Speaker 1: 0:24

Hello everyone, Welcome to another episode of OpsCast brought to you by MarketingOpscom, powered by all the MoPros out there. I am your host, Michael Hartman, joined today by my co host, Naomi Liu. How's spring up there in Vancouver?

Speaker 2: 0:38

Great, we've been having a stretch of sunny weather, so I can't complain.

Speaker 1: 0:42

Rub it in, while I've got thunderstorms going through here, such as North Texas this time of year, although we had a beautiful weekend, so I can't really complain, other than all the pollen. That's covering everything, anyway. So let's get started. Joining us today is Nicole Alvarez and she's going to talk to us about all the ugly work that goes on in behind the scenes for beautiful CRM marketing data. So Nicole is a solutions architect with ClearPivot. She is a solutions architect with seven years of experience with clients across multiple industries. She was born in New Jersey and has since lived in three different countries, which we'll get into a little bit. When she's not working, she is likely neck deep in an online course we also talked about that probably Trying to create hybrid plants. This site we haven't talked about, so I'm curious now, or contemplating how to how much rotisserie chicken it takes to train her cat, or is taken to train her cat. So, nicole, thanks for joining us today.

Speaker 3: 1:40

It is a pleasure, it is absolutely a pleasure, thank you.

Speaker 1: 1:43

Yeah. So let's uh, let's get into this a little bit before we really get into the meat of the topic. Yeah, it's always interesting. I think maybe your audience doesn't care about it, but I like it, so we're going to do it anyway. But I like to know a little more about people's. You know their story and their career journey, and so, yeah, you mentioned that you've lived in three countries. I know you're in Uruguay now. Hopefully I'm not butchering the pronunciation but, yeah, if you could share a little more about your career journey, how you ended up where you are, and maybe a little bit like how you ended up in all these different countries, and Uruguay being the latest.

Speaker 3: 2:25

Absolutely so. Part of it is my obsession with always learning something new, which you have, I mean, when you work in operations. It's part of it, so it's kind of what led me here. I also always loved to travel, and there is a necessity to travel while working if you do it long term. So I started working remote, actually in 2015.

Speaker 3: 2:50

So the landscape was completely different and at that point it was very limited to marketing, to programming, like any kind of development work, and, quite frankly, that was really it. So I decided to try my hand at being a developer in 2015. And I bricked both a phone and a computer and decided that wasn't for me. So I started as a content writer. What happens with that? Well, you have to know marketing to be a good content writer.

Speaker 3: 3:25

And then I realized, when I got into marketing, okay, it doesn't matter if I'm getting the best leads in the world, if sales doesn't have a process for working them, it doesn't matter how good the leads are. So then I got into marketing and sales operations, and then there came the service part, and one day I woke up and realized I'm working in RevOps now. So marketing still has a very fond place in my heart and that affects a lot of what I keep studying too. So, for example, here in Uruguay, I am studying cognitive science, which, oh my gosh, it's programming, it is psychology, it's philosophy Even the philosophy of the animal mind was the last course I took, and all of that comes into how I work with my clients, how I design processes and how I approach data.

Speaker 1: 4:26

I think it's interesting. It's funny how cognitive science kind of has an overlap. I don't know, amy, you may not remember this, but one of our very first episodes, early early on, we had Brandy Sanders on and she said she she mentioned something like I probably won't get it exactly right, but it was something like if you're in marketing ops or rev ops, right, you should really understand. I don't think she said cognitive science, but basically that kind of like. That kind of stuff like that and chess right, because just like being able to see three steps ahead or four steps ahead. Do you remember that, naomi?

Speaker 2: 5:05

Like vaguely, yes, like I remember the conversation, but not like the specific details like that.

Speaker 1: 5:11

I just I remember. I don't know why that one has stuck with me ever since, like now, four plus years later. Right, it's crazy.

Speaker 3: 5:19

That's incredible yeah.

Speaker 2: 5:21

But, yeah, I ended up in um.

Speaker 3: 5:24

I I always liked psycholinguistics. From when I studied, I never thought my psychology degree would apply so much to data operations and to marketing operations. But it really does, and because it is all just based on our own psychology, it's trying to take what's really happening, reduce it to numbers that are still useful to us and reflect a reality. I ended up actually watching a documentary during the pandemic on how we process information. I realized everyone they were interviewing had studied cognitive science. I went on linkedin.

Speaker 3: 5:59

I looked them all up I sent a connection request, and then I started uh studying it here I love it.

