Revenue Operations in the Military with Carter Wright

Hi, I'm Michael Hartman.

I'm Naomi Liu.

And I'm Mike Rizzo.

And this is OpsCast, a podcast for marketing ops pros and 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 everyone. Welcome to another episode of OpsCast brought to you by the MoPros, now powered by marketingops.com. If you're not a member, you should join soon. Today I'm joined by my co-hosts, both of them. So all 3 of us are here, Naomi Liu and Mike Rizzo. Mike doesn't want to admit that. What is this? What do we call this year, Mike?

It's the year of the MoPro. It's the year of the MoPro.

All right, Naomi, say hello, please.

Hello.

I just feel like people are going to get tired of me saying that to them all the time. That's okay. So the year of the MoPro, folks, is the year of 2022, just for those that listen to this later. The year we said that was the year of 2022.

Yeah, I guess we actually have to do that now because I was, as I was telling you, as we, before we recorded, I talked to somebody who's like on episode 10 around the time we went from being live to recorded. Yeah. So I guess we actually do need to call that out. All right. Today our guest is Carter Wright. Carter is currently manager of revenue operations with the U.S. Army. Carter has been with the U.S. Army in a variety of roles, including combat duty. So he's legit. Most of his roles have been in and around sales and marketing. In addition, he is actively pursuing more knowledge about marketing and revenue operations and is a freelance consultant. So you might be asking yourself, how does marketing and sales apply to the military? That is exactly what Carter is going to share with us. Carter, first of all, thank you for your service and thanks for joining us today.

Hey, I appreciate it. I'm glad to be here. Yeah, first I gotta throw my disclaimer. All right, these opinions are my own and not my employer's. They make sure I get that out there anytime I come on, just, just to be safe rather than sorry. Get that out there. Yeah, glad to be here. I actually, I cover work for the recruiting for the Army, which I view more as sales than I do actually recruiting the way that we do it. And I think the Army is starting to come around to that idea because they actually pushed out an email not too long ago. Asking if we feel like we're getting enough sales training or if we've been doing it on our own. So maybe I'm not alone in that aspect. But yeah, I work up in the operations cell and going from top of the funnel from our marketing leads all the way through the funnel when they, the sales funnel, and they leave out for basic training. So that's the way I looked at it was revenue operations is one way that I viewed it. Is that, so that's as I come and learn the terms, that's what I went with. And that's why I call it revenue operations for the Army. Unique, I know.

Yeah, I like it.

Yeah, it's different. And Carter and I got the chance to talk to them earlier a few weeks ago. And at first I was truthfully, I was skeptical about like how, what the connection was. And so I think it was interesting to hear how, what I think the majority of our listeners are out there in the B2B world or maybe B2C world. And they're trying to apply this to traditional marketing and sales. So I think this will be an interesting one for our listeners to get their heads around.

Sorry, I'm going to interject here. Shout out to Andrew who called me out and said, hey, on my profile on marketingops.com, Um, I don't really fall into the categories of B2B or B2C or B2B2C. So I need something more specific than that. So I'm actually curious, Carter, what would you say? Like it's B2C, it's A2C, RV to consumer.

I view it as B2C. Yeah. That's the best way I can describe it to people is B2C.

Okay.

Fair enough. Fair enough. For Andrew, I think I have to list it as he works in the education sort of arena. And so I just said EDU. That's what we'll put there. I don't know what else to say.

Good. Yeah, I think it's going to be realistic. Before we get too much into this sort of connection between revenue ops, marketing ops, and the military, we'll get to that in a few minutes. I think first, Carter, why don't you just share with our listeners your journey, your career journey, and how kind of how that has led you to be interested in the area of revenue and marketing operations?

Yeah, surely. Yeah. Joined up. Straight outta high school. September 11th happened when I was in basic training and then signed up to be a special operations. So I jumped out of planes, kicked in doors. I was on the invasion into Iraq. They even wrote a book about it, about the invasion with the 82nd Airborne. And then did a few tours, got picked up for recruiting duty. And then I got to watch, it was purely sales-driven at that time. Not a lot of marketing going on besides the civilianized company that we had. Because we, we Do you have an agency that covers some marketing? So we have the agency side and then we have what we call the green seater side, which is those in uniform. Y'all can still hear me?

