Speaker 1: 0:23

Hello everyone, welcome to another episode of OpsCast brought to you by MarketingOpscom, powered by all those mo pros out there globally. That'll come into play here in a second. You'll know why. I am your host, michael Hartman, flying solo today. Mike is off getting ready for Mopspalooza and Naomi is somewhere off in Vancouver doing whatever she's doing or somewhere, but we'll be back together soon, I'm sure. So joining me to talk today about establishing marketing technology as a tool for business impact is Mirko Rokers. Mirko is general manager at Triggerfish, a global marketing technology agency based in Brisbane, australia. Mirko is an experienced senior leader who helps implementing marketing and technology solutions that align to organizational strengths and goals, with demonstrated experience across digital marketing and technology disciplines. Prior to joining Triggerfish, mirko held leadership roles in digital transformation, digital marketing and other related fields, both internally at companies and at other agencies. So, mirko, thanks for joining me today.

Speaker 2: 1:25

Hello, thanks for having me.

Speaker 1: 1:27

Yeah, it's mid-afternoon, mid to late afternoon for me and it's early morning for you, so we appreciate you getting up early to do this.

Speaker 2: 1:36

Yeah, the kids got me up hours ago.

Speaker 1: 1:38

Oh, yes, by the way, you know that that changes because I've got teenagers and now I have to go wrestle them out of bed, although mine are generally, knock on wood, pretty good about getting themselves, even the youngest, this year I, for the youngest I was like you're going to have to start. You've got a clock now you're going to get yourself up. Yeah, you know, if you're going to be driving, you've got to take some responsibility for that stuff.

Speaker 1: 2:05

So, I like that. That's kind of where we're at, so a little different stage, I think, than where you are. If I remember right, you've got younger kids.

Speaker 2: 2:15

Yeah, I've got three all under seven.

Speaker 1: 2:18

It's a different. They're all different, those different stages, all right. So I think this is going to be an interesting topic, especially given the timing of when we're recording. So this is being recorded in late September 2024. And I think if people are not already in the midst of planning for 2025, they will be soon. They're certainly thinking about it. I know I've seen lots of stuff out there about people thinking about how to measure marketing ops or marketing technology teams. Lots of different ideas there.

Speaker 1: 2:52

So, why don't we start there right? How do you think about, or what kind of suggestions do you have for how teams in marketing, ops or marketing technology should be measured right? And I mean just for transparency, right, and I mean I'll just for sort of transparency. I both have had and would love to have something, something tied to revenue, revenue, a proxy for revenue or pipeline or whatever. But what I've struggled with when I've had that is that I just didn't have control over my own results. Right, I was so dependent on the rest of the marketing team, the teams, you know, the, the market itself, all those kinds of things. But I'm open to whatever, wherever you think we should go with this yeah, yep, I looked at that.

Speaker 2: 3:38

It's a highly interesting topic and one of the key topics that you know that, in my experience, drive, drive the budgets and drive the revenue and the investments of Martech for businesses overall.

Speaker 2: 3:49

So I think the philosophy on this is it's all around the impact that a Martech team can do and while we can all measure our marketing efforts and our platform efforts in its single entity, of course, quite simply this comes with it.

Speaker 2: 4:09

The key really is to understand what the impact is to the business overall and that, as you said, should be ideally a financial figure that we have in mind, that we can influence more or less and feed to the bottom line and the complications of connecting. That is, of course, there. You do need some form of support or buy-in from possibly other business partners or stakeholders around, from either IT or the finance departments or whatsoever. But, yeah, connecting what you actually do and bringing it back to what does it do for me overall as a business outcome should be the measurement in today's landscape of MarTech. Obviously, we're investing a lot in licensing and implementation and the teams that are around it to drive us forward, so the real question has to be setting how much of that investment actually influences the business overall and there are so many different ways of how you can strip it from a business perspective that we can discover, but overall it is from growth to retention, to technology, operational cost savings, different metrics that you can apply. That, I think, are the key ones to look at.

Speaker 1: 5:39

So I struggle with the ones that are tied to revenue. Metrics right. So I think you make a good metrics right. So that's we could. I think you make a good point right. It's still difficult, even with attribution modeling and some other newer techniques for trying to tie marketing activity to that.

