Following Your Passions to Marketing Operations with Ahmad Moore

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 and welcome to another episode of OpsCast brought to you by marketingops.com, powered by all the MoPros out here, out there. I'm your host, Michael Hartman, back again, joined by my co-host, Namie Liu. Hey, Namie.

Hello.

It's been a while.

Oh, it's been a little. I know it has been. I'm glad we got this to sync up and work.

I am always happy to have you on these calls. So—

I like to hear that.

Yeah, well, people must get tired of hearing my voice, so they need to hear other voices. Anyway, so joining us today to talk about his career trajectory and how following his passion shaped his career is Ahmad Moore. Ahmad is the founder of Pressure Marketing, a marketing operations/automation agency. He has over 10 years of experience in marketing operations, and he specializes in aligning sales and marketing teams through strategic automation, process optimization, and powerful tech integrations. Prior to founding his agency, he held multiple leadership and line roles in marketing automation and operations. He also has experience in sales and business development in multiple organizations, and he started his career in an IT help desk role. So, Ahmad, thanks for joining us today.

Thanks, Michael. I'm happy to be here. Hey, Naomi, how you doing?

I'm good. How are you?

Doing great. Thanks. Thanks for having me.

Good. And we're scattered all across the continent here. So, well, let's get this started. Ahmad, like, I wanted to say that your path to marketing operations is unusual, which it is, but it seems to be more the norm than the exception for many people we've talked to. So, yeah, let's walk through your career, and I would love for you to share along the way the lessons you learned at kind of each of the different stops and how it helped you kind of get to where you are today. But let's think, like, one of the things that's unusual is that you started in an IT help desk role. So, What were, like, what were some of the things you did on a regular basis then, or lessons that you learned then that you apply today, or have applied along the way throughout different parts of your career? And I know we might hit some of those as we get into it later in the discussion.

Yeah, yeah, I definitely agree that it's— you can call it a different trajectory, but it does seem to be more common and common as I hear people who are in ops now. But funny enough, starting at the— starting at the IT help desk role, I tell people marketing ops is just IT with better branding. And you may or may not agree with that definition, but sometimes that's the easiest answer to give to explain to someone what we do in marketing ops. So, when I was on the IT help desk, I was kind of like the guy making sure systems talked to each other and users had what they needed and things didn't break in the middle of a launch. So, if anything, any of those things sound familiar, that is very, I think, common to what we do in our marketing operations roles. So, I think what the IT help desk roles did is give me a really good foundation for the way databases work. I did a lot of data hygiene, but really it gave me 2 superpowers, I like to say, right? So, it gave me one, it gave me a 6th sense for messy data, right? So, I can smell dirty CRM fields through a Zoom screen, right? When I see dirty data, I know it pretty quickly. And the second superpower it kind of gave me was what I like to call like an empathy engine, right? So, and what that means is I learned How to listen deeply and translate what looks like a heap of mess or chaos into solutions and how to do that quickly. So, those 2 things.

Empathy engine. I hadn't heard that one. I like that.

Yeah, it definitely gave me an empathy engine because you have to listen deeply, right? You have to listen to what's really being said versus what's being said. You have to read between the lines, if you will, right? Sometimes what people try to explain is the issue ends up not really being the root of the issue. So, having a little bit of empathy and listening there is definitely something that still applies to what I learned at the help desk.

Yeah. I was smiling because, Naomi, I think you've told us that you've described to your family what you do as IT for marketing. Is that—

Yeah, IT for marketing. That's kind of— that literally is the closest, or even just anybody, right? It's not just family, it's also friends. And people that you just, you know, come across and they're like, what do you do? And, you know, what is marketing operations? IT for marketing. But, you know, I have always said that I don't necessarily like the word marketing in marketing operations sometimes because it tends to pigeonhole us a bit, especially as you get more I guess, deep within an organization, a lot of the things that you end up doing are not just for marketing either, right? They may be tangentially related, right? Revenue-driving goals. But sometimes you can also do a lot of stuff for, you know, the HR team, the finance team, employee onboarding, IT security notifications, legal, you know, like all of those back office functions as well. Sales, right? All those back office functions as well. So, on one hand, yes, I would say IT for marketing is a bit easier for people who are not in the space to kind of digest and understand that it is more of a technical role than marketing, traditional marketing. But I do think sometimes it does pigeonhole us a little bit.