Okay, perfect.

And then, so I watched it evolve as, as well as, as technology evolved with us. We started getting more marketing data and then, yeah, I'll do that. We started getting more marketing data, which helped me get better at my job. So I'm the guy that every time we got a new link, I started clicking things and figuring things out. And that helped me get good at recruiting because I could, I could see where my competition was, what they, and where they were being productive because our, we go all the way down to zip code level. And I can see when my direct competition, say the Marines, the Navy, and everybody, they're writing contracts for a specific area. And because I know their message that they're pushing, I could tailor my message that way as well. And so then when social media started coming about, um, I started using that to leverage different areas and everything out there as well to help push my market. But, uh, we have quite a, quite a bit of reports that we use to analyze. So we have hundreds of segmentations that we have all over the US that we use, uh, down to zip code level. So I can search for a specific persona or segmentation per zip code that would also give me background knowledge on how to shape my message. And so the more marketing data that we were able to obtain, that really helped me rest of my career. So I ended up moving from a basic, what I call sales, up to running an office. And then from there I moved into enablement and then eventually into where I'm at now. And then without dominating too much, how I got into enablement was actually funny. So I reported to a new office because they move us every 2 to 3 years to make sure that we can function well across the US. And then it was my second day in the office. I didn't even have my computer yet. And I was asked to put together a brief of our area and what my, basically my strategy would be in order to increase our market share. And so I worked on it all weekend, got it set up that Monday. And then basically the people I was briefing, they're like, hey, you know what? You're going to come work for us. And then I spent the rest of my time traveling to different stations and showing them how to use Their data in order to be more successful in their marketing data. And that's basically how I got to where I'm at now, because I went from Enable It and then up to Revenue Operations.

So I'm curious, before we move on a little bit, I'm curious too, I can't remember if you told me this or not, but your title, does your actual title inside the Army, is it say Revenue Operations or is it, is it something different? Because I was, what was interesting to me is you were using terminology that I wouldn't normally associate with, I think, recruiting for the military. And my guess, by the way, my guess is you probably have me in your database. Not me, but my teenage sons, but that's a separate thing.

100%.

So yeah. So do you, when you all are talking, do you use like more of the civilian language or are you using more of the military type language?

The only thing that we don't use that's civilian language is like my title's in the Army is just operations because every Every, every unit has an operations cell. So they don't make the specific differentiator between, if I was still infantry and on the front lines, there'd be an operations cell for planning missions and everything. So we're just called operations here. But as far as market share, segmentation, personas, we have a little bit different name for personas. Segmentation we do use. But yeah, for the market share we use. So it would really Some of the verbiage I have had to learn all over again. So what you guys call ICP, we don't use that term. We use targeted market, which I know that's used a little bit different as well. What you guys call a map is different than what I call a map.

And so for us, you're like, my map is literally a map with topographical.

Yes, we have that one too. But we also have, our map is more of a picture of just the sales funnel.

Okay.

With percentages that really break it down Barney style is the best way to put it for somebody just coming to recruiting to be able to see the picture and understand where they need to be at. Yeah. So our map's called a mission assessment plan.

Okay. Got it.

And then we don't call our system a CRM. I learned that from listening to a lot of people. We do have our own CRM that is not out there to the public. That, that we use to get all our data, put all of our leads into. It mirrors a lot. Like one of our reporting systems is called BuyZone. I could only assume it's mirrored a little bit off of PowerBuy. And we have our own G2 site and yeah. So we had a lot of sites that I've heard a lot of things about, but not quite the same. I can put it that way.

Is it proprietary tech? Sorry, dude. Is it proprietary tech that you have on the, on That's being developed or is it backed? Do you know if it's backed by— I haven't heard the name, so I guess I could do a Google search, but.

So we are getting a new CRM that I can't tell you who it's backed by, but I know it was backed by somebody you guys know out there. But yeah, there is a new one being built right now for us. The one that we're working with now, I couldn't tell you who the originator is. I assume it's just because of how different it is from most, which I've noticed some similarities, but it seems pretty unique to us. So I think we I think the Army at some point crafted this one because I've been using a version of this one since about 2009.

