How Can Marketing Ops help with the "Messy Middle" of the Buyers Journey with Martin Pietrzak

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 RevOps 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 in everybody. Welcome to another episode of OpsCast by marketingops.com, powered by all of you marketing operations professionals out there, the MoPros. Today I am your host, Mike Rizzo. I'm flying solo. I get to step in for the infamous and incredible Meister Michael Hartman. And unfortunately, Naomi did have a conflict in the schedule because guess what? We are all busy marketing ops professionals, and she had to go take care of some stuff. So we do hope that she'll be back with us again soon. But thank you for jumping in today, joining us to talk about this important topic of what is referred to by our guest as the messy middle of the modern buyer's journey is Martin Piatschek. So Martin is the founder and president of Pinch Marketing, which is a B2B marketing and lead generation agency. He's a marketing executive with 20 years of experience in hands-on planning and implementing of digital and conventional marketing strategies that exceed revenue targets in corporate and startup environments. And prior to founding Pinch, he held various marketing and marketing leadership roles across several companies and has also worked as a co-founder of a B2C semantic search company, which is awesome. I've been around a few semantic search folks. Martin, thank you for joining us today.

Thanks for having me, Mike, and hello to all the ML Pros.

Appreciate it. We are excited to have you. All right, so we are gonna jump in. It was kind of queued up right at the intro there. Let's start with the obvious question. What is the messy middle of the buyer's journey? And, you know, how would you describe it versus other models of the buyer's journey?

Yeah, sounds good, Mike. I'd love to jump into this. So let me maybe start off by saying what it's not. And I think we are I think we're all familiar from a marketing perspective around, you know, the consumer following this linear buyer's path, right? From awareness to interest to decision and finally purchase. It's nice, it's clean, and it goes from these step-by-step like a ladder, and hopefully at the end of the day, you know, it finalizes with a nice big fat purchase. However, what we've observed, and it's not just me, you know, the messy middle actually comes from a study that was published by Google, so they have a million data points to Substantiate this, but the the model is no longer really that linear anymore. It's it doesn't really reflect the current customer behavior. So today buyers are much more dynamic. It's a very nonlinear process. Really, I call the looping between all these phases between exploration and evaluation. So it's it's people no longer go from step by step by step. They jump. Between any of this. So like, I like to use this Netflix analogy. So, you know, we all watch and love Netflix, or maybe we hate it now because there's so much choice. But if you think about this, you gotta go into— so how do we search for stuff these days? You know, maybe I'm gonna log into Netflix, I'm gonna watch a couple trailers, then I'm gonna stop there and I'm gonna maybe read a Rotten Tomatoes article on the side. Maybe I'm gonna— I just remember that buddy of mine texted me A message about a movie or show that they really loved. So it goes back and forth, right? I might do this multiple times before I make that decision what I really want to watch. So I think this really is the true reflection of what the Mess-O-Metal is. It's this idea of looping between all these different stages. So what was 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 might be 2, 3, 1, back to 3, back to 5. So it's become much more complex than we ever anticipated it to be.

Yeah, I have to agree. I mean, arguably, in a lot of ways, it was kind of always complex. I think in particular in B2B, we tried to oversimplify the buyer's journey itself. And I think what's happening on the B2B side is certainly starting to show signs of exactly this, what you're talking about, right? This messy middle. On the B2B side, I would say there probably was some linear nature in the past. I agree with the notion, but I also think that there was quite a bit happening underneath the water, right? If you look at that duck that's swimming in the lake, that people aren't necessarily making super simple decisions. They are texting their friends or placing a phone call to their parents or their whoever they're their close constituents, right? To get a sense of like, hey, what did you use? You've got kids, you know, did you buy a special type of sunscreen? And, you know, and the journey kind of goes from there. Question for you just in general, as you think about the messy middle. And by the way, like, prior to us getting on today, I was like, I swear one of those other than Google, and maybe it was Google because you called attention to it. But I swear that some of, some publication, Gartner, Forrester, you name it, just like recently published something about this, right? Like how, how the buyer's journey is like really complex and kind of just like flat. Like it's just this like bouncing around of all these things. Like that's this messy middle that we're talking about. But I couldn't find the visual to support it.

