00:02:34.110 · Jacqueline Freedman

That's awesome. Yeah. I think people don't recognize building is a lot harder than you'd think, So I'm actually not a Swiftie. However, this conversation just makes too much sense to it makes too much sense to not talk about it in a Taylor Swift kind of way. So Taylor had her Eras Tour, and you have MarTech 1.0 all the way to 4.0.

Which level are most enterprises still playing on repeat?

00:02:34.310 — 00:03:35.850 · Tony Byrne

Yeah. So the four eras, these are the four eras of of consumer behavior and kind of enterprise response. And you know, we had the website era, the multichannel era from 2009, which we say through 2025, and we have 26 to 30, is the omnichannel era and then 30 to 35, we call the post-channel era. And that third one, MarTech 3.0, and then leading to the fourth one, 4.0. 3.0 is really kind of a transitional era that we're trying to help some enterprises through now, and we actually have, you know, so you asked which era are we at?

And now we have some data on that. We've done some benchmarking, both with large enterprises and midsize enterprises, and the median value, as well as the average, is about 2.25. So we're still in the very much in the multichannel era and putting our toe into the omnichannel era. And, you know, we just wrote about this recently, the the hype is way ahead of where enterprises really are at.

Not unusual, but it's good to kind of know that and and just remind people of that.

00:03:35.890 — 00:03:40.410 · Jacqueline Freedman

Yeah, it's a good barometer. Don't grade yourself against the philosophers.

00:03:40.850 — 00:04:01.340 · Tony Byrne

Yeah, yeah. And you know, it's funny, Jacqueline, because we get advisory calls from our enterprise members and, and 95% of the time, the kind of vibe around the call is like, we're behind, you know, but 95% of you can't be behind. It's just that you feel like you're behind and generally you're not. Doesn't mean you shouldn't be moving forward.

But as an industry, we don't suck as much as we think we do.

00:04:01.380 — 00:04:04.300 · Jacqueline Freedman

Yes, we we're all hard on ourselves, that's for sure.

00:04:04.340 — 00:04:04.580 · Tony Byrne

For sure.

00:04:04.580 — 00:04:22.420 · Jacqueline Freedman

But it's nice to know the grade point average is 2.25. I love that. Okay. What is one renewal you would tell a CMO to cancel tomorrow and we are recording this after some big announcements. So I'm curious if it has changed since our initial conversation.

00:04:22.460 — 00:04:59.840 · Tony Byrne

Yeah. Yeah. Well, we'll beat up on Salesforce a little bit later. I'm going to start with Adobe. The one where we really see people just vastly overspending is Adobe AEM, that whole universe: AEM Sites and DAM. And for that matter, you could toss in analytics and any number of different things. It's a platform really built for the 2.0 era.

Way overkill for this coming era, but I think your web CMS is likely to go away anyway at some point. And so overspending at that tier is awful, bordering on criminal. And if you're using Adobe AEM, by definition, you're vastly overspending relative to the value of that channel.

00:04:59.920 — 00:05:01.480 · Jacqueline Freedman

Hard agree.

00:05:03.080 — 00:05:09.200 · Jacqueline Freedman

So in 2030, who is going to read your book first? A human or their agent?

00:05:09.240 — 00:05:43.840 · Tony Byrne

Yeah, it's probably the agent in many cases. And so it could be a personal agent. And we'll talk about those, I'm sure. Or, you know, any number of other agents out there from walled gardens, from from AI companies and various and sundry bots. And so, yeah, definitely agents are going to be digesting this. And hopefully what will happen there is they'll direct the human to actually try to ingest and digest some of it literally themselves.

I think it's kind of a myth that agents are only going to distill things for people. I think the smarter agents are also going to point people to things that they should digest themselves.

00:05:43.880 — 00:05:45.040 · Jacqueline Freedman

Fingers crossed.

00:05:45.920 — 00:05:46.680 · Tony Byrne

Yeah.

