Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining us. And as you know, we don't do introductions, so I'm going to jump right in. Plus, today's speaker, Mike Rizzo, most of you know Mike. If you know anything about models and you work in tech marketing, you know Mike. And you know also the community and how big it is. So Mike, I'm just going to segue right into the first foundational question, and this will help also people get a little feel for your background. In a nutshell, Mike, just can you please define it? What is marketing Ops?

So yeah, the first thing I'd like to start off with is marketing ops is not demand gen. So first and foremost, it is not demand gen. I have a whole talk track on demand gen being not just paid ads either. But with that in mind, marketing ops is about aligning the people, the process, and the technology that you have within your organization around your go-to-market. So every business is a little unique, right? I hope. And every tech stack is unique. To one company, an MQL might mean something, and another, an MQL something else.

And so whether you use the lead object in Salesforce or not, every single one is a little bit different. But the only folks that are out there that can help corral or herd the cats on that one should be your marketing ops team. So they're there to say, hey, tell me about your go-to-market process. How are you trying to enter new markets? What are you going to do to be able to capture those leads and qualify them? How do you want to see those come through and win? All of those little operational details, the tooling that goes into all of that takes people and process and technology. And so a marketing ops person is responsible for those things.

And as a demand gen marketer, for more than 25 years, I have worked with marketing ops teams in almost every company I've been at, even all the way back to the 90s before he was even called that. I mean, these were unicorns. These are people who had, back in the 90s, they were called IT skills, not data skills. But they also had a really clear handle on the go-to-market, understood all of our marketing content and channels, and also were pretty well versed in our sales motion to tie it all together.

So let's tackle something right out the gate, because I think there's this misconception of like, oh, I need marketing ops once I have a ton of leads or a ton of demand coming in. And there's a lot of focus on that, new leads. But what we're hearing from most tech marketers is not a focus on new leads. It's on databases that have been built but are not performing. So for a moment, Mike, could you help us understand as a marketing ops expert, how do you think about data and how quickly it gets out of shape or irrelevant?

Oh, yeah. There's a bunch of research now, thankfully, on all this stuff to support a lot of the need to try to look at your database and say, hey, we need to put some sort of motion in place here to make sure the data is clean, make sure that we're sort of getting rid of outdated records, dispositioning folks out of the database that we would just never need. It's a little bit strange, because a lot of the time, people don't want to remove records out of their database. And honestly, look, if they're just never going to buy, there's no reason really to keep that. Maybe put a statute of limitations on it, like, hey, I'll store the bad data for up to a year and a half or something. But if they never come back, maybe it's good to just figure out how to archive that.

But the way we think about, statistically, I think it's like, oh, the numbers changed a lot, because there's so much change in the tech sector now. But gosh, I know there's a very high percentage of decay, something like 20% decay rate in data quality each year. And so you expect roughly 20% of your records to switch jobs, to switch a platform. They're not using HubSpot. They're using Pardot. They're not using Pardot. They're using Marketo. And I think putting a system in place to be able to try to work through those nuances is really, really important. There's certainly tooling to help you do that, but to each their own on which one they feel is the best approach. And then around email quality itself, we talk about it a lot in the Slack community. In fact, Kickbox came up the other day. There's a new product I heard about called Scrubby.

There's a whole bunch of tools out there that folks are using to try to understand, hey, is this record, are these tens of thousands of records healthy? And should I keep them? And how can I slow nurture them back into our lifecycles? I heard you say, look, I don't need net new leads. I've got a lot of folks in my database already. So what should I be doing to try to re-engage them? That's definitely the right question to be asking. I don't mean to soliloquy here, but I was just on a webinar two days ago for the state of PLG. Everybody's talking about product-led growth. And one of the things we talked about from that motion is that, first of all, that it's also a brand play. It's not just a self-serve model with a free trial.

It doesn't magically create revenue for you, but it does engage your buyers the way that they want to be engaged, which is I don't really want to talk to sales. But the other piece was just focusing on expansion revenue and opportunities within your current customer base. One of the commentary that came out was, hey, if you can grow by 20% from net revenue retention on your current customers, that means that you're hitting 120% revenue targets from your previous base at essentially no cost. So what are you doing to activate those current customers and get them to buy more? 