Speaker 1: 6:07

Yeah, I mean, I think I think to me the part that really connected the dots for me was like, yeah, like human psychology and we. One of the unique things I think which I enjoy about ops is the you know, the interaction we have with so many different types of people and so many different types of roles who have different kinds of things that they care about, different motivations, different um different of things that they care about, different motivations, different um different, different things that they're incented by. So like understanding all that is actually really really valuable if you kind of think about it that way.

Speaker 2: 6:40

Mm-hmm, I think the thing working in operations for basically my entire career the thing that I always find is, you know, the challenges and the issues that the different teams have tend to have underlying similarities, right? Oftentimes they're trying to find ways to automate certain processes, they're trying to find ways to streamline certain initiatives that they have, they're trying to find ways to utilize the tools that the organization has in their wheelhouse to do their job better with fewer resources. And I think a lot of times in ops marketing ops it's highly creative because of the problem solving aspect of it.

Speaker 2: 7:28

There's many different ways to get to the same end goal, but what is the best way? And it's always kind of that challenge, because I find that if you come up with a solution and you implement it, it's very rare that you will then change it to something else. Like once it gets implemented, then it's kind of there and it's like you know, five years later you have okay. Why do we do it this way? Oh, because we implement. You know, it's like so it's almost like you have to get right, like you have to get it right. You know, and it's it's it's because otherwise that kind of stuff just like stays around forever.

Speaker 1: 8:05

We need more creative destruction, right destruction happening on all this stuff.

Speaker 3: 8:11

Yeah well, there's something to be said for that, which is it can reflect a state at a point. But what's the essence of what we do? It's reflecting what actually happens with people and trying to approximate it with processes. Of course, five years later, I can assure you your team's not doing the same thing they were doing five years ago, or at least I hope not.

Speaker 1: 8:30

So I think it unfortunately happens more often than we want to believe it does, cause I've seen that. Yeah, like I was working at a place where the poor procurement person.

Speaker 1: 8:42

When I walked through cause I was trying to go, I was in the middle of that in my role from the marketing context and I was like every time it was like this really convoluted, complex process to do it and updating this one document and updating this other place and submitting something in the system, and I was like why? And it was just kind of like, just because that's the way we had been doing it right and no one had ever. I was like, oh my god, like I feel so sorry for you because you've got all this extra work that is not really adding value but is killing time.

Speaker 3: 9:12

All right, I want someone that does those AI meeting note takers to sound an alarm every time someone says that's the way we've always done it.

Speaker 1: 9:23

Like yeah, that would be. I actually like that idea. Yeah, right, yeah, I hope any developer listening.

Speaker 3: 9:27

I actually like that idea. I mean, yeah, right, that would yeah, I hope any developer listening if you. If you hear that, uh, get in touch.

Speaker 1: 9:35

Definitely it would be an interesting one to to flag that, um, okay. Well, this that's. It's a really interesting connection point, um, to go through that and why you moved there to your and I I'm not going to pronounce like you do, I'm going to pronounce it like the gringo. I am Uruguay, okay. So when we talked about this before, this whole idea of I think you've now called it the ugly work we talked about it before as the boring parts of operations being important. Talk to us about what you meant by that and and why you think it's so important.

Speaker 3: 10:12

If I come to a client and I start saying things like lead scoring, automation, workflows, dashboards, everyone gets super, super excited. These are the big, big, shiny goals that everyone wants, and it's not built by adding more things. It's built by taking the data you already have or collecting better data and then using it. So no one will get excited if I come in saying field audits, permission sets, process documentation. Everyone kind of just you know, their eyes glaze over and they're like wait a minute, I don't want to do that.

Speaker 3: 10:54

But sometimes even the best way to show the quality of a data is build that ideal. You know, quote, quote, report and show them. If we're reporting on the data in the state that it's in right now, this is the kind of result we get and this doesn't reflect reality. So sometimes it's a backwards approach where you can build something on bad data and then even use that as a way to demonstrate. This is why we need to clean it up. So part of this is the psychology of communicating to someone that, like, these big, shiny goals are based on a lot of hard and sometimes quote ugly work. But that's how we get the beautiful processes. That's how we get the beautiful results of it.

Speaker 1: 11:42

Do you see, you said that the data doesn't reflect reality. Like what? Because I initially for listeners, like I was like sort of had a look on my face, probably. But what do you mean by it doesn't reflect reality? Because in some ways, I would argue, it actually does reflect the reality of the processes and systems that are in place.

