Marketing Ops Journey With Corey Huff

Speaker 2 0:23

Hello and welcome to another episode of OpsCast brought to you by MarketingHousecom, powered by all the MoPros out there. I am your host, Michael Hartman, joined today by my co-host, Naomi Liu, tapping up there in the Pacific Northwest.

Speaker 3 0:36

Blue skies today Definitely doesn't feel like winter right now.

Speaker 2 0:39

It feels like winter here in Dallas, Although we somehow it was the straightest of the week of the snowstorms and ice storms along the Gulf Coast that somehow didn't hit us just north of that, which is really bizarre. So snow on Galveston Island and in Houston Weird stuff. So joining us today is Corey Huff, currently Marketing Operations Manager at Discogs. Is it Discogscom? We'll have to clarify Before he began working in marketing.

Speaker 2 1:09

Corey spent more than 10 years as a professional stage actor and director. His background makes him truly a story-driven marketer with an enthusiasm for tech. He has worked on data-driven campaigns in B2B tech, fine art and B2C music. His book how to Sell your Art Online is a perennial bestseller. Corey, thanks for joining us today. Thank you so much for having me and it is discogscom.

Speaker 3 1:32

Everybody says discogs and the name is short for discography.

Speaker 2 1:37

Sure.

Speaker 1 1:38

So, discogscom.

Speaker 2 1:39

Yeah, I think. I could take us off on a very deep rabbit hole if we started talking about music, and I dare not do that, you know, I feel like we've had a lot of guests on, and I've always loved hearing origin stories.

Speaker 3 1:52

But I think we're the first theater to bridge that gap between that chasm I guess chasm, or however you pronounce it between theater and but he's not, but he's not.

Speaker 2 2:05

We've had at least one other person who has a theater connection I think he's the first who has uh been on the stage right on a regular basis on the stage. Yeah, yeah, so you had someone who was more, uh, kind of the directorial side of it. I don't know my area of expertise, so I don't know what to call it. If I remember it was, it was a play in tetherton, maybe I can't remember um anyway.

Speaker 1 2:28

So I am like you like.

Speaker 2 2:29

I've always loved hearing these origin stories, so why don't you?

Speaker 1 2:33

we start there, corey, with your like what's your story?

Speaker 2 2:36

career journey, how'd you end up at where you are? And, uh, I always like to hear you know what were their pivotal moments or pivotal people that had an outsized impact on your career.

Speaker 1 2:49

Yeah, you know, I came to marketing in a very roundabout way. You know, when I was in high school I knew that I wanted to go to college, but nobody else in my family had gone to college and everybody in my family was very blue collar, like my stepdad was a welder and a truck driver, my uncle was a roofer, and so nobody I didn't know anybody that knew how to like get into a professional career, right, so I just sort of followed my interests, which included stage and and theater acting stuff and I was in a touring shakespeare troupe as a teenager, so that was just what I was interested in.

Speaker 3 3:29

And I ended up going to college for theater. Got my BFA in acting from the University of Utah and promptly graduated into the 2007-2008 financial crisis.

Speaker 1 4:03

So jobs were few and far between and I knew that I didn't necessarily want to move to New York city because my interest in theater was not Broadway, it was more like I want to do weird adaptations of Shakespeare and's a few cities around the country where weird theater nerds can exist and have complimentary careers, where everybody in the theater company has a day job and then they do weird theater at night.

Speaker 3 4:26

And so that's how I started my career out. I moved to.

Speaker 1 4:28

Portland and I. My first job was working for a marketing agency that was running Google ad management services, and this was just.

Speaker 3 4:38

you know, probably two years or three years after Google ads even came out.

Speaker 2 4:42

So, it was still very new, I remember those days.

Speaker 3 4:44

Yeah, and so nobody knew what we were doing, like we were all just making stuff up as we went along. I remember those days job fits well with my plans to do theater in the evening and that kind of worked. And I did that as a professional stage actor for a decade after I moved to Portland. And I still do shows here and there, but it's not my primary focus anymore just because I like to have money but.

Speaker 1 5:27

I do really enjoy making theater and telling stories, and I still do that when I, when I get the opportunity, once, once a year or so that's awesome.

Speaker 2 5:35

I'm curious what's your? What was your favorite? Uh, shakespeare play that you did an interpretation of uh, it's hard to say one favorite, but I did, we did a production one summer where I

Speaker 1 5:50

got to play. We did Romeo and Juliet in rep with Hamlet.

Speaker 2 5:54

So that means we alternated weekends.

Speaker 1 5:56

We did Romeo and Juliet one weekend, hamlet. The other weekend I got to play one of Hamlet's friends the two kind of idiots that run along with Hamlet in that show. And then in Romeo and Juliet I got to play Tybalt, who is the guy that Romeo kills and then has to flee town because of it. And then I was the fight captain, for that meaning that I was the one that worked with the fight.

