Simplifying the Complex: Attribution, Alignment, and What Really Matters with Penny Hill

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.

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Hello everyone, welcome to another episode of OpsCast brought to you by marketingops.com, powered by other MoPros out there. I'm your host, Michael Hartman. Flying a bit solo. This is the first episode we're recording after MOPSpluza 2025, so I'm sure Mike and Naomi are recovering from that, but I'm powering on. So I am joined today by Penny Hill. She's the founder and principal consultant at 3Threads Consulting. Penny has built her career at the intersection of marketing, operations, and strategy, helping teams simplify complexity, bridge gaps between departments, and make data meaningful. Today, she and I are going to be talking about one of the most common sources of friction in go-to-market teams, attribution and alignment. Why do so many teams fight over credit? What does marketing contribution actually mean? And how can simplifying our metrics and our conversations lead to better results? So Penny, welcome to the show again.

Hey, yeah, thank you. Yes, yes, thanks for having me.

Yeah, I like, this is a little bit odd because I think we scheduled this before you're on another episode that we already recorded because we did the The one with Leslie and all the others. So that's, this is fun.

Yeah.

How can you do it twice?

Yeah, it is.

Yeah. Anyway, well, good to have you again. All right. Once, I know you and I have talked about this, but, and I'll tell you my version of this if you want, but you've said that both marketing and executives across businesses have a tendency to overcomplicate things, especially in marketing world, I think. So like for me, I often find myself telling marketers like, you're caring about stuff that only marketers care about, which is maybe a slight variance. But like, what does that look like to you in practice? And why do you think it happens so much?

Yeah, yeah, I think, I mean, I think we tend to overcomplicate a lot of things. And we really see it when we're talking reporting and attribution models. And there's a few ways that I see this. One way is, you know, we can, we end up having different attribution models for different channels. Right? Or segments. We're hyper-focusing on all the differences. So now we have all of these models, or we have too many. Maybe it's all the same channel, the same. We don't have differences per channel, but we have too many attribution models. We're looking at every single cut of this. We've got it feeding our data. Now everything's just muddied because we're looking at too much. And you can also have it where we don't have one at all. Or maybe we have one, but no one's using it, um, because we just can't come to an agreement on what it should be. And I think at the end of the day, a lot of times this happens because we get really, really stuck in exceptions. So we're really focused on the details. We're digging into the weeds of everything and we want it to be perfect. And it's just not going to be. Like, perfection should not be our goal really with anything, but certainly not in enterprise.

Yeah. I tell people perfection is, first off, it's an impossible thing, right? That's, I used to, I worked with a CMO who's like, what does beautiful look like? And I was like, I hate that question. You know, like I understand like what's the best work we could do, but like, it's just so hard to get to. And like, I think, I mean, I look at the world as trade-offs.

Yeah.

Very different thing than like what's right, what's wrong. So I think there's very few things that are like that. So, um, yeah. Yeah. I mean, what do you like, what do you, what do you think is the big driver though? Like, I, I do think this tends to be, I mean, I don't know, maybe it's the same case in other functional areas, but it feels like marketing is particularly susceptible to this, like, overcomplication of stuff? Do you think it's unique to that, or do you think it's something that's common across other business functions?

I mean, I guess, I mean, most of my career I've been in marketing, but being in ops, you know, you touch a lot of things and I feel like, I mean, I see complication in customer service. I see, you see complication in sales. Um, I think we all tend to do it. I really do. I don't know if it's just marketing. Um, I think an example is ICP. I see that a lot and that's marketing and sales and you might have customer, you know, the customer success team. You've got lots of orgs in there, um, giving opinions on ICP and we'll end up making it so granular you can't operationalize it. We just overcomplicate it looking for perfection. Um, I mean, sometimes it's, and it's also because you have too many cooks in the kitchen.

Yeah.

I think that, that can drive a lot of it too. When you've got everyone that kind of gets, everyone gets to have an opinion on it, or everyone gets to kind of drive the decision. I guess everyone can have an opinion, but at the end of the day, you have to have, you know, a few key, key people that will, will drive what happens. Um, and you've gotta at some point stop showing it to people, stop getting input.

Right.

Or you'll just keep changing.

I know one of the things I run into is where people want want to try to solve for every particular scenario that might possibly occur, right?

Yeah.

I mean, I equate it, the people who aren't into sports might not get it, but if you look at the rule book for the NFL, it just keeps getting bigger and bigger and bigger because they try to have rules for all kinds of different scenarios that are unique. Whereas, and I'm less familiar with FIFA and the the world of actual like football for the rest of the world. But like that readup is pretty simple and leaves a lot to interpretation in the moment, which I like. I, that I tend to gravitate towards that. And I think a lot of people, maybe it's an American thing, right? Where you want to solve for every scenario. I don't know.