Speaker 1: 5:58

You mentioned cost saving. So I struggle, I don't struggle with, like my here's my philosophy on this. Like, I think, rather than looking for cost savings although that could be a thing like, if you're looking at purely, we've got two or three items in our technology stack that are redundant or duplicative right, then you can cost savings because you could eliminate spend at the door. What I'm not a huge fan, if we can avoid it is saying cost savings because we're going to reduce headcount. What I would rather look at, I think, is two variants of how you get the most out of the dollars you have. One is maybe more about we can get more effective or more efficient in the use of our existing resources because we've applied technology or processes, so there's sort of an efficiency one that I think is maybe there. The other is one that I've used successfully in other places, which is, rather than cost savings, it's cost avoidance, and what I mean by that is and it's a little bit tied to operations. So the idea the first place I used this when I was working with a customer support team at a big global semiconductor company. Somebody go look at my profile, they'll figure out who it is.

Speaker 1: 7:16

But I was asked to go figure out how can we enable the significant growth curve of sales without having the same sort of parallel growth in cost for support, because that's his. That is historically what it had been. And so I went through a lot of work with the different leaders in those organizations and came across a methodology that I thought would work. Went through a lot of challenges trying to just convince people that it would, because it eventually became something that was like equivalent to, uh, uh, like self-support, right, people in communities, yeah, yeah, which is a little before his time.

Speaker 1: 7:51

But the idea was, rather than selling it as we're not gonna we're not gonna eliminate people's jobs, what we're gonna do is we're gonna we're gonna make it so that people who are there are gonna get two benefits right. One, they're not gonna be having to, you know, solve the same case types of cases over and over, because we can enable people to self-serve, and what that means is, then, the kinds of things that they're working on are the ones that are really meaty and different and challenging and more interesting for them, and at the end, we are able to solve more cases with the same headcount. So, instead of hiring more people and doing it the same way, we're changing how we're operating. So I think to me those are models. Have you seen anything like that that has worked for MarTech or marketing ops? I know that was a long setup.

Speaker 2: 8:38

I like it and I think you know. For me it's two things. One is the effectiveness that you just talked about. How can we make the team more effective in operating that you just talked about, how can we make the team more effective in operating? And that is from establishing better experiences myself, from a team getting the authors to be faster in publishing something new that's the effectiveness we really want to have, so we can actually do more with less or do more with the same amount of people.

Speaker 2: 9:08

And there's another element, and that is the time that's usually wasted in the technology space where we need IT support or we need other support or where my work is blocked because of a technology issue. That amount of time is huge. I see it every day with clients where marketing teams are solving tech problems instead of actually working on what does our experience look like and how can I make it better and how can I entertain my customer better. That is currently online. So that time if you would really spend that in effective marketing and understanding what we do in the market space, it would be a tremendous saving and efficiency gain across so many different organizations.

Speaker 2: 9:52

And you know, we came across a client a long time ago and that was their day-to-day thing was solving tech problems for their customers through a phone line and one. You know you just move one problem into another one that's now getting even more expensive. Instead of looking at, you know, let's solve the tech once, once for all, and then provide a self-service system. It was a huge sort of one of the biggest franchisee organizations worldwide and the idea was simply just to have a self-service portal where, you know, I, as an owner of a franchisee restaurant or something, can see my day-to-day steps, my day-to-day business operations. I can see where do I need to invest, not invest. Time is precious. If I can make a really good decision really fast because someone shows me the data that's relevant to me, I can operate better as a business owner instead of calling the hotline and asking what do I need to do? I've got a problem here and then someone else has to figure out this problem.

Speaker 2: 10:53

There is a lot to gain if you think about how yeah, one self-service, but also, yeah, how a marketing team should operate less almost with less tech right in mind.

Speaker 1: 11:11

Oh, I'm a big believer in that, like you, should have a like tech. I mean people call it different things, right shiny object syndrome or right, getting tech for tech's sake. I want to come back to that example you just gave in a minute before we, so let's put a pin in that. Before we move on to that, I want to have one follow-up, because I think if Naomi were on here, I know that one of the things she uses to measure her marketing ops and tech team is utilization of the tech stack. Yep, so, across her team and marketing teams, depending on who the primary users are. Do you find that that's an effective measure for marketing ops, marketing tech teams as well?

Speaker 2: 11:52

Yeah, it should be, especially when you are on organizations that are connected in the B2B market for member base. Wherever I have some form of a login or returning customer that I can try to understand the know, the repeat of visits and engagement with your platform and the product or the service that you provide is a very simple measure to you know, understand the involvement of someone trying to solve their problem with your product and an effective marketing stack can help tremendously to provide value on engaging customers. So having them return and use it.

