In addition to buy-in and budget, what support is needed from other internal teams to set up an organization for success with a new Martech solution?

An onboarding plan and a dedicated owner!

I'm sure you've seen it before too-- you buy something new and shiny, and it takes a lot longer to implement and use than expected. Fast forward a few months or years and you realize nobody is using it anymore and it's shelfware, ready to be cancelled. I've found it to be super helpful to assign a singular owner to the martech solution, who is in charge of ensuring it's implemented effectively, people are onboarded onto it, and to report out on usage periodically. 

I would make sure your leadership team is built into the vision for what the MarTech is going to unlock. Even after their approval, keep them in the loop on your implementation progress. Then when you're live, socialize your successes and failures with leadership and xfnl teams. Bring people along for the ride and get them excited about what you're doing.

Specifically, I'd build relationships with teams in marketing, sales, operations, product, and anyone else that is part of go to market. You may need to build a relationship with IT or engineering, depending on your company.

Ask for help when you need it. Most marketers aren't good at onboarding technology and maintaining technology so if you can find a team or someone that has experience managing software projects they might be able to help you avoid critical mistakes.

Someone once told me that the average adoption rate of martech platforms is close to 5%. Meaning that of all the features they make available the average customer only uses about 5% of them. I don't think this is exactly right but I believe it to be directionally accurate. Trust me when I say I have a little experience with the accuracy of that.

This is wasted opportunity, not using features you're paying for. So you need ADOPTION for new martech solutions. Get a few folks internally to become champions of it, get them training anyone that can get value from it, create guilds, highlight successes, make yourself the best customer of that platform possible. Suddenly you'll be getting way more value than you pay for. Way easier said than done but if you can accomplish escape velocity the ROI will absolutely be there, if not you'll likely throw away money blame the vendor and try something else.

To be set up for success, you’ll need a driver or owner for the MarTech solution. Without this person, oftentimes you’ll find the software is forgotten or underutilized. The driver ensures the tool is used to its fullest use case or capacity.

The driver should also create a utilization playbook. This playbook should address questions such as:

• How is the tool intended to be used?
• What are the capabilities that are not being used today, but that the org can grow into?
• Who else can use the tool and also realize its value but isn’t today?

You may not have a MarTech stack committee at your org, but the owner can drive these types of discussions.