MarTalks- The #1 Ecommerce and MarTech application podcast

The area of API-first ecommerce has seen relentless optimization of the customer experience. Decreasing page load speeds, personalized shopping, and the ability to adopt other new features more quickly can all contribute to happier shoppers, and more revenue for brands. But what happens when the conversion of experience into dollars falls at the last hurdle? At checkout, an unintuitive or outdated...

Businesses’ inability to use their marketing data effectively is a widely-understood problem – but understood no better, perhaps, than by Brian Kotlyar. A career marketer, Brian first rose to the rank of VP at Dachis Group in 2010. Since then, he’s made a career of driving growth for startups which solve customer data challenges – most recently at composable CDP vendor Hightouch. Hightouch is one...

Evan Liang is the founder and CEO of LeanData, an industry leader in account-to-lead data matching. He describes the company as “revops’ best friend,” and explains how it allows sales and marketing teams to optimize sales processes by turning the data management ‘burden’ into a valuable asset. You can also listen to the podcast, and read a summary article here: https://bit.ly/3Q8qdwB Rosenstein Gr...

Reading the mainstream business press, you might think that tech companies are going begging in their pursuit of investment capital. But when you work in martech, there’s another story. There has undoubtedly been a slowdown in startup investments over the past 18 months.   There is far less appetite for larger, cash-hungry businesses without the metrics to show near-term profitability. Instead, in...

In the exciting world of startups and scaleups, it’s important to remember that some of the biggest implementers of MACH solutions are actually long-established, enterprise system integrators.  With expertise and client relationships pre-dating composable commerce, these companies are well placed to understand the client’s history with technology, business practices and digital maturity. This allo...

A composable inventory optimization tool, Invent Analytics is designed to eliminate the guesswork and introduce greater profitability to brands’ demand chains. Founder Gurhan Kok joined us on The Martalks Podcast to discuss how his technology works, and to describe his successes with likes of Camper, and Academy Sports + Outdoors. You can also listen to the podcast, and read a summary article here...

Often, tech startups are founded by individuals with a background in software engineering. That’s great for creating a standout product, but soon enough, specialist expertise is required to flesh out other leadership functions. Nowhere is this more important than HR, people and talent acquisition. The martech industry’s relatively high churn rates, international client bases, and occasional rapid...

Most brand-side professionals know what they want to achieve from digital transformation – but are not necessarily clear on which technologies will get them there, or the implications of individual choices they make along the way. This has created a valuable role for consultants in guiding brands through this change: aligning the strategic needs of the businesses with specific choices and solution...

As API-first commerce solutions continue to proliferate, vendors will increasingly need to look for product strategies that differentiate themselves from their competitors. Gordon Cooke, the co-founder and CTO of the platform UpStart Commerce joined us on the latest episode of Martalks to explain how his product’s management tool is helping retailers manage the complexity of MACH, and how they wor...

As chief digital officers look to invest in their customer journey, there is significant debate over the optimal technical architecture for content management and delivery. Deane Barker, Global Head of Content Management at data experience platform (DXP) Optimizely , joined us on the latest episode of Martalks, to share his view on the importance of selecting the right content management infrastru...

After years of commentary on the possibilities of AI-powered automation, we are finally starting to see applications that are genuinely useful and applicable to businesses. This is particularly thanks to the rise of composable commerce architectures, in which data is readily exposed, and where the accelerating adoption of third-party solutions is increasing the number of touchpoints for AI-powered...

Retailers’ visibility and control of their customer data – from customer experience to supply chain to back office – is now a crucial component of their commercial success. It’s enabled the direct-to-consumer (DTC) trend, increased brands’ ability to operate independently of marketplaces, and well-organized data is the foundational element in marketing personalization. As retailers’ ambitions beca...

Customer experience innovations can have a relatively short time to value  - and with extended reality (VR and AR) now becoming affordable, brand marketers are making increasingly complicated decisions about CX developments. So, how can technology companies help customers understand the opportunities, select the right systems, and ultimately win buy-in for change? In this podcast, Andrew Elia of A...

40,000 ecommerce stores generating $10-15m annual revenue are running on WooCommerce. Off the back of an envelope, that’s a market worth half a trillion dollars.  Some of these retailers want to take advantage of headless architecture, but in most cases, replatforming is not an option. Costs are either too high, or the scale of the undertaking too daunting. But where there’s adversity, there’s opp...

Enterprise retailers are embarking on increasingly ambitious ecommerce offerings.  This has  created a lot of work for systems integrators (SIs), but it's also added nuance and complexity to how they sell. Rajib Das, CEO of Ignitiv - a digital agency and CX consultancy - recommends "consultative selling": going beyond the tech, to become deeply entrenched in the key performance driv...

The remit of systems integrators (SIs) has expanded in recent years. Previously, they were primarily only called on to stand up solutions and integrate systems. Today, software customers depend on them more heavily to assemble and maintain complex microservice architectures, to enable the exposure of data, and to work as a commercial partner by continuing to optimise their tech stack. Solutions pr...

For most of the history of software, partnerships were mostly about driving incremental revenue from resales. Today, partnerships are likely to be crucial to staying relevant in the market, and winning and retaining business. This is because the very traits that make API-first software attractive to buyers – being relatively low-commitment and easy to integrate, enabling faster development times –...

What makes a great leader in martech sales? The yardstick I have always used is the ability to scale a successful team by attracting, and getting the best out of, the most talented professionals in the market. For that reason, I hold Tod Klubnik in the very highest regard. His success as a head of sales, and latterly a CRO, at SaaS businesses made him a natural fit for the first episode of The Mar...