The MOps Leap: Transitioning into Strategic Marketing Roles with Rick Collins

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 all the MoPros out there. I'm your host, Michael Hartman. Flying solo as Mike is right in the thick of Spring Fling 2025, the inaugural one. So, and then Naomi's tied up. And so, uh, we are going to power through. So joining me today to share about his career journey is Rick Collins. Rick is currently Vice President of Demand Generation at ConnectWise. Rick started his career in IT, eventually as the head of IT, CRM, and more with United Way of Central Ohio.

Hi, Rick.

When he joined ConnectWise, he pivoted to a role as a senior marketing systems analyst. Since then, he has moved into leadership roles within marketing operations and then into his current role of vice president of demand generation. So, Rick, thanks for joining me today.

No, thanks for having me.

So this is, this is gonna be fun. So we, we talked before, and I look forward to sharing the, the story with everybody on our— who's listening, um, because we want to get into this conversation. But I think a lot of what was really intriguing and why I think I reached out to you to be on is I think it was interesting that your path went through marketing operations into, I'll call it a more general marketing leadership role. And I think a lot of people are always thinking about like, if I'm in marketing ops, right, what's the next step and what's the next step after that? And I think it hasn't always been clear and sometimes there hasn't been a lot of belief that you could move. into more of a general marketing leadership one. So I think that's part of why I was curious. So why don't you maybe talk through your career? I did a very high level, right? Talk through your career a little more detail. And my longtime listeners know that one of the things I'm always interested in is if there are pivotal moments or decisions or people that had maybe an outsized impact in the trajectory and direction of your career.

Yeah, no, happy to. And yeah, is marketing ops marketing, right? Is that what we're going to get down to?

Oh, no, no, we've covered that. But yeah, if you want to go there, we can.

No, I'm kidding. I'm kidding. I've seen them all. They've been fun dialogue. No, I, you know, I was never— I never saw myself kind of going down into an IT path, even though most of my career was kind of down IT. I was more of a— I was an international business and Spanish major in college. I thought I was going to be, I don't know, an importer-exporter or something related to like business within Latin America and Doing something related to that. Really didn't have it mapped out. It was just kind of an aspect of where I thought I'd go. And when I graduated college many, many years ago, I started to try to find, all right, where am I going to land? What is this going to look like? I just happened to find myself in IT and was pretty good at it. I picked up systems really well. I was able to understand applications. I was in QA is where I started. And so even What you're talking about, what pivotal moments, that year and a half that I had in a telco in QA is I was working directly with developers. I was testing systems. I was learning automation. I learned how to do light coding. I was— I didn't have a computer at my house growing up. I wasn't one of those people who was like super into it. I just kind of picked it up. I guess it just fit for me. And so I kind of parlayed that into my next role, and I was implementing software for a software company. So I got kind of my first taste of SaaS. This is like the early 2000s. And so much different world, but it was a lot of moving from mainframe computers to server, client-server-based applications. And so got into SQL and really was kind of liaison between the tech and business. And so that's where—

Yeah.

kind of found my niche was I fit well kind of balancing and understanding the business world and being able to work with non-technical users and people. A lot of the people I was working with at that time in that role was county government employees. And so a lot of people have never used a mouse before and transitioning them from a green screen mainframe computer. Some of the listeners probably don't even know what that is, but—

Oh, I do.

Yeah, I'm sure you did, right? So they were going from HP 3000, these old, old-school mainframe green screen applications, and moving them to a client-server-based application. And so I was training them, I was implementing the software. I would have to remote into their machines at times, and they'd have to, you know, is the modem plugged in? Try this. It's all that kind of stuff.

Right.

And really, that just highlights kind of that that bridge that I kind of served between the technical and the non-technical, because then I was working directly with the developers. Hey, here's what we're seeing on the ground. Here's the areas that we might need to do. I was building the databases. We'd have a local copy of the database. And so I would set things up based on the requirements of the end user. So it was a lot of that, which—

Sure.

I definitely took that into once I got into a more marketing role and kind of leveraging that business impact and understanding the impact and the end user aspect of things. And so when I got to United Way, I was over IT, you know, I had multiple roles throughout the software company. And then when I went to United Way, it was really kind of a, it was sort of marketing ops before we knew what marketing ops was. And it, but it was a little more than that because it was kind of a, it was a CIO essentially with an outsourced IT company, a managed service provider.

