Speaker 1: 0:23

Hello everyone, welcome to another episode of OpsCast brought to you by MarketingOpscom, powered by the Mopros out there. I'm your host. Michael Hartman joined today, as you can see, with my co-host, naomi Liu.

Speaker 2: 0:36

Hi, it's been a little while.

Speaker 1: 0:37

It has been. It's been a minute.

Speaker 2: 0:40

Yeah, Schedule's aligning finally.

Speaker 1: 0:42

I know. Well, spring has sprung where you are and where I am, so we're ready to go. Maybe that's a sign that we'll get to do this more often. Well, good, joining us today is AJ Driscoll. Aj is a marketing consultant with AJ Driscoll Consulting LLC, the agency that he shocker, surprise, surprise founded. Prior to starting his consulting business, aj was a marketing operations leader at DeepWatch, where he co-led the marketing team. He has done previous work in marketing, marketing strategy, marketing automation at agencies as well as in-house, and he likes to take a data-driven approach to effectively build, scale and measure marketing strategies. Aj, thanks for joining us today.

Speaker 3: 1:25

Thanks for having me.

Speaker 1: 1:27

Yeah, I'm trying to remember. You're up in the northeast somewhere, right?

Speaker 3: 1:32

Yeah, up in Vermont we got some snow yesterday, so I'm jealous of hearing that you guys have spring.

Speaker 1: 1:38

Snow.

Speaker 3: 1:40

Yeah.

Speaker 1: 1:40

Snow, that's crazy. Snow in April in Vermont.

Speaker 3: 1:47

Well, hopefully you're a skier, you get to enjoy it not enough to enjoy uh skiing, just enough to uh, you know, make them salt the roads once again yeah, make driving treacherous, so at least you're prepared.

Speaker 1: 2:01

Down here in dallas, like if it snows, like I just try to avoid driving because the idiots out there don't know what to do. We don't have the equipment to really clear the roads. It is what it is, okay. So our main focus today is going to be talking about why it's important for marketing operations professionals to understand product marketing. But before we get into that, I did a quick overview of your career and your journey, but I'd love for you to share maybe a little more about that and how you became passionate about this topic of the understanding of the overlap and understanding needed for marketing ops folks with product marketing.

Speaker 3: 2:46

Yeah, I think one commonality into my career path has always been just falling into some realm of marketing. It started off by my internship where the director of marketing, who had hired me to be an intern, left the company two weeks after I started and had just purchased HubSpot and the rest of the company leadership was like, hey, intern, go figure this out. And that really kickstarted my life into marketing operations and learning, marketing automation, all of that kind of good stuff, and just kept developing it from there until I reached the point at DeepWatch where I was now a marketing ops leader and, collaborating with so many different people, realized it'd be hugely beneficial for me to better understand everything else that's going on in marketing so that I could be more effective at marketing operations, which led me to mostly product marketing. I'd been involved with demand gen strategies and things like that in the past, running campaigns and nurture programs, all that good stuff.

Speaker 3: 3:57

But where where product marketing came into the fold was developing a new ICP exercise and I pushed people to have a more data-driven approach because there was kind of the notion that we knew who our customers were at the company and we kind of dove into if that was true or not. And from there started taking a data-driven look into you know, what does our current customer base look like? What deals close the fastest, all of that good stuff and built a readout on that and that was just kind of step one that felt very marketing ops focused. But from there we started developing out buyer personas on who would be within that ICP and going into the details of you know what makes them tick, what are they looking for in a solution, how does the company service their needs, figuring out those pain points. And I was heavily involved in that process and kind of realized that I had now fallen more into product marketing and it kind of gave me a nice little avenue to to continue focusing on building out ICP.

Speaker 3: 5:13

Um, uh, exercises with other companies, and you know, that's kind of where I immediately fell into and had success within my consulting business. Um was able to, you know, talk with a few companies that needed to know their customers better and jumped in and, you know, taking that data-driven approach as well as, you know, interviewing customers, understanding industries all of that kind of good stuff is where I just fell into and I think it's hugely important, uh, as a marketing ops professional, to start understanding that stuff so that you can do more than just the system side of things, because then you can start merging that with specific strengths within a company and being able to be more beneficial than just being the guy who knows how to clean lists, configure HubSpot.