Speaker 1 6:25

Choreographer to set and stage all of the fights and then train all the actors on safety and making sure that we get the fights correctly. In my background I also have done hundreds of hours of stage combat with swords and all kinds of hand-to-hand weapons, so that was one of my favorite productions, because I got to do so much stage combat for that one, uh. And then we also did, uh, a collection of Ray Bradbury short stories that we adapted for the stage.

Speaker 1 6:56

We did it in a very big garage, so there was literally like 10 seats but, it was just a passion project that we wanted to do and we knew that not a lot of people would come.

Speaker 3 7:08

So that was super fun.

Speaker 1 7:09

But then I did like I directed Seussical the musical for a church in my community and we have like 2,500 people see it over the course of three nights.

Speaker 3 7:19

So I've done. You know small theater and big theater.

Speaker 2 7:23

It's really fun. Yeah, I am not a Shakespeare person in general. There's a great Shakespeare theater here in Dallas. I haven't been to in years and just realized it, but I remember. I don't know Hamlet, but they did a version of Hamlet that was like Hamlet in five minutes, which was pretty ridiculous, yeah, so ridiculous. But fantastic at the same time so well, good, let's, let's talk about so if I, if I'm remembering from our conversation before when you I can't remember who was- at discogs or somewhere else.

Speaker 2 8:00

your kind of entry into, I guess marketing ops was really just email marketing and then it's evolved from that. So what is it? A? Did I get that right? If not, correct it? And then you know what are some of the lessons you learned along the way there. Yeah, that's not necessarily where I started with marketing ops.

Speaker 3 8:21

I was at, so after the, agency that I mentioned.

Speaker 1 8:24

I went to work for a tech, a VC-backed tech startup called Jamry, and at the time we were building identity solutions. So I was a very early employee there and had a couple of different roles, but where I ended up was marketing strategy and since we were building data products mostly what that meant was working with our client marketing ops teams to figure

Speaker 1 8:53

out how to use the data that was coming across from your Facebook or Google login to create personalized marketing campaigns campaigns. So we would do things like we partnered with UMG on the Lady Gaga Born this Way album launch and figured out how to take all of the millions of people that were registering for that event and create some personalized marketing campaigns for those folks. And then I just kind of went from there. I worked at a couple of different data startups, including a CDP, then went and did my own thing for a little while and then, yeah, I came to Discogs coming off of a startup that didn't make it and I was sort of looking for a way to downshift and make my life a little easier for a little while and took on an email marketing role which quickly expanded to basically being now the head of marketing apps there.

Speaker 2 11:07

Do you happen to have, like I'm curious about this right, so do you have a strong.

Speaker 1 11:12

B2C network that you can lean on, Like is there a MoPros for B2C?

Speaker 3 11:18

Slacker that you're a part of right. Well, yeah, the answer's no. I've been looking around, so if anybody knows of one, please let me know. That's not entirely fair From my time as a startup founder and consultant, I do have a lot of friends who have done some B2C stuff.

Speaker 1 11:39

And the e-commerce field team is pretty interesting, but that's primarily for founders. The e-commerce field team is pretty interesting, but that's primarily for founders, right?

Speaker 3 11:51

So they didn't let me stick around after I was no longer a founder. But that's a joke. I do have some folks that are just kind of in my network that I will ask questions and talk to.

Speaker 1 11:59

But yeah, I'm not aware of any B2C marketer communities like Mopros?

Speaker 3 12:06

Why do you think that is?

B2B vs B2C Marketing Comparison

Speaker 1 12:07

It's a great question. I don't really know. I think B2B this is me riffing right, I don't have good data backing this, but I think part of it is that B2B marketers are involved in team selling from the beginning. Right, we are working as a team to create an outcome. You know, whether you're doing ABM or whatever, you really have to collaborate pretty heavily with other marketers and with the sales teams.

Speaker 1 12:42

So I think that maybe B2B marketers are a little more prone to collaboration in that way, but B2C marketers often you are working on a pretty large scale and you're either at a little tiny e-commerce shop where you're the owner and you maybe have a marketing assistant, or you are at a big retailer and you just have your role and you just do that and maybe there's not a lot of need for collaboration or community in that way.

Speaker 3 13:12

I see yeah.

Speaker 1 13:13

That makes sense. So have you ever thought about?

Speaker 3 13:17

making the jump to B2B.

Speaker 1 13:19

And do you think maybe from your perspective, right being part of the MoPros?

Speaker 3 13:23

community. What do you think that?

Speaker 1 13:25

jump would be. Do you feel like it would be?

Speaker 3 13:27

oh wow, I'm totally out of sorts here or just by the nature of being in the community and osmosis and whatnot. Well, I started at a B2B right, so that first tech startup that I mentioned.

