Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of OpsCast brought to you by MarketingOpscom, powered by the MoPros. I am your host, michael Hartman, joined today by both my co-host, naomi Liu and Mike Rizzo. How about that? All three of us again, hi from sunny Vancouver, sunny Vancouver, sunny Dallas too, but probably a little bit warmer than you. I'm gonna guess, guess it's pretty warm here.

I don't know about that, uh, we've well.

So I'm trying to in my head while I'm talking try to convert to celsius for you, but I can't. But I'd say we're upper 30s in celsius, we were upper 30s. Okay, that's definitely warmer than here yeah, like we were at we were. We're probably right around 90 degrees fahrenheit. So there you have it. Spring is almost over for us just yeah no, it's hey.

I was in austin a couple weeks ago and, um, it's right, it's humid. It was humid and fun, uh, for our first sort of chapter launch program there, so that was great yeah, chicken shit bingo right chicken shit bingo.

It was a good time I can't, like I'm gonna have to go down, like I need to go to austin just to go check that place out it's.

It's pretty entertaining, I have to say yeah, I can only imagine.

But you could probably only get away with it in texas, maybe vancouver too, I don't know right, it's kind of I think we should make that a thing why?

not hey, mopsapalooza, there you go. You're welcome, alright. Well, let's get serious here. Get on our serious voices here, alright? So today we're going to get to talk to a special guest. Joining us to talk a little bit about the long, storied maybe storied history of marketing operations is Chris Petko. Chris is currently vice president of revenue with SureShot. He has over 25 years of experience in the marketing and sales technology space. He played several key roles in contributing to one of the biggest IPOs for a Canadian founded technology company. You might know them as Eloqua. There he led customer success and marketing operations teams. He has also held senior leadership positions at Oracle, avina Solutions and Uberflip, where he pioneered a service offering that increased platform renewals to 99%. He's also an investor that supports early stage startups in the SaaS space that have disruptive potential. So, chris, thanks for joining us today. Thank you for having me.

I'm glad I'm not. I think I'm still probably the oldest one on this episode, but I'm not going to ask ages here, so we'll just assume that we're close. How about that? We're close.

Yeah, we can assume that we can talk about weather, and you get no sympathy for me being in Toronto. It's colder and it's grayer than Vancouver or Texas right now.

Yeah, yeah, you know, there's tradeoffs, right.

Sure.

Okay, so something that you and I it's funny, I think you and I talked a little bit before. I thought like I wish we had just recorded that conversation, so we're going to try to replay it here a little bit. But, just like many people we've talked to, or people who are in marketing ops, people tended to have fallen into marketing ops so I think you have a similar story. So maybe why don't we start with you just kind of walking through a little bit of your career and what some of those pivotal moments or people were that shaped it?

Sure, absolutely. I think. You know I fell into Eloqua originally because I was a client and I was working in the financial services industry. Going down the path of portfolio management, managed to fall into becoming the pioneer of the e-marketing, or internet team at Franklin Templeton, which is where I was introduced to Eloqua. We were one of the first customers of that platform, found myself at the company early 2004-ish timeframe early 2004-ish timeframe and after being part of the CX team for a while, I had the opportunity to become the Eloqua Power User for Eloqua and at the time I thought that was a wonderful idea. I mean, this is the chance to be the thought leader, the one shaping best practices, the one pushing the technology in ways that it has never been pushed before. Lo and behold, you know, I realized quickly that I was, you know, one of the Eloqua experts in a company of 400 self-proclaimed Eloqua experts. So it was a difficult role. There was a lot of criticism, there was a lot of no-transcript.

What was the term then? Elo-king?

There's all kinds of terms the grandfather of Eloqua, the Elo-king, elo-queens, there's all kinds of different terms out there, but we'll keep this PG for now.

That's awesome. Yeah, I remember those days well. I was a relatively I don't know if I was an early client or customer, but I was. I keep trying to. I'd have to go look and figure out the timeline, but it wasn't long after you were there that that I was a client. Um, yeah, so definitely like has evolved right. I mean that I signed on about a year before the Oracle acquisition, I think it's when I so 2010 ish Sounds about right 2009, 2009, 2010.

My salesperson was, uh, at the time Susan Larkovic, Now Susan Zuzik. Yeah, so um, Mike, you're right there.

Yeah, Just you know dropping things throwing things around recording that's what happens here,

all right. So you were, you were the eloquent expert within alexa, uh, with some asterisks next to it, I guess, in some people's minds, but you know, let's go with that. What, um, what? One of the things that I remember when I first saw eloqua was this idea of the, the contact washing machine, um, which I don't know. That was actually a thing, but it was like a set of things, if I remember right. But if I remember from our conversation, you were, you were highly involved with that, so can you maybe share some of the background about what that is, maybe even just for some of the people who are listening, who are not Eloqua historians here, right, what the contact washing machine was and then how it evolved over time?

