The Impacts on Marketing Ops from the COVID-19 Pandemic with RJ Andaya

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 and your marketing operations career.

And welcome to another episode of OpsCast brought to you by marketingops.com. New home for the, for the MoPros. I'm your host, Michael Hartman, joined today by Mike Rizzo. Our co-host Naomi Liu is unavailable today, so it's just the two of us. So you're gonna have to suffer through that. Mike, what year is this?

It is the year of the MoPro, and it's officially a thing now. marketingops.com launches. We got the MoPros community. This is great. I'm excited.

Yeah. And so we're recording this on— it's almost the end of June, which means that summer camp is less than 2 weeks away. Is that right?

Yeah.

Wow. All right. So summer camp in Seattle. Can't wait. Awesome stuff.

All right. It's going to be fun.

Let's get into this. So today we are going to be talking about some of the impacts that have happened through the pandemic and after the pandemic in terms of not just business in general, but for marketing ops pros, and probably might touch on RevOps as well a little bit. And to help us talk through that today, we have our guest RJ Andhaya, who is currently Director of Marketing Operations at Observe.ai. Prior to that, RJ worked in multiple roles in marketing ops, marketing strategy, demand gen, general marketing. He's kind of done a little bit of everything in those areas. RJ, thanks for joining us today.

Hey, Michael and Mike. Great to have you both here. Thanks for being here. I'm excited. So I just joined GoPros a couple of months ago. A lot of great knowledge from that Slack already that I'm getting from it. So super excited to be a guest here.

That's awesome, man.

Yeah, fantastic.

Glad you're a guest and thanks for the feedback. And, you know, as always, keep it coming. We appreciate it.

Yeah, and as we learn, as I learned, I still need to do it, is like last week we, I need to go set up a profile, and you do too, on marketingops.com with the new capabilities there. So huge, huge opportunities down the road there.

I know.

So why don't we do this? I know we want to talk about kind of your observations and our, like all of us, on kind of the impacts of the pandemic, but why don't we start a little bit first, you know, we talked about your background a little bit and that you've covered a lot of ground in your, in your journey. So, but curious how you, can you share with the community or listeners what, how you led to your, how your career ended up in marketing ops?

Yeah, of course. I think like everyone's, like how everyone got their, you know, got to the stage of their career where they're at today. So like myself, I really wasn't looking to get into, I didn't even know what marketing ops was before. I was an accounting major. I found that to be boring, not more for me. So I switched to AI.

It's okay. It's boring for a lot of people. But hey, to your point, some people really enjoy it.

But I do like numbers though. So, and I was pretty technical as a kid. Like I built computers, I was a gamer, like I was pretty nerdy and geeky. I switched to MIS. Um, it was a good blend of like business and IT in it. Um, and I took marketing for GE. Um, I actually found that to be very boring too. So I was not expecting myself to be in the marketing field at all after college. Um, but you know what, when I graduated, I, um, I needed experience, right? Everybody needed that. So I took the first internship I could get. And the first one that I got an offer for was a marketing internship. So I took it, you know, I was pretty open-minded. I'm like, it's— I thought to myself, it's probably a lot different than what it was in a classroom. So I'm like, you know, let's go. And I'm getting paid for it. So that's a huge plus. So I landed that role. And really, that was more of like a Swiss Army knife. type of role. It was a lot of things like graphic design, you know, digital marketing, managing a little bit of budget for digital, managing the tech stack reporting. It's pretty much like everything under the marketing umbrella as a generalist type of role. And it's a small company. We have like 50 people. We have just one product marketing leader. a field marketer, a web designer, and there's me. So I got to do a lot as an intern, anything under the marketing sun, really. And, you know, I found out all the stuff that I was really good at and made me really shine in that internship. I got Employee of the Month in my second month as an intern. And the things that really made me shine—

That's awesome.