Speaker 1: 12:33

Sorry, I think maybe I didn't clarify so I think she uses it to evaluate the utilization of the tools by the internal team. So there's tools that the internal team uses, not necessarily customer-facing platforms, if that makes sense.

Speaker 2: 12:50

Oh yeah, internal, yeah, I mean definitely. I haven't ever mentioned that to myself, to be honest, but if we look at it back at it, you know a lot of teams that we come across are in their margin stack trying to log in but dealing with problems. If you can see that that stops, or the time goes down, or the time on not getting an output sorted, is wrong, you have definitely a metric there that would be a key indicator to where to improve.

Speaker 1: 13:27

Yeah, and it feels like it would be. It could also be a qualitative thing, right, so take it like so you invest in, say, a bi visualization type tool, right, to do dashboarding reporting, but then everybody's still doing reporting using excel and powerpoint, right, yeah, um, it's like, okay, well, maybe we missed the mark. So you talked about a scenario with that franchisee model, right, so, for instance, the franchisees are the customer or the primary key players for the franchisor, I guess. So that's a good example, I guess, from your work at triggerfish or or wherever else, right, how have you seen marketing technology? And I and I think in this case, right, we're talking about marketing technology that some varieties might not think about, because I don't think everybody has.

Speaker 1: 14:28

Like web bait, you know, like customer facing web, web tools is under their domain, I have, for sure in the past, but not everybody does, do you? You know? Um, but I think we have influence and I think we should should be tied, but that's a whole separate conversation. Do you see, uh, do you have other examples of where, like, doing some things through technology, customer facing technology that the marketing team either has control over or influence over, have had an impact on customer satisfaction, customer retention, things like that?

Speaker 2: 15:04

Yeah, so we typically categorize four outcomes that any business is trying to do right, and magic plays a role in all four of them. We covered the cost-saving piece earlier in our conversation, or the effectiveness of Martek.

Speaker 1: 15:23

Cost avoidance.

Speaker 2: 15:25

Exactly right avoidance or optimization effectiveness. The other one I don't go too much into is a rebranding, like positioning my brand differently, different up here, different way of doing it. There's obviously a big piece to it. I was not going too much into that. But the other two for me is either growth and acquisition and how that's being managed through a customer-facing website or portal, or retention, and retention for me is typically involved with engagement, personalization, self-service, and in that regard those four categories always apply. For what I've seen, every single business has one of those four elements as a priority to solve. Some of them have two or three of those two that they are chasing. And, to give you an example, we work with a financial services provider who's in the retirement section, so financial planning and so on, so it's a very regulated market I believe in the US as well, if you think about financial services and so on Very regulated yes.

Speaker 2: 16:38

So the things you have to do to actually do the right thing and to do it correctly and following the compliance regulations are quite intense. So the idea was a while back to. How can we use SmartTag to get people to join a brand faster? I'll give you an example. The standard join approach online was about a 60 click step 60 clicks to make before you actually are part of that business.

Speaker 1: 17:09

Sorry, I'm just like I was making sure I heard you write 60, 60, not 90. 16 would have been enough and 60 is ridiculous.

Speaker 2: 17:17

The amount of data you had to submit in a multi-step form and you could spin it in a lot of different ways, but that was standard for the industry at the time. If you can bring this down to five clicks, 30 seconds was the outcome for our example in that regard. Be able to join a financial services organization in 30 seconds was the outcome for our example in that regard. Be able to join a financial services organization in 30 seconds. Remove the barrier, remove the entry to the organization, gain benefit, solve your problem as a customer earlier and figure out the missing pieces of the other 45 clicks that you still have to submit at some stage in a different way as definitely a massive improvement. So thinking for me is the market should somehow improve your value proposition. In other words, what can it do to provide an advantage compared to the industry standard and in your business chain or the business value that you present to your customer? That, for me, is always possible, and the financial services one was one. I'll give you another one that was coming back to the franchisee experience.

Speaker 2: 18:38

A lot of people that are a franchise owner these days you know, not necessarily the business expert in that industry yeah, they maybe just thought it was a good you know option to share or to invest, uh, into a shop and not really running a shop before um. So how do you help these people that run or that become a franchisee to operate this business really effectively? So, providing the relevant data in some form of portal that allow them to understand the business easier, make decisions on that quicker and decide where to spend their time is critical, and that is where Matic, for me, comes into play. That's easily done in terms of. Of course, you still have to integrate. When I say easy, there's a little bit of work to be done, but applying the thinking of let's bring data in, let's see how we can improve the self-service experience and the engagement that that person that has with it to make their life easier, their job easier, um, save themselves a bit of time and, overall, just make a better decision for their own business yeah, I mean it's.