Sure, I'll give you just a high level description of what it is now and then give you the context behind how it evolved. Contact washing machine is basically a set of steps inside an automated workflow in Eloqua that is designed to clean data. So how did this evolve? There's a couple of things that came together rather serendipitously. At the time, you know, I was in marketing operations. I was, you know, partnered up with some great marketers like Jim Williams and Al Wolfe and Amber Stevens and Erica Goldwater I think she was managing some of our events at the time and we were seeing many different sources of leads coming into our database, mostly through list uploads, standard list upload from an event and I would take that list I remember this was my first day in marketing, if I'm not mistaken and uploading that list into Eloqua.

It was obvious to me that some of the data that I was uploading was either erroneous or formatted poorly. And you know, we were up in the standard process was to upload the data and we're over writing good data with bad data sometimes. And that, coupled with, you know, a question by Brian Carden, our CMO at the time, which was how many VPs of marketing did we meet at the event. Those two things came to me and I quickly realized that the data that we're uploading is most times of bad quality, outside of the email and the first name, last name. So I built a program called the List Upload Program Terrible name, but it served the purpose of ensuring that leads that were being uploaded to the system were not overwriting good data. Leads that were being uploaded to the system were not overwriting good data.

And what some of the early elements of that program strived to do was to standardize some of the data being uploaded, and when I say standardized I mean taking state values or country values and using ISO two-digit code and then normalizing other pieces of data, which basically means I was looking at titles and normalizing into a third field so that we could properly report on who and what that person is from a role and function perspective. So that was an early stab at trying to fix our data. Through many conversations with sales and marketing team, I uncovered that data really bad. Data was being defined in four major categories. That was is the data correct, is it complete, is it current and is it consistent.

And that framework really helped us to shape that list upload program as that program evolved and we, you know, of course, we made a couple of edits and revisions to it. One of my colleagues, mike McFarland, had the brilliant idea of let's turning this on to run constantly on our database so that every new contact that comes through gets pushed through this program and the data becomes cleansed, normalized, standardized. And then Jim Williams had the great idea of calling it the washing machine program. So that's basically a brief evolution of how that program evolved into what it is today, and I use a similar type program in my current role, um, but I've pulled in newer elements like ai and machine learning, just to take it that extra step further yeah, that's crazy, naomi, you're, you're, you're a heavy marketo person, right?

I don't think there's anything that I remember from my marketo days where there's, like this, fairly standard, or maybe I'll call it a best practice or a template for doing that kind of stuff. Is there anything like that in the Marketo world?

Not out of the box, no, but we kind of have a hybrid. I guess you could call it our version of a washing machine program Our overall data hygiene strategy. I would say that maybe 30% of it lives within Marketo, via smart list for data appends or normalization or just standardizing certain things like job title and country names and things like that. And then we also use Ring Lead as well for a lot of the heavy lifting of merging, dupes and deletions, cleansing things like that. Yeah, so we have something similar, but it's not something that comes out of the box with Marketo, and I do want to add that if you were to build something like that today, another thing that you would probably add to your program is compliance right. Is the data that you're importing compliant to your program? Is compliance right? Is the data that you're importing compliant with all of the laws that have been coming in GDPR, CASL, all of that?

So back then it was like the wild wild west of email marketing, right yeah. So now I guess, formally or technically, now there's six Cs to the framework, there's compliance and there's also centralizing data as well.

Yeah, that's interesting. So, Chris, you mentioned that today you're using some AI machine learning stuff. What is that bringing to this in terms of elevating its ability to do more or better?

Well, there's a couple of things I think when you think about how and why the washing machine became so popular. One, it was bad data in, bad data out. So when Brian asked me how many VPs of marketing are in our database, which was our ICP, ryan asked me how many VPs of marketing are in our database, which was our ICP. I remember before the washing machine program it looked like maybe 150. In a segment that I was looking at After I normalized titles it was closer to 15,000. So that part in itself really helps to drive visibility and help you understand what's in your database. When you start adding additional things like enrichment to your database, then you get deeper insight into who's in your database, not just from is the title most current, is the title most updated but also around the account that they're associated to or the business that they're associated to. So enrichment is another area where I see this evolving and seeing it add more value.

Ai, specifically where I've seen success and where I've seen value is when you start looking at tools that will predict someone's personality profile, that becomes valuable not just from a sales perspective but also for marketing also for CX as well.

From a marketing perspective.

