Coordinating Your Teams and Your Tech

At 5 by 5 Design we believe it’s possible to change the world by posing the right questions, listening to the honest answers, and following the path that emerges from the dialogue. Today’s discussion focuses on navigating and coordinating multiple internal departments within today’s complex digital landscape.

Peter Bregman is the owner of Digital Adaptive, a company committed to delivering actionable strategies that empower organizations to drive substantial growth through strategic innovation. We’ve asked Peter a series of questions about how organizations can align their technology and teams to their business strategy. Here’s what he had to say.  

1. Why is aligning your technology with your teams an important part of a successful business strategy?

There are more marketing tools and platforms available than ever before. One look at the 2024 Marketing Technology Landscape by Scott Brinker will make it clear that things have gotten a lot more complicated in recent years. When Scott started the project of tracking marketing tech tools in 2011, he found around 150 different platforms. This year, he found over 14,000!

In addition to the plethora of tools available, skill specialization has increased in marketing and sales roles. There are now people who specialize in social media, email marketing, search engine optimization (SEO), paid search, digital ads, account-based marketing (ABM), lead generation, influencer marketing, or connected TV (CTV) ads (just to name a few). With such a vast array of technologies and skill specializations out there, it’s no wonder that many businesses are having a hard time aligning their tools and teams to their business needs. The result is that many companies are not getting the value they anticipated out of their investments, and employees are frustrated with having to constantly learn new platforms without seeing the results they hoped for.

By aligning tools and teams to business strategy in the first place, organizations can ensure that their technology spend will be aligned with their goals, and that they’ll have the expertise they need to get the most out of the tools they implement.

2. How can an organization identify their technology needs and choose the best tools to address those needs?

It all starts with reviewing and aligning to your overall business strategy. Are you B2B or B2C (or maybe B2B2C, or something else entirely)? What is your target market? What is your value proposition?

Once you have those things nailed down, you can begin to build a Go-To-Market (GTM) strategy. You need to understand your product positioning, market segmentation, and distribution channels. This might seem basic, but it’s imperative that your overarching strategy informs your marketing strategy, and by extension, what tools you need to execute that strategy.

Depending on your GTM strategy, you may have very different technological needs. For example, a high-end architecture firm may rarely have repeat business, and instead, may need to constantly find new clients looking to build. They might leverage social listening tools, customer relationship management (CRM) for long sales cycles, and targeted ads. On the other end of the spectrum, a freemium SaaS company is looking to both retain current customers while acquiring new subscription users. They would be better served by strong product analytics, email automation, and social influencer marketing.

3. How is AI influencing technology and how teams work together?

AI-based tools are exploding at an incredible rate. In their 2024 survey, Kaltura found that, “52% of marketing and event professionals already integrate AI into their marketing toolbox, while 36% are experimenting with it.” It’s clear that AI has the potential to drastically improve efficiency and effectiveness of marketing efforts, but only when leveraged properly. The success of generative AI tools, and especially ones built around Large Language Models (LLMs), such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude, and Meta’s Llama, depend entirely on context and application.

When considering whether or not to use a new AI-based tool, companies should do what they do for any new tool—start with their business model and GTM strategies, and determine what problem they need to address. If they start with a specific use case and are able to add enough contextual information, AI can help them make progress in leaps and bounds.

It's worth noting though, that the integration of AI is shifting team roles. Copywriters are now collaborating with AI to generate initial drafts, allowing them to focus more on refining messaging and brand voice. Data analysts are spending less time on data preparation and more on interpreting AI-generated insights to drive strategic decisions. These AI-driven role shifts highlight the need to integrate technology strategically, rather than simply adopting AI for its own sake.

4. What are some common challenges organizations face when it comes to aligning technology and teams?

Shiny-object-syndrome is one of the biggest problems these days. There are so many great tools out there, and companies often want to make use of all the latest and greatest tools to help their business grow. They jump from one platform to another or just add more tools to their ever-growing stack. It can be tempting to do this, but it will rarely, if ever, generate positive results. Tools need to be built around a strategy, not the other way around. Also, implementing new tools and training teams on them is time consuming and often difficult. The goal should be high utilization of the tools you have before expanding your toolset.

Another major issue is tool/skill mismatch. There are so many specialized marketers and salespeople these days that they may not have the skills or desire to learn a new tool that is brought in. The skillsets of the team need to match the business strategy and align with the technology you are using. Having an ABM expert at an e-commerce company is not going to yield good results. Neither would having a consumer-packaged goods (CPG) expert on an enterprise-SaaS (software as a service) marketing team. Align the team members skills and the technology if you want to meet your goals.

5. How can organizations support their team members’ different strengths and build relationships using technology?

Once you have established your GTM strategy and know your strategic areas of focus, it’s important to make sure everyone is aware of, and understands the path to execution. Teams and employees should be assigned ownership of outcomes directly related to the strategy. In some cases, this may require rearranging teams, up-skilling/training, and/or adding new team members with needed skills and experience. These skill areas should be tool-agnostic and focused on results rather than day-to-day operation of a specific tool/platform.

With the right people and skills in place, it’s important to include the team members in the process of finding the right tools to accomplish their goals (and, by extension, the company’s goals). If you have capable people with the right skills, they should be the subject matter experts and can help drive tool selection and adoption.