Behind the Scenes with the OpsCast Crew

Hi, I'm Michael Hartman.

I'm Naomi Liu.

And I'm Mike Rizzo. And this is OpsCast, a podcast for marketing ops pros and rev ops pros created by the MoPros, the number one community for marketing operations professionals.

Tune in to each episode as we chat with real professionals to help elevate you and your marketing operations career.

Hello and welcome to another episode of OpsCast brought to you by marketingops.com, powered by all the MoPros out there. I'm your host, Mike Artman, joined today by my two amigos, Naomi, Mike. What's up? We're here.

Been a hot minute.

I know. We don't get to do this very often. I always look forward to them too.

Yeah, I do too. And yeah, it's, we should do it more like often, but we're all busy.

Yeah. We always say that. And I think best of our listeners are just as busy as we are.

So they're like, you're busy. I'm busy.

For sure. Um, yeah, so like, it seemed like a good time for us to kind of connect either, either way, um, whether we do this more often or not, maybe it could be like a quarterly thing, but we are recording this like in the last few days of June 2025. So by the time this gets out, it'll be, I think, right around mid-year point. So feels like a good time, like a milestone to go like, hey, what's going on? Like, where are we in 2025? What's going on in 2026 with the community? And The world and everything else. But I know, Mike, that there was some big stuff that came out earlier this week about community. Why don't you like, maybe we start there, like what's going on with the community the rest of this year? I know we've got Mobsapalooza coming up. Um, we had the event earlier in the year. It's like, what's, what's, what are the big things happening now?

Yeah. Um, gosh, there's a lot happening in the community and, um, I think, I think the thing that I'm probably certainly most excited about is, is bringing everybody back together, um, this year in October for Mopsapalooza 2025. But, uh, as of this recording, it was like 2 days ago that we, uh, hosted our like sort of formal, what is membership all about? How are we reinvesting into the community? What new programs are we bringing to the community? Um, and how are we just trying to lean in? On creating an environment that feels like trusted and safe and all of the above. We did that webinar like just a couple days ago and got some really good questions from folks. I'd say the gist of the sort of like bullet points that I could give from that are Slack is now a paid-only sort of member benefit. Your membership actually comes with a livestream ticket to Mopsepalooza. So that's a $500 value that we bake in there for you. Um, and the folks that are already in Slack today who got in on some of our legacy sort of like free Slack access, as long as you're like actually participating, um, you know, we're fine with you hanging out. Like, just don't just drop emojis occasionally. Like, you know, contribute, ask a question, answer a question. Uh, we'll evaluate that every 45 days and if you've sort of been gone and dormant, uh, we'll move you over into our forum. Uh, and that was like key bullet point, I think number 4 now if I'm counting. Um, there is a community forum product.

Yeah.

It's a proper forum. Um, and it's been there for years, but nobody ever really—

People don't know that though.

Yeah.

They have no idea.

When you said that, I was like, oh right. Oh right.

That's right. Yeah, there is. I was like, I was like, I know about it. And I can't remember the last time I was there.

Yeah, yeah, totally. I mean, like, look, for every person that is on Slack, there's equally another person that can't install Slack, right? Like plenty of you out there are using Microsoft Teams or maybe nothing for chat. I don't know. That would be strange. But, um, you know, for, for all of you, there is a community forum product. It's at community.marketingops.com. Uh, you can use your marketingops.com login to go access it at any time. Um, and then there's like some paid channels and stuff like that where we're hosting all of our local meetups, for example, like local chapter meetups are going to be organized there. Uh, you'll get to see some of our content calendar in there. Um, so I'd say like that was the thing that was probably most substantively, um, different and exciting about what has happened in 2025 so far is like the formal shift to, uh, move toward more of a membership model, um, that, that makes Slack a feature of that membership, but also investing, as I mentioned, into that, right? By giving you access to Mopsapalooza on the livestream, um, at, at least at the, at the pro level, right? Like the initial sort of membership level.

Yeah.

So yeah, I'm excited. Um, those are all, you know, it, I don't know. They're, they're important shifts that we need to make, uh, as an organization so that we can continue to go build out more of the explicit sort of like role-based community programming and, um, host some more like engaging sort of speakers and educational opportunities, these kinds of things. Um, you know.

Debbie, were you on the webinar this week?

I wasn't, no.

Yeah. So I was, I mean, I think, I thought there were a lot of good questions. I think a lot of it was just clarification on the details of like, my membership is this one, how is that going to change? Oh, I mean, I suspect if you haven't already, Mike, you're going to get questions. I'm going to put you on the spot here because we hadn't planned this.