You write content and you're hoping that that content is relevant, because we all know relevance equals conversion, and I think the majority of focus has been around intent, data and ABM recently, which is all great, but, to be honest with you, nothing is going to help you with relevance more than understanding the actual individual at scale.

Now, you can do that if you do it one off, but if you're talking about, you know, a database of millions of records, it's almost it's impossible to achieve that type of personalization at scale. So AI can help you by predicting personality profiles and then using that profile to you to dictate the version of the content that you're sending or the version of the message that you're sending. I've used it myself personally over the last couple of years to a great degree of success, and I can see a lot of our marketers looking to do the same thing. And then, finally, if you plug in something like machine learning to continuously modify the normalization rules that you have around, things like title, that also drives a pretty good amount of value as well that makes sense.

I feel like what you described is. There was a, a plugin that I played around with, like pre, like ai, you know, going out of control recently, where that was plug-in for LinkedIn. That did that, so you could look at a profile on LinkedIn and it would give you an assessment of their, like, a profile of the personality assessment. It was pretty interesting. So if I was doing some outreach or something, you could personalize it. So you're saying you're using it to do something like that at scale, which is pretty, pretty cool. Actually, I can imagine that helps the salespeople at a minimum.

Yeah, it sure does, and it helps with CX as well. I think there is something to be said around understanding the personality of your customer and understanding if there's a correlation to success or a correlation to adoption of the product or correlation of of value extracted from whatever you're selling. Uh, it's early days still in that field, but I'm I'm positive there are some correlations to be drawn around that, yeah, Uh, fairly bullish.

on that same exact topic, I've had a few deep dives on this with a few folks and I, I, I, I spoke to forgetting who I, who I was talking to now, but the point of the conversation was similar, similar to what you've touched on, Right, but like extrapolating at scale information about what your best customer like you know there's tools that are doing this today, right, Like looking at who your best customers are and, you know, trying to tie them up to maybe like an industry or company size or you know whatever, whatever slice of sort of personification or or demographic you want to look at. There's products that are sort of doing this, but I think what will be really interesting is when you start to have a tool that looks at your data set and starts to identify the personas, the way that you're talking about, right, and then like, allow the marketing team to leverage a set of communication tactics that are like hyper relevant to the types of personas that you're already seeing success with and trying to tap into that. So like really going all the way back up to the top of the funnel and your go to market messaging frameworks are influenced by your down funnel activities, by your down funnel activities and it's this like constant flywheel of, yeah, like our personas that we're selling to have different pain points, different needs and different nomenclature and the ways that we want to talk to them. But it's, it's it's darn near impossible to do that at scale, except for now with AI and ML. It's it's going to get really, really interesting and and where this all sort of I don't even know why I propose it out in the public, but I'm going to do it anyway because it's not like I'm going to do anything with it.

I do believe we're on the precipice of potentially a net new type of qualifier right. So if you know what success looks like for your buyers and you know how to communicate to them and someone enters your funnel, if all those boxes are checked across, the like, it looks a lot like a duck sort of walks, like a duck right. Of course people aren't ducks, but like, ultimately, we think that this is a really, really well-qualified individual for us to talk to. I think that dictates a revenue-qualified lead in RQL right, which is a RevOps-qualified lead, which is a totally different way to think about.

Like we haven't previously been able to really do this because we're looking across the funnel, right, we're looking at the top, the bottom, the renewals, all of the success metrics, and someone is going to be like, yeah, like MQLs are still going to be a thing, because there's going to be these sort of warm ones that are out there that we think look good, but our QLs are going to be the even hotter ones because they look like everything that we expect them to, based on the way that our AI and ML are set up Right. So I I totally believe that, like that's coming, someone's going to do it, and I don't know who it is, but someone's going to do it. Anyway, sorry, Was that a tangent? Was that too much of a tangent?

No, no, it's interesting. I'm not. I think you're onto something I've I hadn't gone quite that far. I mean, I was thinking, like what I was trying to think of, like this is starting to connect the dot with me, for you know, we've been talking to these people who are putting together or pushing forward new sort of new go-to-market approaches or strategies or frameworks, and there's this sort of consistent theme across them about things like trust and that the old kind of the older way, like the way we've been doing things for the last 15, 20 years, is kind of under so much pressure for different reasons that I could see something like this enabling us to do kind of what you did right, like another part of the qualification process in some some mode, but also in terms of you did right, like another part of the qualification process.

It's some some mode, but also in terms of, you know, adjusting, communicate the communication, whether it's it's scale or one-on-one, as much as possible to match the way that that person would prefer to communicate, right, so they may match on the, on the profile, uh, but if their, their preferred style of communication is very like bullet point direct, right, you could do that. But if they want a more verbose one. You could do that too, right? I think that's. That's where I was going is how this could play out too.

