Exclusive Breakfast Brings Marketing Operations and MarTech Into Focus

March 5th saw an exclusive gathering of marketing technology (MarTech) professionals in Toronto, looking to bridge the gap between marketing strategy and digital marketing technologies. Hosted at the Malaparte in the TIFF Bell Lightbox Building, this invitation-only event was a chance for everyone working in Demand Generation, Revenue Marketing, and Marketing Operations to mingle and attend a panel discussion by leading experts in these fields.

Dan Radu, President of Macro, a B2B marketing operations & CRM agency, moderated the event. He gave time for the three panellists to lend their expertise on the latest trends and how modern marketing organizations can run operations at scale. On the panel was:

• Brent Chaters, Head of Digital Customer and Marketing Practice at Accenture
• Katia Houbiquian, CMO of Microsoft Canada
• Jake Wells, Senior Value Engineer at Workfront

After the breakfast mingle and network, the panel launched with Dan focusing the questions on how organizations can leverage the power of MarTech successfully to grow faster and improve their revenue. The panel discussed best practices for managing a marketing technology stack and the importance of work management in the marketing team. 

One of the main points stressed was that technology is only one piece of a much larger puzzle: Companies must also keep their focus on people and processes.

Watch the panel discussion

Reviews from the audience

Tia Vladi, a Digital Strategy Leader from Rogers Communications. noted several takeaways:

1. To be a successful marketer, learn to talk like the CFO.

Focus on key metrics such as churn and learn to always connect the dots between what you’re doing and the business objectives. In other words, learn how to tell the story of how your technology is getting business done

2. “Don’t let the agency hold you hostage”.

Don’t let the narrow capabilities of your agency constrain what technology you use for your omni-channel campaigns

3. “Keeping up is one of the biggest challenges.”

Keeping up with the proliferation of technology is one of the biggest challenges for marketing departments. In 2018 there were almost 7,000 marketing technologies! How do you stay on top of all this new technology popping up?

4. “Is your company set up for technology readiness?”

When asked about what the “next big thing is” in the technology world, two of the panelists spoke about AI and blockchain. Brent Chaters countered by saying, “Don’t just think about the next big thing in technology, think about how your company is set up for technology readiness. If you see an interesting technology, test it, use it. And if it works, scale it—if it doesn’t, get rid of it.”

Several social media posts surfaced during the event:

‍

‍

The collaborative CMO 

A major focus of discussion was the role of the CMO in the dynamic technology landscape and the CMO's relationships to work processes, management and people. This is no surprise, as 88% of companies agree that the CMO’s role has changed in the last two years and that it will continue to change, according to the research by Accenture Interactive & Forrester Consulting.

The research found that the CMO is seen as the connective tissue between different lines of business by 90% of businesses. By pulling together all parts of the organization, the CMO collaborator has more control in shaping the brand while at the same time allowing the entire organization to constantly work within a unified vision of the brand.

All in all, the successful collaborative CMO focuses on collaboration, process, people and work management. 

A new perspective in the Canadian market

The Tuesday networking and breakfast panel was crucial to bring the latest practices in marketing technology to the Canadian marketplace. 

“The panel brought an advanced discussion here in Toronto, and the marketing leaders who attended were very pleased about that,” said Dan Radu, President of Macro. “We hope to change how companies think about their marketing programs and campaign operations enabled by their marketing technology. Many companies in both US and Canada come to us when they need an extra hand in running marketing operations at scale or want to extract the most value from the sales & marketing technology stack.”

Don’t miss out on the many other B2B events focused on marketing operations and MarTech. To learn more about Macro and stay in the loop with future events, please visit www.macromator.com.