From Marketing Ops to GTM Strategy: Breaking the Execution Ceiling with Jackson Fisher

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 everyone, welcome to another episode of OpsCast brought to you by marketingops.com, powered by all the MoPros out there.

I am your host, Michael Hartman.

Today, I'm going to be talking about what happens when marketing ops professionals hit a ceiling or the ceiling and what it takes to move beyond execution into broader go-to-market strategy. So joining me is my guest is Jackson Fisher, who recently completed 10 years at the American Hospital Association, most recently acting as manager of product development. Jackson was an early member of the marketingops.com community, one of the founding 100. That's a big deal. And began his career in marketing operations before pivoting into a more strategic role inside product development. So in the episode, we're going to be talking about translating marketing ops skills into business impact, speaking the language of revenue, and preparing for a broader go-to-market future. Jackson, welcome to the show.

Thank you.

Thank you.

I'm excited to be here.

Yeah, it's certainly like, when did we last talk? It was a few months ago, right?

So Yeah, probably about like 2 months ago, I believe it was right around the, uh, right around the new year.

Yeah. Okay. Um, well, good. I'm glad we can make this work. Uh, we're now into 2026. Let's, um, like, let's, I'd like to start this way anyway, but let's walk through your career path. So, you know, you were one of the early members of the community, which actually does make you stand out, um, in a lot of ways. But, um, but you went from marketing ops into product development. So, What led you to that pivot? Was there some sort of decision point? What was the catalyst for that maybe?

Yeah, sure. As you already kind of alluded to there, I've always felt like a really deep connection to marketing operations. So there wasn't an easy choice to decide to pivot away from the field to pursue other opportunities. But kind of coming back to the journey itself, about 10 years ago, I joined the American Hospital Association as a part-time hire actually. My manager was going out on maternity I believe. And I was a contract guy who was there for a few months to help out and do some coverage. Was able to parlay that into a full-time opportunity. And then full-time opportunity eventually grew into a promotion within the marketing operations team. And I have nothing but great things to say about the team that I worked with there. My manager, I love, I still keep in contact with her. It was an excellent place to really get that exposure to marketing operations. We use Marketo at the AHA. And yeah, I mean, really just kind of dived into it, you know, with as much enthusiasm as I could. I was able to attend the Marketo Summit back before it got absorbed by Adobe, turned into the Adobe Summit. So I was able to attend that a few times and really just expand as much as I could, you know, the usage of our Marketo instance too, and just, you know, try and find a lot of the utilization opportunities that we were maybe not actualizing. And a lot of that eventually kind of grew into not just like utilizing the platform, but also reporting, man. I created way too many reports. I have like thousands of reports. I've just, you know, anything I was curious about, I pulled a lot of reporting on to generate some analysis. But doing all that, it caught the eyes of, you know, my manager at the time. But then also we, after 5 years or so at the AHA, we brought in a new director of product development and caught their eye as well too. So that led to some conversations with the product development team and eventually led to me being the first person to join that product development team, you know, through the ability to kind of stay close to marketing operations, but kind of pursue some different things. And really what was like the trigger for the decision was just trying to pursue growth opportunities. I guess I'm an ambitious guy. I wanted to do more than just the scope of work that I was doing. And that's through no way dismissive of the team that I was on. It's simply that there wasn't enough growth opportunities really kind of being made available at that current time and place. And I wanted to try and do something different and I wanted to take more ownership. That was a One real challenge that we had was that it was hard to be granted additional ownership at that place unless you were a manager or a product owner of some sort. So that was really a kind of a big driving influence as well too, is trying to get out of that comfort zone of stuff I could do really well and move into a place where I had the opportunity to do something different, but really take more ownership of it. Product development in particular, I thought was like a good place to take that risk because there's a lot of overlap with an approach to, you know, marketing automation. Because at the end of the day, it's a lot of building. You think about and conceptualize and execute the building differently, but at the end of the day, you know, it's a transferable skill. So I thought, you know, if I'm gonna take a bet on something, I'm gonna take a bet on myself here trying it along this avenue where I know I can stay close to certain things that are gonna serve me well.

Yeah, I think if Mike was here, he'd be smiling because he likes to talk about marketing ops should be treated like a product, right?

Absolutely.

Function as a product.

Absolutely.

So it makes sense there's a lot of overlap. I find it interesting how so many people sort of, if, I mean, it sounds like yours was a little more intentional, but you sort of fell into marketing ops, right? And led to Wendell. A little bit. Yeah. That's interesting.

