Bridging the Gap: Building Mutual Understanding Between Marketing and Ops with Monica Wright

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

Hello everyone. Welcome to the 200th episode of OpsCast brought to you by marketingops.com. I am your host, Michael Hartman, flying solo. One of these days we'll get Mike and Naomi back on as well. As a reminder, Mopsapalooza is coming up in about a month, so if you haven't got your tickets, get those now. For this special milestone episode, we're joined by someone who brings a real dual perspective, having worked deeply in both demand gen and marketing operations. So joining me today is Monica Wright. Monica is a growth and demand generation leader who has led ops teams, hired them, and depended on them. She is a growth and go-to-market advisor, and she's here to talk about the often overlooked challenge of mutual understanding, why marketers need to know more about how ops works, and why ops teams need to understand how the rest of marketing works to truly drive impact. So, Monica, welcome to the show.

Thanks. I'm so excited to be here. You know, I've been floating around the MOPS community for a long time now, and It's a great opportunity. Thanks for having me.

Yeah, absolutely. We're glad to have you. So, and this is a topic that, you know, our longtime listeners will know that I'm a big advocate for mutual understanding. So, but let's start with your background. I covered a little bit of it. You've worked across both demand gen and operations. So yeah, I'm curious how that has shaped your approach as a marketer.

Oh, sure. Well, actually, if you're open to going a little bit further back, Um, I actually come from publishing. I mean, even further back, like back in the days when there were paper routes, I had those. Yeah.

And you know, you had a paper route.

I did. And my sisters inherited them too.

So, um, I was, I was a backfill for my friends who had them in Minnesota.

Yeah.

They did it during the holidays. They would, they would, the Sunday delivery on a winter day in Minnesota. On a bicycle, not so fun.

Yeah, I've done that only, you know, in, you know, in Massachusetts. But so I get that. I absolutely get that. Lots of Walkmans broken, lots of batteries, you know, expired, you know, no helmet. But, um, it was, you know, and I was thinking about this earlier today and I had this aha moment. It's like, wow, you know, I was, I was in the middle of of, you know, collecting money, talking to customers, delivering the content at 12 years old. Like, I was that person. And we would get like requests to like ask our subscribers, you know, questions about, you know, feedback and all that stuff. And, you know, at 12, I was like, well, that's kind of like an ops marketing thing. And I didn't even realize that till this morning.

Right.

So anyway, I thought I'd share that little anecdote. But yes, I was first in publishing. from B2B publishing to newspaper publishing. And what was really interesting was it was really about, you could say, oh yeah, that was all content marketing. Sure. Yes, it was, but it was mostly circulation. So we were essentially building out when newspapers are going online, building out products to attract audiences, right?

Right.

My background really was in that notion of audience development. And when the early 2000s came about, the notion also of search and content retrieval exploded as one does. And so I made the move over to search, had that sweet spot working for Third Door Media for about 10 years or so. And so I got to talk about digital marketing, marketing technology to audiences everywhere. And that's really where it started, you know?

Right.

So I had the pleasure once, you know, during COVID there was some changes, but I had the pleasure once of actually interviewing him. I was like, you know what, after working and launching marktech.org, being part of that team, Like, you know, it's time for me to go into a software environment and really understand how these businesses are marketing, you know, because I was, I was the media person, right? So, we were building the audiences for these SaaS companies.

Right.

And so, I was like, let's flip that a little bit. I had that opportunity. And, you know, there was this one time I had this interview with this one gal and she was like, oh, you don't have any direct software experience. I was like, no, but, you literally hung up on me, like on the screen, right? So—

Crazy.

Like, I need to be, I need to get my butt into in-house. And so, what really happened was like, it was out of necessity, you know? I had to understand how these frameworks worked. I already knew what the, who the players were, you know, from martech. And, you know, we had to build on our own, especially when the organizations were really scrappy. So that's, that's really how it ended. You know, it's like understanding, um, both sides, um, really, um, you know, understanding those functions, you know, just you can't, you can't do one without the other.

Right.

And especially if you're like the one person, you're figuring it out all on your own. You know, even back in the old, you know, early SEO days and building your own blog, I mean, We all had to figure it out on our own and where we got traction was sharing that information. So, yeah. And it was all community-led, but.

So when we, when we talked before, you said that there's a number of marketers who often underestimate how much they depend on their ops teams or ops person. Sometimes it's just a person. Yeah. What do you, what if you were to give advice to marketers? Yeah, I guess general marketers, demand gen marketers, what do you, what, like, what would you recommend to them in terms of trying to understand what goes on behind the scenes within the ops realm?

