Building Better Tech Stacks Through Consultancy | Ragnarokast #9

Steven

I’m Steven. 

Spencer

And I’m Spencer. Welcome to Ragnarokast, your podcast for all things marketing and MarTech. 

Steven

Hello everyone. 

Both

We’re the Co-CEOs of Ragnarok. 

Spencer

Welcome back to the Ragnarokast. Hi, I’m Spencer. 

Steven

I’m Steven. 

Spencer

You probably already heard that in the intro, but here we are. And also we have our friend Geordy here with us today.

Steven

That’s right. Geordy. K. 

Geordan

Hello. 

Spencer

That, that’s how you go by, right? Geordy. K. 

Geordan

Yeah, I, it in my, my older years, that’s what’s what I’ve been referred to as, so I’m just, I’m just laying into it. 

Steven

Sometimes they call him the GK unit. 

Geordan

I was in middle school, I was G unit and that was like the cringeist thing I could’ve done to myself as a boy from Montana. 

Spencer

Did you refer to yourself as that or did someone else give you that nickname? 

Geordan

Somebody gave me the nickname and I laid into it, but that doesn’t really help the situation. 

Steven

So in your internal monologue you would say things like G Unit is pulling out a pencil from his pencil case? 

Geordan

Yeah, I go G Unit is crying on Halo too. 

Spencer

Oh, One of my nicknames was Fabio because I had one hair. 

Steven

That’s yeah, I remember that. 

Spencer

I was not blonde though. My hair was the same color as it is now. Few less though.

Geordan 

But just as handsome. 

Steven

Oh wow. 

Spencer

Wow. 

Spencer

So Ragnarok has been around since 2012 and we are essentially a group of marketing and MarTech stack consultants. We’ve been leading stack evaluations and implementations integrations for quite a while. We’ve gathered two of our brightest minds when it comes to this thing, both Steven and Geordan. And so we’re gonna talk about how we actually make these recommendations and some, some tips and tricks that you, marketers and other people. 

Steven

There are only two types of people in the world. Marketers and everyone else. I 

Spencer

Would say like Yeah, yeah, yeah. There are two types of people in the world, marketers and everybody else. 

And this is only for you marketers, but everybody else can pause for 

Geordan 

No one else is allowed to listen to the podcast. Turn it off right now 

Steven

If you were here for, I don’t know, historical fiction. Yeah, wrong spot. 

Geordan 

If you’re one of my parents that I told I was gonna be on a podcast, get outta here Jane. David, 

Spencer 

Actually, I’d like to give a shout out to my dad. My dad’s been listening to the podcast and he does, I think he’s like the first listener every time. 

Steven

Nice. 

Spencer 

So shout out, shout out to Billy b. 

Geordan 

Yeah, Billy, Thanks for listening, Billy, 

Spencer 

He’s Gonna be so happy. By the way, we gotta include that. Yeah, maybe we’ll have him on sometime, you know, just for funsies we’ll do a special episode. 

Steven

We’ll never get to talk the whole time, so 

you wonder where he gets it from. 

Spencer 

Yeah, I’m quiet. I’m quiet compared to my dad. So anyway, we wanna, we wanna give marketers, you know, some tips and tricks on building their stack. We’ve gathered two of our brightest minds here, that work on implementations daily. 

So that would be Steven and Geordan. I’ll let you guys take it away after I ask the question, which I didn’t realize there was a question. Oh, 

Steven

Question number one right there. But it has a duration of five minutes. So really ask that question, but direct it out. Who is Jordan? 

Geordan

Who even am I? Yeah, so I’m a solutions architect at, Ragnarok to say that to put me in the same league as Steven is like comparing a JV basketball team to the NBA. But you know, I’m glad to be in the conversation. 

Steven

Wow, You’re the least varsity. 

Geordan

Oh, well let’s go. I’m upgraded. Yeah, I’ve been here for about a year and a half and I just try to make sure that implementations go smoothly and, and customers are happy using the partner platforms that we, that we use every day. 

Spencer 

So guys, essays, both solution architects and Steven Aldrich’s. 

Why do we even need a stack in the first place? Why isn’t there, you know, a, a stack of tools? Why, why isn’t there just one tool that does everything we need it to do? 

