Michael Hartmann: 0:25

Hello everyone, Welcome to another episode of OpsCast brought to you by MarketingOpscom, powered by all the mo pros out there. I'm your host, Michael Hartman, flying solo once again as we creep ever closer to Mopsapalooza 2025. Today, my guest is Ellie Carey, Senior Demand Gen Manager at StarTree. We're talking about what happens when marketing teams hit their MQL goals yet still get cut. Ellie joins us to explore the growth, the growing demand for ROI visibility in marketing, how attribution and reporting often fall short, and what MOPs leaders can do to make their impact more visible and strategic. So, Ellie, welcome back to the show.

Ellie Cary: 1:02

Yeah, hey, it's good to be here.

Michael Hartmann: 1:06

We're good, All right, this is real life folks We've got. We've got stuff going on, things flying around, All right. Well, let's start with a bit of your background. I know we covered this a little bit in the episode we did recently with all the other women that were joined us, joined us, but can you walk us through now we have a little more time your career path and how you got into Jim Mangin and MarketingOps time, your career path and how you got into Jib Manjan and marketing ops.

Ellie Cary: 1:34

Yeah, so I think, really, I'm a problem solver and a creative at heart, and I found a great career in marketing where, just like, I think, a lot of people in our space, I started in web, went into social, started to expand that experience into email, paid, then channel marketing.

Ellie Cary: 1:50

Where I've been the last couple of years, though, is marketing ops and rev ops, or going to market motions, and over my career I've probably seen 50 plus marketing orgs because I've worked in-house and agency. I've touched B2C, b2b, all business, safs, enterprise. I had a client for pump systems, so I've done a lot of different things, which has been really cool, but I think one of the biggest eye-opening moments in my career is I was in a role for a SAF startup, and we had an open room concept where we had everyone together in what I love to call the pit. So what was really interesting to me is we had marketing, we had sales, we had customer success. We all were in the same room, literally on top of each other, but nobody was really talking to the other one about how we were doing things and marching together as a team. It was the most bizarre being in a silo without being in a silo moment that I've ever had.

Michael Hartmann: 2:56

Everybody had headphones on, I guess.

Ellie Cary: 2:58

Yeah, everyone had headphones on, but like everybody was in cubicles right next to each other and it was an eye opener for me because there was a lot of data breakdowns like field mapping issues. But what was more strange was nobody was talking about pipeline together and revenue together, and I think that was the first time in my career where I really said I think I want to be able to look at this holistically from start to finish, and I really want to see how the things work and how they all tie together. To follow the money, because I do really like to follow the money, or show me the money, like Jerry Maguire says.

Michael Hartmann: 3:39

Yeah, interesting. I've never been a fan of those pit things. So, my wife, there's a place my wife worked which is a brain research place here in Dallas and there's been studies that show that those kinds of environments are actually terrible for people to be able to get work done. Been in one where that was forced upon me but, um, like I know the idea is to build connections and things like that. But I think your example is evidence that, like it, actually people try to get around it and and sort of focus in, whether it's using headphones, like I'm wearing now, or, uh, whatever, right, they or they go and usually you have some sort of space where you can go and close a room or whatever. But I'm sure that's just like it. Maybe it's just a symptom of our, our age, where people feel like they're connected more than ever but not really like.

Ellie Cary: 4:38

Yeah, oh, yeah, yeah oh yeah, no, and that's probably why I love working at home now, because I get a lot more, a lot more done.

Michael Hartmann: 4:46

I miss being in an office. I really do, so I'm that guy, but um, I don't miss commutes, that's definitely yeah.

Ellie Cary: 4:55

I joke that I'm fully feral and I own it and I love it, so yeah, Fully feral.

Michael Hartmann: 5:01

Um, okay, I like that alliteration, all right. So one of the things that we've talked about and we're going to be going into a little bit is that you recently went through a tough restructuring too, right? So, first off, thanks for sharing this, but can you talk about what happened, in a general sense probably, and what it revealed about, I guess, maybe how you believe that marketing performance impact, whatever is measured for most organizations, and what you learned from that?

Ellie Cary: 5:35

Yeah. So I think and actually I was thinking about this and reflecting on it I don't feel like this is uncommon, and this is the second org where I started a role and then, within the quarter, there was a riff usually a significant one, a big org shakeup and restructuring and I'm really fortunate in that I'm the last man standing, quote unquote. But I think the org made a really executive good decision where they're thinking about not just today but tomorrow, and I think a lot of businesses have to think about that. And we've seen this trend over time right when, like I think it was December 2023 or winter 2023, where there were a lot of layoffs across the tech org right, and it was kind of this cadence where you see certain timeframes. You have these kinds of things happening where the business is planning for how are we sustaining today, how are we hitting our numbers? How are we going to project what we're doing next year from now, next two years from now? And so they have to take a hard look about performance and make executive decisions.

Ellie Cary: 6:43

And I was in this boat where they did the exact same thing. A couple quarters went by, certain metrics we needed to hit and the reality is what was really surreal about this is marketing was hitting their numbers. We were hitting our MQLs, we were doing really cool stuff, we had cool events, but I think what the truth, what it really boiled down to, is we were hitting those numbers. Think what the truth. What it really boiled down to is we were hitting those numbers, but how much were we spending? To hit those numbers was a really critical number that I think leadership was looking at, and rightly so, but I don't know if the marketing team was really looking at it the same way, and so it's.

Ellie Cary: 7:22

I think you're right, it's not that unusual yeah, well, and but I think, like from an executive, you have, you know, your cmos. They look at that, they have nightmares about that, right, but your people, that are your doers and in the weeds of the programs and things that you're doing they don't exactly have direct line of sight into. That is really important, especially as a marketing team, where you have to have those conversations of like, yes, we're hitting our numbers, but what are we getting out of it? Is it contributing to pipeline? And it's not always fair, because marketing doesn't always have a direct impact to pipeline. The same way, right, we're not the closers, we're the ones that set you up for success, but it really starts from us starting you to set you up for success to the closer. And if you're not closing as much as you anticipated, yeah, there's going to be a you know response to that.