Sure. Okay.

Kind of took care of the day-to-day IT. And I just looked at, you know, looked at holistically, but a big part of it was building out CRM and marketing automation platform. And so I was heavily involved with the worldwide organization of United Way, trying to build a common donor management system powered by Salesforce. And so got very heavy on the marketing side, decided I wanted to move to Tampa. It was too cold in Ohio as a— I'm a Buckeye. And so decided my wife and I were like, let's, let's go to the beach and start over. And so we, when I found ConnectWise, found a role there in marketing ops, didn't know what marketing ops was really, but the way it was described, the way the role was described, it's like, yeah, that's kind of me. I remember talking to the CMO at the time. He's like, we're kind of looking for a unicorn, someone who understands tech really well and can dive into the systems and the process, but can understand the users and work with the business on sales and marketing. Look, well, that's kind of feel like that you're describing me. And so kind of fit well. And I saw a lot of upside there. And so, you know, I was a one-man marketing ops person. Didn't mean we didn't have those functions. Some of the functions that eventually came under me under marketing ops, we had email, right? We had CMS and kind of the front-end web dev and that kind of stuff.

Yeah.

We had some project management. But this is like 2017. So marketing tech, you know, I don't know what Scott Brinker's slide was. It probably was not more than 1,000 at that time. It was small.

Yeah.

Yeah. So it just hadn't become a reality, but I think I joined at the right time and it was kind of the explosion and the formalization of marketing ops. And so I, you know, proved my value pretty quickly and kind of made the case. I'm the one who approached the CMO about formalizing marketing ops into a team. He aligned with that. And so we started to kind of build that out and build out a team from there. And we acquired companies, got acquired by PE. So a lot of things, it was kind of good timing as well as just the landscape changing.

So I guess, I think you said a couple of things that, so first, like 3 things that came, kind of caught my attention in that, like one, so first off, my wife, we were talking about this right before we got on, she's in involved with nonprofits world. And so I am now, because of that, becoming familiar with Salesforce's version for nonprofits. It's a lot of the same things, but there's certain things that are different. It's been interesting. It's an interesting learning experience. But it like, it transfers, right? So that's like another thing, right? Like I can help, like I can still help her when she's trying to like, I need a report that does this, right? I can, Yeah. Find my way around. I think it's interesting that you came out of college without a, like, what would be like typical, like a computer science or engineering type degree, and you ended up in that role. It reminds me of when I first got out of college, because I did, I came out of an engineering school and sort of something adjacent to computer science. And so, I started at PricewaterhouseCoopers in the consulting practice, and one of the things they did is they sent new hires off to learn like how to, how to code the way they do it, right? How to do IT projects. And I remember in my cohort, this, this one woman who really stood out to me, who like most of us had some sort of at least experience with computers and yada yada. This one girl, she, um, sorry, one woman, she was, had been a, she was a religion major at Duke. And I remember just being like, oh, she is going to struggle, but she didn't. And it really sort of changed my viewpoint like that. I think there's this, just because somebody's got on paper, right, what looks like something that doesn't make, make a match, like there are other characteristics that are important. She knew how to think, she knew how to learn. Um, she knew how to ask good questions, like all those things applied. And I suspect you probably had something like that as well, right?

Yeah, I think a lot of people in marketing ops and in marketing in general, as we talk about kind of the curiosity, and I think someone who is naturally curious and who wants to go deeper and understand, I think that's, I look for that when I'm hiring people, whether it's for marketing ops or RevOps or a general marketing role in demand gen. I think that just sets people apart when they do that. And I think it can drive so much innovation and digging. I definitely had that. I learned it at times, but I also kind of had that, it was a little bit innate. And so I remember, you know, early in my career going to a developer and, you know, a customer had an issue. And so, hey, here's the issue they're describing, what's going on? It's like, oh, you know, did you check this? No, I didn't check that. We need to check that. Did you check this? And so he's kind of giving me like, here's the way to solve, to try to narrow down and diagnose what's wrong.

To diagnose.

And so, it's almost like, all right, I can do that. So, then I started to back into things. And then, you know, if it was a stored procedure fix in SQL, like, all right, show me how you did that. And it's like, not just teaching.

I haven't heard stored procedure in so long. Wow.