Speaker 1: 6:06

Yeah. So just real quick, I want to follow up. So, um, this is something we didn't talk about because it was when I was prepping for this session, but you, um, you were, you were like a co-leader for all of marketing at at what? So I'm curious because I think that's, uh, highly unusual. First off, having a co-leader is unusual, but, like what, how did that happen and what did that look like for in terms of, like, your scope of responsibility versus the other person?

Speaker 3: 6:36

Sure, yeah. So at the time we had a CMO for about a year and a half and then she had departed the company and, instead of us looking to backfill that role, leadership made the decision that her directors would then co-lead the marketing team. Because we'd all been working very closely together for say, two years and with that we were able to, you know, get along really, really well and a lot of our thinking was well aligned along, really really well, and a lot of our thinking was well aligned Um, so we were able to just continue on kind of making those leadership style decisions, um, as a team, and that consisted of myself, someone who is in channel and field marketing, and then someone who was dedicated to product marketing, um, and the three of us, yeah, drove strategy for for about a year before.

Speaker 1: 7:31

Oh, there's three of you, not just two.

Speaker 3: 7:34

Yeah, three of us, so we all kind of owned our own piece of the business, uh, within marketing. And then, yeah, we would all be a part of the those like leadership conversations and able to to move things forward, and we had three different and unique perspectives and approached things in three different ways and I think we did some pretty cool stuff over that time.

Speaker 1: 8:01

Do you think?

Speaker 2: 8:01

I'm curious because I think a challenge that a lot of us in marketing ops have is, especially when you're starting out or growing, your team is getting that, you know, visibility within the organization and you know not just being a cost center, right, but actually like a revenue driver. And do you feel like that having that understanding of you know product marketing and building those relationships with those teams helps to be that stepping stone that, hey, you know this team, like you mentioned, is more. We're not just like making donuts, right, we're also like thinking about strategy and we have a lot of insights and we see all of the data and where things are going, trends. And I'm just curious, like if there are people out there who want to move away from like just being an individual contributor and they're wanting to have more of like an elevator role within the organization, Do you feel like this is that stepping stone towards getting there?

Speaker 3: 8:58

It can be. I think what was the stepping stone for me in particular in this situation was I was the second marketing hire at the company when I was onboarding.

Speaker 2: 9:11

To kind of define where it's going.

Speaker 3: 9:13

Exactly so I had that benefit. But then I've also always been firmly in the belief that marketing operations can impact more than just marketing. So injecting myself into conversations with finance, with sales ops, with other parts of the business and just being a partner and helping them even on the HR side for recruiting, follow up and being able to send out marketing automated emails that way and making their process more seamless Just there's so many different ways to use the tools that marketing operations has to make other impacts across the business and I think that's what led to a lot of my success and a lot of my success over the entirety of my career. It's really just been about collaboration and thinking of ways that the marketing operations kind of base can impact other parts of the business.

Speaker 1: 10:07

It's just curious so.

Speaker 2: 10:09

I am curious.

Speaker 1: 10:11

Go ahead, go ahead, naomi.

Speaker 2: 10:13

No, I was just saying that, like, I think it's always interesting for people to hear about how someone can get from you know, a pure ops role towards expanding their, their job scope. Right, I think there's different ways to get there and it's always interesting to hear some of the ways that people are doing it.

Speaker 1: 10:34

Yeah, so I wanted to go maybe a step further in that, just like you said, you inserted yourself into these other things. I can imagine there's lots of different ways you could do that, some which could be actually counterproductive, right, if you do it the right way. How did you approach those? How did you identify where those opportunities might be? And then how did you approach the people who you would interject with?

Speaker 3: 11:00

Yeah, I think I opened myself up to a lot of conversations and try to make myself available to other team members and you know just understanding from other people's perspectives. You know what are their needs, you know where are they having issues within their day to day. Is there anything I can do to help there and just being essentially an asset for anyone in the team to tap into? One thing that I like to say about how I approach doing my work is that it's my job to help other people be better at their jobs and if I'm doing that the right way, I feel like I'm successful at that point. Um, and that goes beyond marketing. You know marketing ops really is the marketing.