Speaker 1 13:40

You know, I started in an account management role just because they needed somebody to stop talking to prevent our clients from talking to the engineers. So I started in account management, and then I was working in marketing strategy, which is kind of a unique B2B role where I was helping both our marketing team with building strategy, but also working with client marketing teams and helping them understand how our tools work and what to do with our tools and the data right and this was like 2010.

Speaker 1 14:12

So a lot of big scale data campaigns were not common at that time.

Speaker 3 14:18

Do you think it would be more difficult for somebody to go from B2C to B2B or the other way?

Speaker 1 14:23

around. I don't know. One of the hallmarks of my own career is that I just kind of do whatever's interesting to me and like I will often tell people that my core skill set is actually just learning stuff really fast.

Speaker 2 14:39

I think that there are some challenges going back and forth right Like.

Speaker 3 14:44

Michael and I had this discussion before about whether or not data fidelity and cleanliness matters more in B2B or B2C?

Speaker 1 14:54

I think there's an argument to be made either way and I think that their attribution is probably harder in B2C because there's so much happening and so many channels involved and so many people involved and you get into data sampling issues and all that kind of stuff.

Speaker 3 15:10

But I think that there.

Speaker 1 15:12

The other one is probably that B2B marketing is a lot more buttoned up, at least in the customer-facing version of it.

Speaker 2 15:21

And as somebody who tends to be.

Speaker 1 15:25

But you mean like more formal, yeah, yeah. Yeah, if you're selling, you know, million dollar contracts, uh, million dollar sas contracts. People tend to be pretty conservative about how they talk about things, uh, whereas if you're selling music or selling, you know uh, retail furniture or something, you can be a little more casual and goofy.

Speaker 2 15:48

Yeah, I mean. I would argue that there could be less buttoned up communication.

Speaker 1 15:53

I'm with you there.

Speaker 2 15:54

So I have an opinion about your question now, Bate. Yeah, biting my tongue a little bit, but I remember talking to somebody years ago because my original, my first step into the marketing world was in a B2C one and it was short-lived. Most of it has been B2B. And I just, I think the transition from B2B to B2C, to a B2C environment would be easier, and that's because I think B2B is just inherently a more this is why I want to clarify when you said buttoned up, corey is like I don't think from a process of people and like I think there's, just it's just it's kind of a mess on the B2B side, Whereas on the.

Speaker 3 16:36

B2C side yes, there are challenges, and there's certainly scale is probably.

Speaker 2 16:43

The scale is significantly different but the complexities of things like. Building a database that you identify people who are part of a household is a pretty well-known thing, right. But trying to do that on the analog, on the B2B side, of trying to understand who are the people within an organization, their role. It's a really complicated thing and usually you've got a bunch of human entered stuff where people are incented.

Speaker 2 17:12

There's no real incentive to focus on the quality of the data. So there's not much right is a real challenge. I'm not saying one is better than the other, but I do think that if you were coming from B2C to B2B and you didn't, I think that could be overwhelming, even though the volume of data was much lower.

Speaker 1 17:31

Yeah, I think it also depends on the stage of your career and how much experience you have, and whether you're going from an equivalent role. If you're going email marketing in B2C to email marketing in B2B. I think that's probably a relatively easy transition, but if you're going email marketing in B2C to email marketing in B2B, I think that's probably a relatively easy transition. But if you're going CRM operations, across those that's probably going to be a pretty tough transition because that's going to be pretty wildly different.

Speaker 2 17:57

Yeah.

Speaker 1 17:59

Yeah.

Speaker 2 18:00

I think you're right. Tools and platforms are a little different. Say, on email, right, because you've got tools that are made for the scale that you do at B2C, that are different than B2B, and all that Saturation rules too, yeah, I get like I don't know every single day Two times a day.

Speaker 3 18:24

Saturation rules hit a bit different't know Every single day, two times a day from the same retail Saturation rules hit a bit different yeah.

Speaker 1 18:28

We have all kinds of controls and limits on how many times we message people, because in retail you get whale buyers, right, people who are going to buy a ton of stuff anyway, anyway, and then identifying those people and limiting how many, how often you message them, even though they're going to trigger more messages because they're buying more and they're on the site more uh, figuring out how to not piss off your whale buyers is uh pretty unique to bdc, I think yeah well, it's funny, because that whole idea of that frequency of communication.

Speaker 2 19:03

Nami reminds me. So again, when I first moved into marketing I would call it direct marketing. So I was involved with building a huge database for a company that was still doing direct mail, telemarketing. And really email was not really a thing at that point, it was at least not a significant thing.