Yeah, maybe. Yeah, I do. I, I see that in the attribution models for sure. People trying to do that, like that's, we get in trouble. And I always, you know, early, Yeah. And lead scoring.

Yeah.

Yes, for sure. For sure. And it's funny, early in my career, like actually not even my career, this is when I, this was when I was in high school, I made maps and I, I did this for a government contractor. And it's funny cuz they always said like, and we made maps by hand and everything, you know, had to be done pretty well. And, but they always said good enough for government work. That was something I always heard, good enough for government work. And it was, it was just this, like, it's like 80% good. It's, we're not looking for perfection with this because we'll be here all day. Um, and that, I mean, that's something that stayed with me my whole life. I think that a lot, like, well, we're at, this is good enough for government work. This is, we're at the 80%. This is good.

Yeah. You know, I mean, that's to me, there's another analogy of like strategy, right? I think, again, I think people tend to overcomplicate strategy and a book that I read years ago, gosh, it's, I don't even know how old it is now. It's gotta be, in the 15, 20 years old is called Execution. It's kind of a scary name, the discipline of getting things done. And it kind of like, it was the one for me where I was like, 'cause I was in strategy and consulting work at the time and it really changed the way I thought about it. And like strategy's important, but it doesn't really mean a whole lot if you can't actually execute on it and hold people—

Yeah.

Hold yourselves and others accountable for the results. And so it was a big, for me it was a big mind shift to go, into that model of like execution is at least as important, maybe more important than strategy. Yeah, that's right.

Yeah.

So one of the things we talked, I mentioned, you know, I mentioned upfront, right, was attribution. And I know that probably you and I both have had a lot of conversations about attribution. I think with your consulting work now, you've probably had more recently too. But like, in fact, I was just talking to somebody else about a potential being a guest and it was like attribution was maybe one of the topics and like, I was like, it continues to be a topic that is of interest and a challenge for a lot of people. Like, why, like, why do you think it's, it continues to be such a pain point?

You know, I think, and it, it really is for everyone, every, everyone I've talked to, I think every company, and there's been quite a few since I went out on my own, Attribution has been some source of pain for them. Either they needed to set it up or it was there, but it's not working quite like they want it to. And I think it's because we just tie so much to it, especially as marketers. So many companies, you know, your marketing goals are based off source pipeline, which isn't something I necessarily agree with. But even if you don't have source pipeline, you've got to show what revenue you're generating, right? We got to prove there's value in the marketing we're doing. And so you've got it, you know, where are we attributing that revenue? I just think we tie, and we rightly so, tie so much to revenue and marketing, right? That we tie so much to these models that we then tend to overcomplicate them because we want to make sure we get credit where we're putting our time.

Yeah. Well, it's funny because I, like I tell people all the time, I have this sort of love-hate relationship with attribution modeling. But like, my point is like, it doesn't, like, even the simplest attribution models are complicated math if you're not kind of a math wonk. And so it, and as soon as someone sees something in the model that they don't agree with, right, it undermines the overall message rather than supporting it. So I have—

Yeah.

I've tended to shy away from it a little bit. I haven't totally thrown it out because I think there's value in it still. And maybe we can get to this a little bit later though too, because like, I think there's also like who you're sharing it with matters. But you also mentioned contribution, right?

Yeah.

I think you and I actually went back and forth on this when we were talking about this at one point. Like, I, because of my kind of change in mindset about Attribution, I have probably moved more towards, I think I like the idea of a contribution-based model, right? Where you have some sort of, there's some assumptions here that there's some agreement about how we're measuring, you know, who sourced the pipeline revenue upfront. So we're not spending time in reviews about that and agreeing that there's probably going to be somewhere it's right and somewhere it's wrong. And so fine, we're all working towards the same big number. But like, yeah, I think you like, where do you lean on that? You know, do you lean more towards like, I think attribution reporting is a little better or, or contribution-based stuff or like, what do you, what's your take on that?

Yeah. So when it comes to marketing, I think I personally feel we should only be looking at what does marketing influence. So more of that, you know, what, what part of revenue is marketing touching? I do not, I don't like marketing source as marketing contribution. Um, models. And I mean, I've done 'em, I do 'em like most companies do 'em. Um, but I just think it causes, it just causes a lot of, it causes a lot of infighting between sales and marketing. And at the end of the day, we need to be on the same team as them. And that's my goal. Usually my goal is to align with sales. Our goal in marketing is, is to help sales, right? We, we are, we are there to, to kind of help move that pipeline. Um, You know, down the funnel and make it bigger, right? Make it close faster. Like that's the kind of stuff we're doing in the enterprise B2B space. Um, it doesn't necessarily matter who sources it. I don't think that, you know, you just, you don't have a person that raises their hand on a demo form and then just walks through and is the influencer or decision maker on the closed won opportunity anymore. That's just not the buying.

