In this episode of Marketing Automation Moment, hosts Hannah Wehrly and Mike Maynard discuss why so many companies are reconsidering their marketing automation platforms and whether they’re truly using them to their full potential. They explore the rise of AI driven sales tools, market growth trends, and how businesses can get more from their existing platforms. Plus, in the Insightful Tip of the Week, they tackle when it’s the right time to change your MarTech stack.

About Napier

Napier is a PR-lead, full service marketing agency that specialises in the B2B technology sector. We work closely with our clients to build campaigns, focusing on achieving results that have a significant positive impact on their businesses and which, above all, ensure maximum return on their investment.

About Mike Maynard

Mike is the Managing Director/CEO of Napier, a PR and marketing agency for B2B technology companies. A self-confessed geek who loves talking about technology, he believes that combining the measurement, accountability and innovation that he learnt as an engineer with a passion for communicating ensures Napier delivers great campaigns and tangible return on investment.

About Hannah Wehrly

Hannah is the Head of Business Development and Marketing at Napier and leads on pitching, proposal writing, lead nurturing, email marketing, social media and content creation. Hannah joined the Napier team back in 2017 as a Marketing Specialist after completing her degree in Marketing and Communications, and her role focuses on developing new relationships with potential clients.

 Time Stamps

[00:00:00] – Introduction
[00:01:12] – Acton’s eBook Insights and re-evaluating Marketing Automation Strategies
[00:02:25] – Understanding Platform Capabilities
[00:05:54] – Underutilisation of Marketing Automation Features
[00:08:08] – Market Growth and AI Influence
[00:11:49] – Salesforce’s Shift in Strategy
[00:13:22] – When to Change Your MarTech Stack
[00:16:29] – Conclusion and Key Takeaways

Follow Mike and Hannah:

Mike Maynard on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikemaynard/

Hannah Wehrly on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hannah-wehrly-b0706a107/

Napier website: https://www.napierb2b.com/

Napier LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/napier-partnership-limited/

If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to subscribe to our podcast for more discussions about the latest in Marketing Automation and connect with us on social media to stay updated on upcoming episodes. We’d also appreciate it if you could leave us a review on your favourite podcast platform.

Want more? Check out Napier’s other podcast – Marketing B2B Technology: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/marketing-b2b-technology/id1485417724

Transcript: Re-evaluating Marketing Automation: Are You Using Your Platform to Its Full Potential?

Hannah: Welcome to the Marketing Automation Moment podcast. I’m Hannah Kelly.

Mike: And I’m Mike Maynard. This is Napier’s podcast to tell you about the latest news from the world of marketing automation.

Hannah: Welcome to the Marketing Automation Moment podcast. I’m Hannah Wehrly.

Mike: And I’m Mike Maynard.

Hannah: Today we talk about the number of companies re-evaluating their marketing automation strategy.

Mike: The fact that most people don’t use the capabilities of their marketing automation platform.

Hannah: The growth of the market.

Mike: An AI sales development rep.

Hannah: And the insightful tip of the week of when should you look to change your MarTech tool stack.

Mike: Hi, Hannah, it’s great to be back recording another episode of Marketing Automation Moment. Obviously, you were off for a little while. It’s great you’re back at Napier. And I’m really looking forward to having a much more frequent discussion about marketing automation platforms with you going forward.

Hannah: Thanks, Mike. I’m super excited to be back and actually super excited to be delving back into the market automation world. There seems to be a lot that’s happened since I’ve been gone. So let’s jump straight into it. I’ve got some real great things to talk to you about today.

Mike: It’s great to hear lots has been happening, Hannah. What are the exciting stories you’ve seen?

Hannah: Well, let’s kick off with Acton, Mike, because I actually received an email from them quite recently, a couple of weeks ago, and they were promoting their new e-books, very marketing focused, How to Find a Better Market Automation Solution. But it did have some interesting insights within it. And one of the things that they actually said was that 87% of companies are re-evaluating their market automation strategy. And I have to say, as an ebook, it was quite ballsy. They had a really good section about, you know, whether your market automation investment is paying off. Then they went straight and delved into, you know, how to migrate, how easy it can be. What did you think? Did you have a chance to read it?