Going way back, right? I'm older than I look. But that was kind of what took me down this path of, I'm not just gonna wait for somebody to answer it. find the solution myself and I'm going to learn how to do these things. And so I kind of, I really started that journey early on in my career and that kind of fueled me as I advanced up into different roles as well.

So I said 3, that was 2 things. So the 3rd thing that was interesting to me is the story about how you ended up at ConnectWise in that, did you say it was the CEO or the CMO that Described like what they were looking for as a unicorn.

The CMO. Yeah.

CMO.

Yeah.

So I think it's interesting that, like, what do you think that, what do you think happened that helped him see that you, even though on, again, on paper, you didn't look like you would probably be a match that, that gave him the confidence that would, that would work?

Yeah, it's a good question. I think, so I interviewed with, man, I feel like 10, 11 people there. It was a, I remember going through a barrage of interviews. And it was digital marketing. It was their web development resource, their internal development resources, all their VPs of marketing, him. There were a ton of different audiences that I was interviewing with.

That's a huge number.

I know it was a lot of people.

Wow.

It was an intense interview process. And I think they had interviewed, what I Pretty sure if they, if I remember right, this was a while ago, it was 8 years ago, but they had been through a lot of people. They had interviewed a ton of people and every person they would interview, they were either too technical and didn't connect with the business side or they weren't technical enough. And they, at least from the interview process, they felt like they were kind of lacking in one area too much that they didn't think they could pull it off. And so I guess I blended that mix pretty well. I was able to connect with the more dev-heavy or IT technical resources. And then with the business side, I was really able to connect there. And so I think that he understood that and saw and said, this, I think this is the person that we're looking for that kind of fills both of those roles. And ultimately what he had a vision for, I think that a lot of this credit to him. He had a vision for what the role could be and what he was looking for. And yeah, the rest is history.

That's great. So in that transition period, yeah, so like you were a team of one, so maybe you had some connections to people who had other sort of skills that you could lean on as well. But like, what, can you talk a little more specifically about maybe skills from your prior experience that you were able to leverage as you moved it From, I don't know what to call it, maybe general IT kind of support to the marketing domain?

Yeah, I mean, the troubleshooting skills was like immediate. I think that and then requirements, like understanding requirements, high-level requirements and how to challenge a vendor or an external resource. I think those are 2 stories I can remember vividly that were maybe the first month that I started. So Lead routing, lead management was a big issue that we were struggling with at the time. Had a lot of complex rules, had a homegrown system. And so I spent probably my first few weeks, months really understanding the system and how it worked. And then I remember we had an external group that was bringing in a tool, like a partner management tool that they wanted to implement. We had a homegrown CRM system, a homegrown lead management system at the time. weren't on Salesforce or Marketo like we are now, but they wanted to create a custom integration. And so I went to this meeting with our head of internal development and they had sent over some requirements ahead of time. So I read through all the requirements and then built out like, all right, here's the questions I have that this is how our system works. How are you going to do this? And kind of just not, I don't think it was anything too crazy, but it was just kind of like— I understand how our systems work in the month that I've been here for the most part. And here's what I think we're going to need to do for how you're trying to connect with us. It's different than Salesforce and having a lead object, a contact object, and a company object, like those types of things. And being able to show that knowledge, I think that helped, like, okay, this guy knows what he's talking about, to our internal development lead. And that those relationships, I think, you know, my relationship building was something I really pride myself in and really kind of concentrated on and trying to branch out into different aspects of the company. So I think that was one. The second scenario is we have multiple products, we're a multiple business unit company, and one of our products has a trial. It's more of a PLG motion. We didn't call it PLG back then, but you get into a trial and you get trial nurture and then you convert to purchase. We were having trial issues. The trial was not working and nobody could really Diagnose what was going on.

From a product standpoint? Yeah.

So like signing the form, you know, that nobody knew. Is the form wrong? Why are we having issues? It was basically a prospect would call into sales and say, hey, I can't get the trial to work. Something's wrong. And somebody would, you know, web resource would go on the page and say, nope, works for me. And then it was like, that's it. Like, They're crazy. There's something wrong. And so somehow it ended up, they're like, hey, Rick, here, here's a project I want you to work on. And so I got really deep into it and just kind of the troubleshooting skills we talked about earlier.

Yeah.

