How B2B Companies Can Optimize Their Tech Stacks

It’s yet another frequently used term in the world of B2B marketing these days – tech stacks. How should tech stacks be optimized effectively to generate better output? Should marketers fall for “shiny objects” that they add to the pile? On this week’s episode, we talk to Dan McGaw (Founder & CEO, McGaw.io) about the importance of getting a company’s tech to talk to each other. Dan also elaborates on some of the common mistakes, what approach companies can use to streamline their tech stacks, and how data hygiene plays an important role in gaining visibility into customer journeys and retention.

https://youtu.be/w3l_YP_SSZg

Topics discussed in this episode:

• Dan talks about the importance of getting a company’s tech to talk to each other [01:27]
  
• Dan elaborates on how much of the marketing budget spent on Martech goes to waste [04:12]
  
• Data taxonomy is one of the most common mistakes that people make when it comes to Martech stacks [07:15]
  
• Dan shares an example of how he recently solved a challenge that is related to marketing attribution for his client [08:49]
  
• Dan’s advice:
  
  • Choose tools based upon accomplishing your objectives and find the weak points in the chain [16:46]
    
  • Go beyond the basic stack and use automation [24:02]
    
  • Review your tool budget monthly/quarterly, and evaluate the tools every 6 months, especially in Q2 [25:11]
    
  • Start working on data hygiene [27:59]
    
  • Stop believing the hype and don’t be the first one to try the tools [29:23]
    
  
  

Companies & links mentioned in this episode:

• Dan McGaw on LinkedIn 
  
• McGaw.io 
  
• UTM.io 
  
• Marketo 
  
• Full Circle Insights 
  
• InsightSquared 
  
• Mixpanel 
  
• Webflow 
  

Click here to access the episode key takeaways.

SPEAKERS

Christian Klepp, Dan McGaw

Christian Klepp  00:00

Welcome to B2B Marketers on a Mission, a podcast for B2B marketers that helps you to question the conventional, think differently, disrupt your industry, and take your marketing to new heights. Each week, we talk to B2B marketing experts who share inspirational stories, discuss their thoughts and trending topics, and provide useful marketing tips and recommendations. And now, here’s your host and co-founder of EINBLICK Consulting, Christian Klepp.

All right, ladies and gentlemen, welcome to this episode of the B2B Marketers on a Mission podcast where you get your weekly dose of B2B marketing insights. This is your host, Christian Klepp. And today, I’m excited to welcome my guests into the show, who is not only a successful entrepreneur, but he himself is someone who has been on a mission for many, many years. And that mission is to help businesses to optimize their tech stacks, and to get the technology to talk to each other. So coming to us from sunny Orlando, Florida, Mr. Dan McGaw, welcome to the show, sir.

Dan McGaw  00:56

Hey, thanks so much for having me. It’s wonderful to be here.

Christian Klepp  00:59

It was really great to be connected. Dan, and I’m really looking forward to this conversation. So let’s just, let’s just get rolling.

Dan McGaw  01:06

Yeah.

Christian Klepp  01:07

All right. So Dan, you know, we’ve had this discussion before, you’ve built up a successful business around helping companies to convert more customers with integrated marketing technology, and clean analytics. So for the sake of the audience, please talk to us about the importance of getting a company’s tech to talk to each other.

Dan McGaw  01:27

Hey, yeah, well, you know, I think the biggest problem that we have, like at most companies is we have all this different data about our customers, which is siloed, in all these different tools. And a big problem with that is you really want to be able to like have a good personalization or good automation experience for that customer, you need to be able to basically integrate all these tools together. So that way, they can talk really, really well, because that’s gonna enable you to do better marketing activities, right? So you really want to be able to build a marketing tech stack, which is well integrated together so that data can pass around freely, and then be used for whatever you want to do. So really, one of the most critical things that we work with companies on is building their mar tech stack, their tech stack in general, but making sure that that data can flow freely through all their tools.

Christian Klepp  02:09

I guess one question that probably always comes up, I guess, I suppose in your line of work, Dan is like, why do you think, you know, a lot of companies, um, you know, they just keep adding on to that tech stack. And they just keep getting, like all this new technology, rather than, you know, I would say, probably using less technology and being more effective. I’m not sure if that’s the right, the right way to describe it. But any thoughts on that?