Steven

Well, the analogy I always like to make is to imagine you get one pancake instead of a stack of pancakes. Now at the end of that one pancake, you’re gonna want another pancake at the end of that stack of pancakes, you’ve eaten too many pancakes. So somewhere in between a small stack and more than one pancake. No, I’ll, I’ll, I’ll I’ll remove that. 

Spencer

You you lost me, man. Something with syrup and

Geordan

Actually, you were going for

Steven

The ironic thing is we used to have a single solution, right? And, and that was kinda the legacy platforms that that that sort of grew up. What what ended up happening is, is sort of early on we all had these different tools and really connecting together, this is kind of early internet days when you’re working in like, you know, stuff that eventually Salesforce and Oracle would’ve bought up where you would have a sort of separate database solution that was, you know, kind of owned by this company. So an Oracle database or a Microsoft database. 

And there wasn’t really a whole big kind of open application framework yet that existed. So it was really difficult to kind of build different solutions. You ended up having to kind of build them and then kind of add in like SQL databases and things to get them connected. It was a bit of a brutal world and that’s kinda where I grew up in my career was working around trying to solve that like tech stack at the time 

Spencer

I grew up in a brutal world. 

Steven

There was so much internet Just blocking 

Spencer

disruption, ringing from the sky. We got road. 

Steven

So the marketing tools that people had were pretty limited in terms of what they could do because you had to build all these like integrations and things to, to, to make it work. And everything was delayed and it was terrible. So what ended up happening is, you know, the Oracles the Salesforces of the world, they bought up these kind of point solutions and built them all into a cloud ecosystem and that was great, right? For a week. And then it was bad. And the reason why is ’cause it was just as bad when it wasn’t integrated as it was when it was integrated into a cloud. They never actually completed the integration through and through to make it seamless. 

So essentially you had these businesses that kind of come outta that, like the Brazes, the Twilio Segments, the Movableinks of the world that essentially came out and said, well, hmm, I think we can do this better by focusing on solving this core problem and then making it really easy to send data in. So essentially think that you basically recreated what was already there, but you solved what was actually the core challenge, which was getting data in. And they did a very good job of that. Once you made it easy to put data in, you then sort of had a model that everybody else could adopt to where they could say, oh, well I’m not a marketing automation tool, I’m a CDP or I’m a data warehouse, or I am A MMP or an analytics tool. 

Any number of things. And so it ended up happening is you have these sort of point solutions that all ended up integrating with one another and then all of a sudden you didn’t need a cloud provider anymore. And that was great for a couple of things. I mean one primarily you didn’t have to have these expansive contracts with cloud providers plus all of the consulting fees that you would pay to integrate them into and to try to run them. You could sort of use point solutions that were really good UIs and people could learn and were, and were much more easy to kind of adopt and, and string together. You had separate contracts which was not great for enterprise-level businesses, but sort of in that mid-to-enter and lower market a lot easier to kind of navigate that. 

And so you ended up having sort of cheaper rates that you’re paying across the board. And then lastly, you sort of had this opportunity to customize what you wanted based on a partner that was maybe more vertical-centric for you or had a little bit more experience with your type of use cases. So if you’re households versus B2C versus B2B, you could have very specific use cases around that. 

Spencer

And Geordan, how do you feel about Steven calling marketing mid?

Geordan

I, I guess no, no opinion, 

Spencer

But what’s your, what’s your take on that? What, what’s, what do you, what do you think? 

Geordan

I think Steven put that pretty, pretty beautifully and it gave like a really great like holistic approach if I’m, if I wanna really like dumb it down and, and just kind of from my point of view, the biggest thing for, for businesses to have these like tech stacks and things like that does seem to be, you know, those, those one size fits all solutions, you know, those, those don’t truly exist, at least from, from my perspective, where you’ll see things that like CDPs that can do a lot of really interesting stuff with your data. But when it comes to kind of like the end result being sending sort of like email me or email messages or like handling SMS things like that, the functionality that comes packaged with those offerings tends to be lacking because they do data super, super well, right? 

So you’re looking at having like a CDP on top of like, or that feeds data into a CRM or something like that so you can really get the most out of your data, and they kind of like get the best out of each other, you know, without breaking the bank like Steven said. 