Speaker 3: 11:45

Ops to marketing is the obvious one that pretty much everybody in this community is doing, but you can expand so far beyond that. So if finance wants to start understanding you know what marketing channels are driving the best ROI and things like that, you can figure out ways to collaborate with them to help work in their frame of reference work in their frame of reference. So one thing we did there was, you know, we took POs from marketing events and marketing platforms and things like that and then injected those into Salesforce campaigns so that we were able to see okay, this cost $10,000. We got a hundred leads. Cost per lead was X and you know this is how many opportunities. Here's the ROI, here's how many closed one. And that was all seamless because we took that kind of marketing ops approach Finance got what they needed, marketing got what they needed and then sales also had insight into what touch points also helps lead to the end results of a one deal. So it was a collaborative effort and if you're doing it in that way, I think it provides better outcomes.

Speaker 1: 12:54

Were you, were you the one you know, sort of initiating conversations more, or was it more like you? Just you were just always listening for those opportunities and other, you know, when you're in meetings or conversations with people.

Speaker 3: 13:10

I would say a little bit of both. So definitely on the listening side of like hearing where people are having issues or wanting to accomplish certain things you know, like for the finance one in particular that had come about from our CMO who was like let's track the ROI of all of our marketing programs, how are we going to do that? We started looking into solutions. I wanted to know what finance was using to see if they had a way to easily kind of automate some of this, and they didn't. But then it became a collaborative project where I was working with them to have that data flow in from our accounting systems into Salesforce and then marketing programs coming from HubSpot into Salesforce and having that be kind of the place where everything was interconnected and we're able to get the data that we wanted.

Speaker 1: 13:59

Interesting Love. That Won't be a shock to me. I'm a big fan of collaborating with finance, so we don't need to beat that drum again. But so do you think of yourself primarily as a marketing ops professional that has learned product marketing, or do you feel like you like you've now achieved sort of a level of expertise in both, where you feel like pretty competent in both?

Speaker 3: 14:27

I would still consider myself a marketing operations professional first. If somebody asked me what my sub-industry within marketing is, that's what I would say. But I'm also usually leaning towards more startup type companies where you're wearing multiple hats, so feeling more comfortable and stepping in those sorts of roles and being able to provide value in more than just like the system side of things.

Speaker 1: 14:52

Right, okay, good. So when you talk to your consulting work, you're bringing in, getting brought in by companies, other organizations, to help with defining ICPs. You mentioned that earlier and, if I remember right, you're like aligning messaging and technology with Just like. What was it that led you to focus on that sort of niche area as opposed to like? I think what a lot of people, when they move into like call freelancing with marketing ops, right, they tend to be more systems focused as opposed to business or process focused.

Speaker 3: 15:28

Yeah, I mean realistically, it was from market.

Speaker 3: 15:31

Need you see everybody out there on LinkedIn posting about like how you have to know your customers and you need to be able to drill down into your ICP and you need to be able to do all of those things in the right way.

Speaker 3: 15:43

And my pitch is kind of coming into that sort of exercise, with a marketing operations mindset, of being able to take a look at data and analyze what's going on in the systems, looking at past wins, past successes, past losses, and merging that with understanding an industry. One thing that I think I do a pretty good job at is, when I'm approaching new ICP work, I become entrenched into that industry and would say that I would become, you know, a low level expert in in the goings on of what's in, what's happening within those spaces and then also injecting myself into the buyer side of the shoes. So taking a look at okay, this company does this really well. Here's what we need to focus on. Here's an industry or a vertical that you need to go after. What makes that industry tick, what are their pain points, and taking a look at it from both of those angles and then merging that with data you can come out with really great outcomes. And then you pair that with all of the new AI technology out there and it becomes a pretty powerful exercise.

Speaker 1: 16:57

Gotcha, I'm smiling because I'm like it wouldn't be a proper podcast episode without the words AI coming into it. Somehow these days it feels like it's got to be in there.

Speaker 3: 17:08

Absolutely.

Speaker 1: 17:09

So you mentioned this data-driven approach, and when you go in and you get engaged with one of these companies, organizations, and you're going to help them, it's some degree. It sounds like you're not only just identifying and building icp profiles, you're actually validating against what they think they know right. Um. So there's a little bit of that, too, going on. But what, like? How do you approach? Like, what are the major steps you go through to help get that defined?

