In this episode of the podcast, Mike and Doug discuss the current MarTech landscape, and make some scarily accurate comparisons to past business cycles.
MarTech and SalesTech companies are claiming that they have the solutions to all of your problems like snake oil salesmen in the wild west. All of them are pushing technology to increase the volume and efficiency of your sales and marketing practices, but are increases in volume and efficiency the solution to the growth problems of small to mid-market businesses? Doug argues that using tech for this purpose can only hurt.
Doug mentions how small businesses win business because they offer quality service at a below market value cost, but when you take shortcuts using technology to increase volume it hemorrhages your addressable market. Look at the example of new artificial intelligence email services. Not only are the emails bad, they drip with inauthenticity. But what do they solve for? Volume and efficiency. The thought is that you can make quota by increasing your volume even if you send out bad emails, but this just burns through your addressable market because you took a shortcut. Remember that technology is meant to accelerate, not create. Using it to create catches up to you and hurts you...badly. Beware of modern day snake oil salesmen. Beware of people who claim to manufacture antiques.