Ellie Cary: 8:16

So I think what I learned through this experience is really, it's not just what's good today, but what's viable tomorrow. I think, as a team, you have to have direct sight of what you're doing and how is it tied to the bottom line? And if you're the email marketer or the event manager and all these things and product marketer and I think we've talked about this, I've heard this all the time. Right, that it's not just counting their MQLs and hitting that metric, because it's almost a vanity metric at this point. It's how do you get the dollars in?

Michael Hartmann: 8:53

Yeah.

Ellie Cary: 8:53

And what do you do next to get more dollars in?

Michael Hartmann: 8:55

Well, I think this is, I think, reminds me of something that I recommend for all marketers and marketing ops people specifically is, if you don't understand how your organization makes money, right, it's going to be really hard for you to have an impact, right, if you and I think it helps you be strategic. So, if you want to be seeing a strategic, when you're asked to go do something you're you know you should be thinking about in the context of what's the customer prospect like, what's that experience going to be? Like, how's this going to help us drive profitable revenue? Right, and you know, and those kinds of things. And it's just, I don't think a lot of people are have that understanding, particularly in marketing. Because your point, like to your point right, the the sales teams, b2b context right, the sales team is typically the one closer to that closing of business. But if you don't understand how that process works, it's going to be hard for you to push back.

Michael Hartmann: 9:56

Yeah, it's interesting because I also I struggle with this.

Michael Hartmann: 10:02

I was actually taught, so I've got kids in college now and I was talking to my older one, who's studying finance, which is something I encouraged him to do, but we were talking about the challenge of a lot of enterprises right now, especially public ones.

Michael Hartmann: 10:18

I don't think it's unique to public, but definitely public ones this focus on short-term results quarterly results as opposed to longer-term ones, results, right, quarterly results as opposed to longer term ones and it also leads to decisions that are, you know, seen as positive in the short run but not always in the long run, and I think that's I don't know that I have a great answer for it or a solution for it, because I think it's so embedded now into how people evaluate organizations, but it's, it's, it's a tough one, I mean, that's so, I mean, but at the same time, right, it's not to say you can't ignore patterns, right, so to your point, like if they're quarterly, quarter, quarter over, missed goals.

Michael Hartmann: 11:02

It's interesting though that MQL is, you think that I hear a lot of people talk about pipeline should be more of a pipeline. Revenue should be marketing's kind of joint goal with the rest of the organization sales in particular, or to build attribution models, which all sort of point to a continuing view that that's marketing's job is to do MQLs and that's it. Yeah, are you seeing the same thing?

Ellie Cary: 11:37

Well, and I think oh yeah, no, it's again. It's that siloed box of like I just need you to drive this thing and then you pass the baton right and then the next team takes over, and I think that's there's some reasons for that, right, because you have it's. You know, when you start diversifying that relationship, then you have more owners who are responsible, right, and then it becomes a little bit muddier of like. Well, we can blame, not blame, but you get what I you know you can right yeah you can point the finger at this person because you're not closing here.

Ellie Cary: 12:11

We had our numbers. We're having drop off here. It must be this party org that needs to fix some stuff, right? Um? But as we all know, customer journeys aren't linear and the experience isn't linear. So you know, that's. I think that's the conundrum that we're kind of in right now Refining that experience and making everybody accountable at each step of the way in the right context.

Michael Hartmann: 12:33

Yeah, Well, so I mean I brought up attribution here just because it's commonly used, right. So I mean I have my own sort of view about. I have sort of a love-hate relationship with the concept of attribution. What do you think is working well or what do you think is broken about the way most organizations use, or kind of look at, attribution.

Ellie Cary: 14:06

So I think you know, in theory, attribution should make decisions faster and easier to understand. In reality, that's true half the time, maybe if we're lucky right. I think there's a couple of reasons for that. When you start thinking about things, I kind of see where you have failure modes of you're either over-engineered or you're under-engineered with how you go to market with your attribution. So I think, with over-engineered, with how you go to market with your attribution, so I think with overengineered, usually it's one or two people that have crafted this awesome strategy.

Ellie Cary: 14:40

It's in a black box Sometimes it's slow to update or provide visibility and it's hard for leadership to understand sometimes and people that are not technical in the weeds it's hard for them to understand. The other side that you might have is if it's under-engineered, so you might be missing some data points that are really important or you don't have that proper pull-through, so data gets dropped or data is inaccurate and inaccuracy is a loose term. Right With attribution, I feel, and you might. The other thing is when you're kind of under-engineered, are you doing it like a first touch? Are you doing it a last touch, weighted touch, whatever, but are you tracking it equally the same way, in the same process when you're stamping a contact or a lead into an account, into an opportunity, and that's where things start to get a little bit messy and the real thing.

Ellie Cary: 15:40

I think that organizations need to really consider that. I think they don't understand as much as the technical side of it I like to call it the underneath, and I say the underneath because my husband and I are not really into watching Stranger Things and he calls the upside-down world the underneath, and I was like, oh, this is a perfect idea and that's where I feel like our systems are, the underneath, where it's chaotic and it's like sometimes people understand it, sometimes people don't. But really you're underneath is kind of that. Um, that's your plumbing of how you get things working and like a sprinkler system. Right, if there's a leak in your pipe in one spot, you may be able to water your grass still, but you have some dead grass here or there. So that's kind of, I think, the important piece that the org needs to understand and support, and they don't always because they don't understand it yeah, I totally agree.