I think it's just, if you think about it, it's probably just one messy big cloud with a lot of lines in Yeah. I completely agree. Messy is right. And I use the Netflix model because I think that we could all understand it, but from a B2B perspective, I think what the culprit is behind all this is, I want to say, somebody broke the internet. I think before, we were used to going into the store and dealing with a salesperson to brick-and-mortar type locations to figure out what the decision is. It's become much more complex than that. As buyers, we have all these tools available to us how we can educate ourselves.

Right.

We read blogs, we go check out social media, we read reviews, we talk to our friends and peers, we may be part of some events that we go to. So, the platforms that are available to us as consumers have become infinite, right? And I think it's— so, the digital realm made it essentially much more complex. And I think buyers today, they're much more educated as a result of that. And they will look for that information, not just about what they want to purchase, but about the brand that they're transacting with. So this is really, really critical to understand this complexity going forward.

Yeah, yeah. And I think you touched on things that I think we'll probably unpack in another segment here. But this idea of the trust in the brand and the relationship that you build with that, right? I totally agree. I was going to sort of tee up or ask the question from your side, your opinion on really, is it the technology that's influenced the, you know, I think it's the access to information, right? Of course, when we think about the buyer's journey before, to your point, we were trained to say, okay, I'm going to walk in, I'm going to talk to somebody, I'm going to get their advice, and then I'm going to make a decision on which thing I'm going to purchase and walk out the door with. And so our user behavior previously was, I'm gonna go to a website, I want to talk to one of the reps, they're gonna tell me about their thing, and if it's good for me, I'm gonna do another website, go to another store, check that out, and then eventually make a decision on what I want to buy. And it seems like today it's really perpetuated by the access to information. It's just that much easier. So with that in mind, let's talk about some of the technology or process that you feel like we need to have in place to understand the buyer's journey? And then, we can't escape it. Is AI somehow impacting any of this and how do you think that it is?

Yeah, good question, Mike. I think that we, especially I think for the marketing ops folks out there, it's so critical to understand that the complexity of this buying journey also complicates with the technologies that we use. There's no question about that. So, for instance, from the setup of the CRM platform to the the MA platforms, to maybe working within data platforms, data lakes, DPM systems, anything that allows us to not only collect but make sense of all this data that's out there, especially if it's being supposed to be captured at various stages of this journey, it's much more complicated. So, I don't want to specifically call any particular technologies by name, but I think this complexity probably makes the infrastructure setup also more complex, so we can no longer this linear path, right? And saying, oh yeah, here's a nurture I'm going to build out in Mailchimp, and from email 1 to 2 to 3 to 4, it probably requires tools that allow us to capture not only the internal tools that we can control, like maybe the email platforms, maybe the website, maybe other things, but now it's the third-party data that we need to be able to bring into the mix. So maybe the social media interactions, maybe third-party review sites, You know, tracking content on, on other people's sites, which of course makes it much more difficult. So I think integrations with those disparate systems become critical. So, you know, it might take into consideration not only the, the current platforms you have, but how to integrate it maybe with tools like Zapier or something like that, where it allows to connect those dots. And then, you know, how the heck do you make sense out of all of this, right? You know, you have all this data coming from multiple directions at you. I think that's where I think, you know, we talked AI, you mentioned AI. I think that's where AI can can really make some sense of this complexity. We as humans, by looking for these nuances and these linear connections, we might miss some things that AI might be able to pick up. If we have— before, we might have 10 data points. Now we're going to have like 5,000 points. And if we have the ability to put the AI on top of all that, that might really allow us to make more sense out of it and figure out how to build models that are a little bit more sensical in this very complex, self-complex structure. And I think AI has the ability perhaps to even make some sense of it, maybe some predictive modeling where it allows you to, even in this messy middle, to help us understand, okay, like if this person did this and that, there is a higher likelihood that they'll also do that. And that's really critical for us to understand. And it's much more difficult to do so, I think, manually and maybe crunching the data in Excel. I think AI really can shine in Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I definitely, definitely agree there. I think what's interesting about just the sort of like, you know, we'll call it the onslaught and ability to sort of like capture data is really at the core of this is we're seeing, particularly in B2B, like B2C arguably has been doing marketing operations. They just, they've been calling it something else for a lot longer than we have, right? They call it lifecycle marketing and And these other types of terms, B2B is like stepping into a world where it's trying to set up some of the things that you talked about, your data lakes and your data warehouses, to try to create those sort of unique IDs that tie back to a buyer's journey and then create the opportunity for AI to potentially show a propensity to take the next step. There was this wonderful session that Ari from NVIDIA presented on at Spring Fling just a few weeks ago around the propensity for anything. And it was really the same sort of talk that we're discussing here. And it's this idea that, you know, really at any given point, there's multiple potential buyer groups, multiple potential things that are weighing in on the business's decision to engage with the brand. And it's just about understanding their propensity to take action for the next step. Right. And I think it's forcing us, I'd love sort of to go down this little rabbit hole for a minute when we think about being a little bit tool agnostic in this conversation right now. The architecture is changing.