Dan McGaw  02:35

Yeah, I mean, it’s totally true. You know, marketing and for most marketers is not about being effective, right. So I wish it was. But most marketers are more in this for the shiny objects, and so are a lot of business leaders, I hate to say it, but most companies really focus on shiny objects, compared to focusing on what is most effective at the end of the day, we do things because it makes our egos feel good. So that’s a really, really easy scapegoat there. And a lot of people get caught up in the hype of this new tool is going to provide these new KPI increases, and they kind of over believe the salespeople, over believe kind of the marketing of that tool. And they never really put that tool in the place. And instead of solving the problem of getting more value out of a tool, they go by another tool and drink the Kool Aid again, to try to solve their problems. So a lot of it has to do with there’s this new shiny thing that’s gonna do this thing. And then there’s this new shiny thing that’s gonna do this thing. And because at the end of the day, they never remember they have a subscription for that other thing. They wind up with a bunch of tools. I mean, it’s, it’s pretty bad. But it’s usually it has more to do with the fact that something shiny, it’s gonna help me reach my goals, but it never does. So I’m gonna move on. And a lot of these tools just never get used. It’s quite surprising to us the amount of adoption that doesn’t get had at these companies for these tools.

Christian Klepp  03:56

Yeah, that’s, that’s definitely an interesting point. And I know that it’s probably like hard to like, give an exact figure. But what would you say is a ballpark in terms of like how much money companies spend a year on tools that they may or may not be using at all?

Dan McGaw  04:12

Yeah, it’s definitely hard to give you a ballpark, especially because every company is so different, right. But a lot of companies, I mean, a lot of companies are spending anywhere between $5,000 and $50,000 on their marketing technology, subscriptions alone. So definitely a wide swath there, right. So but I would probably estimate around 20% of all the marketing budget, which is going towards technologies and tools – 20% of that is not even being used. And I can even speak for myself, like right out of the gate like Hotjar. I haven’t used the tool in five months. We still have it, it’s still sitting there. We’re still paying a license for it, but nobody’s using it. Right. So there’s definitely services out there that help you do like turn those things on and off and maximize. At the end of the day, like $89 a month isn’t going to kill me. Obviously, it matters a lot to hotjar as well, but yeah, a lot of it just really comes down to about 20% of your marketing tech spend is just the tools not being effectively used or adopted. And for most tools that you even own, and I’ll use Marketo, as an example. Most people are only using 30% of the feature sets. So Marketo does all kinds of stuff, only 30% of its features are ever used by one individual customer, right? And if you go to another customer, it’s a totally different 30%. Like people, obviously, all are using email. But there’s a lot of other things that Marketo does, that people just never even take advantage of.

Christian Klepp  05:28

So you drop two figures, and they’re 20 and 30%. Which, which sounds to me, like a pretty substantial. I mean, like, you know, if you’re, if you’re investing that much, and it’s not being used, I mean, that’s money that could be used elsewhere, utilized elsewhere, in the overall company’s budget, right?

Dan McGaw  05:44

Yeah, well, I would definitely say, but at the same time, right, I think that’s part of the problem, right. And I’ll just use my I’ll pick on Marketo, a little bit here. Marketo has a landing page builder built into the product, it’s integrated with everything, compared to Instapage, or any of these other sites, it sucks, right? Like, it just does not allow you to build landing pages quickly and do this stuff. So Marketo, right, landing pages are kind of just part of it. So like, while I say people are only using 30% of a platform like Marketo, well, what else you’re gonna do, right, you need to use a best of breed tool for your landing pages. So you’re not going to use that big chunk of that that product. And that happens with a lot of different tools, right? Like, in our organization, when we pay for Salesforce, it has a ton of reporting into it. Well, we don’t use a lot of the Salesforce report, even though it’s a big component of it, we don’t use custom objects, we don’t use all these things. We use Salesforce for a very specific part of that, because that’s what is best in breed in. Well, when we think about using reporting, we’re using a lot of other things for reporting, whether that be Full Circle Insights, whether that’s Insightsquared, whether that’s sending that data to a BI tool. So in a lot of cases, like you’re never going to use all the feature sets of these tools, just because there’s not a real need to it, but you’re using it for what it’s best at. And that’s probably what is most important to be focused on.

