Marketing teams often fall into the trap to solve complex problems by concentrating on process or technology.
The result? Pain points are patched, but the underlying problems continue to exist. This is why insulated transformations fail – and what leaders can do to build permanent solutions.
Where most transformations go wrong
Have you ever been to a room where the walls are plastered with sticky tones? There was probably a read, a facilitator or two with a timer and a parking lot-that catch-all board where difficult questions are reserved for later-bad even someone who blows a whistle to keep things on course.
The execs start things: why are we here? What will this achieve?
Then the consultants descend. Let the process start.
Swimming tracks. Transfer points. Decision makers. Stakeholders. Raci hit lists. Today it is all about people and process. The message is clear: first repair the human side – because until you do that, no technology will save you.
No more silos. No more pain points. Content, data and insights that were delivered on time and on specification. Campaigns that run smoothly and reach the right audience with the right permission and the right message. Manual workload eliminated. Reporting and KPIs eventually ended up with every team and low.
Fast-Forward three years: you still have that deck with 102 Schia to digitize the outputs from that day. Maybe you even remember that room that wallows with Raci cards for months. Twenty -eight steps to launch a campaign through three channels? No step too little! And who exactly needs to be informed?
How funny those memories can be, here is the hard truth: somewhere, in a parallel universe, someone mapped the perfect Martech pile. It has real-time streaming, abstraction layers, ETL pipelines and CI/CD. Almost like a side issue, they put a note in one corner lecture: “People and process.”
Dig deeper: it’s time for a better approach to change management in marketing
Why repairing one side never works
I believe in a robust process – Clarity about who does what and when is essential, especially in complex organizations with several stakeholders.
In every scenario with software and data, however, it is short -sighted to investigate processes without considering the systems they form.
It is just as naive to think that bringing in a shiny new CDP, CRM, CMS, Dam, ESP or DXP will solve your problems magically. These systems only deliver value if they are used – and how they are used, determines the size of that value.
In other words, no serious marketing, digital, data, martech or insight challenge is resolved by concentrating solely on process or technology. Technology inevitably stimulates change and the need for new methods. Likewise, better processes can unlock the full potential of your tools, sometimes even eliminating the need for a dreaded RFP.
And yet almost every organization enters the technology or process of rabbit hole – pouring endless time and resources – only to appear with half a solution.
That’s because they tackle these challenges separately. They have lost sight of how mutually dependent technology, processes and strategy are. When this tunnel vision starts, even well -intended efforts fall short. Marketing leaders need a wider lens – one that helps them recognize when they concentrate too tightly and rests them to lead integrated transformations that lingers.
False pain points
Pain points are useful as a discovery tool. (People like to rage!), However, only focus on pain and leaves too much room for the doctor to prescribe the most obvious solution.
Take these common symptoms, often used to justify a Martech change:
- Data fragmentation and martech tools that work in silos.
- Inability to scale or adapt to external changes.
- Heavy dependence on manual campaign setup.
- Difficulties to coordinate campaigns via multiple channels.
- No centralized image of customer involvement between contact points.
- Slow analysis and disconnected reporting.
- Poor acceptance of platform.
- Increased compliance risks.
Compare them with the signs that a process change is required:
- Data is spread over several platforms without any source of truth.
- Inconsistent campaign performance data between systems and reports
- Poor visibility in KPI performance.
- Weak integration between marketing tools limits cross-channel efforts.
- Heavy dependence on manual processes.
- Difficulties to scale marketing activities.
- Teams that are active in silos.
Do you see the overlap? Whether the conversation is about process or technology, the perpetrators are usually the same:
- Data and reports silos.
- Slow marketing activation.
- Excessive manual workload.
- Poor adaptability and scalability.
- Weak cross-functional cooperation.
- Inconsistent customer experiences.
Every organization is confronted with a mix of these challenges. Walk into a discovery session all over the world and you will hear the same themes: silos, collaboration, customer experience, scalability and speed.
What then happens often depends entirely from who leads the discovery. A process adviser? You get a process fix. A technology specialist? You get a technical solution.
If the people who have reported those pain points are not involved in shaping the solution, you will probably get a connection on a Frankenstein.
Diger Diger: Martech Maestros focuses on internal processes – and encourage external success
The bias of specialists
There is logic to keep solutions separate from the diagnosis: people do not always know all available options. They can only solve for the context they know, not the context that is coming. If you had requested a solution for transport problems before the invention of the motor vehicle, you will get a faster horse.
The problem is that if you spend a disproportionate amount of time documenting pain points with people who know, but not spends so much time asking how they would solve them – or what they have already tried – you will probably end up with the solution of an outsider who is overly simplified.
Bring a specialized team to design that solution and the rabbit hole becomes deeper. A technology adviser will say that you need new tools or that your existing needs better integration. A process adviser will probably emphasize unclear roles and responsibilities between teams.
Both are likely to mark tools inefficient. Both will have different ideas about why that is the case. And both will want to draw diagrams – diagrams that don’t talk to each other.
Ultimately, it will be your responsibility to reconcile those perspectives, so make sure you have heard from both sides before you make the call.
Process versus Tech: The Split
To illustrate this, we show some of those symptoms that we have previously discussed and see how they can be interpreted:
- Speed of marketing activations and bottlenecks:
- IT Consultant: Lack of automation.
- Process consultant: unclear transfers and priorities.
- Adaptability and agility Challenges:
- IT -Consultant: outdated tools that no longer support evolving marketing requirements.
- Process advisor: Inflexible processes that are too slow to respond to the changing needs of the customer.
- Freagmented customer experience:
- IT Consultant: no platform to support Omnichannel coordination or travel orchestra ration.
- Process consultant: non -coordinated activations that create inconsistent messages about channels.
If you listen to the IT consultant alone, you must re-use your Martech stack and then hand it over to the same lower team of four people spread over five markets, with seven reporting lines and three cost centers.
Just listen to the process consultant and you will probably end a perfect clarity on the exact 37 steps needed to:
- Take the report from an e -mail attachment.
- Stick it in the shared document.
- Change the column head.
- Drag the formula down.
- Click to perform macros.
The reports will be 100% accurate and delivered on time – as long as three people spend an hour every Monday at 7 to make it happen.
You solve the pain points, but the real problems will remain. Those problems are those you have to tackle.
Each company consists of complex people who are expected to maximize their effectiveness through a maze of platforms and automation, while supplying scale and speed and working seamlessly in teams and systems.
Cycle
How can you effectively tackle these pain points and stimulate meaningful, sustainable change?
If you are in a position with this, there is a good chance that you have become a specialist – inevitably sensitive to bias – or that you are too far removed to see the actual random causes. In both cases, a form of discovery will be necessary, whether it will be led internally or externally.
There is one essential rule: get the right advice. That means well -informed advisers who understand your company and argue for process change just as much as technology.
- Listen to those who report the pain points: Especially as attempts from the past to change things have failed.
- Bring familiar advisors on both sides: Make sure they are equally qualified, understand each other’s motivations and are encouraged to deliver a solution, not just their preferred fix.
- Propose request from both corners: Research, compare, contrast and identify gaps, because there will always be something.
- Combine perspectives in one extensive plan: Determine problems precisely, propose a process fix, a technological solution or both and tell people why you chose it.
If you have the time, try to exchange the solutions – process for technology, technology for process – and see if something unexpected arises.
Yes, this approach takes time. But you can thank yourself for the line.
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