Right.

Like fundamentally, it feels like it's forcing us to like, start with the data versus starting with the tools, which I'm super excited about because all of us in marketing ops were like, hey, here's this tool that we bought. And we're like, great, what do you want to do with this? Yeah, I hear you. So, you know, I think the question that I'm sort of getting to is like, what is the strategic impact that we can now bring to the table when you think about like, as you engage with your clients, right? And you're trying to help them understand how to make sense of this messy middle. You know, what are some of the things that you like to talk about in terms of like helping to paint a picture of the art of the possible? And then is it changing the way in which you're approaching your conversations with your customers today?

Yeah, it's a good question. I think yes and yes on many, on all the fronts you've discussed, I think, you know, but let's start with the market, your audience, right? Marketing ops, you know, being an owner of a small business and working with small clients sometimes, you know, we help them support their, you know, marketing operations infrastructure setup. And I think historically, justly or unjustly, that marketing ops has been seen— and we can argue this one— is that have been seen as a support mechanism to a lot of the marketing functions and maybe sales function. Sometimes they take hybrid roles. And I think this is a huge opportunity, I think, for marketing ops folks to To really become the strategic partners to the business, right? So, rather than looking at and, you know, taking the direction from others saying, hey, set this up for me, set up this infrastructure, now I think they have a seat at the table, so to speak, to help build these flexible systems, to help wrangle this complex data, and support, really support this consistent presence, and by building this infrastructure, that support to help to understand and influence buyers during this complex, messy reality. So they're no longer just a support mechanism, they're the enabler. And I think this is an opportunity, I think, for marketing ops to see it as such, to really help enable and help accelerate the sales and the marketing initiatives that I think companies are struggling with because I think that, you know, they're still stuck with the old models. And I think here where marketing ops can really shine to help them by building the right piping, the infrastructure, the data purview, and, you know, converting that into intelligence that can really, really help to accelerate those business initiatives. So I think that's in a nutshell, and there's a few things we can discuss in more detail, but that's kind of at the highest level.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I, I, you are singing. People are going to think that I planted you onto the show because you're like $20, Mike.

Come on.

Yeah, yeah. Um, no, you're, you are, uh, what's the term, like, uh, not preaching to the choir necessarily, but just like singing, singing the song that I really like to sing, which is, um, How can we get these organizations to start to understand that modern go-to-market technology is really broadly your go-to-market motion is enabled by various capabilities across many solutions. And at the end of the day, it's a product in and of itself. And the opportunity to, to your point, as I've been sort of pushing out into the wild too, which was, you know, for our listeners, Martin and I didn't have a chance to talk prior to this. So I'm, Hearing for the first time. I promise I didn't plant them on the show, but I definitely have said many times over, like, hey, you are ultimately the strategist and the key enabler for the go-to-market tech stack as a product, right? And building that roadmap and helping the organization take their goals and apply them down to capabilities and build a roadmap that supports their continued endeavors. Because every business has a different hypothesis on how they want to go to market. Right? Some do ABM, some do SEO, da da da da da. But the enablement factor and the underlying data principles that are there really fundamentally come down to you're a product manager and you need to create a user story and journeys and features and functionality and release it and enable people to leverage the products that you've acquired to go to market. But I think like to try to get into some of those capabilities, Why don't you share? I know we wanted to like dig in a little bit on like what are some of the sort of nuanced types of examples where a marketing ops person can step in and help an organization maybe think about the art of the possible as it comes to these technologies? Like maybe break down some of those capabilities for us.