Speaker 3: 17:38

yeah, there's definitely like an art and a science to it. So taking a look at the data is just one step of it and it kind of gives you an understanding of what things look like in the historical data. And then you're also looking at things like the future predictive data of what an industry where it's moving, who cares about X topic, and then also looking at what's in pipeline, who's on the website, those sorts of things. And then the art side comes from interviews both with stakeholders at the company. So understanding what does sales see their ideal customer profile as, who do they see having the most success with, why is the pitch unique for this specific group? And kind of synthesizing that data all together as well and seeing if it aligns with what you're seeing from just the numbers side and kind of pulling that together.

Speaker 3: 18:36

Also, then, taking a look at industry reports of this industry is focused on X initiative over the next five years. Does that align with what your value prop is? Is it solving a specific pain point? Do we need to shift slightly? Do you have to go up market, down market, based on the budgets that they typically have in this space? Where does that right fit? All of those things start to come together and then being able to bridge that into the specific pain points within each role is kind of the next step after that. So that goes into the buyer persona side and getting a really good understanding there of who you're targeting, why you're targeting, why you're targeting them, what keeps them up at night, those sorts of things come into the fold and I think that's where you create a really strong program and then you're able to build out your messaging, your content and everything else that follows there.

Speaker 1: 19:30

So how often are you going into an organization where they think they know their ideal customer profile whether customers really well, and you go like, actually what your data is telling you is something different, right? How often does that happen?

Speaker 3: 19:49

It's usually not far off of the assumptions, I would say. In many cases it's more of a fine tuning of what's going on. I think a lot of the time it's also pushing people to either be up or down market or to reduce what that span is. So you know, there's, say, there's a company that typically sells to. So say, there's a company that typically sells to midsize enterprise, b2b companies that have between 500 million and a billion ARR. You can take a look at that and ask them what their ideal customer profile is. And often you see them saying oh yeah, we'll sell from 500 million up to 5 billion. And you take a look at the data between 1 billion and 5 billion in annual revenue and the win rates are terrible. They're not seeing website traffic there. They win, you know, at a much lower rate. The longer deal size, longer to close out. You start to find those sorts of things and then you don't see a strong trend of them being able to support something like that to encourage them to just stay with within where they're winning and where those things are. So it allows them to. You know, refocus budget, make sure they're targeting those buyers in the correct way. They're not spending out in places where you're trying to reach those larger buyers. You're not wasting BDR time in them doing outreach. You're making sure that you're refocusing to where you're most likely going to win.

Speaker 3: 21:34

I've also had it the other way, where, if you're really good at selling into the Fortune 500 and you want to go down market, why aren't those deals coming through? Is it that you're priced too high so it becomes a barrier to entry for those types of people? And then it's like well, your ICP is actually in this fortune 500. You have X percent of the fortune 500 as customers. Instead of saying let's redefine your persona, let's say your new ICP is actually your customer base, so that you can land and expand in there and say you have 40 percent of the fortune 500, which is a good scenario for a lot of companies. Um, are they using all of your offerings? And do we switch to a retention play and an expansion play versus a net new play? And I think that's where the biggest surprises are when you tell somebody like you've got a great customer base, let's stay focused there, um, versus them trying to figure out their way down market or up market and things like that.

Speaker 2: 22:38

And once you've done that, like in your opinion, how important is it to understand the product? Any of the pain points like what's the value proposition? How important do you think that is?

Speaker 3: 22:52

I think it's hugely important. You have to understand, you know why your product or service in a specific area meets their direct needs and you know there's initiatives that teams have and there's things that they want to be doing, there's things they're aspiring to be. Making sure that your product can fit those needs, your product can fit those needs, I think is one of the most important parts, because you do need to have that strong message or people aren't going to look at you and they're not going to care, because if you're not making their lives easier, then why are they buying your product or service?

Speaker 1: 23:40

totally. Um, you mentioned that part of what you do is you, you, you become like an industry expert. Um, how do you do that? Right, I think it's. I'm a big believer that there's more commonality across industries than maybe people are really deeply entrenched in them are believe, but still there are nuances. How do you approach that?

