How Your Role in Marketing Operations Will Evolve with Garrath Robinson

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 in 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 solo host Michael Hartman today again. Mike is in this— we're like literally, I think, a week away from, well, less than a week away from Mopsapalooza 2024 starting. He's wrapped up in that and Naomi will be with us soon, I'm sure. So hopefully we will see everyone or we'll have seen by the time this gets out. Hopefully we'll have seen everyone at marketing at Mopsapalooza. So without further ado, joining me today is Gareth Robinson, founder and CMO of RevXL, a marketing and ops strategy consultancy. Prior to founding RevXL, Gareth held leadership roles in demand generation and marketing operations at multiple companies. And before that, he had roles in sales operations, marketing operations, and Salesforce consulting, as consulting and in-house teams. Gareth has also started several companies in the past, and maybe more importantly, he served in the US Army for 3+ years. So Gareth, thank you for joining, and thanks again for your service.

Yeah, thank you. And thank you for having me on.

Yeah, absolutely. So just so we can set things up for our audience today, we're going to be talking about how folks who are in marketing operations who maybe feel like their role is not as viewed as strategic or feel like that they're just order takers, but want to be doing more, how their role can evolve. But As we like to do here a lot, before we get into that, we'd like to have you share a little more about your career path with our audience. And I didn't prep you for this, so unfair warning, I guess, that one of the things I look for, if you can think of it along the way, is any sort of key moments, right, or key people that were part of that, so who maybe had an outsized influence over the direction of your career. Be curious to hear about that.

Yeah. And, you know, my career started, interestingly enough, I had started my first business in college. And, you know, we did really well with that. And it was a service-based B2B business, doing general contracting, property management. And I fell in love with sales, marketing and sales through that. And at the time, you know, going to school, it just, you know, I wasn't learning what I really wanted to learn. It was kind of, you know, you're opening the book and your homework's like, you know, go, you know, read these like 12 definitions and memorize them. We're going to take a test on them. And I'm like, well, this doesn't, you know, this doesn't really help me, you know, build the skills that I'm really looking for. So a friend and I decided to start our business and we did really well with it. And through that business, I made a lot of connections and Started to get really interested in tech as we were kind of building out our business. We were starting to bring the tech piece in to automate our marketing, automate some of our sales. And from there, I just really fell in love with the tech side of things. And that kind of got my wheels spinning a little bit. And so, you know, after we graduated, we ended up selling that business to a competitor. And I was fortunate enough to get my start in the financial services world. slash insurance world doing Salesforce consulting for banks and credit unions. And I fell in love with it from the get-go. And, you know, if anybody's worked in financial services, you know, the industry as a whole lags behind tech and some other industries. And so a lot of the work we were doing was very high impact, especially when it came to the customer journey, especially when it came to optimizing the sales process, etc. And I had a lot of fun doing that. And so that's where, you know, my love for technology and operations really kind of started was there, just because I could see the impact that just like even marginal gains in efficiency could have, you know, for a company and the kind of momentum that it can help build. So from there, you know, I got recruited and went and worked with Microsoft and Kroger on a really large project. And we were, you know, we were taking a digital shelf AI solution across to 13 international markets. And so my role there was to work with the Microsoft team to build out our go-to-market plans for each of those markets and develop the sales plans for the executive briefing centers that Microsoft had in each of those markets. You know, we hear so much about efficiency and optimization, this, that, and the other. And working with Microsoft for those 8 or 9 months was absolutely, probably still to this day, one of the best experiences of my career because to see an organization that large perform at the level that they do even downstream was pretty incredible. I mean, they really have things dialed in, especially from a, you know, team management perspective, managing projects, managing partners, everything is really dialed in. And if you've ever worked with them, you've probably experienced that yourself. And so, again, that experience kind of sparked the idea of like, okay, I really love what I'm doing here and would like to kind of, you know, go from working with these more established enterprise-level companies to get into the startup space. And I got into a startup company. I was really fortunate to get into a rapid growth company here in Indianapolis. And I would say that was probably where everything really started clicking for me and really got me engaged with go-to-market as a whole versus just the marketing and operations piece. You know, we scaled that company. Year over year, something close to 50%. We went from a $28 million company to a $55 million company, having stripped down the entire tech stack, rebuilding the entire sales process, while at the same time, you know, revamping our go-to-market, you know, strategy, really going from a lead gen-based model to a demand gen-based model and a partnership-driven model. And so that was one of those experiences. And I think we all have one of these where it's like, The 18 months that I was there felt like 10 years of experience.