Speaker 1: 19:50

it's interesting that I don't. What strikes what's in the back of my head here is we've talked a lot about things that make it's not even onboarding right, but the experience for paying customers better right, which I think in general, I think we could all say that we believe that would be a likely benefit to retention, which is way cheaper than acquisition, I think by all measures, to retention, which is way cheaper than acquisition, I think by all measures. But at the same time, I feel like so many teams like marketing teams, revenue teams, whatever you want to call them, are still today measured more on acquisitions as opposed to retention, and not much is. I've only seen a handful of places where I've worked where there was much in place for, like we'll call it, customer marketing right and retention, like I. So I'm like I'm it's just like occurring to me. I'm hearing this kind of theme over and over lately and it's just. I didn't mean to ask you necessarily, but it's like have you, are you seeing, do you see the same kind of thing with some of your clients?

Speaker 2: 20:54

Yeah, it's funny that you say that. It's because I think growth comes with being a shiny thing. You can sell it easily internally too. I got the business growth sorted by 10% I don't know no one counts necessarily all the time how many dropped off on the other side. So, yes, it is a bit of a focus that we can see too.

Speaker 2: 21:21

I think the critical piece for me is that retention is hard. It's harder than growth. You have to think more clearly about your customer, what they want, why they're there in the first place, and a lot of that sits in in my experience in in the business culture and the culture of how marketing is run today. It still has a quality, more traditional approach of you know. We are here to present the brand and we run campaigns and we get them to the side and then they're converted as such.

Speaker 2: 21:57

Retention in in a more complex organization involves integration. Quite often you bring CRMs and content management systems maybe together to apply the data level that you need to understand your customers, to identify your customers when they come online before you know who they actually are. So that identification piece of who are my customers that are currently visiting my site is, for me, always a critical piece to invest, and you need to work with a lot of people that understand data too, that actually make sense of what's happening and see if it's a valuable journey. Is that a valuable visit? Is that service experience actually critical to someone's you know, motivation to stay with the business as a customer? Sure, and coming back to why I said culture, I think we still see a lot of marketing departments run in isolation to the rest of the business, and that is the key problem.

Speaker 2: 23:00

If tech and you know we call it MarTech for a reason, you know but if IT and marketing are not working in cooperation or on the same objectives, we have two different visions of what the departments are supposed to do. So retention and anything that works into providing really sophisticated user journeys. As such, you need to bring in your different departments from tech to data, finance and ops that understand how the customer is actually being served holistically through that business, and that, for me, is a culture piece. If these three or four departments are not actually working together on the same objective and seeing digital or MarTech as a platform to deliver that, it's going to be hard, it's going to be really hard.

Speaker 1: 23:49

I think when you said culture, our audience can see this, but my head was nodding vigorously. I think you're absolutely right that culture is a big part of it. The other thing and this is my own bias, I don't remember how many years ago, years ago, I was at a company-wide event, a global company event for all the marketers globally Again, same big semiconductor company. A speaker came and we all got a copy of his book and, for those who may remember, there's a book called who Moved my Cheese. It was a very short book, pithy, short chapters. It was in that sort of style, so very easy to read. But I remember somewhere in the middle of the book is a chapter in quotes, right, a chapter that's two facing pages, and it says this is customer money, and I used to keep a photocopy of that up in front of my desk for years and years and years.

Speaker 1: 24:42

People would always ask me about it.

Speaker 1: 24:46

And the reason I say that, why I think it's tied to culture, is because I think you'll hear me actively avoid calling anybody internal to the company a customer.

Speaker 1: 24:56

Yeah, I'll call them just about anything else other than a customer, because I think it helps me at least go like customers are the ones who make it possible for us to get a paycheck right, which was the gist of that chapter, and I think what gets lost the more you're removed from those customer interactions.

Speaker 1: 25:15

So sorry, all the IT people who might be listening, or technology centric people, right, I think, when you're, they tend to get far removed from actual customer interactions. And so they start to serve. They try to be quote customer oriented, but they think of their internal teams as their customers and what I've seen happen too many times they do things that make it maybe better, easier for people internally, but that actually make it harder for paying customers actual customers, to interact with the organization. Now, you can also get into things like you know, are the humans that then interact with your customers. Also, you know, does the culture enable them to do the right thing for customers? You know that's a piece of it too, but I totally believe that culture is a really important part to retention.