Using some of the technical resources, talking to the sales team, what are they telling you? And then starting to diagnose what was going on. And all of a sudden it was my project. And now I owned making sure that the trial would work. What are we going to do to ensure that the trial is available and working at all times? And we, you know, mentioned we had a lot of homegrown systems at the time. And so it wasn't like, let me go to the Marketo community and see if anybody else has had this error. This is our own system trying to diagnose and work with dev. And so I think those are 2 early scenarios that earned a lot of trust in the company for me and with my boss and the CMO and then the rest of the organization. So I think I kind of parlayed that into a few different things. And then he was really big on what What can we bring? How can we really advance ourselves from back then a lead scoring model that we didn't really have? How can we kind of advance this? How can we engage with sales a little bit better, get a tighter connection with sales? And I had been working very closely with the donor management team in my United Way year. So very, you know, different nonprofit, but it's still sales. So I had those strong relationships. I think those kind of things I tried to to use and that, you know, that relationship and trust that I was gaining with sales to help them feel like I'm a resource, I'm a value add to you, not just somebody trying to throw something down your throat.

Yeah, I think it was interesting. I was going to— I have a follow-up for you, but I was— you just kind of touched on it, like the ability to build, I would call it trusted relationships, right? Because I think an important skill that I think a lot of, especially people early in their career, are maybe not as comfortable with. And I think one of the nuances there Like, I do a lot of coaching and one of them I did, I have to work with people on regularly is use the word challenge, right? You used to like challenge vendors. I think, I think sometimes you have to do that internally as well, right? With people who have a bigger title than you, right? And like, is that something that you, like, did you also challenge internally in this process? Like, and, and like, we could talk about how you did it if you want, but I mean, I, I know how I would approach it, but. Yeah.

Yeah, for sure. We had a weekly meeting with our head of digital, our head of internal development, our head of web development, and trying to think who— there were a few other kind of VPs of marketing in there. And I got pulled into it and that essentially all we were doing was kind of challenging things. And I got comfortable very quickly with that group, but I formed relationships Initially to try to understand and kind of took more of a, let me understand first before I try to challenge anything. But once I felt like I had a good grasp, you know, 2 months in, which, you know, that's hard to say, like nobody knows a company of size in 2 months, but I felt like I had a decent understanding that I could start to push back on things and question things. I'm not like an in-your-face type of person. That's just not my personality. So I think more I use questions to try to challenge things. So tell me more about that. Why do you think that way? Or why should we approach it that way? If we look at some of the data behind that, things like that, or I'll leverage data to try to show like, hey, it's not a bad idea. Here's what I was looking at. Is there a reason this wouldn't work? That's kind of the approach that I've typically taken and certainly was not afraid to to do that. This was, you know, 8 years ago, so my memory's failing in terms of an example, but I think that's how I approached it.

Do you also, did you get comfortable, were you, have you always been comfortable with when you get challenged as well?

Yeah, I'm very much a, you know, show me, you know, prove to me it won't work, then let's do it. Like, I am, there's no sacred cows in my world. I'm very much in favor of If someone has a good idea and my idea is not right, tell me why and let's talk about it. And okay, let's try this different approach. So I'm sure I did. I don't remember an example of it, but we definitely— yeah, definitely not afraid of that.

I try to do the same thing and think about it in terms of team leadership stuff, but I had somebody who worked for me who I can't remember what the details were, but we were working on a problem. We were going into our one-on-one, which normally I let them set the agenda, but this one, we, we had a specific thing we were trying to work through. And I came into it with a, like, I think this is what we should do mindset. And, um, this other, the person who worked for me really like challenged that and had a different idea and, um, convinced me that that was the better one. And that's what we went with. And my first reaction was to celebrate. Right. And go tell my boss, like, hey, this is a good day. You know, this person challenged me, was right, fought for it, and that's what we did. Like, to me, that's a good thing.

Absolutely. No, I think, I mean, I think you're spot on. I think people are, especially earlier in their career, oftentimes someone can be uncomfortable with that. Like, this is, and I invite the challenge for my team now, right? Like, I want them to push back to like, Guys, this is what I'm seeing. This is what I think. Tell me I'm wrong. I'm okay with that. And I feel like we do have a culture at ConnectWise that invites that. I do think as a leader in a role that I'm in that I need to welcome that. And again, you said celebrate. I think that's a great way to approach it. We should celebrate when someone pushes back and doesn't doesn't give in just because I have a bigger title than them and said we should do this. And when they know that's not right, they just do it, then that's, you know, we're all worse off if that's the case. So I think that's a really good point.