Yeah.

Like, what's the why behind it, right? Like, I really enjoy being on Slack and great community and It was in and out occasionally, maybe like, what's the, so like maybe it feels like to some people like they're losing out on something, but what's the, what's the back? Maybe there's a little bit more you could share on the why. And then like, why is it like, if, how would you tell those people that, um, they still have access to, to the, whether it's to that community side or whatever, to, to be able to get the same kind of Connections?

Yeah. Yeah. No, it's a, it's a good question. It boils down to like, I kind of, I, I lightly breezed over it right as I was starting, starting to describe some of the bullet points of the takeaways, but it boils down to creating trust and safety and making sure that we have the right people in the community that are creating the right value. I have to say, as a community, I'm incredibly proud of our members for stepping up and constantly, you know, Engaging the way that they have, um, signaling if they feel like there's something that isn't quite right. Um, you know, I know there's a number of us that sort of act as like pseudo-moderators to the community and we'll notify our team to make sure that, you know, we have good participation and there's nobody like spamming and sourcing services or anything like that. Um, but really it comes down to, hey, I know that by being a member of this community, it is, uh, an agnostic, environment, right? We don't, we don't adhere to any one technology, we don't service another agency or anything like that. Like, we're here to invest in this practice area. And we want our members to feel like we're invested in them. And what I can tell you is those that have historically been sort of just like, on a free plan, they're not necessarily as engaged as those that have come in and contributed in other ways, right? Even though we didn't have a membership before, there was plenty of people that were jumping in and hosting workshops. Uh, they were coming to our conference, engaging in lots of different other formats. Those are the people that are the most engaged. And I think when you invest, uh, your time or your dollars, or sometimes both, you end up getting more value out of a community. And, and that's really the why behind it, right? Is we want to create an environment that everybody's excited to be in. Um, and they know that there's investment back in them.

Gotcha. Have you, have you, what's been the feedback you've gotten so far?

Honestly, just like, makes sense.

Yeah.

Generally speaking, it, you know, it's a, it makes sense. It's, uh, um, definitely the like, hey, what does it mean to be active in 45 days, uh, type of thing. Um, and so we just wanted to, you know, clarify that's like, some level of meaningful contribution. Usually that results in like asking a question or responding to somebody on a question. You know, we can't, I mean, if it's not a widely known fact, just for the listeners out there, like we can't see your DMs. So we have no idea, like if all you do is DM people, we wouldn't know that. So there is some level of like, you kind of have to be Um, engaged on some of the other public channels, right. That are, that are visible. Um, yeah, so it's really just—

Or, or the, or the, there, I know there are private channels in Slack. Those, those get, how do you have visibility to those too? It's just DMs.

Yeah, we'll, we'll have some visibility just as like moderators. We'll have visibility into those 'cause we're in those channels. Um, uh, but like an app that, for example, 'cause we're all kind of nerds, right? So the way that we're tracking this is Uh, when you contribute to the community, there's a date stamp that's stamped to your record. Um, and it says like the last time you were active. And if that lapses by 45 days, we'll know that you, like, you, you haven't been around contributing in any, any way. The apps that we have to be able to look at that, they can't see into private channels unless we explicitly invite them into those. So like, generally speaking, you know, we're looking at mostly just public forum contribution type of stuff.

Okay.

Right.

Yeah. Oh, makes sense. Yeah.

See, that was the response.

Makes sense. Yeah. Um, yeah, I just, I mean, I was trying to, I was trying to put myself in the position as much as I kind of know and supported all this. Right. I put myself in the position of someone maybe who's not as actively like that involved with the, what's going on with the community from an operational standpoint.

Yeah.

Yeah, there's a lot. I would be, if anybody ever wants me to like lift the veil and talk about like the whole, the whole thing, like I'll do it with you one-on-one anytime you want. You know, it's probably not worth like blasting it out to the entire world 'cause people would be like really bored.

Yeah.

But for those that are interested, I'm more than happy to like lift the veil and, and share that kind of stuff 'cause there's, there's a lot that goes into managing this stuff. Right. And Um, and we want to make it a valuable experience. And unfortunately, um, that has a cost. And yeah, largely that's been supported by our sponsors. And I think we've done a really nice job of engaging with them and balancing the load between, you know, ensuring our sponsors aren't just like getting a pitch slap into the community.

Right.

Right. Um, so, you know, we want to, we want to sort of continue to balance that and maintain a focus on Member first. It's always been about our members. And now we're just creating more intention for that environment.

Yeah. But yeah, I know there are other events coming up, but the next big one, like community-wide, is Moxpalooza, right? In October. You said it's late October. I can't remember the dates.