Analyzing Marketing Ops Challenges and Strategies

Speaker 2 19:23

And really email was not really a thing at that point, it was at least not a significant thing, but one of the things that I learned along the way is that it was actually like Visa one of the Visa companies that sold Visa cards had figured out because they monitored very closely what happened. It was typically the third mailing that generated the most response. So their whole goal was if you've got a target of people you're going to send stuff to, you, send the first two very quickly back to back and then the third one is where you hope to get.

Speaker 2 19:51

I don't know if those numbers still hold true today, or it was a long time ago, but I think that probably still, there's something probably comparable to that on the email side, which is why we you and I, we all get lots of emails from retailers, or you know consumer oriented companies.

Speaker 1 20:10

Yeah, I mean we run flash sales at Discogs, where you know a large portion of our sellers will put a big chunk of their inventory on sale for 24, 48 hours and we will send you know an email in advance giving everybody a heads up. And then we'll send two or three emails in that two-day period and the final email is the one that usually drives the most sales, because there's an urgency, like the sale is ending and people go okay, fine, I'm going to buy the stuff that I've been looking at. Yeah, that's interesting.

Speaker 2 20:39

Yeah, that's interesting. So you've worked in both B2B and B2C.

Speaker 1 20:50

We've already touched on a few things that are similar in nature, some things that are different.

Speaker 2 20:56

Are there other things that you, from your experience, have seen, that are things to consider that are different for B2B and B2C?

Speaker 1 21:04

Yeah, we talked about the data scale problem. You know if you're a decent-sized retailer, it's relatively easy to get a few million people a month on your website and if you've been around like Discogs is 25 years old this year, so you can imagine we are the de facto recorded music marketplace right, we get millions and millions of people.

Speaker 1 22:49

So I'm interviewing right now for a marketing ops specialist role and I've been asking people like what experience do you have writing SQL queries for a database that has millions right? Because that requires a different kind of approach than you know a couple hundred thousand or something, and a lot of marketers just don't understand, like the, the challenge and how time consuming it can be to comb through that kind of data and find signals that are uh useful and figuring out how to identify which signals are the most important is a challenge.

Speaker 1 23:30

And if you're a small company, like I've been on B2B teams where the whole company was like 150 people and the marketing team was like five people and it's relatively easy to kind of know basically who's in your CRM and all that kind of stuff. At Discogs we know maybe the whale buyers and we know our top sellers, but getting to know how the mass audience responds is pretty challenging. Responds is pretty challenging.

Speaker 1 24:08

And we're trying to balance that with creating personalized campaigns so that we're not over messaging people and creating messages that are unique and relevant to people. Do you you?

Navigating Team Dynamics in Marketing Ops

Speaker 2 24:18

mentioned attribution. We just had another guest on recently that also has B2C experience, so I'm glad we're getting multiple people. But it felt to me like there was something we talked about where I'm surprised you called it attribution, because I think she used another term and I don't remember what it was. There was a sister who was like oh, this is like the challenge with attribution in the B2B world. Right, there's this like building that linkage from.

Speaker 3 24:47

We did this activity to.

Speaker 2 24:48

This was the outcome Ideally, some sort of revenue right and time linking. That is actually really hard. You find that same thing, is it? And you said I think, it's harder in the B2C world. Why did you say that?

Speaker 1 25:02

I think because you're just dealing with more data, so there's more noise.

Speaker 3 25:06

So in the.

Speaker 1 25:07

B2B world if you're doing last touch attribution, you might see that somebody got touched by a LinkedIn ad and you met them at a conference and then you sent them an email and they signed up for a demo. Right On the B2C side, somebody might see your ads on any of five different platforms. Right, we're on Google and Meta and some display ad networks, and then we're also running emails and a bunch of other stuff.

Speaker 1 25:46

So running emails and a bunch of other stuff, drilling down to that individual is very time consuming. So we try to do it in cohorts. And when you start trying to do attribution in cohorts you know you're talking. Do we do mixed attribution? Do we do last touch? How do we attribute those things? And then you run into sampling issues where if you're using Google Analytics, especially GA4, everything is sampled. So you have to export all the data if you want to start getting granular with it and it gets pretty daunting, pretty quick.

Speaker 2 26:21

Yeah, it's interesting. You've worked in agencies sounds like you did some of your own consulting and stuff like that and you've been in-house with um what? Kind of same question right, what are the some of the similarities and differences in those, those two environments that you've seen?

Speaker 1 26:44

I think that probably every in-house marketer would benefit from working as a consultant or maybe at an agency just because, as an in-house marketer, you think about your role right, I work in email marketing and I'm just going to worry about email and I don't really think about the broader role. Right, I work in email marketing and I'm just going to worry about email and I'm not going to. I don't really think about the broader picture, right?

Speaker 1 27:08

But as a consultant you have to quickly get in and learn how to identify whatever the problem is, whatever problem you've been hired to solve. You not only have to understand what that problem is, but the underlying root causes of that problem, at least if you're a good consultant.