Speaker 3: 23:57

Yeah, I guess it's changed in the past year. Essentially it used to be doing a ton of analyst research and attending industry webinars and just going down rabbit holes of e-books, of industry trends and top news sites and things like that and being like a domain expert there. But now there's tools like Perplexity out there where you can say give me an overview of this industry at this level based on this specific topic, and you get a pretty good base there. From that point, there is still other research that you should be doing, but you can really take it from what used to take a a full week of research into a day, two days of research to to get a good understanding of what's going on because of those AI tools out there. I think that's one of their more powerful use cases.

Speaker 1: 24:57

Yeah, you're the second person recently who's told me about perplexity, so now I know I have to go check it out.

Speaker 3: 25:04

Yeah, I'm a fan because they cite their sources. So it makes it a little bit easier to verify where data and information is coming from, and you can either include or exclude further research into those. So if you ask them, like, give me an overview of what marketing operations is, it'll pull in a bunch of information. You'll get sources from HubSpot and Salesforce and whoever else is in that realm of probably selling to marketing operations professionals and then you can take a look at okay, this is a valid data source, this is a sales pitch. You can exclude that and just get a good idea of where they're pulling that information from.

Speaker 1: 25:51

Gotcha. We'll go back a little bit so you kind of walk through how you understand the business, understand the industry, uh, build out the icps. What? Once you get that? You get agreement or alignment with the client or your if you were in business right, you're whichever product marketing team. It may be like what's the next step after that? That? Right, how do you? How do you, um, how do you take advantage of that understanding and knowledge?

Speaker 3: 26:19

Yeah, it's really building a roadmap from there. At least, that's my approach. Um, so you get an understanding of, you know what that ICP is and then do an index of what do we have today that can be used for that ICP. Do we need to create more content? Are there gaps? Is there sales training that we need? Icp? Do we need to create more content? Are there gaps? Is there sales training that we need to do? Do we need to adjust pitch decks to align better to what that specific type of buyer is looking at and then creating?

Speaker 3: 26:45

I like to create a huge grid where it aligns like decision makers, influencers, gatekeepers, anyone else in the process and match that to the verticals that you identify within the icp you want to go after and figuring out. You know what boxes do you have checked, which boxes you need to have work, uh to, to put more work into, and then also aligning that to each stage of the buying process. So how does a decision maker look at awareness stage? How are they doing research? How does an influencer do it? And as you move down the cycle, like, being able to check all of those boxes is a huge task. I rarely ever see anybody who can do all of those things unless you're some massive company. But focusing on those points where you're some massive company, but focusing on those points where you're having those sticking points in the sales process, so verifying what that ICP is seeing within sales.

Speaker 3: 27:44

Do you have a five-stage sales process and prospects are falling off at stage three? Let's look at why. What information are they missing? Why aren't we meeting their needs at this stage? Building the content out for those specific personas and those specific ICPs? At that stage it really just becomes like a mapping session. And then looking at timelines of when can you accomplish X? When can you build out the new pitch deck? When can you build out this piece of content? How important is it? Prioritizing all of it, that's kind of the next steps in it.

Speaker 2: 28:18

You mentioned that one of the keys to your success has been collaboration. So I'm curious like what is the importance of collaboration across teams? I know you, you won an award at a company by demonstrating a high level of collaboration. Do you want to talk a little bit about that?

Speaker 3: 28:35

Yeah, and that goes back to what I was saying about just wanting to help everyone get better at what they're doing. So I approach collaboration of you know, finding out the people that I'm well aligned with you know whether that's in a manager role, director role, um and talking to other individuals across the organization and similar leadership levels, and then figuring out like, hey, what are you trying to get accomplished? Is there anything I can do to help you do that? Do you need data for this? Do you need email templates for that? Is there anything I can do within the CRM to make your life easier?

Speaker 3: 29:10

In customer success, Just any way that I can help is kind of how I approach every conversation and just a personal trait of mine is I never really expect anything in return. I get everything I need out of an interaction like that by making that person more successful, and I don't know if everybody has that type of mindset, but that's how I've always approached my work and, you know, if everybody else in the collaboration feels like they're getting value out of it, I feel like I'm doing my job well.