Spencer

So there are a number of, at this point historically best-in-breed tech companies that are now like in their own small way adding on things and it’s, it’s not necessarily like the Salesforce Oracle model where they’re buying up things and adding it to themselves, but they are adding on like things that are not necessarily their specialty and kind of overlapping more and more with companies they would typically not come up against. So like basically CDPs, ESPs, analytics, et cetera, sort of all adding on other stacking on other elements of this and, and sort of like Frankensteining this new thing together. 

Whereas before it might’ve been like a more pure best in breed. Now it’s sort of maybe somewhat more holistically than buying another company, but they are diluting it In terms of the original purpose and adding on all these other features, have you guys seen any, is that still too new but have you seen any pros or cons to any of those kind of tools? 

Geordan

For sure. Again, I’m not gonna name specifics or anything like that, but we are working with a client now that has like a really robust CDP system that has kind of a journey offering, which is basically used for them to send emails and things like that. And from a user’s perspective or a user experience perspective, it’s just been a hassle where, you know, you could use something from another platform, which again, not gonna name specifics, but there are other platforms that are much more user friendly that could do the same thing that this other platform offers, but much easier and much cleaner. 

So that’s one situation where, you know, it would be nice to recommend to them something to kind of handle that sending facilitation or something along those lines. 

Steven

Yeah. To add into that, so there are some companies that are, you know, buying other tools so to speak. You know, like I like to think of like the mParticle example buying Fedora, which is a, you know, sort of an AI compliment to what they do and, and that’s sort of adjacency is net net improving what they do from a, from a CDP perspective, I don’t think they’re really competing with, I mean they’re somewhat competing but they’re, they’re sort of adding in an additional kind of capability into their stack that feels a little bit more natural to what they do. Kind of a similar example with like Heap and Replay kind of adding in that functionality to further enhance the analytics where you don’t, you’re not necessarily departing from what your core strength is. 

And then you kinda look at the flip side of that and you look at somebody like Mixpanel who had push messaging and things like that kind of built into their platform and then they basically cut that off because it was so not adjacent to what they were doing ’cause they want it to be a core product analytics platform. So I think there definitely is some like sequencing of thing or, or the sequence of how they integrate these different tools is, is definitely important. But there are some people who are really doing it right. But to your point, Spencer, there’s definitely quite a few that are kind of moving more into that cloud ecosystem, which it’s, they’re definitely doing it a lot better ’cause they’re using more modern technology so to speak compared to what’s been out there. 

But potentially that, you know, the idea there is they’re hoping maybe to pick up more of the incremental opportunity from their clients, but they might not necessarily be the best at it and they’re, they might be several years off from even having, you know, enough feature parody with say somebody who’s best in breed right now in that space. 

Spencer

Yeah, I mean we’re only starting to see this in the past year with, you know, quite a few companies in like the, the product and marketing space like MarTech that are adding on these things that are not normally in their scope. And so we can’t say whether they’re good or bad yet because they’re just, it’s all too nascent. But it sounds like generally what you’re saying though, that like when, a best in breed tool can still be considered best-in-breed if it’s investing in or buying an another company that’s deepening what they’re already good at and just expanding on that and they still remain best in breed. 

Alright, so to get back to the schedule, and this is a very open-ended question, feel free to interpret it in your own way. But when you’re consulting with a client on what their tech stack should be and how you implement it and what other tools you should bring in, like how long does this process typically take, you know, for maybe each of you guys can just sort of give an example or, or your thoughts on it. I think it’s very likely there’s someone that’s gonna listen to this that’s going through the process of, trying to figure this out and it is a time investment. 

What is, you know, what is the range and what are the, can you gimme like a, just like a bullet points of the things that really make it easier or more complex, like ways that they can make it easier on themselves when they go through this process? 

Steven

Yeah, for sure. I think it all starts in having very definitive, clearly defined use cases. Like what is it you wanna do? Who’s the target that you that that you wanna activate on and what is the intended, you know, asset or thing that you want to maneuver? So whether it’s I wanna send these 15 emails and I wanna welcome series an abandoned cart or, or I wanna do progressive profiling on my website or I want to gather push tokens from the app, be able to send push notifications. All of those have to just be documented somewhere and stated right. 