Michael Hartmann: 16:31

my, my what. What I would add to this is I think often attribute attribution is used, um, to communicate, like an roi kind of thing or a. It's a attempt at getting credit. But I think, because of the nature of the complicated math and it almost doesn't matter if you have a relatively simple model or a more complicated model, they're all complicated for most people and to your point, right, they often miss key things for a variety of reasons, right, often miss key things for a variety of reasons, right. But I think I, I would, you know, I would advise marketer marketing leaders to not that they can avoid it, like, don't talk about that with senior leadership, because they don't care.

Ellie Cary: 17:25

Yeah.

Michael Hartmann: 17:26

Oh yeah, now do I think it should be thrown out completely? No, I, there's value in it as long as you do it. Whatever way you do it, right, pick it, pick away, be consistent about it and do it over time and use it to inform what you're doing within marketing, but not necessarily outside of marketing. Right? I believe that storytelling is a stronger thing outside of the organization. Right, looking at examples of opportunities or deals that were won recently and then telling the story about how we won right and it's it's the joint thing across all the parts of the organization that had an impact on that deal. Right, right, from marketing to sales to legal who were reviewing contracts, to like whatever right, I mean, there's a whole bunch of players that could have been part of it and I think that, in my experience, has been much more compelling outside of marketing to talk about it that way.

Ellie Cary: 18:21

Yeah, well, I think there's a simplicity of it too, and not to dumb it down, but I think the higher up you get in the org, you're asking more direct questions with. The answer should be simple, right, like, what campaign performed the best? That's an easy question. How you answer it, and when you get into the weeds, like we do not, so easy, right, well, it depends. Are you looking at first touch? I don't care, I just want to know how the campaign's performing, right? That's the right question. Yeah, we don't have to go further than that right, yeah, and we had some.

Michael Hartmann: 18:54

We've had we've had a couple of like senior, like cmo, cro type people on recently who basically said, like, at that level, no one cares that you're busy because everyone's busy, right, they want to know what the the outcome was, not the yes output, if you will, right? So that's interesting. So, um, you mentioned the idea of over-engineered, under-engineered, um, but you know, do you lean towards using simpler versions of these models or more complex, and what's like, what's the trade-off that you think about in terms of that and the cost that goes with something that's more complex? Maybe?

Ellie Cary: 19:38

Yeah, so I think I lean more into.

Ellie Cary: 19:41

I have to constantly remind myself to not over-engineer because I think in what we do it's really easy to do that Right, well, you know, because it's like we're not just dealing with one system, we're dealing with like five plus right, then we're dealing with five different objects that we need to be tracking consistently the same way.

Ellie Cary: 19:59

Then God knows how many workflows we have to build on top of that to make it happen right, systematically, in a scalable way. So it's really easy to over-engineer. But I think to me, from a simplicity perspective, I've had a lot of fun looking at trying to build a comprehensive story through one object if you can, and maybe that's me over-engineering it but simplifying it at the same time. So, yeah, well, and that's where, like I personally, I think an underrated object is the campaign member object in Salesforce, because you can track multiple, you can track leads, contacts and accounts on that right, and when you're building reports in Salesforce it gets really convoluted of like, well, I'm only looking at this lead report, so I don't know the number. Oh, I'm looking at this contact account report, and so that's how the story starts to disintegrate because you're not looking at one universal spot, and then it gets complex.

Michael Hartmann: 21:00

Yeah, the way I think about these. When things get complicated, I think about it in the context I used to say just like a chain and it has a whatever link is the weakest, one is the place where it's going to can break.

Michael Hartmann: 21:10

But it's really more like a web of chains, right, what we have today, all those daisy hooks, any in any one of those links breaks, and I don't necessarily mean literally breaks, but there's a where there's a you know a place where something can get you go wrong. Um, you know, you've got, say, you've got a process that normalizes a field some way, but you get some value you don't expect and you know up until now when ai can maybe help do some of that in a smart way. Right now you've got a place where it can break and it's all these things. And this is like part of why people don't trust the data that we report out on, because they see anomalies like that, that because we're pattern recognition animals, right with the something's outside of the pattern, it's very obvious yeah, well, and I feel like you know it's kind of how you're going about it too.

Ellie Cary: 22:05

Again, honestly, I could maybe care less about the marketing models Like weighted is fine to me, it's fine. I think we get into problems when we start doing first touch versus last touch a little bit. Only if your first touch is something different on the lead versus the account, versus the opportunity. That's not first touch to me. Right account versus the opportunity that's not first touch to me, right. So I think you know the best way for me to simplify these things is really have some streamlined pick list values across your key data sets. I think you can have some free for all data sets, but that's more, I'd say, a macro level versus macro, and that's where AI can help you. You know, streamline that, clean it up, um, but really doing that? Because I've seen some things where it's like, oh, we'll do concatenated fields, which that's where data, I feel like, goes to die. Maybe that's my hot take, but they're great in theory, they really are, but in the end it's like, oh, how can I actually report on this, right?

Michael Hartmann: 23:05

yeah, I, you know, however you concatenate it, it's going to generate something that's confusing. Yeah, yeah, it's usually a sign that there's something broken, whether it's an understanding or just data or process or whatever. Um, yeah, but I've done.

Michael Hartmann: 23:20

We've all done it right, we've all done it, we've all done it, yeah, um, so when, when you started at, at starree, what was kind of in all this context, right, what did you discover in terms of infrastructure tracking, measurement, yeah, and what were you able to do to try to assuming there are some challenges, because I think everybody says that when they deal with something new, but what were you able to do to try to assuming there are some challenges, because I think everybody says that when they deal with something new, but like, what did you? What were you able to do?

Ellie Cary: 23:53

yeah, so I think there's been some interesting data sets or data pieces to track down across the tech stack, because we have a really, really great tech stack. Um, I also think, coming on, there was some campaign work that needed to be done and really more around the campaign member object and the campaign parent-child hierarchies, which I don't really feel like there's a blueprint out there on like the best approach for campaign hierarchies.

