The Martalks Podcast | Martech & Sales Thought Leadership Darrell Rosenstein

One of the striking trends of the composable era has actually played out on the customer side.

As deployments to full-stack composable commerce have become faster, brands have invested more heavily in the talent needed to lead digital efforts from inside, and command greater control of the data.

In this special episode of Martalks, we put three of those brand-side tech pioneers on the podium to discuss the roadmaps of their journeys to composable adoption. 

Speaking to…
Fred Argir - formerly CIO  of Toys “R” Us and Barnes & Noble, and now CEO of The Argir GroupDiane Randolph, a seasoned CIO on the board of Shoe Carnival, Former CIO Ulta Beauty, and who now advises technology companies such as OriumStuart McKeachie, CTO at Serena & Lily, and formerly of Williams-Sonoma and Restoration Hardware.…we investigated the marketing requirements and difficulties that provided the motivation for replatforming to composable platforms and the agility that the business gained as a result.

We also delved into the agents of change, and how that responsibility falls variously to vendors, integrators, and in-house personnel, and the cultural implications of transformation for the wider business.
Read a full summary of this podcast at Rosenstein Group.com.
Rosenstein Group: martech & ecommerce executive search

Rosenstein Group is the only martech-specialist exectutive search firm. For over 20 years, we've been matching leadership talent in sales, marketing and customer success to pioneering startups in ecommerce, supply chain and sales enablement, and for digital agencies.

Our experience with recruiting e-commerce technology leaders for companies like SAP Hybris and Demandware has established us as an authoritative and trusted liaison for startups seeking their first sales leader, and scale-ups on their way to IPO.

Visit RosensteinGroup.com to find out more.

Forward-thinking brands have long known that customer consent is a crucial component in effective marketing. This has come into greater focus recently with stricter regulation around the proper use of customer data, and the long expected death of third-party cookies finally coming to pass. 
But how do you actually secure that consent, at scale, without becoming intrusive? Zohar Hod, a serial entrepreneur with experience in fintech, has crossed over to the martech world to answer that question. 
His latest venture, One Creation, is a low-code customer preference solution. By seamlessly integrating into any part of the digital consumer journey, their solution can confirm or acquire new data, enrich existing customer profiles, and allow for personalisation that doesn’t veer from the attentive into ‘the creepy’ (in Zohar’s words). 
In the latest edition of Martalks, I talk to Zohar about the importance of zero-party data, about how One Creation integrates with other solutions in the modern composable marketing stack, and his key learnings from founding five startups over the course of his fascinating career. 
You can listen to the podcast in full, or read a transcript of the key moments here: https://bit.ly/4aZWNIy.



Rosenstein Group: martech & ecommerce executive search

Rosenstein Group is the only martech-specialist exectutive search firm. For over 20 years, we've been matching leadership talent in sales, marketing and customer success to pioneering startups in ecommerce, supply chain and sales enablement, and for digital agencies.

Our experience with recruiting e-commerce technology leaders for companies like SAP Hybris and Demandware has established us as an authoritative and trusted liaison for startups seeking their first sales leader, and scale-ups on their way to IPO.

Visit RosensteinGroup.com to find out more.

For all the analytics tools in the modern ecommerce stack, retailers often still experience discrepancies between the analytics data, and actual revenue figures in the ecommerce platform.
Ultimately, this restricts marketing, since a lack of confidence in the data translates into greater caution when allocating budgets.

Solving this problem is Edward Upton, whose company, Littledata, helps retailers harness the first-party data at their disposal, and to ensure greater accuracy across the whole marketing arsenal. Intergrating with marketing channels such as Klaviyo, Google Analytics and Meta, as well as with commerce platforms including Shopify.

Edward joined us on the latest episode of Martalks, where we discussed how Littledata’s Klaviyo integration can help brands not only with abandoned carts, but even abandoned browsing sessions.

We also touched on how lost confidence in the data trickles down to the agencies that brands collaborate with, and dipped into Edward’s prior experience as a startup founder, including the importance of starting a new business with the right team.

You can also listen to the podcast, or read a summary article, on our website: https://bit.ly/3J2NkEG


Rosenstein Group: martech & ecommerce executive search

Rosenstein Group is the only martech-specialist exectutive search firm. For over 20 years, we've been matching leadership talent in sales, marketing and customer success to pioneering startups in ecommerce, supply chain and sales enablement, and for digital agencies.

Our experience with recruiting e-commerce technology leaders for companies like SAP Hybris and Demandware has established us as an authoritative and trusted liaison for startups seeking their first sales leader, and scale-ups on their way to IPO.

Visit RosensteinGroup.com to find out more.

