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Scott Brinker has had his eyes on the marketing technology landscape for decades. As author of the Chief Marketing Technologist blog and creator of the Martech Supergraphic, Brinker often notes growing trends in martech.

One of his emerging trends is low- and no-code tools. Gartner estimated that enterprise low-code application platforms will be 65% of all app creations within the next five years, and the worldwide low-code development technologies market was projected to total $13.8 billion in 2021, an increase of 22.6% from 2020.

Brinker, VP Platform Ecosystem at HubSpot, joined CX Decoded Podcast co-hosts Rich Hein, Editor in Chief at CMSWire, and Dom Nicastro, Managing Editor at CMSWire, to discuss the rise of these no- and low-code tools and address some of the healthy skepticism in the market.

Episode Transcript

Note: This transcript has been edited for space and clarity. 

Rich: Scott Brinker is the VP Platform Ecosystem at HubSpot. But we all know Scott as the author of the Chief Marketing Technologist blog and the creator of the Martech Supergraphic.

Dom: Yeah, you forgot one, Rich, he’s also the godfather of martech, coined by yours truly on Twitter. You can look it up, search it out, I’m the first one to call him that. And he’s run with it. For real. I created this mob boss of marketing technology.

Rich: If you say so Dom, but I can tell you this. We are so happy to have Scott with us today. We will be discussing all things marketing technology, but in particular the rise of no-code and low-code tools. I mean, Forrester says the no-code, low-code markets reached $21.2 billion this year. And Gartner estimates that enterprise low-code application platforms will be 65% of all app creations within the next five years.

Scott’s going to help us make sense of the explosion of a whole new ecosystem of tools that can be stacked and used together to do some pretty significant things that will definitely further your customer experience initiatives.

Dom: Absolutely, Rich. Scott, or Don Brinker, how are you today, my friend?

Scott: I am good. Thanks for having me. So like if I’m the Godfather of martech, and you’re the one who made me the Godfather martech, you’re like the Grand Godfather of martech. I feel like I should be kissing your ring.

Dom: Well, no, if I’ve made you the Godfather that makes me, what’s his name, Don Fanucci, the one in the old school Bronx that Robert De Niro’s young Godfather character shot when he was trying to fix the light bulb.

Scott: This is going nowhere good.

Dom: Okay, okay.

Rich: Let’s not go down that rabbit hole.

Dom: All right. All right, fine. Let’s talk about martech, I guess, and Scott’s role and all that.

So Scott, HubSpot, that’s your full-time gig. Tell us a little bit more about that role and how you got into the Chief Marketing Technologist gig because there might be a listener who doesn’t know.

Scott: Sure. Well, I joined HubSpot a little over four years ago. I’d previously been the co-founder, CTO of my own martech startup that got acquired by another company, and yeah, joined HubSpot with really this mission to help HubSpot better integrate with that just exploding landscape. Not only all the martech solutions out there, but boy, you’re seeing the same thing happen in salestech and fintech. It is a very large and heterogeneous world out there in the cloud. And yet with CRM platforms like HubSpot, one of the keys to winning is making sure we integrate with all the other great tools and people’s stacks.

Rich: You know, Scott, usually this is the time of the year when we see your supergraphic, and I was hoping you could dish a little bit on the state of martech. The supergraphic’s been exploding every year with more than 8,000 marketing technology tools out there in the last roundup. But of course, the pandemic hit. We haven’t seen a graphic update since 2020. So how’s the landscape looking today?

Scott: Oh, if only the landscape had shrunk down to like a couple dozen vendors, as you know, so many people had been predicting. Yeah, man, I would be able to kick that out over a weekend. I can say from the data we’ve collected, it is well over 10,000 and probably considerably north of that. I don’t want to give anything away.

But yeah, long and short of it is we skipped 2021, and we’ve come up with a new methodology for how we can actually wrangle 10,000-plus vendors and should have something released here this spring.

Rich: Well, this is the time to dish Scott. This is the time.

Dom: I know there weren’t enough magnifying glasses. I heard that was the case. That’s why you skipped 2021 Scott, be honest.

