Today on the Martech Minute we speak with Sheryl Schultz, she’s the founder and president of CabinetM. CabinetM is an online tool to help you plan, track, and manage your marketing technology infrastructure.  Now, in the martech world, there are over 8,000 products and solutions at last count. If you’re looking to track what’s in your martech stack, or see what else is out there – or if you just want to make sense of it all in general, you should definitely check out CabinetM.

Colin White: Thanks everybody for joining us, this is Colin White from Martekrs with another segment of the Martech Minute. Today I’m pleased to be joined by Sheryl Schultz, she’s the founder and president of CabinetM. Thanks for joining us Sheryl!

Sheryl Schultz: Thanks for having me Colin I really appreciate it.

Colin White: So CabinetM, you have been around for a few years and I first came into contact with CabinetM because I was looking for different marketing technology solutions – that’s what I do! – So I came across CabinetM as a research resource for martech solutions. Tell us a bit about what you do.

Sheryl Schultz: Sure – so CabinetM is an enterprise platform that helps companies manage their technology strategy implementation and performance. The platform provides marketing teams with the ability to audit, track, manage, and collaborate around technology across teams and geographies. We end up paying for ourselves really quickly because organizations find themselves reducing their costs by using the platform to rationalize and simplify their existing technology stacks and eliminating the recurring costs of redundant and non-performing products, and driving revenue through better technology application and integration.

So lots of catch phrases there, but what we found in the marketplace as we really spent a lot of time talking to not just marketers, but sales operations folks, and marketing technologists, is that companies are consuming lots and lots of technology. Most of the large organizations that we sell to have anywhere from 50 to 250 products that they’re using. And for each one of those products they’re trying to capture information on anywhere from 20 to 50 different attributes. Think about things like how’s the product performing? What does it cost? Who owns the contract? What are the contract details? When does it expire?

But also some sophisticated organizations are looking at what does the roadmap for this product look like, because many marketers end up using just 20% of the capabilities in a product. So why rip it out and replace it with something else or supplement it with something else if you could actually look at where is this product going, I already use it already, it performs well for me, I really like it. And so we give those marketers the ability to collect all of this information within a framework that they can then collaborate around. Think about lots of people all building their stacks, putting them in one place and then based on the permissions that you give them, sharing and editing and continuing to collaborate and iterate on the technology that they’re using.

Colin White: Ok so how did you come to found the company? I know that you’ve got a link on your site to the classic Scott Brinker martech landscape eye-chart with all the logos on it – so tell us a little bit about how you came to build out CabinetM?

Sheryl Schultz: Yes, so Anita and I – Anita is my co-founder – we’re two longtime startup marketers, and we grew up in the telecommunications space. What happened was folks kept bringing us onto their advisory boards, and so we came to know each other very well. And we both grew up in the telecommunications space doing startups from inception through M&A and IPO. And somewhere along the line we took a left turn and we ended up in the angel investing space. And as an aside to that, we ran the Golden Seeds organization. Golden Seeds funds female-owned and operated businesses. We ran that from 2009 to 2011. And at the end of that Anita went in to run an e-commerce business at the request of the VCs who had funded it, to change its trajectory, and I spent time immersed in marketing technology, which is where I found myself investing. And Anita in her role found that she had this amazing team of three digital marketers but they were constantly trolling and googling and calling friends to figure out what they should use next to acquire, engage with or retain customers. And at the same time I was spending a lot of time with new emerging companies and realized how difficult it was for them to differentiate themselves in a space of lots of companies growing in their space and lots of content and noise. Content is a great thing until you have to sift your way through it.

And so we spent a lot of time ideating around what we would do together. After Anita left her 20-month role at the e-commerce business and at our core is marketing and we saw how significantly different marketing was becoming, it became first of all an industry versus a profession. And at the time Scott Brinker had 750 products on his landscape and we thought that there were probably about a thousand in total.