Speaker 2 27:23

Or uncovering what the real problem is. Yeah, that's not what was told to you. Yeah.

Speaker 3 27:35

Oh, my very first experience as a consultant, I was referred into how there is a Fortune 500 company that they were building websites for car dealerships so when we went in there to talk to them, ostensibly the problem was, we were trying to figure out how to put social media icons and other features. How to?

Speaker 1 27:56

integrate those into websites, and nobody on the team really knew anything about social.

Speaker 3 28:01

So I brought in another friend who was a website designer and we went in and started looking at everything.

Speaker 2 28:07

The actual problem was that the team hated each other.

Speaker 3 28:10

Like they just couldn't talk to each other, and so like what I ended up doing was spending all of my time like interviewing team members one by one and then going back to the head of the team and saying here's what I found out Like the reason your team can't figure it out is because they can't talk to each other.

Speaker 1 28:27

And that was a pretty awkward conversation because I was young, I was I wasn't even 30 yet and I was figuring out, like, how to navigate those team dynamics.

Speaker 2 28:39

I think it's also important to acknowledge, though, too, that some of it can be personality, a personality trait too, as well, right so?

Speaker 3 28:47

in-house right there are going to be marketing ops, folks that are want to be only individual contributors.

Speaker 1 28:54

They want to, you know, get their tickets and work their projects and send out their emails, and that's really kind of what they want to do.

Speaker 3 29:01

Maybe some troubleshooting but not necessarily ask questions, because that's just. They just want to do the work right, Sure.

Speaker 2 29:08

Yeah.

Speaker 1 29:10

And I feel like there are also you know some of the agencies that I've worked with.

Speaker 3 29:14

There might be, you know, the customer facing consultant that I'm working with, but they generally will have, you know, one or two people behind the scenes that are also doing some of that work too, and they're they're not the people that I'm generally interfacing with every day.

Speaker 1 29:28

So I think I do want to call out to that.

Speaker 3 29:30

Absolutely. It's valuable to have um. Both sides, but you could also be an individual contributor at an agency too right, and just be that person doing that you know behind the scenes work my team.

Speaker 1 29:44

She wants to do a great job and she's extremely detail-oriented and she's saved my saved me a whole bunch of times because she just catches every detail and knows what we're doing, back and forth totally.

Speaker 2 30:08

I could not agree more on that um I don't know was there other things that you kind of see as similar or different between in-house?

Speaker 3 30:19

and consultants world. Hmm, I mean the broader scope.

Speaker 1 30:26

Can I say no?

Speaker 2 30:28

Yeah, there probably are, but I can't think of anything.

Speaker 3 30:31

Nothing immediately comes to mind I think my challenge is I can't help but ask a lot of questions so anytime I go in a house somewhere and start asking questions, it's the same thing I do as a consultant, because that's just the way my brain works so I tend to ask a lot of questions, which means that I end up getting pushed into, pushed out of individual contributor roles and into organizational or leadership roles.

Speaker 2 30:59

I guess neither role this is more of a, not even related to being an announcer or consultant. Do you have you uh ever encountered scenarios where uh cause it sounds like you have?

Speaker 1 31:18

where you've had to be like a translator and it can be.

Speaker 3 31:19

It can be a uh for instance.

Navigating Marketing Automation Platforms and Loyalty

Speaker 2 31:20

So for instance you're, working with say uh, more of a tech team and you're trying to solve a problem for a business. Enable some campaign that requires some something to be done within the technology platforms. You've got to do it. Um and uh terminology like you're in a meeting terminology between the two teams everyone's saying the same words, but you walk away and like two very different understandings of what, what we just talked about. How do you, how do you deal with that?

Speaker 1 31:48

uh, I feel like that's been the core of my whole career. I I came into marketing ops because that first tech startup that I was at they hired me as an account manager but we didn't really have like role definitions or like do this or don't do that, literally when I was hired on day one. Uh, the head of sales handed me a folder full of uh client contacts and said hey, can you just make sure these guys don't have to talk to engineering anymore?

Speaker 1 32:19

And so my job there was okay, feel the client call Okay, I hear you You're upset about this or you need that Okay whatever, Go talk to the engineering team.

Speaker 3 32:31

Hey client wants this.

Speaker 1 32:33

Engineering manager tells me X, y, z, and then I have to ask 10 clarifying questions because I didn't understand it, and then I go back to the client and say here's what the engineering team can deliver.

Speaker 3 32:43

And try to figure out how to be clear enough to the engineers that they understand what the requirements are, but be diplomatic enough with the client to help them understand that what they're asking for is or is not reasonable. So that was kind of how I got started here.