Well, and I guess, Go ahead. And, you know, just to kind of expand on that really quickly, um, I was eager to jump into it as well too, because in my previous role, I was at a little startup, uh, you know, marketing company that worked with like a lot of CBS radio stations to get their email lists. And then it was just spam emails more or less. And it was not using an automation platform. So, I mean, we had to design all the emails in-house. We had to, you know, kind of build our own servers and push everything out through there, control the bandwidth internally. Um, there was like a Google, like, document that we still had access to years later after leaving the company. They were using it for project management. It really was low fidelity. So then when you get that opportunity to use a best-in-class tool, it's something I was salivating to do. So there was definitely some intention there where it's like, oh, I can move into doing something like this. Absolutely. That would be something I'm eager to do. And before getting started on Marketo, I actually was looking for a way to gain that marketing automation knowledge and going through the HubSpot Academy to get, you know, a HubSpot certification, which was free before I ended up getting that Marketo experience.

Oh, that's crazy. Yeah. Um, yeah, back in the early days of, early-ish days of HubSpot. I bet it's changed a lot since you first started that.

Oh my God. Big time.

Yeah. So, so one of the, I think you used when we talked before that, um, the way you described it to me is that when you, you're in that marketing ops path and you hinted at this a little bit, you felt like you hit a ceiling, right?

Yep.

Can you maybe expand a little bit about like what that felt like, looked like for you? And was there any particular thing you said, like, was it a general feeling that said, hey, it's time to go beyond marketing ops and execution? Or was there some other sort of evaluation you did to think through that?

Yeah, absolutely. It was both of those things. So starting with the latter and kind of like the evaluating of the situation, there was a couple key things there. One of them was that I, as I mentioned a couple minutes ago, have a ton of respect for my former boss. So she was manager at the time. She's now the director of marketing operations. She's great at her job. She does really good work. She's nurtured a great team and she's not going anywhere. So that always was a little bit of a limitation that was in place and that I knew that I wasn't going to in any way make an effort to try and undercut her for And foremost. But then additionally, just, you know, that limits the ceiling that's there, that, you know, kind of brings down the ceiling even through no fault of anyone. I mean, she's great at her job, but that inherently presents a challenge where there's not an opportunity for growth because the next point is that we had a flat headcount forever. It was the entire time I was on the team. We had a contractor for, I think, 6 months to help with a migration. And that was it. After I left the team, they didn't replace me. So it always was a really flat headcount on that team. So that was something that I was kind of studying and trying to separate myself from where I knew that I had a really strong internal advocate who was like pushing for me to try and get a promotion and trying to get these other opportunities. But also we knew that our team was not getting that investment to grow. So like that in turn would mean like, okay, I can't really manage anyone on a team this small when, like, you know, my boss was only managing 3 people total, um, you know, despite the fact that we were a really successful team, um, really consistent results. But, you know, we never got that investment to grow. So it was sort of like a twofold thing there where it was looking at the fact that, all right, our team is performing at a really high level. Um, and, and to justify that, we were hitting all of our sales goals and everything. I'm not just saying that.

Sure.

Yeah, but it's like, so we were doing that, but we were never getting that investment to grow. So that, in addition to seeing that the vertical path was a little bit stunted, and then the other thing I was talking about before, where was that limitation on ownership and the ability to kind of take more control of certain things or influence certain things. All that kind of came together where it was like, all right, this just feels like the time where it's like, I really love the team I'm on. I really like the work that I'm doing, but it's not giving me those additional opportunities. And I don't think the institution is going to give those opportunities either. So it's kind of like, you know, when you're measuring an opportunity cost, and that was a big thing where it's like, all right, I'm gonna take advantage of this opportunity that I do see now because, you know, it's worth the potential risk that comes alongside it.

Yeah.

And the payoff was absolutely there where it's like, you know, moving to that new team allowed me to continue to do a lot of really good marketing operations work, but expand the scope of all the other work I was able to do, people I was working with, so on and so forth.

Okay. Yeah. That's interesting. I think, I suspect there's gonna be a lot of people who resonate with the idea that they feel like there's a ceiling to what they could do, whether it's because, you know, someone above them is content and not looking to move or because there's not growth in general for the organization. And it's really hard when it's a place that you like, right?

Absolutely.

And it's, then the only way to get that, if you If that's an important goal for yours, is to look outside. And it's bad for the organization too, right? Because they lose a lot of institutional knowledge and all that.

Sure.

So, okay, so then you moved into product development. Maybe talk a little bit about how that happened. That would be probably good. But from what I remember when we talked before, you said that that role was a broader one. There's a little bit of operations, a little bit of a consult, like internal consultant, Chief of staff, like those are some of the words that I remember you using. So how do you describe that role and how do you think that your ops, marketing ops background helped you kind of ramp up and become productive in that new role?

Yeah, and the really, really short version of how that transition kind of took place was that the project that led to it was I had a lot of research done that was looking at our Salesforce numbers alongside our Marketo numbers. And in particular, it was looking at all the consultants in our database and I saw an addressable market there. That recently hired product development director also saw consultants as an addressable market. So we just happened to have the same idea from very different perspectives. That was our first conversation that we had. More conversations along that matter, bringing in more reporting and more of these different things that I had squirreled away in my sandbox, but now found, you know, a willing ear in. Um, so bringing all these out, and then that's really what kind of like informed the transition. I was very upfront with my manager, um, too about, you know, my ambition to grow and do more. So she kind of saw this coming as well too.