Yeah, you know, this is something I'm really, you know, it's really important to me because I've seen it play out so many different ways at different organizations, you know, and The notion of operations being downstream or the ones that are reacting to requests, it doesn't, you know, I think marketers just, some marketers, not all of them, but they just don't realize how ops is the strategic backbone, like the nervous system, right?

Yeah.

You know, you've got product, you know, which is, you know, the heart and soul, and then you've got the nervous system that really pulls it together. And And so, it's not just about keeping the lights on, right? And it's—

Right.

And it's designing those systems for the entire go-to-market motion. And I think, you know, those, just that philosophy, rather than realizing that MOPS is, you know, our, you know, tactical department, you know, they're really a strategic organization, if you will, or a function that is the glue, you know, that accelerates, that drives the accountability in a way, you know, because they're the data folks.

Sure.

Or we are the data folks. They're the ones like, they're just, they have the overarching vision of how, you know, the campaigns are working, but also how the full go-to-market motion's working, right? So, And it's also about, I think, keeping the teams sane, you know. So if, if there's this, you know, I think a good operations team will protect the marketers' energy in a way, you know, they're not questioning the data.

Yeah.

They can focus on what they can do best. They can, they can collaborate a little bit better and really focus on who the customers are, you know, rather than, rather than, oh, this form's broken. You know, it's just, I think it's, I think there's this mutual importance and trust that needs to happen. And, and it's definitely not downstream.

Yeah. So, I mean, let's take it from the other side then. So, yeah, you know, what, what would you tell marketing ops professionals to be doing to better understand how to support their marketing teams? Sure. And maybe even go beyond that, right? To me, I think of doing that for both marketing and sales, especially, well, I think of it in the B2B sense. So, what's your take on that?

So, I think ops folks, you know, first of all, getting out of the reactive mode, you know, being proactive, right? And so, instead of waiting for the campaigns to launch and then scrambling to get the the information in order to track them or to facilitate them. It needs to be part of that initial conversation. And I also think having a great ops team can be a translator in a way, right, between the marketing, the creativity, the messaging, and what the business reality is. Right. And so, you know, it's— I've worked with organizations that really considered marketing as this, like, arts and crafts motion. You know, it's not—

The PowerPoint team, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. We're the PowerPoint team. We're the ones that are getting stuff printed, that sort of thing. And what this, you know, the operational piece of that, I think, you know, they're the ones that are really understanding what's possible behind the systems. And they're the ones that are building the new infrastructure. They're the ones that, or we are the ones that are bridging between, oh, wouldn't it be great if we could do this, versus, oh, this is what we can actually do and make it work by scale, right? Make it grow.

Right.

And I think that element is really important. I also think ops teams really own the data story, you know? They're the ones that are determining or assisting, like determining the metrics to track. They're the ones that, or we are, I should really say we, because, you know, as marketers too, we're the ones that are, you know, telling the teams about what the customers are doing, what the campaigns are like, what the pipeline is, how the pipeline's performing, you know, where are the bottlenecks, what's not working, what is working, and creating that accountability across. across that whole team. So it's not just about marketing, but it's more on the revenue side and the whole business side of things. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, I think a lot of marketing ops folks get frustrated because they feel like they're just being told what to do, to do this reactive. And kind of my response to that is some of this is on you, right? In that you, like, I think this is where the understanding is important, right? You need to understand, like, you should really understand how the business makes money. That's like number one. But like, if you're partnering with marketing teams, you should understand what it is that they do, what it is that they're trying to achieve. Yeah. Because then you combine that with what you described, right? Understanding what's possible and that you can then be a trusted advisor, right?

Well, that's it. The trust piece, you know, you're creating that option is creating that confidence. Not just in the data, but in the whole operate, you know, the whole go-to-market operation. You know, they're the ones that are, we again, you know, you know, focus. They can, we can focus on the accountability. We can focus on, you know, you know, recommending what actions to take, recommending, okay, we can repeat this process really easily. And scale it, right? This is what's really meeting our ICP versus just, you know, a plethora of leads coming in. Or this is what we should really do in terms of, well, maybe we should focus on retention rather than acquisition. You know, these are, these are the teams that, you know, have their fingers everywhere, you know, and really are the conductors to make it all work.

Yeah.

And Yeah.