Michael Hartmann: 24:18

So it's always like I'm not a big fan because it seems like where you're going to go. Right, they always break down at some point.

Ellie Cary: 24:24

Right, and so it's kind of like you know, that's a missed opportunity. I will say, like maybe my personal experiences, I feel like campaign member statuses though they could get overwhelming yeah, that's a missed opportunity because you can track consistently. You know, did someone engage? Did they convert? I even have, if I can, and I try not to over engineer this but did they opt out, right? And how are you stamping that against the life cycle, right? This person's an MQL. You can stamp that on the campaign member and you have that story across the tech stack. Again, I feel like it's complex to get there, but that's to me the holy grail to get the answer quick and easy. I think the other things that we did or that I was able to do some cool stuff, um, I don't know if you've ever played around with like campaign walloper, but that was like a really easy way, walloper campaign walloper.

Ellie Cary: 25:17

I am not yeah, it's, yeah, because, like I think, yeah, yeah. So I feel like the pushback of like I don't want to use campaign member statuses because I have to recreate the wheel every time. Right, with campaign walloper, you set your statuses. Because I have to recreate the wheel every time? Right, with Campaign Walloper, you set your statuses. They're consistent across your different record types and you can do it easily in one spot where you don't have to build a bunch of workflows or logic around. So it might be fun to check out. I've had a lot of fun with it and that's made my life a lot easier.

Michael Hartmann: 25:43

Is there some sort of technology that plugs into, I assume, salesforce, maybe HubSpot life a lot?

Ellie Cary: 25:48

easier Some sort of technology that plugs into, I assume, Salesforce, maybe HubSpot CRM. Yeah, so it's on the Salesforce side, it's basically it's a plugin or, like you know, a package.

Ellie Cary: 25:57

Yeah, it's a package, if you will, and I think what they do is they create kind of like two or three behind the scenes lookup objects, right, but really what you're able to do is tie and update. I have consistent campaign member statuses based off of the record type and the channel or medium that I'm trying to track okay, so yeah, yeah, I mean anything that can enable consistency and automates.

Michael Hartmann: 26:22

Yeah, otherwise is relies on humans. That can be done on an over and over basis, like I'm a big fan of that.

Ellie Cary: 26:28

So yeah, and the other, the other fun hack that I got if we're getting really nerdy, because I hope you want to get with me, um is I was able to um build some apex. I had my developers do that. I'm sorry if you're not with a developer, but basically we're able able to automate campaign naming structures on the Salesforce side. So I'm able to say this is like the baseline, how I want to name the campaign, and I have like three or four main fields that I use every time, like start date, channel, medium, whatever asset type, and it automatically shoots out a campaign name. On the other side, which has been really fun and really easy to work with, and it's directly inside Salesforce.

Michael Hartmann: 27:13

So I've never done that but I have had. I've worked with a project management system years and years ago. There's kind of purpose built for. It's not a big, well-known one, I don't even know if it's still around. It's one that this is not meant to be a plug for anybody, but Aquent, the agency, uh, sold, had some technology. They sold one. It was, robo head was the name of the platform.

Michael Hartmann: 27:34

It's very rudimentary project management, but one of the cool things that was cool is every time we had a tactic we did, we put it in there, we put in all the core information about it would generate, um, would generate.

Michael Hartmann: 27:46

We could generate names for all the different, like the campaign name and email name, uh, yeah, and we used all the same like same naming stuff, and so it was really inconvenient because it was always there, um, yeah, and then that became actually the starting point for when we did reporting is we used the list from project management system. We could go tactic by and we had a campaign basically for every tactic, even if they're part of a kind of a bigger you know, kind of say I wouldn't even say multi-channel, but just like a campaign that was made up of more than one tactic. We could keep it all, we could do it together and the naming convention was convenient enough that we could pick up, say the say. It was a webinar, so we had the webinar itself. We had the emails that were part of it to promote it, the follow-up emails like they all had some consistency to it. Um, but we still were like copying and pasting that into marketing automation platform or crm etc. Etc. But, um, yeah, but I like that.

Ellie Cary: 28:46

No, that's the solution. And yeah, no, now I want that what you have, so I can do it across the entire tech stack, because that would be a lot easier across assets and campaigns.

Michael Hartmann: 28:56

Yeah, it was, and.

Ellie Cary: 28:58

I can do that. I'm sure We'll get there.

Michael Hartmann: 29:00

I don't even know that you need AI. I mean, you could probably accomplish a lot of the same stuff with the kind of thing that a lot of people do with a spreadsheet to do utm parameters right yep, yep 100 use the same spreadsheet to do your asset naming right.

Michael Hartmann: 29:15

It's just a matter of plugging it all in um and then make sure people don't overwrite the formulas. Um, yeah, okay, so this is interesting. By the way, another I'm not this is, I don't remember the name of it, but something that I recently learned about with Salesforce. There's another I'm just going to generate generically a plugin, cause I never remember what the right terms are in Salesforce for things like this, but there's one that I found that's really interesting. It does some I don't want to call it intelligent totally, but like some interesting ways of automatically adding contacts to opportunities with roles, okay, and it's supposed to do it automatically, and then there's an opportunity to like, review and approve it, and then people can obviously manually do it, but I've never been at a place which I've, so I'm really curious to see if that works and it the organization that does it. It seems to be a free one. Yeah, I love it, yeah yeah, no, I share.

Ellie Cary: 30:18

I'm gonna ask you about this later and see, I want to see it too deal, deal.