Speaker 3: 12:07

Well, let's take the example of reporting right. Say you want to build a fairly simple report on lead sources right Now. That gets us into the question of attribution. How do we define attribution? I know we could go down that rabbit hole for as long as we wanted to, but let's take a side journey. Um, let's say we're trying to report on a field called lead source. But let's say the whole team has permissions to create fields and everyone has realized there's a need for a lead source field. So suddenly you realize there's lead source, lead source, new lead source, test, lead source V1, lead source final. And imagine now that they are my nightmare of single line text fields. How do you consolidate that into this simple or shiny or beautiful lead source report? So that's what I mean when I say that these little details, like having unified fields that everyone knows how to find or use, and having permission sets that are guardrails and not handcuffs when it comes to things like this, make those processes easier and make everything flow better downstream.

Speaker 1: 13:25

Makes sense. So everything we've talked about so far you mentioned, I would say, put under the category of data. Are there other domains, documentation, and nobody gets excited for?

Speaker 3: 13:51

the process documentation meetings. Actually, one thing I see a lot is people being afraid to admit how their processes are, and we touched on this earlier. I assure you nobody's processes are perfect and they're never going to be perfect, and this is something you will constantly have to look at. So when you go in, when I go into a process documentation meeting, I'm not looking for the ideal state. I'm looking for what's actually working, because something is happening. We need to at least track that. That's how we can get data that reflects what's. You know what the reality of the situation is, and then we can improve it from there. But we have to look at what's actually happening first. The other hand of this is where's the documentation? Who manages the documentation? So this gets into the category of delegation responsibilities, management audits, which are not words that spark joy in a lot of people. So it's necessary.

Speaker 1: 14:54

My accounting friends probably get excited about those words.

Speaker 3: 14:59

I'd like to meet these people. Yeah, when you can show someone the value, it really drives it home, and that's where you can get someone's attention.

Speaker 1: 15:17

So, Naomi, I know you do, I think you still do like quarterly business reviews with stakeholders that you support, Like, do you like? Are you? How? How are you getting? Are you getting into that kind of conversation about all these things that are sort of like the hidden activities that need to happen, but are that are important, that for the visible ones?

Speaker 2: 15:35

I mean, that's almost what I think about it um, I find that those types of conversations are better in written form because, really, I think that when you start talking about like hidden, like things that were being mentioned, like you know, process docs, and like integrations and field changes and all of like it, eyes glaze over, people start paying attention. This is not something that they like. These are just words. It doesn't actually, you know. So I find that those types of updates are better suited for, like when you talk about like what does this actually mean for the person? Right? So if there's like a field change or like an update to certain like integrations or whatnot, like how does that actually impact them? Like, what's the end and result of that? The end result of that is now it's easier to see if somebody has left the company, right?

Speaker 2: 16:30

it's easier to see if, um, an email has bounced things like that, right, but those types of things I find are better communicated, in my opinion, in britain form via. You know, either via like a like a monthly like recap, or maybe it's posted somewhere on some kind of internal like a confluence, or it's like shared on an internal shared space, on show pad or whatever it might be.

Speaker 2: 16:57

Sure, right, um, just for documentation purposes and like what has been communicated out to people. Um, but it just depends on your audience, right? Instead of if it's for your business partners. Instead of saying like we made this field change, I moved it on the page layout to here it's now you can more easily see that this person has left the company. Um on this date like that.

Speaker 1: 17:20

It's really interesting because, um, I'm fascinated, because this is probably my own tendency, like, I prefer conversations about stuff like this because I find that it's hard to so many things can be misinterpreted with written, especially if I'm not, like I don't consider myself a great writer. I think I've gotten better over the years and tools have helped for that, but I feel like the nuance gets to be less.

Speaker 2: 17:46

But if you're trying to communicate it to like, sorry to interrupt, but if you're trying to communicate it to like, sorry to interrupt, but if you are trying to communicate it to, like, a wider audience, you can't have that conversation with, like, like, there's a lot of people that are just not gonna, they're gonna completely miss it. You know, and I want to make sure that it's written down, just so that I'm also like, did I remember to say this? You know, did they watch the recording? Did they? You know x, know X, y, z, and it can also, if it's on a meeting, you can also, like, you can write it down on a slide, you don't?