Yeah, yeah, super, super interesting. I don't know, it's all fun and exciting.

So super interesting times, that's for sure all right, chris, yeah know you're the investor here, so you, you go off and do you do stuff here. Huh.

I think also the one other thing I want to throw out there is less of a um concern back when I when we built this program, but I remember when I would be giving the presentation either to customers or an event, and it was a one-hour long presentation on average I think it was for a million-person database. By the time the presentation was over, five people would have lost their jobs in that one hour, and I think it was an interesting stat just to grab people's attention. But I'm positive that number is magnitudes higher today than it was 10 years ago or 15 years ago, given the turnover that people have in multiple different industries. So I think the currency of your data is becoming more and more of an issue for marketers than it ever was before, and maybe that's something else that not only enrichment but AI could help with. Yeah, I totally agree.

Yeah, I mean, I think I think there's a lot of potential for AI, and I think I didn't. I still haven't had a chance to dig into the latest smart tech landscape, but I suspect there's a lot of of the new technologies have a significant component of ai machine learning, um, you know that kind of stuff in their large language models, whatever it is, um, okay, so, so one of the potential uh, I guess risk is a maybe too strong of a word, chris is that we do like what we just talked about, right, we got all excited about, hey, this technology can solve all of our problems, right, and we're going to just start ringing the cash register. I think we've heard many of us have talked about it as shiny object syndrome, marketing technology that pops up and we think we're going to do it.

Know, marketing technology that pops up and we think we're gonna. So you know, you know the, the. I think there's this view that technology is a little bit of a silver bullet. So what do you like, do you think? Why do we keep falling into this trap? And you know how do you keep from doing that? I guess, especially like you have. You have sort of different roles, right, you're an investor, you're a practicing revenue leader, right? Like in both cases, you probably have different perspectives on that, but I'm just curious how you think about that.

I think there's a couple of things. I definitely saw a shiny object syndrome at Eloqua around people, and that's a whole other topic. We can circle back on that later. Aliqua around people and that's a whole other topic. We can circle back on that later.

Technology is often looked at as a silver bullet in, sometimes in the absence of understanding the fully understanding the problem. And it's easier, I think, sometimes for people to plug in some technology and hope for the best then to truly understand the problem, solve the problem with people in process and then apply the technology later to enhance that solution. And I think that's always the better approach. In almost every single project or initiative I've been in, technology coming last is usually the best approach and that just ensures that you understand the issue, not only root cause, the symptoms and how to solve it, before you throw technology into the problem. So why does it happen so often? I think one lack of understanding of the problem and lack of ability to understand the problem and I also feel my personal perspective on being part of several small companies but also being involved in talking to a lot of small companies is, if you look at the average tenure sometimes of professionals, it's one to two years now as short as one to two years. Tenure, sometimes of professionals it's one to two years, now as short as one to two years.

And generally speaking, you know Marketo users are going to pull in Marketo into the stack, eloqua users are going to pull in Eloqua into the stack. It takes a year to implement. It takes another year to start getting value. But by then those users, those professionals, are gone to the next role. So it's no longer about truly understanding the problem, solving it. It's sometimes around the instant gratification. And I know my tenure here is shortened so I'm going to do what I can and then move on. So I think there's a couple of different things at play here and then move on. So I think there's a couple of different things at play here, but in the end, like I said, if you truly focus on understanding the root cause of the problems, the symptoms, and then how to solve it with people and process, and then layer on technology later, to me that's always the better approach.

I'm just going to blame it on Gen Z. I'll do that soon. I'm just going to blame it on Gen Z. That's so messed up.

TikTok made me do it right, TikTok made me do it.

No, I, I, I, you know, I think that the whole idea of people process technology, I'm with you that, like I've always been, early in my career I did consulting and I was doing we would do financial systems selection and implementation where I was, and one of the things we always told our clients that we did for them is we helped, helped you focus on, if you're doing an evaluation of three financial accounting type systems, right, the the vendors are going to want to sell you on all the whiz bank stuff that's really differentiated from them.

Like we can close the books, we can redo your annual reporting, like all these things super fast. We always had just kind of steering back and said like they need to be able to do the basics every day really well for that to even be worthwhile. Otherwise you're just doing like you're dealing with bad stuff faster. So you do ap a, you know argl, like all that stuff just had to work and if they couldn't do that, then all the other stuff didn't matter. And I think, um, it's, it's it's easy to forget that like there's some basics that can can come into play here. So, um, and sometimes I, hey, look, our marketing ops professionals sometimes like to do the like cool, clever solution to something, when maybe a simple, like yes, manual potentially solution is sufficient.

