When I started as a technology industry analyst twenty-five years ago, I was loath to provide personal advice to friends and clients working in enterprise digital/marketing roles. I felt comfortable answering other questions, like... "Thoughts on what vendors to look at?" Sure. "How to select the best-fit platform?" Definitely. "How to evolve our MarTech stack?" Absolutely.

"What to do to advance my career?" That, my friend, feels more like art than science, I used to think. Well, experience brings some wisdom. After developing close ties to enterprise MarTech leaders over the years, I'll acknowledge there are many different ways to succeed, but also some universal patterns that feel worth sharing.

1. Don't Align with a Single Vendor

This is an interesting topic, because becoming an expert on, and an advocate for, a single vendor's platform or suite can often provide a short-term boost to your prospects. But it can also sidetrack your career into an alley that usually terminates in a dead end.

If part of your MarTech role is serving as a product manager, you surely want to champion the capabilities of any solution you bring into the organization. But the minute you start aligning with the vendor -- speaking at their events, starting to focus on tooling rather than outcomes, getting cozy with their leadership -- you subtly put your future prospects in their hands, rather than your own.

Large, suite vendors like Adobe, Microsoft, and Salesforce are very good at cultivating you. They may want you to create something like a "Salesforce Center of Excellence" at your firm, and soon you are doing their cross-selling for them. At first, benefits do accrue, but at some point you will likely learn that these relationships become one-sided. Those same vendors are also skilled bullies.

Vendors and platforms come and go. If you do a good job of selecting the right platforms (RSG has opinions on this), that technology should endure for a while in your stack. But vendor attention and roadmaps can wander. Vendors go through re-orgs just like your firm. Just remember that modern enterprise MarTech stacks are composable, with no single dominant vendor, and therefore you'll want to stay light on your feet too.

So instead, stay aligned with capabilities and outcomes, and never shrink from challenging your incumbent suppliers.

2. Domain Expertise > Platform Skills

This is related to #1 above, yet reflects more on another key leadership skill: team-building. As you grow your teams, you will see the value in specific platform expertise. I would encourage you instead to focus on domain expertise.

Let's say your enterprise licensed the very rich and complicated outbound marketing platform, Braze. As readers of RSG's vendor evaluations know, Braze gives you a lot of levers to pull, but also famously confronts a marketer with a variety of byzantine problems. It's tempting to save time and grief by hiring an experienced Braze specialist.

Yet if given the choice between someone with more Braze platform facility and someone with more savvy and experience around executing messaging-rich, international marketing campaigns, I'd pick the latter. The Braze specifics can be taught, and sometimes outsourced, even if temporarily. The real gift here is in campaign design, testing, and analysis, where the learnings get measured in years and not months.

And remember: you may find good reason to leave Braze, or any other MarTech platform.

3. Data, Data, Data

I feel a little trite reminding you of the importance of data ("the new oil!" lol). But I'm going to anyway.

Most of you labor mightily to combine Marketing and Technology services into something better than the sum of those two parts. You've gotten this far because you're good at it! In larger enterprises, however, the Data function has split from IT, even if only in a dotted-line way, to bring its own rhythm and skills to the ubiquitous challenge of exploiting ever-exploding volumes of information.

Almost every trend we envision around MarTech -- from incorporating effective AI, to finally mastering Personalization, to the growth of Marketing Analytics -- hinges on ready access to hyper-relevant, high-quality data.

A while back I latched onto the term "MarDaTech." It didn't stick. Doesn't quite roll off the tongue. But the concept of needing to align three loci seems more evident than ever.

Fortunately, your experience stitching Marketing and IT will really help as you incorporate Data as a first-class actor in this drama. For starters, don't treat enterprise data ops like a black box, or worse, as just "the help." Do consider new roles on your team for marketing data operations. Try to get closer to this work, at least to the point where your team is teaching you the important gaps and opportunities.

It will make you more effective, and also open up new professional opportunities.

4. Omnichannel Is Your Springboard

The scope of MarTech, like the scope of Marketing as a whole, will differ across enterprises. I would wish for every MarTech team that their remit included outbound campaigns, paid media, and inbound experience plus organic social media management. That way, you can better align multichannel customer experiences. Unfortunately, those three clusters frequently fall to different teams -- like Marketing Campaigns vs Brand/Performance Marketing, vs "Digital" -- which don't intersect until much higher up the org chart.

So the first order of business (if you haven't already) is to provide leadership on behalf of customers and prospects across all those touchpoints. Take the customer's point of view and press for stack alignment and efficiency across channel silos, as well as, inevitably, more foundational, channel-independent services. If you don't lead here, will anyone else?

That's multichannel alignment. The next order of business is supporting true omnichannel customer experience. This one is much harder, but to that extent, a potential major springboard for you personally. If you are advocating for the customer, and the coherence of their interactions with your firm, you are necessarily going to encounter major stakeholder groups across Sales & Account Management, Customer Service & Support, Product, Customer Success, and others. The specific labels and roles will change depending on your industry, but you get the idea.

Here's the opportunity: Someone needs marshal resources on behalf of the customer (who has been conditioned to a Netflix-like experience), and the enterprise (which increasingly wants to demonstrate stickiness). This will require cross-departmental cooperation on a level rarely seen in large enterprises. But if you don't take the lead, who will?

I believe you're well-suited to the task. You know where the key content assets live; you know what customer data you can leverage; you have excellent UX resources at hand; you understand the concept of journeys; you can navigate privacy essentials; you know how to work with IT and Data ops; you've acquired collaboration and leadership skills. Take the lead.

5. Make Connections

Again I stake no claim to originality on this one. Your mentor, your coach, your therapist -- they're all telling you that in the long run, human connections matter most. Well, add your MarTech advisor to that list.

From the previous sections in this post, building relationships within your enterprise will clearly contribute a lot to your career success. Your curated set of LinkedIn connections will also broaden your horizons. What I'm talking about now is a little different: ongoing, in-person, peer connections with those facing the same challenges and opportunities as you. Full disclosure: I'm advocating here specifically for RSG's MarTech Leadership Council.

Council meetings feature a lot of private sharing, and sometimes the most useful outcome for a MarTech leader is confirmation that you’re on the right path. Incidentally, the most common take-away from these sessions is that the realm of enterprise MarTech is not as advanced as vendor and guru claims would otherwise have us believe. 

The world is a turbulent place right now. I've seen premier MarTech leaders lose their jobs and sometimes their entire teams, overnight on a whim. Connections made at RSG's Council typically don't provide members a new landing place right away. It doesn't work that way. What the Council does supply is new ideas and confirmation of best instincts in a way that helps ensure that your next professional landing place gives full measure to the breadth of your potential.

Best wishes for your career!