Michael Hartmann: 0:25

Hello, welcome to another episode of OpsCast brought to you by MarketingOpscom, powered by all the MoPros out there. I'm your host, michael Hartman, flying solo today. Today we are going to be exploring how marketing can earn its seat in the boardroom and what it takes to partner with sales, revops and the rest of the executive team to truly influence revenue strategy. So joining me to talk about this are two guests today with deep experience across B2B leadership and consulting. So joining me to talk about this are two guests today with deep experience across B2B leadership and consulting.

Michael Hartmann: 0:51

First up is Kyle Priest, who has held roles as a CMO, cro, coo and president of companies ranging from private equity-backed SaaS firms to global agencies like Razorfish. He's built and led marketing, sales and growth teams and has a front row seat to what works and what doesn't when presenting to the board. Also joining me is a return guest, eric Hollibone, who is president and COO at DemandLab, a marketing consultancy helping organizations mature their marketing operations and technology strategy. He's also an engineer by training, yay, engineers which shows up in how we bring structure to complexity, especially when translating marketing activity into business value. So, kyle, eric, thanks for coming and welcome to the show.

Eric Hollebone: 1:30

Thanks for having us.

Kyle Priest: 1:32

Thank you, Michael Thanks.

Michael Hartmann: 1:35

Well, and I think, Kyle, I think we figured out you and I are in the same geographic area where we live, but I don't think you're in Texas right now. Is that right?

Kyle Priest: 1:42

I'm enjoying the 70 degree weather in the Midwest right now. It's wonderful.

Michael Hartmann: 1:46

Yeah Well, we've got a little bit of a dip today. In case you're wondering, it's only supposed to be 94. Oh, and I I think I did the translation for some people in europe earlier today. I think that equates to 35, 36 celsius something about that yeah, all right.

Michael Hartmann: 2:05

Well, let's. Let's start with an idea here before we get going. So before and this is something I think we talked about, like before marketing ever gets into a boardroom or executive team meeting, depending on the company you said that C-suite needs to be aligned, and I think, kyle, this was you who said this. So what does that look like in practice, and and how often do you actually see that?

Kyle Priest: 2:31

Yeah, thanks, michael. And you know, eric, feel free to join in or add on to this. What I would say is there's a lot of depends on the size of your company and the situation of, you know, lifecycle of your company. Are you private equity backed? Are you public? Are you small, medium large? Are you hyper company? Are you private equity backed? Are you public? Are you small, medium large? Are you hyper growth? Are you growth? Are you operate Like? What modes are you in and where are you at?

Kyle Priest: 2:53

Because that tends to change the complexion a bit of what goes on in the boardroom and also with that, and what industry you in and sort of how mature is your overall kind of commercial organization? Because sometimes the CMO is front and center in the boardroom, sometimes they're not in the boardroom, but when the team is aligned, I felt that always all members of the leadership team staff, elt, are in the boardroom and, funny enough, that's not always the case and more and more, when it is aligned, it means that everyone's rowing in the same direction on a few fronts. You know, there's, there's the vision, but then there's what are we trying to do this year that will get us towards it and what are we really prioritizing and are we all sticking to those priorities and are we agile enough to change right? Like it's one thing to say, you know, we're gonna, we're gonna plant flag here and we're gonna, we're gonna get most of our bookings over here or we're gonna enter this market. It's gonna go, you know, go fast. But everything changes the minute the plan hits the street right. And so a really aligned company is an agile company because they're connected and focused on the right things together and when that happens between the board and the leadership team, growth is exponential because it's effective and it's efficient and it just works.

Kyle Priest: 4:23

When marketing isn't in the boardroom, it tends to indicate that maybe first the leadership team is not as aligned as it could or should be, or at least it creates a chance where maybe the full story is not on the bookings and the margin and the quality of revenue, which I'll talk about as we go on, is the most important thing for anyone in the commercial group. It's really about sales and marketing being not just tied at the hip but really connected in every single way, and more and more we call that a growth function where we see at least sales and marketing and rev ops, or sales ops and marketing ops, depending again where you're at um all aligned. And when the team is aligned at the leadership level, then the story becomes consistent and clear and the lexicon or the words everyone uses are the same. And if there's one thing you want to really tap into wherever you work, it's what's our lexicon and how do we communicate the targets, the values, the goals. And then how do we report insights against those and performance against those?

Kyle Priest: 5:41

When you see those, those are kind of for me the KPIs, that there's an aligned team. If I'm entering a company to look at it, you know, are they speaking in one language? Do they have clear not just clear vision, values, goals, but they all speak about them the same. And if you're trying to grow your career or improve your team's integration, you can start there. That's probably the first place to start.

Eric Hollebone: 6:02

I can talk about that all day, michael. I'll stop there. I'd like to pick up on two threads and give one example. I think the point about storytelling is one of the key focuses that we kind of underrate at times and I think it needs to take a stronger position in most people's thinking and thought process. It's like the evolution of the mission and vision actually becomes a story. The story is the kind of the output, and I think we're going to circle around that one a little bit.

Eric Hollebone: 6:27

Today we work with Fortune 500, from our consulting all the way down to small companies. But one of the ones I really enjoy working with is Series A, or, once you go for the series B. It's a story about growth, which means you better have your marketing story and your revenue story set for those investors, and I find that leadership doesn't include marketing or doesn't understand the value of marketing at that point in an integrated way like you've described. But I just want to like boil it down to like it's really important, even at the small size of companies, that this alignment happens. Otherwise you're missing a huge potential or you're just slowing your growth is the other answer. You're just not getting to the goals that you really want.