It was one of those ones where it felt like it went by super fast, but it also felt like it took forever, right?

It was amazing. And, you know, when I made the decision to leave, it wasn't because I didn't love being there. It was just that, you know, I wanted to go take on a different challenge, a little bit of a harder challenge. But, you know, that company and the experience I got there, just the leadership team that I was able to learn from, world-class leadership team. And it was one of those situations where everybody just seemed to be on the same page and we were just pumping out campaigns like a well-oiled machine. It was just like plug and play.

Yeah.

And this was a little bit pre, like, you know, COVID era. We were performing like a COVID-era company before COVID or a growth-at-all-costs era company before that era. And just to see how, and we were going up against some pretty large companies, you know, Nutanix and Veeam and VMware, et cetera. And we were just outperforming them. And a large part of that was, you know, our approach to the ecosystem, our approach to partnerships, and our approach to, you know, how we, you know, really how we built our relationships with customers. And so that changed everything for me. It's one thing to learn the tactics and the strategies and stuff at different spots. And you get some like behind the curtains looks at like why things are running at such a high level, but this was very hands-on, very, very in the weeds. And so building out some of that myself and being a part of a team that just performed at such a high level like that and a leadership team that really allowed you to take ownership of the outcomes. That changed everything for me.

That changed, yeah.

And so from there, you know, I went into another company and it was like the complete opposite. It was a struggling AI company that had kind of been an industry leader for 20, 25 years and, you know, had just quickly lost a lot of ground to fast agile startups that were really well-funded coming into the TTS space. the LLM space. And so that was a totally different beast. That was, hey, we're basically a recovery phase company that really needs to turn the ship around. And so, you know—

From a, I guess, stage-wise, very different, but size-wise, were they much different from the one right before that?

They were probably 3 or 4 times larger from a revenue perspective. So they were doing about $350 million a year in revenue. The company I was at before that was doing about 55, 60.

Yeah.

So there's, you know, the dynamics were a little different too because it was a European-based company and not an American company. And I was one of the only Americans on the team.

Yeah. Yes. I think we've talked to people before about like the differences in cultural differences globally and how that can impact things. So like I had worked at Texas Instruments, right? And I worked a lot with people in Asia. China, Japan, so on. And, uh, then I went and worked for a company that, uh, worked for the Americas division, I guess you would call it, for a Japanese-based company. And working with headquarters in Japan versus headquarters in Dallas or tech in the US with people in Asia, 2 very different dynamics. And, and, and culture was easily a challenge if you really weren't You know, perceptive about that. Uh, it also made a big difference to be able to go over there and meet with people in person. This is all before, well before COVID and before even like doing a video call would have been a highly unusual thing. And now it's, you know, you'd have to have a special conference room and all that.

Yeah.

Um, I just, uh, I don't know. I think you're pretty close to the end there, but, um, one of the other things that struck me and always strikes me when I think about it is when you talked about when you're in college and you were interested in sales and marketing, but you felt like you weren't really learning. I'll paraphrase it. You weren't really learning practical skills, right?

Yeah.

But what really stuns me still is how few, I used to say there were none, but I think there are a handful of places that do like formal, like college-type education around sales. Marketing is at lots of places. Virtually every business school has it, but almost no place has sales. And it just always stuns me because At the end of the day, like there are so many people that go into sales and maybe that's why it's hard to train for is because there's some value in having people with lots of different sort of backgrounds and diversity in that sense. But it's still like, I just am blown away because I know there's sales training and sales methodology and things like that, but you can't, like in general, right? You can't go get a bachelor's degree.

Yeah, you know, what's interesting is we had— I'm thinking of like my 2 to 3 favorite professors. And the interesting part about them was they had all been in enterprise sales. Most of their career was either at Heinz or like Nabisco or, you know, Johnson& Johnson, etc., like at these, you know, really large enterprise-level companies, you know, running sales teams or running regions, etc. And so, they were also teaching marketing. They had some art. And so it was really interesting to have their perspective throughout that versus just, you know, I had, you know, I took a branding course and, you know, the guy was a brand manager at whatever company and, you know, just taught brand management and branding.

Sure.