Oh yeah. Okay.

I guess from my perspective, I'm curious if you run into challenges when it comes to like budgeting or budgets. Is that something that's under your wheelhouse of responsibility? Do you have to make business cases, whether it be developing tools internally for support or even just going out and acquiring new ones? What does that look like for you? I'm curious how that differs.

Yeah.

So our system's 100% internal in that aspect. So there is no add-ons or anything onto our system that's compatible because of our security encryption. So anytime anything needs to be added, it's a lengthy process. It's got to go through a security background fitting to make sure it can fit with ours. And I think that's probably part of the option with our new CRM we're working on now. I know it's been in the works for over a year now, and it was supposed to roll out a lot sooner than it has, but part of the issue that I'm hearing Is, is our security protocols that we got to deal with. So, because we deal with a lot of socials and social content. I would say that is a very common problem. Yes.

I was going to say that too.

There's something we definitely share.

Yeah.

Yeah. But I think, I think what I'm hearing from Carter is that 2 things. I think the level of, because he talked about encryption, I talked about security in a more general sense, usually when thinking about our tools, not so much I'm sure there's some encryption, but not a huge amount, but the whole procurement process, Carter, am I right that I think where Naomi was going, I thought it was a really interesting question because I hadn't thought about this until she brought it up, is that, yeah, I think for the most part in our roles, we have a little more, some amount of autonomy on making choices about tech. I see Naomi nodding, so that's good. But it sounds like you're in a position where you might make suggestions on what tools or technology could be used, but it's the actual decision-making and the acquisition of it, the procurement, the deployment of it all happens at a higher level. Is that accurate?

Yes, that's 100% accurate. Yeah, we don't get to, we get to put in input, but that's about all we get. So if we want any improvements with, with our stack and everything, we can send it up. And then sometimes we hear back eventually, or sometimes we just wait and see what happens.

You're probably not alone, people at large organizations. That are not military focused probably have similar scenarios. I know I've heard of them. So what other ways are you making the connection between— because one thing that I noticed when you're on LinkedIn is you're out there talking about revenue operations and marketing operations. It sounds like you've been doing a lot of educating yourself as well. How are you using that knowledge or your sort of your background in connecting the dots? What are the major connection points you see? Between what you're doing from a military perspective, understanding that there's technology and unique pri— maybe unique privacy stuff, things like that, with what you're learning about, call it like civilian enterprises.

Yeah.

That's one of the reasons why I joined LinkedIn was to basically learn from everybody on there. I've been doing a lot of working through other CRMs to learn about them. I've been talking to a lot of people in the different fields and gauging, hey, this is what I do. This is what you guys do and getting feedback. On what's similar or not. I attended a few webinars. I've done, I did the RevOps HubSpot Summer School, which I can see some similarities there. But yeah, I'm getting a lot of feedback just from people that I'm talking to, things that I'm learning. It's going to sound really like I have really bad about this, but I probably listen to about 3 hours of podcasts a day to try to make sure that I'm getting the knowledge of what everybody's talking about. Make sure I get the lingo down a little bit and it helps me out with getting Similarities as well. Just in ingesting a lot of content between LinkedIn, podcasts, anything I can find online for training, it's really been helping me find some similarities.

Okay.

A few of the people that I've talked to online, they'll post some HubSpot tutorials or whatnot. And then I've seen some that are similar to the way our systems are set up. And so I'll comment that because it's refreshing to see that there is some similarities there. And then I've got guys that, that used to be not specifically in my position, but have worked in the same organization as far as recruiting for the Army. And I've talked to them that are now out there that work for different companies like Salesforce and that kind of thing. Got them on LinkedIn. I was like, hey, let me venture here for a minute. And I talked to them and they'll tell me what's similar to their system compared to what we use. And, um, so basically lots of research is, is how I spend a good portion of my day when I'm not on LinkedIn.

