Michael Hartmann: 0:24

Hello, everyone. Welcome to another episode of OpsCast, brought to you by MarketingOps.com, powered by all the MoPros out there. I'm your host, Michael Hartman, Flying Solo Today. Today, I'll be tackling with our guest a challenge near nearly every Mops Pro runs into is how to make your work matter to the C-suite. So my guest today is John Russo, currently the founder of B2B Fusion. He is also a former CMO for high-tech public and private companies for 10 years prior to his agency, having led companies in Silicon Valley, New York City, and Luxembourg. He's got a passion for marketing operations as a nine-year former board member of Mocha, which we were just talking about. Marketing Operations Cross Company Alliance, which was the first offline community for marketing operations professionals. More recently, his agency helps other marketers with their go-to-market strategy and journey to more confidently execute on their pipeline goals. He and his team optimize ABX platforms like Sixth and DemandBase with AI to get that pipeline destination. Today we're going to explore why so many smart teams struggle to speak the language of business, how AI and cleaner data are changing the game, what it really takes to earn trust from senior leadership, and how mops can best prepare career-wise in this challenging environment. Lots to cover, John. Thanks for joining. Welcome to the show.

Jon Russo: 1:37

Michael, I am super excited to have a conversation with you and uh grateful to get engaged with the mops community. Uh we'll we'll talk deeply about mops, but it's my it's the number one function in the entire marketing organization and my 20 plus years of experience. I can't wait to dig in. So thanks for having me.

Michael Hartmann: 1:56

Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, and we uh we'll have to save our the the topic of the history of mops and community maybe for another time. Uh as you've explained it, Mocha to me, and it talks about my experience. Like my experience at some point, I say I was in mops before it was mops because I'd had e-marketing was a title I had at some point. So all right, but let's start with the big picture on in the market before we get into technology trends and finish off with career advice. So why don't you give us some background on some of the common business issues you are seeing in the industry right now and how AI might be playing into that, maybe even either exacerbating it or helping solve it?

Jon Russo: 2:35

Yeah, it's uh a thoughtful big picture question there. Um, first of all, as an operator, it's probably the most challenging time I've seen in 20 plus years of operating. There's a heck of a lot of pressure right now on top line. Every team member that I talk with, prospect or customer, is feeling pressure from senior leadership. So it's very, very challenging. So, you know, gone are the days where you could just walk in and get tools. Um I do think there's there's a bit of that, but the enthusiasm to buy things has certainly settled down significantly in the last two or three years, and the sales cycle is just extended. Um, it makes it really, really challenging right now for somebody in a mop's role because on one hand, um, you know, you you've got a lot of potentially legacy data that's accumulated over time. You've got these impossible expectations coming out of the C-suite that just say do AI or do better. And oh, by the way, don't spend any more money uh getting from point A to point B. Um and you're kind of seeing on LinkedIn every day, we're all getting bludgeoned by did you see this feature, did you see that feature? So it's kind of a hurricane right now to be an operator. Um, not an easy time, uh, but I do start, I'm starting to see some green shoots. Uh so you know, I'm hopeful, particularly around AI. To your second part of the question about how AI might be playing into it, um I think that's a mixed bag, too. On one hand, you've got uh a lot of tools that are coming out, a lot of overlap. So the big question that I'm hearing right now is can we do this better? Uh meaning, can we deploy our Martex stack better, more effectively, differently than what's currently being done today, and shrink our cost uh infrastructure. So that's where I see AI really coming into the picture.

Michael Hartmann: 4:37

Something that I saw today just triggered a question for me. So I'm throwing this at you maybe out of the blue. But like what how do you think that's playing into maybe two components, right? One, the sort of the roadmap for some of the existing technology, but maybe more interesting is the idea like the decision now between kind of big applications, marketing automation platforms or whatever, versus um best in class and specific things, right? That maybe AI enabled uh or you know, built on AI first kind of models. Like, how does you think that's playing out in terms of decision making on that?

Jon Russo: 5:15

Yeah, it's really interesting. And it'd be interesting to hear the answer, depending on how this audience would respond versus, say, a C-suite. On one hand, you could say platforms are out the window, we're just gonna get a bunch of tools, but everybody that's listening to this, I would think, would have an appreciation that each tool is like picking up a foreign language, that to really understand the integration, the communication, the expertise and the use case, you really have to get proficient at those tools. So uh there's some limit of bringing tools on to an organization, whether you've got a robust mops function or maybe you've got a nascent mops function, there's there's probably some limit to bringing those tools in. But the C-suite doesn't see it that way. All they see is hey, Marketo's costing me a lot of money right now. They're not budging on price. My ABX platform is costing me hundreds of thousands of dollars, they're not budging on price. What do I do? So I do think the question's coming up, and there's going to be more appetite to move away from the platforms, uh, more so than ever before, but I think there'll be a limit to how much you could actually absorb on that.