Yeah, sounds good. And I think, you know, you touched on that a little bit, Mike, when you said we haven't really had an opportunity to chat earlier. And I think the key here is that we got to be flexible, right? In this conversation, we got to be agile. And I think that's exactly the number one thing that I think I want to send the message to the ML Pros is that we got to be flexible. So you have to figure out how to implement these flexible workflows, right? Which are trying to adapt to this iterative process, how buyers think about buying, allowing multiple entry and exit points throughout these campaigns, right? If you think about, if it is a linear path, but you have all these like 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. You know, sometimes, you know, somebody might stumble on an old blog article that, you know, you've written and then completely missed an email nurture that you were supposed to send to them. So you can't control necessarily all these entry points, but what you can do is create this adaptive workflow that allows people to enter and exit where they choose. Then I think you can help them define this path without defining the path, right? Which is what sounds— doesn't make sense to some degree, but maybe it's this idea of we can create a playground with all the different toys in it rather than building a railroad track, right? So when allowing the buyer to choose how they want to use it, I think that's really the key here. And, you know, we talked about, you know, the multiple entry points, and with this philosophy that The customer is in the driver's seat, not you. So, as much as we like them to be on this highway in the left lane, chances are they're somewhere else and we need to accommodate that. So, that's number one, I'd say.

Yeah. No, it's funny. Earlier in our discussion, I actually had that same sort of— I mean, you described it as defining a path without truly putting them on one. And I think, I think for a marketing ops person listening to this, that makes actually a ton of sense to me. For an executive who might be tuning into this, they'd be like, what the fuck are you talking about? You're not making any sense. And that's okay, right? That's exactly why you want to hire people into the roles and get them to help you figure this stuff out, because it is about engineering an environment with the intention to guide somebody and And it's these subtle cues that, you know, if you're kind of aware of the potential, sort of the propensity to move sort of through the funnel, right? There might be these blog posts that are engineered to be more of a discovery mechanism, and you might have these other resources that are kind of a little bit deeper in the layer, but you're aware of the fact that they might want to sort of jump around, and you have to engineer that with the intention of Look, I want to create as much information gathering opportunity for this customer as we possibly can, but then I need to be able to figure out what they're doing. And so I think in some of the examples that were sort of outlined on our document that we're talking through today and some of the talking points we wanted to get to, I think it comes down to signals, right? Like there's this whole market that's, it's like kind of frustrating right now with the number of like players that are in the space around signals and real-time data, but I do think that there's an opportunity here. Do you kind of want to unpack what maybe some of those opportunities are?

You know, funny, you said it earlier, right? You try to minimize the what the fuck moments from your management team, right? And I think data can play a really, really important part in that. And so maybe before you jump into building out these models, I think the first thing you might want to also do is create a system that allows you to monitor and collect all these different, you know, you could call them signals, but so how can you collect all this data, hopefully real-time, and then looking at that, observing that, maybe leveraging some AI tools to figure out like, hey, where are these people on that journey and what are the steps that they're taking? My recommendation here is make sure that you can anticipate or at least trying to leverage anything that you know of the buyer, maybe talking to the people who are good conduit to those customers and saying, hey, how did they find out about us? How did— what steps did they take? And then trying to mimic that and trying to collect all this data. So this could be your internal data sources, so maybe your website traffic, you know, the Google Analytics of the world, the— your social engagement, maybe through integrations, your email platforms, you— and then you go over, you know, third-party data, right? You can have, uh, how does the Maybe third-party data, like maybe Sales Navigators of the world, but then you married with the Bambora intent data and then marry all that with what you already know of these people in your own CRM platforms. And then once you have that sensing or listening mechanism set up, then it can really allow you to leverage the data, hopefully in real time, to really put the decision-making on steroids, right? And that really, I think, gives you a lot of the ammunition to go back to your bosses and the business leaders to say, hey, the reason we're doing this is because this is what the data actually tells us, and it's not as linear as you perhaps thought. So, you might have to challenge their thinking a little bit, and leveraging data is the best tool to do so. So, I think that's how I think about it, but I'm not sure what your thoughts on that, Mike, as you know your audience best, but this is kind of what my observation.