Michael Hartmann: 30:21

We can do that, I'll share mine and share yours, um, okay, so one of the other things we've talked about as well and I'm a big believer that it's easy to get caught up in the kind of the cool stuff Sometimes I would call it clever, like overly clever stuff that we can do with marketing or marketing ops and you said something that I think that resonated with me, which is you know, we need to get back to the fundamentals of marketing. I know what I think about when I think about that, but what do you mean? Something that I think that resonated with me, which is you know, we need to get back to the fundamentals of marketing. I know what I think about when I think about that, but what do you mean by that?

Ellie Cary: 30:54

Well, I go real old school. I feel like, and like basic marketing concepts of like the four P's yes, I know, I'm wild throwing that in there, people only care about the one P anymore. Oh, what's that? P tell me promotion. Oh, you think so. Okay, that's fair. No, I believe in that, I think.

Michael Hartmann: 31:16

I'm saying that's wrong, but I think that seems to be the only one people think about.

Ellie Cary: 31:22

Well, and I was thinking about this too, because I feel like from a mops and demand gen perspective, we don't really get to touch product or price right. That's kind of given to us, but placement and promotion we do like that's really what we get to do, and I also think those are probably two of the fastest changing things in our environment right now. Right, the different tools are changing. The way people want to be marketed to is changing, so there's a lot of change that you have to how people's search is changing. Oh God, yeah. So it's like the fundamentals, when you're really coming down to it is you do have to be basic in thinking about your ICP clarity. Is your offer compelling? Are you talking to people the right way? They want to be spoken to you right now. Um, and I think with you know ai slop out there, people are tired and want to be spoken to you a different way well, I think um in the b2b world as well, there's slop before ai it's always there.

Ellie Cary: 32:19

Yes, it's just more slop. Yeah, it's just more like easier to see right.

Ellie Cary: 32:25

I noticed that you're using M-dashes. That must be slap right, easier way to recognize, which. I love M-dashes. I used them before. I hate that they're not as cool anymore. Same with emojis, but yeah. So, like you know, going back to like the fundamentals of marketing really have to have your ICP needs to be clear, you have to have an offer that's enticing. Your message has to be consistent and repeatable across channels and then you kind of need that you know tight feedback loop to say is this working, Is it not? And that's, I think, as old school or fundamental. As I go back to the missing ingredient, I feel like today, is the context right? You have to give the right context in the right right moment to the right person.

Michael Hartmann: 33:10

Yeah, no, I mean right, you have to give the right context in the right, right moment to the right person. Yeah, no, I. I mean I'm to me getting back to fundamentals. Are things like, if you're going to invest in going having a booth at a trade show or an event, um, get the right people there, right? What is your goal? Is your goal to generate leads? Is to build awareness, like know what you're doing it for and don't, and then measure yourself against that? Right? If your goal is just because I know a number of people who's like, yeah, we spend a bunch to go to whatever Trade Show X and we don't get any leads from it we very rarely get leads from it, but if we don't show up, people question our viability.

Michael Hartmann: 33:46

Right, because it's the show that it has to be at, okay, well, if that's the case, right, spend what you have to spend and no more, and don't expect to get leads. But if there's one that you're expecting to get leads on, make sure you have the right people staffing the booth, because if you have the wrong people, you're not going to get leads right and you need people doing like like. Whenever I've worked at a booth, I was all right. Well, I'm always stunned. They send people who just sit there back in the booth their phones or whatever and they're not engaging.

Ellie Cary: 34:14

People walking by and like this is not that hard, right, but if you don't have the right people who won't do that, you're not going to get the leads right no, and I and I and I think you also deal with like the other side of it too, like well, what happens after the event and how do I get leads? What do I do with the leads after? Right? Yeah, how many days does it take to get a list, put it into your system and actually market people right?

Michael Hartmann: 34:39

too late yep, totally um. And then the other, it's the other one. It's interesting because you brought up the term vanity metrics and I, um, I've started getting back to the point where there's been such this focus of kind of moving to the extreme of everything needs to be. Call it data-driven, which I hate to some degree, but fine, call it that. Everything has to have an ROI that we can measure in the short term and we're going to discount anything that we now call vanity metrics. So web activity perform like email opens and clicks, conversion rates on landing pages, things like that. But I still think we should be measuring these things right and I think we should be measuring again.

Michael Hartmann: 35:23

It didn't actually talk to you like this is not to go out to the rest of the organization, but if I am responsible as a campaign owner for delivering results from a campaign, the things I can control, because I can't, like you said, like if it, once it gets to a lead, becomes handed off to sales, like I need to depend on sales to hold up their part of the bargain. But I can like, if my, if my promotion for a webinar is not generating the kinds of registrants that we wanted, I should be fixing that and I need to be paying attention to that immediately. I should know what I expect and if I'm not there, like, adjust, like, and I think people have gone so far to thinking about all the way at the end, right, how many MQLs are we going to lead and influence on pipeline, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. That they forget that there's core, fundamental execution that we need to be monitoring and holding ourselves accountable for and not focusing on that because it's now considered a vanity metric.

Ellie Cary: 36:21

I would challenge you too and ask how do you feel about looking at it from a reverse waterfall perspective?

Michael Hartmann: 36:29

so company has a goal of x amount of revenue. We expect that means we need to have the x amount of pipeline coverage, whatever the number is, 3x, 4x, 5x. And then, uh, to get that we expect that we need x number of mqls that will convert to like that, like working backwards, to like okay now yeah marketing needs to generate x number of mark. I hate it you do well.

Ellie Cary: 36:54

No, because that's where I'm like, that's where I feel like the enemy vanity metrics at the top of it actually kind of come into play right like. So what's my volume?

Michael Hartmann: 37:02

so I think I think the the when I say I hate it, I don't hate it. You're right, so Okay.