Christian Klepp  06:56

Yeah, no, that’s absolutely right. You’ve been talking about some of this stuff already in the past couple of minutes, but just run us through some of the, I would say the most common mistakes or misconceptions that people have when it comes to mar tech stacks. And like your advice to them, like what would you recommend they do to address these?

Dan McGaw  07:15

Yeah, I mean, the most common thing that we see people mess up with, and the common mistakes that we see when it comes down to a tech stack in general, is the data taxonomy that connects all these tools together, people tend to not worry about that until a very, very late stage. But at the end of the day, you need to have a unified taxonomy between all of your tools, your analytics, your marketing automation, your CRM, all of these tools should have the same taxonomy of communicating with each other. So first name is first name compared to one is spelled differently than the other one. So the taxonomy is like the most foundational issue we see that happens across all of these companies. When you throw a customer data platform on top of that, right, this taxonomy is like 10 times more important, but taxonomy is the number one problem we see everywhere. I mean, I would have to say 75% of the deal flow we have, the foundational issue that they have is taxonomy is screwed up, integration is then screwed up. And then there’s not enough experience to actually do either those two things and roll them out successfully. And that’s really what we come in to solve is the taxonomy. So I would say the taxonomy is the biggest crux that we see across all the stacks that we work on.

Christian Klepp  08:18

Yeah, that was a that was a really interesting point, which I think was… is probably the perfect segue into my next question, because the next question is basically focusing on you know, let’s talk about like something like one of the biggest challenges or problems that you and your team have managed to solve for a client in the in the past 12 months, and you don’t have to tell us the name of the company. It’s fine. Just just just a little bit about, you know, a bit of background of what the challenge was, and how you, you and your team managed to solve it.

Dan McGaw  08:49

Yeah, I mean, I can point. I mean, there’s a lot of challenges that we’ve solved over the last 12 months, but I can speak to a project that I’m currently working on, or I should say, somewhat wrapping up. So we had a customer who was leveraging segment as their customer data platform, so piping all their data into segment and then letting segment distribute that data to other tools. The problem was, is that they needed to do marketing attribution, what was our first touch, what was our last touch before they converted, things like that. Because they had some tools set up through segment and many other other tools set up through native integration. So like Google Analytics was just installed on the site. All of these tools had slightly different data in them. So that was a huge kind of touching point where we need to kind of integrate that stuff. But the hard part was trying to figure out what was going to be the best solution for this customer when it came down to how would they report on their attribution first touch and last touch, because they’re a SaaS business, right, and they have a sales process as well. A lot of these last touches are offline, a lot of the processes that are happening or an invoice sent through chargebee. So we really had to design a stack that would enable them to be able to track their online attribution as well as that offline attribution and give them the best analytics reporting. Very luckily, this client already had Mixpanel in place, and Mixpanel is cohorting feature was able to basically allow us to create channels to look at users that came through these. So we had a first touch channel, last touch channel, we have a use Mixpanel cohorting to do that. The process of figuring out what was the right tool? What was the right data taxonomy? How would we store that data? How would we store the data in the cookie? How would the cookie be fetched from the server? There was a lot of really complicated kind of technical issues in there. But the one thing I can say is that the end solution, which was how do we report on first touch, and last touch using Mixpanel, was able to be accomplished. But the trouble was like, how do we technically integrate this? So leveraging hard code on the site, leveraging Mixpanel super properties? How do we track all that information and store that data successfully? Once again, it’s a taxonomy issue and an integration issue, we were able to… in essence, give them first touch, last touch, be able to get like a ton of granular data around that. But it was all around marketing, attribution. I mean, there’s a five month project to just solve first touch and last touch in a very, very accurate way. Because I will tell you this, for anybody out there who’s using first touch and last touch and Google Analytics, right? Your models pretty simple, right? You probably don’t have a bunch of sales people, right? And you’re probably only tracking to like, lead generation, not to the actual subscription to connect all those pieces, it takes a lot of thought, takes a lot of time. And but when you get it done, you have really, really accurate data.

Christian Klepp  11:23

That’s a really great example, which made me think of another question, which I’m pretty sure you get all the time at some, you know, when you’re trying to like, work together with the client to get their technology to talk to each other, you’re probably going to run into problems like I guess, system compatibility, software being out of date, or like maybe they need to, you know, upgraded to a newer version. I mean, there’s, there’s something at least just listening to what you’ve been saying the past couple of minutes. There’s so many moving parts in this ecosystem, right? So…

Dan McGaw  11:54

For sure.

