The Ugly Work Behind a Beautiful CRM

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.

Hello everyone, welcome to another episode of OpsCast brought to you by marketingops.com, powered by all the MoPros out there.

I am your host, Michael Hartman.

And joined today by my co-host, Naomi Liu. How's spring up there in Vancouver?

It's great. We've been having a stretch of sunny weather, so I can't complain.

Rub it in while I've got thunderstorms going through here, such as North Texas this time of year. Although we had beautiful weekends, so I can't really complain other than like all the pollen that's covering everything. Anyway, so let's, let's get started. Joining us today is Nicole Alvarez. And she's going to talk to us about all the ugly work that goes in behind the scenes for beautiful CRM marketing data. So Nicole is a solutions architect with ClearPivot. She is a solutions architect with 7 years of experience with clients across multiple industries. She was born in New Jersey and has since lived in 3 different countries, which we'll get into a little bit. When she's not working, she is likely neck deep in an online course. We also talked about that probably trying to create hybrid plants. This site we haven't talked about, so I'm curious now, or contemplating how to, how much rotisserie chicken it takes to train her cat or has taken to train her cat. So Nicole, thanks for joining us today.

It is a pleasure. It is absolutely a pleasure.

Thank you. Yeah. So let's, uh, let's get into this a little bit before we really get into the meat of the topic of, um, you know, it's always interesting. I think, uh, well, maybe it's Maybe our audience doesn't care about it, but I like it, so we're going to do it anyway. But I like to know a little more about people's, you know, their story and their career journey. And so, you know, I meant, you mentioned it, I mentioned in that that you've lived in 3 countries. I know you're in Uruguay now. Hopefully I'm not butchering the pronunciation. But yeah, if you could share a little more about your career journey, how you ended up where you are, and yeah, maybe a little bit like how you ended up in all these different countries and Uruguay being the latest.

Absolutely.

Um, so part of it is my obsession with always learning something new, which you have. I mean, you have, when you work in operations, it's part of it. So it's kind of what led me here. Um, I also always loved to travel and there is a necessity to travel while working if you do it long-term. So I started working remote actually in 2015. So the landscape was completely different. And at that point, it was very limited to marketing, to programming, like any kind of development work. And quite frankly, that was really it. So I decided to try my hand at being a developer in 2015, and I bricked both a phone and a computer and decided that wasn't for me. So I, so I started as a content writer. What happens with that? Well, you have to know marketing to be a good content writer. And then I realized when I got into marketing, okay, it doesn't matter if I'm getting the best leads in the world. If sales doesn't have a process for working them, it doesn't matter how good the leads are. So then I got into marketing and sales operations. And then there came the service part, and one day I woke up and realized I'm working in RevOps now. So marketing still has a very fond place in my heart, and that affects a lot of what I keep studying too. So for example, here in Uruguay, I am studying cognitive science, which, oh my gosh, it's programming, it is psychology, it's philosophy.

Even the philosophy of the animal mind was the last course I took. And all of that comes into how I work with my clients, how I design processes, and how I approach data.

I think it's interesting that you're— it's funny how cognitive science kind of has an overlap. I don't know, Naomi, you may not remember this, but one of our very first episodes early, early on, we had Brandy Sanders on. And she said, she mentioned something like, I probably won't get it exactly right, but it was something like, if you're in marketing ops or rev ops, right, you should really understand, um, I don't think she said cognitive science, but basically that kind of like, that kind of stuff like that and chess, right? Because you have to just like being able to see 3 steps ahead or 4 steps ahead.

Yeah.

Do you remember that, Naomi?

Like vaguely, yes. Like I remember the conversation, but not like the specific details.

Like that, I just, I remember, I don't know why that one has stuck with me ever since, like now 4+ years later, right? It's crazy.

That's incredible.

Yeah.

But it's so true.

Yeah, I ended up in, um, I always liked psycholinguistics from when I studied. I never thought my psychology degree would apply so much to data operations and to marketing operations. But it really does. And because it is all just based on our own psychology, it's trying to take what's really happening, reduce it to, you know, numbers that are still useful to us and reflect reality. I ended up actually watching a documentary during the pandemic on how we process information. I realized everyone they were interviewing had studied cognitive science. I went on LinkedIn, I looked them all up, I sent them a connection request, and then I started, uh, studying it here.