Scott: Oh my goodness, why we’ve come up with a really novel solution here. I can’t wait to share it with you. So yeah. For those of you who are in bated breath for like landscapes of martech logos, hang in there, something’s coming.

Dom: We’re excited, you know, to talk about the low- or no-code emergence in martech, you’ve been writing a lot about it, keynote addresses and stuff. But sticking with the martech supergraphic, and just the general landscape for a second, I was always fascinated how you broke down those marketing technology tools by category.

And that was fascinating to me over the years to see new categories emerging. Why, you know, some categories grew and others didn’t. Are there any exciting things you can give us a hint on about category growth? You know, is data exploding more than content? For instance, like, what do you see in there for trends?

Scott: I think one of the things that have continuously fascinated me with the martech landscape, is because every year we’ve released it, you know, the question becomes like, oh, okay, well, what’s the hot category? And the reality is, like, pretty much every single category continues to have somewhere in it, some sort of revolution, something that’s underway.

I mean, my favorite example is this CMS category, which, again, if we were going to pick a category, that probably has the claim to be the oldest category on the martech landscape since 1995. And you know, those first CMS platforms, if any category should now be like, mature and locked up, and we’ve solved this, nothing to see here, you know. But yeah, I mean, like, I’m speaking to the guys at CMSWire, I feel silly, of course, like, you know, I mean, like, this whole space is just crazy with the innovation that’s happening there. And so that same thing is happening across pretty much every category.

I would say, I think it’s less about anyone category having, like, a dramatic revolution. But more that some of these trends, and the one you want to get to about no-code is almost becoming like this universal paradigm of okay, well, for all these tools out here, how do we empower more and more general marketers, general business users, to be able to create things with these, that previously, they would have had the job out to some sort of technical expert or some kind of specialist.

Rich: You talked about shrinking the market down to 12 martech tools, I mean, if we could get down to 12 categories, that would be nice. I mean, it’s just been an explosion.

You talked about low-code a moment ago, and where this is actually intersecting with marketers. So where do you see today, currently, marketers making the best use of these low-code, no-code tools?

Scott: Wow. I mean, it’s all over martech, I think actually, one of the areas we’ve always started to just take for granted — I think we’re some of the first low-code, no-code tools in marketing — is just the creation of things like landing pages, web content. Again, it wasn’t that long ago that if you wanted to build out landing pages for a marketing campaign, you needed a web developer. And as you might imagine, you know, web developers did not exactly fall all over themselves to spend their days generating hundreds of variations of landing pages for the marketing department.

So like, empowering marketers with these tools. Okay, we can have a web developer/web designer, like, set up some templates, and then hey, marketing team, go nuts, make as many variations of these ads and email campaigns with different pages; good to go.

What’s fascinating is right now that paradigm is continuing to expand to other kinds of activity. Another really common one right now is around workflows. You know, like, oh, okay, when somebody responds to this campaign, depending on who it was, and how they qualify, I want to trigger this thing off in marketing automation, I want to get this thing in the CRM, I might want some sort of like notification happening inside a sales team like Slack or Teams or something like that.

So all these kinds of workflows marketers dream up for, oh, here’s what I would like to happen when X gets triggered. People are now using all sorts of like, no-code interfaces, whether it’s, like, inside their marketing automation platform or through using a tool like Zapier or more upmarket tools, like Workato. Yeah, like kind of if you can dream like hey, this is the digital sequence I want to fire off associated with this touchpoint with a prospect or customer. Yeah, marketers can increasingly self-service a whole bunch of those, too.

Rich: Yeah, I can tell you internally that we’re using, you know, Zapier, Workato, and when you talk about tools like that, I think of things like Swoogo for events, or Leadpages where anyone can go in and build these landing pages, and then connect them with the integrations they need.

Scott: Yeah, I mean, again, it’s at some level, it’s not rocket science, like, in fact, actually, what makes no-code so exciting is, it’s the sort of activities that marketers have essentially an unlimited number of examples of things they want to do like this. But they’re also not that difficult, which you would think would be a good thing, but actually, it’s kind of a bad thing up until no-code because it was really hard to justify going like, oh, okay, well, let’s hire a developer to build this one just because we’re gonna use it for one month for this event. And then yeah, I guess we’ll throw that out and build something else over here.