Yeah.

So we found a way to really kind of massage the situation where I don't want to leave my team high and dry. So I stayed involved with them for a little while to help ease that transition. But yeah, I mean, being really upfront and transparent about expectations and about just what I'm trying to do and where can we make this happen that still benefits everyone within our commercial team. Yeah. And then, yeah, so then that eventually led to the creation of the role, which then, like I've said before, allowed me to be that first person to join that product development team. So coming back to your question though about like, you know, how would I describe that work and that transition and doing everything, you know, consulting, chief of staff, all that fun stuff. I actually think the most like accurate one-word description would be a conduit. And I think that very much resonates with a lot of people who are in marketing operations because, you know, you're just serving as that intermediary and you're connecting so many different teams and your platforms, your processes. You know, there's a lot of things that go through you and More often than not, marketing operations teams can be pretty small. If you're fortunate to work at like, you know, a Fortune 50 company and you got, you know, a much larger team, different story. But most of the war stories you hear from people in MOPS is, you know, it's a mighty team of 1, team of 2 or 3. And that means that you have to do quite a bit and you have to serve as that intermediary and, you know, again, that conduit to make things happen. Not only do people come to you with requests, they also expect you to, you know, to find the throughput and make it happen. So I think, you know, with a lot of the that goes into marketing operations. And in our case, you know, we had handled 2 instance migrations, a couple of rebrands. We had a really, really old legacy Salesforce instance that had tons of custom fields. So just, you know, doing some field cleanups between CRMs, all that stuff, you know, you get familiar with a lot of different touchpoints. You learn a lot about why the heck does this exist? What is this? When was this created? You know, so you start to really see a lot of like business cases come up in a lot of different places. Again, you get familiar with working with a lot of different teams, MOPSs, the touchpoint In a well-instituted place, you're familiar with a lot of different stakeholders. So being really mindful of that, again, I think prepares you in a really beneficial way. So I think a lot of that played a big part in it. And then I think it also is a chance to interpret a lot of information and then use it to tell a story as well. I think MOPS, you do a lot of that. You have to absorb a lot of information. You have to decipher God knows what. But then you have to take that and translate all that technical speak into something that is memorable. And creating memorable and effective stories is a huge part of that product development work. And I think, again, there's a lot of taking that technical hands-on knowledge and then broadening the scope of how you think and apply all that, that parlays really well into doing product development work.

Yeah. So This is maybe just, I want to make sure I'm on the same page. When you say product development, in my head, I think, you know, define the strat— I guess it depends on what kind of product, like, so I'll put it in the terms of like a software product, right? You have use cases or functional capabilities of it, and you've got a roadmap for how you're going to do it, when it's going to send it to release schedules, prioritization. Yeah. But Generally not a huge amount of involvement, maybe in smaller ones, um, with go-to-market execution, maybe some input on strategy, but really you leave it up to the marketing and sales to do a lot of the heavy lifting and campaigns. Like, how involved were you in your product development role in like the go-to-market activities?

Yeah, sure. Um, so we had a unique setup because, I mean, our team was was small. Um, so in, in doing that, and, you know, the fact that I was kind of brought onto that product team because of my marketing operations knowledge, I served as like the in-house, um, product marketing manager and, you know, the go-to-market guy as well too. So, as we were given, you know, our product development was on the commercial side of the American Hospital Association. So it's a not-for-profit. People don't really think about us as a business.

Right.

Um, but we worked in the for-profit portion of the business that did a lot of B2B sales, um, in terms of what was originally an endorsement model business, and we, you know, would do like RFPs for all that stuff, and then, you know, long-term relationships with different clients endorsing their services and solutions. Pivoted to a broader B2B product, but our product development work was in creating marketplace solutions for them, sponsorship products for them. So a lot of things that were either experiential or in terms of creating, you know, kind of like rearranging our digital products to find a unique niche, you know, around like webinars or lead gen that didn't cannibalize the existing products. We didn't threaten our existing sales, but trying to find opportunities to create new custom programming where marketing operations was a big part of making sure that, you know, the audience outreach and all the stuff on the backend that made the product experience happen was done in the most effective way possible. And one particular example of that is we had a, that B2B product I mentioned. So that was called the Associate Program. We were very intentional about building a lot of that product within Salesforce. So our sales team was giving us all the information we needed in real time rather than doing all the retroactive correction of like, okay, we sold this, but we're missing a ton of information here. And now we have to try and backfill all this. Let's build this, you know, this contract and the product itself and a lot of the operational stuff. Let's build all this in the front end, so to speak, for the sales team so that we're getting this as they're writing the contracts and as they're working through these opportunities rather than trying to like retroactively bring in these elements. So, you know, our product development was a little bit unique in that You know, we created some webinar series products. We had one really successful product that was a live event as part of our conferences. So we put on, you know, an informational showcase that we developed from, you know, a to-do and request from leadership saying, hey, we need ways to solve our sponsorship problems. We're losing sponsorships. We need a new sponsorship product and we need something that is going to give these guys more tangible value. So that is not a marketing operations challenge initially. But then what made it work really well was how we brought marketing ops into the product development work.

