Putting together your MarTech stack is like building with Legos, except you need to create your own instructions.

You should start by having a list of business cases: “I need to know which cohort of users has the biggest projected LTV.” Or, “which step in my marketing funnel is leaking more users?

Here is the trap: your marketing or sales problems won’t be too different from your competitors. Everyone wants to know who are their whales, or how to optimize funnels. And there are more than 5,000 MarTech solutions out there.

You need to be conscious about the size of this task: assuming you already identified your business problems and you have processes/manuals in place, there is a zillion of tools you can use to automate your company further. You can spend years implementing them.

Technology is way ahead of us; we need to get better at identifying the core business, prioritizing, and knowing when to build solutions and when to buy them. It will pay off to think about this before you go into a MarTech solutions junkie mode.

Identify your most valuable problem, the unique solution you are providing, and then see if there is any tool in the market that can do at least a part of the work.

Chances are you will find some, and those will be your competitors. Focus on building what’s missing. It doesn’t matter if you use MailChimp for sending emails, or Marketo as your CRM. Focus on how a custom integration between them will give more value to your company.

Check out this post for a more detailed explanation about how to build a MarTech stack.

Leo Celis