Michael Hartmann: 37:08

I don't mind that model. But I've been at a place like my reaction was very much like. I was at an organization where that was very much the way that marketing schools were set. And at some point, like when that, when the thing at the end, right, Revenue goes up by like the percentage, right, when you go backwards, right, Whatever the multiplier is that's the you're expected to generate this volume. Marketing can very well probably generate the volume of stuff from their work. But is it all like? The quality is probably going to go down, right, Like, and it's going to be expensive to get the incremental one. My.

Michael Hartmann: 37:44

The reason I say I don't like it is because I think this is kind of getting back to like how should we be measured jointly with sales? It should be pipeline revenue, right. So I do believe that, like, we need to agree on what the pipeline coverage we have, we need to to have the predictable revenue coming out of it. But I would rather be held accountable to the pipeline. And if I believe that, yes, a waterfall model works and that's the way that we're going to generate that, fine. But if we believe a different kind of well, maybe it's a mix of waterfall, or what I need to do is I need to invest more in certain like really focus in on key customer personas or things like that, and it's going to be more expensive for that, but I'm going to do lower volume but generate higher quality. That's going to more likely to convert. I would rather do that Like, so hold me accountable for the outcome.

Ellie Cary: 38:39

Yeah.

Michael Hartmann: 38:42

Just a raw number of MQLs. Does that make sense?

Ellie Cary: 38:45

No, and I think that's no, and I think you need to be doing that. When you're looking at a reverse waterfall, to do it effectively right, um, and that's where you start looking at like your channel mixes again in in the vanity metrics of like, if you're not getting bites on certain channels or certain campaigns you're trying to target, this is who you're going after, um, then you have to start thinking about the vanity metrics, I think, a little bit, and against the waterfall, but you have to do in the right like. Am I segmenting proper? Am I getting the right people in? Is the message right right back to the, the core principles, right on the um, persona and the offer? That's, I think, where, like, the vanity metrics might be important to be aware of and understand against your personas yeah, I think we're saying the same thing, because this is why I've gone back to the.

Michael Hartmann: 39:34

the now commonly called vanity metrics are where we have control as marketers, really, and we need to be willing to like I see a lot of organizations. I went through like a decision making sort of mini nba class years ago at another company where we had access to a lot of organizations. I went through like a decision making sort of mini nba class years ago at another company where we had access to a lot of these sort of um nba courses in, say, a couple weeks, right, and one of them was a decision making one and it's the whole. Like I see, organization after organization after organization making decisions on what I would call the sunk cost fallacy. Right, so I've already spent X amount of dollars. Like we can't, we can't stop investing in this, we need to continue investing in it. But when it's clear it's not working, like that money's gone, you can't get it back.

Michael Hartmann: 40:18

Yeah, there might be some contractual stuff where you could recover some of it, but generally it's gone. So making a decision on what we've already spent is not the way to approach. It is like you gotta go, like will the additional investment yield the results we want? And I think that's where a lot of organizations fail, and I think the same thing it applied to. This is why I believe that, like, too many marketers are moving so quickly that they're not stopping going, even at a high level, like I'm going to do this tactic, I expect the outcome to be a raw number of whether it's leads, registrants, whatever the thing is page views.

Michael Hartmann: 40:59

Oh, like, all those are not immaterial, because if you believe that your effectiveness at those things ultimately does move prospects and customers through the funnel, the more you can make each one of those points in time more effective. There's a multiplier effect, hopefully, right. So if you do believe that there's a little bit of a funnel although I don't believe it's a straight funnel anymore, to your point earlier I do think there needs to be a re-emphasis on those things, right. So, hey, we tried these paid search ads. We're spending a ton of money and not seeing any click-throughs. Well, that's just a vanity metric Bullshit. Right, it's money going out the door.

Ellie Cary: 41:45

It's a lot of money.

Michael Hartmann: 41:47

So either change the tactic, stop it, like, especially with those where you don't have to commit to a longterm we should be looking at every day and every day, every week, whatever the timeframe is, and being like truly critical thinking about I bring this up a lot truly critical thinking about I bring this up a lot. There's a book that I got again years ago, same company, where I was got access to that MBA type training. A speaker who came in was promoting his own book, but it's called how to be a marketing superstar and it's a very like pithy kind of short chapter book If for those people who know who moved my cheese, it's kind of in that vein, but I was so good. There's this one chapter that is like stuck in my head ever since and it's one chapter, is two pages facing pages and it says this is customer money and it basically the point is everybody's paycheck should say this is customer money.

Michael Hartmann: 42:43

Right, and it's the. It's kind of like a cheesy thing to say but like the point was none of us have jobs without customers paying us for whatever product or service we're selling. But it also to me it reinforces the idea like we need to be good stewards of the money we spend too. Yeah, and yeah. I think that, like I think you talked about it, like there's a lot like marketers sometimes don't think about the full picture of what they're spending on, because they think oh yeah it just costs it, just how it.

Michael Hartmann: 43:15

Just this is how much the event costs, right, this is how much it costs to uh, pay someone to do a photo shoot, right, like and I'm not saying those aren't important things, but like, really like being conscious about, like, do I really, should I really spend that money?

Ellie Cary: 43:36

It's something I see, a lot of marketers are doing Well, and I think that kind of comes back to like we just talked about where are you spending? Are you burning more to get that prospect right, To get that MQL, that opportunity? And if so, like is it viable and is it worth it? And I think to your point. We don't always think about it as marketers that way and we should Orgs think that way. They make decisions on it At some point. We probably should too.

Michael Hartmann: 44:06

Yeah, I mean, the financial viability of the enterprise matters, right. So that's why, like, I've kind of gotten away from like and I think this is where the market is now. There was a, I think, a period of time five, 10 years ago where growth at all costs was kind of the model, especially for startups.

Ellie Cary: 44:21

Yeah, and I think it's now shifted very significantly to profitable growth.

Michael Hartmann: 44:30

Yes, a hundred percent, yeah, yeah, probably where it should have been, but that's so. If you don't have that mindset of being critical about what you're spending money on, you should, so yeah.