Yeah, it's like, I'm like, I don't know how I got this. It's my second month. But that really made me shine was things under the marketing operations umbrella, right? Because some of the first things I did there were a lot of analysis and setting up their CRM and integrating it with their marketing automation. At that time it was Act-On. Again, I was the only marketer that's kind of like doing that for them because nobody was doing that. So I found out that skills I was good at really are in that marketing ops umbrella, and I didn't even know it was a real function until I decided it was time to move on to a company with more growth potential. And when I was looking for jobs and I was typing my skills on LinkedIn, on Indeed, everywhere, All the roles that were showing up were marketing ops, and I was like, oh, this is— so marketing ops is a thing. So I applied for that next job. It was a marketing ops specialist role, and, you know, that's kind of like my path that led me here.

That's incredible. Yeah, I mean, it's interesting. I was— when you were describing that internship, I was thinking about my the co-op job I had while I was still in college at the time was IBM. And yeah, I think there's something about that stage where you're like, you don't know any better. Like, you see, just like, you like to just, if you like to tinker, right, and that kind of stuff, right, it's really easy to find opportunities to do that. So yeah, so fun stuff. All right, so let's, you know, we were gonna talk about impacts of the pandemic. I thought maybe what we could start with Is not necessarily like we— I think we could dive into some details, you know, along the way here. We've got a while. But yeah, maybe like top level, like what are you seeing as, as like major impact from the pandemic? And I, and I suspect there's gonna be some that were generally positive and some that are generally negative. And I don't know kind of what your thoughts are. I don't— I'm sure I'll have opinions though, 'cause I'm not short on that.

Yeah, I think, um, so I mean, if I have to summarize it, um, to like 4 different things, there was definitely a need for a quick turnaround on digital transformation, right? That was the number one, I'm pretty sure that's the number one thing that everyone in marketing ops saw during the pandemic. You know, gone were the days when you just walk up to someone for a request, right? Or explain what the data means, like all of that has to be done digitally now. How do you do that? How do you transfer information cross-functionally? in a streamlined way, right? How do you generate insights and make sure those get to the right people quick enough? You know, there's a lot of that that really happened. At first, it was kind of like, you know, a lot of that's needed before the pandemic, but it happened at a lot slower pace. And when the pandemic happened, it's like, we need this yesterday. So that was probably one of the biggest things that I've seen. The other one's probably— there's a lot. I mean, of course, the biggest impact also is kind of like how we market. You know, without events, without seeing people in person, what do you do, right?

Mm-hmm.

So there's a big shift on going digital. And I saw a huge increase in our tech budget for advertising and also how can we do that better? Can we add ABM to our portfolio, right? And an increase of budget and tech additions as well to help people be more productive. And also enable better reporting and automation. The last thing is, you know, accountability was huge before, but I feel like it became even bigger during the pandemic and even up to now. Like, from a high level, there was a lot more focus on budget management and ROI, especially there was a, you know, there was a recession, a short recession that happened during COVID So there's a lot more eyes on that, and on a macro level, there's a bigger need for cross-functional alignment. And again, a streamlined way to really just transfer information in a distributed environment and being able to make quick shifts in strategy in, you know, in a new kind of business world, right?

Yeah, so, um, I'm glad you kind of broke that last bit down. I was trying to— I, I was going to ask some questions about that, what you meant by that. But, um, so what— so let's go a little level, another level deeper here. So one of the things you talked about just then, or I think you kind of alluded to it, is that prioritization is becoming more important, right, through this for MOPS. So when you say that, like, are you talking about what projects do we do? Is it prioritization of campaign activities and support? Is it a little bit of both? Like, how are you— like, when you say that, what are you thinking about?

Yeah, I think what really changed with us here at Abserve, here at my current role, is, you know, focus on focus and prioritization on key segments that we target, right? Where do we want to spend our time on, both on sales and on the marketing side, our time and money? So there's constant iteration of our ICP and more regular reporting of it and our core focus of our personas that we want to, that we sell to, right? And spend our time on. So that was huge. And, you know, maybe, maybe like the first quarter you don't see a lot of shifts, right? But 3 quarters down the line or 4 quarters down the line, as you release more features, more enterprise-level capabilities, you start seeing more of those. You start seeing a gradual shift in your audience and who you're targeting. So there's a lot of like constant iteration of that to make sure we stay focused and we keep evolving our sales and marketing motions to where our market's going.