Christian Klepp  11:55

How do you how do you and your team deal with that? Like, I mean, you certainly must have a system or process in place to help stream the line out a little bit, right?

Dan McGaw  12:04

Yeah, so well, I mean, there’s definitely a process. I mean, when we first start working with a client, there’s almost always a diagnostics upfront. That diagnosis gives us access to all the tools, we go research all those things, and then we basically turn over every stone that we can, and then write a strategy on what we would recommend. We also have a proprietary tool. So if you went to McGaw.io, there’s a wiziwig it’s called What you see is what you get stack builder on our website, if you go to that, and you just put in your domain, it will automatically tell you every single code you have on your website, all the tools, and then enable you to build a diagram. So the first thing you have to do is build a diagram of all the tools you have in your stack. And then of course, like, where does the data flow? Does it go down? Does it by lateral communication? Is it only one way? If you use that stack builder, which is I mean, it’s free on our website, just check it out. It enables you to understand how is the data flowing between all that stuff. And then what you have to do after that is figure out like, hey, do we need to change to a different tool to enable an objective? And that’s what we’re always most focused on is what is the key result? What is the objective we’re trying to accomplish? And I think most companies do it the opposite. A sales rep contacts them and say, you can do x, and then that becomes their focus. Really, you’re focusing on what is my business objective? And how is that going to help me get there. So what we do is we focus on those business objectives. And then we start swapping out tools, whether we need them or not, based upon those things, but you also have to understand swapping out a tool can take a lot of time. I mean, we just did a implementation where we were putting in segment adding in HubSpot, adding in a fewer things. It was a nine month project. I mean, it cost the company six figures to get this done. So like these are big, hairy, expensive things and don’t get me wrong, there’s there’s cheap stuff all the time, we did like a $20,000 implementation for over a two month period. But there’s a lot of moving pieces in that. And that goes back to you’ve got to start with what is the data taxonomy of this tool? How’s it gonna work with this other tool? And then how’s it going to integrate? And that really is the deciding factor on most tools for us is, how is it going to integrate? Right? And how do we roll those out? Because ripping out a marketing automation tool, that’s a lot of work. There’s a lot of dependencies. So but it always starts with that stack diagram, and then figuring out where’s the weak point that’s preventing us from reaching our objectives, and then we’ll swap out those things. And we tend to choose tools based upon their ability to integrate and if you read my book, Build Cool Shit, right? The whole premise of the book is picking tools that are going to work together as an ecosystem essence that are going to constantly recycle your data through them, so you can create amazing marketing outcomes.

Christian Klepp  14:39

You leave that out so beautifully, man, it made me think of like, there’s probably a lot of like comparisons but something like CSI right where they conduct an autopsy, and they tried to like solve the case by putting all these like missing pieces together and it kind of sounds a little bit like that.

Dan McGaw  14:54

And it’s funny that you say that we always joke about where the dead bodies hidden when we get into a stack, because there’s always dead bodies. There’s always something that you’re just like, why is this? What happened? And then we have to forensically figure out what’s going on and then figure out how to un-mess it up. So that’s, that’s totally our process.

Christian Klepp  15:17

Exactly. That I’m gonna get, you know, I’d like to get your thoughts on this. I’ll drop. I’ll drop a couple of figures in here. But like, there’s an article that was written by intercom.com. Alright. Yeah. And this is something that we all already know, you probably have already known for a long time. But the mar tech industry as a whole right, is estimated to be worth something like, probably like $120 billion, certainly, billion. Yeah. So again, so short of stating the obvious. That’s a huge space that’s only projected to get bigger. Right. And so this article also talks about this report that was put together by Forrester and it points out three key factors for this, you know, for this growth, right.

So one is, to nobody’s surprise, digitization is driving investment. I mean, clearly.

Number two, to your earlier point, marketers are overwhelmed by the number of options out there, and they still are, and they will continue to be. Alright.

Number three, segments are starting to mature, which can be a good or a bad thing. Right?

So here’s the question. So going back to some of the things that you’ve been talking about in the past couple of minutes, if there are marketers, and there’s B2B companies out there that are, you know, taking a step back and having a look at their tech stack and trying to figure out, okay, what’s the best… What’s the best route forward? One advice would you give them?