Yeah.

That's not the, that's not how, how they buy. You know, not that it never happens, but in general, that's not—

Exception, not the rule, right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

And so I just think it causes, I don't know how many times, like you end up just fighting with sales or like, but we really did this. And you look in the data and they may have, right? Because whatever model you do, it's made up. It's a little finger in the wind of where are we going to set it? Um, yeah. So, yeah. So I do, I, I like moving away from that. You know, you're not, marketing's not sourcing it. Maybe you have sales at SDR source. Like I, I could see value in that, um, to see kind of which of those orgs is bringing it in. But when marketing comes along, I like to see that they're influencing it.

Yeah. So you, you don't, like, have you found less of that, um, infighting when you use marketing attributed?

Yes.

Yeah. Really?

Yeah.

Interesting.

Yeah. I mean, if we can, Anytime you say marketing source something, I feel like sales gets, like, gets a little kind of defensive or can, you know, they just, they create the pipeline, right? Like that's, that's their job. That's what they do.

Yeah. Interesting. Yeah. Cause I, I have, I mean, part of why I have shied away from it, I mean, not to get too far down another rabbit hole, like I've kind of gone, I mean, I think the flaws in either one of those, if that's the only things you're looking at. I've had more luck with going at it with a different tack, which is less about pure numbers and more about story, right? So—

Yeah.

Yeah. Looking at like recently won deals that are hopefully representative like of a bigger pattern and looking at across that buyer's journey, if you will, like what were all the different touchpoints that maybe had an influence and the timing of them and things like that until that story rather than trying to go like, here's this complicated model or this, you know, complicated way that we're agreeing. We've said that we're going to say who sourced this deal, right? And focus more on like, what were the things that, what are the things that happen when we win and when we don't win? And that I've found works better with the broader audience than any of those model kind of things do. Have you ever tried anything like that?

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think that's a piece, I mean, to me, and maybe, maybe I'm thinking about it differently or, or wrong, but that's a piece of the model. Like, cuz when, you know, I look at it as when we, we do a model, we do an attribution model, or my team does one, we have laid out every single touchpoint. Mm-hmm. Like the goal is we've got every single touchpoint there in our data that then we can do what we please with. And part of it is that multi-touch attribution, looking at like what all is happening on this opportunity. And I do think that's the best story to tell. It's very easy to tell one by one. I think sometimes you need a way to be able to say holistically, like, what is happening? And especially like for your campaign managers, like, I'm putting money in ads. Are they in, are, you know, what's happening with them? Okay, well, we see people that are interacting with our ads. Now we see they're on these opportunities or whatever. Like we can see that's influencing this kind of pipe.

Yeah. And that's, I think that's kind of getting at what I was talking about, about who sees this reporting, right? I am a big believer that attribution reporting should be used certainly within marketing, but definitely like if you've got campaign manager type roles, right? They should be.

Yeah.

I mean, if I was in their shoes, I'd want to know like as soon as my campaigns were launching, right? How are they performing? And across a number of metrics, including are they driving pipeline and revenue or at least having some influence on it? So like to me, that's what I was talking about, like having the right audience, but I don't think you were wrong. Like, So you said if you're understanding it right or not, I think we're saying kind of the same thing, right? Like there's an aggregate level attribution reporting, but then if you go down to specific cases, right, it brings those numbers to life. And that, like, I literally, you know, I've been in rooms where I wasn't doing, I was just doing the attribution reporting, like with sales teams and, you know, people were not paying attention.

Yeah.

The other time, like, And then we switched to doing these stories about specific ones and people were leaning in and the body, like they just, the body language was different. And then over time, right, the conversations I was having with those teams changed too.

Yeah.

So everything's in either, like I said, it's in the script or—

Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's, we're, we're doing all of it, I think, you know, with different audiences.

Yeah. And the reason I bring it like, It's not an easily scalable, repeatable thing, but it almost shouldn't be, right? Because you're looking at specific cases. But it, and so it requires some, you know, I'll go back to my playing defense in basketball, right? It's an effort-based thing, right? You have to put some effort in to do that and to build a story. But I think it pays dividends, especially outside of marketing.

Yeah.

So. I mean, that's—

Yeah, no, I agree with that.

All right, we should stop right there. I like that. Now, let's— so you've touched on this too, right? So there's a little bit of this that is about getting credit, which I struggle with that as the right goal. But when you see that in these organizations where there's this sort of credit credit gaming, credit game that's going on between marketing and sales or marketing sales BDRs, depending on where they're structured. Like, like what, like what's your, what does that tell you about those organizations in terms of, you know, what's working well, what's not working well?