And not just at no cost, but at top margin. These are existing customers. They buy your existing products. They're not asking for a discount. They'll probably give you referrals. I mean, they're perfect. But most DemandGen marketers don't think that way. 

Yeah. Most of us are, and I say us because I've been in the DemandGen growth role many a time, most of us in that role are thinking about how do I get net new logos? How do I get net new names? What events do I need to be at? All these kinds of things. And I'll go back to what I said at the beginning, the reason why DemandGen isn't what marketing ops does, but also why DemandGen isn't just paid marketing is that it's about creating demand across the entire ecosystem of your prospects and your current database of customers. So you have to find new and unique ways to engage them.

Some of them might be webinars that you host weekly. Some of them might be a podcast that you want to spin up. Am I telling you that you need to have some sort of media arm in your company? No, but it's not a terrible idea to consider how do I get involved with other sort of media entities like this show that you're doing.

MarketingOps.com has their own type of thing that they're working on. There are so many opportunities for you as a DemandGen marketer to get your stakeholders in on discussions that are happening either at virtual events, webinars, podcasts, or live conferences. Those are opportunities for you to go generate more of that demand and then send your current prospects to these other events that are happening because they're hungry for knowledge.

Exactly. And this actually brings up a really, really important question, especially for those of us that are running campaigns across industry, across region, where we've got to think about scale, but we've really also got to think about personalization. One size will not fit all. In fact, it hurts our brand when we come across like that because we may be working a lead up the funnel, which is something you never want to do, right? Reducing our credibility.

So I have a key question here that ties to how some companies you've worked with and many of the folks in the community think about APIs and data quality. You mentioned a lot of sales and marketing leaders are hesitant to reduce the number of contacts in their database, even though it's been proven that this is a non-responsive contact or the data is just bad. I'm going to ask a related question to that. How do you know, how do you gauge the appropriate size of a buying committee in a target account? How do you know how big it should or shouldn't be and who should or shouldn't be someone we're working on? You must have had this experience. 

I don't know that I have, I don't know that I have the, I need to find another word for this because the silver bullet is like the thing that I just say. I don't have a silver bullet answer. There's another way to describe that though. I just don't know what it is. Yeah, I don't know how you totally know exactly the perfect like buying committee. I will say one of the best ways to try to work through it is trying to look through your past deals that you've closed, right? And hopefully you've aligned with your marketing and your sales teams to figure out how to get the sales reps to associate those records to those deals. Most of the time, those opportunities inside your database only have one primary contact on them and that buying community isn't really scoped quite clearly enough.

And so if you're not using, you know, products to help you do that, I think, I think, you know, Gong can step in in certain cases, right? And really help you understand who the real buying committee is because you're talking ideally like the conversations are recorded, you know, who they're talking to those kinds of things. But if you're not using technology, then get on the phone and start talking to your sales reps about, well, how did you close this deal? Right? And how did it get there? One of the things we used to do over at an organization now known as Katata used to be Mavenlink. I boomeranged back there and when I came back after being gone for about a year or two, they started implementing a new process that was around, I don't know if you want to call it like a QBR because certainly, you know, everybody does QBRs, right?

But there was a, well, I hope you do anyway, you should, quarterly business review for those that don't know the acronym. And, but in this case, we were doing a sort of monthly, how did that deal get to where it is? And it was actually this really refreshing celebration of all the parties that were involved to help bring that deal through, which included sales, marketing, solutions engineers, sometimes the partner team, and often the client success team on how did we actually usher this thing through the pipeline. And as a demand gen marketer, you can't really ask for more than that, right? Like you're getting a pretty clear picture of like what it takes. But your job is to be like the scientist of like, how do I break down what just happened into something that I can go to market against, right?

Yeah. And you hit on a really, really key point here, and I'm curious to know what role marketing ops coder couldn't play in this, right? Sales teams, especially sales teams selling tech and any salesperson selling tech for more than with five years of experience, they know in conversations with their buyer, they have triggers, right? There's certain thing a buyer will say, which they'll just know means, Oh, I got to get them this, right? Or Oh, this is going to take two weeks, right?

They have the experience. And again, because like you said, there is a model to the purchase. There's a model to post purchase adoption. You sold hundreds of times, you know, what's going to happen, right? Unfortunately, most of that knowledge, most of those triggers, most of those timelines are not communicated back to marketing. Yeah, they're really not. But but is that information are those timelines are those stakeholders is that in the database? Can it be modeled?