Yeah, I would agree.

Yeah, I think that's a great way to put it. Yeah, I think it's more for the IT for marketing or the way I said, just IT with better branding. Just, it's a much easier explanation for someone who's not in it.

I like that. I'm going to steal that. I'm going to start using that now. I'm IT for the whole company with better branding.

Yeah. Yeah, that's funny. That's great.

Just a quick point for what you said, Naomi, too, is like, I just recall being on the help desk and I'd get tickets like an email isn't syncing, right? Or this list isn't pulling right. And you mentioned not liking the marketing Sort of tagline on there because it's so much more than that. So, when I got those tickets that I would have to handle, I'd dig in and I'd realize that it's really not just a tech issue or a marketing issue or, you know, an issue as they described it, but it was actually maybe a process breakdown, right? So, this kind of trained me to see kind of beyond what the symptom is and really fix what the root issue is. So, when it comes to— Being defined as marketing operations. It really goes way beyond that, right? So, the help desk, it kind of forced me to speak in more of a— also more in human language than jargon because there are enough, you know, buzzwords in marketing ops that we can use all day long. But I think a skill that every MOPS pro needs when you're sitting between sales and marketing and IT and success and all the different departments is being able to Speak human, if you will, right outside of jargon.

So the translator.

Yep, exactly.

Yeah. No, I think, I think, uh, one of the things that you said that you did, you, you really leaned into is the, like, listening and listening closely. And I think a lot of people don't do that, uh, or discount the importance of that. And I'm curious, um, knowing what little I know about sales, because your, your next stop then was in account management at an agency, right?

Yeah.

Big change. So I'd love to like, like, what's the driver behind that? But I'm curious, like all the best salespeople I've dealt with are actually really good. They do 2 things really well. They listen really well and they ask really good questions. And so I'm kind of like, is that something that you think you took from your help desk role and that those things you talked about empathy engine and listening and took that and applied that to the account management role?

Absolutely. Yeah, I always— I like to say I went from fixing tech to fixing people, right? But no, but honestly, honestly, I wanted to— I think this transition was because I wanted to understand the business side, right? I wanted to understand strategy. I wanted to understand clients. I wanted to understand the outcomes that they were looking for. And What I quickly realized is that even in all that, in all that desire to me wanting to figure that out, I kind of missed getting my hands dirty a little bit as well. So, what I mean by that is I was the account manager that, like, couldn't stop checking the backend of the email platform, right? I was the strategist who wanted to go into the code or the HTML or the JSON and see what was going on. So, yeah, I think that itch to— to be behind the screen or the help desk with a more technical person really never went away. But what the job moving into that more client-facing role at the agencies, what it gave me was a front row seat to how clients think, right? And how to translate the marketing objectives into some of those more like actionable outcome-driven actions, right? So, because it taught me to navigate That ambiguity and sharpen my ability to kind of like reverse engineer the outcomes that were needed. And it was coming from a place where I'm thinking of the mindset of what the client— how the client is thinking or how they're approaching it. The client may not be thinking of some of the steps that are involved in getting to that outcome, but I'm listening to them and I know the results that they want to get. So, I'm coming with a few different perspectives now that I've had the agency client-facing portion of it, but I still really enjoy, um, sort of, you know, getting into the backend and understanding what's going on as well. So I learned both of those things from, from that.

So you're able to like take some of your, like that listening and, and stuff and be able to go like understand what the client was actually asking for regardless of what words they were using. Right. And then translate it into, this is how you Practically, tactically can deliver on those or guide them in a different way. Is that kind of what you're talking about?

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. It allowed me to be able to, I guess, simplify the conversation without getting too technical, if you will, the part that I liked, but also understanding that the client wanted to understand how to resolve or come to a certain outcome. But without bogging them down with the technical side that a lot of people would say, that's too much for me. That doesn't excite me. That's not boring. How do we get to the end result? Right? So, how do you deal with a client? How do you speak to the client differently? How do you come from their perspective while still getting the technical things done and translating that in a way that they can step by step clearly see how this is going to happen?

