Editor’s note: The following post is part of a partnership with Creative Influence about marketing innovation happening in industries across Atlanta. Innovation isn’t just about technology. Innovation sometimes comes in the form of entirely new industries requiring completely new approaches to finding and keeping customers. This column, which will tackle how innovators are getting their new products and services adopted by buyers, will publish twice a month.
Atlanta has long held a reputation for aggressive self-promotion. Boosterism. Among Atlanta’s claims to be the Hollywood, Silicon Valley, Wall Street - or whatever - “of the South,” word has spread that we’re now the marketing technology center of the South…or of anywhere. Have we raised our chest-thumping hyperbole to the point of hype-mastery? Or, is it just that Atlanta is a city where marketing and sales run so deep in our veins that being a marketing innovation hub makes perfect sense?
To get a pulse of Atlanta’s current MarTech ecosystem, we checked in with a dozen of the City’s experts in the field. From MarTech customers to category creators, capital providers to catalysts and consultants, they provide a snapshot of a market that’s matured and poised for a new level of growth. Atlanta’s ability to make good on aspirations of MarTech dominance may just be for real. But it will take three conditions to realize full potential: continuity, reinvestment and integration. To see why that’s the case, let’s take a look at CMOs as buyers – particularly in Atlanta.
Atlanta Provides MarTech’s Front Row View
Marketing efforts always begin with the customer. In MarTech, the customers are the salespeople and marketers. So, if there’s a foundation for Atlanta’s MarTech ecosystem, it’s the city’s history as a sales and marketing hub.
For all the usual reasons, like affordable cost of living and great transportation access, Atlanta has long been an ideal location for any company’s regional sales office. We’ve been ranked the No. 1 city for sales managers with 66% more jobs for sales managers compared with the average U.S. city. We’ve also been ranked as one of the best cities to advance your sales career and one of the best for building your marketing career.
Forbes said of Atlanta’s marketing community, “As one of the fastest-growing cities in the marketing field, Atlanta, GA averages about 1,000 advertising and marketing jobs available at any given time that generally command a competitive salary.” The same, of course, is true about Atlanta’s ability to attract next generation talent in just about any field – notably, technology. So, the MarTech talent pool here is great.
Add to that the senior level sales and marketing leadership resident at our 30 Fortune 1000 companies including brand giant, Coca-Cola. Dun & Bradstreet ranked Atlanta No. 10 for best mid-sized companies. At the same time, by all measures we’re one of the best cities to start a small business. Any way you cut it, if you’re marketing digital marketing technology or services, Atlanta is ripe with potential talent and prospective customers of every size and flavor.
Plus, Atlanta’s corporate powerhouses make a concerted effort to bridge the big company – star-up innovation chasm including in the MarTech sector. For instance, Engage is a venture fund and accelerator program backed by giants like AT&T, Chick-fil-A, Cox Enterprises, Delta Air Line, and Georgia-Pacific which has at least four MarTech companies in its portfolio. For more on how large Atlanta companies are paving the way for the venture community check out this previous Atlanta Inno article: How Atlanta Is Bridging the Corporate-Venture Divide.
It’s paying off for ATL MarTech. “At Salesloft, Atlanta was our No. 1 market. Adoption rates here went way beyond the core technology companies. In Atlanta, we were able to get into industries we couldn’t have penetrated as easily elsewhere,” said Kevin O’Malley, formerly VP marketing for SalesLoft and now VP of marketing and sales development with Topo – a research and advisory firm providing insights to business on marketing and sales technology.
Ryan Hollenbeck sees Atlanta’s MarTech space from the dual perspective of a civic champion and a CMO. Hollenbeck is SVP, global marketing with Verint - a leading global provider of customer engagement, security and intelligence data mining software. He is also chairman of the board of Tech Alpharetta which supports the growth of the technology industry in Alpharetta. He’s quick to point out that Alpharetta – one of the fastest growing areas within the Greater Atlanta metropolitan region – boasts 700 technology companies. Tech Alpharetta helps to create new tech ventures through its Startup Incubator. Hollenbeck notes that there’s direct linkage between Alpharetta and Atlanta’s full MarTech ecosystem. He’s an advisor to two Midtown Atlanta-based ATDC MarTech companies, Parmonic and SalesTing. Meanwhile, the Technology Association of Georgia and the ATDC incubator are actively involved with Tech Alpharetta. For instance, Voxie is an Alpharetta-based MarTech company that’s part of ATDC’s Accelerate cohort.
For MarTech companies, Atlanta’s robust pool of marketers provide a front row seat to the massive changes this executive function is experiencing. With his chief marketing officer hat on, Hollenbeck also described the fundamental change – not just for CMOs in Atlanta or Alpharetta – but everywhere. “More than ever, chief marketing officers are expected not only to make a measurable contribution to the lead pipeline but also to help advance prospects through different sales stages,” he said. Sales and marketing roles are coming even closer together.
“Marketing and sales roll up into one number on a company’s financial statement so they have to be tied at the hip,” said Sangram Vajre, Terminus co-founder. “Marketing’s No. 1 job is to grow sales. Marketing and sales have to work together as one team and the lines are getting blurred."
