Spotted something interesting at the Denver MarTech conference last week

So I was at this big enterprise marketing conference in Denver last week, and I noticed something weird. Almost every booth from the big marketing automation vendors had these super generic demos showing the same workflows for email campaigns and lead scoring. But there was this one smaller vendor, some startup I'd never heard of, who had a live setup where they were actually pulling real data from a Fortune 500 company's CRM. Their demo froze for like 20 seconds and the presenter just laughed it off and said "that's enterprise reality." I ended up talking to their CTO for 15 minutes about how they handle API rate limits. It made me realize how often we see these polished demos that never match the actual day to day chaos of enterprise marketing. Has anyone else noticed a big gap between what vendors show at conferences and what really happens when you try to implement their tools? What's the worst demo you've seen?

2 comments

2 Comments

grantadams21d ago

Bet those polished demos are exactly what works in most real setups though.

margaret_kelly5520d ago

...and that's exactly what happened to my buddy Steve last month. He watched a flawless demo from a lighting company, bought the whole system, and spent three weekends trying to get it to work in his actual living room. @grantadams, you're right to be skeptical of those polished setups.