Ahmed Datoo: 4:59

this is a great question. My understanding and appreciation of marketing operations has evolved over the years. When I first became a CMO, I would classify my relationship with MOPS as just a huge disappointment, and the reason for it is I was like, okay, great, I have a team that can be my right hand, so to speak. Like for me, I am a CMO that, um, like, I'm driven by data, I like to have an understanding of data and then that helps, either, helps influence my intuition, um, but I, I like to be able to analyze data.

Ahmed Datoo: 5:45

So we run a program. I want to know what was the success of that program. I want to be able to analyze data. So we run a program. I want to know what was the success of that program. I want to know, like, which sets of marketing activities are driving pipeline. So to me, I viewed my marketing operations team as, like, my strategic hand, helped me pull together the kinds of analysis that is going to help me make decisions around allocation of spend and what programs to be running, who our icps should be, etc. Etc. So that's my expectation going in right, and what I found was the marketing ops team was like, so in the weeds about executing programs like marketing campaigns and programs managing the technology stack, all that and managing the technology stack, and like doing managing technical debt and doing integrations, and like a new feature has been released by a vendor.

Ahmed Datoo: 6:35

It drove me nuts. I was like why are we wasting time on this? And, and now, remind you, my understanding of marketing operations has evolved so. So this was my going in just frustration and I said how difficult can this be? Like? Why does it take so long to do something like this? And so I tend to learn best by doing so. Of course, I interact with the MOPS team. They're like you have no appreciation around how difficult it is. I'm like how difficult can it be to build?

Ahmed Datoo: 7:10

At the time, I think we were using Eloqua. So I was like how difficult can it be to build a campaign in Eloqua? Turns out it's really difficult. And so they would walk me through about, like you know, it is very complex and blah, blah, blah. And so I said you know what I'm going to build the campaign. Can I do the next one? And I got hands on, I figured out how. To you know, I read all the instructions around building emails and campaigns. I was like this doesn't look too hard. And I got the campaign brief. And of course, the campaign brief didn't map what was the email template. There I got the campaign brief and of course the campaign brief didn't map what was the email template. There are all these variations. So immediately I'm thinking, okay, we should probably have some guidelines to the team, like stay within the parameters of this, but I'm like still, it shouldn't be that difficult to do.

Ahmed Datoo: 8:00

And then it was just like endless clicks in the system and sitting and waiting right, which was something that they didn't communicate to me, which is just the poor user experience of the software and the reality of the software. And then there's the back and forth between the marketer who requested, saying don't quite look like the way you've done this, can we change this to bold? And that required me logging back in the system doing all these changes. So I began to have an appreciation, having gone through that process myself, of like okay, I get it, like I understand that they are bogged down in kind of building out programs and I understand why. And, um, I think the other thing I didn't quite appreciate is how many different systems that they would need to touch to do something as simple as build a mail campaign. So it wasn't just Eloqua, it was like there are a variety of other systems that they were touching, and so once he, once I had an appreciation of this. Then I had empathy, which is OK, I get it.

Ahmed Datoo: 9:03

Now I understand why they're not able to actually do what it is that I need to do, and so experimented with a whole bunch of stuff, like what if I hired an offshore team and try to get rid of the repetitive work? So we tried doing that and I was hoping that would free up time for my MOPS team to do the strategic important work that I was really interested in doing. And it didn't, primarily because the offshore team would make mistakes and invariably. You know, in your ideal world you have enough prep time for a campaign. And I'm guilty of this because I would be like, can we go run this? Now? It's the middle of the quarter. We're not going to meet our pipeline numbers. We need to spin up a bunch of new campaigns and like overnight we got to spin stuff up and there's always a lag when you're dealing with offshore, so there's a lag in the initial creation of it, and then there was a lag when we needed to do revisions. It just slowed the process down.

Ahmed Datoo: 10:05

So I never had really good experience offshoring, so I brought it back onshore. So the the question around like, um, how, how? Did I think about mops? I had this, this appreciation of like this is what I want mops to do, and, by the way, that's what mops wanted to do, like it's not, like I was suggesting something that they viewed was out of their job description. They just simply didn't have the time to do it Right.

Ahmed Datoo: 10:32

And so what I ended up doing is because I'm a, you know, technical CMO, I started building my own reports. I was in there, I was, I created a data warehouse, I started building my own sets of reports and and I realized that worked for me, but that doesn't work for most cmos. Like you know, I'm not going to be the cmo who's going to be getting into canva and doing design, because that's not where I spike right. So, but there are cmos would go do that, but would not go and like, do the the snowflake data analysis type stuff that I was doing. So it's just this perpetual problem that I was facing as a CMO and this desire to be able to drive that organization, to help propel marketing, to be able to do great things, and so that's something that was always in the back of my head.

Michael Hartmann: 11:25

Yeah, it's interesting because the first thing you said really is, you know what you wanted was essentially insights, right? How are things working? What are the results? How can we talk about it with the rest of the organization?