Dan McGaw  16:46

I mean, choose tools based upon accomplishing your objectives and find the weak points in the chain. Right. So naturally, when you’re choosing tools or choosing technologies, right, that’s got to be mapped to an exact objective and an outcome. And you’ve got to really use that tool to accomplish it. I mean, the marketing tech budget has exploded at companies over the past five years, especially after COVID. Right? I mean, you’ve seen everything is now digital. So but the biggest things is like, is the tool actually going to help you accomplish your objective? And I think that’s a thing that we see a lot of people get distracted with is they get caught up in the sales cycle or they get caught up in the hype, and they buy tools or overbuy tools. I’m really big on proof of concepts, right? Like, let’s test this out in the lowest tier, try it out, even we own another. We own a SaaS company called UTM.io. It’s all about data governance for your campaign links. And like helping that stuff out, we always advise our clients like, hey, let’s get started on the startup plan. Right, let’s get started on the premium plan. I don’t want you to buy enterprise yet I want you to get used to it and take your time, because that’s how you build good customers. And a lot of companies just jump in and buy the five year contract with all the bells and whistles and then never use any of it. And then five years later, like I wish I would have never bought that. So really align the tool with your objectives and your key results. I hate to keep beating that home. But I see a lot of bloat in these companies like loss, we’re talking five figure monthly subscription bloat, and we’re just like, Why do you have this tool? They’re like, well, we thought I’d do this. And it’s like, well, why are you even trying to do that? Well, we thought it’d be cool. It’s like, well, who thought? Well, the sales rep told us… I was like, Well, why would you ever buy that? So it happens a lot.

Christian Klepp  18:29

Yeah. Yeah. So sounds like it. Sounds like.

Hey, it’s Christian Klepp. Here. We’ll get back to the episode in a second. But first, is your brand struggling to cut through the noise? Are you trying to find more effective ways to reach your target audience and boost sales? Are you trying to pivot your business? If so, book a call with EINBLICK Consulting, our experienced consultants will work with you to help your B2B business to succeed and scale. Go to www.einblick.co for more information.

I promise you, my man, we are not going to talk about COVID. We’re not going to talk about the pandemic. But you alluded to it earlier.

Dan McGaw  19:08

I love COVID, I’m fine with it. We’re prepared for it. So…

Christian Klepp  19:13

Yeah. Well, I mean, what I want to say is that, you know, clearly things have changed as a result of this pandemic. But you know, what have you seen in your area of expertise in that particular landscape that has changed as a result of the pandemic?

Dan McGaw  19:28

I mean, volume, by far, volume, I mean, immediately, I mean, in the first two months of COVID, I mean, we knew COVID was coming right around the end of December. So we were in it. We were in the loop that like something was going on in Wuhan, they started shutting stuff down, and we found out about some of the stuff around the end of December. And in January, we had a lot of prep. In February, we had a lot of planning. And then in March when it really blew up, we were actually already executing. So we were very, very ahead of COVID which was great. I think for the first few months of COVID. Everybody kind of had this hurry up and pause right. And which was very, very stereotypical. But then it became very clear if I want to be able to reach a consumer, if I want to be able to reach anybody. The only channel I have is digital. I have no other means. I’ve been dug around you have TV. But I, at this point in my career, I consider TV to be digital. Because when you think about OTT, right over the top, when you think about Netflix, Hulu, Disney+ all of those things, they’re through the TV, but all of those things are run through digital systems. Now, the fact that you can do with Hulu, soon you’ll be able to self-serve, you’ll be able to buy an ad on Hulu, show it in between an episode all through a self-serve platform, right, like so to me, TV is now becoming a digital medium for sure. So once COVID kind of settled down, you got into really the latter part of March really, when you got into May, everybody was like how do I spend more money on digital. So I mean, the volume has just been exponential in regards to the actions people are trying to do with COVID. And everybody probably saw this, for the first six months after COVID. Everybody was running five webinars a week, right? Like everybody was doing a webinar. And then six months, maybe nine months later, you started seeing that taper off because it was webinar fatigue. And now you’ll see podcasts are huge again, right, like, so it’s just really, really fascinating to see this evolution. But the easiest way that I would say it is just the volume of digital of everybody becoming digital has really, really increased. I mean, we’ll use King’s Hawaiian, which is the the bread manufacturer, that a lot of people know, in the United States, I don’t think you guys have King’s Hawaiian in Canada. Really, really popular, well known bread manufacturer, they’re sold to like every grocery store ever. They’re digital, right? They hired us to help them bring them digital. Who would ever thought that like a bread company would be forcing themselves digital. But that’s, that’s why I say but just the volume now everybody has to be digital is key. So…