That makes sense. Yeah. So you were missing some of the hands-on though, you said, but then your next role or set of roles actually, I guess, were in more like BDR sales and sales management leadership type roles, um, and including at startups. I'm just, now I'm curious, like what led you down that path, right? It seems like a step away from that hands-on kind of stuff.

Um, yeah, yeah. All right, so, so I definitely, I definitely took the scenic route. Um, the— and the reason that came about and how that came about was working with a, uh, working with a startup. Um, and I was working with this startup very early on. I think I was employee like 2 or 3 or something like that, and they, they grew. But as you know, or as, um, some people know, when you're, you're either starting a startup or working with a startup, you can definitely wear a lot of different hats regardless of what your title is. You kind of step into whatever needs to be done, whatever needs to get accomplished to continue to build and grow the company. So, when I took this role, I understood that that was going to be part of what we did in the startup. So, I got to sell things. Sure, that was great. Yeah. I also got to build the processes from scratch. I got to optimize CRMs from a new instance, right, from scratch. I got to connect marketing revenue, like, in real time. So, when— I think when you're on the front lines talking to customers daily, what you do is you stop theorizing what works and you start knowing what works. Right? So, I got addicted to kind of watching how pipelines actually form, right?

Yeah.

And that experience has me— got me obsessed with alignment because when marketing begins, you know, when marketing is in a place where they're handing off junk to sales, then, you know, sales suffer. So, it's that tension right there that became sort of my playground and now really has become sort of the mission behind the agency is like that sales and marketing alignment or that sales and marketing and success alignment that crosses departmental alignment. I've seen so much misalignment in those roles that I've really just become focused and honed in on what are the best ways that we can get these teams aligned on the same page, having those meetings that sometimes want to be canceled, but I think I feel are necessary to have for that communication. Aside from the technical integrations and connections, also sort of those soft skills in talking to the sales operation Sure. So, yeah, so getting into those roles, the question being like, how did it— how did that come about? Or how was that— how was that play into where I— how I see things now? It had a lot to do with the alignment and a lot to do with building out processes from a hands-off perspective. But again, That technical side of me was still there, so I still had that in the back of my mind.

So, on the surface, it sounds like you were still stepping away from kind of an operations-type role, but in practicality, it was something different. Just, I'm curious, some of what you just described, right? I love the idea of getting direct feedback from customers. I encourage anybody who's listening in an ops role, spend time with your sales team, try to listen in on calls, that kind of stuff. I think it's really, really valuable. But, you know, it sounds like you also had to deal with probably some challenging conversations with other teams, right? Like, did you, did you think your experience dealing with, you know, in the help desk role or others where you had, like, you're probably dealing with people who were upset or frustrated or feeling under pressure, right? And they weren't maybe at their best, like, but you had to deal with. those kinds of conversations in a professional way, right? Did that come in handy as you started getting into these roles where you're interacting with other teams that maybe had— maybe didn't— weren't aligned on the same page? And how did that come about? Like, how did you apply that?

Yeah, that definitely was a big part of learning to think a little bit differently or take a different approach when coming from a marketing ops perspective, the sales roles definitely stick out, the client-facing roles stick out. And I'll just bring up the sales roles that I had specifically because I did have the opportunity to kind of build a sales team from scratch, but then also be that salesperson that was at trade shows, that was selling, that was talking to people directly. And I think most marketing folks, they never— they don't carry a quota, so to speak, right? And that shows. And what I mean by that is that I approach ops like a revenue operator and not so much a campaign builder, right? If it doesn't shorten the sales cycle, if it doesn't speed up lead flow, if it doesn't improve attribution, then it's noise, right? And that's kind of what sales taught me. It taught me to measure marketing not by activity but by impact. And at the end of the day, when you're holding a quota and you're a salesperson and all you're thinking about is what impact it's going to make and what impact did it make on the revenue. Because when you're in sales, nobody really cares how pretty the email was, right? They want to care if the deal closed, right? And that lens taught me to kind of see beyond the dashboards and keep my focus on whether or not it moved revenue and did it make an impact on revenue and I hear a lot. I think the question might have been asked in the community, in the Marketing Ops Pros community in Slack this week, was about do we see the marketing ops roles being swallowed or integrated up into the RevOps roles? And to a certain extent, I do see that and it does make sense to me and that is my perspective. A lot of times, I'm coming from a revenue impact perspective. So, yeah, I mean, I think that's what those roles taught me or put me in the mindset of now that I come— I'm still in marketing ops. I still, you know, run an agency that is marketing ops, but we're very focused on revenue and the way we approach that. We're very focused on impact.