Yeah, 100%. So you started as a team of one and then you, at some point, you saw that it actually could be something more or needed to have something more You know, and you went and pitched the idea of growing the team. Like, how did, what was that process like? What were some of the, um, like, what did you, I mean, I'm going to expect, right? There's, there's, you were going to have to come up with some sort of business case for it. Uh, maybe not an ROI, but some sort of like reasoning that they, that people could sink their teeth into and go, yes, I'm, yeah, we need to do this. What, so what was that like and how did it go from there? Yeah.

And there's a few things that were happening in the business that helped. I would advise anybody who's kind of looking at their career, there's certainly you control a lot of that, but the state of your business and the external factors that are happening within the business, the opportunity has to be there. And the timing was right for me. We had just gotten acquired by private equity. So we were on a move to move off of our homegrown systems onto Salesforce and Marketo, we had just acquired another pretty large company too. So like multiple things were happening within the business that were kind of driving the need to change the structure that we had. So I think those were part of it. Now I had started talking to my CMO about it before then. Back then we were pretty heavy serious decisions. users and, you know, really got involved pretty heavily with them.

Well, that's interesting just by itself. I mean, Serious Decisions clients are usually really big enterprises.

Yeah, right. And we, you know, we talked a lot about like our maturity. How do we get more operationally mature? What are the things we need to do? How do we put the— I mean, just think of the demand waterfall, you know, the old school demand waterfall that existed back in the day. Like we were heavy I don't know, advisors to that, or, you know, that was kind of where we took things. Well, I leveraged a lot of their resources on marketing ops and here's what a marketing ops role would look like. Here's what a team structure would look like. So I had some help on that front for sure.

Sure.

But I used that as kind of a guide. And I think, you know, I was able to show some wins that we were having just by having this formalized under our marketing ops umbrella that me plus a few others and the combination of the acquisition, the private equity, as well as just some of the wins that we had, able to make a case like, hey, what if we formalize this? Here's what it would look like. What are your thoughts? And I think he was open to it pretty quickly. So it wasn't like it took a ton of convincing that I had built out a huge business case. It was more, this is the structure that we do it in. And here's what Especially when I was hiring that new role. So we formalized some existing roles. So the email team came under me, which was under a different team, was under digital before. And so we kind of formalized it that way. Project management came under me. But then I need a role, a net new role that does not exist today to just scale what I'm doing. And it really was just another person. And tech drove that a lot too. We were expanding our tech stack pretty significantly as pretty much everybody was in 2018, 2019. And so that, I think that drove it a lot. Like, hey, if we're going to acquire any type of tech, we need a strategy around it, of course, but we also need someone to optimize and not just be an admin to add users, but really how are we going to leverage this to its fullest? And I think that drove the business case even more. If we're going to spend $100,000 on a tool, it makes no sense to just not have anybody own it because if nobody owns it, nobody's going to use it and we're just going to have—

Shelfware.

Yeah, vaporware, shelfware, whatever you want to call it, right?

Yeah. So, it's interesting to me. It totally makes sense that there were external factors or catalysts that when the time was right, it made sense. But I don't want our listeners or audience to walk away from this thinking, oh, I need some sort of external thing to happen because you also talked about You started conversations, I don't know, was it months, you know, maybe years in advance?

It was months in advance. Yeah, it was before it actually came together.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I think that's a really good lesson to learn because, you know, one of the things that I've tried to do when I've tried to like pitch something big and maybe not an organizational change, but maybe a big project that's in that new thing, is by the time It becomes like you need the formal decision to say, yes, you can go, you know, do whatever. Like, I want that to be a no-brainer, right? All the work that goes into ahead of that is really, really important so that you don't want surprises when you get to the formal discussion about approval, right? You want all the heads who are going to have to nod yes are already on board.

Yeah, for sure. No, I think you're spot on. I mean, you don't want to wait Till an external factor and then like, hey, I see it. I think, you know, I was pretty proactive and just like, all right, I see an opportunity here. I chatted with some of the relationships that I had within the organization, like, hey, I feel like there's a need here. Am I off on that? So I approached it that way. It's like, tell me if I'm missing something. So relying on some of those relationships I had, and I think, you know, I had good buy-in and good relationships that could tell me, no, you're crazy. You shouldn't do that because here's why. I didn't get that. I got support. And so I think that helped too. But I had a really strong relationship with our CMO. I think I was able to show value that I was able to provide. And I hate saying I, because it was really a we. It was not me doing this on my own. There were other people very involved in this, but I think centralizing that And just kind of that, the expansion that we were going, you know, back then we were calling it digital transformation. We were able to show some really good value from the digital transformation effort that made sense to start to expand. And then once we got one person, it was just like, oh wow, we're seeing value here. We need to keep going. And it just kind of cascaded from there because the need for marketing ops is so heavy.