Michael Hartmann: 11:40

And I suspect, if my experience is any indicator, right, that even if you could have figured out a way to open up time on that team, there might not have been a skill level to really do it in a way that would have been helpful for you, right, because I think there's a. I think there's a. I mean, I could get this really, really general, having kids here in the college age. You know that, like the, the whole, like uh, math curriculum for has really not changed in 40 or 50 years, right, for kids coming, and I think that's a problem.

Michael Hartmann: 12:13

We get people come out and we just don't know how to really do data analysis, right, don't know how to put it together, don't know how to interpret it, don't know how to look at it.

Michael Hartmann: 12:22

Um, you can't really talk about the difference between a snapshot in time of something versus something that's over time and all those things that are different ways of thinking about it, and that's one of the concerns and one of the things I bring up all the time here is just like we need more people who can do that, and I'm bullish on things like AI tools being able to enable some of that, whether it's by freeing up time and capacity or by helping with doing some of the heavy lifting of that. Whether it's by freeing up time and capacity or by helping with doing some of the heavy lifting of data, like organizing data and doing some initial first pass analysis. But do you think the teams you had before would? Did you ever get, I guess, first, did you ever get to the point where they could start to do some of that and did you feel like they had the skills and capability of doing that?

Ahmed Datoo: 13:10

so definitely had the skills to do it. So this this comes to you like how I hire. So, generally, when I, when I was hiring for anyone in any role within marketing, it was like intelligence first and foremost, some form of curiosity and then some degree of domain knowledge, and it was the domain knowledge in marketing ops that always killed me, because I would find amazing people, but they were HubSpot people and we were a Marketo shop and it's just too steep of a learning curve, right. Or I would find incredibly curious, incredibly smart, talented people, but they were. You know, they spiked on a certain set of technologies that didn't exist in our stack and that's the critical component of it, right. And so you end up making these compromises to get in people who have domain knowledge about the stack, and it's kind of crazy that we make decisions. We need to make decisions based on familiarity with technology as opposed to just smarts. But I was fortunate. The people that I ended up hiring were really good. Uh, I mean, had experience with the tech stack, but were really smart. So, yeah, I felt like if, if they, if given the time and given a problem, they would go figure it out. Right, they may not necessarily know data analysis, but I could probably work with them to say, like, here are the kinds of reports that I'm looking for, and then be able to go figure it out.

Ahmed Datoo: 14:42

This is pre-AI right In an AI world. This is what's amazing about AI. Like, I talk about myself and you know I like colors. When given something, I can review it and tell you whether I like it or not. I don't necessarily feel like I've got great design skill, in fact, um, you know, I deliberately stay away from. I told my wife, like you can handle all the decorations of the house. I won't have any sort of review. The only thing I ask is that I get to handle all the tech gadgets like that. That's going to be my, my, purview, right?

Michael Hartmann: 15:21

um, so I have my request. My request was just only veto power on like if really didn't like something from a design like I really want to be able toanche on electronics.

Ahmed Datoo: 15:32

But um, you know, when it came to, when it came to design, um, I would it's very difficult, like I'd sit down with a designer and the designer rightfully so would ask me a question. Like you know, give me your design aesthetic. And early in my my career I was like I don't know what my design aesthetic is, I'll know it when I see it, which is like the worst thing. A designer hears Like um, how do you work with that? And so early on it'd be like they'd give me something and I would just tear it apart and they're like, okay, you clearly don't like that design. Give me a couple of designs that you do like, and so I'd start talking about. You know, here are vendors that I like. And so I began to realize I began to speak the language of the designer.

Michael Hartmann: 16:30

Right.

Ahmed Datoo: 16:32

Fast forward to today. Now, all of a sudden, I can be a designer not a great one, but I can iterate on that design process a lot faster. So I can go into mid journey right now, and do you know, to mid journey right now. And do you know, image creation around concepts. I can go into all these coding tools and actually create first iterations of a homepage design, right To get to a point where it's like, yeah, this is in the general direction of where I want to go, and then I can hand it off to a professional to either make it better or at least have a starting point to say, like this is kind of the aesthetic of what I'm looking for, right and so. And, by the way, I don't. There are certain things where I want to go to a designer because, like the home page, I want to nail right. But if I'm doing a landing page for a webinar that we're doing next week, I don't necessarily need to go to my agency to nail that right. I could probably use the tool, the AI tools, myself and build something comparable, because I already know what my brand voice is, the style, whatever. I can use those tools myself. That was not possible at all right.

Ahmed Datoo: 17:41

And so your point about people who are not analytical or quantitative. Now, all of a sudden, you know I started the conversation by saying the CMO job and marketing's job in general is tough because you have to spike in all these different things. I view this concept of now, as an employee, you will have access to digital employees and a set of tools that allow you to spike in each of those categories. You'll be able to do design work. You can now write amazing copy. You can do analytical work. You can actually do operations oriented work. You can do strategic oriented work. Right like. All of those are possible, um, and I think what's what's required in that, in that sort of world, is taste. So. So, when you use these tools, you got to know what good looks like.

