Q Naim (Founder, Team Circle) on why fixing your martech stack starts with being brutal and turning things off.
Plenty of martech gets bought by people who will never log into it. Q Naim has watched teams sit on half a year of paid license before launching a single use case.
As founder of Team Circle, Q advises marketing leaders on the stacks and measurement models behind their spend.
He breaks down the two kinds of shelfware. One is the tool stuck between contract and first use case. The other is the roadmap feature that never gets built because a vendor-forced upgrade has the team rebuilding what it already had. He explains how measurement turns into a way to justify tools already bought, and why value growth you can measure earns more confidence from finance than cost cuts. He also makes the case that companies behind on digital transformation may now be able to leapfrog competitors who invested early.
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3 Takeaways:
Chapters:
(00:00) Introduction
(1:00) From Attribution to Marketing Mix Models
(2:41) The Shelfware Problem
(4:38) AI and Tool Sprawl
(5:22) Escaping Justification Metrics
(5:49) The Less-Is-More Framework
(6:51) How to Avoid Measurement Paralysis
(9:19) Lightning Round
(10:47) Martech Hot Take
About the Guest:
Q has a background in both advertising and science. He worked with brands in Seattle, joined FCB in New Zealand, and later founded Team Circle, an AI and customer technology consultancy focused on making technology easy. He chairs IAB New Zealand's Data, Privacy & Measurement Council.
Connect:
Q Naim: https://www.linkedin.com/in/qawesome/
Sara Faatz: www.linkedin.com/in/sara-faatz-b67213
Progress: www.progress.com
Sara: [00:00:00] I'm Sara Faatz, and I lead community and awareness at Progress. This is 10 Minute Martech.
Q: No one's really trusting that number that if you add up the combination of all your digital channels is more than your actual sales, and there's more scrutiny coming from executives at the kind of top level. And nothing builds confidence more than actually growing the value that you can deliver and being able to measure that.
Sara: That's Q Naim, founder at Team Circle. Let's get started.
Q, I found something you said recently that I knew I had to start with. You said, "Marketing measurement is finally broken enough that it's gonna be worth fixing." It's a pretty provocative statement, so let's start there. What exactly is broken, and what have marketers been pretending to know that we don't actually know?
Q: Yeah, great question. Marketing measurement has been, I think, a love-hate relationship for a lot of industry for a [00:01:00] long time. Really, attribution seems to be a big part of it. Everybody kind of misattributes the quote around, "Half of my marketing's wasted, but I don't know which half." And for a long time, the rise of digital channels enabled people to have this hyper-granular measurement that was more accessible, more real-time, more directly connected to the outcomes that they were driving, and started to skew the focus to that which was easily measured.
And then I think as the cookie-pocalypse kind of passed and as browser privacy increased, and we started to see this shift that started to damage that direct measurement and methods like multi-touch attribution, all of a sudden you had the resurgence of econometrics or marketing media mix models coming into the play.
Of course, with additional automation and intelligence tools, it's more accessible, right? There's more open-source models provided by the vendors. There's [00:02:00] more ease in data preparation and management that used to be a big part of the effort and lift to actually do those more complex models.
And so I think that it's just been the reckoning we've seen with clients, where all of a sudden it's like no one's really trusting that number, that if you add up the combination of all your digital channels is more than your actual sales, and there's more scrutiny coming from executives at the kind of top level, including from the finance department.
CMOs are finally frustrated enough. It feels like we're starting to see some action and moving towards actual bottom-line results and less of the vanity kind of interim metrics that have driven a lot of decisions for years.
Sara: You've also talked about shelfware. Talk a little bit about that and your dislike for that and why, and how people can really understand the difference between what is shelfware versus just something that's been underused.
Q: Yeah. People have seemingly [00:03:00] bought things for a long time that they didn't really understand why, apart from the fact that there was a drive to digitally transform or modernize the business or do something along those lines. And so you have uninformed procurement teams and executives running processes to acquire technology that they're never gonna log into themselves, and they really don't understand exactly how it's going to be applied.
And it kills me, right? Because you have hundreds of thousands of millions of dollars being invested, and often the license start date compared to the first use case getting launched leaves a big gap. So you could be sitting on half a year of license without ever actually delivering any value.
And so that's one sort of shelfware, which is the time to value, I suppose, once you kind of get handed the keys to the car, so to speak, before you actually drive it and take it around the block. The other kind is the well-intentioned, "Well, that's on the roadmap to implement as part of a broader rollout or [00:04:00] implementation, but we never actually get to that, and it's been hard to prioritize because the other part's broken.
"Plus the vendor's making us upgrade to stay within support or service, and so now we're actually chasing our tail trying to rebuild the thing we already built." I hate the concept of migrations. I'm a big fan of upgrades and trying to look at it in that way. But yeah, so I think that we're at that point now where you can take a more holistic look at your overall stack, and starting with the money is a great place to start.
Where are you spending? And where is that investment going? What are you actually getting from that? And are you using the tools?
Sara: Yeah. Do you think AI helps or hinders that, though?
Q: On one hand, AI could help assist in doing an audit and getting a view [Sara: Sure.] of everything that's there and starting to drill in.