I love it. Yeah, I know. I think, I think to me, the part that really connected the dots for me was like, yeah, like human psychology. And we, one of the unique things I think, which I enjoy about ops is the, you know, the interaction we have with so many different types of people in so many different types of roles who have Different kinds of things that they care about, different motivations, different things that they're incented by. So, understanding all that is actually really, really valuable if you kind of think about it that way.

I think the thing working in operations for basically my entire career, the thing that I always find is The challenges and the issues that the different teams have tend to have underlying similarities, right? Oftentimes, they're trying to find ways to automate certain processes. They're trying to find ways to streamline certain initiatives that they have. They're trying to find ways to utilize the tools that, you know, the organization has in their wheelhouse to do their job better with fewer resources, right? And I think a lot of times in ops, marketing ops, it's highly creative because of the problem-solving aspect of it, right?

Yeah.

There's many different ways to get to the same end goal, but what is the best way? And it's always kind of that challenge because I find that if you come up with a solution and you implement it, it's very rare that you will then change it to something else. Like, once it gets implemented, then it's kind of there. And it's like, you know, 5 years later, you have, okay, why do we do it this way? Oh, because we implement, you know, it's like, so it's almost like, you have to get it right. Like, you have to get it right, you know, and it's, it's, it's because otherwise, that kind of stuff just like stays around forever.

Yeah, we need more creative destruction, right, happening on all this stuff.

Yeah.

Well, there's something to be said for that, which is it can reflect a state at a point, but what's the essence of what we do? It's reflecting what actually happens with people and trying to approximate it with processes.

So, of course, you know, 5 years later, I can assure you, your team's not doing the same thing they were doing 5 years ago, or at least I hope not.

So, I think it unfortunately happens more often than we want to believe it does, because I've seen that. Yeah. Like I was working at a place where the poor procurement person, when I walked through, because I was trying to go, I was in the middle of that in my role from the marketing context. And I was like, every time it was like this really convoluted, complex process to do it and updating this one document and updating this other place and submitting something in the system. And I was like, why? And it was just kind of like, just because that's the way we had been doing it. Right. And no one had ever, I was like, Oh my God, like, I feel so sorry for you because you've got all this extra work that is not really adding value, but is killing time.

All right, I want someone that does those AI meeting note-takers to sound an alarm every time someone says, that's the way we've always done it.

Like, yeah, that would be, I actually like that idea.

I mean, yeah, right. That would, yeah, I hope any developer listening, if you hear that, get in touch.

Definitely would be an interesting one to flag that. Okay, well, this— that's— it's a really interesting connection point to go through that and why you moved there to Uruguay. And I'm not going to pronounce it like you do. I'm going to pronounce it like the gringo I am, Uruguay. Okay, so when we talked about this before, this whole idea of— I think you've now called it the ugly work. We talked about it before as the boring parts of operations.

Yeah.

Being important. Talk to us about what you meant by that. And, and why you think it's so important.

If I come to a client, and I start saying things like lead scoring, automation, workflows, dashboards, everyone gets super, super excited. These are the big, big shiny goals that everyone wants. And it's not built by adding more things. It's built by taking the data you already have or collecting better data and then using it. So no one will get excited if I come in saying field audits, permission sets, process documentation. Everyone kind of just, you know, their eyes glaze over and they're like, wait a minute, I don't want to do that. But sometimes even the best way to show the quality of data is build that ideal, that ideal, you know, quote unquote report, and show them if we're reporting on the data in the state that it's in right now, this is the kind of result we get. And this doesn't reflect reality. So sometimes it's a backwards approach where you can build something on bad data, and then even use that as a way to demonstrate This is why we need to clean it up. So part of this is the psychology of communicating to someone that like, these big shiny goals are based on a lot of hard and sometimes, quote, ugly work. But that's how we get the beautiful processes. That's how we get the beautiful results of it.

Do you see, you said that the data doesn't reflect reality? Like, what, because I initially, for listeners, like, I was like, sort of had a look on my face probably, but what do you mean by it doesn't reflect reality? Because in some ways I would argue like it actually does reflect the reality of the processes and systems that are in place, right?

Well, let's take the example of reporting, right? Say you want to build a fairly simple report on lead sources, right?