Speaker 3: 18:13

have to read it all, but then also like reiterate it, there's actually a whole. One of my focuses with my extracurricular studies is psycholinguistics and I highly recommend, if you haven't listened to anything from him or read anything from him, there is a person named steven pinker who focuses in psycholinguistics and I recognize the name, the dynamics of communication and the way we receive an interview. It's just mind-blowing. But he's got a great sense of humor so it's easy to digest oh good, like that, don't take himself too seriously.

Speaker 1: 18:51

Yeah, it's really interesting. I just because I I wasn't expecting it. So this is. This is why I love talking to naomi and others, because, like, I get another perspective and it challenges how I might think about it, my my default mode. So, um, okay, so this is. This is kind of interesting because there's all this hidden stuff, or boring stuff, or ugly work, whatever term we're going to use. So you listed a couple of things, nicole, like what are, what are some other, some of the other, like major categories of things that you think fall into that, into that bucket workflow audits for sure.

Speaker 3: 19:34

Like we mentioned before, if you build a workflow and you leave it alone for five years and someone builds maybe 3, 5, 10, 15, 20 workflows on top of it and then suddenly you wonder why fields aren't doing what you would expect them to do, check the workflows.

Speaker 1: 19:52

Marketo seems to be ripe for that kind of stuff, where there's all these workflows that are interacting with data and doing things that like if people set them up or go on and like you start getting sort of butterfly effect stuff that happens when you put new stuff in. Right Did this one thing and now we're like but something crazy is happening. Well, you gotta go yeah, dig into and to me it's like plumbing.

Speaker 3: 20:17

You know, if when your plumbing's working fine, you don't notice it and that is the sign of a good workflow, um, but when something happens with your plumbing, I can assure you you will notice immediately and it will not be a pleasant experience, but much like going through your workflows early and doing audits, maybe quarterly, let's be honest. I mean, not every team can do that. It's ideal but it's not always practical. If you can do it even once a year, just set a goal, that's realistic. Do it even once a year, just set a goal, that's realistic. But if you can at least look at what you have and revise it and say, okay, I understand what these are, I understand what they're doing, it is way better than dealing with something way down the line. That is much less appealing.

Speaker 1: 21:10

Yeah, definitely Any other major categories we want to talk about here?

Speaker 3: 21:17

um, one use case I see a lot more is forecasting. Um, everybody, I mean forecasting is such an easy sell. I mean everybody wants to see what's going to happen. That black box of uncertainty, of this fantasy of what does my future look like? How many marketing qualified leads can I expect? I mean it would be great. But again, that's all based on data.

Speaker 3: 21:44

Yeah, so it's not like you can just tack things on to a system that has its own faults. You have to look at it, you have to audit the actions you know you have to really think about. You have to. When I, for example, do a lead scoring project, the first thing I look at is closed one deals, which kind of gets us out of marketing, but it does have to do with it. So you think what actions do these people take? How are you measuring them? Are you measuring them? And then even going into naming conventions?

Speaker 3: 22:21

Because if you, for example, say that I don't know, there are so many different lead scoring methods, right, you could rank them on grades, you can rank them on percentages, you can rank them with emojis, you can rank them with wording conventions that are easily readable by humans. But does it make sense? Does it work and I assure you there are workflows, fields, permission sets and a lot of documentation behind that and it's like good, it's, it's good embroidery, right? You see the beautiful picture on one side and you flip it over and you go, oh my gosh, maybe I'm also just a terrible embroiderer, but I mean, that's what my embroidery looks like, at least yeah, no, that visual is great.

Speaker 1: 23:05

I know exactly what you mean, right? That's so funny, nami. You look like you were about to say something.

Speaker 2: 23:19

No, I'm just. I'm chuckling because I relate to that embroidery.

Speaker 3: 23:22

It's so true, it looks great on the front and you turn it over and you're like, oh, that's a hot mess, but you said something really I mean, both of you had really interesting points before too about this is great. I mean, we understand this as people that work in this every day. But how do you explain this to something like a client who may be focused on those beautiful things and might be, quite frankly, repulsed by all the work that has to go into it? So that's when those nuances like do they prefer an email, you know? Do they prefer a call? That's where that comes in.

Speaker 3: 24:07

I have two clients right now that are at startup level intensity. I actually don't know if they even sleep down for even a half hour meeting to go through reports. They will be like why am I here? So that's a great case for an email and they understand it and they have the need to understand it. And then I have some clients who really value that FaceTime dashboard. I might know that they need that kind of question and answer session or that they may give me another suggestion or say, hey, you know this report looks good, but can we add some more detail or can we add some more nuance? So it really does depend, and that's that communication aspect of, how do you make these ugly bits not only appealing but, you know, desirable? You know, how do you, how do you wrap these in this pretty package and say this is lead scoring, this is forecasting, this is that workflow, this is, you know, lead rooting. All these magical things you want, this is it.