00:05:47.240 — 00:05:54.480 · Jacqueline Freedman

Oh, last but not least, what is your hottest take? I feel like you gave a couple already unintentionally, but I wonder if you've got a spicier one.

00:05:54.480 — 00:06:31.850 · Tony Byrne

I think my hottest take is that, you know, there's a lot of platforms that are going to go away. And the big one that marketers are really focused on is outbound messaging. I think as a platform, it's going to go away. Those services are going to become commodity services that you plug into your infrastructure.

And so that's another area where you're probably over investing today. Should you turn off your Braze, Iterable? You know, whatever platform. Not necessarily. We're not turning off ours, but is that literally a whole category of software that's likely to go away? I think the answer is yes.

00:06:31.890 — 00:06:34.130 · Jacqueline Freedman

The dumb pipe theory coming through.

00:06:35.530 — 00:06:45.810 · Tony Byrne

The pipe will be smart, but whether you need those brains in an actual software platform and to have a whole team running that platform, that's where I think we part company if we're future gazing.

00:06:45.850 — 00:07:36.630 · Jacqueline Freedman

Yes, without a doubt. Okay. Well, we're going to quite literally set the stage of this Eras Tour and you have made your career out of accountability by holding vendors to their promises, analyst firms to their conflicts. There are many. And enterprises to their buying decisions. Now you've published a book with a date in the title, so let's pressure-test it.

So first, the map. The book splits the story into two: Eras, how customers behave, and Levels, how enterprises respond. Customers entered the Post-Channel Era this year, and enterprises are working through what MarTech 3.0 and 4.0 is, and it starts within 2030. So you say enterprises have always lagged customers.

What's different this time that keeps 4.0 from becoming one more edition of an enterprise lag?

00:07:36.630 — 00:08:43.919 · Tony Byrne

Well, I think enterprises will continue to lag and we should have some empathy here. I mean, it's just hard, right? Like because Netflix and Google and others have, have kind of set a bar about and trained consumers. And certainly in the B2B space, we've always seen a lot of consumerization of trends and things like that.

So it's really hard for enterprises to adapt. We have bigger concerns around compliance and scale and localization and different markets and different tiers of customers and profusion of channels. So I think when I when we say lag, it almost sounds like someone's a laggard. Right? And I don't want to imply that I think that it's inevitable that enterprises are going to be a little bit behind what really calls the question on 4.0, I think, is will be these whatever you call them, personal agents, personal assistants, some people call them that.

We're going to see them potentially even faster and more on the B2B side than the B2C side. They're already going to become pervasive. And I think that's going to expose your stack and your operations very quickly. And so this is going to become a cost of doing business, kind of catching up. And a lot of the catch up is going to be on some foundational services.

00:08:43.919 — 00:08:58.580 · Jacqueline Freedman

For sure, 100% agreement. And also it is hard. And yet if you stay in the outdated on if the average is 2.25 in terms of the era. That means we have a lot of people on 1.0 still.

00:08:58.980 — 00:08:59.860 · Tony Byrne

Correct.

00:08:59.860 — 00:09:19.180 · Jacqueline Freedman

And making that jump. I hate the term digital transformation, but it has to be at the core. Otherwise you quite literally your company will go extinct because you are by way of the legacy dinosaurs. But even worse is the unwillingness to grow and change.

00:09:19.340 — 00:09:23.780 · Tony Byrne

Yeah, if digital is an important channel to you and for whom is it unimportant? I don't know.

00:09:24.220 — 00:09:25.940 · Jacqueline Freedman

Very few, that's for sure.

00:09:27.220 — 00:09:44.980 · Jacqueline Freedman

All right, so you define a martech leader as someone or anyone who claims the title, and you say the function has no standardized career path. If the profession can't define its own leadership, who drives the transition inside of the enterprise? It's confusing for all of us.