And, but the sales, the sales, the professors with the sales background definitely brought a little bit more juice to the education as far as, hey, like, this is what it's gonna be like out in the real world. This is like the reality of like how marketing and sales need to work together. So I definitely, I definitely see what you're saying there. And in fact, you know, not to veer off here, but my junior year, I'm taking this like, you know, branding course and, you know, my professor's teaching it and she was someone who had been in enterprise sales. And so when that started, I was like, you know what, I'm just going to start an e-commerce brand. I'm just going to like do it hands-on, you know? And, you know, we're like 12 weeks into the course and I come into class one day and I've got these, like this product that I've ordered and, you know, vetted and tested from Alibaba. I've got my custom packaging, the whole nine yards. I had built like a website, this, that, and the other. And she was like, I come to class like 10 minutes early one day and I was like, hey, I just wanted to get your opinion on this. Like I've been building this like pseudo company, this, you know, mock company on the side this entire semester. But I think I'm going to like take it to market and like actually try to see if I can't build a profitable Amazon business out of this, which we ended up doing. But she was just like, you know, like all my years of teaching and, you know, she'd been there 15, 20 years at that point. She was like, I've never had a student actually build a company throughout the course of, you know, the semester. And I was like, for me, it was like, I'm just so practical, hands-on type of person of like, it's never going to stick with me unless I just go do the damn thing.

Yeah.

So that experience for me was, I'm really fortunate. You know, we were talking about colleges before we hopped on. I got to go to Indiana University. And I think where, you know, some of these schools shine is, you know, their curriculum is more built for the enterprise-level type of companies. And so you do lose a little bit of that, you know, real world. Well, this is what actually happens for the rest of us. This is how things kind of play out. you know, in these smaller industries or these smaller segments. And so it was nice to kind of have that experience of building one company and then building an e-commerce company and kind of wrapping this up and talking about my background. You know, I built 3 e-commerce companies, 2 of them did pretty well, one of them completely flamed out. You know, learned that lesson. I tried to— I got a little cocky and tried to go sell sunglasses. The customer acquisition cost on those is— No competition there. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The CAC on that's pretty high.

Yeah.

So I took that L, learned that lesson. And then, so to get to where I'm at now, about a year and a half ago, I just realized like I've learned so much in corporate America, but at the same time, like I really like the variability of consulting. being able to work on multiple different types of projects and not just being married to one company and one project and, you know, like one outcome. Um, and so I just kind of like behind the scenes just kind of started building my personal brand, which was awkward at first, getting on LinkedIn and posting for the first time and putting some content out there and just, you know, kind of that what am I doing with my hands moment of life.

Yeah.

But it's been amazing so far and, you know, getting to meet you and the connections that I've made on LinkedIn and you know, in other communities, it's been incredible. And we're having, you know, amazing impact with our clients, being able to help multiple, you know, founders and startups win at the same time. There's so much fun and excitement that comes with that. And so that's how we kind of got here today.

Yeah. So I think you touched on a little bit of what we wanted to cover, right, in your career path, where some of these different scenarios and Both how it was living in a marketing automation, marketing operations role within different types of environments, as well as what the perception, what you believe the perception was for them. And I think most of our listeners who've been in this will have either, are either experiencing or have experienced one where they felt like they were not appreciated, not seen as strategic, not Yeah. Not, you know, just essentially like told what to do and then you didn't go do it. Um, and you, you know, your recognition was when something broke, right? As opposed to making sure everything was working smoothly. Um, which by the way, I just want, the reason I asked you about the different size of those 2 companies where you had sort of the different experiences. One of the things that I've experienced is, although I haven't really worked much in this, in this startup or early-stage company. I've been in one before I was doing marketing operations. And I think there's this, the ability to move quickly, to be agile and to move things through, even if you have a relatively well-defined process, right? It's relatively easy because there's not many people who are involved. And there's something where I think people are surprised, leaders in particular are surprised about when you get big enough, right, there's this point where you can continue to perform at that pace, but at some point things start to slow down, right, when you get big enough.

Yeah.

Because there's just more people, lack of knowledge, less experience, whatever it might be. Um, and it takes, in my mind, you know, a level of trust in people that is not always there as you get into like enterprise organizations that people are going to move Quickly. So you get into all these extra, extra reviews and lots of people who can veto things, but may or may not, like, lack of clarity about how decisions are made. So yeah, it's, it's a frustrating bit that I think many people deal with, especially at large organizations.

Yeah, I totally agree. And I think it's the reason why a lot of, you know, especially in today's world, I think we've seen the job market shift so much in the last few years to where I think people are kind of decoupling this idea of I've got to be at the same company for 5 years. I can't just like, but I think now that, you know, a lot of companies are embracing that, hey, like, you know, there's people like me out there who, you know, I would struggle being at the same company for 10 years. I would be bored in most cases unless I'm sure there's some outlier cases there, but For me, it's like I enjoy that variability. I can come in, I like to work fast, and I can have this impact. I know what I can do. Just because I, you know, if you looked at my resume on the surface, I've left 2 or 3 companies after 18 to 24 months. And it wasn't because I didn't love what I was doing there and I didn't love the people I worked with and the experience I was getting. It was just, hey, I've kind of hit this point where my day-to-day is the same thing. every day and every week feels the same. And for me, that's my sign of like, okay, it's time to, it's time to go find that next challenge.