And then you have— yeah, yeah. October 27th through 29th this year. I just had—

San Diego.

It's in Anaheim, California, right behind Disneyland. Oh, still Anaheim.

San Diego's next year.

Yeah. Well, we're looking at San Diego next year. This is, I did, I did that. I'm actually thinking about doing a public post about this just to show the pain of what it takes to try to put one of these events on. It's insane. I did 6 site visits in 10 days. Uh, and I'm, I'm sure for those of you listening right now, I am shopping for 2027 venues right now. Um, 'cause it's, that's what you have to do in this, in this thing.

To book 'em a year out.

You have to book 'em 2 years out.

2 years out.

Minimum 2. Um, that's like the norm. And, and, you know, ideally beyond that for some of these places. And what's really scary is they ask for like money upfront. Right. And so, yeah, most of that's based on your F&B minimum. Y'all, some of, 2 actually, out of the 6, I wanna say 3 or 4 of them were asking for an, a food and beverage minimum spend. Of $350,000. You guys.

I mean, I mean, we can do it, but that's—

But like, are we eating caviar and steaks for every meal? I mean, we can do it. I, I actually, it's funny, all of our, anybody who's involved with intimately with events probably goes like, oh yeah, they, they have a program. I have no idea if that's, I mean, it's a big number, right? Like But I don't know if it's the norm or if it's high, low, like I have no context.

I mean, and, and it's all relative, right? So like for those listening, our event is approximately 450 to 500 people, right? That's, that's what we're going to see in person probably this year. And last year we had 437, the year before it was 330. So we are growing, right? But if you do the math, The $350,000 that you spend on food and beverage per headcount, that's before taxes and gratuity. So if you add that on top, you're talking like $1,000 per head for effectively like 2 days of food. And you're not feeding 'em 3 meals a day, folks. You're giving 'em usually some light breakfast and a solid lunch. I don't know what we're eating to be able to do that. It'll like, even if we could afford that, we can't afford it. Just to be very clear, like we cannot afford that.

Yeah.

Even if we could, I am confident that at that volume of attendees, that is actual food waste. Like that's, that's what it's going to turn into is like, we literally would just have to order food just to hit the minimum and it would just get thrown away, which I, which I just won't do business with venues that, that want to stick to their guns on that kind of stuff. So anyway, just to like give you the stark offset, there are other venues that offer $100,000 food and beverage minimum, right? So it's like totally arbitrary. Yeah.

Yeah.

For, for the same amount of space, same cost of the room nights. Like it's, it's all crazy. But anyway, I digress. Mopsapalooza is October 27th through 29th, 2025. This year it's at the Westin in Anaheim. We are currently wrapping up our ticket holder voting phase. So if you have a ticket, you can go in and rate and review all the sessions and then help us create the community event that you wanna see at MoxiePalooza. We'll announce all the speakers in the lineup in late July. The workshops are pretty well solidified at this point. Um, we have a lot of workshop hosts this year, which I'm really excited about. Um, and then I actually got a message from a couple of the attendees that were super fired up because they've always wanted to do Disney in Halloween time. Um, and so they're grabbing our Magic Pass and they're like, yeah, I'm going to Disneyland. 'Cause it's gonna be Halloween. I was like, oh, right. Yeah.

I forgot. For the record, that was not me.

Hey, it's not for everybody.

Not my jam.

Yeah.

I get it. That's okay though.

Yeah. Yeah.

I wanna know what, what is Naomi speaking? 'Cause that's what I wanna go see.

Naomi? Oh yeah. We're doing a panel.

Yeah. We're doing another panel, right?

Yep.

You, you and me, Mike. Mm-hmm. Yep.

We'll do a panel.

Should we, should we, um, should we wear costumes? Like have it be themed?

Spooky.

Ooh, that would be kind of fun.

Right. And as you're, I don't know, what would the theme be?

We'd have to come up with some like marketing puns.

Right.

Like, I was like, I was—

Yeah.

Your favorite moves. Well, I, one time I wanted to like, uh, act like a popup banner and just like, just like walk around and then like, like step in front of somebody and just like hold up a sign.

That's so funny.

Like a chatbot. Yeah. Yeah. Like, okay. Can we, can we? Yeah.

But anyway, I'm excited about it. Yeah, we had like 15% of our attendees buy tickets to come back right away this year. That's awesome. For last year, for this year. So, so that's, that's really exciting. But yeah, beautiful hotel, a little bit more intimate 'cause it's like, it's—

I've been to that Westin. It's a, it's a nice venue.