Yeah, I would say, you know, when I see this between any group, you see it a lot between sales and marketing. You can see it even within marketing. You're, there's not alignment. Like, They're not on the same team. And I think, you know, it really shows that division when we're fighting over credit. It's part of why I like to take sourcing out of it, because I think it helps take the credit out of the equation. Um, because it doesn't matter. We're all on the same team, right? I mean, we all win whenever, you know, that we get that pipeline, we get that closed one. Um, we all lose if we don't, regardless of who sources the pipeline. Um, so. I think, um, I think it really can show a lot of division. I think it's very common. Like, this isn't, to me, this is part of the, uh, it's, it's like a stretch goal wherever you are, right? You're really trying to get that alignment with sales and working at it. Um, and I, I, even when there are sourcing models, like where it's like marketing, marketing, you know, kind of has goals based on how much pipeline they source, I tend to go into calls like kind of throwing that off the table. Like, you know, Yeah, pipeline's yours. We're here to help you. How can we help you? What are we doing to help you?

So I was curious, can you, do you have an example you could share or a general approach to that? Because I like that, but like sometimes it's hard getting people to change their mind. Like, oh, we, like I see job descriptions, for example, like for marketing ops roles and it's like build attribution models. And like, to me, is it like a major thing? And that's not, again, not to say that it's wrong, but like, I find the same thing, right? Whether it's attribution modeling or contribution approach, there's struggles with that, getting that alignment. But what you described there sounds interesting, but I don't know what that, kind of trying to think about like, what does that look like on the ground, if you will?

Yeah, so I think what it looks like, I would, you're kind of, when you're working with sales, You don't want to talk about sourcing. You're talking about things about like, here's everything marketing is doing in marketing. You're looking at those deals kind of like you were talking about. We're showing them, here's an opportunity, right? Here's everything we've touched. And then hopefully if, if, if it's working like we want it to, we can start to show like when marketing's in the deal, when we are in the account, we're seeing, you know, higher revenue from it. Maybe we're seeing it, you know, be faster. It's going to close win faster. When you can start to look, you know, some of those ABM metrics.

Yeah.

Um, that we pull together, you can start to kind of do those just A/B comparisons, um, and make it really, really clear. And I've always found that's really helpful when you can show that. You can show the win rate too. Another one, you're, it's a higher win rate.

Yep.

When we are surrounding the account and we're in there with you. And regardless of whether a lead came in originally from us, It doesn't matter. Like if you take that off the table and you just talk about what are we doing to help you with these, in these accounts, in these opportunities.

Do you find that you, cuz somebody has to take the first step towards that. Do you find that it's you in the kind of a marketing or marketing ops role having to be the one that takes that first step?

Yes. Yes. I, yeah, I have, I have found it, but I, a lot of times I'm the one that's kind of helping to drive that. So it's, You know, I mean, there can be organizations where sales is driving that as well, I'm sure.

Sure. Yeah. I just, my, my, that's my experience too, is it, I mean, like maybe not quite aligned with what you were talking about in general, but like, I think part of this, in quotes, lack of alignment between marketing and sales is because they speak different languages a lot of cases. And so I know I find myself like, part of this is I worked in sales for a brief period of my career, right? So I appreciate the challenges and nuances of that and what they're expected to deliver on, et cetera, et cetera.

Mm-hmm.

And, you know, I try to, I try to bring that to the conversation, um, and where I can, right? If they've, they're coming and they're asking for something, or if we're going to them to ask for something, right? some update to Salesforce or CRM, whatever, right? Then that we're— I'm thinking about it from their perspective and showing that, right? And so, working with—

Yeah.

I mean, like one of the examples that I have is like a company I was at where I inherited some already stuff in flight that was changing, impacting the sales organization. And the top-level sales leadership was aligned, but what I found the problem was, it was like The next level down, next level down, right? That's not like, it hadn't really been embedded there. And so when I started to look at making changes from what was originally the original strategy that I inherited, I specifically asked for what I called lieutenants, right? The people who are kind of closer to the impact and building relationships with them as well, right? And it took a little bit of time to do that.

Yeah.

And sometimes that meant doing something kind of to help them, right? Something small to like show that I was trying to listen and help so that when I went back to them, I could, you know, I'd built some credibility.

For sure. Yeah, for sure. No, I, I think that's really important. Um, I know I was actually telling some people on my team recently, I mean, sellers are our customer. And, and I know this isn't, you know, marketers don't like to hear it, but at the end of the day, they're kind of our most important customer. Everything we do has to work for them. Um, and it has to drive revenue and they're the ones that are putting revenue on the books. So like we really have to take them into account. I'm not that we don't focus. I mean, we're marketing ops. We're certainly supporting marketing. I'm not saying we don't, but we've got to make sure we're aligned with the sellers. We're taking them into account and we're communicating with them.

Yeah.

In some way.

So. Yeah. I mean, I'm laughing. Well, I have 2 reactions to your thing. Like one is like, I hate the idea of internal customers, but like, I'll let that go.