It’s just the pro-code world out there is a very sophisticated and heavyweight tool. And then there are definitely cases where we need to leverage it. But it’s like all those lower-end use cases of which marketers just have an unlimited imagination of ideas, those are the things that are now putting it in the hands of the marketers to say, oh, you want to do that here, you can self-service, do that yourself. It is a win, not only for the marketers, but it’s actually a win for the IT teams and the other folks who, quite frankly, didn’t really want to be bothered with all that sort of low-end use case.

Rich: So these were actually underserved tasks, I guess, and developers, it’s almost like their time is too important to be working on these minor tasks, but these things still need to get done.

Scott: Exactly. Exactly. Really, this is not a head-to-head competition between pro-code and no-code. It is a highly complementary relationship.

Dom: I love those developers Rich, they cut right to the chase. I mean, we’re in our web redesign project at CMSWire, it’s so fascinating how the developers get in there, like, alright, this is what we did. This is the sprint. This is that sprint, this is what’s coming next. Any questions? I love it. I love it.

Rich: They can be abstract at times too Dom, I’ve worked with developers in many different instances over the years. And we have some good ones right now who are like that, but I’ve met many who couldn’t articulate what they were doing. But they were incredible at writing abstract code.

Dom: Yeah, well, we’re gonna get to like a developer sort of take on low- and no-code a little later. I’m going to talk to Scott, see what he’s heard about it.

But Scott, let’s even step back one more level and talk about just what would be your definition of low- and no-code because I’m thinking of my CMS right now. And I’m not a coder, never took a coding class. But I can go in the HTML, I can put h2 tags and make a subhead, I can put <p> tags in to break a paragraph, can you believe that? And then I put a slash in there. And that ends the paragraph, it’s unbelievable.

Is that a low-code tool? Give us a sense of what we’re talking about here. You know what I mean? Like, where are we? What is this?

Scott: Yeah, actually, I think you nailed it. That’s a great example of low code. And again, the boundary between how low the low-code gets before it’s like, you know, let’s just call this a no-code, is I think it really comes down to are you thinking through something as a marketer, as a business user or how much do you have to actually think as a programmer? And again, depending on the nature of what you’re trying to get done, these more sophisticated tasks, even if you’re not writing whole Java programs, if you need to think a little bit about like, oh, well, I want this « if then else » logic, then I want to make sure it’s covered. And I maybe want to look up something in a table on air table. And then based on that, you know, do some conditional, you know, activity on the other side.

I mean, again, this, it’s kind of like, here’s a great example. It’s like Excel macros. You know, I mean, everyone knows how to use Excel. But there’s always been a subset of us who take Excel to the next level. And it’s not a full programming language. But it’s that kind of power-user level way of like, oh, how do I, you know, get this software to, you know, do something just a little bit more advanced for me?

Rich: Going back to your last conference, I believe low- and no-code was one of your top three innovation themes for marketing technology, alongside Big Ops and commerce. It would be great to have you give a definition of what Big Ops is and your thoughts on commerce as it relates to martech.

Scott: Yeah, briefly running through these because they’re actually kind of all interrelated. They’re feeding each other. So to me, no-code very broadly is letting non-specialists, in other words, general marketers, general business users, do things that previously they would have had to rely on a specialist for. So that might be like, building a little app or a little workflow or web page without needing a web developer.

Rich: Isn’t a WYSIWYG, like, a perfect example of that?

Scott: WYSIWYG is a perfect example.

Rich: Like one of the oldest.

Dom: It’s also a cool thing to say.

Rich: It’s one we’ve all been using for forever, as we’ve been using WYSIWYGs, and that right there is kind of a no-code tool.

Scott: Absolutely. But other examples like data analytics, okay, do I need a data scientist? Do I need, like, a professional analyst? Or can I use a tool like, say, Looker? I have a question here about how these segments are related or performing. Is the interface easy enough for me to just go in and self-service the answer to that myself instead of opening up a ticket with someone else?