I'm jealous. I wish I could do research and education for any length of time beyond just a little micro bits that we get in moments like this where we're talking to folks that like, you're teaching me stuff right now, just thinking about how you're strategizing on your learning methods, I think is awesome. And then on top of that, the foundations of this community where like oftentimes you're quite alone in the role in most organizations. And so certainly the part of the success factor is just the fact that we have people to connect with and talk to. And what I love about Your effort, Carter, is that even though this isn't exactly a fit, it's still helping you, which is awesome. And I'm glad to hear that you're able to absorb and make connections through the community and through the rest of the research methodologies that you're implementing. Super smart, dude. I would've never thought to go look for other folks that had done your role who are now at civilian roles. So good on you, man. Kudos to you.

Appreciate it. Yeah, it's, it was a steep learning curve when I first got on LinkedIn. It was a bit intimidating cuz you're like, what can I share that resonates with With everybody else, since our systems aren't exactly the same, I had to figure out what's the same and what's not in order to even get out there. And some of that came down to, I didn't understand the right names for titles, like, uh, enablement, we just called training.

Like I was the training supervisor and, uh, sometimes I think it would just be better if it was just called training.

But yeah, like when I did enablement, I traveled all over California, 39 different recruiting stations, and I trained them on market share and everything and kind of view them as 39 small businesses, you could say, because they each have their own set of challenges and markets that they're in because the farmland in California is completely different than when I was in San Francisco. So like, sure. Completely different markets there, completely different messages they got to put out. And so when you, it's their own challenges that you get to go in and analyze and try to help them come up with a strategy on how they're going to do things. And I really enjoyed that. And then it ended up Pushing me up another level to where I'm at now. And to be able to do that, I just don't get to travel as much.

So I'm curious, you mentioned, and Mike caught it as well, the, that you're connecting with people who are formerly in roles similar to yours who are now out of the, it sounds like they're out of the military, at least from an active standpoint. Yeah. I'm wondering, are you getting, I assume you're getting value out of learning the language that at some point, I assume maybe not, you want to, you're going to maybe leave the Army. But so that makes sense to me. Are you then also bringing some of that language back into your, into the Army and you and your, maybe your, I don't know if you have counterparts in other parts of the country or the world. Yeah. Are you, how are you applying that daily into what you're doing, doing that translation? Which by the way, I agree with Mike. I, kudos to you because I actually, when you were describing that, I was thinking how I've had I've worked with multiple different technologies in the big ones, both Marketo and Eloqua, a little bit of exposure to HubSpot. And part of that is just learning the language that they all use for essentially the same thing.

Yeah, the, it is helping a lot. Matter of fact, I was having with one of my bosses, we were actually, because just like everybody else, we have trouble with attribution sometimes.

Did you just say one of your bosses?

Yes.

Okay.

I was thinking the same thing. I was like, ooh. That's a fun one to deal with.

So he's just gonna slide that one in, right?

I could break it down is, yeah. Yeah. Just the easiest way to break it down is I have a CRO and a CEO is the positions that I'll call them just for namesake. But I could go by rank, but it wouldn't mean a whole lot for here. And matter of fact, I'm filling, um, one of them had to go out for surgery. So I'm filling the CRO role now as well. So I'm multitasking for the next 6 weeks.

That's awesome.

So we were just having a discussion about attribution and just like everybody else, we sometimes we have a hard time tracking attribution as well. And so I basically, as I was talking to him, I was like, this is something that comes up a lot according to these people that I've talked to. Because, you know, he wanted to do some dropdown menu surveys and everything like that for the people that we got enlisting. And I was like, if we leave this block open. To see where they actually came from, much like a lot of people talk about, it'll give us more accurate data than what we can trace back in our reports. Because again, we— it's one of the many reports I'm sure we all track is attribution, contact times. And we got lead scoring and everything for our marketing leads that come in as well as our sales leads, just like anybody else. I don't know why I got such a bad connection today, but yes. I was having a conversation with one of my bosses about attribution for our leads. And so I was talking about All the things that I've seen on LinkedIn and everybody talking about, and some of the studies that have been published about leaving some cells open instead of having everything a dropdown for, for some of our closed deals, or if you want to call it that, or our enlistments, about how they actually found us, whether the recruiter found them, whether it was the Facebook ad, et cetera, on how they actually got there. And not just so much of what we could pull in our reports in the system. And so being able to go back, I can use What we've been talking about as far as attribution and what I've been learning from LinkedIn, from everybody on there and different portions of everything that I've read in my research. I think it has helped. I've been going around. It's definitely helped with my personal social media savvy because I've learned a lot from everybody on there on social media. I was not as good at social media and I'm still working on that previous, but learned a lot of tips and tricks. We actually have a, just like everybody else, we have a digital marketing team. That's co-located with me that, that we use up here. And so we sort out people's strengths, assign them to that, get them trained up, and then we make it that their primary focus, but then we track those leads like that as well.