With the dramatic rise in the popularity and adoption of MACH technologies across ecommerce and Martech, the question of how to innovate, or follow the trodden path, is of tremendous importance to vendors and merchants alike these days.
On the one hand, an increasingly competitive market for martech solutions has seen the rise of a lot of groundbreaking solutions. On the other, retailers and ISVs (and, indeed, their investors) need to achieve certainty wherever possible by relying on tried and tested approaches. Add to this that the composable space is best viewed as “compostable” where best of breed solutions will be able to be ever more quickly and easily integrated into tech stacks replacing legacy solutions.  Therefore it is imperative that solutions creators pursue dual development path first of product innovation and second of product integration are pursued with equal vigour to insure long term success and relevance for customers. 
Leading composable agencies like Orium play a key role here in developing the accelerators to drive those integrations and adoptions to success reliably and quickly. 

Few have a keener perspective on such questions than Jason Cottrell, Orium's founder, one of the leading ecommerce integrators, and one of the most trusted and leading voices of the composable solutions movement.

In our first Martalks episode of season 2, Jason shared his experience that dates back to Orium’s first incarnation as Myplanet. Covering 15 years of ecommerce history, this conversation tracks: 
the evolution of composability, through the earliest experiments with headless systems, the explosion in modern, API-first solutionsthe changing relevance and role of legacy vendors in the market.
You can listen to the podcast in full, and read a summary article, on our website: https://bit.ly/3OTSupS




Rosenstein Group: martech & ecommerce executive search

Rosenstein Group is the only martech-specialist exectutive search firm. For over 20 years, we've been matching leadership talent in sales, marketing and customer success to pioneering startups in ecommerce, supply chain and sales enablement, and for digital agencies.

Our experience with recruiting e-commerce technology leaders for companies like SAP Hybris and Demandware has established us as an authoritative and trusted liaison for startups seeking their first sales leader, and scale-ups on their way to IPO.

Visit RosensteinGroup.com to find out more.

The area of API-first ecommerce has seen relentless optimization of the customer experience. Decreasing page load speeds, personalized shopping, and the ability to adopt other new features more quickly can all contribute to happier shoppers, and more revenue for brands.
But what happens when the conversion of experience into dollars falls at the last hurdle? At checkout, an unintuitive or outdated experience could be the difference between closed sale, and a wasted customer journey. 
Jordan Gal has been on a mission to improve online checkouts. He’s now started two businesses to address the problem. His current venture, Rally Commerce, offers a streamlined payment process that allows retailers to quickly adopt payment methods without protracted integration processes. 
On the latest episode of Martalks, Jordan joined me to discuss: 
the limitations of legacy ecommerce checkoutsprioritizing customer choice as part of an effective product strategythe importance of following your nose as an entrepreneur, and trusting in the market as adjudicator of your successYou can also read a summary article of this podcast on the Rosenstein Group website: https://bit.ly/3uZDVKf.




Rosenstein Group: martech & ecommerce executive search

Rosenstein Group is the only martech-specialist exectutive search firm. For over 20 years, we've been matching leadership talent in sales, marketing and customer success to pioneering startups in ecommerce, supply chain and sales enablement, and for digital agencies.

Our experience with recruiting e-commerce technology leaders for companies like SAP Hybris and Demandware has established us as an authoritative and trusted liaison for startups seeking their first sales leader, and scale-ups on their way to IPO.

Visit RosensteinGroup.com to find out more.

Businesses’ inability to use their marketing data effectively is a widely-understood problem – but understood no better, perhaps, than by Brian Kotlyar.
A career marketer, Brian first rose to the rank of VP at Dachis Group in 2010. Since then, he’s made a career of driving growth for startups which solve customer data challenges – most recently at composable CDP vendor Hightouch.
Hightouch is one of a wave of data startups now helping brands extract the value from more complex martech stacks. With more systems and touchpoints, come more possibilities for data-led marketing – but with a greater challenge in turning those possibilities into profitable business initiatives.
In this podcast, Brian and I discuss:
the data challenge facing modern marketers, where time and resources are wasted on technology briefs, often simply in order to assemble and maintain usable audiences for campaigningthe role of the composable CDP in addressing this problem, specifically in enabling brands to optimise use of their existing data resourcesthe value of human capital for startups, based on Brian’s extensive experience of recruiting teams as a leader in martech.You can read a summary article on the Rosenstein Group website, here: https://bit.ly/3tUsmDz
Rosenstein Group: martech & ecommerce executive search

Rosenstein Group is the only martech-specialist exectutive search firm. For over 20 years, we've been matching leadership talent in sales, marketing and customer success to pioneering startups in ecommerce, supply chain and sales enablement, and for digital agencies.

Our experience with recruiting e-commerce technology leaders for companies like SAP Hybris and Demandware has established us as an authoritative and trusted liaison for startups seeking their first sales leader, and scale-ups on their way to IPO.

Visit RosensteinGroup.com to find out more.