No, no, I think it's spot on. Unfortunately, for better or worse, data has been the center of the conversation for at least the last decade, and it's become even more prominent in the discussions in sort of the age of AI. But I do think that it's, in some ways, I feel like it's a chicken and egg problem with leadership, right? If you don't have a system in place to capture information, just broadly, Capture data, whether it is first-party sort of web traffic data or first-party data at the CRM level. What's fundamentally true is that like there has to be something there at the bottom, right? This net, if you were to create a visual, to be able to capture that stuff and then eventually start to find ways to make sense of it. And so, you know, as you make the argument for how to go implement these things or the why to your business partners, your leadership team, et cetera. I think it's really about, I want to enable our team to be able to show up in the ways we want them to show up. And ultimately, I want to make sure that we are providing the right sort of experience for our customers during their buyer's journey, right? Because we fundamentally understand it is going to be all over the place. Right now we need a system to be able to capture all of that information. I mean, just very concretely, right, Martin, like look at a tool like Gong or any other type of listening device, right? Like for recorded calls.

Yep.

When you start to capture that information, the next phase of this is like, what can I learn? Like start asking the questions, right? Like executives can turn to your marketing ops team and say, what can we learn from the insights that we're gathering from these from this net where we've caught all this data. And you can go back from this call recording on Gong or whatever, Fathom, you name it, and start to extrapolate like, really, how did they find us? What were their pain points? What are the things that they cared about? Because then you want to go pass it back up the funnel to find a way to create that consistent sort of experience, right? And I think that that is one of the really exciting things about being in marketing operations is that you get to be a steward of the brand in a lot of ways. So I would love your thoughts on that piece of this too.

Yeah, stewardship of the brand. I'm going to get there in a second, but something you said really struck me. And the reality can be daunting that it might be difficult for the marketing ops person to get all the the tools in the toolkit that they might need. So using a tool, the example that you use with Gong, I think it's critical. And I think on some level it might require to reframe or retrain like the SDR, BDR functions or the AE functions to make sure that they ask the right questions about how did you find out about us? What have you read? Where did you read it? Who did you hear it from? What got you there? Obviously not like a, it's not supposed to be a polling question or anything like that, but it's like through the conversations, hopefully, And now with the extraction of all this data and AI, maybe it will give you all the data points that you might need. So, that's a great starting point. I really love what you said there. But yes, I think about stewardship of brand. I think it's because the customers take on this very wild journey with us as a brand, we have to be consistent. And I think marketing ops folks have a unique opportunity to make sure, be that steward of that brand to make sure that you're always showing up consistently in the marketplace. Not only that you're visible, but you're also consistent. And I think this visibility means to also sell the narrative that you gotta use various channels. You gotta meet the buyers where they are at, not necessarily where you think they should be at. That will help you with defining what the decision-making processes are. So I think The always-on marketing concept is really critical. So forget about one-time email blast campaigns. Forget about this like quick and dirty, you know, advertisement campaign. Now start thinking more broadly. Think about this evergreen, always-on marketing campaign that can be accessed throughout time, throughout different ways, in different entry and exit points. Could be through content, advertising, thought leadership pieces, offline, online, is really, really critical. So I think you as a marketing ops person have that opportunity to really tighten that grip and making sure that when you see these mistakes that I think we make in all marketing, this luring lead generation campaign that will last 3 days, make a recommendation, that's probably not the approach that you want, right? So, so content must be easy to find, um, regardless if it's a blog article or review or whatever, and then figuring out like where is it that you need to collect all this data. So the challenge of this is, um, to, to think about it from a long-term perspective rather than just like this immediate result and finding the balance spot.

