As we have detailed in previous coverage of this year’s MarTech Replacement Survey, marketing organizations were not timid when it came to ripping and replacing pieces of their marketing stacks in the past year. But while you might expect marketing leaders to be the main drivers of those projects, executive management was more involved than before.

We decided to ask who championed the replacement instead of who in the organization made the final decision. The final decision-maker is often the individual who owns the budget and cuts the virtual check; we were interested in who the advocates for change were.

Related: Though marketers wanted to save on cost, better features drove 2021 technology replacements

The survey found 30% of replacements were championed by executive management, up from 25% last year. Meanwhile, 39% said marketing management were the champions, down from 43% the prior year. There is a possible source of bias here if people are likely to place a high value on their own role: these were the two largest self-identified groups taking the survey.

It’s striking that marketing operations were identified as the champions by only 12%. It’s conceivable that some marketing operations managers might have decided to group themselves with marketing managers for the purpose of this question. Whatever the case, this result is surprising.

Speeding up decisions

It’s also worth noting that decisions were made more quickly than in the previous year’s survey, the trend now leaning slightly more toward two to three months than three to six months. This acceleration of decision-making among businesses is consistent with what vendors have told us as we have researched our MarTech Intelligence Reports. One vendor described customers as “rapidly accelerating” their digital transformations, while another said the COVID pandemic “has acted as [a] forcing function driving the rapid adoption of a broad range of technology at an unprecedented scale.”

About The Author

Kim Davis is the Editorial Director of MarTech. Born in London, but a New Yorker for over two decades, Kim started covering enterprise software ten years ago. His experience encompasses SaaS for the enterprise, digital- ad data-driven urban planning, and applications of SaaS, digital technology, and data in the marketing space.

He first wrote about marketing technology as editor of Haymarket’s The Hub, a dedicated marketing tech website, which subsequently became a channel on the established direct marketing brand DMN. Kim joined DMN proper in 2016, as a senior editor, becoming Executive Editor, then Editor-in-Chief a position he held until January 2020.

Prior to working in tech journalism, Kim was Associate Editor at a New York Times hyper-local news site, The Local: East Village, and has previously worked as an editor of an academic publication, and as a music journalist. He has written hundreds of New York restaurant reviews for a personal blog, and has been an occasional guest contributor to Eater.