Yeah.

That's interesting. I mean, have you— do you— I mean, now I know your role has expanded, right? You have other stuff. Has that helped you? Like, how do you handle those kinds of conversations with other businesses or other teams?

I think that, and I kind of want to touch, go back to something that you had said earlier about having responsibility in the BDR and sales piece, right? I think a lot of the challenges that I've dealt with in my career have come about with lack of awareness around what, like, the teams actually even do, right? And so, I think when you can educate and provide context, right, because a lot of stuff is about context too, provide context around, like, what the team is actually doing, how is it helping you, what are the things, like you had mentioned, Ahmad, around, is it shortening the sales cycle? Is it, you know, adding to attribution? I think those are all things that help with that. dialogue and that engagement around, you know, this is what the operations team does, and this is how we help you. And, you know, we're here to help you, not hinder you. Although sometimes, I think, when I write sternly worded emails to people about, do you know GDPR and Castle? You can't actually do that. That sometimes can be a bit of a challenge too.

Naomi, I can't imagine that coming from you.

Sternly worded email. I do think that alignment between, you know, a lot of people talk about alignment between sales and marketing, right? But it's not until you actively manage an inside sales or a BDR team, which I am currently doing now for 2+ years, that you really, you know, are aligning yourself with sales and really Have the ability to see and peek under the hood as to what are their challenges? Where what are the things that are really helping them to move the needle? And what are the things, especially when someone can only make, for example, X number of calls in a day, and there's more than X number of leads that are coming in. How do you help them to prioritize that? Right. And then that's when the operation side really kicks in because then you're really analyzing the data and seeing like okay for every. X number of leads that come in from the source, they're creating this many opportunities. So this is what they should be really focused on and giving them. So they're not just, you know, going through a call list, dialing for dollars, right? They're really focusing on being strategic on what they can do and everything else can be sent into a nurture or an email follow-up or whatever, right? Especially if they're very heavily commission-based. Yeah.

I think that's— No, I mean, I think, I think that like understanding the incentives that drive behavior for a lot of these people.

Yeah.

Is really valuable. And if you don't understand that, I think a lot of people who are listening might go like, but my sales team is a pain to work with, right? They're just, they're lazy or whatever. But I would tell them like, if you haven't been in those shoes and understand like, they're like, how they get compensated makes a big difference on how they behave. And you mentioned the commission, right? I've worked with sales teams, some that were on commission and some that weren't. Right. And the— yeah, Naomi's head tips like, what? Yeah, I was the same way. Like, what? They don't have commission? Um, uh, anyway, but it like, but it was like, it was eye-opening for me. Like I, 'cause I had been approaching that the team, this is a good example. Like the team that I found out after the fact that I was trying to get their behavior to change. And I assumed that they were commission-based. I was like, this is going to help you make more money, basically is what I was like. I was trying to find ways to get them to change their behavior based on that. When I found out, like, but they were, I was, I felt like I was hitting my head against the wall. And then when I, when I finally asked someone like, how are they compensated? And realized they weren't, that wasn't the motivator for them. Like it didn't really matter. It's like, oh, I need to change my tactic on how I'm approaching them. Right. And so, right. It's, it was really fascinating.