And it's funny. I've got this weird— yeah, I think I've got this weird combination where I like structure and process, but at the same time, I do not like doing the same thing every day.

Same.

You know, it's just like, they don't seem to go well together, but But it's just like, that's how I'm wired. Um, but part of it is because I, when I think of structure and process, I think, I think some people think of, um, very, very rigid, very, very detailed, like step-by-step, you must do this. Whereas I'm much more of a, what I like to think of as like, I like principle-based processes and flows that gives people like, here are the guardrails.

Yeah.

but leaves some up to not only interpretation, right? But also up to like how you work, right? So I don't want to define— it's funny, being a parent is like this, right? I have, like, there are ways that I have done things like load a dishwasher. And by the way, there's still a right way to do it, but I've been told differently. But, you know, like there are things that, you know, I'll be doing, I've done something, something the same way and I'll see one of my kids doing it. Like, why are you doing that? And they're like, they explain to me and I'm like, oh yeah, that's actually better. Right. Like, so like, or it works better for them. So even if it, like, even if I don't think it's better, if that's how it works for them. Okay. Right. That's fine.

Yeah.

And I think that's how I like to think about it. I was telling somebody, I have a client that I was telling somebody the other day, like, I like to build stuff. Like, I want to, I want to reinforce the spirit of the law, not the Letter of the law.

Yeah.

You know what I mean?

Yeah. I, I call it, for me, I call it like the bullet. I guess if I would name it anything, I'd name it like the bullet point method. And it takes me back to like, you know, college where you're giving all these like 20, 30, 40 minute long speeches, you know? And I just, I love speaking in front of people. I do not mind being in front of an audience and speaking. And, um, you know, I remember one time I was like, you know, I, I practiced and I had this rigid, like, this is how I'm going to practice for this and I'm going to do it every day. this, that, and the other. And then when I got in front of everybody, I was just super nervous. And like everything—

Isn't that weird?

Had like broken down. And so the next time I went to do it, I was like, I'm just gonna have these bullet points on my slides. And then I'm just gonna— I know, I know that I know the topic, I know I can speak to the topic. So I'm just going to use bullet points. And then when I get to the next bullet point, I'm not necessarily winging it. I have like a little bit of a structure in mind, but I'm more so playing off of like, What's the entire? What's the vibe of the room right now? Do people look interested? And so it allows me to kind of be a little bit more agile in the moment, right? And so I've always used that for like public speaking and you know other areas of life. Like I used to, I used to like plan my workouts the night before, be very detailed with them. But then I found myself, I like wake up and I'm like, well, I don't want to do that today. But you know, I'm like, well, I gotta adhere to this program. I gotta adhere to this protocol. But I'm like, well, I don't want to do back today.

My back's really sore.

Like I would do something else. And so over the years, I've gone from like having a very rigid framework, like, or, you know, doing things very rigidly like that to just like, hey, I think life, you gotta be a little bit more agile because it keeps things— you have, you have the guardrails, but it keeps— you're able to keep things a little bit more interesting and a little bit more fun that way at the same time.

Yeah. Yeah. The, the workout thing. So I, I do, well, I'm, I'm Kind of on IR right now, but I, I've been doing for a couple years this thing called F3. It's men's workout group, but part of it is everybody leads workouts on their own. And I'm, I'm pretty, I usually have a lot of structure, but we were doing this crazy, like almost full day thing that included 4 different, ouch, 4 different workouts of 30 minutes each with like runs or rucks in between. And I had the 3rd one and I had kind of made a plan for it and I had, had, uh, had it on my phone, but I had, I left my phone with the guy who was kind of doing support, right? Bringing drinks and stuff. Well, he didn't show up. Like he was off somewhere else. He didn't bring my phone. Was in his truck. I didn't have it. I hadn't memorized it. I knew enough about what I had wanted to do though, that I just made it work. I just kept it simple.

Yeah.

And I asked the guy who was leading the overall thing about it. And I said, you know, how did, how do you think it went? He's like, it was great. Right. You keep it simple. Like some of the other guys had overthought what they had done. So like, it's interesting because like, to me, that idea of having that, that what, what some people might find is unstructured or unplanned, right? It's, it's not that you're not preparing, right? But you're preparing in a way that gives you that, like, here are the main things I really want to make sure come through, right?