We even see it with creative asset generation, I mean, products like Canva. I mean, think about it, like, you know, how many ideas have marketers had, where they’re like, oh, I have a great idea, I want it to look like this and have this thing, I guess I’ll need to have a graphic designer go do this for me. Don’t get me wrong, there’s still a whole bunch of things we actually want professional graphic designers for.

But tools like Canva to me are kind of like the no-code equivalent, you know, in that space where it’s like, actually, there’s also a bunch of lower-end use cases where I don’t need to wait for hiring a graphic designer because, given the set of templates out of Canva, I can actually do a perfectly good job of this myself.

Rich: And that specific use case, there’s so much of that going on within marketing that it almost had to happen this way. I mean, you have to make it so that a marketer can actually get that job done without having to use all these other people around them. It just makes them so much more efficient.

Scott: Yes, yeah. Basically, it’s like the Theory of Constraints, like wherever there were bottlenecks. Okay, is our bottleneck on IT? Is it on graphic design? Is it on waiting for the data analyst? For more of these things, where we have the simple use cases, and again, frankly, it would be overkill to have those experts spend their expensive time on. Yeah, just giving marketers the ability to self-service a whole bunch of those themselves, just accelerates the entire process.

Dom: And folks, I do want to issue an alert. My editor used a really cool and fancy term, he said WYSIWYG, and I wanted to spell that out for our non-WYSIWYG people. « What You See Is What You Get, » correct Rich?

Rich: That is correct Dom, it is a tool that is commonly found within CMSs in many other places, places like Canva, too, where you can just take text and format it and images. And it’s just basically to create different styles of content within CMSs and other places.

Dom: But it’s also so cool to say.

Scott: Yeah, for me, I totally misunderstood that. I thought WYSIWYG was that thing I put on my head for Halloween.

Dom: So all right, let’s level set even more here, Scott. So like a lot of trends, as you know in martech and tech in general, some of this is a little too good to be true, it feels like. I’m not totally making that charge, but it almost has that free legal consultation kind of ring to it to me on some levels.

So there are challenges here, there might be imperfections. Our own developer from our sister company, Cylogy, told me in a 2021 CMSWire article, « In most projects we’ll see low- and no-code functionality used to build out big chunks of projects, the majority of the functionality, with developers working on the 10% to 20% to 30% of apps’ site functionality that fills custom needs and that low- and no-code would have a hard time solving. Where do you come in here, Scott?

Scott: Yeah, I think that’s a fairly accurate statement. I mean, don’t get me wrong, there are some people who are, like, no-code maestros that given these no-code tools, oh, my goodness, build whole, like, businesses with.

But I don’t think that’s actually the majority of the cases, I think actually the way you just frame that is actually extremely realistic, which is to say, listen, we want to use the low-code and no-code tools for, like, a whole bunch of these low-end use cases that are generally speaking, relatively well-bounded, you know, and we can have relatively good guardrails around that. And then anything that, yeah, you need sophisticated development for.

And it’s not just about sophisticated development in the sense of, oh, I know, a particular programming language. It’s sophisticated development and even like, how you think about the architecture. I’ve got a lot of moving pieces here, how do I make sure they all like align properly? You know, that just starts to get into a place where you want a dedicated professional who does that for a living.

So yeah, I would not claim no-code has eliminated the world of professional software development; you still have to pay for your true legal consultation.

Dom: Yeah, if I’m a marketer, listening to this, you know, I’m wondering, okay, so where can I use them? Where can I improve my processes? Do you have a sense Scott, of where some of those low-end use cases, hey, let’s start small kind of thing with low-code, with no-code, you know, I want to start today, you know, where are some of the areas you think most of them can start?

Scott: Yeah, well, we were just talking about a few earlier. So anytime you want to publish some sort of campaign or new touchpoint, or hey, listen, we’re going to run an event and we want to get people to sign up for this. So first of all, there’s publishing the actual experience that people are going to go to and they’re going to sign up on. Do you have to have a web developer custom build all that, or can you kind of publish it through a low-code, no-code environment?