00:09:44.980 — 00:11:05.090 · Tony Byrne

You know, this is such a fascinating topic. So I still think the martech leader does, actually, and that they're in fact uniquely suited to drive this transition. So, you know, what's interesting about martech is that the roles aren't particularly well defined and the titles are all over the place, like we have somebody with a lower title who's managing hundreds of millions of dollars in spend, and then someone else with a higher title who's basically kind of like an advisor to the marketing ops team and then, you know, everything in between.

And so that's what we mean by it's a very unclear career path, but that doesn't mean that the function is unimportant. The function is critically important. And when we look at digital paid media, even things like customer service, product and product marketing, they're all facing some similar challenges.

And we actually think that the martech person is the best suited within the enterprise to deal with these challenges. So, you know, the whole last chapter of the book is like, you know what? If you're really good at this and you probably are, you have an opportunity to really seize the mantle and become what we've always wanted but never had, which is kind of a chief customer technology officer, something bigger and broader than martech.

I'm a little bit nervous. A part of me kind of doesn't want to say that, because we're all still trying to get the martech piece right, and sort of get to the next level. But from a career path, I think that's definitely an opportunity.

00:11:05.130 — 00:11:12.770 · Jacqueline Freedman

I wholeheartedly agree. We are the nexus point that can translate to every different function. We deserve our flowers.

00:11:14.490 — 00:11:16.330 · Jacqueline Freedman

I'm a little biased for sure.

00:11:16.370 — 00:11:17.330 · Tony Byrne

Yeah, yeah.

00:11:17.370 — 00:11:34.890 · Jacqueline Freedman

And you're well known for your concepts of North Star. And so you say the 4.0 is each organization's very specific version of a North Star. So if every enterprise arrives somewhere different, how is the thesis falsifiable?

00:11:34.930 — 00:12:44.830 · Tony Byrne

Yeah. I mean, maybe it's not. You know, other people use the word North Star as well. So I'm borrowing on a long kind of history around that term. But, you know, and even 2030 is a little bit of an arbitrary timeline. So first let's talk about pacing. Some organizations are going to need to hit this sooner, like 2028, 2029.

They're going to need to get there. Others are going to take their time like we are helping some organizations actually find a new web content management platform right now, because they're still going to need one six years from now. Their 4.0, It might be reasonable for them to hit it around 2032. So 2030 is a little bit of a median point, you know, to think about in more of a concept year rather than an explicit sort of deadline.

And then the other thing, as you know so well, is that B2C versus B2B, we can overstate it, but it still does matter. The type of business you have: is it direct to consumer, or is it not? That matters too. And there's a lot of hybrid hybridized business models out there. So whether we like it or not, we're all dealing with what we've inherited.

In some cases, our stack landed on us instead of us landing on a particular stack. And so we have to everybody has to kind of find their own North star. Within this framework. We give you a framework, we give you a way of getting there. Yeah.

00:12:44.870 — 00:12:58.000 · Jacqueline Freedman

I don't know if everyone recognizes how many different variables and levers that are involved with what your unique North Star could be. Because it is what is right for company A is absolutely wrong for company B.

00:12:58.040 — 00:13:08.400 · Tony Byrne

Yeah, and there's whole issues around organizational maturity where your C-suite and your board is at and, and any number of other variables that come into play here that make it really hard to generalize.

00:13:08.440 — 00:13:11.320 · Jacqueline Freedman

Yeah. Oh yeah. Especially when AI is on the table.

00:13:12.120 — 00:13:15.240 · Tony Byrne

Yeah, yeah. On the table or up in the clouds somewhere.

00:13:15.240 — 00:13:58.220 · Jacqueline Freedman

So stacks definitely don't change just because a book says so. Sorry to say it, they change when someone has to justify a renewal or kill a platform. So I want to talk about the Post-Channel Era, Tony's Version, and let's get specific about the stack and the craft, because the stacks operators build in-house are very different animal than the ones analysts recommend from the outside.