Now that gets us into the question of attribution. How do we define attribution? I know we could go down that rabbit hole for as long as we wanted to, but let's take a side journey. Let's say we're trying to report on a field called lead source, but let's say the whole team has permissions to create fields and everyone has realized there's a need for a lead source field. So suddenly you realize there's lead source, lead source new, lead source test, lead source V1, lead source final. And imagine now that they are my nightmare of single line text fields. How do you consolidate into this, that into this simple or shiny or beautiful lead source report? So that's what I mean when I say that these little details like having unified fields that everyone knows how to find or use and having Permission sets that are guardrails and not handcuffs when it comes to things like this make those processes easier and make everything flow better downstream.

Makes sense. So everything we've talked about so far, you've mentioned, I would say, put under the category of data. Are there other domains, for lack of a better term, that you think this would apply to as well, where there's Ugly work?

Oh, absolutely.

Documentation, documentation, documentation. And nobody gets excited for the process documentation meetings.

Actually, one thing I see a lot is people being afraid to admit how their processes are. And we touched on this earlier.

I assure you, nobody's processes are perfect, and they're never going to be perfect.

And this is Something you will constantly have to look at. So when you go in, when I go into a process documentation meeting, I'm not looking for the ideal state. I'm looking for what's actually working because something is happening. We need to at least track that.

That's how we can get data that reflects what's, you know, what the reality of the situation is, and then we can improve it from there.

But we have to look at what's actually happening first.

The other hand of this is, where's the documentation? Who manages the documentation? So this gets into the category of delegation, responsibilities, management, audits, which are not words that spark joy in a lot of people. So it's necessary.

My accounting friends probably get excited about those words, but I'd like to meet these people. Yeah. Yeah.

You know, when you can show someone the value, it really, it drives it home. And that's, that's where you can get someone's attention.

So I know, Naomi, I know you do, I think you still do like quarterly business reviews with stakeholders that you support. Like, do you, like, are you, how are you getting, are you getting into that kind of conversation about All these things that are sort of, like, the hidden activities that need to happen, but that are important for the visible ones. I mean, that's almost what I think about it.

I find that those types of conversations are better in written form. Because I think that when you start talking about, like, hidden, like, things that were being mentioned, like, you know, process docs, and, like, integrations, and field changes, and all of, like, Eyes glaze over, people stop paying attention. This is not something that they like. These are just words. It doesn't actually, you know. So, I find that those types of updates are better suited for, like, when you talk about, like, what does this actually mean for the person, right? So, if there's, like, a field change or, like, an update to certain, like, integrations or whatnot, like, how does that actually impact them? Like, what's the end result of that? The end result of that is now it's easier to see if somebody has left the company, right?

Right.

It's easier to see if an email has bounced, things like that, right? But those types of things I find are better communicated, in my opinion, in written form via, you know, either via like a monthly recap email, or maybe it's posted somewhere on some kind of internal, like a Confluence, or it's like shared on an internal, shared space on Showpad or whatever it might be.

Sure.

Right. Just for documentation purposes and like what has been communicated out to people. But it just depends on your audience, right? Instead of if it's for your business partners, instead of saying like, we made this field change, I moved it on the page layout to here, it's now you can more easily see that this person has left the company on this date. Like that.

It's really interesting because I'm fascinated because this is probably my own tendency. Like, I prefer Conversations about stuff like this because I find that it's hard to— so many things can be misinterpreted with written, especially if I'm not like, I don't consider myself a great writer. I think I've gotten better over the years and tools have helped for that, but I feel like the nuance gets—

But if you're trying to communicate it to like, sorry to interrupt, but if you are trying to communicate it to like a wider audience, you can't have that conversation with like, like there's a lot of people that are just not gonna, they're gonna completely miss it. You know, and I want to make sure that it's written down just so that I'm also like, did I remember to say this? You know, did they watch the recording? Did they, you know, XYZ? And it can also, if it's on a, if it's on a meeting, you can also like, you can write it down on a slide. You don't need it all. Right.

Right. Right.

But then also like reiterate it.

There's actually a whole, one of my focuses with my Extracurricular studies is psycholinguistics. And I highly recommend, if you haven't listened to anything from him or read anything from him, there is a person named Steven Pinker who focuses in psycholinguistics.