I mean, I've got a, like, I remember a, this is actually before I think marketing ops was even a term, but I had a role where, which was when I think today it would have been probably in marketing ops or close to it. But I had a product marketing team I was working with at a big company and they wanted to, they're like, we want to put a form on our website to let people give us feedback or, you know, give us ideas. And I was like, I was like, are you sure you want to do that? Like, yes, we should do that. I was like, well, Okay, let me just walk you through what's going to happen, right? Building a form and getting on the page and capturing that, easy. Actually, it's really easy. But then what you're doing, but what you're doing is you're setting up an expectation for these people that you're going to do something based on that.

Yeah.

What are you going to do? Right.

Then what?

And it was silence, right? Yeah. That's the, like, to me, that was a way of pushing back and it's like, I don't have any problem with doing that as long as you have a plan for what you're going to do. that's going to be realistic. Because if we do that, I actually thought the risk was higher of disappointing or angering customers and prospects if we did that, because we weren't going to do anything. In which case, we're asking them to give up a lot without getting anything in return.

Right, right. And I think, you know, based on your previous question about, oh, you know, Why marketers should really understand. I mean, this day and age, it's a lot more prolific. I mean, you know, it's assumed, but even 5 years ago, it wasn't assumed. You're like, well, we need to find out all the things and we're going to have this form with a gazillion different data points and we're going to do this and we're going to do that. Okay, well, what are you going to do with it? You know, and, and that should really be a joint conversation that shouldn't be up to Ops or the, you know, the marketer. I mean, I think that's a, that's, that's the full end and sales. I mean, it's not, and product, you know, it's not just, it's not just the sales.

I'm so glad you said that, right? I mean, 'cause it's like, I think a lot of teams, a lot of times the sales process part of it gets, gets left out.

Yeah. And, and that's really where, you know, this whole, you know, this holistic vision or view, um, and where ops lives in that holistic view. I mean, it is all equal parts. In my opinion, you know, it is all equal parts and it's not a downstream function, especially now with just the prolific software options and AI and the expectations of buyers and the expectations of customers and users and everything. I mean, it is the nervous system, 100%.

Yeah. Well, I mean, I think, I think if you get to that point and you understand how all these things work, uh, where they work well, where they don't work well, and if you understand the marketing and sales process and how these— what's, what's driving behavior, right? There's a little bit of the psychology part of it. Yeah. You then can, you can be in a position to be the kind of person who goes, doesn't just say, yes, we can go do that. I mean, sometimes—

That's right.

You, you absolutely should. And sometimes Sometimes, uh, you shouldn't, but like, to me, like there's always, in many cases for like big new ideas, like there's trade-offs, right? Marketing guy comes like, I'm so excited. I've got this great idea. Right. And they describe it and you go like, I love that idea, but here's how we can get close. Right. I think that's a different conversation than saying, no, we can't do that. Yeah. Yeah.

And I think that's really where that coalition or, you know, that team mentality really needs to happen. I mean, and unfortunately, I mean, it's still a lot of places, it's just still downstream, it's still extremely reactive. But that, and it's not just the technical piece, I think, you know, it's really about, okay, who are we trying to reach? You know, who's the ICP? You know, it's like, oh, well, sales is going to sell to, these easy wins, but they don't really meet this broader campaign. But, oh, we got to go hurry up and go do that because we need to reach whatever quota or whatever goals that we have in place. And it doesn't meet the other thing. And so, everybody gets all completely distracted because sales is saying, well, I need to reach my goals. Marketing's like, well, we've got these campaigns in the can. And then, you've got ops saying, well, what am I supposed to do?

Right?

Right. That's why it just needs to be jointly owned and without a doubt, without a doubt.

Well, and it's funny, I was just talking to somebody today, a marketer, and we were talking about how marketers have never actually gone through the customer experience of what happens when they say fill out a form, right? What is that gonna, like, what is the customer's experience gonna be like?

Oh yeah.

Isn't that crazy?

That's wild for me, especially as someone, you know, we've had to build, I mean, I've done, I've done migrations, I've done all that. I've seen bad data, I've seen bad email deliverability, I've seen spammy instances, I've seen all kinds of things. And that should not— there should be like a test. Yeah, there should be. I really think so. It's like, okay, if you feel like just a casual conversation, if you're joining a podcast, me for example, now what am I going to do with it?

Oh yeah, sure.

I'll take the transcript and I'll do all this cool stuff. Okay, then what?

Right? Right.

Then what? You know. Oh, I'm gonna put it on LinkedIn. Okay, then what?

Right?

What are you gonna do with it?

Right?

And how are you going to take advantage of that? And some of that is like operational. A lot of that is operational.

Yeah.