Yeah.

You know, as the world changed too, that need got greater. And I think it was almost like, give somebody a little bit of data and then they need more and they keep asking and they don't know how they lived without it before that. It was kind of that where we started to do some things and we saw how valuable it was. So now we need more and to do more, we needed to scale.

Yeah, I don't know about you, but like one of the things that I've struggled with before Is when I see that there's a need and it seems so glaringly obvious to me and that I don't, then when I get, when I didn't follow that practice I just described of like preparing ahead of time with all the people, I would get into the formal thing and then I'd get all this like resistance or questions or whatever. And it was because I hadn't done the legwork of helping. There's 2 ways, right? There's 2 parts to this. One is me.

Mm-hmm.

helping them see the same thing, and B, helping me understand why they might, like, because of their perspective, right, why they might see it not as big a need as I do.

Yeah.

So it can help you refine the way you communicate and tell the story.

Definitely. I think you touched on something really important is like try to determine or predict what pushback you might get. How are they going to react? What are the questions you might get asked? What are the holes in your approach? And then see if you can find the reasons why ahead of time so that you're already prepared. Like, hey, that's a good question. I thought about that. And here's why I think this still makes sense for whatever the reason is. And it's, I mean, go back to like traditional marketing. It's persona-based. So this persona, the CRO is going to say this and this is why, because this is what he or she cares about. The CMO is going to think this way. The head of your demand gen team is going to think this way.

And the CFO is getting a whole other perspective.

The CFO, absolutely. If your CFO is involved, you better start talking CAC and cost per everything and understanding that if you're going to go down that route and really being intentional. I think you called it out. Do the homework ahead of time so that you're ready for those conversations.

Well, and maybe the one thing I would add to that is don't— I mean, if you feel like you can't put yourself into those shoes because you don't know that, be humble and go, oh yeah, go ask for that input, right? And just say, I've got this idea. Because I think every time I've done that, because I would be afraid to do that in the past or like unsure, like, why do I bother these people? I found that most people, if you have, if you've put some thought into it, right, and you're not coming in totally random unless, or if you set it up as, hey, I've got an idea, I just wanna bounce off of you. And it's like an open-ended conversation, not like you're gonna, like people, they wanna, they wanna help. I know.

I think you're the way you approach those conversations. I, I've, don't think I've ever had a conversation like that where somebody was like, no, screw you. Like moving on. Right. It's, it's a really good, way to do it. And I think people are really more than happy to have that conversation and to give you feedback when it comes to that.

Yeah, absolutely. I think that's so true. All right. So, so you, at some point, I can't remember exactly when, but you're now in this role, head of demand gen.

2 years ago. I moved from, I was a, so I went from individual contributor on marketing ops, one person to senior manager, to a director, to a senior director, all on marketing ops. And so build a team, from me to essentially 15 at the end when I was still in marketing ops. And then our head of demand gen left, our VP of demand gen left, our CMO approached me and said, hey, I would like you to consider taking over demand gen. And it was not necessarily the career path I had laid out. I was like, I don't know if I really see myself as a demand gen leader. Okay, what, you know, let's talk about it. And so we talked about it and said, all right, let's— I'll do it for 90 days. Um, and then after 90 days, when I decide I don't want to do this anymore, um, you know, if you, if you decide you like, I'm not doing well with it and it's not the right role, or if I decide that this is not the right fit for me, um, I would like to be able to reconsider like going back or what are we going to do? And so we agreed like that's, that's the right approach. Um, And here I am 2 years later, still doing it. Yeah.

90 days times whatever that is.

Exactly right.

To 24 months.

Right.

Yeah, that's interesting. So it was, it was a kind of a mutual decision, but it actually started from your CMO. Is that right?

Yeah, I, it was definitely not my idea. When I went, she, so she she was in town and wanted to have breakfast. And so I'm like, yeah, sure, let's have breakfast. So she's like, I know the VP of Demand Gen put in his resignation. I was like, oh crap.