Speaker 2: 26:05

Yeah, and you know it starts at the top for me. You know, if the leadership of a business has not invested their thinking in what does MarTech do? What does this business look like with a digital channel or a sophisticated digital channel? It's going to be hard for a marketing team to evolve and establish it.

Speaker 1: 26:29

Yeah Well, it's the same as trying to acquire customers. If you've got a product that doesn't do what it says you do in your marketing, it's going to be hard for to get growth right. So it's the same right if you're. If you're not delivering the kind of product and support that enables your customers to be successful like, you're not as likely to have retention yeah yeah, I mean it seems so simple but I still see, see so many places get lost in that.

Speaker 2: 27:01

Yeah, Look, it's definitely a maturity curve to be applied here and I think it doesn't come naturally to evolve or to establish all of that really quickly.

Speaker 2: 27:15

You have to start somewhere.

Speaker 2: 27:18

But for me, the element of once you have your strategy and your objective sorted and I think that is a critical piece to come from the top for any organizations to understand what Martek provides in that strategic element we just talked about the people element or the culture and then it almost comes down to what's the process to get there and what are the steps over the next couple of months, years that we need to do from an investment perspective to mature in this space, to learn and fail and see what works for us and what doesn't work for us.

Speaker 2: 27:53

And for that the measurement comes in play, the tactical measurement at the beginning to see what works, what doesn't work. You know you can take personalization or the onboarding rate or as simple as how many people are actually coming back to the site more often than they used to, or leaving a little bit of data so we can identify. So your technical steps can give you a good indication on is this investment for us actually working towards the same goal? And from there, you know, typically budgets go a bit easier next round to say, yep, the investment works and it provides a value to the business. Let's go to the next phase from here and grow it further.

Speaker 1: 28:31

But you just mentioned the word personalization, which is great, because I wanted to kind of get into that a little bit because I think you know that is a it's been a topic for a long time. I think that's out there and I hear it more now, usually in the context of AI right, being able to do personalization, maybe hyper personalization at scale tied to AI. But you know what are. Do you have some examples of the work you've done with Triggerfish or your past, that where you've seen personalization work and be effective and drive kind of meaningful business results?

Speaker 2: 29:07

Yep, yep. Personalization is personally for me, is one of my most passionate topics. I tell every client about it. It's like you, like we have to get here. It's really hard to sell. I don't know, and I haven't not fully understood yet, why it is so hard sometimes for businesses to get into an approach of personalization from the thinking. I know the doing is not always easy, but even from the thinking perspective on applying a little bit more than just the standard approach to every single customer.

Speaker 1: 29:40

So just real quick, when you say that it's a challenge getting people to buy into it, what are the biggest things that people say? Like, oh, we're my guess. Like I would guess my first guess would be like oh, our data is not good enough, but there's one, yeah yeah, that is the data question.

Speaker 2: 29:58

There's the other question does it actually work? Will it be stakeholders in the business? Is personalization actually effective? Does it make a difference? Is our product so complicated that we need to apply a personalized view on it or a different way to talk about it?

Speaker 2: 30:14

So the understanding of how personalization actually applies to the customer, I think, is not well established Within larger organizations definitely not. Marketing probably understands the potential of it and we can read the stats of McKinsey and Gartner and all the other pieces that it is effective and the research suggests it too. And the research suggests it too. But, yes, seeing the value against the investment that often has to be made to get to the place where you can apply personalization is a hard conversation. It's a hard basket and there is the element of if we talk about the issues of why we're not always getting there. It also requires a strong BAU stream. Just having the capabilities through a platform doesn't mean that personalization happens from day one. You need an almost dedicated person to think about what does personalization mean to the business, to the journey, to the customer? How do we apply and test it? How do we fail and can see this works? This doesn't work. That is a BAU stream that quite often is undervalued of how much effort it actually requires to understand where permissiveness makes sense.

Speaker 1: 31:29

So just I want to clarify when you say there needs to be a BAU stream, are you saying that there needs to be a dedicated stream of work towards evaluating, implementing, testing out different personalization things, or are you saying there needs to be? Okay? When you said BAU, I assume you meant we need to have a business that's running effectively before we start trying to layer on personalization you were talking about to make personalization to have a better. I'll see if I can clarify this. In order to get the best chance of having a personalization effort succeed, you need to dedicate some resources specifically to that, not as a side part of what they're doing.