Yeah.

I just, and part of this because of this other part, which is I've talked about this probably multiple times on the podcast, and I know I've talked to other people about it. There's this book I got years and years ago called How to Be a Marketing Superstar, which is this silly name. For those who remember Who Moved My Cheese? It's kind of that style book. But there was one One, they said, this is customer money, right? Everybody's, basically it was like everybody's paycheck would say, this is customer money. And I think if we lose value, like in what we're doing, no matter what role you're in, in an organization, right? Because he kind of made it like, if we don't hit our revenue numbers, like impacts everybody.

Yeah.

So, and we need salespeople to do that final mile. It doesn't matter how much we can do. So I'm like, if that doesn't happen, then—

They have, yeah.

So enabling them is huge. I would say the other flip side, which I'm really, this is where I think AI, I know people are doing this, but I haven't had a chance to do it, is, you know, using technology and AI, like recordings of sales calls to feed back into product marketing and sales enablement teams, right?

Yeah.

You know, what should we, how should we be talking about our products and services to the market? Um, 'cause I think too much, it's too often it gets siloed, right? And the content that's published is not really useful. It doesn't really resonate with the market. Sales teams don't use it, right? We all get frustrated.

Yes.

So like now we can take advantage of that. So.

Yeah. Yeah. No, that is, that's a really good use case.

Yeah. Tell me when you're using it.

Wow.

Okay. So you hinted at this too, and maybe we could take this a little bit on another level of detail later from where we were. But, you know, so one of the things about measurement, there's lots of different metrics in marketing, lots of data. You know, one of the things that I've talked about before, I would like to get your thoughts on, is matching the type of metric and the level of it to the audience who's going to be Receiving it, right? So we kind of talked about like, to me, attribution reporting, try to do that to say like a CFO or even other senior leadership is probably not going to go over really well because it's complicated. But like, there, I'm sure there are exceptions, but what's your, like, what do you think? How do you think about the right metrics or measurements or reporting to do for different types of audiences within an organization?

Yeah. I mean, I definitely think you've got, you've got to do that and you have different views and I think you get, you know, your executives. I mean, just simply you're, they're just gonna be really higher level. Like you're gonna be focused on revenue, you're gonna be focused on overall revenue. Um, maybe you have a percent that's marketing influence. Maybe a lot of times you do have sourced like this, this is the source pipeline. You've got win rates, um, closed won. Maybe you're comparing if marketing touched or not. But you're still super high level looking at that, those revenue metrics. And then on the exact opposite spectrum, say you're a marketing manager. I mean, that's where you've got kind of some of what you, we think of as vanity metrics, but you got clicks, you got opens, you got views, click to open, um, all of that, you know, um, cost per click, all of that kind of stuff that we don't want to show to the executives, even though sometimes people do. We don't want to do that. We don't want to get too bound up into them because a lot of times, you know, like I use emails all the time. A lot of those metrics aren't real valid, right? Every server opens, or lots of servers open emails, lots of them click them, does not mean someone interacted. But directionally, when you're comparing all your emails, it's really good data for your marketing manager to say, hey, what content is resonating with people? Um, you know, what, what, where should I pivot and things like that?

Yeah.

So, so yeah, so I would say that, yeah, like you've got those very granular dashboards to something much, much more high level.

Yeah. I mean, I've started to shy away from talking about vanity metrics because I think they're just metrics too.

Yeah.

Because, and I think you're right, how you use them is more of what it is. But I also think marketers and like campaign managers, if you have those, like I think it's really valuable to them, especially early in the early stages of a campaign, right? You like, those are the actual number, like signals of are gonna tell you whether or not something's landing and working, right?

That's right.

Yeah. Are people opening your emails? Are they reading 'em? Are they clicking through? Are they registering for your webinar or whatever it is, right? And if you're not paying attention to that and you don't know what to expect from that, then you've got a different problem. But it doesn't mean you don't want the idea of vanity metrics because I think they're early indicators of longer-term success. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. You definitely need them.

Yeah. So, I mean, that's one thing I would like any— and you said dashboards. Like, I, the other part of this, like, I have run into places where people, I go to marketing leaders, like, we need dashboards. You need a dashboard. And I always sort of, I just sort of like, do you not like recoil, I guess, like to that kind of request? Because I think I understand the goal of having a kind of a comprehensive view into what's happening within an organization or whatever, but I think starting with the idea of a dashboard might be okay, but I think doing it a little bit at a time is a better approach. Oh yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. So yeah, I definitely can see that. I do like dashboard. I like things being always on or as always on as your data allows, whatever your refresh rate is. You know, where executives can go look and see and your marketers can be able to just log in and see, see how things are doing. Um, but I also don't think you should get, I think we were talking about this a little bit earlier with perfection. Like you, you don't have to wait till you have all the answers. You don't have to wait till you have the full strategy of everything you wanna see. Like we need to be able to kind of move forward and get things out there and you can always change it. Like if it doesn't work, change it.