And you know, with a lot of our clients that we worked with, especially when we’re doing things like CDP implementations, there are like 80 to 90 use cases that people end up with if they’re being really comprehensive on what’s included in their entire like ecosystem in their desired marketing output. 

So if you’re writing those down and you have like eight, you’re probably not thinking comprehensively enough about it. And that can really help alleviate a lot of the pain further on because that’s what a lot of the consultants can ask you is, is try to dig into like what are actually all of your use cases? ’cause we can always prioritize what to start with so we can build value outta the platform, but you should always have in your vision what does this thing look like when it’s done? And that has to include all of those use cases. And again, like as I said, you know, if there’s 80 in there, you’re probably closer to the right track if you have like 8 or 10 or 15 or 20, unless you’re really kind of early in your, in your brand’s existence, you’re probably missing a lot. 

And so that’s where you wanna be a little bit more broad and deep about what you actually wanna accomplish. 

Geordan

I was gonna also say, I’m going full oink here because we’re piggybacking again, you know, understanding your data is like a huge asset, especially when you’re going into like a net new implementation. So understanding your data is super valuable, especially for something that’s like net new and understanding how your data flows across your tech stack. At least understanding where to find certain bits of information and how that’s going to interact in those use cases. Like Steven was saying, that can save you an incredible amount of time because when it comes to like researching and trying to understand where things are coming from, when you have an outside source coming in and start, start poking around, it can be very time-consuming. 

Spencer

How time-consuming are we, are we saying? 

Steven

Yeah, so generally most folks should plan like to get your, get the, the tool integrated and like three or four of your top use cases. We usually we say 90 to 120 days is, is probably the best like average timeframe to use. Now some people can get that done in two weeks, some people get done in six weeks. Again, it depends on how prescriptive you are and how much support you get from your team from there it’s generally, I would say probably 12 months, 12 to 18 months to be completely fully done. To be in that place where you’re in a done state and you’re building off of that and everything’s kind of incremental and just because you’re, at the end of the day, you’re fighting for resources, you know you need engineers to build the integrations, you need hands-on staff to actually go in and create the assets within the platform to actually execute against. 

You might have other things that don’t yet exist and you’re waiting for those data, that data to be created at the source. So it generally takes a while, but you should be, if you’re not deriving value after four months, you gotta pick up the pace, so to speak, like you should that that, that things should be paying for itself within four months. 

Spencer

So under four months is really what you’re looking at ideally. 

Steven

Definitely to ideally the primary use cases. Yeah. To the point where you’re generating more revenue than what the platform costs. Yep. 

Spencer

Cool. Ideally it gets, everything gets set up properly in a timely manner. How important is it to get it right the first time? Like you have to get everything right or yeah? 

Geordan

It will save you a lot of headache if you do or if you put a lot of thought into what that like architecture looks like and how things are all kind of connected together. 

Again, we kind of talked about this a little bit before, but having something to kind of like unify your data across your stack, it still kind of blows my mind that when you start bringing up like external IDs or like a universal identifier to like track users across your ecosystem, it is a foreign concept to more people than I would’ve thought to, to get a little background. Like I came from a, I came from Ragnarok from a company that built government software and I was kind of spoiled there where everything had a unique identifier and it could be easily tied back to either your customer or their account or something like that. 

And I figured that was just kind of standard, especially like getting right outta school and trying to understand like, you know, how to pull data together so it’s not the end of the world if you can’t get it right a hundred percent on the first time. Like there’s a lot of tools out there and a lot of approaches that you can take to transform your data or kind of right the ship if you really need to. But it is so much easier if you put a lot of thought into it in those initial phases. 

Steven

Right on. And I actually make me think of some, so, so writing a ship can, can be expensive for sure if you, and not necessarily because you made a wrong decision, but sometimes making that wrong decision is because you picked the wrong tool or you thought you had capability that it actually didn’t because maybe somebody had a really good sales presentation and they pulled the wool over your eyes. So in that case, like yeah, pivoting is probably better because you could actually get to drive value outta the tool. I would say in some cases we’ve worked with kind of think of one of the clients that we’ve worked with where they moved from a sort of a marketing automation tool to kind of one of these all in one like CDP marketing automation CRM type tools with some recommendations capability built into it. 

