• by Ray Schultz , Columnist, July 13, 2020

Brands are disconnected from their data and failing to use it for marketing. And a full 57% are planning to change their martech stack, according to State of Marketing Technology, a trans-Atlantic study by Clevertouch.

Of the firms surveyed, 68% have a stack that isn’t integrated or fully connected.  

And only 22% claim they’re operating in a data-driven culture — that means 78% aren’t. 

Another 21% avoid data because the team is not very analytical and doesn’t understand data. Huh? 

On an equally sad note, 30% analyze data to some extent but don’t make decisions based on it. However, 27% are trying to develop a data-driven culture. 

Good luck — at the same time, 72% are struggling to hire martech skills. 

Clevertouch is pushing a concept called the Martech Spine — the basic lineup of the most important technologies, not the broader stack. Indeed, the company proclaims that the “stack” is dead, and should be replaced by the spine. 

We’ll see about that. On its site, Clevertouch admits that 73% of marketers don’t have their spine in place.

For this study, Clevertouch surveyed 200 senior marketers from Europe, the UK and the U.S. The study doesn’t focus on email automation per se, but on the whole martech stack, says Egle Lusciauskaite, account executive at Clevertouch. Yet email is part of that big picture.

The company found that only 12% feel their campaign are aligned to their customer’s journey and interests.  

This may be the reason for the yawning disconnect between marketing and sales. 

A disappointing 25% say they’re a source of sales leads. That may be due to the following:

• Marketing doesn’t have any focus on building collateral for the sales team — 24% 
• Marketing provides sales with some of their sales collateral — 36%
• Marketing enables sales with most of their sales collateral — 19%
• Marketing provides sales with most of their sales collateral and uses marketing technology to drive better results — 21%

And, perhaps predictably, sales and marketing are not equally respected in companies. Marketing is seen as: 

• An equally respected department to sales — 30%
• A change agent and driver of new thinking — 28%
• Just responsible for events or creative marketing — 22%  
• A source of leads for sales — 20%