Yeah.

But how I deliver them can be a little different. You know, it might be a little bit like, I don't know if this is the way it is, but it'd be interesting to hear from people who have been in touring bands, right? I think bands would tend to do a lot of the same set lists, right? From city to city or location to location. But I still suspect that every one of those, for the bands that I would be interested in, would still have something a little bit different, right?

Yeah.

Because they're playing to that crowd. And it's not just, hey, Dallas versus, hey, Indianapolis, right? It's, Like something about that night, like one guy was like just feeling it, right? And a solo and another night wasn't it? Like, I don't know. Right. But there's like, you know, you still got through the set list.

You know, like even when I was in the military, you know, you, you always have a battle plan. You know, if you're going out on a road march or you're going out on a nighttime operation or whatever it may be. You always have your core battle plan, but then you also plan for all of these other things that could go wrong that could, you know, what if they're not in the village that we thought they were going to be in? What if we, okay, let's look at this mountain range. Where could we, you know, where are our blind spots? You know, you have to, you can't have a plan that's so rigid that when you get into, you know, your nighttime operation and things don't go as planned that, you know, your guys, your team. can't adjust on the fly. There always needs to be that ability to adjust on the fly without having to go through a bunch of bureaucratic, you know, levels to do so.

Right.

And so, like, that kind of ties back into giving those frontline people some of that ownership to make those decisions and trusting those people. Because you've put in the planning every, you know, if you've done it right, there's been the executive level, the manager level, the frontline planning and everybody's on the same page and everybody understands their role in the plan. I'll just tie this in the military. Everybody understands their role in the mission. They understand how they can affect the outcome of the mission. And at the same time, they understand what everybody around them is doing. And that allows people to take a little bit more ownership and to be a little bit more agile. Because what if one person goes down?

Right.

What if 2 people go down? We need people who understand what their role and responsibility was as well, so they can backfill. And so, right, being in the military really taught me that it's not all about like having these rigid, like, battle plans. It's, you've got to be open to anything can go wrong at any time. And all of these unforeseen circumstances, you have to be able to give your people ownership in those because you can't call into, you know, the talk and bog room and wait. 30 minutes to get, get a go signal on, hey, we need to adapt this battle plan on the fly. You just got to be able to do it. You got to trust that your people are making the right decisions.

Yeah. So I think that's going to be a good tie back to where we need to go, um, actually. But one last thing, like, was it, was it Mike Tyson who said something like, uh, everyone's got a plan until they get hit in the face or something like that? Right.

Yeah. Yeah.

Um, okay. So, uh, It's interesting because I like that for our listeners, right? We actually do have an outline of a plan as we come into these. So we'll peek behind the curtain. But today we haven't really followed that plan and it's okay because actually I think what we just talked about is going to bring us back to some of the things we talked— we want to cover, I think, about this, right? Which is, you know, if you're feeling like you're— you don't think you're appreciated, you think the perception of you as marketing ops or marketing automation team or RevOps is not seen as strategic and you're not getting pulled into early stages of projects, you know, I think there's things that you can do to try to make change on that as well. And then also there are things that—

Yeah.

If you're a leader in those roles, right, that you can make, provide an environment kind of like what Gareth just talked about to give people that room to be able to maneuver Yeah, with the support they need in the training.

Tying this back into like the tech— yeah, tying this back into the tech world, I think, you know, the way I kind of look at it is, you know, as a leader, whether you're on the executive team, whether you're a, you know, director, VP, whatever, you know, I think the hallmark of a great leader is somebody who is able to be coached up. by someone below them, by somebody that they might see as their subordinate. And I think from a frontline manager perspective, you have to develop the skill and it's hard and it's nuanced and you're going to feel weird sometimes doing it, but you have to develop that skill of leading up or coaching up because at the end of the day, that just makes everybody better.

Yeah, I couldn't agree more. It's funny that you say that because I like to believe that I provide as a leader that kind of environment. So I've probably told this story many times. My kids would tell me I probably told it 1,000 times because they tell me I got to tell the same 12 stories over and over. So this is a work one where I had somebody who worked for me who had not been in this kind of role before. He'd come from a different function. I'd hired, into my team and we were going into a one-on-one planning on talking about a particular problem. And I had in my head what I thought was an appropriate solution. And this person really came into it with like, I think we should do this other thing. And I was like, explain more. Like, I was like, just tell me more, tell me more. Eventually we went with that solution, not mine.

Yeah.