Right. Yeah. And especially if, you know, if you are trying to make effective calls, right, you want to do a ton of research to be able to— you don't just want to pick up the phone and not be able to answer basic, even basic band questions, for example, right? Like, you want to be able to understand the business and what— where are their potential challenges and what vertical they serve. And so a lot of that And just understanding, like, A, that takes up time. Two, how do we then enrich that information to get it to these people before they even make that call? You know, there's small things like that that I wouldn't necessarily— there's other examples, but there's small things that I wouldn't necessarily have encountered or thought about in advance and proactively, like, done until I started managing a BDR team and then realizing, okay, how do I shorten The amount of like research and busywork they have to do so that they can pick up the phone and make an effective call and be confident going into it, knowing that they know who to talk to and that they know objection handling. How do they bypass like pricing questions? You know, all of this, all of that stuff.

Yeah. Yeah. In addition, just in addition to that, Naomi, it's like, and that's so important to know To actually experience, right? And to actually, like you said, you're managing a BDR team right now. And I had that experience as well, being a BDR, leading a BDR team, building a sales team, having that experience to know what the incentives and what's driving them. Like you said, Michael, is so important as well. And to see how that's set up, but it also ties in directly in like what we, what we also do currently is like the structure and the architecture of how everything is set up based on the way they're selling or based on what their incentives are, because I've worked on projects where that wasn't fully understood, right? That sales process wasn't fully understood how it happened. And they, you know, the client or, you know, the person I was working with wanted something built out. And without really understanding the sales process and even questioning if this is the right process or the way to build it, you can begin building and then get yourself tangled up. And you have this whole process that you've now built out on the backend, which really doesn't match to the next steps or whatever that exit criteria is to move into the next deal stage. And now, you have to go back and double back on your work and redo things. So, I've become very, very adamant about having those discovery calls or having those alignment meetings before we get into the backend and really start fixing or building out from scratch or putting— You know, putting that architecture together to make sure that things flow correctly. And as soon as you were talking, Naomi, that kind of came to my mind because I was like, yes, I deal with that often. I understand now this may be what they think they want, but based on the sales process and the steps and the deal stages and the journeys that you have in place, we now need to architect this a certain way.

So, yeah.

Yeah, knowing both sides of it is very important.

Well, I think it helps you, I go back to this all the time, right? It helps you understand, is it right or wrong to do something or not? It's like, what are the trade-offs between different alternatives? Because very, very unusually in life are there very clear, like, this is the right thing to do, right? And when you get into complex organizations, That quickly becomes a choice about trade-offs. And so, I think that comes into play with technology or process or whatever. So, okay, so you were at these startups, you were kind of playing a number of roles, and then you pivoted or kind of came back into marketing automation, marketing operations roles. Like, what was the driver behind that?

Yeah, like I mentioned, even in the roles that I kind of fell into because, you know, of wearing different hats, being at the startups and them not being necessarily intentional moves, those were just moves that, hey, things need to get done. We're building something here. That's where, you know, we need to wear these different hats. Let's just do it. That, like I said, that itch never left to where I was like, I was always wanting to be in the backend and seeing how things were built and seeing, you know, what was going on. So, it's like, have you ever walked into a room and then instantly started fixing it, right? That's kind of like how I felt when, or how I feel currently when I see a broken tech stack, right? I find myself volunteering. When I find myself volunteering to clean up, like, lead routing logic at 10 PM, Or, you know, doing something that where I—

Waking up in the middle of the night worrying about, did that email go to the right people, right, Naomi?

Exactly, exactly. Or picking up a project and saying, hey, I'll just do this, you know, I'll just do this for fun. You know, I got some time this weekend, I can work on that. You know, I knew then that, that's, you know, marketing ops was where I wanted to be. And it wasn't just something that I felt I was good at. I felt it was something that I needed to do, right? This is what I enjoy to do. I like to do this. I need to do this. And it's the clarity in knowing what I wanted to do that really made every career move or every step after that much more intentional and much more clear for me because I knew what I wanted to do. So, every step had a little bit more purpose in it. Like, I knew that I wanted to be in this type of role. I knew what I wanted to fix. And I realized that I got more satisfaction from optimizing workflows than closing deals, right? That was clear for me. I didn't want to manage the process. I wanted to master it, right? I wanted to be a process master. What's the best process? How can we make this process better? How can we improve efficiency here? And that's what drove me. And that's what I thought about constantly. And that's what I knew that I had a passion to do. So that's really when I realized like martech, marketing ops, this is kind of the zone I want to be in. This is the flow I want to be in. How can I grow from here? And from that point on, it made it clear on which direction I was headed.