Michael Hartmann: 6:28

Yeah. No, I think that that makes a lot of sense, what I would expect to. So kind of in that same vein, so what are some of the solutions you're seeing in the market now or in the pipeline for pipeline headcount problems that maybe leverage AI and that the MOPS community might be involved with? Anything interesting, like examples, use cases that you could share?

Jon Russo: 6:52

Yeah, you know, a couple come to mind. Actually, three come to immediately to mind, and they're a byproduct of this environment right now, where um I could think of companies not necessarily getting headcount or they're not investing more in their Martex stack. Uh, two of these three use cases came up as a result of that. Um one use case, and we're early on, by the way, as is a lot of companies with AI, contrary to what you read on LinkedIn. Yeah, absolutely. Um there's a lot of challenges of adopting AI, but let's put that for later in the conversation. Um, the two that that kind of resonate, first, we have had a situation where we replaced marketing automation with an AI agent and a couple SDRs, um, a net $70,000 a year savings. Now, it was a process to get to that point, and that was more of a transactional sale, so not ABM. It would not be something I'd recommend for ABM, which is really where we've spent a lot of time recently in the last couple years uh perfecting ABM. Um we've also seen a use case where we had another client that, oh, by the way, I should also mention the the reason that came up was the marketing automation platform was trying to jam us on price. Okay. They weren't being flexible at all. And the CEO of the company said, I'm not paying a dime more for that platform. You better go figure something out, and pointed to our internal champion and who pointed to us, and it was a process to get you know to do that replacement. The other situation, uh, this company had been trying, client had been trying to hire headcount for the better part of a year, um, a Marketo expert, and we were kind of like the tier two and tier three support. Okay. The challenge with them was they didn't want to pay the salary for that marketing operations leader. And it was a very sophisticated uh deployment, too. So you couldn't just drop a junior person into that and expect that they would succeed. So, long story short, they had budget cuts, and we had proposed an agent to um, I wouldn't say replace a campaigns manager, but to do the routine configuration within Marketo, setting up the programs, um uh in a way that either our internal champion or ourselves could easily monitor as a part part-time off the side of your desk kind of thing. So it's not a one-for-one replacement. Um, and you know, Adobe's rolled out some some capabilities there too, uh, Mary being one of them, I think they call it. Um so you know, we've seen those two use cases as a direct result of kind of this tightening of budget. A third use case that uh I shared with a pavilion group recently is a free tool called Notebook LM. And uh Notebook LM, if a lot of people are familiar with it and they've probably dabbled with it, but where we see a great value add, and you know, it's hard to ascribe an exact dollar amount to this, but it's really a time savings, particularly for ABM with sales. Uh Notebook LM, you can drop a bunch of different or disparate transcripts or call recordings or uh emails into one area that's secure, and it doesn't go out to the greater AI. It's uh called a rag in terms of an AI capability. And uh what it does is you can query the information that you put in it. So imagine if you're going after accounts, like for example, if I was selling into Texas Instruments and I wanted to get my sales team up to speed, or maybe executives that are not familiar with Texas instruments, I share them the link and they can query the database to ask their own questions. It's like natural language kinds of queries. Yes.

Michael Hartmann: 10:48

Okay. I mean, that sounds like a kind of thing that would work well for like a knowledge base, too, right? Where you could put in a lot of unstructured stuff and and query that for solutions.

Jon Russo: 10:59

Yeah. And there there are more sophisticated solutions out there that that uh you know that are more robust and enterprise grade. But uh for for that situation, it has worked swimmingly well. So probably like a small to mid-size, like a mid-sized company would get a lot of value out of that. And the other thing is it um it's something you can do a little bit more local. Like you don't have to typically involve a lot of people. Now, of course, you'd want to check your IT, you know, make sure you have IT authority before you start dropping information like that outside of uh your your existing systems. But for the companies and clients that have used it, they've got a lot of utility, it really takes a lot of pressure off the sales enablement. So it's not necessarily a mops, like the other two are directly mops, but that third use case is coming up more and more.