I think parts of it can, especially the buying committee. So you can certainly tie different contact records to, you know, existing accounts and deals and do some object orientation around like the fact that, you know, Bob, Jane and Sarah were all a part of this deal that we were trying to close. But, you know, the timelines on, you know, so yes and no, like, I always I always, it's a matter of like, what are you going to do with the data? Like if you have a point of view that you'd like to learn from, maybe the stage gates. So imagine like, we started this today at 8:00am Pacific, right? That's a timestamp.

And by the time we're done, it's 8:30am Pacific, right? That's another timestamp. It took us 30 minutes to go through this today. Well, those same timestamps can certainly be created. They are not automatically created in most databases, especially Salesforce. And you absolutely can put these little stage gates in place that measure movement in timestamps. I don't want to go too deep into the weeds on that. But like, there's some nuance there, like, well, what if the deal is dead? Does it overwrite the existing field? Like, how is that tied to those records? But you absolutely can measure like, how long does it take on average once, not just once it goes from lead to MQL to SQL to opportunity, but once it's at the opportunity stage, how long is that buying cycle taking?

Now, I can get a signal of that between opportunity creation and the date that it's closed one, because that's a different stage, right? But that's not really telling the whole picture, right? Like in aggregate, yes, you can get a sense of cool, it takes us, you know, for enterprise size clients, it takes us 180 days. For SMBs, if you sell to both, you know, that one takes us 60 days. But you could start to slice that down more, right? Like, okay, we know if we get, you know, four or five people on the buying committee, it accelerates the ability for us to close that deal by 20%. Right? But okay, is that a marketing ops person's job to go figure that piece out?

No, not necessarily. It's their job to figure out how to tool that. So that you can learn from that data. And then maybe some of those more data oriented data scientist oriented marketing ops people would want to take that on from the analytics point of view. But there's probably a data science play here. And we're starting to branch into a new category of, of marketer and just like, you know, data analyst in general. But I don't think that that's fully the marketing ops responsibility, right? They get to a certain point. And then there's this like handoff that is that.

I love it. And thank you. This is this is what I want. I want to the candid response from somebody who's done it. Right. And definitely have the fingers pointed and said, Yeah, I'm not signing up for that alone, at least. Right? Yeah, it's really someone on the demand gen sales enablement, and frankly, sales side, that should be, you know, working together with us to figure out what that model for the purchase is. And to which is the key question most of our clients have right now. What are the factors that are slowing down or accelerating our existing potential opportunities, we really need to understand that. Or we're just, you know, we're just sitting here at the mercy of the market, right? Yeah. Okay, so from data, and timelines, right, and data quality and relevancy, we shift shift focus, just just a moment here, to workflows. Right? Okay. For the general audience, what, what is a marketing workflow? Could you please define define it?

There's a couple, at a minimum. So workflows, in my mind, fall into at least two categories. One of them is the operational workflow. So as your data flows in, where does it need to be sent to be enriched in some provide in some databases, you might be capturing, you know, sort of a bare minimum set of fields on your form to increase your conversion rate, all the command gen marketers know that. And then there's this enrichment thing that happens if you go send the data to one of the other enrichment providers, you name, you name the one you pick. And then you pass that data across.

So that that's an operational workflow. That can involve your marketing automation platform, as well as other tools. It could be a data warehouse play or like ETL type of provider. It you know, whether that's like a sinkery or a snowflake or what have you. And then you're you're sending that data to to all these other different places that you need to. But the other piece is the other type of workflow is how am I talking to these folks? What messages are they going to receive? And when will they receive them? And that really is just like, you know, we talked about it earlier. You said, hey, abstracting away from a very specific persona or audience type actually does us a disservice in our brand.

And so we need to be talking to people, you know, in the right way, at the right time, in the right place, all these things in the in the right way piece is the hard part, because it's it's very you know, it's very easy to just set up one email nurture sequence. Right. Or for those of us that are B2B/ B2C or B2B2C, you could tap into a Twilio and add in some text message stuff or a WhatsApp and start sending people messages in WhatsApp too. But like you need to know what to send to them. Like, you know, this whole PLG motion thing is is great. Right. But imagine for a moment that if you were signing up for a product and, you know, maybe you invite me in and you're the admin and I'm just the end user, I shouldn't get communications about things that only admins can do.