Michael Hartmann: 7:21

Yeah, yeah, I mean I really agree with Kyle, your statement, Like getting aligned on you called it the lexicon but like having a common meaning and terminology you're going to use within the organization about key metrics or topics. The way you talk about them, I think, is really important, because I see this all the time where just people in general, right, where they term I like to use, they're in violent agreement, right, but they're saying the same thing but with different words, and think that they're not agreeing and they are, and that happens all the time. Or the other one, right, they're using the same words with different meanings and they truly aren't agreeing, but they think they are.

Eric Hollebone: 7:59

I think that, comes down to the lexicon, really forms the elevator pitch that everybody should be able to give about the company, and that's one way to test whether they're actually aligned or not is are you not just reciting the elevator pitch, but do you understand the elevator pitch that you're trying to give? And ultimately, that should be your key differentiator for your, whatever your vision is at this current time and I find a lot of people have struggled to articulate that throughout an organization, top to bottom. So it's a very valid point about getting aligned and how to get aligned and then testing how to get aligned.

Michael Hartmann: 8:37

Yeah. So I mean, Eric, you touched on this just a little bit right this idea that many marketers want to be, or at least say they want to be, revenue centric, but they don't really either don't know how or they haven't really done any examples and haven't been taught how to do it. So when you're working with CMOs or marketing leaders, how do you help them guide towards that? What do you do to help them with that?

Eric Hollebone: 9:03

Well, let me step back and go back a little bit in their personal histories. Most people who went through a university course never really got a financials background and I think that's kind of the thing that's missing in the marketing department. And some people have a real allergic reaction to a spreadsheet and, honestly, as a marketing leader, you have to get over that because that's how you're going to communicate to the rest of the organization. I mean, yes, brand is nice, yes, operations is the way you get things done. But how you communicate has to be in the reference language of the business, which happens to be revenue or cost, in other words, financial. And if you're not on the same page, you're never going to be. Your message is never going to be learned. If you can't translate you know the metrics you have internally to something impactful externally, you're not going to have an impactful message.

Eric Hollebone: 9:48

And this goes back to a point that I've sort of been ruminating over for years, which is marketers, especially marketing leadership, is supposed to be a storyteller externally to the organization. That's the role they're given by the structure of the organization, but they internally turn out to be one of the poorest set of communicators and storytellers to the rest of the organization. They're always pushing out oh, here's the brand message, but they never follow it up with anything that makes them credible, nothing that adds the value of what they do and how they do it to the rest of the organization. One of my little quips in life is if you enter an organization as a new marketing leader, the first person you should walk down actually, there's two, two people you should walk down and shake the hands with and become friends with is your CFO and your CIO. Cio is technology and all that kind of stuff, but if you want to do anything in an organization, you better be aligned with the CFO.

Michael Hartmann: 10:45

I tell marketing ops leaders to maybe not the CFO, but whoever their key finance person is.

Eric Hollebone: 10:50

Oh, yeah, go make friends in finance because they'll A give you the money and permission to spend and, b they'll be your strongest advocate when decisions are made at the table if they believe in your growth story. And part of what marketing does is they don't tell the growth story internally does is they don't tell the growth story internally. So I think there's a big gap in marketing leadership in terms of telling the or learning how to tell the story at the board. And I would turn to Kyle and say you've been at boards. What are your thoughts around how marketing presents itself at a board meeting or getting everybody else ready for a board?

Kyle Priest: 12:15

board meeting or getting, even getting everybody else ready for a board. Yeah, and you know, getting ready for the board effectively means that everybody, if you want to be effective, means that everybody in marketing is thinking revenue first. Because if it's only about top of funnel and brand and major initiatives, major tactics, that's not interesting. Those are the KPIs that lead to the outcomes. And it's easy to say focus on outcomes, not KPIs. But I think what happens to RevOps, teams, marketers, salespeople, support people, success people is a little bit of a roundabout way to get into the board is everybody gets focused in their their day-to-day tactics and the things they have to get done or the KPI metrics they need to hit. I need to generate three times pipeline coverage, I need to make sure these reports are out on time and, you know, match to the board pack, whatever it is.

Kyle Priest: 13:12

But the reality is, if everyone is thinking revenue first, we, we change everything about how we think and I would challenge the marketers and the RevOps to not think, oh, I'm in sales ops or marketing ops, or marketing or sales, I'm just in growth. And this is all leading to how do you show up to the board and how do you show up to the external. There's really three audiences. I think, just for what it's worth, that are three groups of audiences. One is up, that could be the leadership team, the board, investment community or even market. The other is across, and across is only across the whole company or across departments outside of sales support. Right, because those are within the third group sales support mark, because those are within the third group, and the reason I bucket them like that is up has its own form of story. Across is a different cadence and set of focus and KPIs to make sure that you're achieving what needs to be connected to up and then within is what you need to do every day in your function or sub-. You know you're in marketing. You need to focus in demand or performance, or you need to focus in uh, social or pay, you know, earn what, whatever it is your web tech, you know all those things are uh, very important what you do every day. They're not important up above unless they're supporting what the up above wants to hear. And so, um, if everybody can think growth first and we've talked more about that here in a minute too, probably but with that mindset, you go into the board effectively, when you go in at the hip with revenue and support and success.

Kyle Priest: 14:49

You know, the thing that the board wants to hear is A are we on plan? And, by the way, on plan means predictable. It means predictable Boards don't want to see you crush your number and go over by 120% if you're publicly traded. They do if you're hyper growth, right. So you got to know what your milestone is.

Kyle Priest: 15:08

But whatever it is, predictability or linearity of the pipeline is really important. So it's not just the current state performance, it's are we predicting the future? Well, and marketing plays a huge role in that, right. And so when we think about an inbound lead or an outbound or a partner or a field or a new logo or an existing, they only want to hear about that after they hear did we hit it? And then they want to hear what did we do to make sure we hit it? That was great, and what did we learn? And what macros and what micros.