And you know who you know, and it just makes it makes a world of difference to have that that foundation. And I you know, like I said, you know, I've been. Part of like bigger technical migrations and building from scratch. I've been in instances where, you know, there are no campaigns in place, yet they want results. You know, I mean, like, you know, it's just, it's enough to want to stick a fork in your eye, but being able to articulate, especially from the operational side, how that is just so crucial.

Yeah. Yeah, totally agree. So, Okay. Switching gears a little bit, especially given your kind of what you're doing now with advisory kind of stuff.

Sure.

One of the things you said to me when we talked was that assumptions about growth can be risky without a clear picture of like what the data process technology tools are and what, like, what the implications are there. So, but can you unpack that a little bit for us? Sure. Absolutely.

And I've seen this play out over and over again, and it's such a big trap, right? And so when a company or part is— when you're scaling, there's always this constant pressure to show results very quickly. And then someone comes to you with a shiny new simple thing, shiny new, yeah, simple, right? Process change, Or you hear about, I've got this idea and it's going to solve all our problems. There's this temptation to want to believe that that growth trajectory is going to be extremely straightforward and in one direction.

Yeah.

And when we make those assumptions without that solid foundation of Understanding the discovery piece, you know, if you don't audit, you know, your data, if you don't document what you've got for workflows, and I'm, you know, I'm putting on my ops hat for a second. You know, if you don't map out how that stack is actually connecting, not just on the go-to-market, like also with the product teams, any sales tech, you could, You could really just cause a lot of chaos. And I've been in situations where this belief where you could just layer on more campaigns and more and more and more. And if you double that, you're going to double your output and you're not, it doesn't work that way. And it's those assumptions that sometimes can create like a domino effect. So, you know, especially, you know, if your foundation is bad, the data will get messier if you're building just more and more on top of that. The reporting gets, you know, you lose the trust. You start, people start pointing fingers at each other. Leadership doesn't believe you. And then that easy, shiny new thing, that fix, becomes that drag that everybody else is trying to accomplish this when everybody's just trying to fix And so getting sucked into that ad hoc, siloed mode of being reactive, just what it does is it fixes yesterday's problem, but it doesn't serve what you're supposed to do in 6 months from now or the opportunity that might present itself later.

Yeah.

I think that payoff is really critical, you know? And sometimes it's just, you have to, there's a pill to swallow right now in order to make it better later. And that foundation work is not exciting, you know? It is not exciting. And, but it's better than having a broken team and bad feelings and a lot of churn for the customers. That's it.

It's interesting because I think there's this paradox that people don't realize is there, and you hinted at it, which is the easiest example is, say you have a team and you double the size, right? You think, well, we can double the output. Yeah. The reality is there's inefficiencies that happen when you get more people involved.

That's right.

And the same can be true if you've got, I don't want to even say siloed, but it could still be teams that try to work together, but where you have different people doing different things apart. across part of a process, say developing a piece of content, right? That requires a, you know, there's some teams that are doing copywriting, there's creative, you're putting it together, you're getting it posted to the website. Like one of the things I often see is that, hey, we want to pump up how much content we're going to publish. And especially now with AI, I suspect that's really an expectation.

Yeah.

What I find is The thing that causes problems is the underlying lack of trust between these teams, which then leads to layers of review and approval that tends to then put things in this loop of not— so this idea that you could do more is like, it's not like, yes, you could do more and you probably get some incremental improvements by putting pressure on the same team or even adding a person or something like that.

Yeah.

But if you don't fix the underlying trust issue, expectation of review and approval, um, that somebody, like, it's never going to, it's never going to go to the multiple that you think it is because, well, first off, it never will because it's just not realistic. But second, like, if you don't solve that, and I see that cause problems with teams all the time.

Yeah. Yeah. And it's a lack of clarity from a leadership point of view too. Right. I mean, I think some of that's clarity. not just from the team point of view, like, leadership needs to own that, that trust, I think. You know, I mean, it's not just my job to just— I mean, sure, I should trust my ops team. I should trust the creative team, project management, whoever. Of course, of course, right? But if leadership is up here and sales is saying something else, or if, you know, engineers, something, you know, I have no control over that, right?

Right.

And so, And so you could be the best marketer, best collaborator, best team member, most knowledgeable of everything. But if there's no trust, it doesn't matter. It just doesn't matter. And that trust takes time. And I think that's where like there's that disconnect. You know, trust has to beat speed. You know, it always does because it takes a long time to build that trust and it only takes a little bit to just break it in half.

Yeah. But you have to have that trust to, To be able to get as much as you can out of that increase, right?

Yeah.