And my first reaction was not to go, well, I'm a dummy, right? Was to go— I went to my boss and I said, this is a great day because this person, you know, came up with an idea that was different than mine but fought for it. And it was, it was the right thing to do. And that, like, I'm— to me, that is like, that's the best sign for me that I'm, I'm really providing an environment like that. It doesn't always happen, right? Sometimes I still will go like, well, I still think this other solution is like, it's part of Like the challenge of being a leader manager is like sometimes you have to make decisions and sometimes it's not going to be one that everyone is happy with. But if I had done that, right, I believe that this person would have realized like at least they had had the opportunity to put to, you know, to fight for that and provide the case. The thing I always ask people for from that though is once we get that decision, it's, yeah, we all need to support it. Even if it wasn't our, like the, our preferred direction, right? We all have to support it. Otherwise, if you go to a battlefield scenario, right? If you've got one person like, oh, that was a, like that battle plan is terrible. We should not have done this right now. You've got a place where there's a chink in the fence.

Yeah. You know, a pivotal moment in my career, um, was, you know, one of the companies I was working at here, here locally. Rapid growth company, and we were launching this big campaign. And this was a campaign they'd kind of ran three or four years in a row, and kind of had the same results. And you know, it's the night before we're getting ready to launch this campaign. We've got these really beautiful like HTML like emails built out with beautiful headers and graphics and this that and the other. And you know, the night before I called my marketing director at like. 8:30 at night and I said, hey man, listen, you know, I think we need to A/B test this in the morning with plain text email, plain text landing page, et cetera. And he's, you know, he's kind of like, what the hell are you talking about? It's like 8 o'clock at night the night before. And he's like, do you have any copy written up? You know, this, that, and the other. And I was like, yeah, I've got, I've already got an email and a landing page copy kind of put together, but I want to A/B test these just to see, because I had a gut feeling. I couldn't really articulate it well at the time. But I had a gut feeling of like, you know, we're sending this out to like system admins, you know, they don't care about all that. All that other stuff is just distractions to them. They just, they want to know what am I getting out of this? And so, you know, we A/B test it in the morning. We send the first A/B, we send that test out to like 5,000 or 10,000 subscribers or, you know, leads, something like that. And, you know, the plain text email and the click-through rate and everything, it like literally like double outperformed. you know, all of this beautiful marketing we'd been repurposing for 3 or 4 years. And that was part of my angle of like, we've been running this like kind of same messaging and the same graphics, et cetera, for 3 or 4 years. You know, it's not really good. In my head, it was like, you know, people are going to get tired of that offer. So why not just strip it down and get straight to the point? And so it just blew the doors off. And I think traditionally that was a campaign that did $2 or $3 million. And, you know, 30 days later, you know, we captured $4.8 million in net new revenue from it. And It was one of those moments where I didn't think about it at the time, but looking back on it now, my marketing director put a lot of fricking faith in me and he allowed me to be, to let that be a moment of either sink or swim of this is either going to work and it's going to fucking crush it or I'm sorry, I'm sitting here.

That's okay.

I apologize.

We never claimed to be family friendly. It's okay. Yeah.

You know, it's going to crush it or, you know, it's going to be a total dud and I'm going to look like an idiot. And I was so afraid that it was going to be a total dud and I was going to look like an idiot. And that was such a big moment in my career because it gave me the confidence I needed of like, okay, I know how to make smart decisions. I know how to like articulate like, hey, this is why I think this, that, the other. And it was just such a big moment for me because it was that moment where like you, a leader allows you to really take ownership of something and just run with it.

So, so I think, I think people don't really get that support. I think there's a couple of things that our listeners should take from this. So this is a great example to me because I think about how I would react if I was a leader to someone coming to me like with something like that. And I mean, the timing was not great, but at the same time, I think you did a number of things that I think our listeners who are in a spot where they feel like their voices aren't heard should take note of. One, you had it. You had a belief that something could be different, right? Whether it's based on data or based on instincts, right? Or just, you know, whatever it is, right? And it could be one or both. 2 things that you did, you did a little extra work to prepare, right? So if you got the okay with what you thought should happen, you were ready to move quickly. So you did that extra work. The second thing you did is you did an approach that minimized the risk, right? I don't know if the A/B test was on the full audience where you said 5,000 to 10,000. I'm assuming that was a partial audience.

It was like 10%, something like that.