Christian Klepp  21:52

Yeah, no, those are those are definitely great observations. And you know, chances are, you know, even if we revert to some kind of degree of normalcy again, a lot of these companies are still gonna stay remote, they’re still gonna have all their assets, you know, like, be in a digital format, everything is going to be on the cloud, as they say, and so forth. And they’re still going to have a tech stack that needs to be integrated, or people needed, you know, needed technology to talk to each other. So for as long as that persists, I mean, you’re gonna continue to be in business, right?

Dan McGaw  22:22

No, I mean, we should. I mean, we’re the only company that specializes in building tech stacks, right? There is no other agency, that their only focus, I mean, is tech stacks, right. So don’t get me wrong, we have analytics and things like that. But I mean, I wrote the book on how to build a Mar tech stack. So yeah, I have the only online course for how to build a Mar tech stack. So there’s obviously a lot of tangential things around that. But when you’re trying to design the architecture of 17, or 35, different tools, and you’re really maintaining the infrastructure that holds this hodgepodge of tools together. There’s a huge, huge, huge opportunity there. That’s the reason why we chose this about four years ago that this was going to be our focus. And it’s only going to get worse, there’s just more and more tools. And then you talked about the $130 billion amount for mar tech. Well, now sales tech is coming along. Product tech is getting even hotter. At the end of the day, they’re all tools. And that’s what we’re really focused on is what is going to be your revenue infrastructure. All of these tools help you generate revenue. But if you don’t have your infrastructure in check, you really run into a problem. And I highly recommend people to check out a copy of my book because it talks about like, what is the modern stack compared to what is the traditional stack and the modern stack? You can’t, you can’t if you’re a competitor has a modern stack, and you have a traditional stack, they’re gonna kick your ass in a few years. So like, you really got to modernize to be able to keep up.

Christian Klepp 22:38

Yeah, no, that’s absolutely right. Oh, it’s a it’s $121 billion, by the way.

Dan McGaw  23:50

121?

Christian Klepp  23:50

121 billion, right. Um, what’s the status quo in your area of expertise that you passionately disagree with? And why?

Dan McGaw  24:02

I mean, my, the status quo that I can’t stand is the fact that all you need is Marketo, and Salesforce to get your job done. Marketo, Salesforce, Google Analytics, like that is the most basic, I’m not even gonna say the word but like the most basic stack you can have. And most companies that’s like it, they’ve got like a par dot instance, Salesforce, Google Analytics, they call it a day. That’s not okay anymore. You’ve got to have much more power than just that, to effectively run the business and to automate things. It blows us away that we meet a lot of these really, really modern companies, or on even like startups. And we’re like, Listen, just if you just slapped in Zapier, you could automate like 60 hours a week off of labor, and that’s a lot of times, why don’t you set up Zapier? So I just think the status quo most people not integrating not automating is just a little frustrating.

Christian Klepp  24:54

Yeah, no, that’s so true. And I mean, like, you know, again, this is one of these questions where if the answers probably “it depends”, but what would you say would be the standard time for companies to like, review what they’ve gotten there, you know, in their toolbox, so to speak, every 6 months, every 12 months? Or?