So the reason I asked that question, because it sounded like that was the case. So, because in my head I was thinking product management instead of product development. I don't know that they're necessarily the same, but that is distinct from product marketing. But it sounds like you wear hats, kind of both hats in your role, and maybe even a more significant role because of the size and everything else in the actual, like how you're going to go to market. So it makes me think that, you know, one of the other sort of benefits of having the background you did in marketing ops and understanding the data is that you knew kind of probably, you know, uh, what, what data we had that we could trust in to make decisions and then how we could move quickly, right? Because you—

Absolutely.

Right. And so, because I think a lot of people listening or watching will go, probably will resonate with the idea that, Sometimes you get requests that people, like, it's clear they don't really know what's possible or what's actually going to take a lot of time versus what can be done quickly and then get into a defensive posture, right? Yeah.

And I think exactly to that point, that's something I was kind of jotting down some thoughts before our conversation. There's kind of 2 schools of thought that I really got out of those 10 years of experience. And the first was like doing kind of like maps thinking, quote unquote. And it's a little bit binary. It's very technical and If we can do X through an accommodation of Y, we can make this happen. If that particular criteria isn't met, then it's going to require a lot of subsequent stuff. And is that in scope and is that worth it? And there's a lot of ways to kind of get bogged down and shoot down an idea before it's really given time to find its actual value or find the appropriate footing. That other school of thought is kind of that more product development thinking. And it allows you to sort of change that scope and that rationale and let's boil it down to just the essential jobs to be done and what's this optimal path that we're pursuing? Can we do the ideal best case scenario that has no issues whatsoever? No, probably not. But you can find the portion of it that actually is doable. And then what can we do really well there? You can scale that down to what do we need for a minimum viable product to take something to market and just start collecting insights? And then again, you can look for those key jobs to be done. And then that's where, again, I think you can kind of revisit that conversation with the marketing operations team and be like, look, we know that there's an issue with the API sync between platform 1 and 2, But here's what we're actually trying to do. Can you help me solve this problem that is platform agnostic? Like if you had to face this issue, how would you solve it?

Yeah.

And I think that really kind of, you know, allows you to bridge that gap. And it does require a change in thinking. It took me a little while to have that change in thinking, but it, you know, to the point you mentioned before about Mike and, you know, kind of treating marketing ops like product development, I think that was a huge beneficial change of perspective that I took away from that experience.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it all makes sense. So a couple of things that you also talked about, I don't remember whether it's you learned it along the way or it's something you kind of inherently did, but you talked about putting in, I guess, 2 things. One, putting in some structure and discipline around pipeline and structure and predictability of that. And then You mentioned storytelling about like revenue and like speaking the language of finance and executives. They seem to go hand in hand to me. That's why I'm kind of tying this together. But—

Sure. Absolutely.

So how did you, how did you go, like, how did that evolution for you happen? Was it sort of, it just happened, you didn't realize it, it was like down the road, or were you sort of consciously making decisions, like thinking about how do I, how do I better You know, provide predictability for the executives, plus speak their language.

Yeah. So I think a lot of this came again from my little kind of mad scientist laboratory where I was just running all sorts of different reports and trying to see what we could measure. And a recurring thing I kind of came back to was taking some insights to product owners and finding where there were a lot of common pain points, regardless of if it's our webinar products or lead gen products, which I were closest to at the time. And then eventually in the product development role with the products I had more direct ownership over, forming a, not like coalition, but coalition for lack of a better term, of people that are facing very similar issues and bringing then that, talking about that with others where it's like, oh, I discussed this with so-and-so and they're facing that problem. Let's talk about this a little bit more. It sounds like there's something here. So doing a lot of those measurements and then using that to kind of find that unifying story In addition to that, that then informed a lot of like the sales operation suggestions that we made. So, kind of talking about just measuring pipeline, we had to measure opportunities first. Our opportunities were, dude, they were, I'm not kidding, they were crazy. Everything closed. It was like a 95% win rate and everything closed within like 48 hours.

Yeah.

So like you can't build—

No, we just know that story.

Yeah. So it's like, I mean, you can't build a pipeline with that. It's impossible. You can't get foresight there. You don't get any transparency into your losses. It's survivorship bias, putting it politely. So that was something that we really had to tackle was kind of changing these practices that, I mean, in defense of our sales team, they were stretched extremely thin and they may not have always been given a clear justification of why we need these broader insights. So it was kind of like, you just do a lot of listening, you do a listening tour, and you just kind of absorb a lot of what the these challenges are, and you try to find some of those unifying things and you bring it back to pipeline. So another big thing we were trying to do, so obviously, you know, the opportunities, you can't create a pipeline with that. The other thing you can't create a pipeline with is just, uh, the fact that, you know, renewals weren't being appropriately tracked either. So it was like we had a product that was on a 12-month contract. So it's kind of hard to, you know, keep—

Membership contract.