Ellie Cary: 44:42

Nope, and that's kind of where we're at right now too how we think about that.

Michael Hartmann: 44:46

This is like.

Ellie Cary: 44:46

This is our world peace and everything we can do it, and everything. Yeah, with tacos and whatever food makes you feel good.

Michael Hartmann: 44:57

Well, we are in Texas, so we do need tacos, although I had some tamales the other day that were very tasty, so I'll take tamale too.

Ellie Cary: 45:04

Okay, I mean anything. Tex-mex, I'm in.

Michael Hartmann: 45:07

There you go, I'll take it to Molly too. Oh, okay, I mean anything text next. I'm in, there you go, I'll share the surprising place later, when we're done. Okay, awesome, I'm in, okay. So, on the one hand, we're talking about fundamentals or, like getting back to fundamentals is important, obviously, like AI is all over the place now, how do you see AI playing into that? Like maybe again like, what do you see as potential positives and what concerns do you have?

Ellie Cary: 45:36

Ah, yeah. So obviously there's a lot of upside right, I mean from creation, which I don't know if you've been playing around with Nana Banana, but I did this week and it was fun. What's that? Yeah? It's like the new it's the new, it's the new which. I don't know if you've been playing around with Nana Banana, but I did this week and it was fun. Nana Banana, what's that? Yeah, it's like the new. It's the new. It's the new. Gemini image tool.

Michael Hartmann: 45:55

And like, or it's a project.

Ellie Cary: 45:56

I did see something about that, yeah, and you've probably seen bananas everywhere in all kinds of creative. That's kind of the genesis of that. So you know, playing around with creation and how we're translating not just the static images but making video. That's really cool Insights. I've actually had some fun with HubSpot and being able to summarize data about a record Like hey, what drove this person to become an MQL? What's important for my sales team to know? Don't get me started. We already talked about the zero clicks with AEO. That's amazing. And then, from the ops side, I've had a lot of fun making custom agents for myself AI agents, looking at summaries, trying to build some templates and then get AI to basically do templates for me.

Ellie Cary: 46:43

My next code to crack is I just upload or say, hey, give me a brief for this next campaign. That's my awesome comprehensive brief and it does it. But what I would say from a concern perspective your typical boilerplate of security and data integrity and all that stuff. But what I'm not seeing AI do a phenomenal job at is the context and the scalability piece, and that's what I'm hoping that that will get resolved, hopefully in the next year or so. And when I say scalability, because I feel like there's been a lot of conversations around scalability, automation versus AI and how people are jumping to AI to do the automation or do the scalability. But I think it does scalability in these one-off scenarios Like I have this one content brief.

Ellie Cary: 47:37

I need you to build it out and it changes over time because, again, with Gen AI, you're looking at patterns and how to track it over time and it's morphing from what you originally wanted to do. Now, if you're looking at patterns and how to track it over time and it's morphing from what you originally wanted to do Now, if you're trying to build five campaigns at once with the same kind of framework and the same messaging, that's a little hard to scale, especially with imagery too. Like I did this, I was trying to make some isometric icons all looking the same. I wanted 30. That seems pretty small to me. I struggled really hard getting that output. Over time.

Michael Hartmann: 48:09

I have very mixed results with image generation and AI tools.

Ellie Cary: 48:13

Yeah, I think there's some and I've played around with, like MidJourney, nana Banana, even Chat2BT and Ideogram was another one I played with. But what I've seen again that scalability piece of it in the context, and I feel like scalability and context go hand in hand, where AI is great, creating things for you, but it doesn't give you the right, easy to read context, especially for consumers Like why does this matter for this ICP person? Is the messaging aligned to what really matters to them and can you scale it? And those are the two things that I really that concerns me or that I want to see worked out.

Michael Hartmann: 48:55

Okay, yeah, yeah, I'm generally bullish, but I've found that the one thing I don't think I would ever do right now is just completely take like, let it run and not have me interpret the output and adjust it. There have been times when it's been good, but it's usually like I it's on multiple iterations of stuff and over time it gets better and better. As long as I provide can do private history and context. But yeah, it was interesting, I was. I was talking to somebody in a totally different context who is a writer and they happen to do they break new stories and I didn't realize that until we were talking. But in the conversation I said what do you think about these tools? Because most of the writers I know really don't like them, especially like those who like to use em dashes right.

Ellie Cary: 49:49

I love them.

Michael Hartmann: 49:50

I know, and now you can't, because then you're questioned all the time, right, um, yep the uh.

Michael Hartmann: 49:56

But it was interesting. This person said you know, ai is not really going to replace what we do, because it needs stuff to create on and we're breaking new stuff, right, so we're the one creating the stuff eventually it might use, and so I think it's still that's the other part of this like I don't know that they're quite to the point at least I haven't seen it yet where they can be, um, like really creating new, truly new, new stuff, right? I think it feels like that for some of us, because it's new to us but not really new, right, because it's a new idea, maybe, or a different way of thinking about things, and I do appreciate that, but that's not truly new. So I think there's some, some work. It will not surprise me if someone were to come back and say, like, actually, this is my experience and it's different, or in, you know, a year from now, or two years from now or six months from now, that that changes, you know.

Ellie Cary: 51:02

Yeah, well, and what I've seen really interesting too, is a lot of products with AI capabilities in there. Again, that's where the context is really falling flat of like they have these rigid models and I've had talks with like product experts on you know different tools and they're like, yeah, you're not getting the output that you want all the time because our, our model framework is is pretty strict. So like that's the custom ability that I think needs to start happening too. Um, because I think you know, depending on if you're a really niche market, a very technical tool, there's certain nuances and things that you have to do or say, um, besides, like writing link or you know writing rules or tone of voice, and and that's something that hopefully, I think we'll start seeing that with uh, products that have ai capabilities within them, we'll start seeing that with products that have AI capabilities within them, we'll start seeing All right, what?