And then that next step is like, oh, great. So we’re getting people in there signing up for this event. Now, what do we want to have happen next? And that’s any sort of combination of things that might lead into marketing automation sequences, you know, it might lean into, like, oh, how do we make sure that it’s a billing thing and we’re tracking that properly in our accounting system.

You know, just anything that’s gonna then like have the logic of what happens next, when someone does an interaction with one of these campaigns. Yeah, for a lot of those, you can just do that with a workflow tool, like Zapier or Workato, or your marketing automation platform. Yeah, isn’t that exactly the sort of stuff that marketers have a ton of need for, like, every month?

Dom: Absolutely. Every month for sure. All right, great. So now I know where I can use them, where some of these use cases are for low- and no-code.

Now the question is, do we have some problems? Are you hearing out there Scott, do we have some shadow IT, some governance issues going on here? You know, you cite in your research as one of your eight P’s of self-service no-code martech the term « principles, » or establishing a few clear guidelines for good use. So governance is clearly important here.

Scott: Absolutely. You know, it’s funny, though, the whole shadow IT thing, just to be slightly snarky for a moment, so hopefully, your IT listeners won’t track me down and rip the WYSIWYG off my head. But the amount of things that get developed and created outside of IT, the amount of software that’s being run, so far exceeds the amount of stuff that IT directly manages, that at which point is, who is the shadow? And who is the main body? I don’t know that we can call this shadow IT anymore. We’re basically saying, well, pretty much every major department in the organization is now running a whole stack of software and doing all sorts of digital creation with it.

Dom: That’s a good point. Fair point.

Scott: A domain like marketing knows what it wants to accomplish from a marketing perspective, and they should have a lot of control to self-service those needs and not get bottlenecked elsewhere. But marketing isn’t the only thing that matters in the world, gasp, I can’t believe I said that. It’s this stuff of like the security, you know, of these systems that matter, the privacy compliance, right, you know, matters, the consistency and quality of the data that isn’t just being used by marketing, but it’s being used by these other teams throughout the company, as well too, this matters. And so it is really important to have a good governance framework around the use of these no-code tools.

And to be honest, this is again, actually where you see some of the no-code tools really winning business. I mean, again, I just happen to know them better than others. So like, Workato, this is one of the things they sell is like, hey, listen, we’ve got this way that you know, IT actually sets up Workato. And they’re able to control who has permissions to do what they’re able to see, like all the different workflows that are running, they can, you know, audit and monitor these activities. And it’s just like, yeah, IT basically should have governance control over the general business stack of the organization. But they want to be able to distribute a lot of the actual day-to-day work of what people are creating with these things and leveraging these tools for to the individual departments.

Rich: So what I’m hearing is that these organizations that are, I would think hopefully doing it right, are building these auditing and monitoring tools that give IT what they need to maintain governance, security, privacy, etc.

Scott: Yes, and there’s the no-code tool universe, it’s evolving very rapidly. I would say there are some no-code tools out there that have less of that governance, but that’s okay because they’re mostly serving solo entrepreneurs or early-stage startups where there isn’t an IT department to govern anyway.

But I think you see, as you get into the no-code adoption, and more midmarket enterprise companies, yeah, the tools that are attractive to them are the ones that also give them those guardrail controls, to make sure people are leveraging this stuff, but not abusing it, even if it’s inadvertently abusing it.

Rich: I don’t want to put you on the spot, but are there any other tools that you can share with the audience outside of Workato that have these kinds of guardrails built in?

Scott: Well, I mean, certainly like the permissions controls you can set up under Airtable is a great one. I mean, you have a lot of control over how you set over who can engage with, like, what tables, who can view things, who can modify things, and if not surprisingly, you see a lot of enterprise adoption of Airtable.

Rich: Weren’t we talking about, in a previous conversation, there was a large organization that had set up their whole system on Airtable?

Scott: Yeah, apparently, they have a ton in like the entertainment industry. So one of their customers is Netflix. And they wouldn’t share Netflix’s actual Airtable, which you can’t blame them for that. But in conjunction with Netflix, they sort of set up a demo version of oh, this is kind of the way that Netflix is doing it with dummy data.