That's, um, so Observe, you guys have been around for, the organization itself has been around for a little while. I was just trying to do some quick Googling. It looks like funding-wise, it's been established for for quite a bit. There's been, I think it looks like an acquisition. How big is your team that you have that you're sort of working amongst across marketing? And then I guess specifically, are there more than just one of you on the marketing ops team?

So the marketing team is about like 15 people right now. We have a couple of roles open. So if anyone's looking for a new role or a new job and You know, you've been affected by the layoffs, come to our website. We have a lot of roles open everywhere.

I love that. Plug it, plug it, plug it.

Are they listed on marketingops.com though? That's what I wanna know.

They should be.

I'll list them up, don't worry. And then roles open, I might open up a role soon, hopefully to kind of help me out 'cause I'm only a one-man team right now. But we have 15 people in marketing, we have 3 designers that we work with, you know, on a day-to-day basis in India. And across the board, we have 250+ employees across the board.

Okay.

Yeah.

It's a sizable organization you have to support.

Yeah. And we're a distributed workforce. We're primarily remote at the moment.

Okay, cool.

And then when you're talking about sort of these, you know, the way you're prioritizing projects and you're shifting ICP, ideal customer profile, for anybody that didn't know that acronym. Is that coming top down so far as you can tell? Is it almost like OKRs that are set at the top level of the organization and then trickle down to your team and then you're making decisions on how the go-to-market motion might change? And then Sorry for adding sort of a layered question here, but as it's being consumed and you're deciding on what that prioritization is, for how long are you focused on that? Just, is it a month? Is it a quarter? How long do you guys usually go?

Yeah, it's a great question. So I was the first marketing ops hire in here and I started this ICP exercise last year. There wasn't really an ask for it, but I did notice that we need some focus on where we're putting our efforts. So I ran the first exercise around last summer and I started doing it quarterly after that.

Okay.

Now it became a real thing that we do, and I'm currently trying to do this on the renewal side. You know, the acquisition is one thing, right? It's like, what's your ideal customer profile from an acquisition standpoint? But we need to look at who's actually renewing with us and who is— what companies are we expanding our footprint in? So that's the current exercise that I'm trying to evolve this ICP exercise into. And what was the next question?

Sorry, yeah, it was layered and I apologize. So to reiterate, so it sounds like you initiated the ICP discovery, which is great, and sort of focus, which for all of our listeners out there, like, just goes to show you, you know, someone in a marketing ops role can really establish a norm that has as incredible value to the organization. And if you're not organized in that way, hopefully you find a different way to do it. So ICP is one of them. And then the second part, RJ, that I was asking is how long are you focused on the ICP before you sort of do any type of reallocation of funding and maybe target messaging and all that stuff?

Yeah, so it depends. It depends on when we see a shift in in that core ICP, right? So that's why we do it every quarter. We didn't really see a big shift until recently, to be honest. I've been running this for a year, but for the past year, we haven't really released that many features. But this year we have. We released a couple of enterprise features, and everyone's— if you're a fast-growing company, your, you know, your goals to try to move upmarket, right? So we're trying to see if we can find trends that prove that we are moving there. And there's some evidence that we are. We might not be quite at the enterprise level yet, but we are moving at the, at the higher end of the mid-market as we define it here. So that's when we started shifting our strategy from like the smaller end of the mid-market to the higher end of the mid-market as it is today, and that we're focusing on, right? We're not, we might not be focusing more on the, on the billion-dollar companies just yet, but, you know, we've seen an evolution that we are moving upmarket from the smaller SMBs to the higher end of that mid-market. So now we're, now we're spending more money on that, more time. We've also defined the key industries where we win the most. And with deals that move the— with deals that move fastest for us with the highest velocity. And we're focusing on those 5 key industries as part of that ICP today.

You don't have to—

the mid-market, right? And then to the higher end of mid-market. So that's kind of like how it's evolved.