Yeah, that definitely happens. I think what's interesting about sort of the 10-year I agree with you, Chris like there is this 10-year problem where you just don't intimately, you know, I believe that this other piece of technology would actually solve our problems, but then it's like the same flywheel, you know problem over and over again, Like what's what's interesting is, I think, part of that and I'm curious to get your thoughts on this, Chris, and the rest of the group here. I think part of that sort of has to do with education. Just like lack of education up the chain, right, Like understanding what the capabilities are of your go-to-market tech stack, as an executive should be able to give them the comfort level to say we do not need to change systems.

There should be training and procedures in place to like let these things actually do what they're supposed to do? I don't know. Do you think it's it really boils down to like education of understanding the art of the possible with, like, the tech stack that they have and that you know is being implemented, or yeah, I mean education always helps, um, but I also feel that just keeping it simple, um is probably, uh, uh is probably a strategy most marketing ops folks should take.

I was talking to a VP of marketing. She just left her role at a fairly large software company. If she was head of marketing operations, she had 237 marketing technologies that she was responsible for. It is impossible for any one professional to learn and understand how those 237 technologies work and operate, let alone together. So I don't think it's. I think it's education has to be at the forefront. But I also think keeping it simple and not adopting technology for the sake of adopting technology and not buying it because you have budget and focusing on results and people in process, I think are always a better approach.

Yeah, I mean I'd be, cause I know you have a really robust like regular QBRs basically with your business partners, right? Does that? Do you find that helps with what mike was talking about? Right, and helping the rest of those teams understand the what's possible, what's what's harder than other things?

right, so it may be possible absolutely and even, and even, repeating it constantly, the same things over and over again, right, because I find that just because you know I might have spoken about it once in a meeting, you know, three months ago, it doesn't mean that it doesn't come back around, right? And I think what's been important is especially what I've started to do is I've started to do monthly like micro updates as well, right. Monthly like micro updates as well, right? So, just like some of the things that the team is working on, both current state and future state, and then addressing any questions that come up and then, on a wider call, just gauging where the direction of people's interest lies, right, because that changes throughout the year, and I found that that's been super helpful. I just started that this year.

And something else, too, is always follow up emails, so like, sorry, follow up meetings.

So something that I've started to do too is, especially if I'm doing any calls around technology adoption, or just being like, hey, this is a new feature that has rolled out for one of the tools in our tech stack and this is how I can see it playing really nicely with some of the initiatives and campaigns you guys are wanting to run and, yes, it's great to you know, have a call and show it.

But then I've found and this is I'm guilty of it too unless there is a definitive deadline or there's like a very specific date that I am expected or some people are expected to do something, it kind of just can potentially not happen right. Especially with all the competing priorities and just other things that you know, a lot of teams are resource constrained. So just before the end of the call, setting a follow-up call like hey, let's talk again in four weeks and just see how things are going and I found that that has really helped to set milestones and to really kind of hold people accountable right To some of the things that we're trying to do internally as an organization.

I think that's great. I mean, I think I was talking to somebody the other day about just how many bad meetings there are in so many organizations, and I think one of them is just that like making sure that if you've got action items or things that people are supposed to do, everything gets wrapped up.

Yeah, get you clear, like here's who's got it and here's when we're going to get an update, you know, or it's going to be done, and and there's then you hold people accountable, right? It's like it goes back to one of my favorite business books. Um, it's got a weird name, so it's called execution, the discipline of getting things done, and this it was one of the like, one of the big epiphanies for me from that was how the so the benchmark or the best organizations were doing just that. Right. They were like the way they ran meetings, the way they ensured follow-up, like it was just expected that, you know, people would take ownership and and follow up on things, and that trumped having really elaborate strategy. So I love it.

Yeah. It's been working pretty well so far, so uh can't complain. We'll see how. Ask me in six months, let's see how it goes.

I think this is a Mastapalooza topic, Naomi.

Could be. Gotta ask Rizzo, though I need his permission. No, no, it's the community.

When have you ever asked Rizzo for permission?

That's true. I mean, yeah, that's true.

Fair, fair, okay. So kind of related to the shiny object syndrome, is sort of the other end of the spectrum for me, which is things that drive me crazy and I think, chris, you you know I've had a similar viewpoint on this are things like just not doing things that don't have to necessarily be in a system, but like I've been to places where, like we hand over, like their leads, that get passed over and there's no accountability, there's no inspection of the, the funnel and where things are, or opportunities, even like all the way through. So like marketing and sales, um, like things like that that could just like, rather than uh, going oh, again, kind of like do we need a technology for that? Maybe, but like how are, how are like? Why are we not like? Why is that not a bigger conversation in more places? Right, just doing some of these things that are just like you should be doing anyway.