We know Scott Brinker quite well, in fact we provide him with data all the time for that landscape, if you look all the way on the bottom of the left hand side you’ll see CabinetM there – but we actually have helped him over the years, and now there are 8200 products on our site, and the reason there are that many is sort of twofold. The first thing is that as organizations are building their stacks on our site, they ping us when we’re missing something that they think of as belonging in their marketing universe. So we move from just being martech to being sales enablement, sales operations, also EdTech, and then we also have some planning and project management and even some billing tools now on the site, because marketers include them in the way they think about the technology that they touch.

Colin White: There’s a lot of crossover.

Sheryl Schultz: There really, really, is. And look, we end up living at the nexus of three trends. First of all marketing is now responsible for the entire customer lifecycle, and in many cases for revenue generation. They’re supplementing and working so closely with Sales, or acting as sales, and then marketing now is driving digital transformation with the goal of delivering a unified customer experience at every touchpoint.

And then of course what we’re talking about now which is the explosion of new marketing technology. But at the end of the day the problem we solve is we help those enterprise organizations who are using hundreds of marketing tools to implement that technology to acquire engage and retain customers. We help them keep track of it. Technology strategy and selection is really enormously challenging right now, and so being able to visualize what they’re using and collaborate around it across large numbers of people is becoming increasingly important. And if organizations are using anything, they’re using spreadsheets, they’re using Google Docs, and those just do not scale anymore.

Colin White: In my own use cases with some of my clients, I’ve found the the CabinetM platform tremendously useful in helping to sort through all the different tools that are out there. But you also have an agency product as well, what about that?

Sheryl Schultz: One of the things that we know is that marketing organizations increasingly need more and more help, so when we started CabinetM and we spoke to enterprise organizations, a lot of them came to these technologies by saying our agencies are starting to learn about these at the same time, so we’re going to just do it in-house, and that was four years ago in 2014. The pendulum has swung completely in the other direction – organizations are looking for independents, they’re looking for small consultancies, and in some cases they’re looking for large agencies who can do different slices of the technology implementation for them and execute programs for them.

And so we’ve realized that in building stacks it’s not only important to track what you’re using, testing and retiring, but also what you’re building in-house. And sometimes that’s being built in-house or being built externally to make all this work. And also the service providers who are helping you, so that if somebody’s going to execute a video marketing program and you’re using an agency to do that, you want someone to know in another office or down the hall that something exists already so they can check it out and they don’t go through the exercise of evaluating vendors when you’ve already done that. So our agency database is a work in progress, there are about a thousand agencies, and we call consultants, boutiques, agencies, service providers – they’re all underneath agencies. And so we keep reaching out and asking agencies to come in and build their profile.

And all the profiles on our site are free, so for marketing vendors and agencies – your basic profile is totally free. All of the profiles in the database, like LinkedIn, you know, I look like you, you look like the last person that you helped in terms of what the profile looks like. But when you dig into the key performance metrics and why you would use this, and the value statements, of course they’re all different. So we end up being a resource and a free resource for folks to come in and dig into the database. We also allow people to build one stack for free, so anyone can register on our site – you need to be a registered user in order to build a stack – and you can play with that stack all you want. At the point in time when you decide you’d need to do more, most people go for an enterprise trial and then they get me – I end up being the BDR.

Colin White: There are worse places to be!

Sheryl Schultz: You can see, I like speaking about CabinetM!

Colin White: Well Sheryl thanks very much for joining us on the Martech Minute. This is Sheryl Schultz, she’s the founder and president of CabinetM, and they help enterprise organizations and others to plan, track, and manage your marketing technology infrastructure. Thanks for joining us Sheryl!

If you’d like to learn more about CabinetM to help you plan and manage your martech stack, visit their website and set up a free stack at www.cabinetm.com.

And thank you for joining us for another Martech Minute. If you’d like a complimentary consultation about how to optimize your demand gen and marketing automation systems and processes, please contact us today.