Michael Hartmann: 51:55

let's cover one more topic, kind of in the same vein as, like, fundamental stuff, and this is one that kind of went back to fundamentals, not the four Ps, but this idea that you know, retaining customers generally is way cheaper than acquiring new, new customers, that I think that's still the belief. At the same time, yeah, I think a lot of companies again are still focused on acquisition, so why do you think that there's so, russ, tell me if I'm wrong here, but my perception is that's the case. Right, if that's the case, why do you think there's not as much focus on retention and customer marketing and do you think that might start changing?

Ellie Cary: 52:40

Yeah, well, I think that shift is already happening and I think some orgs are really starting to prioritize to your point. It's really expensive to get a new lead in. I think that maybe it was a stereotype of I've already won the business, why do I have to keep selling the business once it's won? I also think the other side of it that you see is like, again, we're still really siloed in how we do things. So it's like marketing's mostly, unless you have a specific team dedicated to customer marketing, you're really more focused on new logos and everything.

Ellie Cary: 53:16

And then I think the other attitude of an org is well, I'm paying sales and customer success to drive the business after the fact, so they should be doing that. I shouldn't need marketing to really come in as that. You know support mechanism. I think if you're a bigger org, like an enterprise business, you have the budget to start investing more in customers and customer marketing. But if you're not, again you have to prioritize, and you're prioritizing the fish that you need to catch versus the fish you have on your plate. Right, cause you already have it. Yeah, that's kind of my burden the hand is the fish that you need to catch versus the fish you have on your plate.

Michael Hartmann: 53:51

Right, cause you already have it.

Ellie Cary: 53:52

Yeah, what is it that's?

Michael Hartmann: 53:52

kind of my. A bird in the hand is better than whatever the number is in the bush Right. That's what this is saying.

Ellie Cary: 53:57

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah yeah.

Michael Hartmann: 53:59

I mean I just it's funny because I think about being on the flip side of that in my head right now where I had this vendor um, they were going to raise prices, like the costs were continuing to go up because the model was very much volume driven and, for whatever reason, like it just kept going up and up. It was a shared license across multiple business units. It was a big organization I worked at at the time and, um, it was coming up on renewal I don't know three to six months out, right, and we had a I can't remember how it was ahead of when we had to sign a renewal or opt out, and I went as, like hey, this is getting too expensive. Like can you, you know what can you do? And initially they just ignored it and so I started pursuing there's.

Michael Hartmann: 54:48

There weren't many competitors for what they did, but there was at least one major one, and so I used to reach out to them. I was like, hey, like, talk to me what we can do, and became convinced pretty much that like, from my perspective, the alternative was going to be a much more affordable, um, and maybe actually better option for us, but I had to get people like people on other business units. They had a hand in this. I think we're used to what it was and I kept giving this the incumbent vendor a 10 opportunities to try to match or come like, even come close yeah, yeah, I just did nothing right, like almost ignored it, and I think it's just.

Michael Hartmann: 55:35

It stuns me when I see that happen, because it's like I get it right, maybe, maybe, maybe there's a uh, your financial model doesn't make sense if you go down below a certain price or whatever, and fine, okay, say it, I don't care. But like, not even responding and not like, and maybe the person's hands were tied, fine, whatever, but it was like that experience. I was like how do you? It's like walking away, and I remember like it wasn't even a big contract, but let's just like like something is better than nothing to some degree, yeah, oh yeah, and that's not totally true, like I get that, but in this case I think it would have been well well, and I think like that creates like so much damage to your brand too, because now you have someone you know your win back.

Ellie Cary: 56:27

Well, good luck winning that customer back right, which is probably the most expensive thing to get. Maybe, maybe I'm wrong, but, um, but you have that. And then, um, those people share their sentiment, right, which you know how detrimental negative sentiments can be. So it's important thing, but again, I think, because we're so linear and so siloed, still, um, it doesn't get prioritized because people don't know what to do with it. And then they're just kind of like over new, where they go, right, we'll send them an email, maybe.

Michael Hartmann: 57:02

Yeah, yeah, just like it's still like. It's still like I'm still like thinking about it again, like I just like I don't understand, not not?

Ellie Cary: 57:10

but I think but to your point, I think orgs are shifting to see that that's an easier low lane you know low hanging fruit to get Um and they're starting to prioritize Um. I'm seeing that, you know, in some orgs that I'm talking to or involved with. So I don't think it's. I think it's a trend that we're going to start seeing more and more yeah Um, especially as leads become more difficult to convert.

Michael Hartmann: 57:34

Yeah, for sure, anyway, well, hey, listen, this has been a lot of fun. We probably didn't even cover everything we could have with you, so, first off, thanks for sharing your story. That was a lot of fun. I had a good conversation. If folks want to go deeper with you or learn more about what you're talking about, what's the best way for them to do that?

Ellie Cary: 57:56

You know, I'm generically on LinkedIn. I can definitely post more, but I'm always a message away and love getting nerdy Marketing ops meetings. I'm a chapter lead, so if you're in Dallas, we also do. Uh, I'm you know, we have some virtual events so you can always infiltrate. You know, all are welcome. So, um, that's probably how you find me and talk to me.

Michael Hartmann: 58:20

So I'm around, that's right. Yeah, so Ellie is the chapter lead for marketingopscom for Dallas. Dallas, fort Worth really, I guess, but mostly Dallas. Well, yeah, yeah, um well, thank you. Thanks to all of our supporters long time new listeners, viewers, all of the above. We appreciate the support. If you have ideas for topics or guests, or want to be a guest, like Elliot was, reach out to us. We'd be happy to talk to you until next time. Bye, everybody bye.