Michael Hartmann: 18:34

Yes.

Ahmed Datoo: 18:35

Right. So, like I know, when I get output from the AI tools for something like an image, or even when I'm working with copy because I was a former product marketer and I worked with designers right Like, I have gotten an understanding of what is considered good from a messaging standpoint, what is considered good or good enough from a design standpoint right, and so I think anyone who has experience right now in marketing can be supercharged with the use of these tools yeah, I'm finding the same, if I for those who are listening, right, I had a weird look on my face when he said that you have that, what was the word you used?

Michael Hartmann: 19:18

um, taste, you have to have taste. And I was like, what does he mean by that? And when you describe, like you knowing what was what good is, which is also subjective, right in a lot of these cases. But, like, for me, one of the things I've learned I have to do when I'm using, just keep it down to LLMs, right, it's like I, when I have found it to work best is when I feed it really good examples of my own first pass of stuff and it makes it better, better, right, or it feeds me something I go, I don't really like this, right, I think it works both ways in different scenarios, but I think, um, like you, I think it's I don't know that I would say it's supercharged me, but it definitely has improved communication and things like that.

Michael Hartmann: 20:00

So, um, I'm I'm bullish on it for sure, and it's becoming more and more of a part of my like daily routine is to use that. So I want to go back to the, the whole concept of like budget allocation, though a little bit. I mean, one of the things you said when we talked before was that it was easier for you to kind of get in, you know, allocate budget for programs, than it was for marketing ops. Tell me more about what you meant by that and why do you think that was the case and what were the results of that.

Ahmed Datoo: 21:27

Yeah, I mean. So to answer that question, you got to back up a second to a higher order question, which is like, in general for marketing for CMOs, it was always easier to get program spend than it was to get headcount spend, regardless of department like whether it was mops or product marketing, right, and the reason why is because there's a direct correlation between programs that you run and pipeline that you generate, and pipeline that you generate has a direct correlation to sales, right.

Ahmed Datoo: 21:59

so if you can basically say for every dollar I spend in program, I'm able to generate, you know, three dollars or four dollars in pipeline and we have a 25 percent close rate. You can, you can have a direct line to like every dollar you spend is going to generate X dollars in revenue. And it was very easy to make that case right. And what people didn't appreciate is you can give me and I actually had a CEO ask me this like what if I gave you unlimited program spend? Tell me the number, you tell me what you need in terms of program spend and I'll give it to you. And I was like, even if you gave me an unlimited amount of program spend, I couldn't use it. And he said why not? I'm like, because someone at the end of the day, has to create these programs. Someone has to.

Ahmed Datoo: 22:52

Like LinkedIn doesn't just manage itself right. Like someone's got to work with the designers and work with the copywriters and then log on to LinkedIn and upload the images. And then, by the way, when someone registers for something in LinkedIn, we want to do a follow-up email. So how do I integrate the LinkedIn stuff back into our marketing automation system and trigger off an email? But, by the way, if I trigger off an email, someone has to design that email and then if someone responds to that email, how do I route that lead to the appropriate sales rep?

Ahmed Datoo: 23:26

And I was going on and on and you see the glazed look in the CEO. I can only imagine it was really difficult to get headcounts. I can only imagine. And so it was sort of like so it was really difficult to get headcounts spent, even when I went to say can I get product marketing whatever? And so you started thinking about where can I allocate resources and what are the more critical resources? And so, depending on the stage of the company, marketing operations unfortunately was always the last to get resourced right. That team, that poor team, was always overworked right and trying to juggle many different sets of things and being heroic right still trying to get being heroic yeah

Ahmed Datoo: 24:08

absolutely right. Like I talked to a cmo, um and who invested in our tools and and I asked the question, why did you buy our solution? He said I wanted to give my team their Friday nights back and I was like that is just brilliant. He experienced the same thing that my team experienced, which is like this team is just dedicated, they want to do a great job, they're working insane hours and they get it done, but as it doesn't scale, so what ends up happening is, as you get larger, you start putting in SLAs like the team is going to be able to turn around a program. It started off when you're really small, in like a couple of days, and then, as you get larger, it grew to a week days and then, as you get larger, it grew to a week and then, as you got even larger, it grew to like six weeks or eight weeks, right, and that's how you end up managing the resourcing issue and um and so this was this was kind of the problem with staffing. So that's why I tried offshoring, I tried a variety of different things. I I'm like you know, ultimately it's just how do we improve velocity of this team and I think, by the way, in any of these marketing departments you have the same sets of issues, like they're all. In general, marketing departments are understaffed relative to what you see on the sales side, relative to what you see on the customer support side. Right, it's also part of the reason why you see these CMOs just burn out and, for that matter, a lot of marketers just burn out. They're understaffed.