Speaker 2: 32:10

Yeah, and I think, if you look at industries, the retail sector probably is more advanced in the personalization element, as online shoppers are quite resonating with it. But in the B2B element, or industry, I can't see it too often and, yes, there are small marketing teams typically in those industries and they're busy doing things. So adding personalization to their duties comes at when and how and do I have the dedicated time to do it, to think about it, to plan it, to think about the hypothesis that I really want to make and understand and test, apply it, feedback and optimize from here. So, yes, that needs to be a dedicated job function. It doesn't need to necessarily be a person on it, but it needs to have enough capacity within the business to apply it over a long term.

Speaker 1: 33:03

Could it be that you get agreement of a cross-functional team with people having specific roles and responsibilities and saying we're expecting them to spend X percent of their time on this specifically X amount of time or?

Speaker 2: 33:19

X amount of personalization journeys established, x amount of personalization triggered would be, then, the success factor of that to measure. Did the investment of that person or the time that we spend on this actually have an impact to the client or the user when they come online? And coming back to when we started the personalisation topic, we worked recently with a client in the healthcare industry around retirement and retirement living. It's a very competitive market and I believe that's the same over in the US as well. Lots of vendors, lots of providers that are in the market that can support. So how do you convince someone who is, let's say, in the older market segments and maybe not as willing to navigate through self-service as such, to select a healthcare service or even think about it Again? You have probably a lot of government regulations in there too around what does healthcare mean and when is funding applied, when is not funding applied and by what age and what are the criteria to get services in that area. So it is a complex topic to do.

Speaker 2: 34:41

So we applied a personalization strategy for a client a while ago and the idea was and I'll start with the problem the problem was the users and the clients in that market would only come to a site once per year. That's when they remembered I have to do something about how I live at home or what I do when I get older so once a year. So how do you apply engagement when the customers only return once a year and engage with your brand? So the idea was here to we need to personalize, and personalize in this sense means we make the content situational to that person. So whatever life circumstances apply at that given time, we need to have the right content right now in front of them. Otherwise, how are they going to find the right information in this big topic?

Speaker 2: 35:35

So the idea is personalization from click one, and that needed to be applied and you can use different methods for that. Key for us was it needs to have some form of identification. So we need to get a cleverly some form of you know name first, name some fields where they will feel willing and trusting enough to provide that, as well as give us indications of where they are in their life. We record that and mix it together and apply immediately a all right, we know roughly who you are. These are the things that might be of interest.

Speaker 2: 36:12

So applying personalization from day one click one, session one, whatever you call it, and simplify this journey. From a massive amount of content you could read and steps you could take in that journey when it comes to healthcare or aged care, bring it down to a very small, slim funnel of information that is relevant, gain the interest and from there the journey starts. And that has been a massive success for the business in, you know, retention I can't talk to you yet, but I know the engagement has increased massively. The return to the site has increased massively and people are starting to engage with the right topic rather than going away and trying to find content themselves somewhere else.

Speaker 1: 36:58

Right, yeah, you're just sort of greasing the gears a little bit right, making it easier for them to get to what they need, partially by eliminating other options, right? Or de-emphasizing other options, whatever. I assume you can't get rid of everything. But that brings me to another. Like you and I, when we talked, we talked about things that you can do to identify when customers or prospects are struggling, and I think we did mostly in the context of a web interaction or a web-based interaction, and I think I told you this story like I had one where, again with the same. I don't know how that, why the semiconductor experience keeps coming up on this one, but it's relevant.

Speaker 1: 37:40

Um, in this case, I was responsible for part of the website and the search search engines in particular on it. One of them was like we had the option for people to search for competitor part numbers to see if we had a replacement or alternative part for it, and one of the things I had someone on my team do every month was just simply go through the search logs and go like what were the top most searched terms or other competitor products where they found no matches right, and then go and then augment the database so that the next time someone came and searched for them, we would present if we had an alternative. Right, here's an alternative product. But it was like it wasn't a. It wasn't really a technology thing per se. It was just a matter of like thinking about like how can we make their, that customer's experience better? And ideally then, like we might get more business too, right? So, anyways, have you, have you. You like, we talked a little bit about this.