You name three areas of overinvestment: the website and CMS, outbound messaging, and paid media. Let's say I run lifecycle and email is driving a meaningful share of attributed revenue. What do I cut first and what do I tell my CFO when the number moves?

00:13:58.300 — 00:15:45.410 · Tony Byrne

Yeah, we deal with this almost every day. I mean, I think first of all, almost every channel says that they drive attributed revenue. So we're with some organizations where the paid media team is doing media mix modeling and saying, hey, forget this owned and operated stuff. We're driving all the we're driving all the, you know, particularly for things that are fast moving or customer acquisition.

And then, of course, digital will also say that they're a big part of securing and closing a funnel and that sort of thing. So I'm not suggesting that you necessarily cut your channel participation. What I am suggesting is that you should begin to cap your commitment, particularly on the platform, and then rethink your operations.

Could you be driving more value in this AI era by thinking more about a channel neutral lifecycle perspective to your customers, both with respect to acquisition and then, of course, lifecycle marketing. Because increasingly when we say post-channel era, it doesn't mean the channels go away. It's just that they're going to keep dropping in importance relative to the other contextual signals.

It's going to be just one more contextual signal, and it will have zero importance with respect to the customer's agent. Right. The agent doesn't care, isn't thinking about channel at all, just taking whatever inputs they can get. And so you need to be able to to talk to that agent. And if you're talking to that agent just by beefing up your website channel, my friend, you are losing that war.

So we really have to start thinking about reallocating our resources first from a technology perspective and then from an operational perspective to something a little bit more holistic and not channel specific. And I would argue that there's a lot of ways of doing that without necessarily reducing your email engagement rates in December 2026.

00:15:45.490 — 00:16:07.530 · Jacqueline Freedman

Agreed. There's nothing worse than the unintentional. Essentially, catfight between teams of my channel drove this. My channel drove that. And like, did you realize we have the same goal, right? And we can maybe find which ones are most efficacious or are more impactful.

00:16:07.530 — 00:16:09.810 · Tony Byrne

Or what is the customer thinking, you know, at the end of the day?

00:16:09.810 — 00:16:11.050 · Jacqueline Freedman

Imagine that.

00:16:11.090 — 00:16:25.050 · Tony Byrne

That really is what's driving this. And and that's what's actually so exciting about 4.0. And also, I think, maybe enervating is that we've all been talking about customer centricity for more than two decades now. This is really going to call the question on whether you really are or not.

00:16:25.090 — 00:16:56.380 · Jacqueline Freedman

Exactly. I think very often it is part of the values of the mission, but it's not actually thought through in full and it is not okay. And I think we as a society are starting to realize like, hold up, why don't you care about my privacy? Why don't you care about the things I care about and why are you only extracting value from me when you could focus on the relationship, which is true life cycle and retention, which actually makes a whole lot more money than anything acquisition does.

00:16:56.420 — 00:17:03.540 · Tony Byrne

Yeah, because you're getting into some really critical decisions, particularly that you can't just leave to AI. But anyway.

00:17:03.660 — 00:17:04.020 · Jacqueline Freedman

Very true.

00:17:04.780 — 00:17:34.220 · Jacqueline Freedman

This episode is brought to you by our sponsors. Hightouch is an agentic marketing platform that reinvents the lifecycle marketing workflow, making it AI-first and warehouse-native. Brands like Thumbtack, Moneyline, and Fullspan Health have reduced campaign timelines from weeks of work across 6 to 10 teams to days or even hours with Lifecycle Studio.

If you're not sure what to make of all of this acquisition news in the email marketing space, they'd love to talk to you and show you how they can help. See what Hightouch can do for you at hightouch.com.

00:17:36.780 — 00:18:14.480 · Jacqueline Freedman

Brace yourself, email marketers. Salesforce is buying Braze, and change might be coming whether you plan for it or not. The good news is you get to choose what comes next. If you're a retailer, choosing an AI company for personalized customer engagement is a must. Bloomreach powers brands like American Eagle, Pandora, and Benefit Cosmetics who win the inbox.