Mike: Well, yeah, you said it through and I thought it was really interesting. I mean, obviously, it’s basically Acton going, pick me, pick me, you know, choose us. But I was quite shocked that 87% of people are re-evaluating market automation. The cost of moving from one market automation platform to another is so big. And the reality is, is pretty much all the platforms have the capabilities to do at least all the basic functions you need. I wonder whether people are perhaps not really committing to making their platform work and perhaps blaming the platform rather than blaming what they’re actually using it for.

Hannah: Yeah, I absolutely agree, Mike. It’s really interesting. I always think there’s in two areas. You’ve got the reasons why you’d actually want to look at other platforms, and then perhaps the reasons why actually you’re not trained enough to understand what the platform can provide. For example, things like budget. If you are looking to cut marketing budget, you know, you’re under pressure from your board, actually switching to a different platform could be a really good idea. But I often feel it’s situations where actually the marketing team doesn’t really understand the features or how to use the marketing automation platform fully, and instead they jump to another platform, they do all this hard work, they spend all this time, and then they’re faced with the same problems because they haven’t bothered to actually learn the features.

Mike: Yeah, I absolutely agree. I mean, we have seen, particularly our enterprise clients, some changes. So, you know, and maybe we shouldn’t say this publicly, but it’s been pretty clear that large enterprise customers of Salesforce who were using other market automation platforms like, for example, Marketo, were being really strongly incentivized by Salesforce to move their marketing automation all onto that one Salesforce platform with their CRM. And there I know some of the amounts of money involved have been so compelling, it’s been worth doing. It doesn’t mean you shouldn’t move, but I do agree with you. I think the first thing you should be doing is really looking at what you could do with your existing platform, rather than deciding that all the problems you have are platform related, rather than maybe training expertise and resource related.

Hannah: Oh, definitely. And I actually think this segues quite nicely into the second point of this podcast. And again, this is Act On. It’s a very Act On heavy conversation today. They’ve actually recently done a webinar. And again, it was the hits, the misses and the opportunities of marketing automation in 2025. And what I thought was really interesting is that they talked about how email marketing is the main priority for marketers for marketing automation success. followed by social media management. I know you’ve got a couple of comments on that, Mike, so I’ll chat that over to you in a second. I think what was really interesting is they said that 64% view nurturing prospects as the main element of a market automation platform. And to me this screams, I use this real big complex system just to send emails. I don’t know what you think.

Mike: I think, you know, you’re being a bit harsh there. I mean, one of the things is, is that was obviously a question where people could pick more than one option. And I think nurturing prospects, fundamentally, that’s what marketing automation does. I mean, I was actually quite surprised it was that low. You know, interestingly, only 42% ranked personalized outreach as being a top use case. I mean, that’s kind of scary, really. You think with all the power of marketing automation platforms, that would be, you know, a key focus is personalize your outreach. So I don’t know, I wasn’t surprised so much with that. But I felt actually, you know, again, we’re kind of seeing these things that suggest that marketing automation platforms are massively underused in terms of what people actually do versus what they potentially could achieve.

Hannah: I think that’s a really great point, Mike, and I guess maybe I’ve been a little bit harsh because I think what I really am trying to say is that, as you mentioned, there’s all these features and, you know, in previous episodes we’ve talked about things like dynamic content, we’ve talked about nurturing and segmenting your lists, and it’s taking it from being a nurture and email marketing system to this real complex system that can really deliver a great return of investment.

Mike: Yeah, I mean, I found some other really interesting stats there. So if you look at what people use their marketing automation platform for, only 50% use it for email marketing. So I’m not sure quite what you do if you’ve got marketing automation platform, why there’s all these people. And let’s be honest, 43% of marketing automation users are actually sending email from a different system. The majority of people don’t use their marketing automation platform for social media management. 60% don’t use it for content management. And then, you know, if you look at paid ads, it’s only about a third that is linking their marketing automation to their advertising campaign. So you look at all that and you think, wow, people really are not using the capabilities of the systems they’ve paid really good money for.

Hannah: Oh, no, absolutely. And I think there’s an element of perhaps multiple automation platforms not doing the right marketing. So instead they’re focused on, you know, migrate, look at us, we’re all great. But maybe there should be a switch and a focus on the content of, are you using it to your full capabilities and look at all the cool stuff that we can do.