Yeah. So even if it failed, right, like it was a minimal impact, right? And if it worked better, even marginally better, like it's a win, right? It doesn't even have to be that successful, much more successful. So to me, like this is the kind of thing that if you're in a position where you feel like, oh, I'm not being listened to, I think there's a better way to do this. Yeah, try to find ways where you can get something in place, even if it's, if it's a more complicated process, right? Maybe test it out, right? Put something together, test it out. Yes, it's going to be extra time. You're not going to get a lot of credit for it initially. But if you do that and then you build your— build the case around some, like, you know, it's a relatively low-risk ask, you're more likely to get—

Yeah.

a yes. It's not guaranteed, right? Nothing like nothing's guaranteed, but I think you're setting yourself up to get a better chance to do that. And the more you do that, the more likely it is that you'll get other chances to do the same kind of thing, right?

Yeah.

And I think that's one of the things I get very frustrated with people who I see online or in our Slack group or whatever, who I think are whining. And by the way, I don't think it's marketing ops alone. I think it's marketers in general are Yeah, for sure. And in general, and I'm like, this is like, part of this is you, like you stepping up and like, you know, and showing that you can, you can build a case for something that has a little bit of business sense to it. So like you, like during earlier in the conversation, you mentioned CAC, right? Which I'm going to assume that maybe most of our audience knows what CAC is, but Maybe they don't, and if they don't, go look it up. And by the way, it's an acronym for CAC, so go look it up.

Yeah.

You should be familiar with these kinds of terms because these are financial terms, sort of, in this case, but they're key metrics that are drivers for your business. If you don't understand what those are, then you need to go try to figure it out. This is like, to me, like if you really want to be seen as strategic, You need to be starting to understand the terms that affect the business, how it runs, how these other teams work.

I think this is, I think this is the evolution of marketing in general. I think, you know, I think where I've probably had a little bit of a competitive advantage as a marketer over the last 10 years is having built 3 companies of my own and doing so very early on. I really understood like, hey, I'm hiring employees. I'm managing $20,000, $30,000, $40,000 contracts, this, that, and the other. I really have to be a CEO-level type of person because I'm working with billion-dollar property management companies, right?

Yeah.

And, and so my entire marketing career in corporate America, I've always tried to look through the lens of the CEO, the CMO. Like, if I was— if I owned this company, you know, what would I want to be done here? How would I want my marketing team to approach this? How would I want my sales team to approach this? And so what's always helped me is being able to work backwards from that. And say, okay, why would this make sense to do? Why should we invest in this versus this? And then kind of hitting on your point, you know, I think if there's one gripe I had, I would have about marketers is, you know, most marketers just simply don't understand finance. They don't know how to read a corporate balance sheet or a K-10 or, you know, whatever, whatever it might be. And those things are really important. Like you should be able to, whether or not you're a public company or a private company, I think all marketers should be able to read you know, the financial statements and make sense of those because at the end of the day, that's indicative of your job performance. And it's indicative of like, how is marketing actually taking the dollars that we're investing in the marketing and sales and turning that into revenue and turning that into profitable revenue at the end of the day?

Yep.

And if you're a marketer who's in a startup or, you know, you're in a company that's looking to exit at some point or, you know, be acquired or merge, whatever it may be, Like, you have to understand, like, okay, you know, this balance sheet is a big predictor of what that might actually look like. And if you have employee stock options, you know, your job, you know, the outcomes that you produce directly affect, you know, your ability to maximize what you're going to get out of that. So I think there's a lot of angles to really look at that through.

Yeah, well, our longtime listeners know I will 100% agree with you, and I would take it a step further. I think going beyond being able to read a financial statement, financial statements, I think it's important to understand the language that finance uses, right? So when you get it down to the level of, we've got $1,000 to invest or spend on something, right? How is finance thinking about where the best use of that money is, right? Which, by the way, one of the options is always we're going to hold on to it, right? So if you don't know how your finance team thinks about that, because they're going to expect a payback, right? Because there'll be some sort of option for them to put it into a financial instrument that would yield some sort of return. And if your use of that dollar can't outperform that with, with like understanding that there's risk associated with it, then your challenge is harder. It's not just like whether or not another team wants to use it for something else, which is also your competition. But that's like, that's the other part of this is like understanding that language, um, just within a day-to-day operations of a, of a, an enterprise.

Um, Yeah.