Yeah. I mean, I think that's a lot of people put a lot of effort into Well, I mean, this kind of gets into like more of an operational piece, but I run into lots of places where there's, I'll call it, I'll be nice, heavy review and approval processes.

Yeah.

In some cases, way too much and unclear who gets input and feedback rights and who gets change rights. I mean, that's like, that is a whole separate art, but I think What I coach a lot of teams I've worked with over the past is like, if you're going to have a review and approval process, be smart about where you're heavier and where you're lighter, because I don't think you have to treat everything the same, right? And I think the example would be email, right? Once an email's gone, it's gone. So probably put a little more review on that to a degree. But if it's content on your website, right, you should be able to change that within minutes, right?

Yeah.

So, doesn't mean you don't have any care for it, right? You still should have high standards, but like, it doesn't, like, it doesn't have to be quote perfect, right? It can be, you can change it.

That's right. Yeah, we can get it out.

So, have you run into that before where there's like kind of overwhelming review and approvals and unclear roles?

Oh yeah.

How have you worked through—

For sure.

Either overcoming that or getting it to change?

Yeah. So I think, I mean, you have to show what the roadblocks are, I think. And it's, I'll use email as an example because I think it's one a lot of people run into and I've seen it before too. You've got everyone has a say in it, right? Everyone's, you know, gets to read it and approve it and they get to read it and approve it multiple times. And every time someone new looks at it, they're going to maybe have a way they want to say it differently. And even certain people every time, I mean, I can do it every time I read it, I might want to tweak something a little bit. And so you have to, you show kind of the delays this is causing by every time it goes back and what it's doing to the teams. I think a lot of people think, well, what's the big deal? It's just like, we're just changing a sentence. It takes 2 seconds. Takes 2 seconds, but my team's having to touch it again. We don't sit around and just wait for your change, right? We have all this in queue and start to show the impacts that it has every time we have to touch it. And then lay it out to like, you have You have 2 chances. Maybe that's what I like to say. You get 2 reviews, you get an initial review, and then you get a final review. And then you don't get to look at it again unless something is legally or technically wrong.

Yeah.

It's going out.

Yeah.

And we get sign-off too. Like I think too, when you have a sign-off, and I have found change is always hard at first, people push back, but after you do it a couple of times, everyone's comfortable. Um, and they're happier. And same thing on the web. I've had that too, like where you can't get a webpage out.

Oh my God.

Because we just are just iterating it and it's like, can we just get some, we have nothing we need, we need this content up there. When is it 80%? When is it good enough? And then we can start, we can iterate on it later.

Yeah. I mean, I think that's like, well, and that applies I think to a lot of the things we do in marketing ops, right? This is an obvious one where it's sort of public-facing stuff, but also things like, um, dude, lead scoring model, like Like I've, like one of the things I've had to really get past with people is like, hey, this is not your one and only chance to change lead scoring. Like if we're doing this right, we're going to finally get it where we feel comfortable with it, but we're going to keep an eye on it. Right. And if something changes, we're going to change the model and that's okay. And to be expected. And we should be doing that together. And so I think a lot of people have been trained when it's like, That's their one and only time to do a piece of content or a change in a process. And I think that's the mistake I think a lot of teams get into. And to be fair, I think a lot of marketing ops people tend to go that way, right? They become rigid in how they approach things. And I think that's a mistake that they need to, when they do that.

Yeah, we can overcomplicate, that's part of where we overcomplicate it too, I think. And I think, you know, actually I just had this conversation about lead scoring and I just had this conversation too about a campaign hierarchy. You know, it's like we are going to monitor this and we can change it and build things in a way you can change them.

Yeah.

You know, your lead scoring model, hopefully you build it in a way that you can adjust scores, you can add and take, you know, add things and take them away. That's what we should be doing as ops. Campaign hierarchy, that's another thing. You know, you don't have to have it all figured out. Right now that's overwhelming. Like, let's put it together, then let's see how it's really going to flow through to our reporting and then change it.

Yeah, totally, totally agree. So I kind of circle back to our kind of where we started a little bit and this whole idea of the credit game, because it really is still sort of been bothering me. So So you and I have both been in leadership roles and then maybe it makes it a little bit easier. And we've been, you know, for those people who are listening or watching who maybe are a small team or a team of one or have particularly challenging stakeholders in their organization, like how would you coach them on how to approach this conversation to start to get past the Credit game and all that?