Speaker 2: 38:37

I think you had some examples of some recent clients or other experience where you've seen this come to life yeah, I mean it comes down to the, the data element, right, how much data can you apply that makes sense of of someone's situation or that explains a little bit more to us? And I think we can go back to my. You know the franchisee experience.

Speaker 2: 38:57

The idea here was to you know there's a massive amount of data sitting within franchise organizations of how you know how the stores or how the different owners are going. So the point probably that you're making is you need to use this type of data that exists within the business and apply it in a sensible way, and in that case, you know there was a portal established for that particular reason that would simply just give them an idea on hey, your budget or your revenue compared to other shops in the area is down or up. Do we need to think about marketing? Your fridge is out of date, it's time to buy something else or make sure you're reinvested. You know that you can do this and this now to bring down the electricity bills by applying those things. So the amount of data that you can submit and translate into valuable conversations and decision-making can be tremendous valuable.

Speaker 1: 39:56

Yeah, and sometimes it doesn't even have to be complicated data right. It's just a matter of actually looking at the data you're capturing.

Speaker 2: 40:03

Even just presenting data in a nice format sometimes, yeah.

Speaker 1: 40:08

I mean, I will not go down this soapbox, but it's yet another reason why I think people in marketing ops smart tech if they don't already know how to do data analysis or don't know the basics of statistics. This is a good example of why. Right, because you'd be able to spot those patterns that maybe someone else wouldn't be able to, because they don't have access to the data. You're in a position where you can actually make a business impact, all right. So I think we're going to have to wrap it up here soon, but, like one, one last question right, as we all know, right, the marketing technology landscape has been continues to explode, right, I think, every year. I think people predict consolidation, and there's some of that happening, but I think there's more new, new vendors out there than there are consolidated vendors every year.

Speaker 1: 40:51

Yes, Yep, new vendors out there than there are consolidated vendors every year, yep, um. So you know people in marketing tech, marketing ops. You know one of the things they are having to do on should be doing on a regular basis is evaluating their tech stack, potentially thinking about new things when they're. When what's your best advice for folks who are going to be bringing on new marketing technology to get to? I guess to get two things right get the most out of it, um, as fast as possible. And then, you know, make sure it sustains the value that expected assuming you did. You know a business case to justify the extra spend and effort to get it in place uh, for me, number one tech is tech.

Speaker 2: 41:34

Yeah, it doesn't really matter what type of tech you buy, what platform you decide. It's about what you make of it, what you feed it, how you use it, how you put your team around it. That's much more critical in understanding really the business value that you try to align yourself with and how you support it. So having the thinking right is probably the starting point for any client that comes on. Any business that I would advise on the tech online will not make change, will not give you anything just by establishing a platform. Typically, I say, once we launch, the work begins. We're just breaking the ground. We can work now differently. How do we work differently? Now is the real question that we need to ask ourselves.

Speaker 2: 42:26

And yeah, the other piece for me is don't work in isolation. If I'm the marketing manager in that regard who got the budget to invest in some form of marketing tech, then how do I get my business aligned to it? How do I get the buy-in from data? How do I get the buy-in from IT so we can work together on the same outcomes or the same objectives here? It doesn't work these days, in my view, any other way. And then let's stay small Descope.

Speaker 2: 43:02

There are lots of shiny things that every vendor would bring to you that they say what you can do with their platform. Yes, they're all shiny, they're all great, but there's a reason why we decided to go there in the first place and start there. Small, so decreased scope is, for me, critical. Decrease the risk of investment, but be very clear on what the objective is and what the success factor is. So the actual measurable impact we want to do, and that can change over the years, over the quarters. I started in the first quarter and see this is what we want to achieve. Here's the next quarter Elaborate a little bit more and we grow it from here. And there is, yeah, that incremental improvement over time, incremental optimization and incrementally increasing my output or the impact that I do with that platform, rather than hitting 100% on day one.

Speaker 1: 43:58

Well, it reminds me and I've got a little smirk on my face because it reminded me something you said reminded me of.

Speaker 1: 44:04

Early in my career, I used to do a lot of work with accounting and finance teams doing consulting, and part of what we would do is evaluate and implement accounting systems Right, and one of the things we always advise our clients is every one of these vendors is going to come in and tell you all this shiny, cool stuff they can do, like elaborate reporting, but we always tell them like you need to be focused on what you have to do every day, which is, if you can't do AP, ar, gl you know entries every day really well, then that fancy reporting is just going to get you bad data faster.