So I think, I think we're going to, like, I think we've covered so much ground, like indirectly, If folks were to look at the outline we have for this, like we, like we have not come even close, but I think we've covered everything. The one, the one last bit I want to reinforce, and maybe you can jump in too, Gareth, because I think you've been in a couple of different environments, is we touched on this a little bit. Like, I think if you're a leader in marketing or marketing ops or revenue ops, Yeah. I cannot encourage you more to be open and maybe even solicit from your team's input all the way down to, you know, the lowest levels of your organization on what's working, what's not working, and then giving people opportunities to test that. Not everybody is comfortable speaking up in a group meeting. Do it in one-on-ones. Do whatever works for those people. And it's your job to figure that. Like I tell people in my coaching all the time who are going to be managers or new managers, your job is to adapt your style to to your team, not the other way around. So I think this is just a part of that, right? If you've got people who are vocal, you probably won't have any problem. If you've got some people who sit back, you're gonna have to go work to get them to trust that you're gonna listen to them. And then you're gonna have to not only earn the trust, you're gonna have to like continue to earn that trust, right? So you can't—

You cannot—

commit to doing everything they say. That would be foolish. But you can at least be honest, like, solicit that input. You'll be— I think you'd be surprised. People are like— I've found in multiple places, people are called boots on the ground, right? They know way more about stuff than I did. Yeah.

Well, you know, it's interesting. I think we're you know, the tech slash ops people struggle the most is they get siloed into, well, you're ops, you know what I mean? Like you're just there to build the systems, right? But really, you know, these are the people who are at the ground level. They're the ones inside of the CRM, inside of the marketing automation platforms, et cetera. They see how things are working. They're looking at all of the data. I mean, if they're doing their job, they're looking at all of the data. They know that they, whether they're in biz ops, sales, marketing, or go-to-market, whatever their label is, You know, number one, they should have, you know, the ability to have weekly standups with, you know, whoever's leading biz ops, sales ops, marketing ops, et cetera, customer ops. Like those 4 or 5 people should be meeting together every week without the executive team having to be involved in all of this other minutia. Give them that opportunity to really work together and collaborate and really move the business forward. I think that's a big piece of it. Giving people, you know, I've been in companies before where I was a marketing ops person and, you know, I reach out to the sales team to schedule a meeting with the sales director and, you know, I get really negative feedback for it of like, hey, nobody asked you to meet with sales to talk to sales. And I'm like, in my head I was like, oh my God, like, that's such a key part of this. Like, my entire job is supporting the sales team, even though it says marketing ops on my title. My entire, my belief in marketing is marketing should be out in front of sales, not behind sales, but in front of sales. And, um, you know, so I've dealt with that in my career at 2 different companies where it's like, no, no, no, no, no, you're just relegated into this role and this is what you do and you don't go outside.

And you're not allowed to, like, you have to talk to somebody in another organization. You had to talk to somebody in another organization. You have to go up the, up the food chain and down the food chain. It's like such a waste of time. I've been there, hated it. wants me, like, want me to blow my head off. No, I think the one thing I would add to that is actually I'm a big believer that like going and spending time with people in these other teams that you work with where you feel like they're not listening to you is go take a step, like you reach out and go spend a day with them. Watch what they do, watch what they have to go through and understand a little more about what they're doing. And that will, I almost guarantee you that will pay huge dividends with certainly there's some outliers out there, but people want other people to understand what they're going through. And the more you do that, the other thing is like the, again, this ties back to like, how does your company actually make profit at the end of the day? But how does it make revenue? Like if you understand how all these pieces work together, you're going to make better decisions on the area that you have core responsibility about because you'll understand how it all works together.

100%. It has to, especially with marketing ops and the employee onboarding process, it has to go far beyond the flowcharts. And this is everybody's, like, let them get involved, let them go meet other people in the company, let them have those conversations because that's how real innovation happens. It's through constant communication and collaboration, not through siloed efforts and everybody just sticking to exactly what the job description says. So, that's kind of my view on it.

Yeah. All right. I could easily go on a rant about how bad job descriptions are too, but I'll stop there. Gareth, we are out of time. This has been a fun meandering conversation, but that's kind of the way I like it. Thank you again for joining us. If folks want to keep up with you or what's going on with RevExcel, what's the best way for them to do that?

Yeah, you can find me on LinkedIn, Gareth Robinson, G-A-R-R-A-T-H, or you can find me on Twitter at Gareth_R. So we're getting our LinkedIn channel set up and running.

Perfect. Not Twitter anymore. Come on. Elon's going to stop, you know, he's going to come down and get us.

I know.

I know. All right. Well, Gareth, this has been a lot of fun. Thanks to our audience for continuing to support us. And if you have an idea for a topic, are interested in being a guest, or an idea for a guest, always reach out to Naomi, Mike, or me on LinkedIn, Slack, wherever we are. We will follow up with you. Until next time, everybody, we'll see you later. Bye.

Thank you.