Michael Hartmann: 11:48

So yeah, kind of uh enabling either like I will almost sit inside sales and age myself, but you know, BDRs and salespeople on prepping for follow-up and calls. Yeah. Um, it's interesting that first use case you talked about. My first thought was I I suspect that a lot more people who are listening are going to be going through that same kind of pressure of, hey, our vendors, pick whichever kind, is putting pressure on us to to recommit and to spend more because their pricing is changing. Um and what I've seen a lot of places is that people like one of the first things I always want to do, if it's unclear when I land someplace, is to get an inventory of what the platforms are, what the current contractual terms are, how much we're spending, when do we have to because if you miss that window of opportunity, right? So you need to be thinking about that sooner rather than later, especially if you feel like your leadership team is going to put pressure on like we're not spending more money, or we have to cut, you know, reduce the amounts we spend. That's like that's something to start thinking about now. I think so. We're recording this in mid-September. Like I would expect that a lot of people have contracts to go through the end of the year and are probably coming up on that timeline when you have to make changes, right?

Jon Russo: 13:03

Yeah, I think you're you're exactly right. And and I will say, in that, you know, that one use case that I mentioned, there's also this element of a leap of faith. Because none of us have really none of us have ever been in this environment before, contrary to what you read on LinkedIn and all the experts of do this, do that on AI. And none of us have ever been through this era. So there is a bit of uh uh you almost have to go in it with a shared leap of faith that okay, we're replacing marketing automation, which all of us on this listening know that it was great back in 2004, uh 2005, or you know, 2007. It's not designed for today. Um so it's not it it it it's logical to make the change, but you have to take that leap of that first step is a scary step.

Michael Hartmann: 13:51

So yeah, and I think the idea of I mean, one of the benefits of having a third-party sort of all-encompassing solution for even keep it to relatively small to say like automating email, right, and that kind of stuff is if you're to go build that from scratch with tools, right? I am sure people are gonna be going, like, oh, we can do vibe coding and knock something out quickly, yada yada, but like it's not like the amount of stuff that goes into security and compliance and all that kind of stuff that you know we'd have to think about is not it's not trivial. Right. So um it's it's gonna be it's a very interesting time for sure. So it so let's talk about AI a little more. So one of the things that you and I talked about before is that we think like the best AI tools work best, or maybe sometimes only when the underlying data that they have is solid, which I I I want to poke at a little bit um once you go through this, but like I mean, data feels like it's always been a top of the thing. Like, and I don't know anybody who says our data's in great shape, right? Um, from a marketing sales standpoint. Like why why is why do you think it's such a critical issue now? Because like one of the I let me give you my sort of pushback a little bit, or at least hopeful pushback, is that I have been hopeful that AI tools could help solve some of the data quality problems, right? Too. So I get that they can't they work best with quality data. That I think I get. It's just like, but to get to the quality data, can we use AI to help get there? So I don't know. What's your take on all that?

Jon Russo: 15:27

Yeah, I I think it's both actually. So I think your pushback is absolutely correct. Um, you know, you you take a tool, for example, like Clay, and we've deployed this with a a number of clients, and Clay is super successful at what's called their waterfall capability of kind of doing a data validation, uh, of getting the right information through multiple sources before it presents, okay, here's a complete record. Um Clay didn't exist really. I mean, they were around even like five, seven years ago, but they weren't as well known as they are now. Now they've like caught on like wildfire. Yeah, and I think one of the reasons they've caught on is in this environment with AI, you really have to uh think about your first party data, its quality, and how you're gonna segment and target somebody. So um what Clay can do is with a level of confidence, validate information that in yesteryear you had to use a combination of demand tools, CRM fusion, validity, whatever they're calling themselves, validity acquired my old company, which is why I know as much as I know about this. Sure. Uh ring lead, like you you you'd have to you'd go down that path. But in today's model with AI, to your point, um clay, if you want to call it AI type capability, and it's workflow, if you harness it correctly, it is an extremely powerful tool beyond just a contact repository. A lot of people think of clay is just oh, a zoom info replacement. And flat, in fact, it's got a lot of workflow capability, uh validation capability, it does have some tie to AI as well. Uh in combination, it can really improve your quality of data. And then you can do the right targeting with other AI tools. So whether you have an SDR tool that might be doing outreach, um if you have uh a chat bot that you you're you're having somebody enter in information, it can match back to the information in your database, that becomes more critical. Uh in every organization, the data sucks. Um it's a journey. If you can get it cleaner, that's probably the best you're gonna do. But your productivity, if you think about data, your sales productivity, your marketing productivity, your marketing tool investment, because you're paying on a typically on a per contact basis, yeah. Um, if you're B2B, you know, all of this is driven by the quality of your data. So really being thoughtful about that, I think, becomes extremely important um for any company right now as they they look toward this AI world.

Michael Hartmann: 18:24

Yeah, it's interesting because I like it's you you it feels like you're struggling to describe what clay is vis-a-vis AI, and it feels like it is one of maybe many automation tools that are sort of a wrapper around AI components. Um and it and in their case, it feels like I but I haven't used it a huge amount, but a little bit. It feels like they've um made it easier to to leverage some of the AI tools and some of the external sources of data and things like that than maybe a a more generic uh automation platform that can do some of the same things.

Jon Russo: 19:01

I think you're saying it better. Yeah, you're you're saying more they're not a pure AI play, um like some of the other tools, but I would consider them kind of AI-ish.

Michael Hartmann: 19:11

Yeah. I mean, I mean I I think I see like like and this is not like like Zapier saying they're an A, you know, an app uh AI kind of tool. And I yeah, I see that they've got connectors to AI things, right? But at the heart, like they're a connector to me. I don't think of them as and they have workflow too. Um but then I see other things like N8N, right? Right.

Jon Russo: 19:39

Hardcore AI.

Michael Hartmann: 19:40

Yeah, yeah. And well, not even hardcore AI, but hardcore uh automation, right? Where you can do it's like you got more flexibility, but that means comes with more complexity in terms of like you have to have more expertise to use it.

Jon Russo: 19:53

You have to have more expertise to use it, and and then uh you know it all comes back to like who are you targeting, how are you targeting them. Yeah. If if you don't have the right baseline information, um and there are there are lots of ways you can do it. I'm just using as one example, Clay. Uh we've seen companies aggregate like in a snowflake database and and kind of reconcile data. And you can old school it too. CRM Fusion, Demand Tools, Zoom Info. Um there are other ways, but I do think that um if I were to invest right now, I'd invest in improving the data quality, particularly on an account-based motion where you've got a very defined set of accounts or people you're going after. Yeah, maybe I'd start there before I boil the ocean of the whole database.

Michael Hartmann: 20:43

So yeah, I mean you could prioritize um where you focus that. And it feels like improving data is a very, again, very generic term. And I was like, what is it? I always want to know when I get that kind of question or get the opportunity to actually do something on that. Is like, are we looking to improve the consistency and completeness of data on our records, or are we trying to expand the number of records, say an ABM kind of motion, right? Are we trying to make sure that we have all the right people that we need to be um going communicating to or targeting for whatever motion we're using? I mean, those are two very different things, right?

Jon Russo: 21:23

Yes. Yeah, two very different things. I'd start with the first one. If if you don't have the right quality of outreach, it doesn't matter adding other people on. Um and but you're you're absolutely right. There is that second part of adding that the full buyers committee, uh, that would be helpful as well.

Michael Hartmann: 21:45

Yeah. I mean, the the idea, and I can't remember if this was a planning call I had for an upcoming episode or one of our recent episodes, it's been one of those kind of couple of months, but there was somebody I talked to recently had the term like minimal viable record, right? Which I liked, right? It's like, what are the what is it we need to do? And I've been at one place in my career where actually we made progress on answering the question, what is a customer? Right. And it was that kind of we didn't use the term minimal viable record, but that was kind of what we were trying to do, right? So for a what's the minimum we need to represent a person? What's the minimum we need to represent um a I don't even want to say in a business entity, right? Like uh other word, a company, account, whatever you want to call it. And um that was pretty like I was sort of like floored that I hadn't seen that more in other places.

Jon Russo: 23:46

That's a great idea. So yeah, I think you're absolutely right. You do need that minimum, you need that minimum, and it it has to be damn good. Otherwise, you're wasting a lot of time, energy, and effort. Um, you know, we've seen some amazing things that the sales teams do when their quality is not correct. The amount of time that they lose with swivel systems, with uh meaning moving from one screen to another or not even working in Salesforce. Uh we've had I hate to even admit that, but uh, we had one client when we started, they're like, we just work in Zoom info. I'm like, what?