And—

I recognize the name, but I don't know why.

The dynamics of communication and the way we receive and inter—

it's just mind-blowing, but he's got a great sense of humor, so it's easy to digest.

Oh, good. Like that. Don't take himself too seriously. Yeah, it's really interesting.

Yeah.

It's just 'cause I wasn't expecting it. So this is why I love talking to Naomi and others because like I get another perspective and it challenges how I might think about it, my default mode. So, okay, so this is kind of interesting. Okay, so there's all this hidden stuff or boring stuff or ugly work, whatever term we're gonna use, So you listed a couple of things, Nicole, like what are, what are some other, some of the other like major categories of things that you think fall into that, into that bucket?

Workflow audits, for sure. Like we mentioned before, if you build a workflow and you leave it alone for 5 years, and someone builds, you know, maybe 3, 5, 10, 15, 20 workflows on top of it, and then suddenly you wonder why fields aren't doing what you would expect them to do, check the workflows.

Operations. Marketo seems to be ripe for that kind of stuff where there's these, all these workflows that are interacting with data and doing things that, like, if people set them up or gone and like you start getting sort of butterfly effect stuff that happens when you put new stuff in. Right. Did this one thing and now we're like, but something crazy is happening. Well, you gotta go dig into why.

And to me, it's like plumbing. You know, if when your plumbing's working fine, you don't notice it. And that is the sign of a good workflow. Um, but when something happens with your plumbing, I can assure you, you will notice immediately and it will not be a pleasant experience, but Much like going through your workflows early and doing audits, maybe quarterly. Let's be honest. I mean, not every team can do that. It's ideal, but it's not always practical. If you can do it even once a year, just set a goal that's realistic. But if you can at least look at what you have and revise it and say, okay, I understand what these are. I understand what they're doing. It is way better than dealing with something way down the line that is much less appealing.

Yeah, definitely. Any other major categories we want to talk about here?

One use case I see a lot more is forecasting.

I mean, forecasting is such an easy sell. I mean, everybody wants to see what's going to happen, that black box of uncertainty of, you know, this fantasy of what does my future look like? How many marketing qualified leads can I expect?

I mean, it would be great. But again, that's all based on data.

Yeah. So it's not like you can just tack things on to a system that has Its own faults. You have to look at it, you have to audit the actions, you know, you have to really think about— you have to— when I, for example, do a lead scoring project, the first thing I look at is closed won deals, which kind of gets us out of marketing, but it does have to do with it.

So you think, what actions do these people take?

How are you measuring them? Are you measuring them?

Right.

And then even going into naming conventions, because if you, for example, say that, um, I don't know, there are so many different lead scoring methods, right? You could rank them on grades, you can rank them on percentages, you can rank them with emojis, you can rank them with wording conventions that are easily readable by humans. But does it make sense?

Does it work? And I assure you, there are workflows, fields, permission sets, and a lot of documentation behind that. And it's like good— it's, it's good embroidery, right? You see the beautiful picture on one side and you flip it over and you go, oh my gosh, maybe I'm also just a terrible embroiderer. But I mean, that's what my embroidery looks like, at least.

Yeah, no, that visual is great. I know exactly what you mean, right? That's so funny. Naomi, you look like you were about to say something.

No, I'm just— I'm chuckling because I relate to that embroidery. It's so true. It looks great on the front and you turn it over and you're like, oh, that's a hot mess.

But you said something really— I mean, both of you had really interesting points before too about— this is great.

I mean, we understand this as people that work in this every day, but how do you explain this to something like a client who may be focused on those beautiful things and might be Quite frankly, repulsed by all the work that has to go into it.

So that's when those nuances like, do they prefer an email?

You know, do they prefer a call?

That's where that comes in.

I have 2 clients right now that are at startup level intensity. I actually don't know if they even sleep. I am both impressed and terrified. And I know if I sit them down for even a half hour meeting to go through reports, they will be like, Why am I here?

So that's a great case for an email, and they understand it, and they have the need to understand it. And then I have some clients who really value that face time, and even if it's something as simple as going through a report dashboard, I might know that they need that kind of question and answer session, or that they may give me another suggestion or say, "Hey." You know, this report looks good, but can we add some more detail or can we add some more nuance? So it really does depend, and that's that communication aspect of how do you make these ugly bits not only appealing, but you know desirable. You know, how do you how do you wrap these in this pretty package and say this is lead scoring, this is forecasting, this.

is that workflow.