Speaker 2: 25:14

So I think something with like the reports and dashboard piece too is I've actually for a long time now, when I create dashboards in Salesforce and you add your widgets right and instead of, I think, by default like the title of each tile defaults to the report title and then you can end up with a dashboard that you're sending to people. That can not make a ton of sense because it's something like you know why, year over year, you know like web lead bubble. It's just like you just have a whole bunch of acronyms and people are looking at it and you're just like what does it actually mean? You have to really sit down and like have a ton of mental energy to like see and understand what you're looking at Right. So I found just even like a really simple I don't want to call it a hack, but just like a really simple change was retitling all of those tiles and those widgets to how many leads that I generate this quarter, how many leads are currently open. You know what stage are opportunities created last month at.

Speaker 2: 26:25

Everything's a question, right, and so when I find that people yeah, so every single piece, or every single report too, that I send to people is. I always title it as a question so that they know what they're looking at is the answer to that question, and that makes sense.

Speaker 3: 26:40

That's brilliant and honestly so. So naming conventions is another thing that I would consider one of the ugly parts. But that's it. It's human Like the. You know right away what you're looking at.

Speaker 2: 26:52

right, and it stopped me getting questions about can we jump on a call so you can explain what this report is? But they know what it is. It's XM report. It says you know like, how many leads does X sales rep still have from last month? Right, like it's every single report that I create now, every single dashboard I create, always is titled with a question.

Speaker 3: 27:15

That's really fascinating to me but honestly, that's brilliant because it's what is the question? And then you have the answer. Here's the answer Yep, oh, I'm so using that. I'm so using that.

Speaker 2: 27:26

No more like QOQ. Why? Why year over year, you know, like previous fiscal year, like it, just no.

Speaker 1: 27:33

So get over the whole idea of trying to be super concise about those titles. Right Be descriptive.

Speaker 2: 27:38

Yeah, yeah, cause even sometimes I look at it, I'm like what am I looking at? Oh yeah, right so.

Speaker 3: 27:45

Yeah, I've worked with a lot of cases where there is an entire dictionary that my clients have put together to just educate people on the jargon they use, which sometimes, let's be real, that's necessary Depending on the industry. You know, you can't be saying five words when it could be an acronym, but there are things like those reports where it's like it has to be understandable. What's the basic essence of a report? We're asking a question and there's your answer.

Speaker 2: 28:17

Exactly Love that and it's so much, especially with people who are just like trying to understand, like you're looking at reports all day long. And I have seen a few others internally who have kind of copied my method, which is great. I love it right. I love that because it just it shows that it works right and it just keeps things much clearer.

Speaker 1: 28:43

That's a really interesting, without confusion. I love that. I love that hack. It goes back to human psychology, right, okay, so we've got all these things. So my experience is I think probably everyone, or the majority of people listening to this or watching this, will go like yeah, we all know this is really important to get the plumbing right. Right, get the data right, get the plumbing right. But we are stretched so thin because of all the more highly visible stuff. Right, getting a campaign out the door, getting an email generated, get a line to pay, like all these things. Getting a dashboard, even right, I think that falls in that category. What advice do you have? I'm actually going to ask both of you, because I think you're going to have two different perspectives One from a kind of more of a consulting side, one from in-house, like what? What have you done that has helped to create some time and space for your you know, for you to you or your teams, to be able to focus on some of that, you know, background work? Nicole?

Speaker 3: 29:53

So for me and this may be a controversial opinion what I have found works in 90% of my cases and again, this might be a controversial opinion my background we're visual creatures. We want to see something. Most of our brain is devoted to visual processing. I'll build a bad report. So if they want to see a lead squaring model and it's a hard sell Bad meaning like, I'll build it with the data we have.

Speaker 1: 30:26

Okay, so exposing the bad data?

Speaker 3: 30:29

Exactly, exactly, exactly. So I'll build it as it should be. It's something you can look at and see, wow, this doesn't reflect the reality at all. And then I can go in, I can take that curiosity, that question from whoever I'm working with and then say, okay, so this is how I build it and I take kind of an education stance because they should know this. My ideal is in a dream world. As someone who primarily works as a consultant, I would love for every single one of my clients to know what I know in a few years, and my ideal world is I would be without a job because they would know as much as I do. So I want them to see you know. If we build a report with the data we have, this is what it looks like. Are these reflecting the reality of your situation? No, this is how we fix it. And then we get that aha moment Like that's it, that's what works, and then they understand that value.