The secret is Loomi, Bloomreach's intelligence layer, in every email you send. It personalizes each message to the person reading it, delivers it when they're most likely to open, and can build entire campaigns from a single prompt. The result is email that feels 1:1 at any scale. See it in action at bloomreach.com.

00:18:16.840 — 00:18:45.890 · Jacqueline Freedman

And now back to the episode. Well, I do want to dive a little bit more into the book because you, you kind of open up with the scene straight out of the movie Her, and you meet your 2030 through these digital assistants. And so you've got Monique, and Moni is her personal assistant. So walk me through one scenario.

A customer's agent is shopping on her behalf. What does the brand actually see and who does it think it's talking to?

00:18:45.930 — 00:18:56.490 · Tony Byrne

Yeah. Well, hopefully, you know, there's a set of protocols and norms in place here and potentially some regulations, particularly if it's Canada, you would think that they'll probably be a little bit more thoughtful.

00:18:56.610 — 00:18:58.370 · Jacqueline Freedman

In the EU, hopefully.

00:18:58.770 — 00:19:36.290 · Tony Byrne

But in this case Monique's agent is from Google. And so the agent will there'll be some transparency both between the enterprise and the agent and some protocols around identity resolution, identity authentication on both sides. Right. And then on the authorizations as well. So your enterprise will will know that this agent is working on behalf of of Monique.

What's interesting is that the agent's going to have its own activity, and then Monique will have her own activity. And so the agent will be a sub-identity. And it's really interesting because not a lot of customer data environments or customer data platforms can deal with sub-identities. So that's just a little technical digression there.

00:19:36.290 — 00:19:45.510 · Jacqueline Freedman

I don't know if they will be able to figure it out. I mean, the concept of an alternate email is still just it's a data point. It's not actually in use anywhere.

00:19:45.550 — 00:21:22.370 · Tony Byrne

And the key thing is it's not just a secondary email. It's a secondary email with its own attributes, which is something very different. It's a lot more object oriented than a flat customer record would be. So, you know, a lot of this has to do with your stack preparedness, right? But yeah, the brand will see what the agent is asking for.

And there's some interpretation that you can do there. But the agent is is the key thing is that a lot of people think this is a race to the bottom. And for some things it may be in terms of the agent asking for what's your price for XYZ? And it's a transactional thing, but the agent, in theory, Moni knows a lot about Monique and may be asking for some content.

And we describe content. You know, data is a system of your best truth, not your perfect truth, but your best truth. We say content is a system of meaning. Moni, the personal agent may be asking for more than just, you know, what's the cheapest hotel room in Valencia within five kilometers. They may be asking for some things that ascribe meaning, which is Monique wants to go to the beach.

She also wants to have a different experience. She wants to see the rice fields, whatever. And this is where content really comes into play as well. The brand is going to see this agent and is going to have to assemble a set of structured and unstructured information in response and potentially also be ultimately get into a kind of a negotiation.

So this implies probably something agentic on your end that's assembling what is a kind of an agent experience from a variety of different sources internally. And, you know, we have two whole chapters on that in the book. There's a lot of things to think about there. But this is coming faster than we think.

00:21:22.370 — 00:21:34.930 · Jacqueline Freedman

And I guess to that point, what evidence today is, is saying, showing that consumer agents are going to arrive on the timeline you predict and what will maybe slow it down.

00:21:34.970 — 00:23:05.160 · Tony Byrne

Yeah. So they're here. I mean, Muse from Meta has 10 million downloads as of this morning. And so, you know, Meta's thing is move fast and break things. And they've definitely done that with Muse. It's an awful platform and has serious privacy concerns. It has security problems. It has performance issues.

It's so awful that Amazon won't let it work with them, which, by the way, anticipates some issues we're going to have around walled gardens and potentially multiple agents and things like that. So it's possible that and I hope that more responsible companies. Meta, of course, is fundamentally an irresponsible company.