Kyle Priest: 15:41

And so the only way to get your, your board, that kind of data is to really think about revenue first. Um, and when everyone is focused, and again you may be building a brand, I've been in situations where we've acquired 56, uh companies, 39 companies, uh, the one I'm in now is 25 so far and growing, and it's all about brand in a certain way, but we don't focus on that. We focus on the growth number and then quality of revenue. So I'm going to come back to that and the board wants to hear okay, did you hit your number in the areas you thought you would that would get us the most value for our shareholders, and are you running into roadblocks? Are you running into headwinds? Are you celebrating tailwinds?

Kyle Priest: 16:23

So great board marketing shows up like connected with everything else revenue first, followed by quality of revenue or bookings, however you want to think of that. They're not the same but for purposes of this discussion. And then major initiatives and their marketing tends to focus on. Look at all the things we did and you know what Activities. I totally empathize because it is a hands-on sweat job to get 100 trade shows done, to get 1,000 campaigns out, but the volume doesn't matter to the up audience.

Kyle Priest: 17:01

What they want to know is what did you learn through that major initiative? Or how did it help you achieve what we asked you to achieve? And they can pass that learning on. If it's private equity, they'll share across portfolio right. Or it validates and builds trust with the board that hey, these guys are really on top of what's going on in their business, they can pivot, they're agile and they can predictably hit their targets and they're growing in the right way with the right quality of revenue. Um, there's a lot more to say there right now, uh, but. But I would say just having that mindset is a big step forward.

Eric Hollebone: 17:32

A couple go ahead, eric, if I was, to boil that down as to how does that translate down into the marketing level. There's a story to be told there, and especially in the B2B space. I'm not as familiar with B2C, but it's similar, somewhat simpler sometimes. There's still three things that a marketer needs to report on. To tie into what you just identified, kyle, I mean, at the end of the day, marketing has to tell the organization what output they have and why it mattered. In other words, if you're reaching for MQLs or leads passed to sales, or whatever the metric may be, as the output of marketing, that's great, that's the outcome that you're looking for and that's what you should be reporting on. We impacted, you know, 60% of the deals we passed on to the BDRs or to the account reps. That's your goal? Okay, great. But then back to your point about predictability. Okay, that got me this quarter. What am I going to get in a future quarter?

Eric Hollebone: 18:29

So now I need to almost step back in time and assure the people I'm reporting to that I have done my homework and the story continues as I go further and further back in time. And certainty, which means that, ok, I'm going to hit my next quarter because I have people flowing through the funnel properly, at the right velocity, at the right stages to be able to hit the target for next quarter as well. So I see this whole process as basically three big reporting steps. Lead generation gets your volume in the door. Engagement is that stage between getting a qualified name from demand gen In other words, the handoff from demand gen is a qualified name. And then the nurturing or engagement people are about moving that person from that initial touch to being successful at moving into the deal stage and ultimately, the deal stage, the output.

Eric Hollebone: 19:18

So if you put that in storytelling, that's a beginning, middle and end You've got your story right there. That's what the company wants to hear, because that every single one of those pieces affects the revenue journey. If we do our job right in marketing and marketing ops and rev ops to tell that story. It's very simple, metric what do we contribute to the overall sales pipeline in terms of a percentage you have to work out. Every organization has to figure out what that denominator, denominator ratio, looks like. So you don't fight over it. But once it's set, it's set.

Eric Hollebone: 19:48

Then you go back in your own bailiwick, which is you know how do we move people around, engage them and get them started, which is that engagement story. How are we compelling, how do we differentiate, how do we move people forward, what do we do with them? And then, of course, the interest of getting them in the door in the first place. And getting them in the door takes a slight two-form split. It's like do you know everybody in your lead world? In other words, you have a certification or something that qualifies that person, or is it open and you're just going after everybody? So once you sort those pieces out, the story tells itself and now becomes a simple way of doing it. Now you can then add on to the story with now that we got the basics out of the way. In other words, 80% of keeping the lights on is what Mark is doing.

Eric Hollebone: 20:32

Now you go back to the lessons that Kyle's trying to extract, which is, and how are you doing it? Better each quarter or month or year or whatever, and what am I learning from it? So I'm getting better at this cycle. Each and every time there is an operational efficiency one, but it's really it's only going to add 10 to 15% of productivity. At the end of the day, what really is interesting is what's new. What have you learned? How have you implemented this, how is it impacting the numbers and so forth. So I think there's an intuitive built-in story in marketing that marketing is not articulating very well to anybody else.

Michael Hartmann: 22:13

Yeah, so I mean, kyle, one of the things you said echoes. I did a white paper for the marketing ops community last year around how to measure B2B marketing effectiveness and one of the key points for me as I was doing the research and talking to people about it is I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with any of those kind of metrics, right, you could go all the way up from like tactical, you know system level stuff to campaign level, to all the way up to say attribution or contribution kinds of things. Level, to all the way up to say attribution or contribution kinds of things. What I, what I assert, is that actually it's that those have been used with the wrong audience for the wrong thing, right, in a lot of cases. And one of the things I think I same thing here. Right, I think a lot of marketing leaders have missed the opportunity to tell stories, have missed the opportunity to tell stories, and so how would you, how would you think about storytelling at the board level? Right, what would you know?

Michael Hartmann: 23:14

what would that be? I know you. You said something to us that I think shocked both Eric and me. So like, like, I'll let you let the that you go into that with our audience then.