And what they were really excited about is the ability to do the recommendations and deploy that across a lot of their templates. And they specifically do like content articles and things like that. So it’s not products even, it was more of a media play. And you know, by consolidating essentially two different tools, they thought they would save a lot of money. They get into the tool, they start integrating, what they find out is that the tool can’t handle the scale, what they’re trying to do, it’s not customizable to what they need to be able to do. So they’ve done, you know, years essentially would announced to, you know, two years of work kind of de-integrating and integrating to a new tool and then essentially deciding to cut their losses and go back to their old tool and then having to reintegrate all over again because essentially they, what they thought they were gonna get, they actually didn’t get. 

And so a lot of ways that you can kind of, I guess get a, a view into whether or not it’s going to work is we always encourage POCs/proof of concepts. If you can get them out of your partners or out of your tools that you’re evaluating, we also recommend that you kind of narrow them down. You, you give them a literal like, this is what I wanna achieve. Again, kind of going back to that use case doc and saying like, this is exactly what I wanna achieve. Can you bring a solution engineer or somebody on the call who can walk me through exactly how this will work? And then that will give you a little bit more of that visibility to say like, wow, that’s a lot of running around that I have to do to get this one thing to turn on. 

You might be able to see which tools natively support this type of future that you’re looking for a lot easier than say the one that maybe looks better from a pitch standpoint. But you know, when you actually get into the back end there, it’s a bunch of disconnected wires and things are sparking everywhere. So that’s it’s always one of those opportunities, you know, after you get burned to just be a little bit more cautious before you put your hand back on the stove. 

Spencer

We don’t want any, any, any fires starting in the basement. 

Steven

No sir. 

Spencer

No, we don’t want

Geordan

Why there’s a stove in the basement? 

Steven 

Listen, Geordan. Okay. Ragnarok started. 

Spencer

Okay. Okay. Real story. During, the storm, during Sandy, hurricane Sandy, I was in New York and I was standing on a stoop and I looked to the left, it had the water hadn’t gotten all the way up to the, it was like four steps up off the sidewalk, but the water was pretty high and it was actually going into the basement and the basement was half flooded and it reached, I was looking into the, the basement area ’cause all the, it’s like a subterranean ground floor thing, but that’s where like where all the breakers were. Oh, and the electricity from the break, whoever put the breakers in the basement, and this, it was a terrible fire waiting to happen. 

Basically electrical fire happened and there were just flames billowing out until the water got so high that it just submerged everything underwater. But the best part about this, and this has nothing to do with anything guys by the way, is like, what as I’m, and I’m not making this up. I’m looking and I’m watching this like electrical fire happen and I look off to the left is Hurricane Sandy, right? Like, like everything was flooded. This was on like 93rd Street for anybody that knows New York East 93rd Street, I look towards First Avenue and it’s like a giant river basically at this point. And there’s like one of those like flatbread, flat flatbread, flatbread, flatbed, flatbed trucks. 

There’s a giant flatbread and apparently, I was on mushrooms. No, it’s a flat, there was a flatbed truck floating up First Avenue, like very slowly like this. And there’s a dude on the back just like party boying by himself, like as during, in the middle of a hurricane on the back of a flatbed truck. And it was, I was, it was amazing. 

Also, one other thing I really wanted to tell somebody this story I saw a a, a lady get crashed into on the bike lane today by a guy skateboarding in a full Spider-Man costume. He came outta nowhere and he, like, t-boned her like, like literally like he was coming outta nowhere and he just like went into the bike lane and they went like flying through the air. 

Steven

Wait, did he like web out his hands and like write himself right away or

Spencer
No, he fell crash and burned, fell right on his face. 

Geordan

So he was not a real Spider-Man.  

Spencer

I think he’s not a real Spider-Man. 

Geordan

I thought they stopped doing that Spider-Man musical because stuff like this kept happening. 

Spencer

Yeah, This is what he does for fun. 

Geordan

He’s out of a job now.

Spencer

They turned off the lights permanently. 

Steven

Can I just say piggybacking into the Spider-Verse Spider pig best character, just throwing it out there. 

Geordan

We’re going full oink on this episode. 

Spencer

Going full oink. All the way.