Yeah, I think that falls into a couple of categories. I mean one. There's the alignment right Issue between departments. I often talk about this from a whole customer experience perspective because I've been, I've seen, I've seen companies who do this horribly wrong, which is marketing talks about the product in one way, sales sells it in a different way and then once the product is delivered, it's completely different than the first two experiences. So you end up selling churn because customers have either, whether they feel like it or not, they've been lied to twice, or they've been misrepresented twice, or they misunderstood twice, and now they have a product that does something completely different. So that's one issue.

The other issue is the lack of alignment and accountability. The other issue is the lack of alignment and accountability and I've seen that oftentimes where marketing would send leads and sales would not follow up with them. So you know, there's a couple of ways that I've seen success in terms of solving for that issue and that just comes down to basic mutual dependence and accountability. So the best way to do that is get involved with leadership to ensure that they are having the right conversation. So if you're sending leads to sales and they're not following up, maybe they're the wrong leads.

So one thing that I've seen work well is that sales owns the definition of what a lead is and marketing is responsible to deliver that, and on the flip side, if sales does not follow up within a certain amount of time, then that's the back end accountability. So it becomes a virtuous cycle. I'll deliver to you what you're looking for, I will follow up with those leads that you've delivered, and everyone should be happy. Now it's not that simple, obviously, but it's generally a step in the right direction, and you don't necessarily need technology for that. You need solid process. We went through that exercise at Aliqua and it was painful but very, very effective so much so that I've consulted a few customers on that and we built a combined call it a business funnel everything from a name and a database or universe out there, all the way down to revenue to client. So all the stages and those definitions were owned by the representative executives in each of those areas, something that everyone agreed upon.

The only beef I have. With you on that is that. It's hard. It shouldn't be that hard, but it is. Because you're dealing with irrational human beings.

Yeah, no, I agree, agreed, and, and, and you know, at the end of the day, everyone's responsible for their share of what they're supposed to do. So sales will sell at all, at all costs. Um, cx has to renew at all costs. Marketing will create leads, um, regardless of how you define them. So I think if you tighten up some of those definitions and if executives are incentivized to coordinate and cooperate on those definitions, I think you're going in the right direction. I have to agree.

I think one of my beef to use Michael's term is like the, the idea of like, experimentation, growth and adoption. Like you have to engineer some of that into that process, right? Like you can create alignment on what we believe a lead is right, but that's very like binary, right? So that doesn't, that doesn't create an opportunity unless that part of your alignment and procedure internally is such that you say we agree that our ICP for our core buyers and leads should look like this there needs to be about a 10% sort of wiggle room, for someone's got a hypothesis for a net new market to enter with new products. And so we are going to fill the funnel with some of those leads that we believe look good, right, and but we're going to be in alignment on okay, we still have to try to enter new markets or try to sell products in a new way or whatever. And so you know you have to be cautious with well, don't, don't like, throw out the experimentation and the idea of like how do I identify new buyers? Because you know that's how businesses grow, right. But like, we know what we?

I think the important thing is we know what we sell well, and we know who we sell best to.

And then, beyond that, as new things come to market and we have a hypothesis of who should be buying them, we have to have the flexibility of being able to bring those into the mix somehow.

And you know, if that doesn't fit your definition of your current definition of a lead, then there has to probably be some other framework to support you know that that type of behavior. So, like, I agree, I just think that, like some people can hear, or some organizations can hear, this idea of like, uh, you know alignment on these terms and sort of forget that there's like, well, we still have to try to figure out who else could be a buyer for these products at some point or or whatever, right, and I think that sort of falls out of the conversation normally, but like, I think openly addressing it, uh, and being like clear about businesses have to figure out how to enter new markets, um, is an important thing, right, cause you don't want to end up being in the situation where everybody sells at all costs because they, they're like I think I could sell to this thing.

It's like yeah, look, these guys are buying it.

Yeah, yeah, but they're never renewing right that was a problem.

So it's interesting.

What you made me think of is something I've used before, which is the other thing I think that maybe helps is I think too many people go into these conversations, things thinking this is the one time we get to define what an mql or what a lead is, or what the lead score is going to be like, what, how, the how we're going to do that, and I think one thing that I've had success with is going into like we're going to set this and if it's not working, we're going to adjust it, right, and if if it's really not working, we'll start over.

But don't think of it as like it's fixed and it's fixed for a long period of time. The idea is that we're going to give it a shot because in a lot of ways right, it's a guess, right, this is like cause, this kind of goes back to where AI and machine learning might play a role in like accelerating that. But I think I think that's another thing that people get too caught up in Like it's the one shot we have at defining this. So we're going to, you know, be really sales digs in and says it absolutely has to be like nothing outside of this parameter right and marketing says, well, no, it needs to be like there's got to be some overlap in common ground and then adjust over time as you learn.

