Savvy businesses can upload customer data, push “power” on glittering new MarTech — the blending of marketing and technology — and watch their conversion rates soar, right? It’s not quite so simple, according to Jay Baer (pictured), president of Convince and Convert LLC.

Businesses excited about massive data assets might need a reality check, Baer said at Oracle Corp.’s Modern Marketing Experience in Las Vegas, Nevada. MarTech is a great idea “but until that gets manifested at the front lines, who cares? You’ve just got a big pile of numbers,” he told John Furrier (@furrier) and Peter Burris (@ plburris), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile live streaming studio. (* Disclosure below.)

If these companies don’t reform their marketing culture to be agile, they will be hobbling on one leg of a solution, Baer stated. This organizational transformation could be more valuable than the best technology available. Underscoring this, Oracle CEO Mark Hurd made a strong statement to more than 100 chief marketing officers at the CMO Summit held at the event.

Despite having the best technology in history, conversion rates still hover at one percent — a problem Hurd and attendees mulled over. “Maybe something is fundamentally broken with how we think about marketing,” were Hurd’s words, according to Baer.

“For somebody in that role to just come in and just drop that on a group of CMOs, I was like whoa,” said Baer, who was present at the summit.

And the missing piece to technology, as to data itself, appears to be the lack of agility in marketing culture, he added.

The way out of the one-percent pit?

It might be easier to teach agile developers marketing than to teach agility to marketers, Baer said. “We need to start taking people or hiring people out of the software development world who have agile experience and put them as PMs [project managers] on a marketing team,” Baer suggested.

The most progressive marketers right now are moving away from reckless ad campaigns to a greater focus on retention, he added. “Start with your current customers and then use those insights gained, and then do a better job with customer acquisition,” Baer stated.

This is of pressing importance as more companies move toward an ongoing service (rather than one-time purchase) model, Baer concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s independent editorial coverage of Oracle’s Modern Marketing Experience. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner at Oracle’s Modern Marketing Experience. The conference sponsor, Oracle, does not have editorial oversight of content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE