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 like, and Naomi should be able to come back at some point. All right. Today I'm going to be talking about what it really takes to build demand generation and revenue marketing capability inside a massive enterprise organization, especially when that tech stack is outdated, ownership is fragmented, and change has to happen without direct authority. Joining me to do that is my guest, Rachel Roundy, product marketing lead for AI at Snowflake. Prior to Snowflake, Rachel spent over four years inside a large legacy tech organization where she helped lead a cross-functional tiger team. I love that term. Tasked with building demand gen and revenue marketing muscle at scale. So the episode is going to be all about enterprise reality. So even if you're not in that, I suggest you listen. There's probably lessons to learn if you're scaling. The gap between strategy and execution, what happens when marketing and ops aren't aligned, the lessons learned. And the ones you only learn when you're trying to drive change inside a company that's been operating the same way for years. Rachel, thanks for joining the show.

Rachel Roundy: 1:32

Yeah, thanks for having me, Michael. That was a great intro. I love it.

Michael Hartmann: 1:36

Yeah, yeah. It's funny. I do I love that term tiger team. I use that myself. And like it's funny when people kind of go like cock their head, like, what? I have to explain it. But I get it. It's a big company. It's like a big company term. I don't know.

Rachel Roundy: 1:49

I think so. I think so. But it's like really descriptive. I think it's like, okay, we're we're kind of like a assembled outside of you know the usual structure to get something done together.

Michael Hartmann: 1:58

Right. It's the way they sort of let some people break out of the the bureaucracy. Exactly. Capture, right? Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Well, why don't we start with um a little bit of your background? I think you've been, I don't remember how long it's been that you've been at Snowflake. I know it hasn't been, it's been less than a year, if I remember right. Definitely, yeah. So maybe like walk us through like a career path, how you ended up at Snowflake doing AI product stuff.

Rachel Roundy: 2:26

Yeah, for sure. Um I've only been here for a little over two months now, which is um bananas, because it feels like it's been a year by in some ways, but also like a blip of time in others. Um, but it's a really exciting place to be. Um, I in my current role is in the product marketing function for our AI and marketing, or excuse me, AI and ML portfolio. Um, so across all of you know the offerings that we have for that on top of the Snowflake platform. Um, and it's fun to be back in product marketing. I've in my previous role, I was at Intel um for four and a half years, and I was doing kind of a hodgepodge of roles, doing integrated marketing, product marketing, um, and then most recently demand and ABM, um, which we'll talk about today. Um I find it really fun to have a little bit of a flavor of each one of those roles. Um, and there's a lot of connected tissue. My role here, uh, Snowflake is really focused on kind of like building that holistic storytelling around how we're talking about our AI and ML offerings, um, really helping some of our audiences overcome their like fear, uncertainty, and doubt around AI. And we were doing a lot of the same thing at Intel, um honestly, with our campaigns with our AI PC and some of our enterprise AI offerings. Um, and both roles, I get to work really closely with sales, with enablement, and with the demand and ABM team. Um, so it's fun. I I like uh any opportunity where I get to just kind of like form a coalition across orgs and and make some cool stuff happen. So um yeah.

Michael Hartmann: 3:54

Yeah, it's funny that you describe it that way. So for the to like pull back the kimono a little bit. Like right before we started hitting record, we we talked for like 10 minutes about this idea of like having broad generalist knowledge and understanding. I guess I don't even like the term T T-shaped because I feel like it misses it. Because I feel like I'm more than T-shaped. I feel like general is like a maybe it's you know, um I don't know, M-shaped, or like I feel like there's more maze where I go fairly deep. Um yeah. But I think that's very yeah.

Rachel Roundy: 4:26

I think there's a ton of value in there. I mean, we were talking about it before, but I think um, you know, a lot of folks, and you know, the the job market has been this way for, I don't know, let's say more than a decade, where everyone's encouraged to become a deep specialist. And that is kind of you pick a lane and then you stay in that lane, and that's where your promotion cycle is, and that's how you kind of evolve. And it's gotten to a point too where it's so hyper-specific. It's not only like I'm a product marketer, but I'm a product marketer for this exact type of technology and this exact vertical. And otherwise I can't branch out of that. But there's so much value in being able to zoom out and see the whole system and how your inputs are affecting everything else end to end. And I think more companies are starting to see that. Like you see, a like now I know like job postings are not quite catching up, but you see a lot of thought leaders talking about generalist marketing. Um, and I think, you know, we talked about this before too, but AI is forcing this as well, because you have to have this really tight collaboration between teams, between your data, between your operations and processes if you're going to scale agentix systems within your org. And I'm not talking about like customer-facing agentix systems, but in terms process stuff, yeah. Exactly. How are you streamlining? And the first place that that always falls apart is with your data and structure, right? And and can you actually go tell an agent to do something that's going to require touching the processes of several teams? And most orgs, not yet, not even close, right? And so that's where the value really comes in of understanding that end-to-end journey. And I can tell you, like, as a product marketer who has also done demand in ABM and also campaign stuff, um, every single person that I've met on those teams at Snowflake is like, oh, thank God you understand what my job is. Um our mops team, right? Like, um, especially them, I think, uh, just uh because they're always uh somehow not as respected or like their value isn't as uh apparent, even though it is critical for literally anything to get done in marketing. Right. But but yeah, it's uh I think it's really satisfying, and you just see magic happen when you're able to kind of connect those dots cross-functionally, which is really relevant to this tiger team that we're gonna talk about.

Michael Hartmann: 6:37

Yeah. Well, so um you know that's the tiger team, I think you hinted at like you so I I think I was gonna say a very large enterprise organization. Maybe you say who it is. I think you already yeah, but it's okay. It's okay. Um those Intel, right? So yeah, when you when you when you first stepped into there, like what was how would you describe that environment?

Rachel Roundy: 7:01

When I first joined, who um I mean I would say in general, Intel is is just a fascinating place that I don't know if I if it's like any other place I've ever worked or will work, um, in that it is massive, right? So we had like a hundred thousand plus employees. We had global impact, we're talking, you know, tens of billions of dollars per year in um revenue. And um, and it's a tech dinosaur. So, like, you know, there were a lot of things about the organization that um were very siloed and it was very spread out. Um, and at the same time, um, you know, there were specific teams that had just an immense amount of scope. So, as an example, the team that I was on for most of my time at Intel, we drove the strategy for 11 markets. Um, and our director was pretty much a CMO of like the entire commercial client offering, right? And so we had everything end to end just within our small team for a global presence. We're talking millions and millions in budget, um, you know, the support with like an 80-20 kind of balance between HQ creating 80% of the strategy and inputs and everything, and then sending that to the edge where they would personalize and execute that last 20%. Um, so it was wild. It was really fun. I got to work with some of the coolest and most interesting humans. I loved talking to the global teams. My that was my favorite part. Like I'm very nerdy and have lived abroad for a long time. So like I loved that the most. Um, but the complexity that it introduced introduces is absolutely bananas. So, like if you imagine just like a nurture program, and say you've got like six languages, and within that nurture program, you've got, you know, a fairly mature uh modular kind of setup, right? So maybe you've got something always on. For us, as an example, we had like an always-on monthly newsletter, and then we had these different nurture tracks that people would go down. Um, and they would get opted into that based on different behaviors or scoring models. Um, and at some point there would be an option to raise your hand, right? There was all these kind of this and this uh really thoughtful logic in it. But every single one of those needed to be built out for every different language, and not only every different language, but also each country that was using those languages. So we would have like French Canadian and then like French French. Um, that's just the basic bare bones, right? Of like the number of assets you've got in there. Now introduce a B testing. What did you like? And so at any given point, you've got like 50 versions of a single email send because you're testing different things. You've got all these different A-B variants in all these different languages. So then you imagine trying to pull a report on like, how did this newsletter from February perform? Well, that is not as simple as just going to query one email. It is literally aggregating all of them. And what we ran into that was a constant battle that we were really getting uh much more streamlined in at the end was like simple things that are like paper cuts that end up making things really hard, like naming conventions. Nobody would follow them, right? At all. And so then if those 50 emails that you've got, our teams have to go manually track down each individual send. There'd also be delays because of localization. So Japan would maybe not actually send that one until a month after the US had sent it. So good luck finding that to go find which one matches to the, you know.

Michael Hartmann: 10:30

So yeah, and my so one of the things that I it's it's there's a I I'm sure there's uh research on this somewhere, but um it's interesting what I've seen, having worked at maybe not quite as big an organization as what you try talking about, but certainly bigger ones than maybe some of our listeners, where they're probably going, like, I'm a team of one or two or maybe three people, right? And like the the amount we get done, if we could just add uh double our size, we get double the output. But what I find is like when you increase that size, you start to build like friction comes in the way, and you don't actually get that multiplier effect because it maybe it's tied to the specialization, maybe it's tied to communication, especially when you're international, right? You just get time and things with communication and hours of the day.

Rachel Roundy: 11:15

But that's absolutely yeah. Well, and you get all of these really weird builds. So, like we ran into this where like because Intel was so massive, there would be a country team that's like, hey, we need to solve for X. And so they would buy their own SaaS, they would buy their own tool, they would like, you know, try to build something up that like our mops to our central HQ mobs team, like would have no idea even existed, right? And it's just kind of this shadow thing that exists. And so then every time that happens, which would happen all the time, then you'd have further and further fragmentation of the experience for customers, but also the data, like you know, reporting metrics, like any, and you know, some of these tools like probably everyone would like to use, but like, can we all get on the same page? And it's hard when you're like dealing with literally hundreds to thousands of different stakeholders.

Michael Hartmann: 12:02

Yeah, uh, just it's crazy. I mean, I think that's for people who've not experienced and where they go like, oh, well, there's you people who work in big companies would be able to work in a startup, for example, or a stage company. I'm like, actually, I think you'd be surprised at how much we could get done with actually fewer distractions and a little more autonomous control, right?

Rachel Roundy: 12:23

Everyone I know who has left the giant company for a smaller company, even honestly going from Intel to Snowflake, which Snowflake is still big for a lot of a lot of uh probably your audience and just people in general. It's 8,000 employees. To me, I'm like, oh, it's just so tiny, you know, like just yeah, much more approachable. And just the speed at which I can actually get stuff done um is amazing. I think a lot of people, it it's it's like your point is really valid. There's that misperception that, like, okay, anyone who's at a big company can't get something done at a smaller company. That's true sometimes. There are people who outsource a lot to agencies or they're not as like directly tied into stuff. But there are unicorn people, I would say, that um are able to operate at that level of complexity and hold that much chaos and still move stuff forward in spite of the organizational drag. Then you put those people in an organization where there aren't those barriers and like holy moly, it's cool.

Michael Hartmann: 13:20

So, right. Yeah, it's yeah, I think I think for the people who have not experienced that, it's it's it's funny. I was as I was reading your the intro for you, it was there was something in there that pink in this conversation did too. That I so I listened to a lot of other podcasts. One of them is um modern wisdom. So Chris Williams, you know, people are familiar with it. In some of his recent episodes, he's been talking about this thing that he's been thinking about called unteachable lessons. And I think this is one of those things that kind of lives in that domain, like unless you've experienced that, right? And you go, like, oh, like oh, how bad can it be at this big company? You don't have all these expectations and you don't have to moves quickly, but like it's a there's there's different challenges you have, right? And until you in it, you don't really know what it's like, right?

Rachel Roundy: 14:06

Like we literally would do like billions of dollars in revenue, like we have billions of dollars in actually marketing influenced revenue documented that we drove in like a quarter, a half, right? Like it's just a different amount of pressure. Yeah, it I I are would argue like it's a lot harder in some ways because you have to wrangle so many cats, like you just have to hurt so many different stakeholders, and and it's really like like I said earlier, you're working kind of in spite of the organizational bog down to keep things moving.

Michael Hartmann: 14:38

There's so many people who can veto something.

Rachel Roundy: 14:41

Exactly. And it's easy to just be like, well, I guess we're not doing that. Um, but you know, I I'm really proud of of what the team did. Um, just like all the programs that we did, but especially this this tiger team effort for sure.

Michael Hartmann: 14:53

Well, yeah, so let's like talk about the tiger. Well, so for our listeners, you may not know what a tiger team is, maybe spend a little time just like what does that mean? And then yeah, you were asked to lead that and talk about what you were asked to to to to build and what the mandate was.

Rachel Roundy: 15:10

Yeah, so Intel is um massive as we've established, massive complex. Um, in addition to that, uh I like to describe Intel as an ingredient brand, really. Uh, but what I mean by that is like most of the revenue is not being closed by us directly, it's being closed by our channel partners because we are chips that are going into devices, right? Um, people aren't buying like a tangible thing directly from Intel, they're buying it in a laptop or a server or something else, some other device. Um, so that makes a go-to-market motion really complex and really, um, as a friend of mine noted, not psychologically approachable, which is a really like hilarious description. Um because of that, Intel had historically only done kind of like brand marketing. Like it was really just this awareness play that was air cover for the industry. Um, but there were real opportunities for us to accelerate, pipeline, and differentiate um and do more with like what we were bucketing as revenue marketing, but essentially demand and ABM, more full funnel approach. Um, and there had been pilots for that over the years in different spaces at Intel, but there had never been organizational buy-in, no leadership buy-in. And so maybe one little team would stand something up and then it would fizzle out and it would always suffer from the classic like lack of sales alignment or buy-in, right? So it'd be like one really excited marketing team that's gonna go build something and then like sales is like, what even is this? I have no interest in this. And it becomes extra complicated when we're dealing with like partner handoffs and you know, looping in partners because a lot of the, again, like when you get to that level is going to a partner. Um, so this Tiger team was like a cross-functional group of folks that were meant to rebuild our concept of demand gen and ABM marketing. Like, what um, what do we have? Like analyze what we've got in place. What should we be working towards? And we really focus that around three kinds of areas. First was like the sales and marketing alignment, crucial up front. Can't skip that part. So many teams still do, which is wild. Um, but like let's make sure we are, we all agree on what good looks like. Um, and then the tech stack, like what do we need in our tech stack to actually deliver on these things? And what data layers and APIs and connection points do we need to have? Um, as well as kind of the process layer of that, right? So, like once we figure this out, what are the planning processes supposed to look like? What, you know, who should own what? And like what are the, you know, um expectations between teams to keep things running? So it was, as Jess accurately described, not psychologically approachable, probably, but um, but it was really cool. And we we started with a mandate from our CMO and um CRO. He called himself a C CO, but that's a whole different chief commercial officer. But anyway. Um, and so we had buy-in from them. And I think that was like the first most important thing to have that top-down buy-in. We got we had folks from our um, Intel again, massive, massive organizations. So we had HQ marketing, um, field marketing, so our country teams, um, our partner marketing org, uh, mops, rev ops, and sales, uh, both HQ kind of sales planning um or like category as we called it, and the field sales folks. And we all started just like by getting in a room for three days to just kind of whiteboard like what is the ideal state if we built our field of dreams of like, what do we want the customer experience to look like and the you know, the impact that we want to have on revenue and working together? Started from there and then worked our way back to like, okay, well, what do we have currently that can help us get to that state? And where do we need to go? Um and we this was all happening at the same time that we were in the middle of a massive overhaul of our Martech stack. So we were moving from Eliqua to Marketo. We are introducing a CDP and sixth sense. So we were trying to do it all all at once. Um so we kind of approached it in this crawl walk-run phase where we identified where, you know, dream state, we knew that we were gonna have the whole tech stack online in the second half of 2025. And so we're like, okay, for the first half of 2025, let's start testing some of these um processes with between teams, like how could we, how might we connect um better on how we're delivering our campaigns and how we're connecting leads through to our sellers and all of that kind of stuff. What is possible within our existing infrastructure and eloqua? And then how are we building towards our dream state? And our dream state included like robust propensity modeling and um lots of fun stuff with intent. And um so we we started building that ideal state and also running pilots within the US and AMIA um from like pretty much right away to see like, okay, well, if we turn on some of these demand gen campaigns, what can we do? And how how do we actually live route this stuff? The other thing that was really interesting was that we did not have like an SDR function at all at Intel. So we we hired an agency to do like an SDR as a service kind of function for us as a part of this. Um, so yeah, we were really looking at that end-to-end experience. Um and it was wild, but we kind of broke it down into digestible chunks. So we had the overall team and then we had kind of subcommittees that were focused on really particular things. So the the two big buckets that most of the subcommittees fell into were like mapping this the sales and marketing journeys. Um, so we sounds really obvious, but a lot of companies don't take time to do this. But, you know, if you have your buyer's journey, you have an idea of like how buyers are moving through, you know, like most teams have that.

Michael Hartmann: 21:05

Major touch teams going away, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah.

Rachel Roundy: 21:07

Exactly. Like what their needs are, what their jobs to be done are all of that stuff. And then you have the sales journey of like, you know, what are they, what cycles are they moving through, right? Like, and everyone's got a different process, but what, you know, when do we take action that triggers the next stage in a sales cycle? Um, and layering those two together just to be like, okay, well, where they intersect and where are we not actually delivering a very good experience or handoff process right now? Um, and just doing that, like, and and just kind of taking a Sharpie to those like junctions and being like, okay, well, this is way off because marketing is doing this and sales is doing this, and that's a weird experience for the customer. So how can we tighten that? And then the click down on like, well, what tech do we need to have in place to explain, you know, to like streamline some of those stages? Sure.

Michael Hartmann: 23:16

I've come can I ask a few questions? Um one, because you are there was sober line on partner channels, and I don't know if those were I assume these were either like resellers or mostly resellers or I guess you were selling to manufacturers who then uh sold products they had yours embedded in.

Rachel Roundy: 23:38

So it's a bunch of different partner types. So it would be resellers, uh hardware manufacturers, um

Michael Hartmann: 23:48

Okay, so so I I had one experience where I dealt with uh what it call what I would call manufacturers' reps, so people who were like salespeople for hire, right? And they didn't they didn't hold inventory, and then we had distributors who held inventory. Um so when you have your salespeople, were they uh like treating like direct selling to and customers, or were they like managing partner accounts who actually like did the selling? Okay, so both, okay. So another layer of complexity there that people haven't dealt with is is hard again hard to explain if they haven't gone through it. Yeah. I I want to go all the way back. You see, you described um how two things. One, how important the sales and market alignment was. I don't think anybody's gonna disagree with that. Was like this kind of strategic thing. But either you described um sound like a workshop, three-day workshop where you brought a bunch of people together. Was that the place where you did the alignment, or was the alignment before that to go like here's who the people are we're gonna say are gonna be part of this tiger team who are gonna go show up in this workshop? Yeah.

Rachel Roundy: 24:54

Yeah. No, so we got um, that's true. I kind of skipped that step. So we had buy-in from our executive team uh like about a few weeks before that, over the holidays of like 2024. Um, got that buy-in and they kind of voluntole, okay, these are the people that need to be part of this, right? Um and so um, yeah, and then we invited them all to a room together. And I will say it was pretty freaking cool. Um, just I'm having been there for like four and a half years, and then I had colleagues on that team that had been there for 25 plus years, and there was a real spirit of like collaboration and working together that folks had never felt previously. And I think it was just the the magic of actually just putting like every idea together and and not um like the working towards the art of the possible together. You know, a lot of these large organizations just it's a mandate. Okay, well, marketing needs you to do this, or you know, um sales needs you to do this. Same between the relationship between marketing and ops, right? Um, it can be said for any relationship between orgs, but there is magic when you can just kind of like step outside of um your like take your hat off for a second and just kind of like imagine the art of the possible.

Michael Hartmann: 26:04

Yeah, so it's interesting. Like I I've been part of Tiger Teams, both leading or participating in it too, or things that would have like could have been called a tiger team, but um I think getting that executive ownership is really or support is important. What I've run into is um in one in one sense I go to the executives and they're all nodding their heads, yes, we support you, but then I go down into like okay, we're pushing this change, and it's make it's hard to it's not landing or really getting integrated into the organization. And what I've what I figured out is there's this gap between uh the executive leadership and what I would call the lieutenants, right? Boots on the ground, people who are gonna have to deal with every changes. So I sort of shifted the way I approach these big things to where like, yes, I still want the executive support. I have to have that, right? Budget, timeline, expectations. Um but I always told them like I want people who are gonna be a part of this to help with key things, especially decision makings, priorities. I I want those people to be two things at a minimum respected within the organization, especially the whatever organization you're part of, so like sales, and and second, I want them to be empowered to be decision makers. Yeah, for sure. You're always having to go back and like we would never get anywhere. Yeah. And I think did you so did you have that kind of expectation set? Or how did you address those?

Rachel Roundy: 27:31

Absolutely, definitely. And I think the other really important part was like making them feel like they were empowered by the power, the tiger team, right? Like that when they went to take these ideas back to their broader team, that the rest of us were like cheering them on and that they were heroes uh too, right? We had bi-weekly executive updates on this tiger team. So we would rotate who was sharing the updates, like really giving everybody visibility, getting to highlight like who got to like show the incredible amount of work because it was an insane amount of work, um for sure.

Michael Hartmann: 28:05

Yeah. Um, okay, one more question, and I'd like to get into some more nuts and bolts stuff. But um, so one of the things I can imagine comes out of something like that is what you described, right? A lot of sort of aha moments from like, oh, I didn't know this is what you did, right? Like, which is great. But also, I suspect there's a lot of people, if you have the right people in the room, they're gonna be passionate about what they believe the right direction is to go, the right strategy, and not everyone's gonna be on the same page. How did you reconcile that within the team to get alignment, even when so the way I describe it, like I I really look for places that drive to consensus. And what by that I mean like everyone's gonna walk out of that and support whatever direction we're going. Before that, all the right people get a chance to really fight for their and advocate for their position as strongly as they can. Um, but as a group, then we go like collectively, we're gonna always support where we're going, even if it was my my preferred direction. Did you run into that kind of stuff? How did you did you have a place thinking about that?

Rachel Roundy: 29:08

Yeah, and I think it's um this is gonna sound so cheesy, but I swear this is like so clutch. Um, like the way that we opened up that like first initial meeting, like I had this very cheesy analogy about um, I'm sure you've heard of this uh parable, it's an Indian parable that's like um blind or monks that are blindfolded and they're supposed they're like touching one piece of an elephant and they're supposed to describe what the animal is. So there's one monk that like touches the foot and is like, oh, it's a cow. And there's another monk that touches the trunk and is like, it's must be some kind of lizard, and like touches the tail, it's like, oh, it's a snake, right? And there's all these different um, because like when you are only seeing one piece of something, you're convinced that that is your truth. And Intel is like this giant elephant, right? And we're all in these different parts and we tend to have these blinders on to like just, well, this is my one piece, and therefore that must be truth. And so it was really opening with that concept of like we all need to kind of take the blindfold off, look at the entire elephant, um, and see, you know, what are we dealing with here? And I really encouraged folks consistently, not just in that one meeting, but to take off their official hats um repeatedly, right? Like as we're looking through things, like what actually makes the most sense and how can we, how can we work towards that? Um, and during the actual workshop, we really focused on, we did kind of a design sprint style session where we had an impact effort matrix and we had people writing their ideas on sticky notes and we'd have time box things and we'd let people go and vote on the things. So it was democratized in a way that it was not like, oh, well, this is this person's idea and I don't like him, so I'm not gonna vote for his idea, right? It was like everyone's ideas on a sticky note, and then you would have time to go and kind of vote. And I think that opened it up to let people be more creative or have their voices heard, but that maybe they wouldn't normally feel like they could say something because their VP is also in the room and they don't want to sound like the, you know, um, but the way we ran that workshop, I think was really helpful. And then everyone was able to vote, and and everyone did feel pretty like we had a high level of alignment in the room um by the end of those couple of days, just because of kind of that approach. Yeah.

Michael Hartmann: 31:14

I actually don't think that that parable of the elephant thing is cheesy. I think it's funny. You another thing that you and I were talking about, you being in Portland and me being in Texas, like there's a lot of people who have perceptions about what those places are like, right? Yes. Some are some are accurate, some are not. But like going through that exercise and thought process will hopefully force people to not only sort of try to open up their the aperture to think about um what they're looking at, not just from their own spot, but also to kind of go like watch out for what are my preconceived notions about what that team does or what this process is or what's wrong, or that because that's easy to get trapped in there.

Rachel Roundy: 31:56

Absolutely. And it's really it's relevant to like you know, some of the other things you're talking about too, with like the relationship between teams or between like campaign teams and not teams or whatever, right? Like we all just kind of get set in that that one view.

Michael Hartmann: 32:08

Yeah. Well, it and I think this becomes especially true in large organizations for whatever reason. It's not unique to it, but there's this us versus them. Yeah. Right. There's stuff that happens and it's human nature, I think, at some point. But yeah, I mean, yeah, I mean right, easy to follow. Yeah, well, I mean, there's like I I forget, is it Dunbar's number? Like, have you heard this?

Rachel Roundy: 32:31

Yes, of like the max number of of people.

Michael Hartmann: 32:34

150 in the in the range of 150, right? The number of people when you get into an organization that's tens of thousands of people, right? It's it it would be surprising that that kind of uh tribal effect didn't happen. Yeah, uh for sure, 1000%. Yeah. So um, okay, so when we talked before, you like as you guys got into this, right? You got a line maker, figured out those like gaps from what you had, what you needed. Um, what were some of the things that surprised you as you dug into that? That like one of the things you said was like you had systems that felt like they were really old. I think you said 2002, shish, right? Oh, yeah, I smelled.

Rachel Roundy: 33:15

Yeah. So like um much love to all of my former like MOFS colleagues at Intel A Heart You All. I'm not trying to like if you're listening to this, I love you.

Michael Hartmann: 33:24

Right, Shade I go. Yeah, exactly.

Rachel Roundy: 33:27

Um uh but yeah, like I think even from the get-go when I joined the team, um, you know, I I had come from a much smaller org where I was like essentially all of marketing, right? With like a small team and I was really hands-on keyboard for everything. And then jumping into Intel was like bananas, right? Like just really perspective shifting. Um, but we had a lot of stuff that was just kind of embarrassing. So like we didn't have any ability to capture UTMs on our dot com. Like that just had been turned off at some point. Like there was just no ability. So we have like no tracking of like our sources from campaigns at all. And like at some point, like it it goes back to like the complexity of this giant company. Intel.com had one million pages. Like that is bananas, right? And just like one million pages. Those are the ones that knew about it. I'm sure there was more than that.

Michael Hartmann: 34:24

Yeah.

Rachel Roundy: 34:25

Oh, so much more. There were so many micro sites, like, but it was a constant battle. And so, like at some point, IT was like, nope, like too much to try to manage all the metadata and all the things on all of these pages. We're turning it off for everybody. And so, like, that was one big challenge. And then, you know, we didn't find out until like uh two months into this Tiger team that, like, oh yeah, no, well, you can just submit a special form and get that turned back on. We're like, cool, love that. Like, thanks, would have would have been great to know that four years ago when we were, you know, trying to get basic campaign tracking for some of our stuff. Um, so that was that was like a really big one. But we also had a lot of broken data transfers. And I know this is something so many companies face, even if they're like modern and scrappy, but pretty much any time that we needed to move a contact from one place to another, it was happening in an Excel spreadsheet. Like there was just no actual transfer of data. Um, and I think it was just like this kind of like the reason that it happened is just like you you have this giant scale. I mentioned this earlier where you've got all these random people adding things to your stack. And so at some point it becomes just like all these like things that have been fixed with duct tape and barbed wire over the years, right? And it's very precariously built and it's like fine enough, but it's not actually working. Um, and because, you know, that type of like demand gen or lead gen was never prioritized for Intel, it was like, well, who cares that like, you know, if we want a contact to go from the map to the CRM, like just, you know, dad, do that with a spreadsheet. And here's a form, a JIRA form you have to fill out. And it's gonna take three weeks to get it moved over there, which is really awesome for your SLAs, right? So um so there was a lot of that kind of stuff that we really had to poke on that was painful of like, okay, really basic things. Like, can we just simply not have our contacts in an Excel spreadsheet? Like events were a great example. And I think a lot of companies actually are still kind of in this boat with events, but like we would, you know, have contacts from an event, and like I'd get it from the events team like two months later. They're like, Oh, by the way, these are the people that badge scanned. I'm like, cool, cool, awesome, love that. Like, I had one that was like a literal year later, and I was like, I'm imagining like money being lit on fire there. Exactly, exactly. So that was another like pet project of mine was like trying to do it.

Michael Hartmann: 36:49

Now you're gonna get into like I had a conversation today with somebody um who was been asked to do more so do more support for sales-based campaigns, so commercial marketing, which means using the CDP for segmentation with data, especially in Salesforce. And this person didn't know Salesforce real well, so we kind of walked through how you would do it. And at the end, he asked me, uh, well, if the sales team if is is going to this marketer and they're saying, you know, go do this, you know, generate this list. And today they can excel and they get uploaded to the um the marketing automation platform. Um, can we do that? I said, Well, yes, but here's what I suspect is happening, right? Salesperson goes, here's like go to a sales option, generate a report, export that, it's getting shipped around to the sales team to say, yes, no, yes, no, right. Oh, there's somebody's missing. If that's happening, we can't replay it, we can't replicate it because the yeah there's no way to make that decision unless they're doing it in some sort of structured way. And like, but like I was like, I don't know about the sales process.

Rachel Roundy: 37:55

And then what happens when they put that in a map and some of those contacts are already in the map, and then you have duplicate records and it's all a mess. And you know, like that is that is uh yeah.

Michael Hartmann: 38:06

But like my place, like it's for you. Now you've got you've probably got multiple sales teams, multiple CRM systems. They use different processes.

Rachel Roundy: 38:14

Right, right, right. We had just sales force, but like, yeah, different campaigns within that, obviously. Um, but very different audiences and different motions, right? So we were solving for this for our like um CCG, which is like commercial client, like PC stuff and also our data center um offerings. And so yeah, it was it was messy. Plus, the sellers at that point, which I feel like most people can relate to this, just never updated Salesforce ever, like at all. Like there was never data in there. But we had a lot of problems with like um the the even when we were starting to build some of the like automatic connections between the map and the CRM, we'd still have to go and manually clean stuff up because there like we'd have to dedupe a bunch of things, we'd have to enrich things, the wrong contact would be uh assigned to the wrong account. Um so there it was a real real mess.

Michael Hartmann: 39:08

Yeah. Yeah. And I think but like that's we people anybody who's dealing with that with a relatively small organization, right? It's not again, it's not a multiplier effect, it's a more of a logarithmic thing. It's like it's um it's it's really a challenge when you get that. Um maybe we could shift gears a little bit because you kind of hinted at this uh, I think off and on here is um Yeah. You know, I think you maybe you would even admit this, right? That you had a perception, maybe misperception about ops, data systems, all that coming into it, or others did who are part of that tiger team. What do you think are the most common kinds of misperceptions from general marketing folks about what ops does?

Rachel Roundy: 39:57

Hmm. I think like most general marketing folks, like I I will say for myself, I am a huge fan of mobs. I get nerdy about it, I love it. Like, you know, I I am super involved with that side of things always. But uh a lot of marketers just don't even think about it. It's not even that they have a misperception, they just don't give it any thought at all. And I think that's a real problem because especially with the way marketing happens now, like it is so reliant on your tech stack. And so you can build like the most incredible strategy, but it will literally not work if you don't have the right tools in place. And I think a lot of marketers need to understand the complexity of that and that it is not something that just happens overnight, right? Like if you want to do something completely different, ops needs time. And when they push back on you, they're not pushing back on you to be jerks, they're pushing back because if that is infestly, you know, going to make a massive change to how they have things organized, their, you know, all the different things, whether it's like how their data flows are set up or like segmentation or any of that, that's like a massive change, right? And so you have to be really committed. I think a lot of marketers will also ask for things that are like one-off requests. And I would say, um vice versa, like at least I heard from our mop team frequently, like that marketers just don't even know what they're asking for. Like they there's a perception that like they just have no idea. Like, you don't need this, right? It's almost like a little bit of condescending, like you don't need this. And I think there are, of course, marketers that do a lot of random acts of marketing that exist, right? But but there's a lot of strategy too. And I think there are a lot of folks that are like, you know, I think what mofs could take from marketing is really understanding the why behind the asks. That like, we want to do this because it's really critical to the customer experience at this point in the journey. And if we do that, it's gonna help us move this right, like other thing. And um, that's often missing in the asks, like kind of the understanding of why we're asking for it. We're not giving you just like a random request to do this crazy thing. Like, this is the reasoning and why it's gonna be better for the customer.

Michael Hartmann: 41:57

So the the pushback I think we would get from our audience who are in marketing ops would be like, I want to do that, but then when I've tried, people said, like, oh, we don't have time, we've got to go do it. So it feels like like that conversation about understanding what that marketer's like their thought process, why they're trying stuff, should start happening sooner so that when the request comes in, you've already built up a little bit of that. So that I agree. Yeah. Have you have you experienced that with any like across your different career spots stops on your career where you've worked with ops teams that maybe demonstrated something like that, like trying to better understand how the marketing team worked, how the um maybe like I I know I've worked with like there was a role I interviewed for with at one point where it would have led creative ops and like didn't get it because I didn't have that. But it's like I have worked with creative teams probably more than any other, like maybe that and like demand gen type teams are pretty equally because there's so much interconnection. Totally. But like I always wanted to understand how they were how they were working, right?

Rachel Roundy: 43:07

Um yeah. I and I think that's like really the like the goal for or the advice for anyone who wants to have a better relationship there or like be more cross-functionally um competent, have more of that that uh ability to connect dots is like that curiosity mindset, like really the just be curious and like zoom out and be curious of like where your role fits in the broad scheme of things. And that's gonna be a superpower because that's what allows you to connect dots and move things forward. Um, but yeah, I would say the Snowflake Mops team is actually super good at that. Um it's a real culture of like being very tightly aligned. Um, our demand and particularly our ABM teams do some crazy cool stuff. Like they are very sophisticated in their approach. They do one to many, one to few, and one-to-one. And their one-to-one stuff is like insanely complex and long-term plays with tight alignment with our sales team. And they like Mops is their like ride or die through all of that. Um, so yeah.

Michael Hartmann: 44:03

Brian, so curious, how does that how does that how's that how does that mops team maybe say no without saying no or push back when I request you? Like, how do they how do they approach that kind of conversation? Because I think a lot of people struggle with that.

Rachel Roundy: 44:18

You know, I can't speak for them because I'm still so new, but like Brian would be a great person to have on your podcast, honestly, because they didn't send him our way. Yes, I will. He's awesome. He was at Monsopalooza if anyone else is there. Um but yeah, um, I don't know how they push back, but I mean, like in in general, I will say about Snowflake all up, which is has been such a delight, is that like every company has like a um talent to ego ratio. And like some companies are high talent, high ego, like think Meta or AWS, or like there's other examples, Apple. And there's some companies that are high low, low talent, high ego, right? Like I won't name some names that I worked at, but like, you know, there's some like that. Um, but Snowflake is very low ego, high talent, and that's how they hire. And it's like you feel that very much. So everyone's just very collaborative. And generally, like if you have a good POV and reason why you're asking for something, people are typically like supportive and at least of like, hey, let's give it a whirl and see what happens. Yeah.

Michael Hartmann: 45:21

So the reason I asked that question is because you at one point you said there was this like you you've seen some mobs teams where they go like they they have a condescending view of these other teams because it's like, oh, they don't even know what they're asking for. And like I have a real visceral reaction to that because I I see it too. And I think that you know, at the same time, those a lot of Those same people that go, like, why am I not seen as a strategic partner? Well, yeah, if you're not trying to like yes, should they understand more? Should they would you like it if they understand more about you? Like, but why don't you take the first step and go like, I want to understand how you work? And when you ask for this, like I want to understand what you're going through and start building that early. Because then what I've found when I do that is when I push back or when I say, What if we did this instead? Or what if like, have you thought about this? Like if they're much more respect receptive to that kind of can't conversation because they see that and sometimes that means doing something you think may not be the best thing, but doing it you also like um I guess is is it uh Amazon has an idea, like if you know, think of decisions as it a door you're going through that you can come back from, or is it one you can't come back from through? Right. So if it's something that's like on the first path, like yes, you like you could do something, and if it goes wrong, like it's not a big deal, right? Low risk. Like, why not just do it? Right. Build some credit, like build some, put some invest in that relationship so that you can then have an opportunity, because then they say, like, oh, this person does want to help, and when they're pushing back, it's because they have a valid reason.

Rachel Roundy: 46:58

Yeah, for sure. I think that is good advice for anyone, like, not just mobs fan, like campaign teams too. I have a friend who uh was worked at Intel with me, and I remember telling her like how nerdy I get about the tech stack, and she's like, Oh, I just can't even think about that stuff. And I was like, that blows my mind. Like you have to, you have to you have to understand it at a fundamental level. Like you don't have to be deep technically like in the weeds with every single thing, but you at least need to understand it at a level that like you know how your idea of how you're building your campaign is going to be supported by your tech stack, and you're not asking for something that is literally impossible, right? Because especially at these big things, you know, like when we're running campaigns at Intel, we're talking millions of dollars in multiple countries. And so you build something out and you just chuck it over the fence, you need you need to make sure it's it's viable, right? Before you just yeah, so yeah.

Michael Hartmann: 47:49

No, I so I think people probably get tired of me because I I that's a soapbox I will continue to stand on is that like don't don't start dissing these other teams, right? Um and get like you gotta figure out, and then there's ways to get then you get you build some credibility and some the chance to push back and that and then but you need to do that even in a respectful way, right? There's ways to do that.

Rachel Roundy: 48:15

It also makes you better at your job, right? Like the more you understand your other stakeholders, it makes you better at your job. I am a better product marketer because I talk to my sales teams all the time. I talk to product all the time, I talk to my demand and ABM people, and I understand what they need and it makes my work better. And it's the same for any any role.

Michael Hartmann: 48:34

Does it sometimes feel like those conversations are um unproductive?

Rachel Roundy: 48:43

I mean, I think that's true for like a lot of human interaction, right? But I would say that like net, net, like I get more out of it than like the downside. Like, of course, there's gonna be times when it's unproductive. Of course, there's gonna be times where product wants something from me that sales is on the complete opposite fence about. And like, you know, there's gonna be some tension there. But like I have only ever seen positive things in my career from working collaboratively with other functions, like on the whole. Of course, there are road bumps, but like on the whole, it's been extremely valuable to me.

Michael Hartmann: 49:15

Yeah, and there it's just funny because I the reason I asked that is I was in a couple of conversations today where I think on the surface people go, if if their view is short term, like it was unproductive. Um but I was having these conversations because some stuff was shifting around, and I was like, I wanted to let people know I could have just not said anything and just changed behavior, but I was like, that's just not I don't want that to be my reputation. So I was willing to have a conversation and it didn't have a particular specific goal in mind other than communicating some change and catching up. And uh for me, long term, I think it's gonna pay off, right? I believe that.

Rachel Roundy: 49:54

Yeah. Well, and that's the thing, like I won't pretend, I won't uh like the takeaway from the tiger team story is not everything was kumbaya and amazing at all times. It was hard. We had a lot of have to consistently like, you know, rally different teams to get things done, or there were delays, or there were like disagreements. But like you have to keep in mind that like two steps forward, one step back is still one step forward. So like there's gonna be times when, yeah, it feels like, oh, this is annoying, or we're stalling, but you're still making progress overall, and that's how any real change happens. So, like having just resilience to that and like keeping your eye on the prize, um, not giving up the first sign of you know, of friction, uh is yeah.

Michael Hartmann: 50:36

Grit, right? Have some grit. Yeah, exactly. I love that. Yeah. So what maybe let's let's wrap up there. Like you kind of hinted at like what you know, sounds like you're pretty proud of the work you did, even if like maybe didn't get all the way to the finish line. Um but like um what do you like, what do you what did you take away from that from as a lesson that you carry forward?

Rachel Roundy: 50:59

Oh man, I feel like so many things, Michael. It was it was so formative in a lot of ways. It was a crash course and like rallying all these different opinions around a common goal um in how to communicate like like with executive teams, honestly, because every two weeks we had to give an executive update, right? And that's a muscle that is a it's something that you know Jess Cow from Adobe talks about all the time, like how to like speak geek to the C-suite or whatever. But like it really is something you have to practice over and over and over of like, okay, what's the level of detail that you need to give? And like how are you going to move things forward? And it's really easy to get pigeonholed on things. So like that was really helpful um for me personally. But also, um, I I I just think, I mean, it it fundamentally changed how I see kind of the go-to-market motion end to end. Like, so have a lot of strong opinions about the importance of overlaying those journey maps. And that works for partner marketing too, right? Like that that should be your ground zero for literally everything. Because then it just everything, you know, falls into that and you could really quickly identify how you should be working together. Um, but I'm really proud of what everyone did. Um, you know, Intel had some massive organizational changes where they outsourced 90% of all of us right after that. Um, so it wasn't actually like the work was not actually just kind of stalled. Um, but I kept telling everyone, you know, there was real value in the lessons that we learned in collaboration and how to like step outside of our comfort zone and you documenting a lot of these things, right? Like building these really complex um models for propensity measurement or you know, lead handoff and stuff like that. Those are all transferable things that we've all taken, you know, forward into our our next roles. So um, yeah, it's it's full of lessons. It was a very intense effort.

Michael Hartmann: 52:47

Yeah. What is it like uh yeah, doing hard shit makes you stronger, right? So lift heavyweights, run longer, right? Run harder. Exactly. Yeah, same kind of thing, more from a career standpoint. Um, well, thanks for sharing, Rachel. This has been a lot of fun. Enjoyed our conversation from before we start recording to till till now. So uh thanks for having me. Yeah, appreciate that. Thanks. If if folks want to continue the conversation or keep up with what you're doing, what's the best way for them to do that?

Rachel Roundy: 53:15

Uh LinkedIn is awesome. So just Rachel Roundy, um, connected to Michael so you can find me easily.

Michael Hartmann: 53:21

There you go. All right. Well, thank you. As always, thanks to our our listeners and our uh longtime supporters. We always appreciate it. If you have ideas for guests or topics or want to be a guest, you can reach out to Mike, Naomi, or me. So, Rachel, you're gonna make an introduction, I think, already. So Yes, definitely. Um, we will always do that. We'll get happy to get the ball rolling. So until next time. Bye, everybody.

Rachel Roundy: 53:42

Bye.