When I started in the MarTech space in 2009, there was only a handful of tech dedicated to marketing use cases which made evaluation easy. The most common factors were; how big is your database, how many emails do you send and what is your budget?

These days, there are hundreds of options and many clones. The cost and risk involved in vendor selection is enormous and most growing companies need to get it right on the first try. With all that effort behind it, signing a contract and getting access to your new solution can be a moment of tremendous excitement and accomplishment.

However, as the confetti lands and the first invoice arrives, business leaders quickly realize that the pressure is one to get value from their investment.

Here are 5 prerequisites to consider before signing a contract to help put your business in a position of success, and avoid the frantic sprint to actually get started.

Are stakeholders’ goals aligned?

Scaling businesses tend to have small leadership teams, everyone wearing multiple hats. 

Founders are doing marketing and sales; operations is your legal team, finance, and talent acquisition; and product development is designing customer experiences, doing tier 1 service and surveying customers for feedback. Each member of the team is stretched thin, trying to hit quota and existing in their own day-to-day forming their own vision, experiencing their own highs and lows and reacting to their own challenges.

Therefore, it is imperative that each stakeholder is aligned on growth targets and KPIs that give you insight into the effectiveness of your efforts.

MarTech plays a role in everything your brand does to go-to-market from capturing demand, bridging the gap between marketing and sales and providing insights on performance. Every solution does things a little differently so its important to understand purpose and goals to ensure you select the right tech and use it to move impactful needles.

Do you know your ideal customer inside and out?

Businesses are increasingly finding situations where a personalized and refined approach to engagement is necessary in order to build relationships on a  foundation of trust. 

While mass marketing still has a place in today’s sales motions, particularly in B2C markets, personalization further optimizes the customer journey, provides a more seamless customer experience and fuels growth.

Given the nature of the one-to-one approach, building deep empathy for your ideal customer informs every single interaction, allows for efficient segmentation of your database and opens up a world of insights.

Start with three of your highest priority personas and ensure that your leadership team is present and collaborative as you define them. Personas should also be Mutually Exclusive and Collectively Exhaustive (MECE); meaning, each persona should be unique and should capture every detail that impacts their profile.

Do you know your customer lifecycle?

Whiteboard your entire customer journey from awareness to referral. This is the path to organic growth and exactly where MarTech can help you optimize.

Start with your current state, map out every customer touchpoint, every targeted ad, email, SMS, call and brand interaction whether it's initiated by marketing, sales or support. Include details on your employee experience as well to see how well enabled they are to service their customers.

Identify gaps in communication, leaks in your funnel and other roadblocks. Some of these areas can be supplemented by additional resources or automated with MarTech. Start with low-hanging fruit that would add the most value and prioritize those moments in your vendor analysis.

Do you have content?

Congratulations! You’ve gone through the process and have signed up for a MarTech solution with all the bells and whistles you needed. Now time to get started because the clock is ticking and you’ve already paid license fees for the first quarter.

Too many businesses sign up for marketing solutions without the right content to serve up at the right time… Until you have key topics, emails, blogs, videos produced and social posts on your calendar, you’ve got yourself an expensive timebomb.

To get value from your investment quickly, have your content ready to go from day 1 so you don’t end up paying for a Ferrari paperweight.

Do you have reliable data?

Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, do you have ample and accurate customer data?

Given the nature of today’s emphasis on personalized experiences, data unlocks the key to building relationships based on trust and service. Quality data enables segmentation down to the persona-level, it gives your business visibility into account engagement and helps all your customer-facing teams service customers quickly and to the best of their ability.

Some solutions will include data sourcing, appending and deduping as features to fuel your outreach. Others will not and will need to be integrated with a dedicated data solution, so make sure you fully understand the state of your database, how many records you have, the breadth of data points you have access to, as well as the accuracy of your data so you can use it with confidence.

Required prerequisites

Before you sign a contract with a MarTech vendor, understand your gaps and where solutions could add the most value to your organization. There are many factors that will drive ROI and all are in your control. By moving through your evaluation process with diligence and intention, you’ll put your business in a place to succeed and realize amazing results, up and to the right.