Speaker 1: 31:39

Yeah, I mean I I'm an advocate for like don't wait on reporting until your data is right. Cause it will never be that way. So like, start, start the reporting to expose it so you can then go incrementally clean it up and fix it. So totally love that. How about you, naomi, I curious, like what you've done over the years to years to be able to get some time and space for your team to do some of that kind of stuff.

Speaker 2: 32:01

I think it's a challenge. I think a lot of teams are stretched very thin resource-wise. You're always trying to do more with less. To be honest, I'm still struggling with that.

Speaker 3: 32:20

Yeah it very much depends on the person you're working with too. There are some people that are very open. I mean, you know, some of my more technically focused clients can honestly get overwhelmed knowing the work that goes into it, and you would think that the people who work more heavily with this and have more understanding might understand the value more at first. But ironically enough, some of my clients who have never even touched a CRM before are some of the most open-minded and curious. But there's such a spectrum of people to work with. I mean, understanding how to work with people is understanding how to work with data. It's just one form of using it to reflect what's happening, be honest with yourself and then improve, which I think everyone wants to do in basically every aspect of their life I think I remember having a conversation like and I've always sorry, michael- no, go ahead

Speaker 2: 33:19

I was just saying. It's like I think something that I have I've struggled with is you know, like you are generating reports because you're either asked for them or you're proactively doing them because you know that. You know some of these reports are needed for the business. But then what do people do with them? Right? So yes, whenever I guess I get asked for reporting like it's very rare that I will just here you go, because I find the last thing I want them to do is receive the report and then they look at it like that's nice and then file it away into a folder called reports from Naomi or something.

Speaker 2: 33:59

I think something that I realize is oftentimes, when people are asking for reports, it's not actually the report that they're looking for, but they're actually looking for is like, what am I supposed to do now? Right? So if and I think it's just understanding like where the ask is coming from, who's asking it, and you know, if it's somebody who is not necessarily, um, someone who, like, likes looking very granularly at data, oftentimes they just want to know what happened and what can we?

Speaker 2: 34:28

do. Did it work or not? Should we never do this again? Should we do more of it? Should we put more money into it? Where are the gaps? Tell me what to do.

Speaker 3: 34:39

It goes back to the essence of why we're doing any of this in the first place. There's a question, there's a desire that they have, and this is one way of answering it.

Speaker 1: 34:49

Yeah, I mean I I probably push back every time someone comes to me and says we need a dashboard for blah right Whatever that blank is.

Speaker 2: 34:57

What are you going?

Speaker 1: 34:58

to do with that dashboard?

Speaker 2: 34:59

Well, and I'm going to do anything.

Speaker 1: 35:06

The level of effort to create a dashboard. I mean in the general sense, not just like Salesforce. Right is, essentially, you're consolidate, you're putting all a bunch of different reports into one that have some sort of connection. And my argument would be if we don't have anything today, let's not start with the idea, like, let's not go with the goal to build a dashboard, let's go to build the first report. Build the first report, get that nailed down, then we can move to the second one and eventually, over time, we might have a dashboard that we actually can use for an appropriate audience. But if you go into it like we have to have this dashboard and we already know what these things are like.

Speaker 1: 35:50

I think, first off, you probably never finish and, second, if you do, you're probably going to be wrong as much as you're going to be wrong Absolutely. I truly believe that. So I was going to go kind of getting back into this like, how do you convince leadership to give you the ability to spend time on this? I actually worked with a manager of mine at one point who I was trying to do like hey, like our data is kind of messy. We need to. My team needs to be able to allocate some time to try to address that, whether it's, you know, mass updates or go find, like what's causing it from a process or system standpoint, and address that over time. I said I know this is not sexy stuff, like that's the words I used and I mean I was kind of like expecting to get pushback and what I actually got was she's like, she's like actually, yeah, that's very sexy. Like we need, like we she. So she recognized it. So I think, if you're fortunate enough to have somebody who gets the value of it even if I would say that that person probably didn't really wouldn't understand all the details about behind what it was, and somebody who trusted me, which is helpful, but I was like I had to, like that was somebody who would get have my back. Let's go do that Right, and it's going to be useful. They saw the vision to me.