Um, but the flip side of that is also important, which is like, you may have the initial trust, but there needs to be, um, you could pick the right word, right? Forgiveness, grace, whatever.

Yeah.

And the other side of it. And advocacy, you know, because, because there are mistakes, mistakes will be made.

Of course.

Of course. Uh, and it's a matter of. not treating those as like, so if you go to this one kind of to some degree, right, extreme where you trust people to do the right thing and a mistake is made and you just say, oh, damn it, we need to go to the other extreme.

Yeah.

You're not really solving the problem long-term. You're just going to cause more problems, different kinds of problems.

Right, right. And you know, there, there, I've been in this situation. I'm sure you have too, where, you know, from a marketing point of view, I was actually just talking to a gal who's a chief digital marketing officer. Officer, a new role for her. And she was talking to me about, oh, how the sales team are making like marketing recommendations on their search marketing programs. It's like, what? Nobody should be doing that. They should trust you're doing whatever you're doing, right? They should just trust that. Nobody should be doing that. And I've been there. It's like, I can do my job. Let's go over here. And really look at it from a full picture, you know? So rather than just saying, oh, it's marketing's fault, this sale, you know, no, it's not qualified, or, well, you're not closing, you know, that's like, you know, it doesn't—

It spirals. That's a negative death spiral, right? Yeah.

Yeah. That is a spiral that we do not like.

My dogs don't like it. They're, they're adding theirs to this. Oh, good.

See? Yeah. We love dogs. If I could just have dogs on my team with Dog lovers, I'd be psyched.

Yeah. Okay. So, so you've kind of touched on this a bit as well too, right? There's a lot of teams that are doing highly manual processes or powering through things to get, get things done. You're being, I would say, heroic, right? This is more on the upside. So, you know, how would you, if you were coming into an organization, you started seeing this, like, what would your advice be to them? And maybe, say you got in one, like, what would be the signs you see that an organization is headed into that direction where they're relying too much on brute force?

Yeah, you know, brute force, you know, how many times have we seen that happen? It's like, we just need to get through this. You know, we just need to do this job.

I like brute force. This is why I played rugby instead of played something that required—

It depends. I, yes, you know, But when, okay, here it is. You can actually see some of these gaps right away. Just, you could call them red flags or whatever. If you're always in brute force mode, you're going to spend, it's not efficient, right?

Yeah.

Everybody's going to be spending more time wrestling with, with the systems or, or, you know, and when I say wrestling with the system, it's like, oh, I just don't know how to use HubSpot. No, it's like you're building stuff in spreadsheets.

You're—

you don't know if that's new or old. You don't know if, you know, if campaigns are being managed, like if you've got everything in spreadsheet, how can you tell if you're in trouble or not? How can you tell what the customer journey is like. How can you— and I'm not saying this is the case, you know, for an organization that's really, really small, and they're just trying to solve a problem and scale up to be more of a product-market fit. That's not what I'm saying. You know, I mean, sometimes you just need brute force just to get the money in the door. But when you're not sure, or where you can't see— when you can't see patterns, right? And even if you have hired the most brilliant folks in the world, You're going to lose momentum, and time is of the essence. And if you can't fix what you don't understand, that's the problem, right? And skipping that piece, for example, switching platforms because somebody doesn't like the notion of lead object versus contact object or whatever, It, you're gonna lose time. You're gonna lose time. You're not, you're gonna also lose that trust that we just spoke about, right?

Sure.

And you've got, you're not gonna be able to connect the data to the results or the output that you really want. You're going to have all this manual information, which is probably not even secure in the first place. Then you've got, you know, and you're, you're not building any resilience for future growth. And, and so instead of like serving your customer, really trying to grow that piece, which is what we're all about, you're juggling a gazillion different spreadsheets and, and, and answering questions like, like, how do I get this report? And that's not true. And, you know, I can't react, you know, my, my workflow and, you know, this lead came in, but I didn't get it. And You know, because it went to some email.

It's broken. It's spam.

You know, that just can't— you can't function that way, especially now. You know, I mean, the buying journey, you know, we— our buyers, you know, I'm a buyer, you're a buyer in different ways. We want our answers now. We're not waiting till some guy or some gal gets kind of our information and then does the research and puts my name in a spreadsheet and asks permission or whatever, you know.

No, I mean, the problem with brute force stuff, and I was only joking that I think I'm a fan of it.

Well, no, there's places for brute force.

I mean, no, no, I'm with you, right?

I'm changing, changing fields, you know, like, when you're making that decision consciously.