Exactly. Yeah, exactly, exactly. And, you know, without an auto renewal, it's hard to keep track of every single one of those when, you know, that's not the sole product our sales team was supporting.

Right.

Supporting the entire product suite.

The renewal period for each, each contract was unique.

Exactly. Exactly. And so that led to challenges on the fact that we did an audit of the renewals and we saw that, you know, only like 40 to 60% of the accounts had an opportunity created at the time of the audit. Um, so that's something that we did where we were like, okay, you know what? This is something we can solve. This is something where we can really own it because our test case here was our product that we own. So we're not gonna step on anyone else's toes, but this is a big issue that if we find a solve for this, And this goes to that product development ethos where it's like, we're putting our time and effort into solving this because this isn't a one-off solution. We see a lot of value here where if we get this figured out appropriately, this scales to other products. And then that across the entire business unit allows us to improve that pipeline visibility, get some actual pipeline in place. Because then the other thing we did in addition to eventually implementing that auto renewal on the opportunity was that audit that we did going through all the different accounts. We saw the 40%, 60%, all that fun stuff. There was no probabilities either. So again, trying to create a— trying to— yeah, exactly.

That's smart.

Exactly.

Exactly.

Yeah. So, you know, you can't create a pipeline there either where it's like we could maybe be forecasting for, you know, like 6 figures over the next 2 months, or it could maybe be, you know, like 15 grand, but we really don't know because probabilities are kind of useless. So that was an idea.

I struggle with the probability piece unless you have a really disciplined way of doing it because Because at the end of the day, right, the, you either, it's either a 0% or 100% at the end, right? Sure. Um, so anything in between, you've gotta have some trust in the fact that there's discipline about knowing like, when do you go from 0 to 25 or 25, 50 and so on, whatever your, your levels are.

So.

Yeah.

And that's something we really tried to do by, you know, this wasn't just, you know, a one and done conversation. We checked in with the sales team for a couple months to figure out the best way to kind of put that in place and did it just like you were saying. We're going to keep it extremely simple, like 25, 50, 75, 90, keep it extremely simple. We're going to limit the choices. We're going to try and really understand what makes this happen. But yeah, I mean, again, to the point about trying to create something we can forecast, we need better inputs if we're trying to get better outputs. And this helps you guys as well too when you're trying to focus on various accounts that maybe have more long-term value than others. Are you prioritizing them appropriately? Are Or do we want to kind of leave money on the table?

Yeah, it's interesting because as soon as you said that, I feel like I've been through that same scenario where you see like, oh, time to close on opportunities is a time period that doesn't make sense for the type of product or service or whatever you're selling. I mean, I don't know that I've seen 48 hours, but I saw one where they were 6-figure and up kind of deals and they were closing in 20 days, right? That doesn't make sense. And then what I found is that sort of gets just, no one pays attention to that as long as things are going well. Yeah, that's true. It's when it went, when, okay, we didn't meet a number last quarter and now the eyes are now on that pipeline. And then people are asking questions for, to be predictable, like what do we expect to close in the next quarter or the quarter after that? And when you can't answer that, then if you haven't been proactive about setting that discipline up ahead of time, you're in reaction mode at a point where people are feeling pressure already. And so it's not a recipe for like better insight into how your revenue engine's working.

Yeah. Or the only other condition it happens is when leadership changes and the priorities change. And then that's again, exactly to your point, you know, not always the most favorable conditions to, you know, to make those changes. Yeah.

So the right time to make— start looking at that is—

When things are going well.

When it's going well. Like, um, 'cause that's, it's so hard and it's what's interesting. So one of the things I think I found for me is having worked in sales for a very brief period of my career, I kind of have an idea of what the mentality is, but also being in organizations where like following leads all the way through to close, like understanding how that happens. And then recognizing patterns that seem out of place. I don't know that a ton of people in marketing ops either get that opportunity or pursue the, like, trying to understand that. And I think it's anytime you can better understand how the stuff you're working on fits into the grand scheme of the way the business operates, and in particular how the organization makes money, if it's a money, like a profit one or breaks even if it's a nonprofit, right? Whatever that is.

Nonprofits still got to make money too.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, so I know this because I'm married to someone who works for nonprofits and they definitely have to generate revenue, right?

Yep. Induced revenue.

Yeah. And it's not always through fundraising. I mean, although that's a very common one, but there are You know, other kinds of revenue they can make. So, but my point is like how that works and how do you track it? How do you predict it? Like that's all stuff that is really valuable. So I don't think we touched on this yet though. Like how, like did you feel like when you moved into that, into these roles that you were maybe like level of expertise or competence in the ability to speak the language of finance and C-levels? Like, did you feel like you were good? Did you feel like you had to improve? How did you improve? If you, what was that like?