Yeah. Yeah. Really, really excited about it. They're, they're about as old as our conference is, so about 3 years old. So I'm pretty pumped. But yeah, that's, gosh, I think that's everything for 2025 that, that has sort of been happening. I did talk about on the webinar this week and, and something else that I'm excited about is we're doing more research this year, releasing more of that out into the wild. So the first report is available to our members. It's the State of Data-Driven Decision Making, a mouthful, in go-to-market specifically. And there's a lot of really good nuggets in there around how data, data quality, and some of the teams are organizing around the use of data for effective go-to-market strategy. So this is a way for us to go a lot deeper on some of that annual benchmark study stuff that we do with the State of the MoPro.

Is this a new one or is this a, because I know you do this State of the MoPros, which is, you know, like, Coming into its, what, 3rd or 4th year, right?

I think it'll be its 5th year, 4th year.

Okay.

I don't know.

So this is a, but this is a different, this is different research than what you're talking about.

This is different research. Yeah. We're referring to these as Pulse Reports. We're going to try to pump them out roughly once a quarter-ish, but effectively just like getting a state on like what's going on in our industry around very specific topics. So the first topic is around data and data quality. The second topic that is, we finished the research collection phase and we're just going into design mode now for the study, but it'll be released in a couple months and it's around RevOps and RevTech and just like WTF is going on in revenue operations. Like, what is this?

Yeah.

And, and so that, that, that one I'm particularly excited about. And then the third one, we're entering that research phase now where we're actually going to collect all the data from all of these Uh, that wanna participate, um, is gonna be around more of your like KPIs and benchmarks, right? Like, uh, what's your salary level?

Like team KPIs and benchmarks or market performance?

Yeah, more like your team, your marketing operations team, um, sizes, like stuff that where you're like, how do I sort of understand me and my role, me and my team, me and my org relative to those that are out there? And, and then by pulling all 3 of those pieces together, we'll be able to also recreate the State of the MoPro research and give everybody access to that at the end of the year as well. So effectively we're breaking apart the State of the MoPro research, going deeper, and then pulling it back together in sort of a bespoke study and releasing that as you might expect at Moxxapalooza. So yeah.

Are you, are you, um, are you open to ideas or suggestions for additional areas of research?

Of course. Yeah.

Yeah.

'Cause it doesn't need to be the exact same like pattern every single time.

Yeah.

So whether that's you or anybody listening, like you're welcome to tell us what you want us to study. Um, 'cause we've got a whole community of people that probably are interested in the same topic. Right. So yeah, be starting.

Yeah, I mean, I wasn't like, I don't, I asked that without having anything in mind. And then of course now I've, I'm sure there's gotta be, gotta be something about AI, right? And its impacts. Um, I would be curious to, like, I think it'd be interesting. You're doing the RevTech one. I'd be curious if there's anything that we're looking into about, you know, what is happening in terms of technologies that might disrupt Like the entrenched players, right? Like I keep believing that there's gonna be something that's gonna come along and just be sort of a whole new ballgame in terms of how things, like a, like, yeah, an alternative to Salesforce that just doesn't do the same thing in the same way, but maybe does things, you know? So I'm just curious, like, anyway, but that's, that would be interesting to me, like to hear about what's going on there, what people are seeing, what they're looking for. Yeah.

Yeah. Interestingly, I met a team yesterday. I'll give them a shout out, which obviously I try to avoid. They're not a paid sponsor of any kind, so just full disclaimer there. I literally just met them last night. They're based in Australia. It's a company called Zepic, Z-E-P-I-C, for those of you that feel like you want to go look it up. They They're doing something interesting. They're really starting more at like the data layer. And I think that, that sort of like scratches at what you're talking about, Hartman. I bet you there's more of them out there where like you're starting with more of like a data-first approach to building like a marketing automation platform versus like, you know, the boxed sort of objects. So for them, it's like anything is an object. Like you could literally like your chair, As a, 'cause they kind of, they cater more to the B2C side. He was like explaining to me, he is like, look, your chair could be an object and then each of the pieces of the chair can be features and assets and metadata of that object, the arm, the SKUs, like all this stuff. And like you could do that for like literally anything. And then you create a relational database and a CRM and a marketing automation platform that allows you to engage with like highly personalized relationships between these objects, which arguably you could do in B2B too. But it was just fascinating to see. The, like, the approach to building technology now, I think, is going to change based on what we're seeing in the market, right? Like, you look at what Clay's doing and kind of pushing the agenda forward on this idea of like go-to-market engineering and, and like sort of a build, build first, like slow down to speed up kind of mindset. I think we're going to see that come to fruition in products too, right? It's not, it's going to end up being like, Almost. We talked about this years ago. I, I, we were saying like, I feel like there's gonna be lots of warehouse native, like things that are gonna happen. That's, that, that I think is upon us at this point.

