Your team is using dozens of tools to execute your sales and marketing plan…but you can’t seem to get a clear picture of what you’re spending, where the money’s going, what’s working, and what’s not. Time to get all of your data in sync by hiring a data engineer, right? Wrong!
The role of the data engineer – and other data specialists like data scientists, data analysts and even martech ops professionals – has become one of the most sought after roles in recent years. In fact, according to a study by interviewquery.com, data engineering is growing 40% YOY. With B2B Sales and Marketing teams now using 22 different SaaS tools on average, CMOs and CROs are driving a big portion of this demand.
Data engineers – often called “the plumbers of data” – are responsible for making sense of the data explosion we’ve seen in digital marketing over the past decade. By transforming multiple sets of raw data across an organization into consistent and actionable signals, they are the key to delivering on the promise that so many B2B brands have failed to realize, despite massive investments in data infrastructure and tech stacks.
But what if we said you don’t need another data engineer?
Hear us out.
The time-to-value of a data engineering hire can be high. For such an in-demand role, recruiting and hiring talent is incredibly challenging, time-consuming, and expensive. Once on board, training and ramping a data engineer, ensuring they are up-to-speed on your business and all of the point solutions in your stack, and then giving them time to develop custom business logic to stitch and standardize it all can set you back literally another year.
Meanwhile, statistics also show that data engineers and scientists spend 45% of their time just wrangling the data and nearly 80% of their time cleaning data. While these are critical steps to ensure data completeness and quality, this leaves little time for actual thinking and insights. On top of that, the mundane data preparation tasks can also lead to burnout and job dissatisfaction. According to a recent study, 97% of data engineers experience burnout, while 70% are likely to leave their job within 12 months, which means you are likely to have to start from scratch before you know it. Back to square one.
Data engineers are meant to drive faster and more accurate decision making. But when your CMO needs her dashboards for the upcoming board meeting – and yesterday! – or you’re on the hook to release your annual benchmark report before quarter’s end, waiting on data engineers to connect, standardize and deliver the datasets you need, governed by complex processes, is last on your list. Instead, you might even be inclined to bypass the data engineering bottleneck, pull some reports, and start number-crunching on your own. We even spoke with one CMO who started taking SQL classes so she could run her own database queries so she wouldn’t have to wait! While you may be able to check tasks off your to-do list faster on your own, the technical debt continues to mount and it’s simply not scalable.
So are data engineers all they’re cracked up to be? Yes!! But doing mundane data integration and transformation is not their highest and best use of time. Since most B2B companies have the same data preparation needs, all of that basic work should already be done, so data engineers can focus on the more advanced data work that is unique to your company. If you can accomplish that, you’ll be saving time and money – and opening the door to better insights, better performance…and better job satisfaction all around.
Octane11 is on a mission to address this hidden opportunity within the modern B2B data stack; to reduce the complexity of data integration and transformation and to bring efficiency and accessibility to the resulting data analytics. Through our enterprise data platform for B2B marketers, Octane11 integrates, enriches, and standardizes all of the most critical data sources across paid, owned, and earned channels in just a few clicks. Furthermore, by integrating directly into primary sources or integrating with an organization’s existing data warehouse, ELT/ETL, and business intelligence platforms, Octane11 can leverage your existing investments and deliver the insights that marketers need in minutes, not days or months – arming them with a much deeper understanding of their overall performance and keeping them on the pulse on the most impactful revenue opportunities.
So, before you make that next data engineering hire, consider a platform that has already done the vast majority of all that data integration, transformation, and enrichment work, so you can save on costs – and deliver value faster.
If you’re a B2B marketer and want to kickstart the new year with clean, reliable data and ensure your team shines in 2023, visit www.octane11.com or give us a call; we’d love to talk to you!