But I think what you're describing is when the default mode is brute force, um, what would it— because it— because the pressure to deliver more doesn't go away. Yeah. What ends up happening Brute force tends to also go with manual, which also means now you're putting a lot of people and you're— yeah, it leads to more mistakes is my experience.

A lot more for sure.

Because it's highly manual. You've got people who are trying to do too much too fast and it just leads to more mistakes. So I'm wondering though, then does that mean that There are reasonable times to take a pause if you recognize that this is starting to affect your team. And I think this is mostly for leaders out there. When you recognize your team is going through like their brute force, lots of manual stuff, and I'm not saying everything should be automated because I do not believe that.

I agree.

But when you're seeing that affecting your team and the quality of the work and the timeliness of the work and meeting commitments, does it make sense to go like, let's pause? Right. Kind of slow down.

Yes.

Try to get things in order. And then we can speed up after that, right? Once we—

Yeah, it's all about calm.

Yeah. Have you gone through anything like that before?

I have. I have. When I was at StreamSets, which is now part of IBM, there was this product called Transformers Snowflake. I mean, it's a data integration product, right? And they're doing some— you could transform your data within Snowflake. And it was like all of a sudden, 6 weeks, you know, 6 weeks. It wasn't just, 'cause Snowflake Summit was happening, so there's that event-led stuff. But then there was, we have to turn off all the campaigns, we have to build this out, we have to find the ASP, we gotta find all the stuff, you know, and all the state, you know, and we were brute forcing it. You know, there was no, we were brute forcing to the nth degree.

Yeah.

Because we had this event coming up, we were relying on our partner motions, we were relying on, also on product, Right. And we had this nice, great big idea of also like, oh, let's do a free trial with these guys too, right? So then we had to pull like the product data and part of, you know, part of the automation.

Right.

But you know what, because of that brute force, you know, we actually had to turn it off because the experience was hokey. But the, the, and this was a couple years ago now. So, but what we did learn, we learned something from that. What we learned was You know what, if we did that with that focus, we were just focusing on that campaign focus. Um, you know, can you hear my dog snoring? Forgive me. Uh, uh, with that focus, what we, you know, we learned—

That's just part of, part of, part of the charm of our podcast. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Thank you. Um, you know, the, it was like contract, you know, accounts were closing like 4 times faster because of that focus. And that's really, you know, it, you know, there's some other metrics around that, but that's, you know, where brute force can happen if you're doing it out of not just necessity, but, but then you have to say, okay, stop. How can we iterate from that? What, what did we learn from that that we can automate? What can we do as part of our, part of our campaign structure, you know, future planning, that sort of thing?

Yeah. I mean, I think, I think brute forcing something For a time-limited kind of thing, right? And one that you go into it going like, we don't anticipate that we're going to repeat this on any kind of regular basis. Right. I think that's when it makes sense. Yeah. So, yeah. Um, and I'm all for that. I'm all for that as opposed to going out and buying some new tool. Right. Which is a pretty big change. Right. That's the—

Yeah.

Um, so that leads me to another question. And so. I think you've mostly been in, at least in a marketing role, like high-growth, constrained resources environments. So one of the challenges with those probably is prioritization and making sure that you're effectively communicating across functions. So what are some lessons you've learned from that? And then my second one, and this, because I think There's people like me who have less of that experience and more larger organizations. How well do you think some of those lessons would scale to those larger organizations?

Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, okay, we can't do everything, you know, and I think that the idea of growth at all costs is outdated at this point, right? There's, to a point, to a point, Good point, right? You know, so this hits home because, you know, that scrappy, high-growth environment where you have to, you have to know how, what, who, where, when, all that, and what resources you have, you can learn a lot of those extremely hard truths really, really fast, you know?

Sure.

And so, and so this is, you know, where prioritization, of course, we just talked about that. But the biggest learning recently is even more recent than anything is like, because we can't boil the ocean, map out— an example. Here's an example of data. You've got web metrics, you've got campaign metrics, ad spend, all these things. Rather than saying, okay, this is how many website visits we've had and how many conversions we had. Like, okay, instead of that, tell me the percentage of our ICP that did that. Tell me, that's what I want. Just focus on that ICP, focus on who you're trying to reach. And so that language of just ICP or target accounts or becomes The focus. Instead of saying, oh, look at our traffic, you know, tripled last month. And it's like, well, yeah, because we were all at, you know, this event. How many of those? I don't care. I want to know what the ICP is doing. So, that's one way to focus that is really, I think, critical and everybody can get on board with, right? Sales would love it.

Sure.