Dan McGaw  25:11

Yeah, I would definitely say you should be looking at well, one, you should be looking at your tool budget on a monthly basis, if not a quarterly basis. So right, I just had 2 finance… I had a finance meeting last week for one of my companies and a finance meeting this this week, and I was just looking at expenditures for tools from the previous month. So we look at the cost on a monthly basis, when you really think about evaluating the tools, right, I would be looking at that on a quarterly or bi-annual, or excuse me, would that be semi-annual every six months. So every six months would be about the time you do that. And usually what happens is that happens at a very certain time of year. And I think people make a lot of mistakes here. Every single year, our business and everybody else in my space, once we hit September, it starts to get crazy. By the time we’re in December, it’s nuts. And there’s two reasons for that one, all of the vendors have to hit their end of your target. So everybody’s powering away. But on the flip side, everybody’s doing their next year planning. So they’re like, Oh, I didn’t hit my metrics, I gotta go buy this new tool. I got all this new budget next year. So there’s a lot of tool buying that happens in Q4. The problem with that is one I mean, don’t get me wrong, you can get some good deals because everybody’s trying to hit their goals. The problem is, everybody slammed and weeded, and nobody can give you really good attention. So we tend to try to get companies when they really start to do their evaluations, you should be really looking at your evaluations or tools in Q2, trying to do some of your figuring things out in that Q2 period, buying the tools by the end of Q3 and kind of getting away from the end of year rush. So there’s a lot of different ways to do that. But that keeps you out of the standard cycle. But every six months for sure, annually for sure. But I’m looking at it on the P&L on a monthly basis, right. So we spend, I mean, our company whose only 20 people, if we paid for all of our tools. Luckily we don’t pay for our costs are probably about $8,000 a month, even without all of the things that we get for free and things we probably wouldn’t use, we’d still be spending probably about $2,000 to $3,000 a month just on tools, that’s a lot of money. Yeah. I mean, what right now that I mean over one and a half percent of my revenue, so like, it’s not the end of the world, but at the same time, like if I can shave five points off, I’m making more money.

Christian Klepp  27:23

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Because otherwise you get you know, like you, like you said, a couple of minutes ago, like you get tempted like get all these tools, and then a burns this massive hole in your budget. Right? So…

Dan McGaw  27:33

Oh my gosh, yeah. No burns a massive, massive hole. And I mean, depending upon what you want to do with your business, if you want to grow, you do have to spend money, but…don’t waste it.

Christian Klepp  27:42

Absolutely. Absolutely. Um, you’ve given plenty of great advice already. But one more for the road, I would say is, um, what is one thing that you think everybody should start and one thing that you think everyone should stop doing? When it comes to B2B mar tech?

Dan McGaw  27:59

The biggest thing, data hygiene, right, like the number one thing, so the big thing that’s come up over the past five years, right, everybody’s like, oh, machine learning, artificial intelligence, I’m so excited. And all these things. And you know, one of the biggest failures of all of those technologies is crap data. You can’t use artificial intelligence if your data sucks, you can’t use machine learning if you don’t have good data. So there’s one thing I want anybody start doing is start working on your data hygiene. I mean, you’ll see a huge proliferation of this over the next couple of years. Data Governance is becoming a huge sector in the marketing technology space. We created UTM.io. I mean, we created the product five years ago, we rebranded maybe three and a half years ago, the whole point of the product is to get more data governance on our UTM tracking codes. So that way downstream, our analysts can actually see what’s going on. And with that accurate data, we can now use machine learning and artificial intelligence to optimize our campaigns, which is totally great. So data governance is by far one of the biggest things that we try to push our customers and constituents to really take serious because if you get that more accurate data, as we get better with artificial intelligence in the next two years, you don’t need to I mean, you don’t need a human to be magical anymore. You just connect it to GP three and you go for it. I think it’s GP three. I think that’s the one that Leon (Elon) Musk has.

Christian Klepp  29:17

And one and one thing people should stop probably like buying tools that they don’t need. (laugh)

Dan McGaw  29:23

Yeah, I would, I would definitely say, Stop buying the tools that you don’t need. But the biggest thing that I would tell people to stop, stop falling for the hype. At the end of the day. These sales vendors and marketers are really talented, and they know how to get you to buy into something and they know how to leverage alignment and manipulation and all these things to get you to buy stuff. People need to stop falling for the hype, and they need to start being a little bit more prudent in regards to the things that they’re buying, but as well as why am I making this decision. And that’s the biggest thing that we see is people just get sucked into the hype and then they end up spending $20,000 a year more or $200,000 a year more on things they don’t need just because they fall into that hype cycle. And you know, I’ve done it myself. So I can’t, I can’t. But that’s the biggest thing I wish people stop, stop believing the hype. Stop, also stop trying to be an innovator. If there’s anything that has made me a millionaire, right, it was the fact that I wasn’t the first one signing up for this new thing, or the first one doing it. I waited for 40 to 50, if not 4,000-5,000 other people to go test something out and do it. And then I went and did something with a technology because it was already tried and true. I didn’t have any risk. Just reduce my risk. It doesn’t pay to be innovative. It pays to solve obvious problems. But it doesn’t pay to be on the bleeding edge.

