If you’ve been in B2B for more than a couple years, you probably already know that if someone mentions Scott Brinker’s martech landscape graphic to convince you of how much marketing technology there is, the proper response is to roll your eyes and mutter, “Yeah, yeah, yeah.”
You’ve heard it a thousand times before. And yet….
Every few seconds or so, somewhere in the B2B universe, some revenue team is implementing a new piece of technology. And about 90 minutes after go-live of that latest miracle tech, someone inside that company will say something like,
“Gee, this new gonculator.ai app is really great, but wouldn’t it be cool if we could get our whatsits from Thingamajig imported directly into Gonculator so our <<name redacted>> team could <<gibberish>>?”
And wherever two or more folks say something like that, one of their cousins who is a genius coder types something up, sprinkles a bit of venture capital money over it, and presto! gap begets gap.
You can apply the same scenario to the proliferation of martech categories. Once Gonculator gets a few customers, it gets a couple competitors. From there, it’s only a matter of time before an analyst firm dubs it a category (with new categories waiting to be born on either side).
The result: the ever-expanding inflationary martech universe — and the increasingly absurd “Marketing Technology Landscape” map:
Maybe we could get Neil deGrasse Tyson to do a show on it.
It’s time to pop the inflationary martech universe
At 6sense, we’re here to simplify — to deflate rather than inflate the number of things you need to buy to build a robust revenue generation machine.
We want revenue teams to have every capability they need to create revenue more effectively. We just don’t think you should have to buy a million different pieces of technology to get there.
That’s what this new Revenue Technology Guide shows. Our platform isn’t just predictive, not just intent, not just account scoring or lead scoring, not just an ad platform, not even just a CDP. It’s all those things — but it’s also a sales intelligence tool, contact and account enrichment tool, conversational email tool, pipeline planning tool… and more.
What you need to accomplish, not what we like to call the category
Analysts and software marketers love categories: marketing automation, digital ads platform, sales engagement platform, and the like. But categories don’t actually help you, the revenue team professional, know what you need to do to be effective. They lead to endless wasteful cycles of research and debate, but they don’t really help.
So, we organized our Revenue Technology Guide according to the jobs that you as revenue professionals have to do. That’s the only thing that really matters, right?
Across the top of the graphic are the big jobs revenue teams need to do. In the swim lanes below are the pieces of technology that you may have today or may need to acquire to get that particular job done.
As you can see in the first image, myriad limited-use tools can quickly pile up into a complicated tech stack. The second image shows how 6sense simplifies things — and also where our partners apply their domain expertise to provide critical capabilities.
And there you have it. A simple, geared-for-what-you-need-to-do guide to the technology you need.
We’ll see you on the other side of this inflationary martech universe.