Speaker 1 33:13

So that was kind of how I got started here and then in every organization that I've been in that has an engineering team and a marketing team. There is a wildly divergent way of working on those two teams and marketing ops usually sits between those two things, right, and so right now, at discogs, we are in the middle of figuring out what that means for us. Right, like we, we now have more engineering resources, okay, does that mean that engineer who does engineering report to uh, what is?

Speaker 1 33:28

the product process for that like is marketing a product owner or are we, uh, you know, going through the product team to request things like figuring all of that stuff out, and then you know when, when a marketing product team to request things like figuring?

Speaker 3 33:42

all of that stuff out, and then you know when, when a marketing leader says, hey, why can't we just X, y, z?

Speaker 1 33:45

And then I have to go well before.

Speaker 3 33:46

I go talk to the engineering team about that.

Speaker 1 33:49

maybe you can help me clarify some things, right, because engineering is going to ask what does that mean? Six times?

Speaker 2 33:56

Yeah, yes, hopefully they ask actually rather than assume.

Speaker 3 34:01

I've run into that before.

Speaker 2 34:03

No, I feel like half of my job is just like. This is what you said.

Speaker 3 34:10

Is this what you mean? And playing it back in a different way, then I go to turn to the other team and go.

Speaker 1 34:14

This is what I heard, you hear the same thing, you know until we get heads nodding.

Speaker 2 34:19

And it requires I think it requires some technical expertise. So if you're talking about things like systems and the terminology that's used in, say, Marketo versus Eloqua versus HubSpot versus, Salesforce right. There's just the word campaign.

Speaker 3 34:36

That's always my best example.

Speaker 2 34:38

When people use the word campaign, there's about 10 different meanings that they can have, and it's really. It leads to all kinds of chaos if you, if you don't clarify that.

Speaker 1 34:47

So or what the heck is a javascript tag?

Speaker 3 34:50

yeah, you don't hear about eloqua very much anymore I do do you? Yeah, I, I don. I don't generally hear that anymore, but that's a different discussion.

Speaker 2 35:00

Yeah, I mean in the general space in the general marketing ops space.

Speaker 2 35:09

I think you're probably right, but there's still a lot of big companies. It's probably meant for more enterprise. I think it's built under the hood for that. Like I always say, there are trade-offs with all these different platforms. I feel like it was really strong at certain things, whereas Marketo is stronger at other things and there's not much overlap, generally speaking, in my experience. So it kind of depends on what you need. And then HubSpot I just don't have an opinion because I haven't worked enough in it and notice I didn't bring up part of that let's not Whatever it's called.

Speaker 3 35:45

We don't talk about part of that.

Speaker 2 35:48

It's like my club.

Speaker 3 35:52

When you were describing what you were doing.

Speaker 2 35:54

I had this office space image in my head, right.

Speaker 1 35:57

What would you say you do here? Yeah, you're doing. I had this office space image in my head, right. What would you say you do here?

Speaker 3 36:01

yeah, um, I am fascinated by the sort of cult, of work, like the culty behavior around the different marketing automation platforms right, I didn't mean to open a can of worms and derail the whole conversation. This could be another podcast episode. I just heard telephone. My ears perked up. I'm like whoa, I haven't heard that for a while. I went to a conference a couple years ago and it was in Boston, so those who are listening will know what conference that was.

Speaker 3 36:31

And I was there and I kind of sat there and observed and thought this is weird behavior Like there's a whole bunch of people that are like super excited and like cheerleading for a marketing automation software platform, that's pretty weird. And a couple of the big automation platforms have built up like that.

Speaker 1 36:51

They intentionally nurture that experience and I'm over here going. I've used like eight different marketing automation platforms over the course of my career and they all are good or bad at various aspects of what we're doing and I don't feel emotionally attached to any of them. Do you feel that way with other products? I'm curious Do you have a loyalty to a specific brand of?

Speaker 3 37:21

car Are you?

Speaker 2 37:22

an Apple fan. Are you more Android? Because I find that.

Speaker 3 37:26

I think people like to belong to a community, sure.

Speaker 1 37:29

Yeah.

Speaker 3 37:34

So I'm curious if that extends to everything or just….

Speaker 1 37:36

There are certain products that I am loyal to that.

Speaker 3 37:38

I buy over and over again Like I'm a gigantic chocolate nerd so I buy a lot of chocolates.

Speaker 1 37:46

But when I buy chocolate for like day to day, like baking or making hot, chocolate. I usually buy Valrhona because they're big enough that I can buy in bulk, because they're big enough that I can buy in bulk. But there are niche chocolate makers that I love buying, like Maru, but they don't make like. They only make tiny little bars, which are incredible and super tasty. But I wouldn't want to pay $12 for a three-ounce bar of chocolate to make a cake, right, right?

