Doug Davidoff
Companies are spending more money than ever before on technology applications (and that doesn’t even account for the “free” software that’s been installed). Our Martech Advisory Services group has had a front-row seat from multiple perspectives:
- Designing, building and maintaining our tech stack
- Advising companies on the design of their tech stack
- Deep implementation with a variety of companies to help them drive greater sales velocity
Over the last three years, we’ve seen an explosion in both the choices and active demand for Martech. Three years ago we had to “push” the tech utilization conversation to our clients. We had to demonstrate the business for considering the use of new technology before we could talk about anything specific. Today, we’re getting “pulled” into the conversation.
On one hand, this is good news (at least for us). Businesses, more than ever, understand the need to optimize and accelerate their processes and they understand that new technology is often required to do so.
On the other hand, we started to see that there was some bad news about this as well. Increasingly, organizations viewed technology as “the” solution to a problem. What’s more, in the tech stack analysis we did, we often saw that companies had bigger stacks than ever and were often not utilizing the existing apps they had appropriately and/or were considering new apps to solve problems that their existing tools could solve if they were using them better.
These observations led to a growing hypothesis we wanted to test. The hypothesis is that while there is growing (exploding) demand for new technology, most companies would be better served by improving how they’re implementing their existing tech stacks and processes before adding new tech.
To test this hypothesis we decided to look at how mid-market companies are utilizing a core part of any growth tech stack - their marketing automation platform. So, over the last two months we conducted a fairly in-depth research project.
The HubSpot Utilization Research
I should add that we also wanted to see how the “real” world was using technology. In preparing to do our research, we dug even deeper into the existing research (both data-driven and anecdotal) around how companies are using Martech. When you look at the bulk of the material in this space, you’ll quickly realize the SaaS (software as a service) companies have a disproportionate presence and skew results.
So we used Datanyze to identify the 500 largest companies that meet these criteria:
- Use HubSpot Marketing
- Revenue greater than $10 million and less than $250 million
- Not in the SaaS or technology industry
You can see the initial results in the infographic at the bottom of this post.