We seem to have a “customer behavior” theme this week. I don’t know why but let’s go with it. A study from marketing services consultancy Lavidge finds that tech buyers rely most on colleagues and friends, search engines, and vendor Web sites as data sources during product discovery, while paying less attention to case studies, industry reports, blogs, and advertising in general. No prizes for guessing that cold call telemarketing is the least favorite of all.

Companies position themselves to investors as well as buyers. Business software discovery portal Crozdesk found the hottest funding categories are now financial technology (yes, “fintech”) and analytics, including AI and Big Data. Funding dropped for former leaders including advertising, sales, and marketing (one category) and CRM. Also hot: integration as a service that lets “citizen integrators” to connect systems for themselves and products for specific industries (vertical solutions) rather than generic (horitzontal) solutions. Quite intriguing if you’re into this sort of thing.

Martech keeps taking larger bites out of marketing budgets: 17.3% last year, 19.9% this year, 23.5% next year, and 30.9% five years from now, according to the latest CMO Survey. This despite barely more than half (56.4%) of current tools being used and nearly half (48.8%) of the survey respondents reporting worse-than-expected results. Oddly enough, marketers rate selecting marketing technologies as the thing they do best.