Speaker 2: 29:46

It's awesome.

Speaker 2: 29:47

I love it when you know and this is something that I've always said like I love it when people in marketing, especially marketing ops, win awards and get recognition. I love it when people in marketing, especially marketing ops, win awards and get recognition, because there are things every year that the sales teams, they go on these elite trips and president's club and all that stuff. Where's the marketing version of it? We're the ones that are kind of supporting them. We have all these mandates to generate leads, close one business, help them with all of this, but where is that recognition for marketing? And for those of you who are listening, who who potentially have like a say in this, I think there should always be a marketing person that gets to be a part of these as well, because it is this cohesive collaboration that you know we are trying to help accomplish, and I think any situation where people in marketing and operations get recognized for that is always going to be something to support.

Speaker 3: 30:37

Yeah, it was uh. I obviously had no expectation of winning an award like that, especially being in a marketing operation seat, uh, but they, the people who won the company level awards were also included in that president's uh trip, so it was uh. So it was a pretty good award to win and got to enjoy what the sales teams often get to do when they hit their numbers.

Speaker 1: 31:03

Right, jamie, I'm curious Do you think, if that was the case, it might inspire more marketers to really truly try to collaborate more with sales or other parts of the business, because I don't know about you more marketers to really truly try to collaborate more with sales or, say, other parts of the business, because I don't know about you, but my, my, my. My perception is there's a lot of people who might be listening. It will go like I try to work with those stupid salespeople, but they don't really. They're just, you know, they're pain in the ass to deal with, as opposed to maybe AJ's approach, which is I don't know, I'm just curious what you think about that. Yeah, are you saying that?

Speaker 2: 31:37

if sorry? Sorry, Michael, is that a question for me or AJ?

Speaker 1: 31:42

It was for you, Dan, because you brought it up, but I'm happy to hear AJ's perspective after too.

Speaker 2: 31:48

Sorry, aj. Yeah, I just I guess just to kind of close that thought off, I thought I think I mean I think there should always be collaboration between sales and marketing, regardless of if there is an acknowledgement about that or an award or some kind of benefit from that afterwards. But I just think it helps to facilitate elevating marketing operations right as a function and getting that credit and recognizing that, hey, there are a lot of support teams behind the scenes that are helping sales to achieve their targets and marketing is a huge part of that.

Speaker 1: 32:30

How about you, AJ? I'm curious that particular notion.

Speaker 3: 32:36

Yeah, I was going to chime in and say you know the part about a sales team being a pain, which I think the general theory out there is. That is typically true. I look at it a different way and I think the relationships are typically like that because they're not seeing the value within marketing. Relationships are typically like that because they're not seeing the value within marketing. So those are the types of conversations that I go into and ask them how can I help you the most?

Speaker 3: 33:13

And it might be something completely outside of the realm of what you're considering doing for the sales team. They might just need HubSpot automation to alert them when one of their top contacts is. It's the website and by you setting up that one workflow that is very easy to do. You've now built that trust, you've built that recognition and people like working with you because you're the person who helps solve their problem. So instead of them having to go into the CRM every day to see if their prospect visited the website, now they just know through email and doing little things like that I think goes a long way and in making those relationships better. And then you hear less about the friction between sales and marketing, because, even though it's not, you know, the ultimate thing you want to accomplish as a marketing team. You're you're building that relationship with the sales team.

Speaker 1: 34:06

Okay, I want to come back to this in a second, but I thought when you were first describing your approach to collaboration, especially the part about you're not expecting anything in return, I can imagine a number of people listening would be going like he's going to get taken advantage of, right. So I guess kind of an open-ended question here is like A do you feel like you've been taken advantage of? And B do you give a shit?

Speaker 3: 34:31

Yeah, that's a great question. I would say for me, I don't feel like I'm being taken advantage of because it's my job to help people, so it's just it comes with the territory. Sure, there's tasks that I don't think would necessarily need to do, but I do them anyway. If that's taking advantage of me, that's okay. But one place where I do draw a line on that is if I'm leading a team, I have pretty strict processes of how things need to be requested and things like that to help protect a team that is full of yes, people who will never turn down something and, you know, putting SLAs in place and things like that to help mitigate that potential of being taken advantage of.