Right. And so the same thing is true for the types of people that you're selling to or marketing to. Like you shouldn't tell them about Widget B when they only care about Widget A. And how do you know the difference between those two things? And that's sort of your your sorry, your workflow for communication, not your operational workflow. 

That's the one we're going to dig into, Mike, because this is a real time problem and it's getting much worse. And I'll explain why in just a second. I just want to remind the audience we have less than 10 minutes left. If you have a question, please drop it in. We still have three more. I don't know if we'll get through them, but we'll try. OK, OK. This concept, this challenge, this opportunity around messaging workflows. Right. And the idea that we're moving towards conversational marketing, it's an area I pay a lot of attention to. It's getting much worse with two things that are emerging and I'm going to be very candid.

These are my friends when I talk about it openly. One, almost every marketing platform out there is training new users on absolutely generic, horrible content. OK, they're just telling them, like, hey, this is how you set up an email nurture. And unfortunately, marketers with less than five or 10 years of experience are like, oh, that looks like a good email nurture. No, that's horrible. What they just set up is a generic email that makes you look worse than chat GPT. OK, now here's the second part.

I just mentioned it is generative AI, right? We're also all of us as humans, we're starting to pick up on nuances around impersonal communication messages that were sent to us, but not intended for us. And it's starting to really bother people. Right. Unsubscribed thanks to GDPR has become instantaneous. Right. So now I know you're, Sourabh, you're asking me a demand and a content marketing question. That's not my thing. Right.

But how can content marketers, how can demand and campaign managers, field marketers, partner marketers, product marketers, we're all in the boat on this together. We've got to communicate personally. what data should we be asking our marketing ops teams for? What signs in the processes should we be looking at? Conversion rates, et cetera. Right. Or abandonment. Where do we find that we are communicating incorrectly? Mike, how do we know?

Yeah, yeah, it's a really good question. I would put it on you to just have an open discussion with a marketing ops professional, you know, as a earlier earlier in my career, it the art of the possible was not understood. Right. Like, of course not, because like you don't know much. Right. And frankly, if you've gotten pretty good at doing content creation or, you know, putting on events or run and DemandGen campaigns on paid or social or what have you, you're not expected to be an expert in how all these tools can work for you. But the marketing ops person should be. And so like it's a little bit you know, I'd say it's probably a little bit humbling to to have to like say, hey, can you tell me like what it is that we have that that like I could be doing more with?

Right. Like, you know, hey, I'm really trying to reach this persona, particularly with these types of problems. And I'm wondering if I can actually understand that from our database and the marketing ops person should be able to say, well, yea or nay. Right. And if it's a nay, well, here's like here's the way that we could potentially capture the data that you're looking for. Right. And then enable you to do more go-to-market against that data. But until you actually like have those questions, oftentimes your marketing ops team is so bogged down with work, there's very little strategic time for them to come in and say, hey, I heard what you were saying.

I don't think you have the data for that. Let me help you. It's very, very rare that we get that opportunity and we keep talking about it in the community to say, hey, you need to pull us in earlier to these demand gen sort of go to market activities because there's a lot of times where we're going to say, I understand you want to get that out in the next 30 days, but we don't have the system there for it. Or I understand that you want to enter that new market, but we are not GDPR compliant and we are not prepared to be able to talk to those people in Europe. Right. Whatever it ends up being, they're there to help enable the team and say, hey, I hear that you're trying to reach this audience. We don't have any data points on that. Yeah. Let me enable you.

Right. And this this sounds very similar to the problem in health care, which we sort of it went away during the pandemic. But the idea or what has been proven, the science of preventative medicine is, you know what, as health care professionals, we should really be telling people what to do before they get sick at our hospital. And we can deal with people that are right. This is a very similar situation. And this, I think, might be our last question, depending on the time we have. Right.

How if we're already in a transactional culture, if that's what I came into at this organization, I didn't build this. I'm not the founder. I'm just a marketing guy. Right. But now I've been here a couple of years and it is truly a transactional relationship between me and all of my marketing peers and the marketing operations team. We send over requests. Sometimes we even create a ticket for it. It's that removed and we get a request or a ticket back. Right. We don't really have much of a dialog. How do we start to change that culture? Like you said, the marketing office teams have the tools. They have expertise in it. They know the art of the possible. They could probably do three times more with the tools that we have, literally three X more than we're doing. But nobody's asking, how do we change or how do we change that culture?