This is, you know, lead routing, all these magical things you want. This is it.

So— I think something with like the reports and dashboard piece too is I've actually for a long time now, when I create dashboards in Salesforce and you add your widgets, right? And instead of, I think by default, like the title of each tile Defaults to the report title, and then you can end up with a dashboard that you're sending to people that cannot make a ton of sense because it's something like you know why year over year you know like web lead blah blah blah. It's just like you just have a whole bunch of acronyms and people are looking at it and you're just like what does it actually mean? You have to really sit down and like have a expend a ton of mental energy to like see and understand what you're looking at, right? So I found just even like a really simple— I don't want to call it a hack, but just like a really simple change was retitling all of those tiles or those widgets to how many leads did I generate this quarter? How many leads are currently open? You know, what stage are opportunities created last month at? Everything's a question, right? And so when I find that people Yeah. So, every single piece or every single report too that I send to people is, I always title it as a question so that they know what they're looking at is the answer to that question. Does that make sense?

That's brilliant. And honestly, so, so naming conventions is another thing that I would consider one of the ugly parts, but that's it. It's human. Like the—

I, you know, right away what you're looking at, right? Because, and it stopped me getting questions about, can you, can we just jump on a call so you can explain like what this report is? But they know what it is. It's, I send them a report. says, you know, like, how many leads does X sales rep still have from last month, right? Like, it's every single report that I create now, every single dashboard I create always is titled with a question.

I've—

that's, that's really fascinating to me.

But honestly, that's brilliant because it's what is the question and then you have the answer.

Here's the answer. Yep.

Oh, I'm so using that.

I'm so using that.

No more like QOQ, why, why year over year, you know, like Previous fiscal year, like it just— no.

So get over the whole idea of trying to be super concise about those titles, right? Be descriptive.

Yeah. Yeah. Because even sometimes I look at it, I'm like, what am I looking at?

Oh, yeah.

Right.

So yeah.

Yeah. I've worked with a lot of cases where there is an entire dictionary that my clients have put together to just educate people on the jargon they use. Which sometimes, let's be real, that's necessary. Depending on the industry, you know, you can't be saying 5 words when it could be an acronym. But there are things like those reports where it's like, it has to be understandable.

What's, what's the basic essence of a report? We're asking a question and there's your answer.

Exactly.

Love that.

And it's so much, especially with people who are just like, Trying to understand, like, you're looking at reports all day long, right? And I have seen a few others internally who have kind of copied my method, which is great. I love it, right? I love that because it just, it shows that it works, right? And it just keeps things much clearer.

That's a really interesting—

Without confusion.

I love that. I love that hack. It goes back to human psychology, right? Okay. So, We've got all these things. My, so my experience is, I think probably everyone or the majority of people listening to this or watching this will go like, yeah, we all know this is really important to get the plumbing right, right? Get the data right, get the plumbing right. But we are stretched so thin because of all the more highly visible stuff, right? Getting a campaign out the door, getting an email generated, get a landing page, like all these things. Getting a dashboard even, right? I think that falls in that category. What advice do you have? I'm actually going to ask both of you because I think you're going to have 2 different perspectives, one from a kind of more of a consulting side, one from in-house. Like, what have you done that has helped to create some time and space for your, you know, for you to, you or your teams to be able to focus on some of that? You know, background work. Nicole?

So for me, and this may be a controversial opinion, um, what I have found works in 90% of my cases, and again, this might be a controversial opinion, my background, we're visual creatures. We want to see something. Most of our brain is devoted to visual processing. I'll build a bad report. So if they want to see a lead scoring model and it's hard to see—

Bad meaning like— I'll build it with the data we have. Okay, so exposing the bad data.

Exactly, exactly, exactly. So I'll build it as it should be. It's something you can look at and see, wow, this doesn't reflect the reality at all. And then I can go in, I can take that curiosity, that question from whoever I'm working with, and then say, okay, so this is how I build it. And I take kind of an education stance because they should know this. My ideal is in a dream world, as someone who primarily works as a consultant, I would love for every single one of my clients to know what I know. in a few years, and I wouldn't—

my ideal world is I would be, I would be without a job because they would know as much as I do.