Yeah. But I'm sure there was a lot of pressure. Like you had moved into kind of sales, sales leadership that like, that's where you would continue to go. Like, did you feel a lot of pressure to to go through that? Or how did you— like, it feels like there's a little bit of tension, right? The sort of easy path might have been to continue to pursue sales and sales leadership versus taking a kind of a big step in a different direction. Like, how did you go through that thought process?

That one, that was— that's a great question because that was— it was a really hard one for me to deal with in terms of like taking Taking your traditional, like, typical career path and saying, hey, I'm going to go— this is the next step and this is the next step. So, I think for a while I tried to chase that, but I stopped chasing that at one point, right? I stopped chasing titles. And what I started really to chase was more of mastery, right? Meaning every time I zigged instead of zagged, right, I picked up a new layer or a new skill. From the sales role to the marketing role to the ops roles to strategy roles. And I think it's that cross-functional view is what makes me dangerous now, right? It's like my journey has been like a mixtape versus a resume, right? My journey has been all over the place. A mixtape.

Half our listeners have no idea what you're talking about.

Showing my age. But I'm just, you know, Um, I should have said playlists or something like that, but, but, but it's really—

Mixtapes are better because it like took effort to make a mixtape. Come on.

Oh yeah.

Oh yeah.

Um, but it was a hard— it was a— to answer your question, it wasn't an easy— it wasn't an easy path. I think it was one where I tried on roles that traditionally didn't fit, right? Um, but at the same time, I feel like That was the best education that I could get. And I wasn't necessarily climbing the ladder, so to speak, but I was kind of crafting my own way or my own path. And it was definitely uncomfortable. It wasn't a place where I think you learn to get into those uncomfortable places and be okay with that. You learn to stay curious because staying curious is what's going to help you to, you know, to learn. I think you get comfortable with those MOOPs, you know, moments, the Marketing Ops Oops Moments, which I love that channel in the Marketing Ops Slack community because people come and share their mistakes. And it's not that I like to see people making mistakes. It's just that I like to see that, you know, you made that mistake or someone made that mistake. That means you're growing. That means you're learning. That means the next time you come and have to deal with the same issue, you have a reference of a mistake that you may have made that you don't want to make again. But now, you have a different way to approach it or you know to avoid this. And those are some nuances that I think you can't— that just comes with experience, right?

Yeah.

That just comes with bumping your head. That just comes with taking chances and being okay with failing fast, if you will, and learning. So, while it was difficult and while it wasn't your typical career path, I'm looking back now, I'm happy that I did take a chance and take those roles that I wasn't comfortable with, with the startups, with the sales, with the IT help desk, and then finally finding, you know, where, if you want to call it my sweet spot or where my passion is.

Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense. I suspect that getting to that I just tell people, like, one of the most difficult times in life is when you are facing a decision about something. Or maybe a better example is like when you're trying to make a decision about something that feels unnatural, or you're waiting for, say, a test result from a doctor or something, right? And then like that time in between realizing you have to make that decision and then making this decision is probably the hardest part. To me, whenever I've gotten to like making the decision, So, in your case, right, making a decision like, I really want to shift my focus from my career to be ops, you know, probably made it easier once you made the decision, right? But it was probably not— it was agonizing up until that point.

Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Agonizing for sure up until that point, right? To your point, it's not for— you have to have some thick skin sometimes, right? Because you have to be able to hear, you know, you have to be able to get through those, um, those feelings where you may doubt yourself, right? Or you may think, is this the right— is this the right path that I'm taking? Or, um, I'm just not gonna get this, I'm just not gonna learn this. So, you have to— you have to keep going. You have to keep on trying things. You have to stay curious. And, um, you know, I'll mention this also because, um, my daughter just graduated from Penn State, so I have to shout out my daughter.

All right.