But more responsible companies like Apple are probably going to look at that and say, well, we need to be more careful. There's a number of ethical and legal issues here that arise. And of course, the the key question is working on whose behalf right are they really fiduciary agents or not for the customer.

But the fact that, you know, there were 10 million downloads suggests there is some latent demand here. Gemini is going to become an agent. Copilot is already a B2B agent. So they're here. Now, the interesting question you're asking is will the pace of adoption be slower or not? And we don't know. And there's a lot of issues still to work through.

But we know, unfortunately, that people will trade off privacy for convenience. And so they're likely these consumer agents are likely to become pervasive. People may have multiple ones. One thing we get into in the vignette in the book is that all these agents are going to have their own unique problems and may not talk to each other very well.

And so there's going to be a lot of friction here, but that doesn't mean it isn't going to happen.

00:23:05.200 — 00:23:31.120 · Jacqueline Freedman

Yeah, it's its own version of an agent silo on top of data silos that can exist. It's just a whole other layer that I don't know if anyone is quite ready for. But yes, to your point, those walled gardens, it's it's also a self-protection mechanism. Amazon doesn't want to give Facebook the ability to do business things for them.

They want to control how it works and every transaction.

00:23:31.120 — 00:23:33.680 · Tony Byrne

Yeah, who owns the customer. Yeah, for sure.

00:23:33.680 — 00:24:18.930 · Jacqueline Freedman

Exactly. But I also maybe I'm a negative Nancy, but I think outside of Martechlandia and all the people that we all you know, know and talk to often, no one is thinking like this. I mean, my husband has never touched AI and has no plans to. Can't relate. But there's so many individuals that just like either have rightful anti AI sentiment and also others that are scared of it and don't want to pursue it.

I know I was scared at the very, very beginning until I had a friend explain like hey, it can help you write your like post interview notes when you're interviewing a candidate. And I was like, oh, that's helpful because I hate doing this.

00:24:19.930 — 00:24:35.950 · Tony Byrne

You know, I it's just great. And, you know, labels matter. And I think the more successful purveyors of this may call them personal assistants. And you may not even know that AI is running underneath. It's like, oh, you know, Google will give me a personal assistant that's going to do all this shit for me. Great. Turn it on.

00:24:35.950 — 00:24:37.070 · Jacqueline Freedman

Let's go.

00:24:37.230 — 00:24:47.590 · Tony Byrne

Yeah. And underneath you. And I know there's any number of different agentic and AI processes going on, both on the customer side and on the enterprise side. But for them, it's just, who doesn't want a personal assistant?

00:24:47.630 — 00:25:00.750 · Jacqueline Freedman

I am intrigued to see individuals outside of tech and what that adoption rate is, because that, in my eyes, is the singular, most determining factor of its success.

00:25:00.790 — 00:25:10.230 · Tony Byrne

Yeah. Well, 10 million people, most of them probably from Instagram, have downloaded Muse. So we're going to find out in real time here what the impact of all this is.

00:25:10.230 — 00:25:46.760 · Jacqueline Freedman

But it's a far cry from what the 4 billion users. So for sure. Yes, it is definitely the upward trajectory, but it's got a long way to go. Okay, so the 4.0 stack to your points is really bottom heavy and really leans toward building. And that works really well for Amazon, Google, Netflix, which ironically, each one of those have their own separate ESPs that they contract out.

But what does 2030 look like for a mid-market company with a three-person MOps team and no engineers? A very different set of skills, resources and time?

00:25:46.800 — 00:27:12.340 · Tony Byrne

Yeah, for that matter. One-person MOps team. What you're talking about really is what we call the true mid-market. So there's a lower mid-market, which really is more SMB, and there's an upper mid-market where you really want a composable stack and you want to drive these things yourself. There is a vast, vast mid-market that where you are going to have to coast along the innovations of your major providers.