Speaker 1 38:16

So yeah, like there's like that um that, I'm definitely loyal to I am.

Speaker 2 38:23

I have very few loyalties like that there's a couple but they're very like car dealership that we use and that the family like they're. They keep using them, right and they've done nothing to sway me.

Speaker 1 38:38

But it's not not loyal to the brand of car, it's more to the dealership yeah, I will say like a lot of companies don't do a very good job building community but like discogs where I work, if I walk around pretty much any city in the us, and I'm wearing the hoodie that I have on right now, which is a discogs hoodie people see that logo and they come up to me and they go where did you get that Discogs hoodie? And I'll tell them that I work there and we'll have a 10-minute conversation about how cool it is to work there.

Speaker 3 39:08

And it's the first place I've ever worked where people think it's cool that I work there.

Speaker 1 39:11

So that sense of loyalty that people have is really, really fascinating to me. Well, so the one that's like that for me with the wearing something else.

Speaker 2 39:24

Actually I tell this so. I live in Dallas. I went to SMU here in Dallas. If I wear an SMU shirt around town I rarely get any kind of commentary. But my son goes to the University of Arkansas, which is not that far away with a lot of alumni in the area if. I wear one of those shirts guaranteed at least one person will say something to me it's just like it's that kind of I don't know if it's the same thing, but yeah, it's really interesting so

Speaker 1 39:56

well so.

Speaker 2 39:57

I want to get on to one more subject with you think for sure, because we talked a little bit about this, maybe even hinted around it a little bit. Is this idea? Of us being change agents and how challenging that can be, regardless of size, stage of the company, company. What's been your experiences in that kind of role as being a change agent and any lessons you've learned that have either helped you or like I'll never do that again?

Speaker 3 40:29

Yeah, there's been a couple of good ones. When I came on board at Discogs the marketing function, the marketing function, was pretty nice.

Speaker 1 40:41

The team was a lot smaller than it is now, and email marketing there amounted to a newsletter that got sent out once a week.

Speaker 1 40:50

And so we started looking at how can we evolve this email marketing to something that's more personalized? How can we do something that's more targeted, more relevant to a larger number of people? And so I just started asking questions like why are we doing it this way and how would you guys feel if we decided to change it in this way? And then a lot of people, especially in established, older companies, can be concerned about making changes. They might have well if we change that.

Speaker 1 41:24

Then people will be confused and they'll wonder why we're doing that and that kind of stuff. And so the way I've learned to approach it is by saying okay, well what's the smallest version of that that we could do and what's a good hypothesis or test that we can implement. So you know, with email it was okay. Well, what if we sent a personalized email to fans of this one artist and we just did it one time just to see how people reacted?

Speaker 3 41:53

Yeah, and then you circulate that with everybody on the team and say you know that went pretty well. Like here's the conversion rate People you know not a lot of people unsubscribed.

Speaker 1 42:05

Here's how I think we could do that at scale. And here's some of the steps. The trust with the team to say here's here's how we could automate some of this. Here's how we can get this to the point where we're reaching you know, 50% of our audience instead of 10% of our audience, right Uh?

Speaker 1 42:34

but it really is about building relationships with your team, showing that you know what you're doing. But it really is about building relationships with your team, showing that you know what you're doing and making sure that everybody understands the things you're trying to do, because otherwise you'll get leadership saying no, don't do that.

Emotional Intelligence and Understanding Motivations

Speaker 2 42:57

Yeah, to me this is like the idea of right and then you can yeah, if it doesn't go well then, you haven't really damaged things from a significant standpoint, and usually it can go faster, which I'm a big fan of. So what about you know? You mentioned this time when you had to have that uncomfortable conversation with a client because the problem that you uncovered was not the one that they came to you for. Yeah, how, how have you? I mean, it sounded like that was relatively in your career. How has that helped you as you've moved along, was it like? Is this something you were naturally good?

Speaker 3 43:30

at, or did you have to like? Have you had to?

Speaker 2 43:34

exercise that muscle, so to speak.

Speaker 1 43:36

I think I'm a probably an above average communicator, but there's I've certainly improved a lot. Right, I've read a lot of books and taken some trainings and things like that and learned from some really great mentors on, uh, how to communicate better, but I do think that I have always been more interested in why people behave the way that they do and how I can help people uh achieve whatever goal they want Right.

Speaker 1 44:05

I love coaching and developing people. I love seeing team members that I think are really talented or really smart or skilled and helping them work towards something that they would find really fulfilling. Um, being able to just have some emotional intelligence with people that you work with can get you a long way towards whatever your goals are, and it just makes it a better experience for everybody If everybody feels like they can trust each other and belong together.

Speaker 3 44:38

Yeah, I agree. No, that's a good that's. I wonder if, like, do you feel like that's always been innately in you or has that developed? Yeah, I mean, we get into, like we could get into some deep deep psychology, right Like my.

