Less Tech, More Impact: Matt Heinz on Choosing Strategy Over Shiny Objects

ICYMI: Matt Heinz on Why Random Acts of Marketing Are Killing Your ROI.

“You need less tech, not more. You need the right tools.”

In this episode of 10 Minute Martech, Matt Heinz, the founder and president of Heinz Marketing, joins host Sara Faatz to talk about why martech has become a crutch, how to choose the right tools and why “random acts of marketing” are holding teams back.

From cutting through AI hype to tackling collaboration drag, Matt delivers a masterclass in disciplined marketing, where strategy drives technology, not the other way around.

Whether you’re building a tech stack or trying to streamline one, this is an episode worth bookmarking!

Matt’s message is deceptively simple: more isn’t better. Better is better. He challenges marketers to flip the script, starting with strategy, then process and only then tools. His insights push leaders to make hard choices, focus on quality over quantity and rethink how team collaboration impacts revenue.

Matt Heinz’s 10 Memorable Moments on 10 Minute Martech

1. Less Tech, More Strategy

Stop using tools as a crutch. Start with strategy, refine your process, then add the right tech to scale what works.

2. Find the Gaps Before You Buy

Map the buying journey, identify performance and efficiency gaps, and fix manually before automating.

3. AI Moves Fast, Really Fast!

Assume AI can do everything, but remember its limitations. Keep the human in the loop to add empathy and context.

4. Humans at Every Stage

Until “robots sell to robots,” your audience will always respond best to human connection and problem-solving.

5. Get Hands-on with AI

Your first 8-10 hours with AI should be pure experimentation. Treat it like a super-smart intern. Give it work and see what it can do.

6. Your GPT Needs Care and Feeding

A GPT trained six months ago is stale. Update it regularly with new insights, industry changes and audience shifts.

7. Random Acts of Marketing Are a Revenue Killer

Activity for activity’s sake leads to burnout, wasted budget and unpredictable results. Strategy means choosing what not to do.

8. Collaboration Drag Is the Silent Killer

Too many meetings, threads and approvals slow speed-to-market and hurt revenue. Streamline decision-making and roles.

9. Quality over Quantity

Matt challenges teams to measure marketing impact in revenue, not leads or clicks.

10. Courage and Discipline Win

Choosing fewer bets takes guts, but it’s the path to greater impact and less burnout.

Matt’s Martech Hot Take

“Make your bets on fewer things and lean into them to be more successful.”

Matt’s hot take is a wake-up call for anyone drowning in Martech options. With more tools than ever competing for budget and attention, the real skill is in making tough choices, focusing on fewer, better bets, and going all in on what will actually move the needle.

Matt’s Recommended Reading List

• Revenue Diaries – Kyle Lacy’s Sunday newsletter on CMO life, leadership and balance.

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Next up in the 10 Minute Martech Series!

Sara sits with Frans Riemersma, founder of Martech Tribe, to talk about the real magic of data and connecting it to the soul of your brand.

Want to keep reading in the meantime? …

Full Episode Transcript: Matt Heinz

Here’s the full transcript to keep you transfixed. Every insight, every quote, unedited and unforgettable.

Sara Faatz: I’m Sara Faatz, and I lead Community and Awareness at Progress and this is 10 Minute Martech.

Matt Heinz: You need less tech, not more. You need the right tools. The antidote is choosing. Strategy is choosing. Make your bets on fewer things and lean into them to be more successful.

Sara Faatz: That’s Matt Heinz, founder and president of Heinz Marketing. Let’s get started. Well, thank you for being here, Matt. What is your burning Martech idea?

Matt Heinz: It’s how do we use less of it? To be honest, I think that marketing technology and sales tech has become a bit of a crutch. And we tend to think that every problem we have can be solved by a tool. Some can, but I think we lean on it too much. We need to think about strategy, process, and then tools. And I think most of us can probably be more effective and more efficient by weaning down the tools that we use to the most effective tools to better execute and for better performance.

Sara Faatz: If you have to prioritize how do you wean down those tools?