Ahmed Datoo: 25:43

But I think, in the realm of AI and this concept of digital employees that could be members of the team, where you can start offloading some of these tasks to members of these team now, is going to free up marketers to be able to do the kinds of stuff that they weren't previously able to do. Right, like all the kinds of strategic work, analytical work that we were trying to draw or creative work that we were trying to drive from our team. Like they're now going to have the time to be able to do this. And I think I think these organizations that are thinking about AI around driving efficiency I know that's the discussion at the board Like how do we use AI to drive efficiency? It's the wrong way of thinking about this.

Ahmed Datoo: 26:24

Like that CMO who said it's about giving my team their Friday night back as a starting point and then this realization that once they have breathing room, once they have the ability to step back and think about what is it that we're really trying to achieve, because they now no longer are running 100 miles an hour. You're going to unlock, assuming, michael, the question you asked earlier, which is did you hire the right people? Assuming you've hired the right people, they're going to be able to grow and to be able to do things in your organization that weren't previously being able to be done right, and that's really the unlock to me of ai yeah, I've heard someone call it the time dividend, right, so that that that's the, that's the real thing that this ai stuff is going to unlock is a time dividend.

Michael Hartmann: 27:17

So to your point right, which to me is like it's that thing, like it frees up people to do things that take advantage of their particular skills and knowledge and experience and their you know, whatever their gifts are. Right, that maybe aren't, they just haven't had time to do.

Ahmed Datoo: 27:33

That's right.

Michael Hartmann: 27:34

And I think that's that's huge. I'm curious a little bit. So all this makes sense about being able to part of why I think why program spend is easier to do also is because it's visible. It's very visible. The result of it is something that's on your website, or it's an ad, or it's an event or whatever. It's very concrete on your website, or it's an ad, or it's an event or whatever. Right, it's very concrete. Um, when it came down to marketing ops right, you mentioned like getting headcount is harder, like do you, did you find, sort of within the marketing apps domain also, that it was easier to get budget approval for new tech than people as well?

Ahmed Datoo: 28:13

um no it wasn't it wasn't and, um, you know, for me, for me, I, I think it this is a lot of this is very cmo dependent, okay, um, so I am a cmo who's technical, so when folks came in with and so you know folks would come in all the time with, can we go off and get this technology? And I'll be like what's the problem you're trying to solve? And invariably I would get tech speak. Now I understand tech speak, so I understand what they were asking for. But you know, part of the job of the CMO is to mentor. So I would say, so what? Two words? So what? Right, help me understand.

Ahmed Datoo: 29:03

Why should I care? As a business person, I understand what you're trying to do in terms of trying to drive efficiency or trying to unlock X, y and Z, but how, at the end of the day, is it going to make life better? And I have this framework that I use, which is I call it the age framework, which is around awareness, growth and execution. Like, these are the three areas that I cared about, right? So, when I was thinking about, like when you pitch a technology, three areas that I cared about, right? So, when I was thinking about, like, when you pitch a technology. Pitch it in one of these three ways to address my so what question? Now, awareness is not what you think it is. It's not external awareness like are you driving brand awareness, it's actually internal awareness.

Michael Hartmann: 29:47

Oh, interesting.

Ahmed Datoo: 29:48

So part of the job of marketing is to market yourself and market the team. So, and whether we like it or not, marketing is a service organization. We service sales, we service support, we service the executive staff. We service a lot of internal constituents as well as customers, and I know CMOs love to talk about. Like you know, it is about the customer and 100%. I'm not disagreeing, but, like you, you would be in a world of hurt if you didn't realize that you're a services organization and you have to address these constituents. So when I'm talking about awareness, I'm talking about does this technology improve marketing's awareness? Internally? So as something as simple as internally? So as something as simple as you know. Um, you have sales reps who are complaining that marketing is throwing over junk leads. Like marketing never throws over good leads, I'm always getting junk. The reality is there's like two leads out of the hundred that they just got that were junk and they fixate on the two, not the the 98 that were good.

Michael Hartmann: 30:54

Right, right.

Ahmed Datoo: 30:56

So if someone came to me and said, hey, I have a technology don't get into the details of what it is which is, like I can solve this problem around junk, like I can reduce the number of junk lead legitimate junk leads or leads that are not our persona, like students or, you know, unemployed people or whatever people who just simply are not going to be buyers of our product I can reduce that so that the signal to noise is much, much better. The leads that the sales reps are getting are all good. You know what that sounds like a home run, because that's going to improve awareness. All of a sudden, marketing is generating good leads. I'm not seeing crappy leads from marketing. The reality is we're still generating some crappy leads. It's just now. Sales is not seeing them, right, right. So that's this concept of awareness. So if you can pitch awareness, great Growth. Growth is an easy one, like if you can have a direct line to revenue. So I am going to go purchase this particular tool because it's going to allow me to execute this type of marketing campaign that's going to generate these kinds of leads, which, ultimately, is going to build pipeline.