Speaker 1: 44:39

It's not that we don't want the vendors to talk about it, because we want to understand, but we want to make sure that the core elements of what we need like you said initially and maybe ongoing we need to be as clear as we can about it and not get caught up in all this really potentially cool stuff that is great, but, yeah, like there's a tradeoff right, like on how you get it in terms of time to benefit and complexity and risk of not getting it completely. All those things should play a factor in it.

Speaker 2: 45:07

Absolutely yeah, there's a tremendous amount of you know wrong investment that you can apply quite quickly, and that's not just money, right, it's a time.

Speaker 1: 45:29

No, yeah, and, by the way, like that's not, I will, I think. I think you need to be willing to try things when you don't have as much data or information as you want, but do it in a calculated way and know that you're doing it and you know. Have a plan for for mitigating that to the extent you can, right.

Speaker 1: 45:45

I'm all for trying things that are are, you know, a little bit of a risk, as long as you have a plan to mitigate the risk and you're transparent, right? This is like we think this is going to work. This is where we think our biggest risk of failing is, and here's what we're going to do to minimize it, and we're going to be truthful about where we are. Yeah, so hey, mirko, again, thanks for joining us so early in the morning. Pleasure, I'm sure we could have kept going on for a long time if folks want to keep up with you. What's going on at Triggerfish? Are you guys going to be at Mopspalooza or I can't remember no, we will not be this year on.

Speaker 2: 46:26

We are coming over to the US in October, though, so it might be very similar timing. We are going to a big symposium in Nashville in the early October.

Speaker 1: 46:36

Right in the middle of the US, all right.

Speaker 2: 46:38

Yeah, yeah, right in the middle of it, exactly Never been, so it will be good.

Speaker 1: 46:43

If you're going to be in downtown Nashville, that will be quite an entry into the United States.

Speaker 2: 46:50

I live in Fort Worth too. Yeah, you will easily find us. You know, draco Fish, marte, I think there's only one of us. You will find lots of other things too. You know, there's a fish out there that you probably find on Google too. That might throw you off for a while.

Speaker 1: 47:06

Sounds good. Well, we'll make sure that we share that with our audience when we promote it Again. Mirko great chat. Thanks for. We'll make sure that we share that with our with our audience when we when we promote it again. Mirko great, great chat, thanks for getting up early. Thanks to our listeners for continuing to support us, as always. If you have suggestions for topics or guests, or want to be a guest on a topic, reach out to Mike, naomi or me, who I'm sure we'll be back on soon enough until next time. Everyone or me, who I'm sure we'll be back on soon enough until next time. Everyone. Bye now. All right, you will need to stay. It's so. This is. I forgot to tell you this is records locally. Oh, oh, yep, it hasn't stopped yet. It says it's stopping. Don't know why it's still going. Anyway, it's, it's records locally and then uploads. I saw yours is running 80, 79, yeah, yeah, why is it? Has the show stopped recording?

Speaker 2: 48:00

yet no, no, it's not saying it's recording actually.

Speaker 1: 48:05

It says it is recording. Yeah, the record button is still on. So it's funny. I've hit it, I can't change it. It says stopping. I've never had this happen, so that's why I'm wondering what's going on. What we may have to do is leave. What I would ask you to do is, when you leave, so hang up, leave your browser open. It should finish uploading automatically, and if it doesn't, we'll follow up. There will be a way to do it, because it captures it locally, and there's a way to get it, but I'm not sure.

Speaker 2: 48:50

Oh, yeah, yeah, it's a long line from Australia over to you guys. Okay, okay, that was good. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I think we really started to gel, you know, after the first quarter or so, on a couple of topics oh yeah, yeah, yeah, nice, yeah is. So is this typically how the how you a podcast for your audience works runs last um, yep, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1: 50:25

Yeah.

Speaker 2: 50:30

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, we had the. Uh, yeah, I didn't hear that yet. It was yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, nice, yeah, awesome, that's good. Yeah, yeah, yeah, nice, yeah, awesome, that's good, yeah, yeah, yeah. I was just in my inbox looking for your name and I typed it in to go to get the latest checking on latest emails and then I noticed that I have an email from you through the podcast series from earlier this year. Like you see, michael already made it into my inbox before we knew about this. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yep, that's great timing for me. That works really well. That would be even before our US trip. This one is saying it sits at 79% uploading. Yeah, you started it. Yeah, yep, nope, nope, nope, done. I can do that. I'll keep it open and do its thing. Yeah, exactly, that's it. Fantastic. Thank you, michael. Have a good one.