If you’re reading this blog, it’s a safe bet that you’ve been involved in buying — or selling — martech software. Probably quite a bit of martech software. So I greatly appreciate that a number of you responded to my survey over LinkedIn asking what you loved and hated about that experience and which resources you found helpful and trustworthy (or not!) in that process. Here’s what you, at least the collective “you,” had to say.

Let’s start with the different resources you use to research and evaluate martech products:

It’s no surprise: recommendations from friends and peers — the power of word-of-mouth — are by far the most helpful resource in evaluating martech products: 80.9% said they were “helpful” or “very helpful.”

The most useful takeaway from this is that it’s a wise idea to expand the circle of peers you can draw upon for such advice, through communities such as MO Pros or in-person events like Martech World Forum, LXA Anitcon, and MOps-Apalooza where you can get the real word-on-the-street. (Also good advice for martech vendors: don’t short-change customer success or customer delight. It’s a powerful marketing channel.)

I was happy to hear that articles/blogs/podcasts/talks by industry experts and practitioners — cough, cough — were the 2nd most helpful resource, by count of helpful or very helpful responses at 74.3%.

The next two most helpful — vendor demos and vendor sales engineers (technical), at 60.9% and 56.2% respectively — were interesting because they were in stark contrast to other kinds of vendor interactions. As a resource for buyers, vendor sales reps were not only considered the least helpful (19.1%), they were the least trusted/least liked (46.7%). Ouch.

That’s interesting, because it’s usually through vendor sales reps that vendor demos are delivered and vendor sales engineers are brought into the discussion. I guess the main lesson here for martech vendors is: don’t delay in giving your prospects access to the resources they really want. And give your SEs a raise.

The other finding here that stood out to me was the use of ecosystem marketplaces. Or more accurately, their relative lack of use. A full 21% of respondents — 1 in 5 — said they haven’t used them much. That was surprising to me given how highly martech buyers typically rank “integrations” in their evaluation criteria. I’d go check a product’s integrations with the rest of my stack as one of my first steps in considering them.

Lots more to ponder in those buyer resources findings, but I’ll leave that as an exercise to the reader. Because we have to get to…

I figured the question — What things do martech vendors do that annoy you as a buyer? — would be therapeutic to buyers and provide useful feedback to vendors. And it was clearly therapuetic for a few participants, who in anwering an “Other” field for this question gave responses such as:

• “Lack of listening to specific needs.”
• “Having no deep knowledge about their tool. Not be able to provide a feature list.”
• “Ignore my questions/comments about my interests in order to do demos and discovery their way.”
• “Mislead me about functionality I need/want (with their tools or others’).”
• “Spam, constantly violate my privacy and right to explore without being exploited. Truly repugnant 🤢.”

Yikes. Some deep feelings there. But otherwise most of the answers don’t come as a surprise. As with the responses on the buyer resource question, it’s pretty clear that buyers want to get to demos and pricing as frictionlessly — i.e., sales-rep-free — as possible. And given how helpful demos are to buyers, vendors, you should probably give it to them.

By the way, I feel seen that 50% of you also can’t stand those distracting “Do you want to chat?” boxes popping up everywhere on a vendor’s site.

As for the fact that the 2nd-most annoying thing buyers report is vendors sending them too many emails, well, we’ll come back to that in a moment. But first, let’s balance the scales with some positive buyer feedback…

What things do martech vendors do that you appreciate as a buyer?

Survey says: #1 answer is producing truly educational content that isn’t trying to sell. Then publish transparent pricing (in case you hadn’t gotten that hint already). And then make it easy to learn which other products they integrate with (there’s that ecosystem resource!).

Lots of genuinely good answers in the “Other” answers for this question:

• “Help build ROI use cases.”
• “Short-form videos with C-Level content (not explainer).”
• “Provide a real reference who has solved the same problem.”

But I found the one-off answer “Include a solutions architect or sales engineer on all calls” the perfect closing of the circle from where we started: sales engineers are the resource vendors can provide that is most deeply appreciated by buyers.

But one more thing…

The last question I asked in this survey was worth its own dedicated write-up: Will AI in martech make buyer experiences better or worse? I won’t rehash it here, other than to connect two dots. We noted a moment ago that 60.2% of buyers are already annoyed by vendors sending them too many emails. And in this question, we see 44.2% believe “AI that will send me more personalized emails” will actually make their buyer experience worse.

Taken together, my martech vendor friends, I’d be cautious about unleashing the kraken with too many proactively-inclined AI agents focused on engaging buyers. Regardless of how delightfully personalized they would surely be. The message from martech buyers to martech sellers from this survey is clearly that less = more — with the exception of truly educational content, full pricing information, and friction-free demos.

And sales engineers. Lots and lots of sales engineers.

Thanks again to everyone who participated!