Ahmed Datoo: 32:03

And I always and I as a CMO, I never cared about leads. I thought that was the wrong way of measuring marketing. I actually thought it was more important to talk about pipeline, because that allowed us to align more closely to sales. So if you came to me and you're like this tool is going to help drive a pipeline and it was believable, like I would ask a couple of questions. Like you know, is this just the vendor pitch? Or like, how do you think about it actually driving pipeline? And if it was believable, that's a no brainer, right? So if you can drive growth with that tool, spend no brainer.

Ahmed Datoo: 32:35

And the last is around execution. And the execution is also tied to internal awareness. The execution piece is put yourself in the CMO's spot when she's going to the board and that board is saying hey, I just saw our competitor, like they are at every trade show and and this, by the way, happened to me um, they are at every trade show. Um, I see their ads on every website that I go to. Um, and their home page is amazing and ours stinks.

Michael Hartmann: 34:21

Yep.

Ahmed Datoo: 34:22

And I went, I did a LinkedIn search and I was like I looked at the competitor. It turns out that that competitor had 25 people in marketing. We had four yeah. So how do you out-execute a team that's got 25 people? And you've got four? Yeah, right, got 25 people and you've got four right. So if there are tools that are going to allow my team to have leverage to make that four-person organization behave like a 25-person organization, so that I don't get asked that question in the boardroom like why is competitor X doing X, y and Z, that's worth it to me, right? So if you can frame in one of these three areas, it's a home run.

Michael Hartmann: 35:02

If you can frame, in one of these three areas, it's a home run. Yeah, that's. I'm seeing you're nodding my head at every one of those. I think, the awareness one being internal, because that is not what I expected. That's a really good insight, because I think most marketers which is surprising me are not very good at marketing themselves internally. Right, so telling that story, um, just so, yeah, one of the things I think a lot of marketing apps folks would talk about, and maybe it's tied to this execution what is it like? There's a like, a time-saving, efficiency component. Is that, is that part of your thought process? Or like what do you like? Or is that like a? Not really what you? Or like what do you like? Or is that like a not really what you're trying to get at, because it feels like it's close, but maybe not really what you're talking about?

Ahmed Datoo: 35:48

well, to me it is the execution right, but I I don't necessarily like the way you position it to a cmo is not necessarily time savings. It's like hey, you know how we're only able to launch one campaign every six weeks and our competitors are launching one every couple of days. I can now launch one every couple of days. Now you're making the same argument. Right, like I'm, I'm I'm freeing up time, productivity, etc. Etc. To allow me to be able to do more with the same amount of resources. But I'm just framing it slightly differently, right, in a language that the cmo cares about, and then, unfortunately, like um, it's good, cmos like the one that I was talking about previously was like I want to give my team their friday nights back. Your people are your assets.

Ahmed Datoo: 36:33

So the cmo um, that is an argument that will resonate with the cmo around productivity. But that CMO has to translate that to a board and to a CEO who doesn't always care about the well-being of employees, I'm sad to say. Right, they just care about the bottom line. And so the way I would communicate it up is like hey, we're talking about these kinds of constraints. What if I could improve the productivity of the team to be able to generate and the way I would talk about of constraints. What if I could improve the productivity of the team to be able to generate? And the way I would talk about? It is like if I generate X number of campaigns, you know I'm generating five more campaigns a week and I know every campaign this comes back to the analytics every campaign I generate generates X dollars in pipeline. I should be able to generate an incremental Y dollars in pipeline.

Michael Hartmann: 37:22

Yeah.

Ahmed Datoo: 37:22

Right, and so now I'm talking in a language that the board understands and still talking about. At the end of the day, this is productivity for my team, but I'm not messaging productivity for my team when I'm talking upwards, and so I try to encourage that skill in all my team members, because at some point they're going to rise to the level of a CMO and they're going to have these discussions at the board and they need to be able to need to communicate those in the language that is understood, and the language at all levels of an organization is different.

Ahmed Datoo: 37:55

Like yeah the way you explain things at all languages, at all levels are going to be different you talked to, brought it up a couple of times.

Michael Hartmann: 38:03

Right, I can, I can do X programs or do whatever and it's going to be kind of a direct line to pipeline. So you know, the on again, off again debate about attribution reporting continues to this day. Right, I'm curious like cause. Yeah, I haven't heard you talk about attribution or influence pipeline revenue. You talked about pipeline and revenue, right? So how do you think about attribution versus some other models for measuring the impact of a marketing team?

Ahmed Datoo: 38:38

Okay, I'll give you a contrarian take. At least I think it's contrarian. I hate attribution. I don't want to do attribution. I think attribution is the single want to do attribution. I think attribution is the single reason why cmos get fired. I also think attribution is the single biggest contributor to um conflict between sales and marketing, and the reason is because the moment you start talking attribution, you start getting into well, well, wait a minute, did marketing actually generate that lead? Like I, as a sales rep, called that lead and left voicemails, like a dozen voicemails, before they responded to that marketing asset. And then the marketer on my team would be like, yeah, but they didn't respond to yours. But we put out this amazing asset and they were like well, they wouldn't have learned about you. And so you have this back and forth.