Um, and she— she got her degree, and I did not get my— my college degree, right? I did go to college, but, um, One thing I know about, you know, having a college degree, that it'll definitely open up doors for you, right? But it's the results that keep those doors open, right? And I learned that you can still learn if you don't have your college degree, because what I did is I started to lean into certifications. I started leaning into heavily self-education. I started leaning into, most importantly, execution. So, I went ahead and I did get a project management certification from Stanford that was for, you know, agile methodology, being a Scrum Master. And that really gave me a lot of structure in terms of how to run a project, how to do things from a very organized and structured way. And you get that from your degree, but I think my real education came from Having to build a system under pressure, right? Or having to learn something on the fly or, you know, making that mistake but taking the attitude of, hey, I'm never going to make this mistake again because I have to prove myself. So, I was always in like prove-it mode, if you will. And I think that mindset helped me because I couldn't hide behind credentials. I couldn't hide behind that. I had to deliver and I had to deliver consistently. So, it helped a lot.

Yeah. Sounds like you turned it into a motivational kind of element for you as opposed to something that could be seen as like a lot of people might go like, oh, I just like, I guess I'm screwed, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. And I'm not— by all means, like I said, I bragged on my daughter a little bit, like, get your degree. You know, if you have that opportunity, go ahead, get the college. I'm not knocking that. But if you, for whatever the case may be, if you don't or you can't or whatever the case, Don't let that limit you. Like, continue to, you know, continue to know that you can self-educate, you can get certifications, you can hone in on what you want to do and, you know, become a master of that by learning, especially nowadays. There's so many other avenues that you can take to get to that place of, you know, mastery in whatever field it is you want to be in.

Totally, totally agree. I'm curious, did that change your view about how you Like what you did in terms of requirements for hiring people. I know, I don't know, Naomi, if you've done this, but like, I don't know, 5, 5+ years ago when I started posting jobs to hire people, I, you know, the default would be requires a college degree. I started striking that or at least modifying like college degree or equivalent experience or something to that effect because I felt like it was, you know, leaving people out who maybe due to whatever, right, circumstances, whatever. You know, do you think that that's become less of an issue or do you still feel like some of that's holding you? And I'm curious to know if you've changed your hiring process for that.

I mean, I have, I guess I have 2 comments about that. Like some of the brightest and most talented and smartest people I've ever worked with, not people that have reported to me, but just people that I've worked with as colleagues in organizations have not had college degrees, right? They've just been people that have been extremely talented and interested in the things that they are good at and enjoy, and have just really doubled down deep into that. In terms of being able to hire for roles on my team, at this moment right now, what is even a headcount, to be honest?

Yeah.

Right? But it's definitely something I think that Going forward, it would be something that I would not necessarily, like you mentioned, take as big of a stock into because I think a lot of it depends on the individual and their ability and potential experience. And it's not necessarily something that I would put as much weight into at the moment. Mm-hmm.

Ahmad, what's your thought on that?

Yeah, I think I have 2. 2 ways of looking at that. The first thing is I don't think the way that I've started to hire has changed in terms of do I still put degree desired on the job description or certain skills that would be ideal. Maybe I tweaked a little bit. You know, I don't get too specific into changing that job description, but it's absolutely changed my view and my perspective on whether you have that or not. Because I think someone who has that drive and that motivation, even if they don't have that degree, is still going to— apply for that position and then try to make their case with the experience that they have or what have you. And I know I've done that personally, and I say that coming from a personal place. It's like I've gotten discouraged a lot of times when I've seen a minimum bachelor degree needed in X, Y, and Z.

Yeah.

Um, and I would let that in the beginning turn me away immediately, right? Until I got to a point one time where I was just like, you know what, I have the experience, I have the skill set, I know it says bachelor degree required. I'm still going to put my resume in and apply for this. And I would say more times than not, I ended up getting the interview and I ended up getting the position and the role based on proving to them that I had the experience, that I had the knowledge, that I didn't necessarily take the traditional way. Just being upfront with them, you know, this is— I don't have the bachelor degree that you say, but I have 5 years experience in this. I have a certification in HubSpot. I have certification in Marketo, this and that. And that, you know, that results-driven attitude really helped. And so, going back to my first point, the reason why I said I haven't really changed the job description, so to speak, is I think someone who has that drive and who has that motivation will drive past that, seeing that job description. So, I'm not going to water down my description, but the ones that want to make it through, my mindset is they're going to see that job description.