Speaker 1: 35:22

Got it. Okay, that makes sense, and I'd be with you. Protecting your team makes sense to some degree. Okay, so long-time listeners, you're not going to be surprised. One of the things I really believe more marketing and marketing ops folks should do is to try to better understand what it's like. You're asking questions like how not just how can it help you, but as a part of that, it feels like you're trying to understand what matters to them and what could have an impact, as opposed to making some assumptions. Is that kind of what you're doing, whether it's intentional or, you know, coincidental?

Speaker 3: 36:18

I think at first it was coincidental, but now I've definitely put that into consideration when I'm doing things and collaborating with people. You can be narrowly focused and perform one function and get really good at that one function, which a lot of people do, and there's nothing wrong with that. But I enjoy being kind of a generalist and being able to make an impact across multiple points of a business. So being narrowly focused doesn't really achieve the goals that I have personally. So understanding all of those other aspects of business and how other people function and how other things work is just something that I naturally take an interest in and often pursue and try to get better at for my own personal reasons.

Speaker 1: 37:13

Do you feel like that gives you an opportunity to help them understand what you like when you're, especially when you're in your marketing ops specific role in time, what you like when you're especially when you're in your marketing ops specific role in time? And second, does it help? Did you give you an opportunity to help people understand what do you do in marketing ops?

Speaker 3: 37:27

I think so, uh, you always get the oh I didn't know you you could do that. I don't, I didn't know you did that in, in those sorts of things. Um, I think it also, you know, gives you the opportunity to like, build up a presence in, in where you are, within the company, and you become known as the person who can kind of fix things, regardless of where it is. And if you can't fix those problems that people have because of all of the collaboration you're doing across the company, you have ways to to point that person in the right direction. So, um, you know, there's a point in time where, if something new was on the horizon and somebody had a problem they want to solve, I was often just included in that conversation to see if there was any opportunity for me to help, which was a position I enjoyed being in.

Speaker 1: 38:19

Yeah, so you're sort of a hub of helping to solve problems through the organization at that point.

Speaker 3: 38:25

Yeah, and that's kind of how I viewed it. And you know, maybe that is a part of, like the RevOps portion, or go-to-market engineer titles that are now more common. But yeah, I've always taken that approach.

Speaker 1: 38:44

Gotcha. Okay, Well, we have. We've covered a lot of ground here, AJ, Is it so? Is there anything that you wanted to make sure we covered that we haven't already covered?

Speaker 3: 38:55

No, I don't think so. We covered a lot of really great stuff. I think you know this was a good conversation and to hear you know your perspectives on these types of things.

Speaker 1: 39:06

All right, I'm going to ask you a question that we started asking everybody and we kind of stopped doing it for no good reason. Just be curious. Like if there was some sort of certification for marketing ops which I think there's work towards that with the community and everything else but like if there was one like what would you say are like here's one or two or three things that absolutely need to be a part of the certification.

Speaker 3: 39:35

One that definitely needs to be in focus is business intelligence reporting, of being able to use something like Tableau or Power BI and that set of things. I feel like that's where a lot of people startdriven decisions and understand data in a slightly different way than just like an executive readout on a HubSpot dashboard or Salesforce dashboard.

Speaker 1: 40:11

Got it. It's a good one. I believe there's a big gap in the need for that skill and the demand for it and the actual supply of people who understand it. So I'm on board with that one. Yeah, AJ, it's been a lot of fun. Thank you for for sharing. It's always been great. If folks want to connect with you, learn more, maybe follow up with you, what's the best way for them to do that?

Speaker 3: 40:42

Yeah, just find me on LinkedIn. Always happy to have conversations and see if there's ways that I can help people out. Yeah, always open to having those types of chats.

Speaker 1: 40:55

Terrific, all right, well, thank you. Thanks, naomi. As always, it's always a pleasure to have you here. We will look forward to having our next session here soon. Until next time, if you have suggestions for guests or topics or want to be guests, please reach out to Mike, naomi or me and we would be happy to talk to you about that. Till next time, bye, everybody.

Speaker 3: 41:19

Thanks for having me.