In this week’s In-Ear Insights, Katie and Chris talk through some of the latest data in marketing technology from Scott Brinker’s MarTech 9000. How much marketing technology is too much? Do we really need hundreds of options for CRM software? What lessons should we take from all this data. Tune in to find out!

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In this week’s in your insights, we are starting to take a look at the data published by Scott Brinker and the MAR tech conference on the MAR tech.

It’s called the MAR tech 9000 9000 different vendors in the marketing technology space offering all these different solutions to your marketing problems.

And we thought we’d take some time today talk about just how many of these solutions there are.

So I’m gonna go ahead and bring up our very, very quick analysis of the top 40 categories, the number of companies in the martec 9000.

These are the top 40 categories.

And the way you look at this, for example, on line one, sales automation enablement and intelligence, there are 508 companies that offer software to do something in that space, you just go down to line six CRM, there’s 336 different CRM companies.

So Salesforce, Hubspot, and so on and so forth.

So Katie, when you see this buffet of marketing technology, what comes to mind?

It’s too much, it is too much.

That is the first thing I thought when we started talking about this last week is, these are too many.

There’s too many choices for people.

And what I can’t wrap my head around is, if there are 508, sales automation enablement and intelligent platforms.

What’s that? What’s the difference between all of those things, you know, aside from, they’re not going to tell you the price or the features on the website.

So they’re gonna force you to get on the phone with a sales guy to do a demo to find out within 30 seconds that you don’t need this thing that it doesn’t answer any of your questions.

Like, to me this is bonkers.

9000 different pieces of software.

To solve a problem, it is to like, as a decision maker, I sit here and I’m like, Well, how do I know if what I’m currently using is the best of the best? How do I stay up to date.

So if we just pick one category, one category still has over 50 options, there is nothing on here that has less than 80 options to pick from.

And it’s overwhelming.

So that’s my takeaways it is overwhelming, Chris?

It is.

And in fact, Scott and the team have this really fa