Oh, right.

Okay, what are we going to do? Like, you know, trying to think like, who could we find? And she's like, well, I want to talk to you about that. And I was like, well, who do you have in mind? And she's like, how about you? And I was like, what do you mean, how about me? Why would I do this? And so yeah, it was a good conversation. She was, she's awesome. She's not here anymore, but she, you know, really intentional about career pathing and career planning and what, where do you, how do you want to approach your career and what's your next step and kind of thinking about that, especially with her direct reports and leadership team, but really for the whole marketing team. And so she, I know she was very intentional about that for me and talking through what, you know, do I want to go down the traditional RevOps route and take on more of a leader of RevOps? So going from marketing ops to RevOps, do I want to be a CMO? Do I, you know, what's the right path? And I've always been, I always feel like there's 2 kinds of paths that people take in their career. Some who know exactly what they want to do and they are like, I'm going there and I'm aiming to that target. And every decision and role that I take is aimed for that. And then others are like, I really like what I do. I'm ready to do more, but I'm not really sure what that is. And when the opportunity presents itself, like, yep, that sounds good. I'm going to move. And I'm certainly more of the latter. I've never been like, I want to be a CMO and that's all I want to do and I'm going to keep going there. If you told me, you know, 20 years ago, 30 years ago, I would have said, CMO? I didn't know what a CMO does, right? It certainly wasn't the path or anything like that, but it just—

You're the opportunist, not the planner.

Yeah, I think that's a good succinct way of saying it.

Yeah, I think there's a little bit of that in me as well. So now marketing ops doesn't report to you, right? That's so— how is that now where you're Kind of a— I hate— I can't believe I'm going to use this word— internal customer of theirs.

Yeah. No, it's a good call out. So we went— when I moved over, marketing ops reported to me for those 90 days. And then fairly soon after, we had a separate marketing ops, separate sales ops, separate customer success ops teams. We brought into a formal kind of go-to-market ops team. Merged it all together, centralized everything. We soon after that decided to just go RevOps instead of go-to-market ops, so sales ops, marketing ops together. So that's how it's been since then. I won't say it's been easy. I think some of the being embedded in marketing, I think it can work in either cases. I would always start there. Like you can, any company can have a centralized RevOps function. It can be fully functioning, work great, and a company can have a dedicated marketing ops function, it could be horrible and not work well. And I think a lot of it's involved with the people and the approach that people take.

Sure.

I think we have been challenged, I think, from a resource perspective. And I think just getting that kind of like not letting sales consume everything, which can, you know, that's a tendency that I think a lot of people have seen, right? Sales consumes all the resources because the CRO is who everybody is looking towards to drive the business because that's where bookings come from. So it certainly has been a change and a challenge. I have to be pretty proactive with kind of pushing to be a little more proactive on their side of where before I think we saw a little bit more of that where we're embedded in marketing, we were looking at the data a lot more closely, we're in the systems day to day, we were partnering together a little bit more closely. I'd say in the past 4 months, 3, 4 months, it's gotten a lot better. We've really been intentional about making some strides there, but we still have some gaps. So I think it's different. I think the good is that I can, you know, I know the systems and I know the data. And so I will get into the data when I need to. And, you know, if I'm not in a lot of meetings, which is all the time.

Right.

Yeah. My role or my Day to day has shifted a lot, but I can find some of those and then call those out to them and and and look at it that way. I think the other thing maybe that I have some empathy for what they go through and where they're at, and so I try to convey that to them, but also to my broader team. Like you know here somebody's frustrated with a lack of response or whatever it might be. I can be like, well, let me give you a little context. Here's why it's not as simple as just they click a magic button and it's done. Here's all the steps that they have to take, and. So like, I agree it's frustrating, but here's why that maybe is the case, or here's how we can be a little bit more descriptive and give them the full scope of what they need to do. I'd say—

Help them help us, right?

Absolutely. Like if we can help give them these answers, then they're going to be able to respond quicker.