That's awesome. You don't have to reveal any secrets of who you're target audience is by any stretch, but I am curious and I know a consistent theme in the community is the how's the cookie made. And so if you could unpack a little bit about maybe the tooling that you have in place to be able to understand the deal velocity and how you came about figuring out which industries are good or potentially better. Maybe just share a little bit about, like, the tech stack and the process and programs you do to analyze that information and the people you work with, you know, if it's not just tech, but also people. That's really helpful for folks to try to figure out, like, how they shape their career and then maybe how to go answer some of those really challenging questions inside their org too.

Yeah, absolutely. I work super, super closely with our sales ops leader. And we pretty much built this tech stack together in close alignment. We have Salesforce, we have HubSpot right now as our marketing automation tool. And to run this ICP, we also acquired ZoomInfo, right? That will kind of help us measure our TAM to help us look at how many companies are in our space that are in our target markets. And then analyze kind of like our deal size or deal velocity and all that. So with analyzing this ICP, there's a lot of data work that had to be involved, right? Because this involves personas, this involves revenue sizes, this involves industries. So this involves like data from all different objects in Salesforce. There's a lot of work to do there. And in order to report on this, you have to standardize your data and clean it, right? You can't have like 100 different iterations of retail. It's impossible to be able to report on it that way. So we had to create a higher level that, you know, categorizes these industries into a higher level of industry that we can report on to maybe like, you know, like 25 to 30 different values, and a lot of those live in— those rules live in ZoomInfo, actually, you know, as you enrich your leads, your accounts, you can have automated settings in ZoomInfo, like if they belong in this industry, make this a value, right? So it's pretty easy to do there. As far as cleaning up the data goes. And then from there, it's really just like reporting in Salesforce on the opportunity data, right? Like how fast does the lead move to conversion? And from conversion, how fast does that lead move or that opportunity go to stage 2, stage 3, all the way to closed lost or closed won, right? How fast do those deals move? And we created a dashboard for this to kind of show this to the whole org too. It shows like lead to MQL conversion, lead to SAL conversion. SAL is pretty much a meeting for us. SQL conversion all the way down to opportunity conversion, right? So now we can kind of see like that high-level conversion for everything and then we just break it down by like different industries and different types of personas that are converting. In a standardized way. For personas, we have to standardize the different departments and functions that we target and also the different title levels like manager level, director level, C-level, and who's really converting and what the roles are in the opportunity. Who's the economic— who's the economic buyer? Who is the decision maker in the opportunity as defined by sales? We also created a custom object in Salesforce called gaps. So these are pretty much product gaps that our customers and prospects report to be blockers for the product, right?

Ooh, I like that idea.

That is awesome. That's really interesting.

Because of this, I was able to actually like use this data to influence some road mapping decisions. Because if you overlay this data to the current opportunity data that we have and see the gaps in it and break it down by mid-market, SMBs, and enterprise, each segment has different gaps, right? So you can see like all the gaps reported in enterprise. So if you wanna move to enterprise segment, if you wanna move upmarket, these are the gaps most reported. So these are probably like the gaps that we need to cover in our product to be able to move up there. So we built a pretty good tech stack here that identifies a lot of that. So I'm pretty proud of what we've done in the year.

Yeah, so this is, I mean, that last bit about like taking that, gap data and feeding it back to product is, I think that's phenomenal. So I think right there, there's like the gem for every, all of our listeners to take back if they're in that kind of company. So one of the things that's coming through there, right, the tech stack, when you talked about this tech stack, every, just about everything you talked about had to do with, you know, data, whether it's enrichment, quality, completeness, or reporting and analytics. You didn't really talk about Like, how are we using this to go to market, right? What are our go-to-market motions and how? So yeah, I know you and I talked about this a little bit when we were kind of prepping for this, that you talked about like there's this, you seeing a shift of more need to focus on data in general, I'll generalize at that, versus like, I think we said sort of campaign support or campaign operations if we wanted to use the 4 pillars kind of model. But, you know, is this exactly what you're talking about? Like, are you, Are you spending more time doing analysis and deep understanding, although quickly, because like you talked about, speed is an important thing that's come out of the pandemic? But then are you then able to then do maybe fewer things or maybe more targeted things? Like, how has it affected that side of the business? And is that— Second part of that is how much of that is you supporting that and doing the heavy lifting of whether it's building out emails or campaigns or whatever, or do you partner with other parts of the marketing team to do that?