Kyle Priest: 23:23

Yeah, I think you probably talked about the funnel, which is is is my favorite thing to talk about. So I think to to build when we have everybody in the sales and marketing and rev ops I'll just say rev ops, but again, sometimes we know it's sales ops and marketing ops and more could be support ops, aligned on lexicon and aligned on focus and priorities. We need a scorecard for that and unfortunately, too many times the marketing teams will see the scorecard from their view, which is the above, the funnel, top of funnel, on down, and the first thing I do when I enter a new role is I flip that funnel right on its head and we always report from the closed one back. We always report from the closed one back. And if everyone will start doing that in their day-to-day, wherever you are in your career, what'll happen is you'll think more like an owner because you'll say, okay, the goal is a hundred closed, one new logos and a hundred expansions with clients at this margin, at this, at this bookings rate for the quarter or for the year, and of that we want 17% from this channel partners. We want 30% of that to source from this. And now you're tying your every day not to okay, well, I have that number in the middle, that's all I care about. No, you care about the closed one, because today you certainly also care about that KPI, but the up audience cares about that top number. And if you're in RevOps, the best thing you can do to help the organization is start reporting that revenue by quality of revenue and source right.

Kyle Priest: 25:04

And source needs to be specific Marketing inbound, bdr, sdr, outbound field, self-generated, partner generated right. That is really important. And as you get to understand your funnel stage gate progressions by inbound source, by type of product, by region, all those different metrics. That's what the board is ultimately going to want to hear. They're going to want to hear that we achieved the target and from the revenue officer and the marketing officer side by side, doing the same presentation together and in that or if that's one person they're going to, they're going to deliver that, but they're going to deliver a unified message. It says the way we did.

Kyle Priest: 25:40

It is for the last six months we've been working really hard on accelerating the stage gates and we were able to do that because we we realized we had a lot of great marketing inbound leads but we didn't have enough coverage to return the calls or the emails or deal with the chats. And so we fixed our customer's lifetime experience up front and we got to where we cleared out some of the noise and we were able to focus. That's a board story they actually want to hear, supporting how they achieve the number and giving confidence we're going to hit it in the future too, because we keep getting better. And so the story becomes all about did the company hit its number, how did marketing contribute to it, and what did marketing learn and do differently to make sure that happened? And what are they going to do to make sure it happens in the future? And, eric, your three tranches are spot on right and that's the up message. That's what the ELT wants to hear, the leadership team wants to hear every month, that's what the board wants to hear, and ultimately that'll make its way into the investor deck. We are so good at sales and marketing. We're a valuable asset. You should increase the value of the stock, you should buy more, you should invest. That's a big deal. And then the across the company gets to see and hear and feel that momentum, and I couldn't agree more.

Kyle Priest: 26:50

Cfo and CIO, the CRO is your sister or brother, right? They're connected with your CMO, but those others, they're your cousins. I mean, they're right there and they're the ones in the organization who are responsible for risk mitigation and protection and enablement, like rev op sales. Enablement, yes, your area, but for the company, they're the ones that enable and and ensure risk, and in doing that, they have great analytic skills too, and they will help you look at this differently. I think that real quick.

Kyle Priest: 27:24

The other thing that marketers tend to do in the boardroom, that that they can do less of, is, or even in the across right with the sales leaders and everyone else, if they're not speaking the same language and they're not sharing the outcome first, everyone turns their ears off, and I mean everyone in the company. A salesperson doesn't care about ROAS. They don't even know what it means, right? So return on ad spend is not important. Customer lifetime value a little more important. But no, what they care about is how many leads did marketing bring to help us hit quota and how are you helping us influence the other deals?

Kyle Priest: 28:05

One of the pet peeves of mine is marketers get hyper-focused on attribution. At the end of the day, we just want to understand the impact. So if you are in B2B and you're a $50 or $100 million company and you go to a trade show, you do not want to come back and jump up and down about all the leads you created with existing customers. What you want to say is we met 100 new companies and they gave us their contact information. That's nice companies and they gave us their contact information. That's nice. But what really happened is in the current year there is $10 million of ARR or bookings opportunity that showed up with 25 customers that came by our booth, went to our party, we did one-on-one meetings with that. We were able to help impact and over time, yes, all that great attribution is wonderful if you're mature enough to handle it, but I would say, if your organization is running into that, you're affecting your ability to tell positive stories and to impact the board, and impacting the board means more funding, more support, more empowerment.

Eric Hollebone: 29:06

I'd like to just add on to that. When marketers are inexperienced at doing metrics or have trouble understanding how metrics come in, they throw the kitchen sink at it, hoping something will stick. And what I would go back to is, as Kyle, you've said, the only thing that matters is what did marketing do or what will marketing do to future revenue impact. So I think there's only one metric that matters out of marketing, which is we met your deal number or volume, and marketing contributed this amount to that progress or could claim, if they weren't in the room, you wouldn't have had 60, 80 or whatever percentage of deals. That's all that marketing should be talking about externally, outside of marketing. All the other stuff we talk about campaign attribution, marketing mix, cost per click those are internal metrics. Those are used to optimize what marketing should be doing next. That's the lessons learned of the history and penetration of the market and the shifting ecosystems and everything else. Great, keep that in marketing.

Eric Hollebone: 30:16

Nobody cares about clicks on a landing page. Nobody cares about email rates. Nobody cares about attribution outside of marketing. Attribution inside marketing matters. Outside of marketing, it's contribution. Only folks. That's all that matters. They think you're given the baton of marketing inside that company and, like every other department, they expect you to run it efficiently. They're not going to get involved in your little sandbox and tell you what attribution should be. That's not a metric that a board will ever give a marketing department, but they will give them. You have to show up with this amount of revenue, this amount of deal, this average deal, this funnel velocity. Those are the things that matter and I think marketers, because they don't understand that, will just start to throw any metric they can at a review or a QBR or a board report or whatever, to make it sound like they're busy because they don't understand the fundamentals of their job in terms of reporting into the rest of the structure.