Yeah, it's interesting. We talked a little bit about the technology and like encryption kinds of constraints that you work under. Can you, I don't know how much you can share. Obviously there's, we don't want to get into something that's not public domain, but Just curious for our audience and our listeners, what do you, maybe based on your research and what you know about how you have to operate within the Army, what are some of the like big constraints that you've got from a technology standpoint? We've talked about the procurement challenges. I get that. But just the pure technology piece that you feel like might be different if you were not in the environment you're in.

There's some days where the encryption on my computer will even block Google. So there's lots of websites that are blocked for us. I can't just connect to any printer or anything like that. I have to, there's a specific printer that I have to be connected to. But as far as technology goes, a lot of the same reports and everything that, that, that I've seen out there are pretty similar. They took away our email marketing platform from us. It was not performing up to snuff. So that's one of the, one of the things I would say that is a major issue right now for both marketing and sales is that the mass email capability and be able to schedule emails out is not there for us anymore. Which I know is something they're working on. But outside of that, the only way to access our entire CRM is on a specific computer that they give us that we have to be able to plug our ID card in because it's got a chip in it. And then we still got to be on a secure network, got to log in. And yeah, so it makes it challenging. I can't connect just anywhere. I was at a different location yesterday and I was trying to get secure. I even turned my VPN on and everything and the It rejected the network. My encryption would not connect to the network, which made it terribly hard to get done what I needed to get done. I had to move to a different location. Remote work is definitely not a thing for us. Yeah, we, we, when COVID first hit, I'd say we did remote work for about, for about a month, but we rely so much on in-person because once they make it to a certain point in their decision, they actually have to take a test that's proctored. And then they had to go to a physical location, um, in order to take the physical and all paperwork's gotta be signed in front of somebody else to verify as a witness. And, uh, same thing with our signatures. So yeah, it was about a month that, that we didn't do that. But yeah, remote work is not a thing. I've heard good things about remote work, but it's mainly been through being vicarious.

Yeah. So that, I was gonna ask about that. Glad you talked through it. Yes. So that sounds like one of the challenges is just the ability to work from different places. That's actually probably a big one for a lot of our listeners that would probably turn— they'd probably like, oh my gosh, what am I going to do? I actually have to go into an office on a daily basis. Some of them might like that.

I don't know.

But my sense is the majority of our audience is not in that camp.

I'm perfectly all right with my remote work situation.

Yeah.

Could do that technology from anywhere. It's fine.

Kind of the best part of having so many stations is no matter where I go in the country, there's always a recruiting station close, so I can always pop in and connect to their network if I needed to. Worst case scenario.

But you couldn't fly to the middle of Europe and a remote island somewhere off the coast of Spain and sit on a sandy beach and pull out your laptop. That's, is that not the dream?

We do have military bases and recruiting stations in both of those locations.

Wow. Amazing. Okay. Shows how much I know about, as a Canadian, about American military. I'm like, really?

You guys? Yeah, we got, we got bases in Italy and Germany and in Spain and not big bases. They're normally dual with multiple branches and everything there. But yeah, we got bases all over the world.

Naomi, I was thinking of something just a little more practical. So I think about the stories we've all probably heard, and I know you've brought this up, like waking up in the middle of the night going, is that email going to go out the right way tomorrow?

I swear I did that last week. I was like, oh my gosh, did I just accidentally purge? Am I going to wake up and our entire database is purged because I did some change yesterday and there's—

Like, so like, I, so Carter, I like that actually is a good, can you get into a facility?

Like, uh, I can get into my home network and I can connect there, but worst case scenario, my, uh, again, I have more key cards that'll get me into the building that I'm at. So I got to scan one for the elevator, one to get in through the door, one to get in through the office upstairs.