Geordan

Can’t stop 

Steven

Get myself, some pulled pork sandwich after this one. 

Geordan

I’m, I gotta get, I’m gonna get that on a T-shirt and then I also have to get, I’m ready to truck or it’s time to truck.

Steven

Oh yeah. 

Geordan

I’m never gonna let you forget it. It’s so good. That was off of a, that was off of a meeting. 

Steven

One of our clients was advertising in a video game and, but the video game’s like a truck simulator. And so I was saying like, so I went and bought the simulator and I was like, now I’m ready. You know, like I’m gonna get my hat on, you know, like my trucker hat and it’s gonna say I’m ready to truck on it, and yeah. I was so terrible at the game though. Like, I, I really should never drive a truck is what I’ve learned because… 

Spencer

So you’ll never be a licensed forklift driver is what you’re saying. 

Steven

The forklift might be a little bit okay. It was the, it was the back of the truck, you know, it just, it just swings too much. It’s, it’s really hard not to hit other cars when you’re making left turns and you know, I prefer Grand Theft Auto over this. So 

Spencer

Were you that guy that uses the fast lane? That one trucker that uses the fast lane? I knew it was you. 

Steven

Oh man, they caught 

Spencer 

Me. Anyway guys, I I gotta, I gotta round us up here. I gotta, I gotta corral us back to back to the ranch. 

I’m the, I’m the, the the sheep dog and I’m bringing all the sheeps home or the piglets I’m bringing all, I’m a pig dog and I’m alright. Bull is back, back in your pen. 

Back in your pen. 

Geordan

You sound like a high school bully. 

Spencer

You know, someone tried to put me into a locker once, but the locker wasn’t big enough so they just kind of gave up and they stopped bothering me after that. ’cause I think they embarrassed themselves, but 

Steven

That’s the way to beat your bully. Just be too big for them. 

Spencer

Listen, man, I’m sorry, it’s not gonna work. It’s just not gonna happen today bud, but okay, so we’re gonna bring this back to the ranch. 

I’d like to just to sum up basically everyone, just on a serious note, like, or semi-serious, you know, building a tech stack doesn’t have to be scary. A MarTech tech stack in this particular instance. Just be prepared beforehand. You can get it done in a, in a few months, you know, with the right team and the right preparation while the all-in-one solutions can seem, you know, like a, like a godsend. A lot of the newer ones are really untested. A lot of this stuff is still in the roadmap beta phase. So try it out if you want. But I would say, you know, based on our experience, the best-in-breed way is, is the way to go. 

Because these are teams that are built around, you know, their whole company, their whole teams oriented around building the best possible product experience for that specific thing that you’re trying to get them to do. So it’s kind of like, do you want to go, you know, broad and shallow or, or just like with an all-in-one solution, or do you want to just bring together tools that hopefully integrate together or can be integrated together to really get the, the best possible outcome. 

Steven

Yeah, and you can always upgrade later too. You don’t have to like, you can, you can always buy the broad knowing that your team maybe can’t quite use all the sophisticated bells and whistles, but two years down the line, you might say to yourself, all right, well I’m, I’m ready to, I’m ready to move on. I’m ready to buy the Cadillac. You know. 

Spencer

Ooh, very nice Cadillac. So, that’s a nice transition. I’d like to shout out to my dad Billy B for being such a great listener. Thanks. He’s also a big Cadillac fan as well as a Ragnarokast fan. And I’d like to thank Geordan, Geordie K for joining us today. 

Geordan

Thanks for having me guys. 

Steven

And if you’re going through Tech Stack valuation and you’re looking for like a sheet to sort of like a template to, to do a comparison against different partners that you’re evaluating, we have some good standards and templates that we can share, with you as well. If that will help you in your making sure that you’re thinking through all the different parts of bringing on a new partner. 

Spencer

And now it’s time for my NPR voice. 

Steven

There he is. 

Spencer

Everyone, please like us on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok threads, other platforms that we’re on that I don’t know about. And also please most importantly subscribe to our podcast on whatever platform you’re using. That’s all. 

Steven

Wherever you get your podcast.

Spencer

Oh, I like that. I like that. Alright everybody hang in there. Until next time, 

Steven

This has been Ragnarokasted!