Yeah, yeah Well, buyers are not binary and markets aren't binary, so I think there has to be room for adjustment. But on the flip side, you want to ensure that you're capturing consistent data to make good decisions around.

So it really is both an art and a science. Could not agree more.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And I have a quick comment I just want to make is if you look at how the market is evolving for leaders, let's say in revenue, never before have I seen CRO roles asking for background in CS and you're seeing a lot of professionals who are successful in both CS and sales taking on more and more leadership roles, giving them more of an operator first perspective.

Yeah, so I was going to kind of lean into that a little bit. You've got a bit experience, both kind of across the board here, including customer experience or customer success or customer support, whatever it is, and I often think it's a missed opportunity in a lot of places to not include those teams in the early stages of marketing and selling, both to inform what's working, what's not working right, so that we can try to prevent what have you seen be successful? Am I off? First off, am I completely off base? I'm going to guess I'm not based on your comment a minute ago. But if not, then what do you see as a model for how to best do that?

Yeah, no, you're actually absolutely right. In terms of my background, I've been in leadership roles in most parts of business consulting, marketing, sales and CX, sales and CX. What I've seen is a lot of small, fast-growing companies always focus on new logo and what that does is it's a disservice to the business for a couple reasons. One, if you don't understand your customer, how are you supposed to provide the best product? And it's not just about providing a singular point solution sometimes. Sometimes it's more of the journey that those customers are going to take with you. So, from a business perspective, reselling new products, upselling customers, leads you to revenue at a much cheaper price than new logo acquisition. So that's one consideration.

Another consideration is, if you take more of a maniacal approach to understanding your customer and the customer lens, that will not only help you sell new logo, but it will help you with your product offering, how it operates. What kind of changes do you have to make to it? What kind of feature enhancements do you need? Why, is you know, is Alicor really that much harder to use than Marketo? You know, talk to a customer. That's how we find out the answers to these questions. So I think oftentimes customer experience is often considered customer support, which is, you know, just deal with the problems customers have. And you know, the companies that excel, the companies that do an excellent job of growing and having longevity in the market, are the ones who use customers as a strategic asset. As a strategic asset and I think it's you know, companies that are not considering this are like I said doing themselves a disservice.

Yeah.

And their customers. Yeah, yeah, I think I mean going back to my time. I mean when I got Eloqua the first time. It was my first time where I felt like they, like there was a very deliberate and um, it was templatized but customized right approach to how, how to get us up and running fairly quickly. I saw the same thing with Marketo. Um, mike, I'm sure you could talk about HubSpot and and others, but yeah, it feels like either through those companies or through their partners, right, they've they, they very intentionally have built that into how they try to drive success early on with their, with their new, new clients.

Yeah, yeah, I agree, I mean I, I think you're spot on, chris. I I got to do a stint reporting into the customer success team when I built the um first customer community at Mavenlink with them and their customer advisory board. I'll tell you that different approach, different angles to think about when you're leaning on the customer success side and one of the things that I really wished I could have seen come to fruition. But I pulled one of those. I was there for a couple of years and went on to work on marketingopscom, but one of the things that one of the founders and I worked on was an outline for I don't know if there's a business model for it yet and if it's sound model for it yet. And if it's sound, um, because it might be a little too limiting or costly. But really, this idea of um cohorts right when you're like onboarding customers.

So maven link was a product that was project and resource management. Uh, solution right. And I said, well, wouldn't it be great if we could just like, look at a buying, look at the set of customers that were coming in and then roll them all into a cohort of co-learning where we're going through an onboarding. We don't have to reveal what it is that their business models are, their pricing structures. But we could at least put them all in a room and talk about how to best solve for some of their unique problems within the platform's capabilities and then immediately get them to collaborate with each other on like well, how do you do this and how do you do that? And put them into the community and really get them to talk. And then all of a sudden, that like stickiness factor is like wow.

I learned how to implement Mavenlink alongside other companies that look and sound a lot like us and I learned from them some of the practices that I adopted, and them from me, you know.

And so I just thought, man, that would be so cool to go through that, because really you're you know half the time, even in marketing ops, part of the reason we have such a wonderful and successful community is that you're doing it alone and you're like when the community suddenly opens up to you and you're like able to ask somebody hey, how do you do this? You learn faster and you adopt Right, and I was like gosh. If only uh, companies could, you know, roll their products out in cohorts of groups like this, that would be just magical, but again, like I don't. So I guess all of that is to say you know, I agree with you and I don't know if that's actually possible, because it feels like you're, you're, you know, if you think about, like the logistics of that, right, the onboarding window has to be stretched, like, oh, we can't start onboarding you until the cohort's ready and there's only.