Leadership would love it. Execs would love it. So, rather than talking about all those vanity metrics about, oh, hey, look at all the people on LinkedIn, And they're like, yeah, sure, but how many of those are target accounts, right? Also, that cross-functional collaboration, right? So, you know, we talked about silos a little bit, but, you know, embedding those other functions, like, within the process. So, if you're going to have a customer success motion, like, you know, if they're sharing feedback, have that part of that function, right? So, it's not just It's not just, okay, marketing's doing this, and ops is doing this, and sales is doing this, or whatever. It's essentially forcing that regular engagement within the team, you know, and making everyone understand how their role connects with the final output, which is revenue, you know?

Right.

And I think that's, those are the 2 big things. So, we talked, you know, we talked a little bit about the data, but also just the team. It's like, okay, here's where we're focusing. So, if you're going to talk to me about random acts of marketing, Because this webinar would be awesome.

Random acts of marketing. I love it.

Yeah, that's— yeah, my former VP of marketing used to say that. It's like, nope, we're not doing that. It's a random act of marketing, not on plan. You know, it's not meeting our ICP. It's a nice to have. We're not doing that. And it's not like being draconian about it. It's about focus.

Yeah. Yeah. It's so just for ops folks out there, like my rule of thumb in terms of prioritization, like if there's a A problem with lead flow, that's generally where I'd like, I give that highest priority, right? Even if that means bumping a longer-term strategic project.

Sure. Same.

Um, cause I want, I don't want to be the one, particularly if it's hand raisers, right? People who—

Right. Yeah. That's always mission critical. And also, you know, if you're, if your campaign, you know, if you have an email problem, mission critical. Yeah. I know.

Oh, like a deliverability reputation and that kind of, yeah, absolutely.

Yeah.

And that's becoming, from my recent experience, it feels like that's becoming more common to have issues with that, with all the changes with like what Google's doing and Microsoft's doing and everybody else, all the major email providers. Yeah. Yeah. So I want to go back to this collaboration piece because I think one of the, one of the things that breaks down is terminology, communication.

Oh yeah.

How do you, how do you, like, how do you, like, it feels like there needs to be a part of that is making, this is kind of getting back in the mutual understanding piece, right? How do you make sure that you're, when you're saying things, the other person's nodding their head that they actually have the same thing in their head, or at least close to what you were meaning and vice versa.

And, you know, this is so underestimated. Like, I, I don't even, so underestimated, you know, even like naming conventions for folders, right? even campaign naming conventions, that notion, that glossary, it's like one of the first things I've always done manually. It's like, and while you're talking, you're onboarding with teams and what have you, it's like, okay, and your qualified lead is, and how do you know it scores? That vocabulary, and everybody needs to speak the same language. So when they see a campaign, Naming, they know which campaign that is, who the target is, and all that stuff. They should be able to see that. They should know that. That's part of the efficiency. Nobody needs a gazillion death by Slack cuts. No more. No more. Here's the documentation. We all agreed on it too. That's the other piece, right? It's like they agreed. And that's part of that SLA.

Yeah.

Agreement, like that internal agreement. It's like, okay, this is how we're defining a lead. A qualified lead is this type of account, this type of, you know, firmametric, technographic, what have you. And then it's like, okay, here are the customers we want to grow. This is why they fit these criteria. I mean, it should be front and center for the entire team, not just—

Yeah.

you know, the marketers and sales, but, you know, ops kind of owns that in a way, you know, not even just owns it, but is the keeper, is the gatekeeper of that. And I am, I'm a firm believer of that.

You know, I even go like up a level.

Oh yeah. Oh sure.

Like, I don't mean up a level in organization. I mean, up a level in terms of the thought process is that, so as you were talking about, you use the words campaign, you use the word lead. And I think, I think their assumptions, you know, there's the whole trope assumptions. Oh yeah. Yeah. Uh, I think they, they actually cause problems, right? Because people assume you said campaign. Uh, and I go, oh, well, you mean a campaign record in Salesforce or in—

right. Right.

Or what you meant was, uh, there's this broader campaign that includes, we're going to do digital media. We're going to do stuff on our website. We're going to send email, like all of these things, right?

Oh yeah.

Well, those are very different things. And I see that very often where we got this campaign or what's going on with this campaign or, you know, leads is another one, right? There's a lead record in Salesforce. Is it a qualified lead? Is it somebody who's a returning prospect?

Like, right.

All these terms, right, require clarity because it leads to misunderstandings.

Yes. Yes. And it makes reporting really hard. It makes telling the story really hard. It makes everything extremely difficult. And so I used the word draconian earlier. I am completely draconian about this stuff, you know, because, because there's— I don't want any surprises. You know, if we talk about marketing qualified accounts, what does that mean?