The Pedowitz Group – based in Milton - provides marketing and sales technology consulting and implementation to a who’s who of companies from Atlanta’s McKesson to global innovators like Intel and 3M. Jeff Pedowitz founded the company in 2007 to help marketers connect their efforts to revenue through MarTech tools like Salesforce, Marketo and Eloqua. “Marketing now has to be responsible for generating leads and revenue while also being change agents and driving innovation,” Pedowitz said. “On top of that, digital is taking over everything and that's massively disrupting how we sell. Consumers are overwhelmed with choices. To reach them you’ve got to go through dozens of different channels with even more different content versions to address all the different personas. Growth begets growth. So, marketers feel the need to invest in more technology to deliver on these expanded responsibilities and pace of change.”
It’s not just consumer choice that’s overwhelming. Marketers are overwhelmed by technology choice. The buzzworthy MarTech 5000 Landscape - which maps marketing technology companies compiled by Scott Brinker and, in part, by Atlantan Anand Thaker – has over 8,000 competitors across more than 30 categories on it. Seventy-three of those are Atlanta-headquartered companies. While the list is a bit out of date, if you remove companies that don’t belong, have been acquired or disappeared and add back new ones, the general count is close enough.
One area where Atlanta well represented on the MarTech 5000 list is in the area of data analytics. That shouldn’t be a surprise with educational powerhouses in our backyard like Georgia Tech – one of the country’s top ranked schools for data science – and Emory’s Goizueta School of Business which houses the Emory Marketing Analytics Center. “Making data-driven marketing decisions has always been important but within the current MarTech landscape it’s even more critical,” said Read Ziegler, CEO of REVELOCITY – a marketing analytics company focused on providing an easy-to-use analytics platform that provides consolidated, sophisticated, predictive processing of the disparate data generated from all those MarTech tools. “Analytics help enrich MarTech solutions with greater effectiveness and efficiency. This can be accomplished by providing a larger and faster “analytics brain” that helps MarTech tools better identify opportunities and execute accordingly,” Ziegler added. As with all other areas of MarTech, there’s a big need for integration and simplification and Atlanta may be well-equipped to lead that charge.
“The average marketing enterprise engages with almost 100 cloud-based MarTech services. The typical smaller business uses 40, mid-market companies 75 to 125 and enterprise companies between 150 and 250 tools,” according to Jeff Pedowitz. Confusing things even more, companies’ MarTech tools each perform a unique function, don’t easily integrate and sometimes solidify marketing and sales functional silos. One opportunity Atlanta’s MarTech ecosystem may have is to be the center where MarTech integration and coordination is promoted. And, to be a center of technology that unifies the marketing/sales team.
Creators and continuity
Another category opportunity for Atlanta is to become a place where MarTech continuity occurs. Arguably, marketers have too many tools from which to choose. And, new ventures appear and disappear so quickly that it’s nearly impossible for marketers to figure out which MarTech players will remain long-term, trustworthy resources. Marketing technology brands which deliver continuity will command the market.
Atlanta has a track record of producing specialty tech companies that achieve early velocity and are then gobbled up by bigger fish. That’s not a bad outcome for founders and investors. But, in the past, few have stuck around to grow into category conquerors. Which can cause tumult for buyers. Atlanta’s MarTech sector shows signs of being different.
Bill Nussey shaped Silverpop into one of the top cloud-based marketing solutions in the industry over a 15-year period. The Silverpop brand has endured since the company’s sale to IBM in 2015. David Cummings had a shorter runway with Pardot which sold to Salesforce after a 5-year run but the Pardot brand has also been sustained. Mailchimp started 20 years ago, remains private and continues to grow in capability and reputation.
The other aspect of continuity that matters to Atlanta’s MarTech sector is that its progenitors are reinvesting in the MarTech sector. “In the Atlanta tech scene John Imlay had been the original source of investing for a long time, but we are seeing a new generation of leaders who are doing it in their own unique way and having impact beyond their initial endeavors in MarTech,” said Matthew May, founder, VP sales and marketing at Acuity Financial Experts - a virtual accounting solution for entrepreneurs – serving many Atlanta MarTech businesses. “You have Mailchimp co-founders Dan Kurzius and Ben Chestnut plowing money into the community, developing a generation of creative talent and working largely outside the limelight. Then Pardot, with the founders taking different paths with Adam Blitzer continuing in that business and bringing Salesforce in mass to Atlanta, and David Cummings building Atlanta Tech Village and investing and cultivating new MarTech successes like SalesLoft, Terminus, Rigor and dozens of others. Going forward we’ll see leaders like Andy Powell of CallRail, Kyle Porter of SalesLoft, and Tope Awotona of Calendly each have an incredible impact on our city beyond their initial ventures.”
The family tree continuity phenomenon is alive in Atlanta. In addition to branches sprouting from Pardot success, others are regenerating, too. Silverpop alumnus, Scott Voigt founded the digital experience software success, FullStory. ClickDimensions co-founder and former CEO John Gravely went on to launch a sales enablement software business, SalesSpark, following his prior company’s sale to Accel KKR. Roger Barnette is leading his third Atlanta MarTech venture; he founded the web discovery platform eTour in 1998 and the search optimization company Search Ignite in 2004. He’s now CEO of the enterprise e-mail marketing platform, MessageGears. “It’s great to see hiring and investment in Atlanta’s MarTech businesses focused on the long haul. There’s a strong foundation being built,” Barnette said.
Be sure to check back in next week for Part 2 of this series.