Speaker 1: 36:59

I keep coming back to a lot of these things, as we've talked throughout the earlier part of this conversation. The human psychology part of it definitely is. I think, something is important, right, understanding your audience. But I think there's also this element of storytelling and, nicole, you might have this like. The one thing that I always think about is humans are wired for stories, right, and so I always find my thing about like, how do for stories right, and so I always find myself thinking how do I tell the story to this person or this group of people, whether it's written or verbal or whatever? Is that a part of it too? Connecting the dots, like the story is like. We need to invest this time and effort in this boring ugly, whatever activity, because the outcome is going to be this. That's going to be a benefit for all of us, right?

Speaker 3: 37:51

Yes, actually, fascinatingly enough, this is one of the things that currently we think is, as far as we can tell, unique to humans the ability to tell stories, the ability to take these abstract symbols and connect them, to extract meaning out of them. And it applies everywhere in life. And listen, if I'm going to be staring at data for eight hours a day, I better have some meaning I can get out of it. So I've developed this like Zen-like relationship with data and sometimes explaining it to stakeholders that don't have time to sit down and drink water for 15 minutes out of their day. So how do you tell a story? How do you communicate?

Speaker 3: 38:33

This is going to be an eight hour project. You may have thought it would be 15 minutes. Here's why, and here's why this is actually a good thing, right? So that skill is so essential and I very much thank my background as a, as a copywriter and when I was younger, and even today sometimes I still write fiction and I think that's been one of the most valuable things to every part of my career, even the day, especially the data part.

Speaker 1: 39:01

Interesting, yeah, changing course a little bit like. Another thing you and I touched on when we first talked was and I think this ties back to data and process and everything else is like I'm going to put it a couple of different ways, I guess being an advocate for customers and understanding the buying journey. How does that tie into like all this as well? Right, I mean, is it? Is it, um, somehow like really tied to it? Is it a different topic? Like, how does it? How do you find that relates to what we do as operations folks and the data stuff?

Speaker 3: 39:41

Oh, absolutely, oh my gosh, if everything so, to start off, every single thing is tied to the buyer's journey, I would, if I could, have one wish, and I'm not even asking the genie for three wishes, I'm just going with one. I want every CEO of every company to go through the exact process that their client goes through, just to see what it's actually like. Goes through just to see what it's actually like. Everything we base everything off of starts there, and that's again touching on that storytelling aspect. What is actually happening? What are they going through? What's that process like to them? If you lose sight of your own customers, everything is going to fall apart. You could look at the best data in the world. It really could reflect what's happening and you could still be scratching your head if you lose sight of what a person actually does when they're interacting with your company.

Speaker 1: 40:35

Definitely it's interesting to me. I don't know what you all do, but because of the space I've been in now for a couple of decades I guess marketing and data and all that I tend to like. I know a lot of people get annoyed like unsubscribe on a regular basis, but I'm just going to unsubscribe from all these things that I don't really care about anymore. I almost never unsubscribe from anything and part of that is because I'm trying to at least loosely observe how they're operating. What do they do, and I'm always surprised and this happens, I think, more on personal stuff, right.

Speaker 1: 41:07

So retailers, where I have had no real interaction with them for years, and I continue to get daily, weekly emails and I often wonder, like, how much is that costing them in terms of actual cost? Right, database size, because they've got a bunch of people like me who are not really interested new life stage or whatever and like it's like to me, it's like plus, it's also just like, are they even moving the needle? Right? And some of them are just naturally like tied to, like life sky, like life stage, right? My kids were younger so I was like paid attention to things that were more for each of them and it's no longer relevant because they're older, but some of them are just like I bought one thing one time, right Research one thing one time and then never done anything else, and it's just like I don't know why they continue to do that. B2b is not immune from that, but it's like the same thing applies, right.

Speaker 3: 42:08

I would even argue that you'd be a valuable. In my opinion which again might be controversial I would even argue that that's a value in its own. You're interested. I mean, you may not need this, but they're top of mind, you're following their story. They're providing something that attracts you. You may not be looking for the same stuff you were looking for five years ago, but you're following the story of the company. They're present in your mind and, let's be real, we all know how much a word of mouth recommendation is worth.

Speaker 1: 42:37

So yeah, I mean, I mean they're not really top of mind. I mean I think I'm an outlier case because, like I think many other people would have started just automatically deleting or unsubscribing, like I'm just like sending you the slow breakup emails.