Yeah, sure. I think that's a great question. So that's something that actually going back to talking about the, like the Marcato Summit back in the day, there, and there you had a blog for a while where it was like the CMO blog or something like that. I did like a lot of research and like, and tried to attend the courses where it was like, you know, beyond practitioner stuff, but really taking that strategic approach and speaking the, you know, the language of leadership. Which very often is that finance and revenue. So that's something I was kind of like intentional about researching when I was still like a specialist and didn't really have any ownership yet, but that kind of fueled my ambition to try and make that eventual move into something that did provide me that ownership. Then when the opportunity did come, it was about really trying to tie your work to outcomes and results. I think that in addition to dollars and cents is a really universal language, but one that's very applicable to leadership and finance. Is really talking about, all right, what was the impact or the outcome that happened through this execution? Why is that relevant to the business? And you talked about it a second ago, really kind of studying opportunities and what happens there. That was a big thing I did as well too, was like diving into the— Marketo has a report called the Opportunity Influence Analyzer, and then also like the Revenue Cycle Explorer, and just reverse engineering stuff and looking at what's happening and trying to, you know, kind of find what's going on there or where we're completely missing the mark. And it's like, hey, this guy created an opportunity and and then no one talked to them for like 2 months. Like, that's an oversight on our part. We gotta fix that.

Yeah. Yeah.

But again, that's marketing stuff. But at the end of the day where it's like, if you do build that correctionary program and then you actually do start to influence pipeline through the actions that you took place there, then that transcends marketing. You're like, hey, you know what? We built this execution and who cares about the open rate or the click rate? What it did do is it influenced like $600 grand in closed won opportunities because we started nurturing people. What it did do is that accelerated the pipeline where these people that were in purgatory for 90 days are now closing in 30 days. Like, those are real results. that matter to leadership that they remember too. They don't remember if like, oh man, our newsletter, we got like a 50% open rate this week. Isn't that awesome? They're gonna forget that in 2 days. But if you're able to talk about how you're accelerating the pipeline and if you're talking about how you're able to influence revenue, those are stories that really matter. And those are stories that help if you're just talking about those internally. Like, so that's something I'll say that I did that I thought was really effective is that I talked to my bosses a lot. I presented these ideas and I was like, hey, here's what I'm seeing, how legit are these numbers? Help me validate this. And then once we kind of got to an agreeing on like, these numbers are actually pretty legitimate, then that stuff they take to their bosses too. And you have people kind of advocating on your behalf in addition to continuously doing the work you're creating. Other people, they're talking about, oh, Jackson showed me some things. Oh, he showed me a different thing too. And it's like, that builds your credibility.

Yeah.

And if you're providing that credibility with the right story, with the stuff that's relevant to leadership and to finance, then I think that's the way that you can really kind of speak their language without like, I'm not a finance guy. Like, you know, if you put me, you know, take like a CPA exam, I would get laughed out of the room. Like, you know, I'm not a finance guy, but I know how to talk about the measurements within there that were really relevant to the goals of our business unit and to the goals of the association at large.

Yeah. So it's interesting. So one of the things like people in marketing ops probably tend to feel is like they're not seen as strategic partners and they want to be. Do you think that some of the things that you did in trying to adjust your language, bring up ideas, right? Digging into data a little more, being proactive about that. Do you think those are things that help set it up so that you would be seen as strategic where you could be seen as like an internal consultant as opposed to an order taker? Do you think, how much of an influence do you think that had?

Yeah, absolutely. I think you have to be willing to put yourself out there. And there was actually a previous episode you guys did not too long ago where someone was talking about their experience going through art school and going through art school means you're putting a lot of ideas out there and they're very open to being criticized and you take that criticism, then you apply it to your next execution. That really resonated with me. I also, I went to an art school for a little while to study advertising, got a degree from there. So, you know, when I heard that, I was like, man, I love that, dude. I thought of my photography classes, my design classes, classes, HTML, all the stuff that I did where I wasn't the best, but you're putting it out there and you're letting people give you that feedback. So I think that really is applicable in the sense where it is a way to just grow your mindset and kind of find these different opportunities and things to pursue. Let's see. And then, shoot, I lost my train of thought there. I'm sorry. Could you ask the other part of the question there? I lost my train of thought.

No, it's, I think Yeah, you answered it, which is really about like, what I want people to walk away from is like, there's an opportunity to make time to do things that are going to give you an opportunity to change the perception of you and the team. Well, that's then eventually then that changes how you are treated.