Michael Hartmann: 39:30

And I was like this is silly, right?

Ahmed Datoo: 39:32

We should not be talking about who's responsible for generating the lead. The only thing we should be focused on is like how do we get that lead into pipeline? This is why, on my team, my team felt very uncomfortable about talking about pipeline because they're like we don't influence pipeline. What if they don't follow up with the lead? And I'm like look, sales, they are incented on closing business. They're not. They're not lazy as much as we'd like to think that they're not following up with leads because they're lazy. They're not incented to be lazy. So if you're giving them good quality leads, they will follow up. If you're giving them bad leads, they're not going to follow up. So don't fixate on the leads, because if you fixate on any of the leads, you're going to give them a lot of junk.

Ahmed Datoo: 40:22

Fixate on the pipeline, the actual high-quality leads, and I don't care who generates it, right? I don't care if it was marketing-generated, I don't care if it was sales-generated, I just care do we have enough pipeline to meet the number for the quarter? And that's how I would like to think. So I think if I was a CMO and I was interviewing, and if the CEO started asking me questions around, how would you measure marketing attribution? I would walk, because that, to me, is a CEO who's going to create this natural tension between sales and marketing unnecessary tension. As opposed to, it's a team sport. We all have to work in alignment, in concert with each each other in order to actually be able to drive pipeline.

Ahmed Datoo: 41:09

Now I'll get the question like well then, if you're not measuring attribution, how do you know what marketing programs to run? How are you figuring out return on program spend? And I would actually say you don't necessarily need attribution, like this was sales generated, this is marketing generated. You just need to know like okay, I ran these, it's so simple. I ran these number of programs, how many of them generated net new leads and how many of those net new leads actually made it in the pipeline.

Ahmed Datoo: 41:40

I don't care how many touches or who ended up doing it, but like are we seeing stuff from our events go into pipeline? I don't care how many touches or who ended up doing it, but like are we seeing stuff from our events go into pipeline and is it going to pipeline at a higher rate than some of our digital campaigns? And if so, you know what is that rate? How many programs do I need to be running in order to be able to generate a certain pipeline number, right? So you begin thinking not only in terms of leads, but in terms of conversion rates, and the conversion rates are going to vary based on channel that you're using, and for every business, the ideal channel is going to be different, and so this notion of a CMO coming in with a predefined playbook generally doesn't work right. So, but this is part of the discovery, that that gets, gets to be done.

Ahmed Datoo: 42:27

But if your team is fixated on like yeah, it was this particular touch point that caused the lead to go from a lead to an mql to an sql, it's just a battle lost yeah, no, it's, it's my.

Michael Hartmann: 42:36

So I'm curious because my my take on attribution is not to just throw it out because like, but if I was to when I talk about it, if I I think it's been misused I think it's the short version, right, it's been used to take through this credit game, um, or to yeah, and I agree with you, it probably is, at least, if not, the cause is a major part of why there's friction between sales and marketing. But I think there's a place for it still. I still wouldn't, I would push really hard to like don't spend a lot of money on a tool or resources to do it. Do one like get as simple a solution as you can, use it consistently over time so you can see trends. But it's used within marketing to help go like what channels, with what customer you know, target audience or whatever is working most effectively, and it's a, it's more of a guide. If you're taking it up to the executive team or the board that's where I think you're starting to like then you're losing for sure.

Ahmed Datoo: 43:36

A hundred percent and to your point like that would be one of the tools. If my marketing team came and said I wanted to go buy an attribution tool, I would say no, we have UTM parameters that we're using. That should be more than enough to figure out whether a particular lead came from a particular campaign that we ran. I know it's controversial, but it is just like to me. This is one of these opinions that is grounded on just.

Michael Hartmann: 44:10

I think it's bad for culture, and so I've just seen too many instances of this just gone wrong. It's just not worth it. Yeah, well, it's funny, though, because I still see regularly job postings for marketing ops roles that are especially leadership ones, like to yeah, part of the job is to implement marketing attribution, part of it is to do, um, uh, build marketing dashboards, and, and I'm like those are things that, to me, I'm like first off, why are you building attribution, like what's the, what's the why and how is it going to be used? How do you like? And then, on dashboards, I'm like, again, not a problem with reporting, but, starting with the idea that if you need a dashboard before you need to, you know, did we get the, the number of people registered for this webinar where you're promoting? Right, which is a, sounds pretty basic, but I think a lot of organizations don't even do that. Yeah, on a consistent basis.

Ahmed Datoo: 44:59

And don't get me wrong, like the analyst I'm not. I'm I'm a big believer in analytics. The dashboards 100 go create them. But like the dashboards that are saying here's the leads generated by sales versus marketing, I don't want to see those in my dashboard. Right?