Mike: For sure. And I think, you know, let’s prove we’re not totally in to act on in this episode. One of the things HubSpot discovered very early on was their biggest problem selling marketing automation systems was the people who churned very quickly, who used it for a year and then gave up. And those were people who weren’t using the system. So this is why HubSpot introduced all the onboarding that now typically all marketing automation systems have. But what we’re seeing is actually people do this onboarding, they get trained up, they probably make quite good use of the system in the first year, but they kind of hit a ceiling and they don’t get better. And actually I think, and this is a call out to all you marketing automation platforms out there, maybe you should be thinking about really focusing on growing the use of the platform. Personally, I love Sharpspring, which is, you know, the platform we use internally. They actually tell you how much you’re using and how active you are. And it gives you a good idea of, you know, how well you’re using the platform.

Hannah: Great point, Mike. Great point. Let’s go back to HubSpot for a minute, because I think it’s really important to say, you know, they were one of the first players on the market. And HubSpot have actually been listed as a top player in a market research study. Do you want to talk a little bit about that?

Mike: Yeah, I mean, for me, the interesting thing is that the market’s huge. I mean, almost $7 billion in 2024. And yet it’s going to grow by way more than inflation. And they’re talking about 12.5% growth in this market. Clearly, market automation is still a place that businesses can make a lot of money and see a lot of growth. And there’s still people out there who haven’t bought market automation systems. What are you doing, guys? And they now are starting to look at it. So I think it’s a really exciting market.

Hannah: I couldn’t agree more. I think we spoke about this a bit last year, and the figures have just improved and they’ve just grown. And this moves on to another point that, you know, we’ve put up for discussion today. But do you think this growth is influenced by AI slightly with the market automation platforms?

Mike: Well, that’s a great question. And we’re starting to see more and more AI feed into marketing automation platforms. I don’t know what you think. My gut feel is people are not buying marketing automation to access AI. There’s AI everywhere. I mean, it’s not a problem accessing AI. I think people are buying into marketing automation because of the potential of a marketing automation platform. Do you agree?

Hannah: I do agree. I think one of the things is the messaging might have changed. So AI talks about saving time for people. We both know, you know, that market automation does that. And I think I’ve seen a change, especially with the big players that use these market automation tools or integration. You know, we’ve talked about my favorite Einstein with Salesforce before, but they are pushing that. So it’s that messaging of, yes, we’ve got AI, but also look at us, look at our systems. We save you time. It’s efficiency. it’s time-saving, it’s making you more efficient. And I think there is a slight change in the AI messaging may have accelerated that. I don’t know if you agree or not.

Mike: Yeah, or maybe it’s just made it easier. I mean, it does definitely give the capability to introduce new features. And, you know, one of the other things we’re talking about is the integration between Piper, which is effectively an AI business development rep, as they pitch it. So it’s an AI tool to replace some of your nurturing. And they’ve integrated that with Marketo. And that seems to have generated a lot of interest, you know, in some ways, almost outside of the marketing press. And I was quite surprised to see how much enthusiasm there was for this story.

Hannah: See, I think this is where we always disagree, Mike, because although I was a little bit surprised, I think it makes sense to me. You know, we’ve seen how much coverage there has been about AI, these type of tools. And I think it’s interesting to see how Marketo is actually using a third party tool rather than building something in internally. What do you think about that?

Mike: Yeah, I mean, you’re absolutely right. That’s fascinating, because as you mentioned, you know, we talked briefly about Salesforce and the fact that they’re bringing a lot of AI into the platform themselves, which is interesting because us old guys, I mean, we remember Salesforce was initially promoted as a CRM in a platform. And the whole idea was people would build apps on top of Salesforce. And that really drove its initial adoption. And now, I mean, maybe I’m being wrong here. I get the feeling that Salesforce more and more wants to control more and more of the functionality, and it’s becoming much less of a platform and much more of a standard product. What do you think?

Hannah: No, I do agree. And I think it would be interesting to see how Marketo compares. I mean, this news about Piper was released really recent, 18th of March. So I think it’d be interesting for us to come back to this maybe in a couple of months and see what the difference is and look into a bit more of why is Salesforce going down this route? Why is that better? But also what has happened to Marketo and actually are users preferring this sort of approach?

Mike: Yeah, and I think also the other thing to see is, you know, how many of us will actually be having conversations with either through email or actually voice conversations with AIs when it comes to the sales process. I think there’s areas where that can work. And typically that’s, you know, the lower value type purchases. But when you look at some, you know, really deeply involved, very high value B2B purchases, I wonder in reality how many companies are going to trust AIs to actually run that process, knowing that we still have problems with things like hallucinations.