Kyle Priest: 31:29

I think what we're saying is if you want to impact the board which we're using as a euphemism for the leadership team and the investment really, what you're saying is if you want to continue to have great positive growth and a great company, then shift to a growth mindset, shift to a revenue mindset, and when you put the revenue first and you follow that, the story starts to unfold. And, Michael, maybe this is what you're alluding to.

Michael Hartmann: 31:55

Yeah, I know where you're going now. Yes, cfos, can I do? Yeah, okay, go ahead.

Kyle Priest: 32:00

Yep, cfos and CEOs are incredible storytellers and if you don't see them that way, watch them when a CFO is preparing and the accounting team and the planning team, fp&a, are getting ready. They're putting a story together and they're not putting a fictional story together. They're putting a cohesive, clear, accurate story together and it's led by numbers, but it's spoken word. Excellent CFOs have to get across an exorbitant amount of information in a very short period of time to an audience that isn't in the business every day, and so when you see on a town hall or in a QBR or if you're in a boardroom, when you see a CFO that's doing an excellent job, they are communicating clearly and concisely the story of what happened in the business. So the business achieved 98% of target. The 2% we can adjust to inflation in a region of the country, receivables from a particular client and we have a contingency plan for the next quarter, plan for the next quarter. We are also excited that the sales team and the growth organization can see a path to achieving the rest of the year target and our cash position. And then they go into. Here are the things that happened in the business, that enabled that, that were really important, and so the key things do bubble up and they change from quarter to quarter, but that CFO's ability to compress everything that happens across your organization into a very cohesive story and you'll notice a sidebar next to the Excel.

Kyle Priest: 33:41

And if you're in RevOps or you're in leadership or you run a function, the best thing you can do is find a way to create more time and space. If you're in performance and you're doing just countless email campaigns, find a way to get time back to understand what's going on in the business and change things right. If one campaign is working and you're not leveraging that real time to the others, then you're not optimized yet and there's blockers for you. So get some of the blockers out of the way, because when you can say, okay, I know I need to hit my revenue and we know we thought that some of it would come from North America and some would come from South America and some from Europe, some from Asia, but it's not playing out that way. Or gosh, we said we would get six months, down to four and a half months from lead to close and we're still at six months. Get into the gong right, get in and understand what's going on. Very few of us have the time to do that.

Kyle Priest: 34:39

And so, if you're in a leadership position or you're RevOps, not only do you want to create the space, you want to create the structure for storytelling, which is the cadence of reporting and the insight gathering. I see a bunch of teams throw up data rooms and a BI and say you can go in there anytime you want. That's not helpful to the organization, right. A BI and say you can go in there anytime you want? That's not helpful to the organization, right. What's important is to, in the process of preparing reporting or working on it, to create enough time for that report and that insight work to happen. And the insights aren't just generative AI, they aren't just predictive, they're dialogue, right. Okay.

Kyle Priest: 35:11

Well, what did our systems tell us? What are we seeing? What did we hear on the calls with the three best customers? There's very little time for that when the calendar is chock full of too many tactics. So this is very much for the marketers. You could cut out a third of the tactics you do and still achieve the same performance without doing anything different other than giving yourself back time to look at it. You could literally cut out a third of the trade shows. You go to a third of the email campaigns, you do a third of everything you do to give yourself back time and you would, at a minimum, achieve the same amount. And so I would challenge you to stress test that where it's safe and work towards if you're not feeling optimized or like you've got the time to do it, because you can't tell the story if you don't know the story. But first pay attention to that. Cfo, they can do it.

Michael Hartmann: 35:56

Yeah, I think that story. I would argue that it is probably more valuable to stop and do that assessment and build a really a really good story with the model you had. Like to me is one thing that I was taught when I was a co-op still in college was to do a presentation, was like a, like one would write a novel. Right, there's a beginning, a middle and end.

Michael Hartmann: 36:21

What I always get frustrated with is that when I was doing it for as a presentation never get to the end right, which is what I want people to walk away with. I had, somewhere along the way, someone taught me like flip that right, tell them what you want them to know, right, in this case, a revenue kind of story, and then everything else is supporting that. And if you do that, that credibility you're going to get is going to buy you the ability to say, yes, I don't think we should be doing a third of our trade shows, but we should be doing this other thing or whatever. But if you don't stop and do that, you're going to be stuck in that flywheel of continuing to do lots and lots of tactics that may or may not be generating the results that are actually important to the board and the executive team. Sorry, eric, I cut you off.

Eric Hollebone: 37:04

So two points to sort of add on to this. One purpose doesn't happen by accident, you have to make it happen. So, to fulfill Kyle's time requirement, I have found the best way to do it and everybody complains, especially in marketing ops and rev ops, that there's just no time for anything. We're always putting out fires, there's always something going on. So what? Make the time by giving yourself a one. If you feel like there's no way to get time, then you can give yourself one hour out of a week to work on purposeful, strategic stuff. And if that means starting with the reporting, then Friday morning, start your morning by giving yourself that one free hour. You can give yourself one 40th of the week back for your goal setting. And the other one I would say is on a practical level start. It's. It's it's we're saying the same thing over and over and over again, but it's because it's so meaningful. It's. Start with the end in mind and work backwards. And I would say in a data scenario start with success and work backwards.

Eric Hollebone: 38:05

So, of the successes you've had this week, this month, this quarter, literally sit down and group them together and try and find the commonality points that move the needle for those particular people. Did they all go to the same trade show? Did they talk to the same sales rep? Did they go to the same campaign? What were the commonalities of the success group versus the non-success group? That is your starting point. That also starts to come back to how do you cut out the one third that Kyle was talking about. If you don't know what is successful, how do you know what to cut? So it starts with success. You tease it apart, you figure out what's common. If they didn't click on any of your 49,000 email campaigns, well, maybe there's some time to be had out of that whole effort and maybe you want to convert more to trade shows. So now you get analytical tools and insights to start playing with marketing mix. But it starts with figuring out what the success looks like and then why other people aren't on this success path at each of the stages.

