“We need better integration between our systems.”
I hear this from marketing leaders constantly, followed by questions about middleware, APIs and data connectors. Yet, after years of helping companies tackle these challenges, I’ve watched the same pattern unfold: millions spent on martech solutions that deliver a fraction of the promised value.
The problem isn’t in the code or the platform. It’s not hiding in API documentation or data schemas. It’s staring us in the face from organizational charts, departmental KPIs and meeting structures where marketing, sales and IT leaders barely speak the same language.
Martech integration is not a technical problem. It’s an organizational one.
Why your integration project is doomed before it starts
Most integration projects begin with technology selection and end with disappointment. The marketing team wants customer data to flow between systems. The IT team delivers connections that function perfectly from a technical standpoint. But, six months later, customer experiences remain fragmented and teams still operate in silos.
What’s happening is organizational misalignment wearing a technical disguise. That’s because your marketing organization doesn’t just run on marketing technology. It runs on human connections, shared understanding and aligned incentives. If these organizational elements aren’t designed for integration, no amount of technology can deliver transformative results.
I remember a major retailer replacing its entire integration platform after a failed digital transformation. The problem wasn’t their previous technology. The problem was that the merchandising, marketing and ecommerce teams had different definitions of success. Their new platform faithfully replicated the same organizational dysfunction with faster data transfer.
Dig deeper: The sticky problem of martech integration
The value stream revelation
When integration projects sputter, I ask, “Have you mapped how customer value flows through your organization?” The answer is typically no. Instead, companies map how data flows between systems.
Effective integration begins by tracing customer journeys across your organization, identifying every touchpoint where value is created or diminished. Only then can you determine which connections will meaningfully improve outcomes.
Mapping customer value flow often reveals that organizational structure is the most significant barrier to integration. Departments built for internal efficiency frequently create hand-off points that fragment customer experiences. Technical integration can connect these fragments, but can’t make them whole.
Instead of asking “How do we connect these systems?” ask, “How should we organize ourselves to deliver seamless value?” That transforms integration from a technical exercise to a strategic imperative.
The people problem no vendor will mention
I recently watched a CTO proudly demonstrate the company’s new integration platform. “Look how beautifully the data flows from system to system,” he beamed, showing meticulously crafted diagrams. When I asked, “How will your marketing team actually use this information differently tomorrow?”, the silence was deafening.
This scene plays out everywhere. A financial services client spent big on integration technology but allocated zero dollars to help their teams work differently with the newly connected information. Six months later, they couldn’t understand why nothing had changed.
Companies will write blank checks for technical infrastructure, while pinching pennies on the human side of the equation. The result is a collaboration deficit, which kills integration projects.
A clothing retailer spent 18 months connecting their website to their store systems. First day, everything’s “working perfectly.” Then, the returns started flowing in.
The store manager calls me raging about “garbage data” because customers are showing up with online orders that look nothing like what they received. The ecommerce director says the stores are making up return policies on the fly. Both teams pulling reports from the same system to prove the other one’s screwing up.
All their fancy integration did was give everybody better data for their arguments. We finally got somewhere when I convinced them to put a store manager on the digital team and send a web merchandiser to work Saturdays in a busy store for a month. Suddenly, everybody had much less to say about whose fault it was and more ideas about how to fix it together.
What transformed the situation wasn’t more technology. It was finally investing in the human side by:
- Creating weekly cross-functional working sessions where store and digital teams jointly reviewed customer feedback.
- Establishing shared bonuses tied to overall customer satisfaction regardless of channel.
- Implementing temporary staff exchanges so digital team members worked in stores and vice versa.
The technology didn’t change. The people using it did. Without a human foundation, you’re building a superhighway between towns without cars. Impressive engineering, but it won’t get anyone anywhere.
Dig deeper: How strategic martech integration drives business growth
When integration becomes your straitjacket
Some organizations have to learn this the hard way.