Michael Hartmann: 45:11

right, right, all right. So you you've you've mentioned this a little bit off and on right this idea of um, get agents, or ai tools, things like that, and your company is focused on that. How is your perspective on all this stuff tied with AI and all that changed since you've kind of moved on from CMO roles?

Ahmed Datoo: 45:34

Yeah, I mean. So I think I have a great deal of empathy for what the marketing organizations deal with, clearly, and so when we went to start Allgood, it was this nagging thing that I had in my head, which is I was never appropriately a resource, which is what we've been spending most of the time talking about. So I saw the advent of AI and I just thought this is going to do a huge unlock in a lot of organizations, and I saw the influx of tools that were coming in right, and there are a lot of ai tools that are out there and I'm going to classify them as builder tools and, um, you know, there is this talk now around going off and hiring a gtm engineer and you know to be the, the owner of all things ai, and and I just think it's a stupid idea. And the reason why I say it's a stupid idea it's like okay, let's rewind.

Ahmed Datoo: 46:38

Microsoft Word comes out First. Word processor right. First word processor right. How many organizations were saying we need to go hire, like a word engineer or like someone who just specializes in Microsoft Word, right?

Michael Hartmann: 46:52

And now, anytime you have word, perfect or not, before you know.

Ahmed Datoo: 46:56

I mean, the tool should be so easy that everyone should use it Right, and so so I. I had this view that AI was going to be something that was going to be like Microsoft Word, like everyone is going to use it. And I get these questions from CMO like should I hire someone to be, like, in charge of AI? And I said absolutely not. No, that's the wrong way of thinking about this. Like everyone in the organization should be using AI. I happen to believe that to get effective use of AI, you're going to need the appropriate context, like providing the system the appropriate context, so integrating your data systems, and so there's an infrastructure layer that you're going to need to build. And, you know, shout out to MOPS Like this is the real opportunity for you to drive the AI initiatives, but it shouldn't be something that is just controlled by one group. It literally should be an infrastructure that's built that everyone is able to leverage expertise. And the notion of, like me, going off and hiring engineers like I don't as a marketer I mean a technical marketer, but no marketer wants to be an engineer, or very few marketers want to be. If they wanted to be an engineer, they wouldn't be in marketing, they'd be an engineer, like the marketers that I hired. I hired because they were creative, they were strategic right, they were analytical. Those are the. Those are the assets that I was looking for. That's the reason why people get in this business not to like piece together, code and do this sort of stuff.

Ahmed Datoo: 48:32

So our view is that you're going to have these digital employees that come out of the box, right, that come out of the box that integrate into systems and do the work Like you're not building prompts, you're not doing the integrations Like. This is just out of the box. And the way I think about this is these digital employees act just like a regular employee. So our customers, our digital employee, we call her Mary. So Mary has a. She gets a Workday account. She gets an Okta account. She gets, you know, an Asana account. She gets a Marketo HubSpot account. She may even get a Salesforce account. She gets onboarded like a real employee. You can chat with Mary like you would chat with a real employee. Mary may actually come back to you with hey, I know you want me to build this email, but I have questions around X, y and Z and if you didn't know any better, you would think that you're interacting with someone on the marketing operations team, right? So you have Mary that just out-of-the-box works.

Ahmed Datoo: 49:44

You start looking at these stats where, like, 95% of these AI projects go nowhere, and the reason why they go nowhere is because it requires so much care and lifting to make them work. Marketing that can out of the box work and talk to all the different systems Now all of a sudden so I'll go back to the beginning of the conversation I don't necessarily need to hire someone who is familiar with HubSpot, because you know what Mary's familiar with HubSpot. I don't necessarily need to go off and hire someone who has, you know, lean data experience or ring lead experience. You know why? Because Mary can do all of that stuff right. So what I'm hiring for now is people who are going to think about in the instance of the AI world, like are they curious? Are they going to be thinking about business process? How are they going to use Mary to reimagine things right? Like it goes back to the intelligence and curiosity that you hire for, not systems related, and it just changes the way you think about building orgs.

Michael Hartmann: 50:47

Yeah, I remember we talked about this before and I think you may have even asked me something like how would I approach onboarding an AI or a digital employee? Right, I think it was the first time I'd heard that term and I think I said I think I would probably do it very much like I would with any. It very much like I would with any new employee, especially a more junior person. And the thing that to me, would be different and this is probably my style is I like to really handhold's not really the right word but really try to be there as a resource early on and then, over time, give someone more and more freedom to act independently, and I'd want to do this like, if it, if it was a digital employee, I'd want to do something similar.

Michael Hartmann: 51:30

What I feel, like what I've, the way I've dealt with some of the tools, is, when I get to something like that, right, I have to define for it, right, what that threshold is in some, some way that is, uh, fairly concrete, right.