That kind of thing. Yeah. You just touched on like the way the nature of your day-to-day work or week-to-week work has changed since you've gotten into— it's probably changed from going from an individual contributor to managing people, right? That's right, yeah. And now you're managing other managers. So, like, what are the big things that you've had to, like, learn to be more effective? But maybe, like, we've talked to a number of people who are, like, managers of people, which is great. I'm curious about that. But I'm also, like, we haven't talked to a lot of people who are managers of other managers. In my experience, that's got its own set of sort of additional nuances that, because you're then you're like coaching a person about how to coach another person sometimes, right? Things like that. So like, what are the kind of the skills that you've had to kind of really invest in getting better at in your new roles?

Yeah, I would say if you, so someone that is managing just managers versus somebody that is managing managers and individual contributors, That's probably the hardest, the latter, is just because, and it just depending on the scope and the skill set of the individual contributor and the managers, when you're having to go both sides, it gets really tricky because you have to get a little bit more tactical and more into the weeds. And it's, that is probably the most challenging aspect of as you move up in the career is like, you're, you know, I'm in meetings all the time with our CMO, our CRO, our head of RevOps, and You know, last night I was in meetings with our CFO and our CEO. And so you're the level of discussion that we're having and the— I'm producing a lot of information and reporting and PowerPoint decks and that kind of thing. Like it's a very executive level summary. Like here's, I have to distill all this information that's happening in 2 slides and tell you simply, succinctly, here's what is happening. Here's the trend. Here's what we need to do about it. And I might get 5 minutes of your attention because you got 1,000 other things to do, right?

Right.

But then if I have to go to an individual contributor and talk through like, here's the email that you need to send in the list that we need to get. So let me help you get to that. That is very challenging. And so I don't have that now. I have had that where I had kind of a combination of the two. I think that the focus, it really is like the managing up, managing down and the level of communication that what, how detailed you get, how you roll up the information. So I think what I have to do now a lot is take 8 different, 9 different sources of information and what people are telling me, here's what's happening, here's what I'm seeing in my different channel or my area, summarize that, try to see the trends. Okay, so if I, if I take, you know, this thing happening, all right, so roughly 80% of the stuff is this. And so if we focus on that, we can change 80% of the business. So we're going to focus there and trying to take all of that information, distill it down so that I can show the trends and talk to my boss, talk to our CRO, talk to the rest of the team. Here's where we need to put our focus on. Here's what we're doing about it. Trying to get in front of that, I think, is where I spend probably most of my time. It's probably 60 or 70% of my time is in building presentations and board decks and that kind of thing, as well as in meetings and talking through like the trends and how we're going to fix things.

Yeah.

And then the other time is spent with my leaders and just working with them and helping them. I have an amazing leadership team that they're easy to lead because they're really good. And so I think we have a really good team. I'm, of course, biased, but I do think that that helps and it makes my life a lot easier.

Yeah, that's great. Yeah. I mean, I wish we had more time because I would love to go deeper in a lot of that. Unfortunately, we're going to have to probably wrap it up here, but Rick, thank you so much. I appreciate it. Really, it's been really— it's been interesting, and I think it's going to be really helpful for a lot of people who are out there listening or watching. If folks want to, you know, is it okay if they reach out to you or follow you? What's the best way for them to do that?

Yeah, LinkedIn is probably the easiest path. If you're not connected with me on LinkedIn, send me a message or just send a connection request. It's Rick Collins.

Reference the podcast. How about that?

Yeah, there you go. Reference the podcast. If you— I've spoke at MAFSApalooza in the fall, or I guess it was the winter. No, it was the fall still. It was in November, right?

Fall, yeah.

I told people that were in the session that I spoke at, like, if you have a sales title, just reference that you were here because I get a lot of sales outreaches. And so, no, I love my sales people, but I get so many outreaches, I typically won't accept it because if I'm going to get pitched right away, then Yeah, that's not really what I'm looking for. But, uh, so if you do have that, um, I'll still connect with you if you let me know that you heard me on the podcast.

There you go. Awesome. Well, I appreciate it. Um, which means they also listened all the way through, which is great.

There you go. That's right.

Yeah. Um, yeah, well, great, Rick. It was a ton of fun. I'm so glad we were able to make this work. I appreciate it. Um, and I'm sure that our audience will be the beneficiaries of all this. So Anyway, thanks for having me.

Appreciate it.

Yeah, to our, to our audience, again, thank you for supporting us. Thank you for your ideas for guests and topics. And as always, if you have a suggestion for a topic or a guest or want to be a guest, reach out to Naomi, Mike, or me, and we'd be happy to talk to you about it. Till next time, bye everybody.