So I want them to see, you know, if we build a report with the data we have, this is what it looks like.

Are these reflecting the reality of your situation? No?

This is how we fix it. And then we get that aha moment, like, that's it, that's what works. And then they understand that value.

Yeah, I mean, I'm an advocate for, like, don't wait on reporting until your data is right, because it will never be that way.

Exactly.

So, like, start the reporting to expose it so you can then go incrementally clean it up and fix it. So, totally love that. How about you, Naomi? I'm curious, like, what you've done over the years to be able to get some time and space for your team to do some of that kind of stuff.

I mean, I think it's a challenge, right? Like, we, I think a lot of teams are stretched very thin resource-wise, right? And you're always trying to do more with less. So, to be honest, like, I'm still struggling with that.

Yeah, it very much depends on the person you're working with too. There are some people that are very open. I mean, you know, some of my more technically focused clients can honestly get overwhelmed knowing the work that goes into it. And you would think that the people who work more heavily with this and have more understanding might understand the value more at first.

But ironically enough, some of my clients who have never even touched a CRM before are some of the most open-minded and curious. So, but it's, there's such a spectrum of people to work with.

Yeah.

I mean, understanding how to work with people is understanding how to work with data. It's just one form of, you know, using it to reflect what's happening, be honest with yourself, and then improve, which I think everyone wants to do in basically every aspect of their life.

I remember having a conversation—

And I've always— sorry, Michael.

Go ahead.

I was just saying, it's like, I think something that I have struggled with is, you know, like, you are generating reports because you're either asked for them, or you're proactively doing them because you know that, you know, some of these reports are needed for the business. But then what do people do with them? Right?

So, Yes.

Whenever I get asked for reporting, like, it's very rare that I will just, here you go. Right?

Yeah.

Because I find, like, the last thing I want them to do is receive the report and then they look at it like, hmm, that's nice. And then file it away into a folder called like reports from Naomi or something. Right? Like what I, right? What I, what I want them, like, I think something that I realize is oftentimes when people are asking for reports, it's not actually the report that they're looking for. What they're actually looking for is like, what am I supposed to do now? Right? So if And I think it's just understanding, like, where the ask is coming from, who's asking it. And, you know, if it's somebody who is not necessarily someone who, like, likes looking very granularly at data, oftentimes they just want to know, like, what happened and what can we do?

Yeah.

Right? Did it work or not? Should we never do this again? Should we do more of it? Should we put more money into it? Like, where are the gaps? Tell me what to do.

Right?

It goes back to the essence of why we're doing any of this in the first place. There's a question. There's a desire that they have, and this is one way of answering it.

Yeah. I mean, I probably push back every time someone comes to me and says we need a dashboard for blah, right? Whatever that blank is.

What are you going to do with that dashboard?

Well, and I'm I mean, are you going to do anything? The level of effort to create a dashboard. mean it in the general sense, not just like Salesforce, right? Is essentially, right, you're consolidating, you're putting it all, a bunch of different reports into one, right? That have some sort of connection. And my argument would be, if we don't have anything today, let's not start with the idea, like let's not go with the goal to build a dashboard. Let's go to build the first report. Build the first report, get that nailed down. Then we can move to the second one. And eventually over time, we might have a dashboard that we actually can use for an appropriate audience. But if you go into it like, we have to have this dashboard and we already know what these things are like, I think first off, you probably never finish. And second, if you do, you're probably going to be wrong as much as you're going to be right.

Absolutely.

I truly believe that. So I was going to go kind of getting back into this, like, how do you convince leadership to give you the ability to spend time on this. I actually worked with a manager of mine at one point who I was trying to do like, hey, like our data is kind of messy. We need to— my team needs to be able to allocate some time to trying to address that, whether it's, you know, mass updates or go find like what's causing it from a process or system standpoint and address that over time. I said, I know this is not sexy stuff. I think that's the words I used. And I mean, I was kind of like expecting to get pushback. And what I actually got was she's like, she's like, actually, yeah, that's very sexy. Like we need, like we, she, so she recognized it. So I think if you're fortunate enough to have somebody who gets the value of it, even if I would say that that person probably didn't really, wouldn't understand all the details about behind what it was and somebody who trusted me, which is helpful. But I had to like, that was somebody who would have my back. Let's go do that. Right. And it's going to be useful. They saw the vision. To me, I keep coming back to a lot of these things as we've talked throughout the earlier part of this conversation. The human psychology part of it definitely is, I think, something that's important, right? Understanding your audience. But I think there's also this element of storytelling. And Nicole, you might have this.