It's— and it's so hard. You know, I think we could pause here for a moment and say, just like, like, hang on this topic for a moment and say, hey, the funny thing is, I guess I'll kind of hark back to last year's kerfuffle that I, that I sort of accidentally intentionally started, I guess.

Sort of, kind of.

Sort of kind of. I said, I said, marketing ops isn't marketing. And the whole, the whole of our community and a number of the people on the, on the interwebs, particularly LinkedIn, were kind of like, you know, what are you talking about?

Did you get booed? Yeah, I got shamed.

And they were like, it's literally in the name. And I think, I think as we kind of go through what was fascinating for me from, from sort of where I sit and what I see in the conversations that were coming through and filtering through that discussion was, um, the, the wild vacillation between, you're crazy, it's absolutely marketing, to those exact same individuals coming back to me personally, um, and sometimes publicly, uh, but personally for sure, um, a week and a half or 2 weeks later and saying, actually, maybe not. Maybe marketing in the traditional sense really is marketing. And marketing ops is something else, and it's more than just marketing. And we've touched a lot on that today. I think at a minimum, we've talked about understanding that marketers in the marketing operation role think like a marketer. They have to be broadly sort of skilled across disciplines to have a fundamental understanding of go-to-market motion. They have a new and profound understanding for how data and database and object orientation works. And then they have to understand the ramifications of ROI and the financial side of things and how to try to tie any level of investment that you're making in your go-to-market motion back to some type of success metric. And then ultimately, they're trying to manage all of this stuff and be compliant and make sure that the buyer's journey is sufficient and reflective of your brand in a way that shows up consistently and it's safely, brand safely, right? Opt-ins, you know, there's no spamming, like Don't do a blast campaign as a one-off. And you become this individual that straddles the line between marketing, quote unquote. As you said, you said, hey, if you hear that they're about to talk about doing a campaign that's going to last 3 days, maybe suggest that there's a different path to go down. And, and I think that's right, right? Like you become kind of a marketer, but really you're a strategist.

Yeah.

You are a strategic partner, right? Like, I don't know.

You know what? It's interesting what you say there. And I think I've been thinking as you were talking about this is that marketing ops folks can be great strategists, but it's rare that a great strategist is also a great marketing ops person. And the way I think about marketing ops people and the evolution of the role is that you've become— we've become marketing scientists in a sense, right? It's not— but yes, I think the understanding of the strategy is critical to see, to really understand who your buyers are. So don't just walk in blindly as just a technical support person, but walk in as that scientist who understands your business, understands your goals, understands the overarching marketing strategy, maybe your North Star and all that. Understanding your clients or customers, but because you have the tools, you can apply some the scientific method to it by not only understanding but then adapting all this information, all this intel you have to to helping evolve that journey that customer takes with you. So I think that's that's an interesting opportunity. So like I understand why you got your hands slapped, but you know that you know ops people are not marketers. But I think to make a more great marketing operations person is. that if you really keep that strategic hat on at all times, you will be a better marketing ops person because you have the tools to really give you the ammunition to have the tough conversations. So, maybe this is how I'll attempt to reframe it a little bit. We become marketing scientists and we have the power.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I think at the end of it, people really felt that It resonated. It created the right conversation for for our space, which is a lot of what we're talking about today on this episode with you, and that it is marketing ops is more than just marketing. It's it's about so much more than that, and I think really all of this discussion today has continued to sort of like again, folks, I didn't plant Martin here. He's just reiterating a lot of the stuff that I'm really excited about for. Our category. And I hope that in general, you've sort of thought through maybe how to reframe your role or how to have different conversations and really try to step into your, whether it's a consulting engagement or your businesses in general, your business partners and your executive teams with a, hey, I'm here to help. That scientific method. I love that idea. That's a great shout out and sort of reframing. And you are a great They're like the great enabler for supporting a go-to-market motion. And as you come in, just be curious. Like the number one thing, Martin, that we've seen in our sort of anecdotal and actual data trend, like points from like our annual research, for example, is that curiosity tends to be the thing that like is the number one sort of trait, quote unquote, of a marketing ops professional. And I think for those of you listening that aren't a practicing marketing ops professional, I hope this sheds a little bit of light on why you want to work with somebody in this role. The other skills that you might have as a digital marketer, as an executive sales leader, a customer success rep, your skills are amazing and we don't have those, but we would love to find ways to, I mean, I can't say that for everybody.