Eric Hollebone: 39:06

So we talked about lead generation, engagement and nurturing. It even goes into BDRs or SDRs and then AEs. There's four parts to this funnel in a B2B cycle. Each of them has their own success path, but there's commonalities there. So it's not like the information is not there, it's just not evident. And your job as a marketing ops or rev ops person is to put it together, tease it out and then explain it to the rest of the crew to get them going on that alignment that we talked about at the very beginning, which is how is everybody talking about the same story? And if you don't have the story, it lets you start constructing the story and get buy-in, because everybody knows this stuff intuitively but they're not articulating it very well amongst themselves. This is back to the Kyle's across the organization effort as much as anything else.

Kyle Priest: 39:55

So yeah, that's good. Sorry, Eric.

Eric Hollebone: 39:59

No, no, go ahead.

Kyle Priest: 39:59

Yeah, well, I was going to add there's a, there's a big technology component here. That's kind of an elephant in the room sometimes and that is. You know, maybe you were an independent or a siloed inside marketing marketing ops group and now you're moving into a rev ops and if you're still just marketing ops and it's not connected, you're going to want to personally run to get it connected. When you think revenue first, you can't have two sets of numbers floating around or systems that aren't integrated. It creates a lack of confidence between the teams within growth. So does sales believe the number of leaks? Marketing says it's got Right. Well, if it's all the same data in the same system and the same numbers, that's a step.

Kyle Priest: 40:39

But the other is when you're getting that capacity back to figure out, well, how do we make sure we hit the number and are we doing the things that really mattered at the revenue? And what do we learn from the close ones that came from inbound and that we did from account planning and that ABX Like when you do that off on your own in marketing, it's not helpful. You've got to have the SDR BDR viewpoint, you have to have the sales rep viewpoint because ultimately it's a team sport to get that win. And as a leader, I don't bonus or tie bonuses to those lower KPIs only. It's got to be to the closed ones. So instead of a head of demand or performance saying you've got to generate this many leads, no, you have to generate this percent of the bookings. And we don't care where it comes from, except there's a kicker if you get it in the right strategic way, which is from these areas, because we know that things will change over time.

Kyle Priest: 41:36

But when you really just personally get in that mindset, you only want to focus on the things that work. No one wants to send out and increase their social performance by 300% when that channel isn't maybe as important as time you could have spent doing something else, and I'm just using that as an example. Sometimes that could be the most important channel, right? Or you know, again back to you don't want to have an abundance of email campaigns when new logos and email are less critical than maybe setting up, you know, bespoke tech days at your customers, right? That's part of an ABX motion. So it's really important to be integrating that thinking and all of this ladders back up to okay, we use the same words and we're aligned. We have reports that really focus on what matters bookings, quality of revenue by channel, and then supporting indicators as to what helped us do that.

Kyle Priest: 42:24

So, revops, that's your job across sales and marketing, right. Like, hey, we got that new product launched in Europe and we achieved a hundred percent or 110% of what we thought we'd do in the first quarter. Why we did these seat things in marketing. We did these things in um success and support, reaching out to our current customers, and we did these things in the field and with partners. Um. That connected story is a story of growth for a company and um'll also shoot your career up faster than anything else. You know, storytelling is the common, one of the common traits of everybody in the C-suite and it's certainly a common trait of everybody on the board.

Eric Hollebone: 43:01

I wanted to touch upon one thing you've brought into this conversation a couple of times, but I don't think it's well understood Quality of revenue. Can you just unpack that Onion, Because I think that's a really important idea. That's not first audience, right?

Kyle Priest: 43:33

They are responsible for the company, but their first audience is shareholders, and what they want is not just growth, but the kind of growth and revenue that builds the future value of the company. And so I've been in companies that were services companies, that became software companies, and a software company per dollar can be more valuable on the investment market than a services company, as a simple example. Or a company that is software but half of it is on-premise and it's trying to get its customers to the cloud. Or a company that's software but limited to a certain amount and wants to be able to grow more. Well, in order to be bought or to merge or to have the support of your investors to go and do buying or invest in more R&D or invest in more field or more marketing, they have to see that the kind of sales we are achieving make us more and more valuable. So we don't just grow in dollars, and we don't just grow in dollars with good margin, but we grow towards that. So quality of revenue starts with are we making the company more valuable? And then it's okay. Did we get a booking with the kind of customer we want that we know is the type that helps us do that? Did we get the kind of deal that's that we know is the type that helps us do that? Did we get the kind of deal that's good for us margin? And is it the is the customer? You know all the things that go into what we call the ideal customer profile. Is it really really right for us Meaning? Are they the right type of buyer? Do they have the right business need? Do we have a fit for purpose or a market fit for purpose? Is our product going to solve their problem and can we add more value over time with them? Are they going to be a great lifetime customer?

Kyle Priest: 45:21

And so sales is so focused on a number it will not always hit the perfect customer. We don't want them to. We want them to do that more often than not Marketing. We want the leads to more often not be the perfect customers. We don't just want growth, we want quality growth and so being able in RevOps to say, okay, we hit it. And, by the way, we said that we were going to do more business in this region because it mattered and we invested three more salespeople there and we spent 10% more marketing there and we did it. That's what the board wants to hear.

Kyle Priest: 45:53

We know how to pull levers, turn knobs and work as a team to go do the things that increase the quality of the business. Because when we do all that upfront, we extend the lifetime of the customer as well. There's a better match when we're a fit, when they're right, and so, again, it's not all the time there. There's a better match when we're a fit, when they're right, and so, again, it's not all the time. There's never a perfect full set of customers, but that quality of revenue really matters. And then it's also down to now we're in the operational efficiency.