Yes.

The one thing that I always think about is humans are wired for storytelling, stories.

Right.

And so I always find myself thinking about like, how do I tell the story to this person or this group of people, whether it's written or verbal or whatever? Like, do you think, is that a part of it too? Like connecting the dots, like the story is like, we need to invest this time and effort in this boring, ugly, whatever activity because the outcome is going to be this. That's going to be a benefit for all of us, right?

Yes, actually, fascinatingly enough, this is one of the things that currently we think is, as far as we can tell, unique to humans. The ability to tell stories, the ability to take these abstract symbols and connect them to extract meaning out of them. And it applies everywhere in life.

And listen, if I'm going to be staring at data for 8 hours a day, I better have some meaning I can get out of it. So I've developed this like Zen-like relationship with data and sometimes explaining it to stakeholders that don't have time to sit down and drink water for 15 minutes out of their day.

So how do you tell a story?

How do you communicate this is going to be an 8-hour project, you may have thought it would be 15 minutes, here's why, and here's why this is actually a good thing, right?

So that skill is so essential.

And I very much thank my background as a, as a copywriter. And when I was younger, and even today, sometimes I still write fiction. And I think that's been one of the most valuable things to every part of my career, even the data, especially the data part.

Interesting.

Yeah.

Changing course a little bit, like another thing you and I touched on when we first talked was And I think this ties back to data and process and everything else is like, I'm going to put it a couple different ways, I guess, being an advocate for customers and understanding the buying journey. How does that tie into like all this as well, right? I mean, is it, is it somehow like really tied to it? Is it a different topic? Like, how does it, how do you find that relates to what we do as operations folks and The data stuff.

Oh, absolutely. Oh my gosh, if everything—

so to start off, every single thing is tied to the buyer's journey. I would, if I could have one wish, and I'm not even asking the genie for three wishes, I'm just going with one. I want every CEO of every company to go through the exact process that their client goes through just to see what it's actually like.

Everything we base. everything off of starts there. What— and that's again touching on that storytelling aspect. What is actually happening? What are they going through? What's that process like to them? If you lose sight of your own customers, everything is going to fall apart. You could look at the best data in the world, it really could reflect what's happening, and you could still be scratching your head if you lose sight of what a person actually does when they're interacting with your company.

Definitely. It's interesting to me. I don't know what you all do, but because of the space I've been in now for a couple of decades, I guess, marketing and data and all that, I tend to, like, I know a lot of people get annoyed, like unsubscribe on a regular basis. I'm just going to unsubscribe from all these things I don't really care about anymore. I almost never unsubscribe from anything. And part of that is because I'm I'm trying to at least loosely observe how they're operating. What do they do? And I'm always surprised, and this happens, I think, more on personal stuff, right? So retailers where I have had no real interaction with them for years, and I continue to get daily, weekly emails. And I often wonder, like, how much is that costing them? In terms of actual cost, right? Database size, because they've got a bunch of people like me who are not really interested, new life stage or whatever. And like, it's like, to me, it's like, plus it's also just like, are they even moving the needle? Right. And some of them are just naturally like tied to like life, like life stage, right? My kids were younger, so I was like paying attention to things that were more oriented to them and it's no longer relevant because they're older. But some of them are just like, I bought one thing one time, right? Researched one thing one time and then never done anything else. And it's just like, I don't know why they continue to do that. B2B is not immune from that, but it's like the same thing applies, right?

I would even argue that you'd be a valuable— in my opinion, which again might be controversial, I would even argue that that's a value in its own. You're interested. I mean, you may not need this, but they're top of mind. You're following their story. They're providing something that attracts you.

You may not be looking for the same stuff you were looking for 5 years ago, but you're following the story of the company.

They're present in your mind.

And let's be real, we all know how much a word-of-mouth recommendation is worth.

So yeah, I mean, I mean, they're not really top of mind. I mean, I think I'm an outlier case because, like, I think many other people would have started just automatically deleting or unsubscribing.