Right.

But in many cases, we are a— it is a better together story. So, like, start to partner up with, with the people that are holding these roles or go find them in your organization. We are getting close to time here, Martin. I don't want to, like, leave anything on the table. Do you have any other thoughts or things that we need to make sure that this audience hears today?

I think we've said it all, but I mean, something that you just said, I think this— I want to treat this as an opportunity to also call out not only the very talented marketing ops people out there, but this is an opportunity with all the new tools out there like AI. I think there's a little bit of angst in the marketplace. So what does it mean to be a marketer these days? And I think all the different roles within marketing, and I think for ops, I think this is Navigating this new messy journey that our customers are on can be a great opportunity to really level up, become more strategic partners to the business. And I think if I had to guess, with AI, the AI may— will make it probably easier on the tactical aspect of the job, maybe the build-out of some of those workflows, but how you think it from a global perspective, to really truly understand how to translate those buyer emotions into something that has structure and infrastructure around it that supports those flexible systems and really making sense of all this complex data is going to be really critical. And I think that's an opportunity and I would love to see that. And I'm surprised how many times I go into clients and I look at their I look under the hood of where they are at in their marketing ops readiness and I could tell you that it's sad sometimes. I understand that small players don't really have a good structure in place, but even the big players, it's a bit of an afterthought sometimes. So, this I think can really, really be quite impactful for the role going forward.

Yeah, yeah, I totally agree. It's really an exciting time to be in this space in general. There's you know introduction of yet another set of new buzzwords all around go-to-market architecture, go-to-market engineering, and da da da da da. At the end of the day, you in a marketing ops role have a tremendous opportunity in front of you, and and I'm really excited. And yeah, I don't think I could have said it any better. So Martin, thank you for for sharing that. All right, folks. We yeah, likewise. The episode is coming to a close here. I want to take the time to say, Martin, you know, thank you for joining us today. If our audience wants to connect with you or reach out to ask some more questions about the messy middle, where might they best find you?

Probably easiest on LinkedIn. But if you want to check out, you know, our website's probably another probably easiest versus my my last name. It's the spelling is complicated. So just check out, you know. pinch.marketing. That's where we reside. And if you reach out through that, it's probably the easiest way to connect. So you can just mention this conversation and love to help out and have a conversation with whoever needs to learn a little bit more about this.

Cool. Awesome. You heard that, folks. So make sure to mention it because we want the proper credit for attribution and how'd you hear about us.

Love that attribution. Live.

Um, all right. Well, thank you as always to, uh, everybody for listening. For those of you who are out there, we really, really appreciate you being a part of this. Um, I did have a few folks reach out recently and, uh, say thank you to, to us for hosting the show. We appreciate that greatly. Um, in that vein, if you enjoyed this episode, please let us know. Um, we are shouting into the void. We get to see your downloads, but that's about all we get. If you liked it, please be sure to go rate and review us. Give us a sort of thumbs up or a handful of kudos, or just share it with a friend that you think should listen to this episode. So please remember to rate, review, and subscribe. And if you yourself want to be a guest, as always, you can reach out to us. You can either go to marketingops.com and go to the contact form. If you visit your profile, marketingops.com/profile, there's a widget on the right-hand side where you can request to join us as a guest on Opscast, or you can just DM any one of us, Michael, Naomi, or myself, and we will try to get you scheduled. Until next time, really appreciate y'all listening. You have a good rest of your day. Bye, everybody.

Bye, everyone.