You know that's three months away or whatever.

Yeah, it may, logistically may be difficult, depending on how many customers are coming in. But you know, an alternative would be to run small micro events after they're onboarded. I've done that a couple of times, both at Vena, obviously. At Aliqua we had our own own. We call them revenue roadshows or what have you. But we took the same formula and executed at Vena, where we would have a micro event in a small setting. You know, 15 people, 15 customers, talk about best practices, talk about use cases, talk about product roadmap, and make it very interactive. And of course, those events can be very strategic in how you engineer who's invited, how the product you're using, what could they potentially be buying more of, or where can you upsell, cross, sell them and then share those stories to elicit that kind of thinking. So there's a lot of opportunity for that after the onboarding too.

Yeah, I mean, I think that makes I think I actually, when I had my first instance of having a Marketo shop, when I got there, nobody internally had actually had a direct connection with marketa, so I had to build that. One of the things I did, fairly or shortly after that, was actually asked them to um, connect me with other customers so that we could start to just like share ideas and learn from each other. And we, like I proactively did that and set up individual. It was one on like us and their customer a and us and customer B. I didn't think about doing all of us together right, which would have been a different way of doing it.

I, yeah, I could see that Like not everybody, not all of the customers are going to be interested in doing that, because they're going to be worried about, you know, proprietary information, et cetera, et cetera. But I think there's probably more openness. There'll be more openness to that than many of these companies think there would be. Sure, yeah, and I agree, like it could be a really powerful thing to help with retention.

Yeah, and with that new logo, I mean, like like that kind of stuff, people hear about it now through other communities and things like that.

Yeah, yeah, it could be really interesting.

We were excited and, given the average tenure, you know your customer you sell today could be a prospect tomorrow. Yeah, oh yeah, usually is.

Yeah, should be, if we could actually track them.

Yeah, user gems.

I know, I know, I've heard about it, they're not a sponsor of the show.

That is the only one that popped into my head. So for those of you that do this, other than user gems please reach out because I don't know your name, I guess.

Yeah, yeah, maybe we should ask Scott and Franz. Yeah, well, so, chris, this has been fun. Kind of felt like a little bit like going down memory lane for me, right, go back to my eloquent days and all that. But unfortunately I think we're out of time. But thank you for sharing.

I guess, any last bits of advice or thoughts for our listeners before we wrap up. No, I think you know if you're starting your career in marketing operations. I think it's a great career to tackle. In marketing operations, I think it's a great career to tackle. I would like to see more education, standard education for the role and for those getting into that profession and I think it's very much evolving with revenue operations, with sales operations. It'll be interesting to see where that goes in the next three to five years. But it's definitely a rewarding role and I think it's sometimes undervalued in some businesses.

All right. So now I've got to ask you one more question, because we used to ask this to everybody and kind of got out of the habit, like, so if you, if you, if you could design a marketing app certification, like, what would you like? Absolutely got to have this one or two things.

Absolutely got to have this one or two things. I think one of the things that really helped me understand the business, which made me a successful marketing ops professional, was understanding data, and it wasn't just conversion rates and what have you. It was the impact data had on the business. Um, and it's you know, give me a spreadsheet and I can learn more about a company than talking to the ceo thank you good call out I love it, mike.

Mike smiling and laughing because he knows like I'm like my stump speech. Stuff has to do like learn finance, learn how to do data analysis and statistics right, learn how to talk to other people in the business about what they do and really learn from it. So glad to hear that yeah.

One of the most enlightening moments was doing decision tree analysis on revenue.

See, I actually know what you mean by decision tree analysis. Like I think, most people wouldn't even know what that is.

So, and you know how, you know how enlightening that would be on where do you invest your time and money and effort when you understand the variables that are impacting close rates and close revenue? But anyway, I know we're running out of time so I could I could talk about that for hours, but I would say data and finance, obviously, two big things that really set up individuals to understand the problems that you need to solve.

So I think that's that's the biggest thing. Perfect. All right, chris. So if folks want to connect with you and learn more about what you're doing, what's the best way for them to do that?

100% LinkedIn 100% LinkedIn.

I'm waiting for someone to give us TikTok as an answer. No time for that. I think Andrea LB will be the one who will have to get her back on, just so she can say that yeah, all right, chris. It's been a pleasure, mike, good to see you. Uh, naomi, uh had to leave early, so thank thanks to her. But, uh, thanks also to our audience for continuing to support us. Uh, we look forward to bringing you more of these great episodes. Bye, everyone. My pleasure.