As more marketing teams embrace agile methods, marketing leaders are increasing their focus on measurement out of necessity. One of the central tenets of an agile approach is frequent measurement so teams can quickly iterate or refine campaigns to improve performance along the way. Agile marketing projects also tend to be shorter in length and time, so it's even more imperative to have measurement tools that can accurately track progress toward goals in real-time.

This can get complicated for marketing teams that have dozens of solutions in their martech stack, all of which produce their own metrics out of the box. Data on clicks and open rates is useful, but it doesn't resonate beyond the marketing department. And that raises another issue since agile project teams are typically cross-functional. A single source of truth is a must, and since the CRM is the de facto revenue record system at most B2B companies, it makes sense to house martech data inside the CRM.

We've had customers tell us that if they had to strip their martech stack down to bare essentials, they'd keep the CRM, where they create and collect leads, plus their primary marketing automation system (Marketo, for example) and their Full Circle Insights solution to measure everything. But most B2B companies are using multiple martech tools - it's not unusual for teams to use 10 different digital marketing solutions, plus an additional five deployed on the company website.