Yeah.

What does that mean? It could mean anything, you know.

So that if you pull a report out of Salesforce and—

I hear all marketing qualified accounts.

You get the same numbers, right?

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And, you know, and, and if there are questions, you know, it's documented somewhere.

Right.

You know, there's a, there's a wiki, there's a document, whatever. This is what a marketing qualified account is. Here's a link to what that list is. Here are the, you know, and And that communication, I mean, it's just, that can really save not just time, but a lot of frustration and—

Absolutely.

And bad feelings, you know? So, we don't want that. We don't want that. And it's not just like, you know, tough fun. I mean, I think it's organizationally imperative, you know? I mean, the product team should understand what a product qualified account is.

Right.

You know, we don't know.

You know, I actually don't even care what the terms are they use as long as there's a shared understanding.

Shared understanding.

Now, I have strong opinions about what some of those should be defined as.

Sure.

I'm not like— I'm like, I'm willing to be flexible. Yeah. Within reason.

Yeah. And, you know, instead of every meeting also becoming this debate of the translation of what this term means versus what that metric means, whatever. You're not talking about that anymore. We've already, you know, it's defined, done. Let's talk about, you know, how are we going to tighten the sales cycle? How are we going to position ourselves? Why are we not renewing? You know, those are more important for growth than trying to make a magic definition of something that somebody thinks is important, you know?

Right. Couldn't agree more.

Yeah.

Okay. So let's wrap up here. So I think, I feel like we have to end every episode with something about AI, or at least have it as part of it.

Right.

So how do you see AI fitting into all this dynamic, you know, especially for marketers and ops pros? What are they, what do you, what are you seeing out there? What do you, would you tell them to watch out for?

Yeah. I mean, it is a force multiplier for not just for ops teams, but for everybody. And, um, You know, I've seen it handle some pretty awesome stuff. I, you know, okay, I think where we need to be careful in a couple areas is obviously privacy.

Yeah.

You know, that's a given, but also the data quality. You know, is it as good? You know, if we are feeding data into something and we have that layer like HubSpot has, and you can just type in whatever it is that you want to find out. Is that accurate? Is there some sort of ghost in the machine that's just whipping up something random that thinks that based on your history is returning something that you want to hear? And there's also that, and you touched on this earlier, this temptation of automating everything, right?

Right.

And getting so caught up on the tech and so caught up on that automation piece that we're losing sight of what the customer journey is like, what that human element is like. You know, what it comes down to is really, you know, we're all— everybody's in business to build relationships and, you know, and make some You know, that's how a lot of businesses are built. Just fair enough. But, you know, where you're going to lose that relationship piece or that humanity piece and some of that nuance is also going to be lost, like some of your expertise, you know, your experiences, how you, you know, that strategic thinking. Please.

Sure.

You know, you know, how are you? But how are you connecting the dots in addition to the AI?

Sure.

It's a lot of potential. But I think that seduction of AI guy solving everything is a bit hairy. Yeah.

Awesome. Yeah. I think there's still a lot to, like, it's just evolving every day. Yeah, it is.

And there's so much potential. You know, when I was first playing Play, I was like, holy cow, what is happening here? This is all this stuff of, well, because it normalized the playing field, right? In a way, like, of go-to-market entirely, you know? It's not just ops folks, it's also marketers. It's also, you know, and, and so opportunities like that are really, really cool. You know, they, they really, really are. But you also got to think about automating everything. Yeah.

Yeah. Well, I've enjoyed the conversation, Monica. I really appreciate it. If, if the, if, if our listeners, followers want to follow your work or get in touch, what's the best way they can do that?

Uh, just find me on LinkedIn. That's the best place. That's the most active place. That's where we all hang out. So Monica Wright, it's all one word. That's my, my little URL. So.

Got it. Perfect. All right. Well, as always, uh, well, and also thank you for being a part of our 200th episode. I mean, that's like—

Oh yes, I know.

Yay.

I should have worn like 200 glasses.

Yeah. Yeah. Maybe I should have since, you know, I've been a part of most of them. You know, I can do that for you. Well, again, thank you so much, Monica. It's been great. It's been a fun conversation. Thanks to our listeners and supporters. As always, we are, uh, would love your feedback. Uh, if you have any of that, please let us know. And if you have ideas for topics or guests or want to be a guest, you can always reach out to Naomi, Mike, or me, and we'd be happy to talk to you about that. Till next time. Bye everybody.