Definitely partnering with other parts of the marketing team. A lot of this is enablement for me to be able to spend time on these strategic initiatives. Like, you know, you can't be doing everything, right? Like, it's impossible, especially if there's only one of you. So a lot of enablement comes to this. To make sure that the team is trained to use the tools that you have, that they understand what's going into the data that we're presenting and what they mean, and also make sure— making sure that there's some sort of, like, approval processes in place to make sure no one's, like, going off the rails and, you know, sending emails without approvals.

Can I ask you— can I ask a question about that? Because this is something that I have struggled with, how rigid to make those kinds of approval processes in different kinds of organizations. So are you— do you have a very, like, a really rigid one that says you can't deploy something until it's approved by a certain person or 2? Or do you say you can't deploy until you either get approval or an SLA has expired and you basically, like, whoever was supposed to approve it didn't do it in time, so you're going to go forward? How are you handling that? Or are you doing, like, is it very specific about what they look for, or are they looking, like, is it more, I'll call it principle-based, right? I could go into a whole other analogy about soccer versus football, but I won't. But just Curious about that because I think that is— I know from my standpoint, that is a struggle I have had is, like, to what degree do you sort of force an approval process? Because I have always— what I keep finding on that is that slow— again, going to the speed thing, right? The more of that you have, the slower you are able to move, and that is— I think that would be my fear.

Yeah, we are trying to find a good balance of it. So It's not a rigid process at all, really. It's just about permissions that people have in our marketing automation platform. Like, people have edit rights to emails to be able to create those, right? But people don't have send rights. So, you know, before sending those emails, they have to log into me on monday.com, which is what we use right now for a project management tool. For me to check the email to make sure that the list is right, the links work, tests have been sent, and then from there, you know, I can say, yep, you know, I'll go ahead and press send tomorrow morning, or I'll schedule it at 8 o'clock. So people don't have those rights to, you know, really mess anything up that you can't fix. So we try to create a process that's Processes, making it, you know, that makes it easy for everyone to do their jobs, go faster, but at the same time mitigating some of the risks that might come from giving somebody too much permission, right, or too much control into something.

Sure. All right, so I have a follow-up question. This is maybe HubSpot specific, so I'm gonna have to lean on you, both of you 2, because I don't have the HubSpot experience. Mike knows this. So one of the things, again, going to like review and approval, right? What I've been trying to push people to in my last few stops is that, you know, we need to sort of prioritize the level of scrutiny we put things through before we go live with them, if you will. And part of that thought process is, you know, what can be changed after we, quote, go live, right? And Yeah, the only one that really you can't get back is email, right? But everything else, like if it's a webpage update or a display ad or search ads, things like that, I think you've got more opportunities to do that. Um, so are you, are you managing that? Do you have that same kind of process that you enable through HubSpot and roles and, you know, this stuff for different kinds of tactics? I don't even know if it's possible, so if I'm way off here on HubSpot, let me know.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So you touched up on it, right? So the things that you can't get back, like emails, definitely, definitely be a little bit more strict on that. But for web pages, we do keep those open. We have a pretty big— not pretty big, not really that big of a team, but we have a pretty solid team of of web designers that know their way around HubSpot, you know, obviously like super knowledgeable about formatting web pages and landing pages. So they get permissions to— they have permissions to edit those web pages as long as they, you know, for as much as they can. And they also have publish rights for those pages as well. But we do have some steps in place to make sure, like, you know, there's QA in place, right? Like, let's say we're doing a launch, for example, and we're creating a bunch of landing pages for it. You know, this has to go through QA from, you know, from the content owner who gets the final say on whether the content's final enough to be published or not. Right. So at the end of the day, we have people calling shots on whether it's finalized or not for them to be able to publish it. But we, you know, as far as like gating who can, you know, click publish and not click unpublish, wouldn't go that far.