Speaker 1: 42:53

Yeah, I mean I've. I mean this is a good example also of like, tell me if this rings true, naomi, like you get into the conversation when it comes to, hey, we've got to renew with Marketo or HubSpot or whoever right, and you know one of the drivers is going to be database size, right, hey, we, you know our database is so big. If we, you know that means the cost is going to be, you know, x times whatever percent that we currently pay. So how can we clean up our database In? I find out.

Speaker 1: 43:23

Find is that we make a case where, like these people who haven't interacted in, pick the time frame 18 months, 24 months, 36 months right, let's just. We can do one of two things. We can just say they're just not interested. We're going to just delete them or move them into a space like, uh, what, we're going to try to do one last crazy attempt to try to get them re-engage and if they don't, then we'll do it like, but at the end of the day you're dropping and it typically, even if you do the second case where you try to re-engage them, most people won't. So then people get freaked out. They're like, oh, we're going to lose 20 of our database like but you're not really.

Speaker 3: 44:04

But what's the value? We may be scared by that 20%, but what's the actual value? We're going back to that essential question Is it worth the?

Speaker 1: 44:13

cost. Was it worth the cost to keep those records in your database versus losing them. I mean if they come and get re-engaged, naturally great. I'm not saying never, just, but it's often like the volume, like this desire to see a large number of in our day. Our database has X number of people Like I. Don't get the fascination with it.

Speaker 2: 44:41

I think it's one of those things where it's like if you tell someone they can't have something, they then want it.

Speaker 1: 44:49

Yeah, it's like, it's like, it's like hoarders, right, right.

Speaker 2: 44:55

In the off chance that that one person is going to open that email and then buy our product.

Speaker 3: 45:02

Yes, well, this is another thing. Going back to just the way the human brain works, we are extremely risk adverse. So if you frame it like that, like oh my gosh, out of that 20% of people, we could have found one actual client, instead of saying, hey, if we focus our efforts on this 80%, we could put so much more effort into actually getting this to convert to a good sale or a marketing qualified lead or whatever. Your why, whatever your desire actually is.

Speaker 1: 45:34

I think a lot of this is like a misunderstanding of how buying actually happens nowadays, especially in the B2B space, right? So much of that research happens outside of anything that we have visibility into, and so it's like you know, why are we doing nurture again?

Speaker 3: 45:54

Yeah, and those are the and I mean that's again. I come from four years right now of client managing. I've been in-house, I've been doing consulting roles, I've worked with startups, I've worked with enterprise level companies in just about every industry under the sun. But that is the one unifying thing, is the why. What, ultimately, are we trying to get at here? And it's so easy, given how many details are involved in these operations, in this data, in all your technology, you can easily look into that and never look up again. But if you keep asking yourself, why are we doing this, what do we actually want to get? And if you go back to those original kind of essential questions, everything else flows, even the ugly bits of your data.

Speaker 1: 46:41

Yeah, all right, well. Well, this has been a fun conversation. It's like we've covered all kinds of random stuff and still got through everything we wanted to, I think. But, um, one last thing, nicole. Is there anything that we didn't cover? You want to make sure our listeners heard? It's okay to say no too no, I think that's it.

Speaker 3: 47:03

The beauty is in the ugliness. The final results are in all this hard work that goes to it. It may seem subtle, but when you can look at something like a good forecast, a good dashboard, a workflow that works well or something that's actually doing what you wanted, that's it. And when you see all the work that went into it, that's your own prize, love it and definitely's it. Yeah, and when you see all the work that went into it, that's your own prize, love it and definitely celebrate it.

Speaker 1: 47:29

For some reason in my head, I'm coming. I think it was Da Vinci who said, like when they asked like how do you get you know, how do you carve these amazing figures? He's like it's already there. My job is just to remove the right pieces, right? I don't know why that popped up.

Speaker 3: 47:44

I love that.

Speaker 1: 47:45

Um, and I may misattribute that, but there's a like an old famous sculptor who did the A wave. So but if people do want to have like how to continue this conversation with you or learn more about what you're doing, what's the best way for them to do that, nicole?

Speaker 3: 48:07

LinkedIn, always LinkedIn. Which?

Speaker 1: 48:08

I am on all the time. Fantastic Well, Nicole, thank you, it was great, Enjoyed the conversation. Naomi, as always, good to see you and thank you to our longtime and new listeners and supporters. We are always grateful for that. If you have suggestions for topics or guests or want to be a guest, as always, reach out to Naomi, Mike RZA or me and we would be happy to engage with you on that Until next time. Bye everybody, Thank you, Thank you.