Michael Hartmann: 24:23

Yeah. Well, I so I it's a the knowledge base thing is interesting to me because I years ago I did a worked on a project to try to um improve a customer support function at a big global company to try to reduce the amount of growth and headcount for support, you know, as revenue grew. And one of the solutions was a knowledge base, but the leaders of the support teams were not really believing that there we it was needed because everything was unique. And what it turned out is when we started talking to the actual reps, like they all had a knowledge base, but they were not shared, right? They had a document on their desktop somewhere, and whenever a customer would call, I mean, that was where their go-to. A few of them shared a document, like on a shared server, but that was like and it's just like that kind of stuff always like this idea like that things are so unique, and we have like I just I'm like that's not the way it is. People figure out how to get done what they need to get done, right? So um so let's maybe switch gears a little bit. So you've been you as we mentioned in intro, you've been a CMO of public companies, private companies, taking some public um through acquisitions, things like that. So and you scale them. So when you look back, yeah, I know you mentioned this sort of at the top too, that um the kind of what you think about marketing operations, but like how did you view it earlier in your career and how has it changed to what your current view of marketing ops is?

Jon Russo: 25:53

Yeah, that's a a thoughtful question. And um you know, I think the the value of marketing operations has just gone up in time from in my eyes. Now, whether all executives see that or understand that, different question, different issue. But um the reason being is the number I mean I mean you think back maybe 10, 20 years ago, Salesforce was just coming onto the scene. So there wasn't much technical debt, there wasn't tool sprawl, there wasn't AI, um there wasn't bad data. There was bad data, but it wasn't fully understood, and the bad data has just gone worse with time. Tool sprawl has gotten worse with time. AI has proliferated, and you know, you got execs saying, Go make something happen. Go, you know, they're they're speaking in broad terms that mops can't understand. Uh, like, you know, do AI and fix the business with AI, and that doesn't translate well to to to a mop.

Michael Hartmann: 27:01

What design what designers have to deal with when they say make that image pop.

Jon Russo: 27:04

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Same same thing. So, you know, I think 10 or 20 years ago, I knew it was important, um, which is why I took a role on Mocha, Mark Marketing Operations Cross Company Alliance, um, and it was passionate to me. And the reason it was passionate to me is because with mops, you have the ability to ascribe value to marketing, and you're only gonna run as fast as a CMO, as fast as your mops person can enable you to run. So that relationship between mops and CMO in my eyes is critical. Um and also I think demand gen is, you know, it's like a one-two punch. Like those would be the two areas as a CMO I would place heavy bets on. Brand to me, especially in this environment where there's so much, you know, I hear a lot of people talking about brand. I want to get behind brand. I'm not a brand guy from a CMO perspective. I'm more of the mops, demand gen. Like, let's figure out how we're gonna get this chip moving in the right direction. Um, so I think it's in to answer your question, like what has where has the value shifted over the years? I think it's only increased over time. Um, and I've been, you know, I probably have a lot more gray hair than a lot of your other guests, but um, I've been a huge believer of mops for, you know, like I said, nine years at Mocha prior to to the mops community being formed by you guys. Um I've been a long time believer that mops is really uh critical. I I should also throw one other statement in, too. There was a um there's a couple people that I think the world of in the industry um that also echoed this. And I think it was about it was within the year, maybe about eight or nine months ago, that I heard both from uh Lotney Conan and Scott Brinker, who I've got all sorts of time for. I think we're all gonna be working for Lotney at one point in time in our life. Uh she is phenomenal. And she even said, Hey, uh, without you, like I can only go as quick as my mops person can go. And Scott Brinker, it's somewhere on my LinkedIn post, maybe I can get afford you the link afterward if you want in the show notes or whatever. But Scott Brinker said the exact same thing. He said, Look, this is the time for mops to shine because there's going to be a lot of integrations with all this AI coming onto the scene. Now, reality is probably a lot different for your listeners, where they're probably pushing the boulder up the hill. But when those two beacons say that, hey, this is a really valuable function, if not the most valuable function, that was good validation for me. Like, okay, I'm I'm heading in the right direction, and potentially good validation for your audience members as well.