Got it. Mike, curious, so what has your experience been with that? Like, I guess maybe Mainly with HubSpot, but in general as well.

Yeah, the, um, so HubSpot, depending on what part of HubSpot you're talking about, the permissioning is pretty robust. Like from a user provisioning permissioning perspective, you can get pretty granular on read/write and different objects that they have access to. Being able to create but not publish pages is certainly a thing. You know, as it relates to some of my brief time in the Marketo instance, like the whole, you know, approve a draft type of functionality, I know is limited probably to certain roles or functions and permissions for Marketo users. That concept doesn't really exist. Like, there isn't a sense of approve and publish kind of step in the process. Unless you're sort of looking at like the HubSpot CMS where they actually have a staging environment where you can go from staging to production and kind of go through that flow. But on the landing page side, it doesn't really follow the same, the same mechanics. And certainly not on things like a workflow, which in Marketo, you know, your entire program is pretty much a workflow. So. There's also sort of that missing element of rigor around, you know, who should have the right to approve this thing and send it out the door. You can, however, at least limit who can hit publish and then sort of build in those manual processes. It sounds like RJ did on the HubSpot side. So there's, there's definitely some limitations, but also enough there that you can have control, I think.

Right, sorry for grilling everybody. I was just like, that's an area where I think we all— every place I've ever been has struggled with how much review.

There's always a balance of how strict do you want to be with these rules versus how fast do you want the team to move, right? And when you're in a startup where everything's kind of like A fire drill. You have to keep it open with some sort of controls. Yeah.

And I, you know, oftentimes in the startup environment, just speaking from my own experience, there were so many occasions in which an email would hit my desk ready for, you know, quote unquote, ready for deployment. And I read through the copy and the content, and I was like, I don't think this is what you want to put out into the world. Like, I don't think anybody actually read this thing. Not at least for the audience you told me I was supposed to send it to. And so those provisionary steps that need to be there are really difficult to manage, right? So it's even before it gets built and deployed, like, is this the right message? And that fundamentally is one of the things that like, I struggled with in marketing operations was like removing myself from being this, like, I don't know, copyright reviewer or what have you, right? Like, I shouldn't be implementing, you know, the content and reading it and going, oh God, like, what's wrong with this?

Right.

It's just not your role, right? It shouldn't be your role. To that end, if you see something, say something, folks. Like, if you think that maybe there's a problem, at least voice it.

Yeah. I was just gonna say, right? Yeah, it shouldn't be your role, but also you shouldn't totally abdicate.

Yes, don't.

There's some amount of responsibility.

Yeah, do take responsibility for it. But it is such a struggle, which is reinforcing the importance of some of the work we're doing in the community. And the reason why we do these interviews with folks like you, RJ, is to try to understand what is the function of your role and what should you be working on. And reviewing content and copy and the messaging strategy for an audience is certainly not one of them. But if you see something, say something.

Yeah, I think, but you just brought up 2 different things, right? Like reviewing copy, if you're in the middle of building something, it's like, it, unless you're so like, unless you've got so much volume of stuff going through that you just literally can't spend the time to scan through an email content, or then yeah, I mean, I like, it shouldn't be a top priority. Messaging strategy, that's a whole nother thing to me, right? I think that To me, that's like clearly shouldn't fall into marketing ops in sort of what I think of its core function now.

It's marketing ops.

Yeah, it's like demand gen, right? Totally.

Totally. But I will also make the argument that if it's at the stage of build, right, like it is ready for build, that means it's ready for build, right? It is not— there shouldn't be copy review happening anymore. Like we've hopefully gone through enough cycles.

Yeah, I mean, that's one thing I also struggle with all the time, right? Whenever we launch a campaign, it's like we shouldn't be changing changing content the day before we go live with something.