I think, I mean, I would, I would coach them that they need to start speaking up. I think a lot of times, especially in ops, marketing ops, we stay really quiet because we don't feel like our voice, you know, should be heard, or maybe we don't feel like we're right or wondering. And I, I think you should always be speaking up with what you see and bring data behind it to show. And, and try to, I think it's always helpful to pivot the conversation to what matters, right? Even if it, it's not as good of a light for marketing. At the end of the day, we need to make sure we're always looking at truth. And something I look at a lot, and I've seen it happen at a lot of orgs, and it's, you know, when we're talking about sourcing, um, marketing sourcing, all this, we're doing fantastic, right? Oh, but our closed won rates are abysmal and we're not bringing in the revenue.

Right.

Well, what's happening here? Um, are we just really the best thing that's ever been there and your sales team is just the worst sales team in the world?

Right.

Probably not. Right. What, like, we need to like step back and look at different metrics. And that's a place where sourcing, you know, doesn't really mean anything, but like, what are we sending over? Is it quality?

Yeah.

What are we doing, doing here? And, um, and I think a lot of, I, I think that's a good way sometimes to start to pivot the sourcing question because I think sometimes you'll see that. Um, when you're having that conversation and it helps even if you're having to say, hmm, maybe what we're doing in marketing isn't as great as we've been reporting. We still need to talk about that, right? So we can do better and we're looking at the right things.

Yeah.

Owning it. Um, and being honest about it. Yeah.

Yeah.

And, and it's fine. Like, I think, I mean, I've, I've walked, walked through this with a few orgs. There's no one's ever lost their job at the end of the, you know, because Like, it's kind of came to light, maybe what we're doing isn't the best thing, right? People pivot, they start focusing on what matters, and the teams grow and they do better. So, I think just people get a little scared.

Yeah. I mean, I think, yeah, my first thought when you said that is that, like, typically it's not one or the other, right? These things are complicated, especially the bigger the org and the more complicated the product and the sales cycle and all that, right? There's lots of factors that go into it. So pointing fingers at one thing is going to probably not really be the case, like the solution.

No, it never is.

Yeah. And I think the other thought I had was kind of goes back to something we talked about a little bit is like reaching across, like putting out the olive branch to some degree. But I think I would go a step further, like start today if you haven't already done it, with getting to know your counterparts and what it is that they're doing, right?

Yeah.

Go hang out with them for a day. Go sit on, if you can go sit on sales calls, right? That'd be huge. Like, I think that would be eye-opening for people who've never done it.

Yeah.

And, um, really like go in there with the idea that you wanna learn, right? You're like, that's—

Yeah.

Because I think then when it gets to those tough conversations, Yeah. You've got a little bit of relationship you can build on.

Yeah.

Because I think like the data, the risk I think people who are listening would run into with what you said is that you speak up, totally agree, but how you speak up matters. That's true. Yes. And if you haven't built some credibility and say that maybe that's not your strong suit is communicating difficult things, which is very common.

Yeah.

Then, um, like you, if you've got some credibility and you built up some trust, you know, you can get past that a lot easier.

Yeah. Yeah. No, that's, that's, I think, a really good point. And we should be working, um, to build those bridges, you know, with our peers on the other side, within marketing, but within sales as well.

Agree. Yeah.

All the way across. It's so important. Yeah.

I mean, I like a simple, like for me, Things as simple as going to see what it's like for a salesperson to go update an opportunity in Salesforce or whatever. So you, like, if you've not seen like what are the steps that go into that and what they're required to do, and if you're at a kind of an organization has, you know, maybe you subscribe to one of the sales methodologies that requires you to have meet certain hurdles, right?

Yeah.

To move something from one stage to another, right? It's, it's not, it's not hard, but it's not trivial either. Right. And it's cumbersome and it's probably, unless you're in like a high volume thing, it's not something they're probably doing every day. So then when we go and give them a hard time about not doing that, it's like, yeah, yeah.

We don't understand.

Yeah. But, and then, then it can, then you can have the conversations. And by the way, Changing an email 5 different times for 5 different people, right? This is why it's, yes, it's not hard, but it's in aggregate, right? It starts to become a problem, right?

Yeah.

So.

Yeah.

Anyway, so when, like, I know you've, you kind of recently started working with a client, like, but you've also probably gone into other organizations. What are some of the things you look for or things where you, like signs that there's some of that complexity has crept into the organization and, you know, where that you need to go try to simplify some of that? Yeah.

I mean, I look at some of the things I look, I look at what people reporting on? What are people like talking about? Like, and see if there's alignment. Um, I think that's a big one. I think, you know, at a high level, if you see marketing's coming to the table with these numbers and sales is coming to the table with these numbers, which happens, um, that's a huge red flag that there, there is some missing alignment.

Mm-hmm.

And even within marketing teams, you'll start, especially larger orgs, you'll see where like different groups are kind of reporting things differently and talking about things differently. Um, so when I come in and I start talking to people, that's kind of some of the things I'm looking for. Like, you know, what, like, are we all on the same team here really?