Michael Hartmann: 30:01

Yeah. Well, Latin is a force for sure. And Scott is well, what do we say earlier? He's his grandfather of Martech. So I don't think he'd be offended by that. It's interesting because when you were describing that like the the one-two punch of marketing ops and demand gen, and that you're not a brand guy, one of the things that occurred to me, and I think um is is um something that I think I've thought of before, which is if you're a marketing leader and you do believe in brand, right? You have to you you can't go right to brand, probably, unless you happen to have an unusual CEO or whatever, because what you have to do is prove that you can deliver you can deliver and execute on demand gen, really, and marketing ops is the enabler there. But if you can do that, you will be able to open up the opportunity to do brand-related things, right? Things that don't require or can't really be measured and things like that. And I think um I think the best marketing leaders I see and hear talk about, right, they don't discount the importance of marketing being held accountable for revenue pipeline results, right? Um, but they do that in an effort to also enable, they also don't discount brand, right? And that it's for the long term, that's still needed.

Jon Russo: 31:19

Yeah, I think you you're saying it far more eloquently than I just did. Um Just lucky. No, and if I were if I were interviewing for a job, I would totally steal what you just said. You're right. Because the demand The demand and mops side open up the opportunity to invest in brand. I think, you know, we may talk about this a little bit later on about the career side. The risk, I think, of leading with brand is it's too nebulous. Whereas mops, like I can, you're measuring. You should know, um, generally speaking, not exact, but hey, I make this kind of investment either in uh a channel, and I I define channel as a big chann, big capital C. So my SDRs, my partners were marketing. And then there's the middle capital C. Is it the web, the webinar, the event? Um, like we as mops leaders and professionals should be able to directionally say what's working and what's not. Yeah. Um, and you can't do that with brand, in my opinion. But to your point, if you do that capital C and lower C and know the direction of that, it enables you to have the conversation internally to then invest in brand. That I could see as is a path.

Michael Hartmann: 32:35

Yeah. Yeah. So I think this leads right into this whole question that we were talking about. Like, yeah, I think I think you used like the term, like we a lot of people in mops in particular, and therefore probably their marketing leaders who maybe don't have the details right, talk in bits and bytes when it comes to describing things. But it feels like to get that trust to be able to do some of those other things that are not as measurable, you need to be able to speak in the language that the senior leaders, executives, board, whatever, whichever it is for your particular organization, or like why why do you think it's so hard to make that like change that frame of reference and talk about things in a different way?

Jon Russo: 33:16

Yeah, and and I think in our our pre-show, we were talking about like uh that the translation process can be um either misunderstood or potentially missed. And I should probably caveat it by saying not every mops person needs to be able to translate, but if you want to succeed organizationally and grow organizationally, this translation is very, very meaningful. And I should also caveat it by saying I've made this mistake even as a CMO when we we get so wrapped up in our language, and it took me um an experience or two that was not positive to figure this one out, um, you know, to bring it into 3D. I'm talking about MQLs and leads, and I got a CEO saying, What's a lead? And I'm like, What, wait, what? Uh yeah, you know, and so I'm talking in my language and comfortable in my language. It was not a language that the CEO who was an engineer um knew or understood. And after that, like I was so comfortable in my language, I realized, oh, I'm not speaking, I'm not sharing my experience in something he understands.

Michael Hartmann: 34:36

Yeah.

Jon Russo: 34:36

Um, so that would be no different from mops. So you might be the greatest technician in the world at Marketo, at Sixth Sense, at Demand Base, XYZ platform, HubSpot, you name it. If you're unable to have that conversation with how your boss is thinking about things, your ability to progress in that organization is going to be dramatically slowed down. So I think there's the boss aspect of that translation. And, you know, I've got an unfair advantage. I was a finance undergrad. I'm probably like one of three people in marketing that have a finance undergrad that did marketing. So I'm more quantifiable than most, which is probably why I like mops and why I like Demand Gen, is because it's quantifiable. Yep. But I I do think there's an opportunity for um mops to learn the language of the business from a CFO perspective.

Michael Hartmann: 35:36

And I was just thinking of that myself. Like the like we we actually had a guest on a a few episodes ago who said, which it came out as to me very provocative, and I was like, that he said like the best CFOs are often better storytellers than the CMOs within their organization. Um and I was just thinking, like, like that's where you should go. Like, if you want to learn how to tell the story that the rest of the executive team goes, this the finance team is where to go.

Jon Russo: 36:02

Yeah, and you have to earn the right, too. Like you it if you can invest in a course on cash flow, um, understanding cash flow, net income statement. And here's why you want to do this, by the way. It's funny you mentioned this because I was thinking about it before we got on the call. When I was a CMO, I would time my asks around a couple different things, my investment asks. Yeah, if we got new funding, that's an opportunity to come in. If we outperformed top line or bottom line and had unexpected cash, that you know, some of the investors want minimal cash flow. Uh, they want to be net cash flow positive, meaning as close to zero as possible. So, hey, I can help with that problem because I've got a platform that I want to go invest in. Um, not every CFO or every business is going to share that information. That's the challenge.