But it sounds like we all face the same problem, so we're all in the same boat, folks.

Well, yeah, so this is, again, another sort of— this hits me hard because I think several places I've been is you think you know who's got the final approval until it's about to deploy, and then someone with a certain title thinks that they have to review it and that their input is absolutely required. And it can even be good input, right?

Sure.

But it's at the wrong point. The other, like, I always feel like we needed clarity on whose approval. Ideally, it's a single person and everybody else gets input, but it's input, not veto power. And I see too many places where input is considered absolute, regardless of where it comes from, and that somebody, anybody, virtually anybody can say no, like, we are just not going to. And those things do 2 things. One, they get you into sort of the cycle of slowing things down, especially, and it is usually towards the end, right, when that comes up. And then they also, what I found is, It's like I used this term earlier this week with somebody who's like, it becomes, you know, the Frankenstein pit of content, right? So someone's like, they're not thinking, looking at it necessarily all the way through. They're like, oh, I need to fix this little like portion of one sentence in the copy, but then it makes the whole flow of it change, right? They don't actually like, they don't stop and go, I'm gonna read through this. Out loud, like I'm gonna say it out loud. Like, how will this sound to somebody who's reading it if they were actually like, if I was to say this out loud to them, would it actually make sense? And I think there's a lot of places where I've seen that things fall apart in that kind of scenario.

Yep, yep, me too. It's unfortunate.

Did I say I have a little PTSD from this kind of stuff?

We all do.

I'll tell you of an example. There was one time when we were doing a launch, just as an example from my career, not this job specifically or my last one. We were doing a launch and, you know, like you said, a person with a certain title comes in on the day before the launch and decides to change up every— the entire copy of the database email announcement that we were about to send I'm like, this is not supposed to happen. And this is where marketing ops really comes in, right, to really try to enforce the process and make sure that everybody abides by it. We're trying to move fast. We're trying to be streamlined. We're trying to avoid mistakes. This is exactly how you make mistakes, if you keep making last-minute changes like this.

So— Yeah, the audience can't see me vigorously nodding my head.

Yeah. Oh yes, yes, yes, yes.

Oh, I'm sorry, I could probably go on about this and rant about it for a while, but, um, I think it's probably best we move on. Well, RJ, this has been a great conversation. I think our audience will have gotten a lot out of it as well. Um, just some of the key things that you talked about and what you've done, and I think a good inspiration for especially what you've done is sort of starting from marketing ops, doing things like ICP Definition and all that. So I think that's great. So thank you for that. Great to have you. If folks want to kind of keep up with what you're doing or want to be in touch with you, what's the best way for them to do that?

LinkedIn is going to be the best way for me. Send me a request. I'll make sure we connect. Or Slack me in the Marketing Ops Slack channel.

Awesome.

Fantastic.

Arjun, thank you for joining us. Really appreciate it. And I think giving people a lens of how to think about marketing ops as you enter an organization has been really helpful, so appreciate your insights.

Awesome. Thank you guys for having me. It was fun.

Absolutely. Well, as always, thank you to those of you who are listening and have been supporting our little project here. It's been a lot of fun. It always continues to be. We are excited about the additional lineup of guests we have planned over the next several weeks. Watch for that. I mentioned summer camp at the beginning, so if you haven't, you still think you can fit in summer camp in Seattle, July 11th, Mike, right? July 11th through 13th.

July 11th through 13th, 2022.

Um, I, I'm gonna say this and I don't know if that's true, but if I'm guessing there might still be a few slots open, but—

I have like maybe 1 or 2 slots open. All right, so if you're, you're hankering for an in-person experience with the marketing ops professionals, you're probably going to want to reach out to me ASAP because I got about one room left, I think.

There you go. All right. So hopefully by the time this gets published, that will still be true. If not, sorry, you're out of luck. Anyway, so with that, thank you everyone. Continue to send us your feedback, suggestions, and support. If you want to be a guest or you know somebody who would be a good guest, reach out to Mike or Naomi or me. And with that, we're a wrap. See you next time.

Bye.