And on the other hand, it's created just more tools, proliferating faster than ever before. And speaking from my personal [00:05:00] experience, it's easy to forget about a subscription for a month. Even in a small business and watching the bank balance go through, you're like, "Oh man, we've had that tool and it was interesting and added value, but now it's been superseded by the next one, and we've built one in-house as well, so do we still need that one?"
And you have to be much more active, I suppose, in your license management.
Sara: A lot of what happens is somebody does invest in a tool or a system, and then they have to justify that cost, right? [Q: Yeah.] And so your measurements become more about justifying your existence [Q: Yes.] and the tools that you're using. How do you get out of that rabbit hole? What advice would you give to somebody who's like, "Oh man, I see myself in this. Well-intentioned, but, you know, need to do something else." Where do you start?
Q: I'm a big fan of less is more, especially these days, and being somewhat brutal and turning things off.
Value for measurement, I guess just to loop back to [00:06:00] that, has always been a three-pillared kind of approach. I think no matter how you dress up the strategy and what alliterative terms you might use, you want more customers or money. You want to keep the money that you have and grow those customers that already exist, and you wanna be more efficient operationally and spend less to operate your business.
And ultimately, any business case will ladder down to those three things. I think CFOs are tired of cost-out business cases that never deliver, and I think focusing on how can we do better, how can we grow value more so than how can we reduce cost. I mean, cost reduction is of course important, but it's often a promise that's never delivered.
Right. And nothing builds confidence more than actually growing the value that you can deliver and being able to measure that. Right.
Sara: We're hearing that there are some people in the space right now who are just kind of paralyzed by all of it, and they're saying, "You know what? I don't know what's coming up next, so I'm just not gonna do anything."
But what [00:07:00] is the right direction? If somebody comes to you and says, "Man, there's so much going on. I know I need to do something, but I'm afraid to take that next move. I'm afraid to end up with too much shelfware. I'm afraid that the products that I'm buying are not the right ones," what advice would you give them?
Q: I think it really comes down to understanding your position in the market [Sara: Yeah.] and what makes sense for you, right? Because there's a strong drive or appetite to keep up with the Joneses, use the latest technology and tools. And for some organizations and some people, it's absolutely necessary.
But then we've also got clients who have turned up recently and been like, "We haven't really done anything significant in the digital transformation space in the last few years. We're conscious we're behind our competitors." And they're kind of just starting this maturity journey, but get the benefit of how much new technologies have evolved in the last three years.
[00:08:00] And you really have an opportunity to leapfrog in some cases. If you were trying to build an agent like we were three years ago and manually coding these things and building it out in a way, you would've put in a lot of time and effort. And sure, you learn a lot and understand the tools more intrinsically, but at the same time, there's a lot of turnkey solutions now that actually deliver incredible results that weren't there.
And if you don't have the ability to move nimbly enough to adopt and change as new technologies emerge or are superseded in their capabilities, then over-investing in something today may be a bigger risk for you. So I do think that shape of your organization and ability to change and move quickly and jump as the technology moves is a big factor in how quickly you should be looking to adopt these technologies.
And then of course, have good friends, right? Which I think we could both rely on, and I think that's one way to stay ahead of it. No one can [00:09:00] be an expert maybe in the entire value chain of everything from actually building the models or the hardware that the models run on through to how they're applied or drive forward.
But you can pick a part of that niche, whatever suits you the best, and then surround yourself with people who are experts in the rest of it.
Sara: Let's jump into a quick lightning round. I'm gonna give you three statements. Finish this sentence: The most common shelfware I find in a martech stack is...
Q: Common shelfware I find in a martech stack is often related to some form of analytics or social listening or supplementary data.
Something that theoretically holds value and additional insight but has to be used and applied and is often just sitting there and no one's looking at it.
Sara: Well, that probably answers my next question, but overrated or underrated: the marketing dashboard?
Q: Underrated.
Sara: Oh, okay. Yeah.
Q: I think dashboards [00:10:00] are super overrated, and there's a lot of them that are measuring vanity metrics and things that no one ever checks or looks at.
But a good dashboard is something that's actually looked at and connected to the big picture to help make decisions and actually apply the analytics to something meaningful, is still underrated.
Sara: Good. Okay. And finish this sentence: The first martech category AI agents make obsolete is...
Q: The first martech category that AI makes irrelevant or kind of displaces seems to be around data management and ETL.
People have never liked it. Machines are better at talking to machines than we are, and so a lot of that integration layer and data management is quickly being superseded by agentic capabilities.
Sara: Fair. That's okay. Very interesting. And I said one more. I'm gonna actually do one more for you. One word: the internet in five years.
Q: Bifurcated, I suppose. Or split in some way. I think the easy answer is dead. The dead internet [00:11:00] theory is definitely there in terms of models building for models and training on models and losing it. But I think there's this opportunity for the internet to actually start to split and there not to be one macro internet as such, but kind of these different realities and different kind of networks and contexts that people or agents might exist and operate in.
Sara: That's great. Love that answer. All right. Well, Q, it has been wonderful talking to you today. Thank you so much for your time.
Q: Likewise, Sara. Absolute pleasure. Thanks so much.
Sara: Listeners, thanks for tuning in. Make sure you like and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Until next time, I'm Sara Faatz, and this is 10 Minute Martech.