Hannah: Oh, I think that’s a great point, Mike. And I think that’s something we definitely need to look at in the future. But just looking at time, let’s move on to our insightful tip of the week. So I want to have a quick chat about when do you look to change the platforms within your MarTech stack? Now, we briefly mentioned earlier, you know, it’s really time consuming, it costs a lot of money to change your market automation platform. and that isn’t something that should be taken lightly. But when we’re looking at the MarTech stack as a whole, when should you be looking to change and when should you be actually sticking with it and deciding that I’m gonna make this work?

Mike: That’s a great question. I was on another podcast earlier this week. They asked me basically the same question, you know, do you lean into finding new technology or are you more about pushing it away? And I actually said, I’m a nerd, so I love new technology, a new shiny thing. I’m like Bolt, it’s like Squirrel and I’m off and looking at the new shiny tool. So actually I try and stop myself doing it because generally speaking, there’s a real risk of spending too much time churning through tools, updating the capabilities of your stack and then never using those capabilities. I mean, you use a lot of marketing automation, and you know, the more familiar you are with the platform, the better you’re going to be at using it.

Hannah: Oh, absolutely. I couldn’t agree more. And I mean, we have a great team for biz dev here at Napier, and they use a variety of tools. And there’s some that I’m more of an expert on some that they love and there’s some that’s non-negotiable. I mean, you know, we’re coming up to a new financial year and we’re like, you know, how are you getting on with this? And I think I would say about 80% of the tools that we’ve used, the team has been like, please don’t take this from me. I absolutely love that and that is down to the fact that we really dedicate the time to training the team, understanding the platforms, we don’t just as you said, might do a squirrel and go, oh, shiny new thing. You know, sometimes I have to say to you, do we really need this? And I think it’s the value of understanding, okay, we’re spending money on this. We’ve chosen this platform for a reason. We’re going to do all we can in the next year to make sure that we’re using it properly because you don’t want to be in a situation where your subscriptions review and you go, oh, right, I had that. And I think that’s actually the case for quite a few marketers.

Mike: I totally agree. I mean, sometimes tools come on the market. I remember when Descript started really being able to fully edit podcasts. It was so powerful that, you know, that was a tool that everybody wanted to switch to. But then you have other tools. I mean, you know, recently there’s been a lot of tools around AI to pull clips from podcasts. And they’re interesting and they do a pretty good job. but they don’t necessarily always pull the right things. And so again, we’re using some of those tools, but also we’re still doing some stuff manually because sometimes the AI doesn’t quite get what you’re talking about. Either that or you and I aren’t very good at explaining it.

Hannah: I think that’s a great point, Mike, and we’ve started using Swell AI to help with our podcast, you know, pull descriptions, but we have Natasha out there doing a manual check, making sure everything makes sense. The tools have to be taken with, I guess what they say is a pinch of salt sometimes, to make sure you’re still hitting that quality as well.

Mike: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, Swell, I think, is one of those tools that the team would not want to lose because it definitely helps write up the show notes. It’s another great AI tool that works really well. But equally, I think, you know, sometimes these tools are not the magic bullet. And as you say, you do need to be involved with the tools. And that has a cost. You know, throwing more tools into your marketing stack has a learning and familiarization impact. that really is going to slow you down if you’re not careful. So I think people need to think very carefully about switching tools. I think we’re getting to the point where most tools are good enough. And if it’s good enough, then maybe you don’t want to jump to the latest and greatest tool that might have a little bit of a extra feature lead for the next couple of weeks. We should be a little bit more German, I guess. I mean, Germans are very, very into their processes and their workflow, and anything that disrupts the workflow is a really major change. So that’s why they tend, culturally, to be really efficient at things, because they don’t go around messing around with the tools they use and the way they work. Whereas I think in the UK, we’re perhaps not as disciplined. And maybe learning a bit from the Germans might be a good thing to do.

Hannah: Well, I think that’s the perfect statement to end the podcast on, Mike. Thank you so much. I’ve really enjoyed being back in the game, having such an interesting conversation. And we’ll be back soon for another one.

Mike: Absolutely. And if anybody is listening from Germany, hello from us as well.

Hannah: Thanks for listening to the Marketing Automation Moment podcast.

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