Yeah.

Um, marching, you know, in the same band? Um, or are we really looking at these things differently? So that's probably some of my first indicators. Like what, what are the metrics and the, the things you're talking about?

Have you, um, I know like one of the things I've, I've noticed, and this is probably especially true in larger organizations, is Um, the team that I see get squeezed a lot is like a creative team, like, like getting them to understand like what's, what's their day-to-day like, um, in terms, especially within the marketing org, right? I mean, that, that to me, yeah, they tend to get squeezed from all sides, right?

Yes. Yes. And a lot of, I mean, I see it, I don't know if this is everywhere, but I've always seen it more than marketing. You've got like everyone's kind of reaching out to them, like all over. You got accounting. asking them for things, you know, like they just can't.

Yeah.

Yeah. It can get, it can get really hard. Yeah.

Yeah. It's, it's funny because a lot of the times where I've put in place like project management systems for marketing teams, the team that's usually the one driving it and really asking for it is the creative team. 'Cause they're, they're fielding so many random requests and they don't always know how their bit fits into the bigger picture of something.

Yes.

And the reason I'm saying that is like, that's also like that when I think about those process things that are getting in the way of being able to execute quickly and consistently and confidently, because they're tied into so many things, that's usually where I find like, I'll hear about those first. So it's interesting.

Yeah.

I hadn't actually thought about it until just now that you're getting it real time from me.

Yeah.

Anyway.

Yeah. And I think that's the kind of stuff too, like your creative team and ops. Like I see this with the operations teams. We can start to kind of call out because a lot of times we're the ones that see the misalignment because we see everything kind of coming at us and we can be like, oh wait, everyone's trying to do different things to the same audience or, you know, things like that. And so that's hopefully, and that's where I really want— Sometimes that marketing operations professionals don't stand, don't speak up. And they, they need to. Like, you're the one that sees it. You're kind of that linchpin in all of it. Um, start to flag. People may not listen, right? But at least you're starting to voice it and we can start having those conversations.

Yeah, I think, I think if you could do that, and if you do it in a way that is, you're thinking like it's, I was gonna say obvious, that's maybe too strong, but like it's obvious where you are, you have the best interests of the organization overall and customers, then I think you're gonna, like, you'll, you're gonna get heard more. So, yeah, pointing it out and making suggestions of how things could be simplified, kind of going back to the original thing.

Yeah.

Like, I'm, I think, I don't know where you stand, but like, I'm a big believer in, Simple, the simpler we can make things, whether it's process, technology combinations, things like that, that can accommodate, take the 80/20 rule, right? And enables us to move and pivot quickly. Like, I would take that over something that encapsulates all, you know, 100 billion different variations of something we might have to deal with every time.

And then get—

Yeah, 100%. And then trust people to make informed and good decisions along the way, right? Where there, where there are exceptions.

Yeah. Yeah. Because when you've got, you've got system and pro— systems and processes built for all the exceptions that you've just tried to make perfect, it, even if you have it perfect for a minute, it's not going to last. And 5 years down the road, you've got a mess. Everyone that built it is gone. They have no idea why the, why anything's like it. It's duct taped together. It's falling apart every time you look at it. Um, and it's really a mess to untangle. Um, yeah. Where if you just would've started simply, you would've had something sustainable.

Yeah.

And it, it, you know.

Yeah. I mean, at the end of the day, like I, where I lean towards is I, I, I would rather trust people to do the right thing with guardrails than to try to build something that, um, well, at your point, right, will likely not for the long term eliminate the like errors or problems. 'Cause it's just like chat, there are gonna be exceptions you couldn't think of.

Yeah.

Yeah. Interesting stuff. Well, I hope this helps some of our listeners out there because I think, I feel like I'm a lone voice out there sometimes. So I'm glad to have somebody else who's in. I can't help but say maybe disagree about attribution versus contribution, but I think we both agree that they both play a role in some place, right?

Someway.

It's just a matter of how we use them. So Penny, lots of fun as always. So if, if, uh, if folks want to hear a little more about you and what you're doing, want to go deeper on this with you, maybe what's the best way for them to do that?

Yeah, they can reach out to me on LinkedIn.

LinkedIn. Like, I'm just going to say, we're just going to tell people that now. Like, I think, I think I've had maybe a handful of people who's not said LinkedIn.

Yeah.

Some of it will be LinkedIn and my website or whatever, but you know. Um, all right. Well, thank you again. It's been a lot of fun. I'm glad you're able to make this work on the week after MUFSApalooza 2025. So, uh, I appreciate that. To all of our listeners and audience out there, thank you for your support. If you have ideas for topics or guests or want to be a guest, you can reach out to Naomi, Mike, or me, and we'd be happy to get the ball rolling on it. Till next time. Bye everybody.

Bye. Thank you.