Matt Heinz: I would go back to your understanding of the buying journey and go back to your understanding of what needs to happen at different stages. Look for the gaps. Look for where there is a gap in performance. Look for where there is a gap in efficiency. Is there something being done manually that needs to be done in an automated way? Is there something that’s being done in a narrow way that can be scaled? I think most things that need to be done in sales and marketing need to start in a very manual way to prove that it works. Then you can apply technology to the problem. Start with the strategy and the objective and the need. Once you’ve got a sense and some confidence that that can work moving forward, then you can bring in a tech tool to scale the impact.

Sara Faatz: Can you use AI to help you with that process or are there better uses of AI from a marketing perspective?

Matt Heinz: Look, you’re at a point now where you need to assume AI can do everything and accept that it can’t do a lot of things—but give it a month, give it a week, give it till the next release. And so I think AI is not that different than a lot of other technology in terms of its ability to do things for you, but the limitations of what it can do to actually imply humanity into the process. I see a lot of companies using AI to automate systems, to create content. Left to its own devices, it’s just creating more noise. Think about how best to use that to stand out with your prospects, to stand out to your audience so that you can create compelling experiences that make them want to spend more time with you.

Sara Faatz: Where is it the right place to put the human in the loop?

Matt Heinz: At every stage possible. Until we get robots selling to robots, I think we react best when we’re engaging with each other. The best marketing is not about products, it’s about people and problems. So the better you understand the people, the better you understand their problems, the better you can focus on content and experiences that address that. At the right stage of the buying journey, knowing that most of your prospects aren’t actively buying. So what are they thinking about in those pre-buying stages? If you can use technology, if you can use AI, if you can use intent signals to accelerate the space and the speed and the connection and the scale of doing that—great. But it’s rooted in how well you understand that audience to begin with. And that understanding is rooted in some fairly common psychology that has existed for a long time.

Sara Faatz: If I’m a marketer who feels like I am missing the boat when it comes to AI, what should they be playing with just to start?

Matt Heinz: You’ve just got to get in there. Your first eight to ten hours are going to be just punch drunk and figuring it out. And you’ve just got to put in the time. I would assume any question you have that you might have gone to Google for before, go to a GPT. You can pick Claude or Mistral—pick whatever you want—but go and use the tool and get a sense for how much more efficient it is to ask a GPT versus traditional search. That’s one thing I would do. Two, there are some really compelling prompt libraries out there. They’re publishing prompt recommendations on a regular basis. Your prompt library and your implementation is going to be unique based on who your customer is and what your go-to-market motion is and what your job is and what you need to be better. And so you think about all the things you can now do—like, okay, does that prompt someone else to say, “Could I do that?” Or does that inspire someone to say, “Well, I don’t need a white paper, but I’ve got to do a presentation in two weeks and I’m really freaked out.” The GPT can build your presentation for you. And so assume that it is a super smart intern and give it the work.

Sara Faatz: You’ve shared things like creating a content mission statement that can then be used as part of your content strategy and your AI strategy. Talk to me a little bit about that.

Matt Heinz: Well, it’s a foundational point of view that ensures all of your content and all of your efforts moving forward are rooted in the audience that matters. Because it’s really easy once you develop personas, once you develop buying committees and buying journeys to start creating content based on that. But then you start to say, “Well, here’s what I think content should be.” When you don’t have focus groups or a set of customers sitting next to you, it’s hard to say, “Well, here’s what they would really think about.” Now you have that sitting next to you all the time. And so that foundation, that benchmark to go back to exists on a regular basis. However, you need to continue to train it. If you built a GPT that says, “Here’s my target customer,” and you do that six months ago—what has happened in the industry since then? What has happened in their business since then? It’s not that different than having just a database and saying, “I built a database of my customers a year ago—it’s still current.” No, it’s not. People have changed jobs and moved around. Your GPTs are the same way. And so that foundation is a great starting point, but care and feeding has to be part of your strategy.

Sara Faatz: You used a phrase in one of your podcasts that I was listening to—“random acts of marketing.” Even if you don’t have these foundational elements, you are going to end up with random acts of marketing. And that leads into all sorts of other things. But I would love to talk to you a little bit about pivoting away from the tools themselves and just talking about that concept of random acts of marketing and how we can make more cohesive, aligned go-to-market plans and strategies and execution—and then we can get into that collaboration drag element as well.