Michael Hartmann: 37:04

Yeah.

Jon Russo: 37:04

But picking up on those signals and reading the room, that's when you can optimize those asks. Well, yeah, I was on another call earlier today, and there was um a mops professional who said, Hey, now's the time to be asking for uh headcount, uh, because mops is the most important. Okay, it is important. I get that. And you got to read the room. If you're not reading that financial room and you're making those asks, you're gonna be voted off the island. Um they just they won't tolerate that. Uh in this environment, they'll vote you off the island. It has nothing to do with how important the function is, it has everything to do with the business and the business direction. So you gotta really um my counsel would be to tune into that to the best of your ability. And if you do, you you your odds of of advancing go up by an order of magnitude or convincing somebody that you need that platform or you need that headcount. Um if you go in uh any other way, I think you're at high risk in this environment.

Michael Hartmann: 38:11

Yeah, and I would say like the you know, if you are in the position of a budget manager within as a mops leader, the more you can show that you're a good steward of the budget, right? Whether that means um you close the you close your time, you you're you meet what your the expectations are month after month after month, and know what you can be predictable. Uh and you are prepared when they come and say, uh, if you if you're lucky enough, they come and say like to your point, like, hey, we've got you can spend fifty thousand dollars more, where would you do it? Right, be ready to answer that question and be confident about it, or be prepared to answer the more often asked question, which is if we have to cut 20% or whatever the number is, it is. And can I go back to a story where like just I'll I'll let you go in a second, but I had a at a end of the year at a large organization and my finance partner, I was like uh it was coming, it was December, they closed, they basically wanted everything in by mid-December. And I said, I can get us to be uh under budget by X dollars, or I can get us we can be over budget by this another Y dollars. So which do you prefer? Because I can make either one happen, you just tell me which one was, and I did, right? I so like that's builds trust.

Jon Russo: 39:24

It it's it's a great uh approach to offer a choice too. I like how you you approach that. Um I was gonna add one other leading indicator that I mean this is hard, right? Mops, it it's such a hard function because you've got to know so much. You're responsible, you're like the catch-all for a lot of the technical elements. You got a CEO saying do more with less and make AI happen, speaking nebulous terms. Yeah, you got users that are not happy, like it's a hard time. And oh, by the way, John just said learn finance. Uh so it's it's really hard. Um another, though, leading indicator is watching the full life cycle. Like if a mops person can understand the full life cycle, so if retention is spiking up, that means you don't have to work as hard on the net new logo side. That too opens up a window for investment. If an acquisition happens, there's an opportunity to do uh what's called with some CFOs, uh like a below-the-line write-off, which helps um cash flow. We've had clients finance projects of us or even like website improvements where they can write off the cost because of an acquisition. Like being tuned into those situations, that's where it opens up the conversation with the finance team. Because that's how the finance team's thinking. They're like, okay, I've got I've got this money, where do I invest it? Um, so those are those would be some other areas to kind of think through.

Michael Hartmann: 41:05

Yeah, I mean, I think that's those are all like uh we've said it before on this on the podcast, right? If you don't know how your company makes money, to your point about retention versus acquisition, like you should learn that because then you can have informed input on where you should invest.

Jon Russo: 41:23

100%. 100%.

Michael Hartmann: 41:27

Uh and it's hard because like your point, like mops people tend to know how the sausage is made, right? They know about how difficult it is to maintain these systems, yada yada, but no one cares, right? Like well, they care about it. No executive cares.

Jon Russo: 41:38

And they care they do. They they they what what they they don't appreciate is how I think how hard mops has to work to pull like reports together, you know, the burn all weekend to answer one simple question. People don't understand the glacier of mops, they understand the top level.

Michael Hartmann: 41:56

Yeah.

Jon Russo: 41:57

Um so but you're right, they don't care about the details, they just want the outcome.

Michael Hartmann: 42:01

Uh yeah, absolutely. Um so we've got, I mean, there's so much more we could go down on that path, but I'm just so we talked a little bit like the understanding finance, like what other what other skills would you recommend that MOPS professionals pursue? Um, assuming they want to like have some some goals to either, if they're an individual contributor, become a leader or to move into other roles within an organization. What what would you advise them to do in terms of skills and experience they should go after?