I was trying to remember like who we, there's, I can't remember who it was we talked to, but yeah, I remember that. Um, curious, Naomi, would you like, would you find it interesting? You think people would be interested? Like your, I think it's one thing that's been interesting and I've talked to a couple of people, but I know like your scope of responsibility has expanded. Like a couple times now beyond, wait, in quotes, right? Traditional marketing ops, right?

Mm-hmm.

Um, do you think it would be like, do you think there are things that would be useful for people in our audience who aspire to like grow and expand and have different career paths? Like, maybe like, what would be like, what are the challenges? What would, what makes sense? Like, what can be leveraged from what you've done into these expanded roles?

Yeah, I mean, I think absolutely. I think part of the struggle that I've had is even just finding people that I can bounce ideas off of that have been in similar situations, right? And so there was someone that I met actually at Adobe Summit earlier this year where we were both in marketing ops and she also managed BDRs or an inside sales team. And when we looked at each other, we were like, oh my God, did we just find another like lever? You know, we're just like, wait, what? You know? Sweet.

We were so excited.

You're a four-leaf clover like me. Right? I know. Oh my God.

And, uh, it just like, it was, it wasn't planned. It was just something like I had, when I mentioned like my scope of responsibility, you could see her eyes light up and she was like, what?

Yeah.

So we immediately made a, made a, um, a note to chat post from it. And yeah, it was great. And I think that's just something that has been rare.

Right.

And I think when it comes to marketing ops, like, despite the industry being a bit more mature now, it's still, there's still a wide range of what people are responsible for, right? I'll meet marketing ops people that part of their scope of work is like demand gen or copywriting or like being responsible for the actual like Development of the nurture program, right? And whereas like, I am not, like, we're purely operational, right? And then there's teams that are not necessarily as involved in vendor evaluations or contracts or, you know, the financial side of things or even negotiating with vendors about, you know, the needs of the business, like, kind of leave that to procurement teams or whatnot, right?

Yeah.

And so, I think just understanding where the gaps are for people. Is it that the company doesn't want that to fall under marketing ops, or is it that there is, it's like chicken-egg, cart-horse type situation? Like, you don't know what you don't know, and how do you get that experience unless you are trained on it, right? Or it just kind of falls under your, onto your radar.

Mm-hmm.

So, I think a lot of that is just like finding like-minded people that overlap on like, The smaller nuances that, like the fringe things, right? That, um, can kind of come up. And especially for me, aside from like the BDRs, it's also, I'm heavily, heavily, heavily involved in sales enablement and sales onboarding. So, when a new sales manager starts, like the second or third conversation they might have is with me, right? Which is, here's access to all of the tools that you need. This is our process.

Yeah.

This is how you progress an opportunity forward. This is how, like a lot of that falls under me, right? And that's interesting, trying to point them to the right teams, right? So, um, yeah, it's a lot.

That is a lot.

I've been in similar ones where I always tell people, I try to define marketing ops, right? Pretty much everybody has responsibility for the tech stack, the marketing tech stack, and usually campaign operations or something like campaign operations and data and probably reporting and analytics, right, to some level, right? And the amount can vary. But when you start getting things like, I, like you, I've had a small inbound BDR or SDR team. I've had responsibility for websites and the operations of those, not the content, but like the underpinnings and that kind of stuff. I have had content teams before, before marketing ops was a thing. And then you touched on it, right? Managing budgets, managing resources, whether that's headcount or consultants, like, and negotiating that. And, you know, I remember distinctly when it came time for renewal with a technology vendor, how me, my boss, and our procurement person all sort of, we strategized about the roles we were each going to play in how we interacted with them, right? To the point like, I was the one trying to like, yeah, I'm on your side. And my boss was the one beating him over the head. And the PR guy was like, I just need the numbers, right? And like, unless you've gone through that, right, or had the opportunity to like just be exposed to that, it's not something that most people get to do. So.

Mm-hmm.

Maybe that's an opportunity, Mike, for some additional, like, I don't know, like Coaching, training, whatever. You're smiling.