So I couldn’t find out what the spoilers were for the next season of Cobra Kai, but you know, nonetheless was able to see, like, how they like structured all these different tables and sort of the workflows between them, and it’s pretty wild stuff.

Dom: So Scott, you know, that whole conversation of governance and IT, having some permissions and all that, brings up another good question of martech ownership. This could probably be a whole other podcast, and I used to write a lot on CMSWire about who owns the martech stack, who’s your martech leader, is it the CMO, is it someone else, is it IT even, because we’ve seen that. So in your experience, who owns the credit card that purchases the martech tools?

Scott: Yeah, that’s a great question. And it’s in the middle of changing again. So up until very recently, it was largely converging on the CMO’s credit card, that even if the CMO needed permission or technical review or approvals from the IT department, which I think is a good thing, the actual budget that was paying for these tools was the marketing budget, which kind of makes sense, they were being used for marketing purposes. Who else should be subsidizing that?

But what’s interesting, you know, this is one of the trends I talked about here in 2022 I see really accelerating, is they’re becoming so many of these tools, starting with the data warehouses, but increasingly, the current generation of business analytics platforms, to these tools like Tray and Workato and Zapier and Automate that are workflow automation tools that are pretty much department independent. You’re seeing, like, all these tools come into play that are actually getting leveraged around marketing, but also other departments, and I kind of think of this almost as the reintegration of what had become a somewhat siloed martech stack, where increasingly more and more components of that core martech stack, I think, are going to be leveraging more common platforms used by the rest of the teams, which is actually really great. Because this becomes a mechanism to help create greater alignment and data sharing and data consistency across teams, too.

What I think is an open question is, okay, awesome, now that you start to have these tools that are unifying the entire digital business, not just the digital marketing team, how do you manage the cost center structure for that? Probably will be a chargeback sort of structure in most cases, but I think it’s an open question.

Rich: Yeah, I was gonna ask, you know, with the adoption of all these tools, is this now starting to impact marketing budgets? Or IT budgets?

Scott: You know, again, this is just one of these questions that I think the default reaction is like, oh, my goodness, marketing is spending too much on technology. Because I think depending on who you ask, the average budget, particularly midmarket enterprise, it’s not unusual here at being like upwards of 20% – 25% of the budget. And like, oh, my goodness, that just feels like an awful lot.

But then again, I kind of wonder, like, okay, wait, if we’re getting into this, really, truly living up to the promise of digital transformation and running the digital business, and you’re actually using this technology to greatly accelerate what you can do, change the leverage that your employees, that your human resources have. I don’t know. I mean, do you imagine a company that has like one marketer and 90% of the rest of the budget is all the technology, and that one marketer is just like controlling the universe from a command center? Is that a, is that a wonderful thing? Or a terrible thing? I don’t know.

Boy, I’m trying to think of the analogy they use for this, like, whenever you want to see some sort of pattern, you look to the places where the things are changing most rapidly. I would humbly suggest the creator economy is a really interesting look-ahead to what we might see in larger organizations, because boy, these creators now, I mean, like one person, or maybe a couple people that are working, you know, maybe a couple contractors, leveraging technology to build businesses that are generating millions of dollars for them. I mean, that is some pretty heavily leveraged human talent relative to technology. And I think it’s really interesting to see, like, okay, well, how far could that kind of leverage start to apply for an in-house creator economy inside large organizations?

Rich: We’ve talked about so many things today. But there is another area specifically within low-code and no-code, and I’m not sure that there are applications that are relevant here. But I did want to ask it because it’s such a big part of marketing. Marketing and customer experience, we’re always talking about integrating different data sources and toolsets, you know, like CDPs, for example. I was just curious to know how low-code is impacting that area specifically?

Scott: Yeah, it’s a great question. So I think a lot of CDPs have a kind of a low-code capability in a couple of different ways. I mean, one of which is just being able to build your own connectors, or where you want to pull data from or push data to, which becomes necessary when, you know, we’re not just talking about integrations to the major commercial (products) off the shelf, which most of these folks have.