Matt Heinz: I still today see a lot of companies that are activity-based marketers that are focused on getting the most things done possible. And a lot of those are the same companies that worship at the altar of the marketing qualified lead and just say, “I just need up and to the right, I need more leads, I need more clicks, I need more traffic.” And more is not necessarily better. If you’re simply firing on all these different channels and hoping that it generates interest for you, that’s not a sustainable strategy. There’s a culture change required here to go away from quantity and towards quality. I don’t need the most leads, I need the right leads. But I need to change the way my marketing team thinks about their output. I need to change the way my leadership team and my board think about marketing’s impact. That is not a quick thing. But what I usually push back on and say is: Do you want to see a list of more campaigns or do you want to see revenue impact? Which of those is more important to you? Because I can tell you right now, more activity will not lead to more predictable revenue if you’re just focused on those random acts of marketing. Strategy is choosing. It’s saying, “Here are the things we’re not going to do and here’s why.” We’re making bets on things that we have a higher level of confidence are going to work.

Matt Heinz: The reason why a lot of companies don’t do that is because they don’t have that confidence. It’s a hedge—they don’t know what’s going to work, so they do all these things and think more is better. But if you know your audience, if you know the channels that work, if you know where they engage and you focus in the places that make the most sense, that are going to generate the most results—it’s not going to be perfect. But you literally can’t do everything and do it well. So you have to be selective. And that takes a level of courage and discipline for leaders as well as organizations and cultures to align behind.

Sara Faatz: Talk a little bit about what collaboration drag is and how you feel organizations can effectively combat it so you have that efficiency across the board.

Matt Heinz: I think this is honestly the single most important thing marketing teams can address in 2025. Back to the idea that we need to do more of the right things, and we need to do them better. As there’s more scrutiny around marketing investments and budgets, as companies grow, a lot more fingers are in the pot, a lot more people want to be involved. So the number of meetings, the number of Slack threads, the number of email threads—it just goes up. And so all of a sudden it takes forever to get things done. With a focus on what we think of as marketing orchestration—everything from roles and responsibilities to planning the execution discipline, to understanding the cadence of meetings and communication rhythms. Getting the right people involved at the right time has a massive impact on speed-to-market, agility, morale, and efficiency. Gartner coined the term “collaboration drag” because they found that organizations with high collaboration drag are also less likely to hit their revenue metrics. So it’s not just about getting things done or avoiding burnout—it’s directly tied to revenue impact.

Matt Heinz: And what’s exciting about this is that organizations that address this with their teams get more out of their teams, get more revenue impact, don’t have to scale up hiring costs, and have teams that feel less burned out and more willing to stick around because they feel respected with their time and efforts.

Sara Faatz: What are some sites, blogs, podcasts that you go to regularly, either for information or inspiration that you might want to share with this group?

Matt Heinz: There’s a handful of people on LinkedIn that I watch regularly—people who are in the arena doing the work. Kyle Lacy, for example, who’s a multi-time CMO, has a Sunday newsletter called Revenue Chronicles where he not only talks about the best practices of being a CMO but also the full life cycle of a CMO—working with kids, growing a family, balancing work and life. I appreciate someone who can share what’s working at work but also talk about the full person.

Sara Faatz: Do you have a Martech hot take?

Matt Heinz: It’s just going to get harder and harder to make tech decisions. Unfortunately, the volume of tech available is going to continue to proliferate. I remember the first time Scott Brinker did his Martech landscape and there were about 1,500 tools and we thought, “Oh my God, there’s so many tools.” Now there’s ten times that many. If you go to Dreamforce this year and walk around the trade show floor looking at all the tech vendors, every one of them will have some version of a compelling story about how they can help you. You cannot buy them all. So my hot take is: you need less tech, not more. You need the right tools. The antidote to random acts of marketing is choosing. Strategy is choosing. Make your bets on fewer things and lean into them to be more successful.

Sara Faatz: Great. Thank you so much, Matt. This has been wonderful.

Matt Heinz: Absolutely. Thank you.

Sara Faatz: Listeners, thanks for tuning in. Make sure you subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Until next time, I’m Sara Faatz and this is 10 Minute Martech.