Kyle Priest: 46:21

So, revops, before you start worrying about the return on the ad spend, you want to talk about how fast did we get someone through the stages, you know? Did it take us a year to do it or six months to do it? That is a huge cost, right? And on renewals, what's our renewal rate and can we increase that through better communication, account management not just product and R&D, and support and success teams. So quality of revenue is the whole company's responsibility. And in marketing that means that we bring in the right leads, right time and to the up audience. It means supporting, hitting the number to the across. It means we're all focused on the meaning across the company. We're all focused together on the priorities that will help us do that. And then within we're we are watching row s, we are watching customer acquisition costs. We're watching all that because it helps us do our job to do that. But RevOps help us stay high on the numbers and work back into that stuff and don't let anybody bring forward all of the functional KPIs.

Eric Hollebone: 47:22

Yeah, I wanted to touch on one item that you mentioned there, which is the ICP, which directly affects marketing groups, and I think it's an immature metric at this time, because people make an ICP based upon mostly hunches or guesses or market segment or wishes of where they want to be and not there's an idea of where's your ICP today and where do you want to move your ICP to tomorrow to get that quality of growth, quality of revenue. And I would say again, it goes back to the same story we've been telling this whole conversation, which it starts with success, what you think your ICP is actually. Go back, using the success model and test whether the successful candidates actually have the traits that the ICP you think you wanted match up. And if you want to get one win out of this conversation, it would be check the success criteria of the people against your ideal customer profile parameters and see if there's a match. If there's not a high percentage of overlap, you've got a fictitious ICP, in which case you're expending a lot of effort on people that may not matter to you as a company and what you really need to do is adjust your ICP, in which case you're expending a lot of effort on people that may not matter to you as a company and what you really need to do is adjust your ICP to reality. Then come back and say, now that we've got what's real, let's plan about how we get the people we want and then start to adjust your marketing mix. That's an internal, like you say. That's an internal marketing optimization.

Eric Hollebone: 48:50

But agreeing on what the ICP across the revenue organization, I think is like step two after or day two after the exercise, because everybody should be saying these are the people that bring the revenue in today. And then you ask the secondary questions is it quality revenue? Can we do it faster? You know, are we attracting the right people? And so forth. But it starts with who's giving us money today because we're the right product, right fit, and then build upon that. And I think that's something marketing ops and rev ops can dig into immediately, which is do we actually know what our ICP is? Because so much flows from that idea into various things. It should modify your marketing tactics, your techniques, your conversations, your words. Back to your point about lexicon. If you're not talking about the same ideal customer throughout that revenue journey, I think you're missing a huge opportunity to start that alignment.

Eric Hollebone: 49:44

If you're coming up from nothing. Start with your ICP.

Kyle Priest: 49:47

Verify your ICP would be my first statement Totally and again, everybody's sort of at a different place on the maturity curve of that. And if you're flying high with voice of customer data and a strong ICP program, you're constantly improving, that, that's very rare. Very few companies are able to do that, only the biggest and and strong and and, on the other hand, if you don't even have product marketing as a function and nobody's really handling that ICP, there's sort of a step process you go through and you'll start with the well, we believe it's this type of buyer with this type of need. And even when that translates to, say, web copy or to the way you try to attract them in outbound, the order of things you think matter to them, even just switching the order can be transformative. Right, if you think that priority one is priority one, but it's really priority three, that's a breakthrough in your efficacy or your ability to generate leads, but it can be bigger than that.

Kyle Priest: 50:41

I was in a group where that was the case in the maturity curve. We kind of knew okay, we generally understand how this group buys and who they are and what they're trying to, the problems they're trying to solve, right. But when we looked at who's really transacting, it was M&A in their space. They didn't transact unless they were bought or sold or being purchased, and so that that's a massive difference, right? When you say, well, we're talking to them about how to help them do their job better and save time and make money, generate profit and have capabilities in their job better and save time and make money, generate profit and have capabilities Inmire had before, and all that, that's helpful, but what they really care about is no, we need you because we need to integrate systems or we won't be able to effectively operate our business and we could actually create her. Those are two different stories altogether from the same person.

Kyle Priest: 51:29

And that ICP has to be managed. That's really well said, eric. And you know RevOps again like keep everybody honest. You know you're going to be the ones with your finger on this, but there's other groups in the building that can help. You know whether you've got business analysts in a program management office or you have them in finance or you have them over. There's a lot of people that can put eyes on this stuff. That that's their professional job inside your company, and so the more people are thinking about it, the better, and there's also great tech advantage on ICP, now you can. I mentioned Gong earlier. Whatever software you're using, you can go, listen to and get AI kind of summations of the top things customers are saying and a lot of people aren't leveraging that right. So I would say there are attached to everything we've said that you can go find.

Michael Hartmann: 52:15

So you both have talked about RevOps and stuff, and maybe this is where we can kind of wrap up a little bit. But since our core audience is intended to be a marketing ops RevOps folks is there a like today, tomorrow? Here's how you can help your revenue leadership to make steps towards some of this stuff.

Eric Hollebone: 52:36

Right, to tell a better story, so I'll go first on this one. I've already hinted at it. If you aren't making time for the future, it'll never happen. So the first thing you do is block out one hour per week and hopefully you can grow. That A strategic number should be about 20% of your time should be focused on the future and 80% should be keeping the lights on. You can't get there in day one, but you can start by giving yourself a small time slice to get there. And you'd start by giving yourself one hour a week and then move up from there. And the other part is I think your job is insights, because you can't change the world unless you have a compelling story. So using that one hour a week is start to generate what works and what doesn't work, and by working from success backwards, it's always start with success and then identify places where you can make changes or propose changes, and there should. The other thing is there should be no sacred cows. You've got to look at it in realistic terms, backed by data and so forth, and I'd like to touch on one thing I mentioned.