I'm just like sending you the slow breakup emails.

Yeah, I mean, I've— I mean, this is a good example also of like, tell me if this rings true, Naomi. Like, you get into the conversation when it comes to, hey, we've got to renew with Marketo or HubSpot or whoever, right? And, you know, one of the drivers is going to be database size, right? Hey, we, you know, our database is so big, if we— you know, that means the cost is going to be You know, X times whatever percent that we currently pay. So how can we clean up our database? Inevitably, what I find out— find is that we make a case where like these people who haven't interacted in, pick the timeframe, 18 months, 24 months, 36 months, right? Let's just, we can do one of two things. We can just say they're just not interested. We're going to just delete them or move them into a space like, uh, what we're going to try to do one last a crazy attempt to try to get them to reengage. And if they don't, then we'll do it. Like, but at the end of the day, you're dropping and it typically, even if you do the second case where you try to reengage them, most people won't. So then people get freaked out. They're like, oh, we're going to lose 20% of our database. I'm like, but you're not really.

But what's the value? It may, we may be scared by that 20%, but what's the actual value?

What We're going back to that essential question of why. That's my point. Is it worth the cost? Was it worth the cost to keep those records in your database versus losing them? I mean, if they come and get re-engaged naturally, great. We're not saying never, just, but it's often like the volume, like this desire to see a large number of, in our database has X number of people, like, I don't get the fascination with it.

I think it's one of those things where it's like, if you tell someone they can't have something, they then want it. Yeah.

Well, it's like hoarders, right?

Yeah. Right?

In the off chance that that one person is going to open that email and then buy our product, Yeah.

Yes.

Well, this is another thing going back to just the way the human brain works. We are extremely risk-averse.

So if you frame it like that, like, oh my gosh, out of that 20% of people, we could have found one actual client instead of saying, hey, if we focus our efforts on this 80%, we could, we could put so much more effort into actually getting this to convert to a good sale or a marketing qualified lead or whatever your why, whatever your desire actually is.

I think a lot of this is like a misunderstanding of how buying actually happens nowadays, especially in the B2B space, right? So much of that research happens outside of anything that we have visibility into. And so it's like, you know, why are we doing nurture again?

Yeah. And those are the— and I mean, that's, again, I come from 4 years right now of client managing.

I've been in-house, I've been doing consulting roles, I have been— I've worked with startups, I've worked with enterprise-level companies in just about every industry under the sun.

But that is the one unifying thing, is the why. What ultimately are we trying to get at here?

And it's so easy, given how many details are involved in these operations, in this data, in all your technology, You can easily look into that and never look up again.

But if you keep asking yourself, why are we doing this? What do we actually want to get? And if you go back to those original kind of essential questions, everything else flows, even the ugly bits of your data.

Yeah. All right. Well, this has been a fun conversation. It's like we've covered all kinds of random stuff and still got through everything we wanted to. I think But one last thing, Nicole, is there anything that we didn't cover that you want to make sure our listeners heard? It's okay to say no too.

No, I think that's it. The beauty is in the ugliness. The final results are in all this hard work that goes to it. It may seem subtle, but when you can look at something like a good forecast, a good dashboard, a workflow that works well, or something that's actually doing what you wanted That's, that's it.

Yeah.

And when you see all the work that went into it, that's your own prize.

Love it.

And definitely celebrate it.

Uh, for some reason in my head, I'm coming, I think it was, was it Da Vinci who said, like, when they asked, like, how do you get, you know, how do you carve these amazing figures? He's like, it's already there. My job is just to remove the right pieces. Right. I don't know why that popped in my head.

I love that.

Um, and I may misattribute that, but there's a, like an old famous sculptor who did that anyway. So, but if people do want to have like, continue this conversation with you or learn more about what you're doing, what's the best way for them to do that, Nicole?

LinkedIn, always LinkedIn. Um, which I am on all the time.

Fantastic. Well, Nicole, thank you. It was great. Enjoyed the conversation. Naomi, as always, good to see you. And, uh, thank you to our longtime and new listeners and supporters. We are always grateful for that. If you have suggestions for topics or guests or want to be a guest, as always, reach out to Naomi, Mike, Riza, or me, and we would be happy to engage with you on that. Till next time, bye everybody.

Thank you. See ya.