Michael Hartmann: 51:44

So the way I've done that in the past is like, if I'm having it you know, this chat dpt like I'm evaluating something like and I give it the things I care about right, come up with a score. I don't even tell how to come up with a score, I just say these are the things I care about. Come up with a score from zero, hundred, right, but only show me the things that are 70 and above and it's worked Well. I don't know what's cutting out, so that's like one of the mysteries. I guess I could ask that too, but I think I would do it the same way. So, as this digital employee, I got comfortable. I was like you're good to go unless your confidence level is below 80 percent, right, yeah. And then maybe over time, like, let's move it up to 85 percent or, sorry, move it down, move it up. Let's start.

Ahmed Datoo: 52:31

Start with like, if you're 95 and move it down to 85 and so on, right, um, but anyway, well I mean, I, I um, there's so many interesting things about that comment, like I think so a couple things Mistakes people end up making. Is they think you're going to bring on AI and it's just going to do everything magically, like it just works. A digital employee would be like you hiring an intern and not managing them. Yeah, like someone has got to provide oversight, right. And so this is where I come back to the comment I made about taste.

Michael Hartmann: 53:13

Yeah.

Ahmed Datoo: 53:14

Mary is going to create stuff and Mary is going to do stuff, but someone has to review it to say is it good or not? Right, because she will go through and she will clean up data, she will classify things she's going to, she speaks 58 languages, she works 24, seven Like. She is going to be your most favorite teammate, right? She's going to do this kind of stuff that you, you, you don't get around to doing and she's going to make you look good and um, but it's only going to work if you have the taste and the tolerance to be able to give mary feedback, because she's not always going to get it right.

Ahmed Datoo: 53:50

This is the thing about, you know, reasoning based systems versus rules and this view of like how the future is changing, like. The advantage right now is we're entering a, an age of, and all of the systems in the past were highly deterministic, meaning you would create a rule in HubSpot, a flow, whatever it may be, in Marketo, and it was like do this, do this, do this, do this. And it worked really well until it didn't, and there was a lot of times where it didn't, and so you spent a lot of time tuning in. Now, with LLMs, you just provided a problem and you tell it because it's like the list is endless. You're never going to get all of that.

Ahmed Datoo: 54:55

Yeah right, in a reasoning-based world, you tell an LLM I care about anyone who's in the marketing ops category, that's it. I don't need to give examples. I don't need to give examples, I don't need to do any of that, and it's amazingly good at doing that. Now it will miss things, so it will classify something as mops as an example, when it shouldn't be. And so you end up giving feedback to Mary like, hey, this is not mops, this should be classified as this. And the amazing thing is it knows that, it stores it and the next time it sees something like this, it learns from it. Right, and it learns all the variations as well. But you've got to spend the time you know doing the providing the feedback and the review.

Michael Hartmann: 55:41

Yeah, I mean, I've got several ongoing things with ChatGPT and I do where it makes sense. I provide feedback, yeah, and it's done a good job of that. Yeah, I was smiling when you were describing that because I was thinking like I built something using Alteryx years and years ago and it was just a thing that I ran every month, but it was complicated. I pulled a bunch of data from different sources but every month it would break because some new value that I hadn't anticipated would show up in the source.

Michael Hartmann: 56:10

To go fix it Like it was like you usually go like, oh, fix it in this one spot and then rerun it and it was fine, but it was a constant thing I had to do. Right, run the flow, it would break. Go fix it. Run the flow, oh, run the flow, it would break. Go fix it. Run the flow. Oh, different thing break, fix it. Right and it's yeah, I mean that that by itself like the ability to to do things like job, job function standardization or job level standardization, banking excluded. Right, because everybody's a vp, but yeah, um, it's huge. So, um, I'm a. I wish we had more time. I really do like I feel like we just scratched the surface of this, right, invite me back.

Ahmed Datoo: 56:54

I'm happy to come back. Well, you should come to mobs palooza that's what you need to do actually, I will be there oh good, good, good.

Michael Hartmann: 57:01

well, I am still on the fence, so I'm still trying to figure out a way to get there, but I'm hopeful. If folks want to connect with you, continue this conversation or learn more about what you're doing, what's the best way for them to do that?

Ahmed Datoo: 57:14

Yeah, they can go to allgoodhqcom. That's our website. I'm on LinkedIn. Just connect with me on LinkedIn.

Michael Hartmann: 57:21

Awesome, that's terrific. Well, thank you again for your time. This has been a lot of fun, I think. I think, uh, we're gonna have lots of controversial stuff that we'll be able to use to promote this, because I think that's that's going to be a game. But no, it was. It was actually really good. I think a lot of the our listeners um will benefit from getting your perspective as a, as a CMO, about how marketing ops is viewed and what you care about and how you have to then communicate things. I think there needs to be more of that. So, thank you for that. Thank you to our supporters and listeners and, soon, viewers. We really appreciate you. Thank you for that. If you have ideas for guests or topics or want to be a guest, you can reach out to Naomi, mike or me, and we'd be happy to get the ball rolling Until next time. Bye, everybody.