Yep. No, my head, I was gonna say that earlier when Naomi was like talking about the, um, sort of the serendipity of being able to find somebody that has like a similar thing, right? Like when we were talking at the, by the way, none of this is scripted folks. So like it, it is absolutely just a natural conversation. Um, uh, when you're talking about like finding someone that has the same skillset as you or whatever. Um, those are the types of things that we're trying to do with the membership program, right? Like we're, we're engineering ways for you to find those connections. So you can imagine a program for Naomi where I ask all of the folks that are signing up now, hey, give us a sense of your role and responsibilities, right? If you actually build out your profile on marketingops.com, it is a LinkedIn-esque style profile. You can give us your job history, your work experience, your certifications, and some of your skills. And we eventually will be able to get to a place where we can pair you up in sort of these micro sort of groups for a period of, let's call it a month, right? Where we can host discussions and go deep on topics or introduce you to each other.

Like cohorts.

Exactly.

Yeah.

Operative word cohorts. Um, and, and that's exactly what, like, we're, we're leaning in on. We're starting with more like role-based, you know, are you a manager, independent contributor, senior manager, director, VP, or more? So at least you're within a peer group that's sort of like experiencing different things, but we can go a whole bunch of different directions. Uh, and so when Naomi shared that with me, that's exactly where my head went, right? It's like, oh great, we should figure out a way to bring people together for some of the things that they're responsible for. Um, which then also means that if you're listening to this, like if you have other ideas of cohorts that we should try to pull together, send them to us. That's what we want to do is like make it easier for you to learn from each other. And shorten that learning curve. So yeah, that's a lot though, Naomi. Coincidentally, I did see someone posting yet again on LinkedIn about the BDR sort of SDR function rolling into like a RevOps marketing. Really, it was actually not even a RevOps org because that's just like SalesOps 2.0, but like it was actually a marketing ops function person that was like, oh, I'm I'm sort of like taking over on this now, or I'm like more heavily involved. And I, I personally think it's like a really good move for, for the organizations that have the leader that can handle it. I think it's a super good move. Um, but I do think it takes time to be able to, and I would love your thoughts on it right now. I mean, like, it probably takes time and experience in role to like get to a place where you can make an impact, right? Like you kind of have to know the inner workings of. That's my sense anyway. It's like you have to really know the inner workings of the business to be able to like be an impactful sort of leader for the SDR, BDR function. Would you agree?

Or? Yep, absolutely. Because, um, I, you know, and I was very honest with the team when I started managing them is, you know, I don't have a sales background. I get sold to online, right? Or people try to pitch me. But I don't have a sales background and— excuse me, we can, can we edit that out?

Yeah, we'll cut it for you.

We could.

Very live.

We probably won't.

Very live. Yeah. Okay. But what I can offer them, and I think this is something that has been very beneficial and has caused a lot of success since I've taken over the team. Is I am very data focused, right? And I'll give you an example. So my example is if you can make, and I'm just making, these are just, I'm just making these up, right? If you can make, you know, 12 very highly qualified calls in a day, right? Where you have done your research on the account, you look the person up on LinkedIn or Sales Navigator, you've, you know, kind of identified their history, found like a talk track that you can talk to them about.

Mm-hmm.

seen their history in Salesforce, know where to look at in Marketo to see like what they're doing, are they engaging with our content or whatnot. And I've trained you on all of that because, you know, I, my team on the ops side, we handle all of that. You're able to make 12 calls a day. Let's look at the historical data that we have in terms of lead source and the conversion rates from if you're getting compensated, for example, on opportunity creation or setting appointments for our sales managers, where, what are the leads and the source where you're going to have the best chance to set those appointments and create those opportunities? And then additionally, on top of that, where are you going to, like, what is the close rate for those opportunities?

Right.

Arming them with this information allows them to prioritize the calls that they're making in a given day. So, it's not just like, I'm gonna dial for dollars type of situation, right?

Not a first in, first out.

And, mm-hmm. And so, when they have that information at their fingertips and I'm training them where to look and how to prioritize and what they should be doing, they've been killing it, honestly.

Yeah. Right?

And they've been like, yeah.

That's awesome.

I believe it.

Yeah. I believe it. Well, I know, I think we, I can't remember what, but I remember we were on one of these with a recent guest, Naomi, and you were saying some things about like what you've learned. Like, I think there's also value in having the perspective of understanding what that team, that kind of function has to do.

Yeah.

To help you in whatever you've historically been doing in marketing ops. Because I, Not surprised, right? I am a big believer that understanding that contact limit, I believe there's a lot of people in marketing and marketing ops who don't understand that and then dismiss it or think it's easy or whatever. And I think having that exposure is valuable. And I love the idea that you're doing it the other way too, right? You're helping them understand what's available to them so they can do better. Yeah.

