Martech strategy that survives contact with the stack

Salesforce, Braze and Hightouch: who owns the customer loop now?

Salesforce buys Braze, Hightouch starts sending, and two CDPs pull compute and AI inside your walls. Everyone wants the whole loop now. Here's what that means for ESPs and for you.

On 20 October Salesforce agreed to buy Braze for $5.66 billion. On 22 October Hightouch announced it sends messages now, across email, SMS, push, in-app and WhatsApp. Its co-CEO, Tejas Manohar, opened that announcement by pointing at the Braze deal.

One company bought an engagement platform.

The other says you don't need one anymore.

Meiro launched Local AI CDP on the same day as the Braze deal, a month after Zeotap launched Open CDP. I wrote about both in a recent piece.

That's a lot of movement for one week, and I wanted a better

Grading your own Martech stack

Every scoring framework in Martech is published by someone selling something, mine included. Here's what each dimension is worth, and the one I'd argue with.

You already grade your stack. You do it every time someone asks how it's going, and the answer changes depending on who's asking.

The board gets "maturing, nothing structural." Your data engineer gets "held together with string." Both are honest. Neither is written down.

Writing it down is the only thing that closes the gap. And the trouble starts there, because every framework you can reach for was published by someone with a position.

Everybody's framework is selling something

I went at this in July, looking at how the agentic CDP got defined.

The definition ranking top

What your Martech vendor's filings tell you before you renew

Your vendor's annual report is free, public and full of things that change a renewal conversation. Including the one date nobody tells you they care about.

A bank buying a customer data platform has somebody, somewhere in the building, whose job is to check whether the company selling it can afford to still be there in three years.

A retailer buying the same platform on the same three-year term usually has no one doing that at all.

Same product, same paper, same length of commitment.

The difference is which industry you happen to work in, and whether anyone thought to open a document that's been sitting in public the whole time.

Does anybody actually do this?

In one corner of the market, yes, and

What is a forward deployed engineer, and who is paying for the one in your team?

Vendors are embedding their own engineers to build your stack. One Martech company's accounts show the implementation running at a gross margin of 0.08%.

At the Martech World Forum in London this month, Nate Wardwell from Hightouch talked about forward-deployed engineers and described them as a service Hightouch provides that is helping its customers. I wrote it up in my recap and left that question hanging.

Isn't that what independent consultants do?

I went and looked properly.

What I found wasn't really about job titles.

What a forward-deployed engineer actually is

In short, someone the vendor employs, who sits inside your team and builds the thing. Not a trainer, not a support contact, not a consultant who writes a plan

The Martech contracts dates and rights

87% of Martech contracts renew themselves and 86% say nothing about whether your customer data trains someone else's model. The paper decides.

Last time I argued that the cheapest money in a Martech budget is the capability you're already buying twice, and that the way to find it is to sort your invoices by capability instead of by supplier.

Say you do that. You find one. Now what?

Now the paper decides. And the terms that decide it aren't the ones I went through in the pricing series. Not the meters, not how a vendor counts a profile or an event.

But the dates, and the rights.

I've been handed a lot of Martech contracts over the years, usually

The Martech Stack you bought twice

Unused features cost nothing. A second contract for a capability you already own costs what the invoice says, and no utilization survey will find it.

Just like my previous article, and most because of the fast moving pace of Martech, I revisited some early work.

Back in July I went at whether AI closes the gap in Martec's Law, and part of that piece dealt with the Gartner utilization number. 58% of stack capability in use in 2020, 42% in 2022, 33% in 2023, with the 2025 reading climbing back toward 49% under a slightly different question. Directional rather than gospel, as I put it at the time.

I still think that's right.

What I didn't do is ask why the dead

Posts tagged with Martech strategy

Everybody's framework is selling something

Does anybody actually do this?

What a forward-deployed engineer actually is