Jon Russo: 42:36

Yeah, and it's a tricky time right now. Of course, the band-aid answer is AI skill, anything AI related.

Michael Hartmann: 42:42

Yeah, the challenge That almost feels like table stakes right now, right?

Jon Russo: 42:46

Right, right. And the trickiness might be hey, my company doesn't allow it. You know, the security's locked down, or uh I, you know, I I don't have the budget. Or to the extent you can even dabble personally in your personal time around AI, I have done all sorts of things. Um, you know, uh losing weight, uh, I've got a bike training regiment, um, I'm planning a trip. You know, there are all sorts of things.

Michael Hartmann: 43:17

I did one for my son to warm up for his 800-meter races.

Jon Russo: 43:21

Right. Exactly. Like AI is so powerful that I've I've learned a lot personally that I can then take over to my business should that opportunity present itself. Yeah. Um, I tell you, that's how I learned Notebook LM, quite frankly. I had uh I was dabbling around with Notebook LM playing with it, and then I had a client, CMO, that called me up and said, You've been talking us, talking with us for 60 days. I need to know tomorrow what's everybody saying and to net it out. Well, I dropped my eight conversations into Notebook LM and boom, in 30 seconds, what would have taken me three days to kind of leaf through and connect hours of conversations across multiple people and multiple constituents. In notebook LM I did in 30 seconds because I was dabbling with it personally. So I think you know AI would be the you know one area to to kind of experiment with. Your community or any community where you can learn together on AI would be um you know really, really helpful. Uh trying to think of any other things that would help from the marketability perspective. I guess the other thing would be the integrations. If you can understand the impact of introducing these tools and the impact that'll have integration-wise, will it make other tools better? Will it replace tools? Um, developing that skill set could be really, really valuable. Uh how can we do it better? That's the number one question that we're being asked right now. And that's a question that you know you could be developing skills toward is how can we be doing what we're doing better uh with AI?

Michael Hartmann: 45:10

Yeah, I think I I totally agree. I think I mean I would love to like I think any organization that you can if you can get the organization to believe that you can try stuff with AI AI with within the limits and constraints about privacy and stuff like that, right? It is really, really powerful to be able to just try stuff without like a lot of risk, and from what I can tell, right? Um and you can learn along the way, and it's it's huge. I'm doing I'm kind of like you. I mean, I'm doing things both personally and professionally using you know LLMs mostly. And I've been I have one automation thing that I'm doing that actually helps with the podcasts. So um and it's a small thing, but it's it's a nice thing that I just don't have to think about anymore. So um John, I wish we had more time. Like we could like we we could go on and just you know reminisce about the old days of marketing apps before it was called marketing apps. But um so if folks want to connect with you or learn more about what you're doing, what's the best way for them to do that?

Jon Russo: 46:21

Yeah, uh a couple different options. First, if anybody ever needs advice, if they're still listening to this, uh free advice, trash or treasure, uh, you know, it's free for a reason. Uh feel free to ping me. Uh you know, I'm full of advice. Uh but I you know I I feel for operators right now. So if you do have a situation and you need a counsel, happy to do that. Um, LinkedIn is probably the best way to follow or connect with me. If you do connect, just reference that you heard me on this podcast. That would be helpful to hear. And then we've got a YouTube channel. In fact, um our YouTube channel's got go to market best practices. And Mike is good, Mike Rizzo is gonna be our guest on Friday, uh, this Friday. Now, by the time this gets published, it may be difference in time. But 300 plus people that we've interviewed. Um, I run it with uh the former head of research at Serious Decisions, Meg Hewer. She was a CMO as well. Um, so and we've had all sorts of guests, uh you know, of mops as well as non-mops, uh in and around go to market and how to do it better and best practices. So those would be a couple ways that you could reach out.

Michael Hartmann: 47:29

It's under the is it B2B Fusion YouTube channel or is it called something else?

Jon Russo: 47:33

B2B Fusion YouTube channel, yep, exactly.

Michael Hartmann: 47:35

Okay, perfect. All right, sounds good. Well, John, thank you again for the time insights. Um, it was a lot of fun. So uh appreciate it. And as always, thanks to our listeners and now viewers. Um, we appreciate your support. If you have ideas for topics or guests or want to be a guest, as always, reach out to Naomi, Mike, or me. Thanks, everyone. Bye. Thank you.