Greg Morales on the joy of always learning

As part of the MarTech Salary and Career Survey, we interviewed people about their experiences in marketing. Today we’re talking to Greg Morales director of marketing technology solutions for Allant Group, a journey orchestration solution provider. (The interview was edited for length and clarity.)

Q: So how did you get to where you are today?
How I ended up here is just being exposed to marketing service providers and kind of working my way up through the industry in different areas. It’s been an interesting ride.

I started with a company that initially was doing IT training and I got exposure to a ton of different technologies because I was the person to set up the classrooms for different vendors that were renting classroom space. Then I moved on to a company that was doing consulting. It went from a small business to a medium one and then we actually ended up in the enterprise space. Then the owners of our company decided that it was time to start another practice and they wanted to make the shift into enterprise marketing management.

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We grew the business from three people up to like 30 and got acquired by the Allant Group. And then we just became kind of martech solution architects.

Q: What’s your biggest challenge when it comes to martech?

A: Technologically speaking it’s the pure depth of the marketplace right now. The fact that we went within years from the martech 1000 to now it’s the martech 10,000. Keeping up with all of that has been interesting. 

It breaks down into a series of services that you have to understand. So there’s still campaign management, there’s still data management, there’s still social, there’s still all these different things. And then within those spaces, there are multiple players that kind of overlap. 

A lot of times you have customers who are coming to us and saying, ‘Do you support this specific stack?’ and we’re like, ‘Well, no, but we don’t have to. We can figure out what you’re doing because they all do the same thing.’ It’s like knowing one programming language and learning another. It’s very easy once you understand the structure of it. You just have to move through the different services that are available.

Q: What are you seeing when it comes to people changing jobs?

A: On my LinkedIn network, there was a time at the beginning of 2022 when I’d see 50 people a day posting, ‘I’m starting a new position at … .’ And that’s all marketing technology people. So I saw a lot of people moving around, moving up, moving over, doing, you know, everybody was kind of rearranging. Now I don’t see that velocity at all. It seems like people are staying put. Everybody’s trying to retool and understand how they can best use the investments they already have in place.

Q: What do you like about your job?
A: I think there’s always something new to uncover. I’m always learning because it’s changing so rapidly. We went from traditional database marketing and then digital came around and as digital came, it opened up this whole new world that nobody had really played in before. And now there’s opportunities in UI UX, there’s opportunities for programmers, opportunities for data guys, it’s just all over the place. I’m kind of an architect, a technical architect, so for me it’s like a playground, right? It’s a giant sandbox where I can just take all the toys and move them wherever.