And our sense is that there's probably 2 or 3, what we call box sets that will constitute your stack. So instead of having like 12 to 24, you'll have three big platforms, something we call a CMS Plus, a CEP or customer engagement platform, and maybe an e-commerce platform like Shopify, which is also kind of a platform: e-commerce plus.

So you have all these pluses in there that are a single platform doing 5 or 6 things that a large enterprise might use best of breed for. And so the key there is just riding the right horse, and you're going to ride their innovations, and you don't have to think about it. And there's actually a certain freedom in that that you're instead focused on, okay, this is what their AI is going to give me.

I'm going to do my best to work within this pool because I'm going to drown in a bigger pond. I don't need this small SMB pond, which is one probably vertical solution. But for the vast mid-market, we talk about box sets and you can get away with a few box sets, and then you just ride the innovation of the vendor, and there's nothing wrong with that.

And in fact, you can compete quite substantially that way.

00:27:12.380 — 00:27:34.350 · Jacqueline Freedman

A great example is Klaviyo customers. You're 99% likely already on Shopify. And any innovation they intermingle and create, you are automatically kind of force fed and or given the opportunity to upgrade certain things based off of their roadmap. So it's not a bad thing at all. It just is.

00:27:34.350 — 00:27:40.150 · Tony Byrne

It's not a bad thing. You know, the only problem is that, you know, if you're a larger enterprise and then that becomes a cage.

00:27:40.350 — 00:27:44.150 · Jacqueline Freedman

Yes. The box set becomes restricting.

00:27:44.190 — 00:27:48.470 · Tony Byrne

Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So it's really about just as always, the right fit.

00:27:48.510 — 00:27:51.790 · Jacqueline Freedman

Yes. And there's no one right fit. There's no unicorn.

00:27:52.870 — 00:28:17.750 · Jacqueline Freedman

So double clicking on mid-market teams, if they want to get to 4.0, they maybe have a couple more people on their team a little bit more flexibility. Do they also, should they consider skipping building and buy a foundation as a service and just lean into the box set because it satisfies most boxes, or what do you think?

00:28:17.790 — 00:28:50.010 · Tony Byrne

Yeah, that's a tough one. I think that one depends. I tend to say probably not build. You want to stay out of the build. And so but you should be thinking about making sure that I really am unifying my customer data and my CEP. You should be thinking about getting more content into your CMS that you may not ever appear on a web page, but it's going to show up for agents.

So you need still need to be thinking about data and content and decisioning the three core pillars that we get into in the book. It's just that you don't have separate platforms for that necessarily.

00:28:50.050 — 00:29:01.170 · Jacqueline Freedman

Okay. You call quarterly planning an unwitting trap. What do you say to a finance team that only releases budget in 90-day increments?

00:29:01.210 — 00:30:05.630 · Tony Byrne

Yeah, I mean, this is a longer critique of the modern world that we live in. That, you know, there's quarterly results for publicly traded firms and sometimes private firms as well, end up driving a lot of perception and decisions, whether we like it or not. That's the world we live in. And so I want to acknowledge that and have some empathy for martech people living in that world.

But if the finance team is only releasing budgets in 90-day increments, then I would say to the finance team that what you're really doing is incenting a set of tactical thinking on this. Because martech teams move in weeks, they would like to move in hours. But martech leaders and marketing ops leaders have to think in terms of of years that this is what I'm going to accomplish this year. When we give out roadmaps, they're typically three-year roadmaps. Year three do we have 100% confidence? Not necessarily. But there are certain things that you have to sequence and do, and you have to have a mix of foundational work, which is usually a cost of doing business and then stuff that you're doing at the edge, which hopefully is going to drive some ROI.

And I don't know how you do that in 90-day budgets.

00:30:05.750 — 00:30:40.720 · Jacqueline Freedman

Yeah, I hope at some point, not just like annual planning, it actually becomes something substantial. And instead each quarter is more milestone based as opposed to objective-based. Okay. So in my eyes, your sharpest claim in the whole book was actually not about the stack. It was about the industry's structure.