And I think that's been a natural progression into like the sales enablement stuff too, that, you know, when a new hire starts, a new sales manager starts, it's like, okay, of course they get Salesforce access and then, you know, this is, you know, how stuff works. But it's also just really training them on the nuances of, you know, how do we set things up and like, what do all of these stages mean? Um, who are the BDRs that support them? Um, what are all the tools that are available to them? Because there is a lot of overlap with sales and marketing tools, right? Even if it's like Marketo, Marketo has a Marketo Sales Insight, right?

Yeah.

That acts as a plugin that can sit on the salesperson's like Outlook, and they can also look in Salesforce and see what they're doing. So, there is a lot of like natural overlap with training, and because of that, I think people in marketing ops should really take a Um, raise their hand, right? And be part of like that onboarding process when a salesperson starts at the organization, right? Because we often talk about like, oh, marketing and sales alignment, but what does that actually mean? Does it mean just like you're talking to them or like fitting in a call with them? But how about really like spending that one-on-one time and training them on the marketing tools that overlap with sales?

Mm-hmm.

I think that's so important. Um, I spend hours with new salespeople that join on, you know, here's LinkedIn Sales Navigator. This is your license. This is how you use it. This is what you, how you connect it into our Salesforce instance. This is Vidyard. This is Marketo Sales Insight. This is how you use it all together. Okay, let's touch base in 4 weeks and see how you're doing.

Yeah.

Great. Yeah.

I love that.

It's that kind of enablement stuff that like, I, I love that you gave some of the concrete examples of like exactly what you're sort of referring to. Because like, it doesn't matter how much we sort of shout it out into the ether, right? Where like I say all the time, you know, I think a marketing ops professional is best suited to grow into a RevOps role. And it's because you have the context window of here's everybody pre-funnel, here's everybody post-funnel and conversion and renewal and so on and so forth that you get to have a contextual conversation about enablement and the art of the possible in a way that Generally speaking, other operations or, you know, players don't have full visibility into that and they don't have the context. You, we in marketing operations, like we're forced to understand that full journey because that's like, that's how we evaluate the success of our, of our efforts and implementations of products. Like people don't understand. And so like arguably everything you just described, Naomi, is RevOps, right?

Yeah.

But like, it, you're a marketing ops professional and, you know, and you're enabling a sales team and you're understanding the, the, the journey and like what, how, how something moves through to the next stage. And, you know, and then you're training people on that. Um, I know we're coming up on time. I feel like it, like we could do a sneak peek maybe just, uh, of the, of, of some of the data we have of like this data-driven Do you want to, do you want to look at it or no?

Do we have time? Sure. I think we have a few minutes, right? Okay.

Here, we'll do, I'll screen share. So for those that get to watch this on video, you can go look at the screen. I guess I'll try to zoom in a little so that we can actually see. This is our latest research, the state of the data-driven decision-making in go-to-market. Uh, I just clicked through to a couple of the like subsections, um, cause we have a whole table of contents. Here that sort of outlines what we went into. For those of you listening, we went into data maturity and strategy, data usage and tools, challenges and culture, people and organizational impact, some forward-looking trends. We got some crowdsourced curiosity, like basically some information on data strategy. That's the beauty of AI and open text fields these days. And then we actually get a little action plan for you on like how to operationalize against some of this information. So, um, in this section, data usage and tools, I just stopped on this one because I thought it was, um, you know, an interesting enough nugget. The question was, uh, what are your organization's top 3 data priorities for the next 12 months? And, uh, the number 1, of course, was data quality and hygiene. Number 2 was unifying data across platforms. So it's like data integration. And, uh, number 3, it actually shows up sort of down here. Um, is automating reporting and dashboards. All right, so I'll pause here. Just any, any quick thoughts? Does this come as a surprise to either of you?

I, no, not in general. No. Like my, and my gut reaction though is like the whole automating reporting and dashboards. I think I, it wouldn't be near the top of my list because I'm, especially with the dashboard word. Yeah, I just, I think, I think actionable insights would be more the way I would think about it.

Yeah.

Especially AI-enabled ones.

Yeah. Dashboards for me are like, I don't know, they're almost a 4-letter word.

I could not agree more.

If it doesn't tell a good story, I don't know. I don't know why we even have the dashboard. Like, is it a set it and forget it kind of thing? It's just, it's just not good. I did meet a team that's—

The worst is when you make them and then in Salesforce and then you can, cuz they don't display the most up-to-date information, right? And you have to like manually hit refresh.

Yeah.

Yeah. And then the worst is like when you spend all this time building it, it's a priority, and then you go back in like a month later and it hasn't been refreshed for like 3 and a half weeks.

