| Good morning, Marketer, and is marketing automation reverting to an email tool? Sara McNamara, Marketing Operations Solutions Architect with Slack and a well-known voice in the MOPs space has been making some very timely observations about changes in marketing technology. In particular, a Pardot specialist herself, she sees a trend to remove processes from marketing automation platforms and relocate them to specialized tools. This implies MA being boiled back down again into an email and list-building tool. This chimes with what I’m seeing with CRM — the prospect, at least, of it being used as a sales records tool while a lot of sales enablement, as well as the marketing initiatives leading up to the hand off for sales, taking place elsewhere. I’m speculating here, but I think we’re going to see some big changes in the space over the next year, and I think — although I’m still joining the dots — these changes will reflect how far we’ve moved away from a focus on specific channels and towards a channel-agnostic orchestration approach to CX. Kim Davis
Editorial Director | 