Eric Hollebone: 53:36

The other person you need to make friends with is the CIO. The CFO is your enabler through finance. Your CIO is your enabler through data, and we didn't talk much about data, but if you don't have the right data systems or access to the right data systems, making friends with the CIO is the way to get that access started. Get them on your side and things will start to become easier. You'll start to break up this Gordian knot of everything's just all over the place and it's too much effort. They're your key to accessing and getting clean data, and they will happily take on data projects because they just want to help the company too. That's part of their job, so let them help you do your job better and engage the IT folks. There's some brilliant people there, and then all your job is to make them work for you instead of somebody else. Kyle, any thoughts?

Kyle Priest: 54:30

Yeah, I think I would just just say tell one growth story. If you're in a marketing ops organization right now, align your story with the sales ops team and the support team, the success team. Get to one revenue number broken out by inbound, outbound, field partner and then go from there on your next pages. If you're in a RevOps, don't let the tyranny of did we hit the bookings in the margin? Block out all the ways that we achieved it. To Eric's point about future what happened? If you don't do it, we need to tell with confidence the board and the leadership team what we're doing to ensure that future is predictable, leadership team, what we're doing to ensure that future is predictable. And so, right after we tell them we hit the number and here's how we got there, we tell them whether or not it was the way we drew it up on the plan. Was it with the ICPs? We thought. Was it in the regions? We thought With the products? We thought what has changed to change that?

Kyle Priest: 55:24

And so if you're marketing ops or you're in demand gen performance and you're, you know, waking up every day saying, well, how do I get, you know, a hundred MCLs and a thousand MQLs and all those, those stages or S1s and like that. Stuff is really important. So don't don't take this the wrong way, but wake up and say how do I hit the 20 deals this quarter I'm responsible for on inbound? Did my leads that that I got six months ago, are they going to materialize? Or six weeks ago, whatever your lead close cycle is Like, really get focused there and tell all your stories and do all your planning from that, because you know what you'll do for the next half of the year.

Kyle Priest: 56:00

If you find out that you're generating leads that aren't following up, you'll stop giving leads to that area or you'll go talk to them and say, guys, we're not turning these leads into something, something's broken in our chain. Let, we're not turning these leads into something. Something's broken in our chain. Let's look at our chain together. Or maybe something's changed in the market. We need to go fish somewhere else. And that only happens when it's really one set of numbers. And if you want to have a great, strong relationship with the field and the sales team and work as a growth unit, you'll operate from one hymnal, one book of truth, one source of truth.

Michael Hartmann: 56:28

It's funny I uh, throughout this conversation I keep coming back in my head to a book that I received, actually a big marketing conference for a big company I work for and you guys might recognize the who moved my cheese book, right. So it's in that kind of style, right, short, pithy chapters. It's called how to be a marketing superstar. There's one chapter, that is, two two faces facing pages and the gist of it was this is customer money and other.

Michael Hartmann: 56:55

That just was like everybody should have printed on their paychecks back when we got paychecks yeah, this is customer money, and it sounds really corny and cheesy, but when it really like, I used to have a photocopy of it, like at my desk everywhere, and people would always ask me about it because I think it the mindset of like, thinking about how, what we're doing today, whether it's an email or tactic or report or now you know like, is it going to help us generate the kind of money that enables us to have a job, right, that's, that's what we should be doing. And I think that focus gets lost the further you get from understanding what affects customers, from actually paying for whatever product or service you sell.

Kyle Priest: 57:37

And when you're connected to the ultimate outcome, you get to celebrate it more internally. It just feels good. So if you're not in that, mindset when you get there you'll see that, and thinking like an owner is a critical part of this.

Eric Hollebone: 57:51

Very quickly to dip into the engineering version of that is. I think JFK walked into NASA one day and I'm paraphrasing heavily that. He asked a janitor, what's your job here? And the guy said to put a man on the moon. His tactic was to wash the floors. His goal was to put a man on the moon. Everybody contributed and that goes back to that heavy alignment that Kyle's been telling us from the start is incredibly important and I a hundred percent agree.

Michael Hartmann: 58:17

Yeah, that feels like a great place to stop right there, right, Like that sums it all up, doesn't it? Um, well, yes, Thank you so much. This has been a lot of fun. I wish we like it feels like we just barely scratched the surface on this topic, but I think we're going to have to wrap it up, Kyle. Thank you, Eric. Thank you. If folks want to you know, connect with you or go deeper on this, what's the best way for them to do this? Kyle, why don't you go first?

Kyle Priest: 58:41

Go to LinkedIn, for sure, and then by all means be passionate about this stuff and love to see when organizations are well aligned and jamming. So I'm here for you.

Michael Hartmann: 58:52

Awesome.

Eric Hollebone: 58:53

Likewise, linkedin is the best place to start, happy to have a conversation online to keep this going forward, because I want a mission to get marketing leadership to contribute better, and it starts with changing one mind at a time and growing the community. I desperately want to see marketing leadership be relevant to the board level conversations, because they've got so much influence, they just don't know how to purvey it properly.

Michael Hartmann: 59:20

Couldn't agree more Well said again. Thank you guys. Thanks to our listeners and watchers who are, as we're, moving, more into getting video out. Thank you for supporting us. If you have ideas for topics or guests or want to be a guest, always reach out to Naomi, Mike or me. We'd be happy to talk to you about it Until next time. Bye everybody, Bye-bye.

Kyle Priest: 59:39

Thanks, michael, see you later Bye-bye.