When looking at martech vendors and marketplaces, it is common to use quadrants as a visual to plot key players in an industry. This provides a simple way to create a shortlist of vendors to explore when starting your evaluation journey. However, there are several problems with this approach.
Every enterprise is different, and customer maturity, needs, emphasis, capabilities, budgets, architectures, incumbent environments and priorities can differ. Overlooking these differences can lead to making poor decisions. Vendors often claim they can solve different types of requirements equally well, but this is not always the case. Furthermore, traditional analyst quadrants tend to hide more than they show, they often include a small subset of the overall marketplace and they assume generic winners and losers.
An alternative approach is to focus on vendor fit based on your specific circumstances. For example, when looking at the marketing attribution marketplace, there are typically five archetypal scenarios to consider. However, vendors are usually good at only one or two of these scenarios. In addition, there are several strategic factors about vendors that are equally, if not more, important than the product itself, such as channels and vendor professional services, their strategy, what’s on the roadmap, technical support, etc. For example, a vendor may have all the features you require, but if they don't offer professional services in your geography, then it may not make sense to have them on your shortlist.
When considering a vendor, you should align around and prioritize canonical scenarios, and prioritize strategic considerations. Vendors will always claim broad applicability for their platforms, but each platform will inevitably bring certain strengths in terms of what they can do best. Therefore, you need to focus on business use cases rather than a laundry list of checklist requirements. This will enable you to create a shortlist of vendors that are best suited to your specific circumstances.
Originally reported by Martech: https://martech.org/beyond-quadrants-an-alternative-approach-to-martech-selection/
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