One company spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on a comprehensive integration project that worked perfectly, which meant nothing when direct-to-consumer channels exploded in their industry. It took the company months to spin up new shopping experiences while their competitors were doing it in weeks. The company’s carefully crafted integration architecture had hardwired their 2020 organizational structure into the technology.
“We built a perfect integration solution for a world that no longer exists,” the CMO told me. It happens all the time. Companies treat integration like pouring concrete — permanent connections designed for stability in a business environment that demands flexibility. They invest in technical perfection without considering how quickly the underlying business needs might change.
Innovative companies design integration points that follow the customer’s journey, not their org chart.
A business where a battle-tested CMO I know deliberately built a “loose coupling” between systems, sacrificing some efficiency for the ability to reconfigure quickly. When they needed to launch a completely new subscription model last year, they were able to adjust their entire customer data flow in weeks, not quarters.
Customer journeys remain relatively stable even when your internal structure changes. A healthcare provider redesigned their integration approach around patient care episodes rather than departmental hand-offs. Later, when they reorganized their clinical teams, the systems adapted easily because they were anchored to something more fundamental than boxes on an org chart.
Building integration muscle: How organizations can excel at integration
The most savvy companies don’t view integration as a project with a start and end date. They treat it as a core organizational muscle that gets stronger with deliberate exercise.
Many martech vendors will tell you integration success depends on their technical approach. That’s like saying your fitness depends on the brand of your sneakers. What matters most is how you train.
Here is what separates companies that excel at integration from those that struggle.
1. Organize around customer journeys, not departmental functions
One retail client restructured their teams to mirror how customers engaged with them, instead of how their org chart looked. This approach fundamentally changed which system connections mattered and why.
2. Invest in human connections as much as system connections
A travel company established integration ambassadors from each department who met weekly to:
- Share upcoming changes.
- Surface pain points.
- Solve cross-functional challenges before they are technical problems.
3. Ruthlessly aligning incentives
A healthcare firm discovered its customer service team was measured on call handle time, while marketing was measured on customer satisfaction. That created a fundamental conflict that no API could resolve. Changing these metrics did more for their integration success than their entire middleware investment.
4. Design for change, not stability
Build integration approaches that can evolve as quickly as market conditions. Avoid hard-coding today’s organizational structure into the technical architecture and create the flexibility to adapt as customer needs shift.
When organizations do this, technical integration challenges become dramatically simpler. It is not because the technology changed, but because it operates in an environment designed for integration success.
Taking the integration bull by the horns
CMOs and marketing leaders can’t delegate this away or solve it with a purchase order.. I’ve seen too many hand-off integrations to IT with a sigh of relief, only to wonder why customer data problems persist.
If you’re serious about integration, roll up your sleeves and lead. One CMO did this by having sales, IT, customer service and product leaders get together for a two-day offsite. Their only agenda? Map exactly how their best customers experienced the company — the good, the bad and the ugly.
What emerged shocked everyone: Customers had to navigate nine hand-offs between departments, often repeating information at each step. No wonder their NPS scores remained stubbornly low despite millions invested in technology.
This CMO then took a big step and volunteered to measure marketing, not just on marketing metrics, but also on cross-functional customer metrics that required collaboration to improve. Within months, other department heads followed suit. The integration roadmap essentially wrote itself from there because it focused on connections that improved customer experience, not departmental convenience.
The technical integration work that followed was pretty straightforward because they were finally solving the correct problems.
Marketing leaders have a unique opportunity. Your customer-centric perspective makes you the natural champion for value stream integration. Your position at the intersection of customer experience, data and technology makes you the ideal orchestrator of cross-functional alignment. Your growing marketing technology budget gives you the authority to influence integration architecture.
By reframing integration as an organizational challenge enabled by technology rather than a technical implementation imposed on the organization, you can deliver what technical integration alone can’t: a fundamentally more effective marketing organization.
Technical integration will always involve technical components. But success or failure isn’t determined by architecture diagrams or API specifications. The deciding factor is knowing that when integrating your technologies, you must first incorporate your people, processes and purposes.
Dig deeper: Why martech integration needs more than technical skills
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