Yeah.

They're gonna push for this anyway. They're gonna have that drive and they're gonna say yes. So, yeah, so I definitely, I guess my mindset is different in terms of I will take every candidate, whether they have that full description. And I see this as a disclaimer sometimes a lot on roles being put out there now. Like, they'll have a little blurb that says, hey, even if you don't have all the skills that you, you know, you think still apply. So, I'm kind of right there. That's me. I would have that blurb on there.

Gotcha.

So we're getting kind of— let's wrap up here. So I know that you founded your agency. I think if I understand right, like part of that, the driver for that was a recent layoff. So you were laid off from a company and that led to that.

Yeah.

Curious, like what led you to do that? And then kind of what are some of the big things you're seeing in the marketplace now, maybe across technology, AI, whatever, and then we can wrap up.

Okay. Yeah, for sure. Um, yeah, recently laid off. Um, you know, I think that was the push that I didn't know I needed, right? The layoff stung. Layoffs always sting. But, but the freedom that you get from it, that, that definitely hits differently. Um, so what I'm seeing right now is like a major, you know, a major, uh, HubSpot wave, if you will. Um, and this may just be from my own perspective because when I first started the agency, I was so like deep and heavy into Marketo that my thinking was, hey, we're going to start this agency and the majority of work we're going to have is probably Marketo work. But what I'm seeing is that like mid-market companies, they want enterprise automation and they don't want that enterprise bloat. So that's kind of where our sweet spot is. Like I'm building the agency that I wish I had when I was in-house, right? So a faster, more strategic, built for results. And I'm just seeing more and more clients on board wanting to use HubSpot for that. Not a knock on Marketo at all. I still love Marketo. There's so much you can do in it. But I think there's a huge gap for agencies that can understand both strategy and systems. And clients, I think, want a partner who can make, make their revenue engine a lot smoother, faster, smarter. And I think they can do that and scale that with HubSpot. So, that's kind of what the layoff did for me. It kind of pushed me into, hey, let's— we have to make this happen at this point, right? Let's go ahead. Because the agency I had, you know, done the formation of it about a year and a half ago, but I would say it's only been about 6 months since we've really been onboarding clients at a steady rate. So, I think the second part to your question is like, what are some of the tech shifts and things that are happening right now? That I'm excited about? Well, obviously AI, right? AI to me is like the new intern, you know, cheap, fast, and needs a lot of oversight, if you will. But seriously, I'm using AI to the point where it's really changing the way we work from content operations to campaign QA, things like that. Like, what excites me so much about AI is The strategic heartbeat of go-to-market, I think. The folks who master the tools, the data, who master orchestration, they're about to become the most valuable players in the room. And we're automating everything except critical thinking, right? And that's where MOPS is going to thrive, right? The more machines handle the repeatable, tasks, the more we get to lead strategy and understand strategy and build different skills that we can now focus on because we're not bogged down with these other sort of repeatable things that we can have AI do for us. So, yeah.

Yeah, I'm bullish on all that as well. Ahmad, this has been a fun conversation. Thanks for sharing. You know, I think we touched on some stuff that maybe a lot of people wouldn't be comfortable talking about. So I appreciate that, your transparency, and that if folks want to learn more about you or what you've got going on, what's the best way for them to do that?

Oh yeah, you can connect with me on LinkedIn, Ahmad J. Moore, or you can head over to pressuremarketing.com. You can check out the website and the services. And then of course, I'm a MOPS Pro community member. So if you're on the MOPS Pro community and you need to find your footing, believe me, I've been there. So we can connect there as well. I think that community is how we all win. So, we'd love to connect with whoever wants to connect.

Terrific. Well, again, thank you, Ahmad, for sharing. Naomi, as always, thank you for being a part of this. I always enjoy it. Thank you.

Thank you for having me.

Yeah.

Thanks, Michael. Thanks, Naomi.

Thanks to all of our audience for continuing to support us. As always, if you have suggestions for guests or topics or want to be a guest, reach out to Naomi, Mike, or me, and we'd be happy to chat with you about it. Till next time, bye, everybody.

Bye, everyone.

Bye.