And, uh, I can't even imagine. I can barely keep up with the one I have if I go into an office.

I was just thinking the same thing. I was like, man, I got one key for the house. And I think there's a different one for the locker that I get at the gym whenever I go there. That's confusing enough for me. Just try to get in through 5 doors.

That sounds like, so I got to tour, oh gosh, one of the credit bureau data centers once. It happens to be here in the Dallas area. I can't remember which one it was, but it was the same thing. You had to card swipe in, you had to card swipe out. You had, it was The most secure place I'd— most secure place I've probably ever been, actually. And it doesn't sound like it's even close to what you're doing with Gartner.

I think I should implement that for my home office though.

Speaking of remote work, right? Are there knocks at your door right now, Mike?

Not yet. The kids aren't home, but I'll tell you what, the 4-year-old likes to come in and find his way and talk to me about some superheroes and stuff. So.

Do a little dance?

Yeah, definitely.

Completely understand that. Mine turns 4 this next week, actually.

That's how he gets that.

He's definitely all about that.

Yeah, I get it. That's crazy. Okay. So another, let's, I want to jump into something because you've brought it up and I know you and I talked about this, Carter, is the amount of data and analytics and reporting that you all do. Kind of going back again to, so based on kind of your own discovery and research and learning, how much do you rely on data? How much do you think that translates to the, are those listeners that we have that are in kind of B2B or B2C space?

Yeah, just like everybody else, data is a good point that we use. We, and there's, we have basically a report for everything, but we use data a lot, but then we also try to rely on the, what we call boots on the ground, the guys on the front lines, and then talking to our recent enlistments. We talk to them as they enlist and then through the process before they leave out for basic training. But yeah, data does speak a lot for us, so we'll go, I set up Probably more PowerPoints with graphs and data that I end up having to present more than I'd like to say, but it's—

You have to suffer through taking data and putting it into a PowerPoint just like the rest of us.

100%. Yeah. Matter of fact, once we're done here, because our, our month ended today, so we're, our days are offset and it is mainly for, for the flow of things. So I got probably 2 hours of reports to wrap up once we get off here to close out our month. And it goes through a lot of information that we're gonna go through demographic ages. We're gonna go through where they originated from, how many visits they had to take before they made it to their final journey, what zip codes they came from, what geographical location. And yeah, and then I take all that and put it in a graph that's easy to digest. And that way I can, can brief it with some, a few bullet points, but just like anybody else, take, takes a while to dig through all the reports to make that pretty graph.

It definitely does. I don't know that he was in it, but you just talked about lead source. I know Naomi could appreciate that lead source and demographics and you got the whole bit there. So good stuff, Carter. This has been amazing. Is there anything we— is there anything that we haven't touched on that you want to make sure that our audience would hear from you?

No. Only thing I can say is I appreciate what you guys do. Definitely learned a lot from you guys on here and the Mopros website. Definitely looking forward to seeing that coming along. I got, I keep getting I can't get a picture on there, right? I'm gonna figure this out though. I'm gonna figure it out. My picture's always too big to fit. I'll figure that part out.

Send it to me, Carter. I'll help you out. I got some ways to help you there and we'll send it back so you can upload it. But we appreciate you being a part, being a learner with us, being a community member. And we appreciate what you do too, because, you know, that's pretty important for a lot of us here in the US anyway.

Absolutely. So Carter, sounds like LinkedIn is the place to keep up with what you've got going on. Is that right? Or is there any, someplace else that people should connect with you if they want to.

Yeah, LinkedIn is the place to find me. Carter-L.Wright is my handle. You can find me on there and I'm on there more than I'd like to admit.

That's all right. We probably all could say that from time to time. So no judgment.

Definitely raising my hand on that one.

Yeah.

As I'm submitting a comment right now, I'm not multitasking.

Yeah, that never happens around here. All right, Carter, thank you so much. Mike, Naomi, thank you as always. It's a pleasure. Thanks to our listeners for continuing to support us and providing us your feedback and support and ideas for topics and guests. If you have more, certainly reach out to Naomi, Mike, or me, and we can get that rolling as well. So until next time, thanks everyone. Bye-bye.

Bye everybody.

Bye.