Speaker 1 44:50

uh, my fiance is a therapist and so we've had some deep, deep conversations about why each of us are the way that we are. And I've done a fair bit of therapy, you know, and I think that I grew up in a household where I had to be really aware of how the other people in my home were behaving, and that I could if I was paying attention kind of nudge them towards behaving in a way that was more predictable or safe for me.

Speaker 1 45:19

And so there's certainly like that was in me from a very young age and then as I aged into the workforce and started taking jobs and stuff, I would run into bosses who were maybe a little tyrannical or just not very emotionally intelligent, and I had to learn how to navigate that and say, okay, if I talk to them this way and communicate that way, then I'll be safe and my job will be safe, and the rest of the team will be able to function better like that kind of stuff, all of our interesting personality.

Speaker 1 45:49

quirks come from our childhood, so yeah this is something that I've been doing for most of my life, and I think it's that mix of like emotional intelligence and interest in technology is the core of what I've done in my career.

Speaker 2 46:10

Yeah.

Speaker 1 46:12

It's interesting because I see a lot of I'm just going to call it.

Speaker 2 46:17

I think it is whining. These people are doing this thing and it's just so stupid. Why are they doing this? I have to hold back a lot of times because I do think part of that is just not taking the time to go put yourselves in their shoes, or try to put yourself in their shoes and understand what might be motivating them. Good example right. Probably everyone will understand when you get struggles in their shoes and understand, like, what might be motivating them.

Speaker 2 46:39

Right, you know, is a good example. Right, probably everyone will understand, like when he struggles with sales teams. Right, you know, why won't they update their opportunities on a timely basis?

Speaker 1 46:48

well, like the reality is incentives not there right they're not going to get paid more or less? On that right but, you're going to get paid on his. Did I win or? Not and if you don't recognize that?

Speaker 2 47:01

it's going to be hard to motivate them to make change, so you've got to find another way. So could you get frustrated about it? Yeah, would it help change a thing?

Speaker 1 47:11

Probably not, so if you want it to change, you have to think about how they might be thinking about this situation. Yeah, I think the challenge for all of us is to be curious instead of judgmental.

Speaker 3 47:26

That question of why are they doing this has to go from being a statement of judgment to an actual question.

Speaker 1 47:33

Why are they doing this?

Speaker 3 47:34

They've been told, so why are they doing this?

Speaker 2 47:37

If you're just talking about Ted Lasso, I'm just. You know, Ted Lasso is a great example.

Speaker 1 47:43

I was thinking I should mention a couple of things that I think are helpful for marketers who might want to be a little more emotionally intelligent, and I think that's one of them. I love Ted Lasso. It's a great show, ted Lasso, it's a great show. Also, shout out to one of my good friends, charlie Gilkey, who wrote a book called Team Habits that I think is really, really effective. We've implemented a lot of what he suggests in his book at Discogs.

Speaker 1 48:12

Also, I think studying any psychology or Buddhist thought, the writings of Thich Nhat Hanh have been really influential for me in understanding how to sit with my anger or how to effectively communicate with people when feelings are high right.

Speaker 3 48:32

All of those things benefit people who want to have more satisfying careers. Yeah, wow, that feels like a really good place to stop so.

Speaker 2 48:44

Corey, thank you so much, it's been great and thanks for joining us. I'm glad we could make that work out. So, corey, if folks want to learn more, from you and what you're up to, or just about Discogs, and want to talk about music? What's the best way for them to do that? Feel free to reach out to me. Linkedin is a great place.

Speaker 1 49:03

I'm on linkedincom slash Corey Huff, C-O-R-Y. There's no E in my name.

Speaker 3 49:10

But you can also email me, corey Huff, at Gmail.

Speaker 1 49:13

I'm happy to talk to anybody about whatever. I just like talking to people.

Speaker 3 49:19

So feel free to reach out and if you want to talk about music, you know, I'm happy all day.

Speaker 2 49:27

Well, you're also on the marketingappscom Slack too.

Speaker 1 49:31

Oh yeah, hit me up on Slack as well.

Speaker 3 49:33

Okay, and then we'll need to make sure that you get us some info on that book. You referenced.

Speaker 2 49:37

I'd love to share that with our audience in the show notes. Appreciate it. Well, thank you again, corey, Thank you Naomi, thanks to all our listeners out there for continuing to support us, as always. If you have ideas for topics or guests, or want to be a guest or want to share a topic, reach out to Mike, Naomi or me and we would be glad to talk more about that Until next time. Bye everybody. Bye, Bye everyone. Okay, I'm really worried that it didn't record the two of you.

Speaker 3 50:04

Oh, Maybe it is, but it says 0% on my side. I've normally seen that 99% uploading and I don't see it here.