Episode #16: A Glimpse Into the Future of Martech - Phil Gamache
Looking at the latest developments with one of the humans behind the Humans of Martech podcast.
Ten years ago, you could hitch your wagon to a single martech platform and build a great career. It’s what I did with Marketo.
Not sure I’d recommend that to someone entering the field today…
All the trends I see in Martech point to:
Legacy incumbents losing relevance
Dynamic startups delivering innovation faster and cheaper
Best-of-breed point solutions beating all-in-one suites
A drive towards “composability” - breaking down functionality that once existed within a single app into multiple tools
A move away from the CRM as the single source of truth
Easily adopted PLG solutions beating multi-year vendor lock-ins
In that environment, you’re at a disadvantage if you’re “only” a Marketo specialist or a Pardot specialist. The ground can move out from under you too easily.
Instead, we’ll have demand for technologists who are way more platform agnostic, bring a toolbox with options in a dozen categories, have deep understanding of data architecture, and can bring it all together as a functional system.
There’s really one huge reason why I think this move is inevitable: innovation always wins, eventually.
And legacy incumbents SUCK at innovation. Despite having 100x the resources (human and financial) they often lack vision, spread themselves thin on too many features, become disconnected from their customer base, are always playing catch-up, and simply take too long to ship.
Meanwhile a few kids in college have already delivered the next killer app built on AWS and OpenAI.
Think this is all hype? Listen to my chat with Phil Gamache. He’s been living this reality and believes firmly that best-of-breed and composability are the future.
Phil is a next-level thinker and educator and someone deeply committed to craft. It was a pleasure to have him on the show.
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About Today's Guest
Phil Gamache is on a mission to future-proof the humans behind the tech and help them have successful and happy careers in marketing. During the day, he runs all things Growth at Pelago and during the weekends you can find him behind the mic on humansofmartech.com.
Key Topics
[00:00] - Introduction
[01:40] - Origin of the Humans of Martech Podcast
[03:42] - Importance of soft skills in becoming a martech leader
[04:33] - Growing an audience for the show
[08:00] - Importance of having a specific approach for the show. Enjoying the process of learning through being a host.
[11:00] - Use of AI for creating podcast imagery and transcription
[17:32] - What do we consider AI-generated imagery to be?
[20:30] - Point of view on martech and being platform agnostic
[25:21] - Phil’s ideal stack
[26:47] - Benefits of a composable CDP architecture
[30:17] - Definition of composability in martech
[34:27] - Challenges of troubleshooting a composable stack
[38:19] - The relative recency of the cloud-first warehouse and the transition to warehouse native tech
[40:22] - How much does the tech matter, in the big picture of business?
[42:19] - Phil’s take on the role of AI a year from now
[44:20] - Propensity modelling
[49:03] - Finding balance in life
Resources
Humans of Martech - Official website. Click on "episodes" to browse the huge back catalogue by topic.
Midjourney - Image generator Phil uses to create the AI artwork for the show
Insightface.ai - App Phil uses to incorporate photos into AI-generated photo.