Yeah. And I totally agree with that too, because I think that's again where, you know, if you're doing research on the of, you know, you wanna fake it until you make it, I guess. But really, like, you know, in a very altruistic way where it's like, you know what, I genuinely believe in a lot of this stuff and I wanna push our team in this direction. I wanna push our organization in that direction. You just gotta pick and choose your battles. And I think that's kind of what I was getting at a little bit before too, is that you have to be prepared for certain ideas to just be dismissed and not, you know, be the ones that teams wanna pursue. But you just have to continuously be putting your ideas out there. And when you're doing that, you have to make sure that you're really helping to do it in a way that is gonna move things in the right direction. So know the people that you're you're working with, know what their problems are, know what they're trying to solve, what the goals they're trying to hit. And then when you bring these new ideas out there, really position it in that way. Think about the needs of the people that you're talking with, their goals, know your audience.

Yeah.

So much of it is just about knowing your audience and empathizing with that, and then framing it the right way through there so that when you are trying to build your own perception about the fact that, hey, I do mops right now, but I can do a lot more, you're doing a lot more, but in ways that people are going to remember that and then take that to their team as well too. Oh, Jackson helped my team Oh, Mike will help my team do this. Like, you know, they remember when you go out of your way to help them when they didn't ask you to do that. So, you know, being able to put yourself out there, being proactive, and yeah, I mean, just being persistent as well too. I mean, you really have to be persistent and willing to work with people. I heard, you know, you want to be something, a little idiom that I love is that, you know, you want to be a shopkeeper, you don't want to be a gatekeeper. So like when things go well, you want to share that knowledge and you want to share those successes with everybody. But, you know, you really want to be able to, you know, move things along together. Um, rather than, you know, kind of, they have these isolated victories that don't scale and can't be applicable and can't be, you know, talked about elsewhere. It's entirely proprietary to you and it's like, okay, that's great. But then when you're gone, none of that stuff you did, you know, is left behind.

Yeah, I think, I think it's really interesting that the point you made about how artists have to put themselves out there and know that they're, they're setting themselves up for criticism or feedback. And then to just keep trying. I think the other part that I would add to that is when you get that feedback is to— I've been accused of asking lots of questions, not just on the podcast, and it's because I genuinely, I think it offends some people to some degree because I keep asking because if I don't understand, I want to understand. I want to make sure I'm not misinterpreting what they're saying.

Yep.

Because very often there's There's nuggets of truth that are useful, right? And you want that feedback. And sometimes I think it's easy to slip into misunderstanding, you know—

Defensive positioning.

Intent that's not there, right? So I think it's all kinds of things. And like, I think the more, I like the idea of like putting yourself out there because because if you do that and you do it well and you listen, you take the feedback and you improve, right? You're going to get better feedback and you're going to improve. Like, it's not unlike exercising a muscle in some ways. It's a different kind of thing. You have to exercise or continue to get better. And it will, I think eventually it will change the perception of others of you. It may also change your own self-perception. Yeah.

I mean, and I think it helps you build credibility too. When, you know, again, when you're persistent about it and you're genuine, it helps build that credibility. And then people, There's a great little turn of phrase I learned the other day too, was, who are you and what do you do? Like, when people are answering that question, work towards your answer of that. Who are you and what do you do? And if people can really speak to that in the way that you've built up your perception to be, and you have the actions to fulfill that, you've done the work to fulfill that, it's, again, people seek you out, begin to seek you out for that. An example of that is like, at the American Hospital Association recently, the entire association migrated to Marcato and Salesforce. So it went from, I think, you know what, 2 business units using it to, I think we had to build 12 workspaces inside of there, maybe 13, add a couple unique sending IPs, all that fun stuff. But as that was happening, our team that was the legacy users, and people began seeking us out, seeking me out in particular, because they knew that we had a lot to offer there, a lot of experience, but also because myself and others on our team had put ourselves out there as the experts and people knew that it's like, hey, we're trying to get ahead of these things. What are your thoughts on this? How can I do that? Help me plan for the future. All that comes from building that credibility, putting yourself out there and being that storyteller as well too. And making sure that that story you're putting out there means something to people where they remember it and they come back to it for the right reasons, for the reasons that you told that story to begin with.

Yeah, I think it's totally true.

And actually real quickly before you ask that, you mentioned you ask a lot of questions. When I was a kid, I was given the What If Award at summer camp because I I love hypothetical scenarios and building for that. So I feel you on that one.

Yeah. Well, yeah, what if is unique, like a specific one says, my most common one, it probably starts with something like, when you said X, did you mean Y? Or kind of paraphrase it because I just, especially in this space, I think people throw around words and assume everyone will It has the same understanding of what it means. And what I found is that is a bad assumption.

Oh yeah. Yeah. Every platform has its own specific lingo.

Yeah.

You can't make any assumptions there. So absolutely, you know, finding that clearest, most distilled message where you're keeping out as much platform lingo as possible, because yeah, you need to have those mutual understandings. Otherwise stuff goes haywire when we start making assumptions.