But yeah, you know, there’s also a huge amount of, like, custom software or niche, vertical market specific software that different businesses need to connect to as well, too. So I think you see low-code there, I would say it tends to, in my opinion, be more on the low-code side than the no-code, just because, you know, there’s still a little bit of that software thinking required to oh, I’m going to ask this API to give me this piece of data and this is the parameter I’m sending it to it, but I don’t know, I suspect you’ll see more and more of those tools continue to simplify the inner face for that, too.

Dom: Yeah, Scott, one thing we haven’t talked about is money. Are some of these low- or no-code tools, are we more likely to see small businesses, entrepreneurs, startups diving into low-code and no-code because they might be cheaper than some of those massive martech suites and stacks and the ones that have a lot of marketing power behind them and that we see a lot in the industry out there? So is price a factor at all, and no- and low-code?

Scott: I guess my sense is, I want to dig deeper into this to be able to answer it with any sort of, like, real authority, but I almost see like it’s the parallel for both no-code, but also packaged software. I mean, let’s face it, even outside of no-code, low-code, there’s a lot of very inexpensive marketing tools that are designed for, you know, those very small businesses just getting started.

I think, no-code, low-code tools, there’s certainly an option there, too. But yeah, I mean, you see the same thing, again, on the enterprise level. And when I look at what some of the revenue structures are for some of these no-code tools that sell into the enterprise, cheap is not the word that comes to mind.

Dom: Gotcha. Well, Scott, we’d love to do a little word association part of the podcast on CX Decoded where we just throw out something and just get your like five-second thoughts. So you ready?

Scott: Oh boy, scared, but bring it on.

Dom: All right, we know you’re the Godfather of martech. So here we go. The actual Godfather movie trilogy.

Scott: Ah, an AB test and offer they can’t refuse.

Dom: That was quick, funny and good. Good. Good job. All right. Next, Boston sports greatness.

Scott: Well, at least they’re not based in New Jersey.

Rich: How did you know I was from New Jersey, Scott?

Dom: Oh, man, man. Shots fired across the bow. All right. Next one, two more to go. Virtual tech conferences.

Scott: They’re getting real.

Dom: Agreed. And finally, New Year’s resolution.

Scott: Have a great chat with, like, Dom and Rich, I look forward to it every year. Check this off the box.

Dom: At the time of this recording, we still got 11 months to go and you’ve already resolved. It’s it’s done. It’s done. That’s awesome. So, you know, I thought it’d be cool, we got deep into martech, and I know our listeners are gonna find it valuable. But let’s break away for a second and tell us something, Scott Brinker, outside of martech. Is that possible?

Scott: Wow, as pretty much every member of my family will attest: No.

Yeah, I will say, I mean, these past couple years, it’s just been so crazy. I used to really look forward to traveling, even though admittedly, a lot of the travel was somehow connected with martech stuff, but I just always loved hearing people talk about what they’re doing, but in the context of like, their environment, not my environment.

And yeah, I really miss that these past couple years. So yeah, hoping here in 2022, yeah, combination of you know, all things conspired together to make it easier to start to do more of those in-person chats.

Rich: Yeah, we are definitely looking forward to getting back to the in-person events as well. We’re hoping that we can do that by the end of 2022. But we’ll see.

Dom: I know, a Scott Brinker Boston conference selfie with Dom Nicastro has to happen.

Scott: Yeah, without that selfie, it’s like the, you know, a conference would never actually happen. I need a photo, I need the evidence, prove it.

Rich: Scott, we really can’t thank you enough for being a guest on CX Decoded. And we’d love to give you an opportunity to share with our audience where they can connect with you and follow up.

Scott: Sure. Well, thanks for having me as a guest, really appreciate it. You know, of course, HubSpot. If you want to go check out the HubSpot app marketplace that is the world that I live in, day in and day out. And then my blog is chiefmartec.com, without the H at the end. So I say « chiefmartec without the H » for the hype. Maybe that doesn’t work, anyway, chiefmartec.com. And also the same @chiefmartec at Twitter if you want to yell at me for anything there, like my remark about New Jersey.

Rich: Thank you again, Scott. And thanks to our listeners for tuning in to another episode of CX Decoded, and we will see you next time.

Dom: See you later.