Yeah, exactly.

Why?

Like, thank you for wasting my time on—

There's no opportunity for sales enablement and training. Yeah.

Well, in section 2, under data maturity and strategy, we found that most marketing organizations are still in the process of maturing digitally. And we get into some of the nuance here. We talk about, like, we ask the question, how would you rate your organization's digital maturity? And the bulk of them said that it's sort of intermediate, or like operationalizing some data practices, but it's still pretty siloed. And then the next sort of 2 highest were around more like developing and advanced. So we're seeing this sort of Really like, I don't know, introductory, intermediate segment take the lead. And then it's like a split between those that are just getting started and those that have some level of maturity and advanced capabilities, which is interesting. This is over 270 people that are answering this. So it's not like insignificant findings, right? Like we're, we're surveying a pretty large landscape of folks here. And then just in the interest of time, I'll sort of rifle through a couple more for us. We saw that about 1 in 5 study participants have no dedicated analytics and reporting full-time employees, FTEs, which is pretty shocking.

Yet nearly half of them had that, had analytics and reporting as a high priority.

Exactly right. Yeah. When you start to look at the correlation between the high priority and the lack of full-time employment, that starts to give you a signal for, well, where is a hiring effort going to be made? Or where do we need to contract? Or what skills do I need to ramp up of my own to be able to support the organization? That's how you can read between the line on some of this, some of this data. And then I'll just sort of, the last one is some of the crowdsourced curiosities, peers on data strategy. The question study participants would like, would most like to ask their peers relates to data governance and data quality. And what we did is we sort of chunked all of these things out in terms of rankings of questions by the study participants themselves. So for those of you that want to come in and have a conversation around data quality, governance, and assurance, we would love for you to participate and contribute some of your thoughts. But there's questions about like, what is your data governance strategy? And then how did you implement a unified multi-touch revenue attribution model? Like, these are all top of mind for our community. And if you go download this report, it is available, like I said, to our Pro and Pro Plus members. If we do get it sponsored, we'll release it to, to some folks for, for free. Unfortunately, folks, the inner workings of building these is, it's very, very expensive and we want to create high-quality research. So these are first available to our members. But if you do go get this, there's lots, lots of really good information in here and we'd love for you to sort of join in on the conversation. But it was a nice transition because you, Naomi, were talking so much about data and how it enables Your ability to have a successful sales org, right? Uh, so yeah, I figured it'd be fun to sort of highlight some of those things.

That's awesome.

Well, I know we all, we all got to jam.

Yeah. It's always fun. So thanks, John. Um, any last thoughts before we head out?

No, just hit me with your ideas, folks. This community is for you, built by you. The podcast intro is, it's powered by all the MoPros out there, right? Same is true for everything else we're doing. So, you know, let us know. We're here for you.

I always love when people, you ask the question, anything else? And people know, and then they go into something else just like you did.

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Call you out on it. Yeah, it's all good. All good. All good.

Um, I'm just gonna sit there and smile next time.

There you go. Just a pretty face. There you go. Uh, oh, I forgot to like, I, I've been wearing my 2023 MAFSApalooza shirt lately too. So. Love it.

I love it.

I found a stack of, uh, marketing ops stickers the other day. I was like, oh.

Oh, nice. Yeah. Bring those out at the next, uh, local chapter meetup that you sort of quasi-run, Naomi.

Mm-hmm. I missed them. There's one, there's one in the DFW area this morning and I couldn't, I just couldn't get to it.

So, oh, bummer.

That's all right. Excellent. Oh, it should be all there.

Yeah.

I've got a bunch of Monopoly boards I'm giving away at MOPSA this year. Uh, for sure. There's, I don't know, I'm staring at a bunch of 'em over there, so I gotta hand those out. Uh, but we're only gonna be giving out shirts to the Magic Pass attendees this year cuz, um, We're just trying to be reasonable about costs and make sure we can host a good event.

So we got one of the early ones. Rather than mess up the quality of the speakers and the truth be told, I don't need another t-shirt. Yeah.

I mean, especially if we end up having to pay $350,000 for food and beverage. That's just— We're not doing that.

Yeah.

We're not doing that.

No. Awesome. Well, again, thanks to y'all. It's always fun. Thanks to our listeners for continuing to support us as Mike said, right, we're always open to ideas, not only for the podcast topics for guests, um, you can reach out to any of us, but also for feedback on stuff for the community that you can take to Mike. I don't want to hear it.

So let's take it, take it to the Rizzo.

That's right.

All right. Till next time. Bye everybody.

Bye everyone. Thank you.