Christian Klepp  30:46

Yeah, it’s um, it’s interesting, because you know, you can have this pioneering spirit, but just don’t be the pioneer.

Dan McGaw  30:54

Let somebody else go fail for you. I mean, that’s what we do all the time. Let somebody else go. And I think the easiest one is I had a ton of people who are I’m friends with, who went and started using Webflow years ago. And they ran into issue after issue after issue. And they would have to pay this expensive consultant to come in and fix the problems. And then they had all these limitations that held them back from making more money. And I was like, I’m not touching it. I’m sticking to WordPress, I can I can go on Upwork and hire plenty of WordPress people. I have all these things like, Well, yeah, but you can’t do this one thing. And I’m like, I don’t care. Like, it makes me money. And it’s cheap. And it does what it’s supposed to do. Now Webflow, many years later, is just catching up to what I’m able to do. And I’m going to give it a consideration. But all the people that jumped on the party early actually spent way more money than I did and made less money because they were held back. So it doesn’t always pay to be the hipster at the front of the line. I mean, maybe if you’re going to go see a concert, but even that, I don’t know.

Christian Klepp  31:50

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Dan, I mean, this has been a super informative, super thought provoking session, you know, do us the honor of giving us a little introduction to yourself.

Dan McGaw  32:01

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it’s been a pleasure to be here, I hope everybody gets an opportunity to get a free copy of my book. If you go to Mcgaw.io, you can get a free copy directly on the homepage. So check that out. And please go check out utm.io if you want to get better campaign tracking.

Christian Klepp  32:14

Awesome. And it’s called Build Cool Shit, right?

Dan McGaw 32:18

Build Cool Shit. Yeah, the book is Build Cool Shit. It’s a real book, right? People always think it’s gonna be like an e-book. But no, it’s a real color book. It’s even got diagrams inside that show you how to do things you need to do. But it’s your blueprint to creating the best mar tech stack. And you know, do you are you cool if we play a fun game with this actually, because we have a text bot, which will show people some cool mar tech. So what I want you to do for your listeners and even yourself is if you pull out your cell phone, right, and then you go to your text messages, what I want you to do is you’re going to text a word to this number. So the number is 415-915-9011. I’ll say that one more time, 415-915-9011. If you text the word martech M-A-R-T-E-C-H to that, it will walk you through an entire text box that will collect your first name, your last name, your address, all those things to be able to ship you the book, and it’s all managed and automated through our stack. And at the end of it, you’ll be able to hit it a link, you’ll be able to do some confirmation. And you’ll get a free copy of my book, right. It’s super, super awesome. But that’s always a fun way to help people see what you can really do with mar tech.

Christian Klepp  32:29

Fantastic. Fantastic. Dan, I got to say that that’s probably the first time that somebody has done this on the show. So you know, thank you for thank you for that. That was pretty refreshing.

Dan McGaw  33:38

Hey, I’m the only person that gets all the leads from all of the podcasts as well. I get everybody’s contact information because we have a textbot. Same thing goes for conferences. You want to go speak at a conference and you want to be the person who gets all the leads, have everybody go use your textbot. I get hundreds of leads when I go to conferences that nobody, none of the other speakers get because I have I have a text system for it. Solve problems, have an objective, go solve that objective, right meet that. My objective was how do I get leads from places where I can’t have people fill out a form? Anybody has a phone, haven’t texted, they all want to test it. And now I solved my objective, which is I need more leads. So at the end of the day, the book is a part of that. But, I hope that’s I hope that’s a fun way for you to see how we match objectives.

Christian Klepp  34:23

Yeah, for sure.

Dan McGaw  34:23

Back to the tech that we actually buy.

Christian Klepp  34:26

Absolutely, man. Absolutely. Dan McGaw, thank you, sir. It’s been an absolute pleasure. And you know, thanks for coming on and sharing your experience and your expertise with the listeners. So take care, be safe and stay in touch.

Dan McGaw  34:39

Absolutely. Thanks for having me. It’s great to meet everybody.

Christian Klepp  34:42

Take care. Bye.

Thank you for joining us on this episode of the B2B Marketers on a Mission podcast. To learn more about what we do here at EINBLICK, please visit our website at www.einblick.co, and be sure to subscribe to the show on iTunes or your favorite podcast player.