Well, and you talk about it just in terms of platforms, it sounds like. So if you had a conversation with 5 people who were in different parts of say marketing and sales and sales ops and marketing jobs, and you start talking about leads, or you start by talking about a campaign, everyone's frame is good. Like if you're a Salesforce admin, are you like, okay, a campaign is an object. And if you're in Marketo, that's not the same, right?

Yeah.

A campaign is somehow not quite the same. That's a program. Like, it's like, But if you're a marketer, you're just talking about it in a general sense, right? Some go-to-market activities we're doing, which may be made up of one or more than one kind of tactic. And so it's like that, and what I find is a lot of things downstream where there's problems could be addressed by getting clarity and spending a little extra time upfront, just making sure everyone's on the same page about it. It doesn't totally prevent it, right? There's still times when that That doesn't solve it, but I think it improves the odds quite a bit. Yeah.

And that's where, you know, that experience kind of coming out of MOPS into that product development role. I was the Swiss Army guy. You know, I had to learn how to use Cvent. I had to learn how to use AMS NetForum, which is a membership database. You know, I had to learn how to relearn how to use Drupal, you know, Marketo, Salesforce, every new short-term platform that we did an integration with, you know, UAT on all that stuff. So yeah, I mean, you absolutely have to learn how to speak that language and then you have to learn how to code switch. And it It is challenging, but when you've mastered it, I mean, you are a Rosetta Stone that, in the terms of go-to-market work, the ability to accelerate things and communicate really effectively with a lot of different teams is imperative. So it's a skill that is hard to develop and it's challenging, and when things go wrong, it is a big headache. But I mean, once you've mastered that skill, I mean, it gives— I think MOPS people are really well positioned to that type of work because you have to learn how to integrate and build across a lot of different touchpoints. It's not, you know, it's not simply just like, you know, turnkey pro— and in some cases it is, but I think, you know, a lot of, you know, this, the opportunities to progress are when you're able to touch on a lot of different things.

Yeah. Well, why don't we do this? Because we're kind of short on time here, but let's maybe wrap up with this. So like we talked about a lot of different things here today. If we were to summarize, you know, for the people out there who are in marketing ops who either want a broader role, move into leadership, whether it's go-to-market or revenue operations, or just want to, like, want to go into sort of tangential things like business operations or whatever, like, what are your recommendations on the kinds of things that they could be doing now to set themselves up for that beyond, like, doing the day-to-day Yeah, get really close with your product owners where you can.

Find out their goals and really help try and like, you know, work with the product owners if it's a product team, you know, if it's a service line, work with them. But, you know, whatever the core competencies are that, you know, really impact things that you're close to, get really close with them. You know, you're close with your existing business unit already. Get close with other teams and help them, you know, move things along and help try and find ways to be an ambassador with them.

Yeah.

In addition to that, try and find a story that you can take to those different leadership teams as you're helping them. In my case, I was working with the lead gen team, with the webinar team, the conferences team, whatever. But you gotta continuously be communicating with them because if you're not putting that story out there, no one else is gonna put that story out there for you. And if your story's not out there, then you aren't able to conceptualize anything else because everything's happening in a vacuum that only you're privy to.

Yeah.

So I think being an advocate for yourself and finding the appropriate and respectful way to do that, but you gotta be an advocate for yourself and putting yourself out there with trying to seek out opportunities. People will eventually come to you with them, but to get started, that likely won't happen. So again, finding ways to put yourself out there. When those opportunities do come, find ways to put measurements in place. What gets measured gets managed. And if you're able to really continuously bring those measurements in place and implement useful ones elsewhere, that's something that is sticky. People come back to it and something you can use to create a narrative as well.

Yeah. Okay. Love it. All that. I don't have anything else to add right now. And Lord knows I could talk. So Jackson, been a pleasure. Enjoy the conversation. If folks want to continue that with you or see what you're up to, what's the best way for them to do that?

Yeah, sure. LinkedIn is probably the easiest place to find me. So Jackson T as in turtle Fisher, F-I-S-H-E-R, no No C. No C. So Jackson T. Fisher on LinkedIn.

Depends on— I'm laughing because what our audiences know is how we talked about our names get misspelled and turned around before we start recording.

Absolutely. Hey man, it's the name of the game, or when you're writing a URL or all that fun stuff. Yeah. And then speaking of URLs, I'm working on a website. So depending on when you listen to this episode, jacksontfisher.com may or may not be Live. It should be. But yeah, so feel free to seek me out on there as well too. That's my current work in progress.

Sounds good, Jackson. Appreciate it again. Thank you. Thanks to all of our longtime and new listeners and viewers. Now that we're on video too, we're on YouTube. So we appreciate all that. If you have ideas for topics or guests, or you want to be a guest, as always, reach out to Naomi, Mike, or me, and we'd be happy to get the ball rolling. Till next time.

Bye. Thank you very much. I appreciate the time.

All right, don't hang up yet. I forgot to tell you that.