Yeah, I think it's a mix of lots of different problems. There's a lot of top down planning that happens when it comes to go to market. There's some organizations will try to do a bottoms up and somewhere meet in the middle, but oftentimes it ends up being like the CFO comes up and just says, hey, we need to grow by 120%t. And everybody goes, where did that come from? Where are we going to do that? Yeah, I think I think we're starting to see another trend as well. Right. There's… we rapidly move from like inbound and ABM to to PLG. And and now there's this go to market thing happen happening as a trend in the space. Look, I think I think they're all like go to market and revops as a category.

I think are they all mean well, they all mean essentially the same thing. It's it's a new way of trying to align everybody and stop doing this. I think when you and I were talking earlier, we were we were discussing for a moment, like, yeah, what is it called? Attribution. Right. Look, it's one team, one dream. Revenue is the goal. We got to try to figure out ways to orient the acquisition model and the attribution model around revenue, maybe logos, maybe certain deal sizes or something like this. But, yeah, I think a tops down sort of revenue planning approach and just distributing orders to folks is what's causing most of that problem. It doesn't mean that you can't take an order from your C-Suite on. We need to grow by X percent this year and try to figure out how to do that. But you should do that together. And we should probably try to avoid saying, hey, this deal came from sales. This deal came from Google.

Ultimately, like, yes, those things sort of matter. Right. You do want to increase or decrease spend in the channels that work or don't. But if you're not able to have a real conversation about, like, how do we actually go hit this together and what are some of the ideas that we can work on, both from a tech perspective and what do we need to fix and the net new net new growth market that we need to enter into? You know, you're just not going to get there, you're going to keep running on that same hamster wheel. So I guess the punch line here is go to market teams or rev ops teams or whatever version of that team you want to name. It's a mashup of the stakeholders that are in a go-to-market function. Right.

So you're marketing, your sales operations. And I think the reason we're seeing that is because of exactly what we just talked about. Right. Like, we don't know how to hit these numbers and we're just passing in these transactional conversations. Here's a ticket. Oh, yep. Finish that ticket. But it's not working. But weirdly, just to put a pin in it, I guess, weirdly, we're hearing from the VC market, for those of us that are venture-backed startups, like it's simultaneously, like, grow sustainably, but also, like, grow quickly. And so, like, we don't really know what's going on right now. But I think, you know, the more you can team up with your counterparts and other departments, the better. But you're going to have more fun, too. Like, I don't know, I don't know about you, but like filling out tickets all day long and like feeling like I'm just like checking a box doesn't really feel like I'm moving the needle necessarily.

No, no, this is actually the path to burnout. Like, I think this is the end. If you don't solve this at the company or team that you're at, you're simply going to inherit, or you're going to infect the team you're going into with the same transactional culture, which is going to want people to not work on that team and you're going to have higher turnover and we're seeing this with marketers, you know, marketers are taking their next job thinking it might be their last, if things don't change, I'm gonna find something else to do, you know, so I really do appreciate this. Before we let folks go, Mike, what is your event? What are you doing in November? Please tell people.

In November, we are hosting Mopsapalooza. It is a three-day event for about 500 or so marketing and revenue operations professionals, DemandGen as well. You should be there learning about what all these ops nerds are doing with the MarTech stacks. We will have client success operations pros, sales ops pros, some IT folks, as well as a plethora of marketing operations professionals speaking. It is all community-led, so you're not going to have a bunch of pitches from vendors up there telling you about their latest features and we got some really good keynotes, Scott Breakholder keynote for us, Franz Reinsmührer, Juan Mendoza, and we're going to announce the rest sort of at the, in the beginning part of the next month, but yeah, we'd love to have you there. It's in Anaheim, California, right behind Disneyland in November. So the weather's going to be pretty nice in California.

So probably the best weather in the country, honestly, at that time of year. And I just want to say to everybody that's on with us, we are going, we have at least one of our marketing ops people going. So this is a really cool event. If you haven't been, please go check it out. Thank you again, Mike. This is, I got to bring you back. This is such a relevant conversation and we just simply ran out of time. Yeah.

Thank you. I appreciate it. I had a lot of fun.

Awesome. Take care, everybody. Thanks.