Why is it so hard to hire Marketing Ops Pros? with Max Spanier

Hi, I'm Michael Hartman.

I'm Naomi Liu.

And I'm Mike Rizzo.

And this is OpsCast, a podcast for marketing ops pros and RevOps pros, created by the MoPros, the number one community for marketing operations professionals.

Tune into each episode as we chat with real professionals to help elevate you and your marketing operations career.

Hello everyone. Welcome to another episode of OpsCast brought to you by the MoPros, powered by marketingops.com. If you're not a member already, you should do that. Go set up your profile. Joining me today is just one of my co-hosts, Mike Rizzo. Mike, what's the year again?

It is the year of the MoPro. It is also—

I need to come up with something else.

I know, right? Something else. But like, it is also the year 2022. So you might hear us stop saying that at some point. If you're listening to this years later, because this is evergreen content, folks.

Do you know what the Roman numeral is for 2022? This is like how geeky I am. No.

XXII.

All right.

That's the fact that pops into your head and you visualize that enough to be able to say it to me means you have a very—

I've thought about this before, so.

Oh, okay.

Okay.

Got it.

Yeah, I actually, so I, for our listeners who don't know, I'm in a workout group and I had to lead a workout and I tried to make themes out of them. I actually did one based on that. So. You can ask me about that later.

That makes sense.

Yeah. Anyway, so sorry to take us off on a tangent right from the get-go, but joining us today is Max Spanier. And Max, I probably should ask, did I pronounce that right?

Yeah, perfect.

Perfect. Max Spanier.

High five.

Thank you. Answer the question, why is it so hard to hire marketing ops professionals? So Max is the founder and president of Sloan Staffing, a recruitment firm that specializes in marketing technology, digital marketing, SaaS sales and technology roles prior to starting Sloan Staffing. Max was an enterprise account executive at Marketo. Before that, he held other sales and business development roles at ION Interactive and Sovai Digital. So Max, thank you for joining us today.

Much appreciated, Mike and Mike. Looking forward to it.

All right. So yeah, we do that intentionally. This is like at my house, like we're all M names and at my house, all my kids are B names and there's 3 of them. So just like this. So Max, what you don't know is we soon to be released episode That just happened was this the other side of this, which is how do you find your next role in marketing ops with another recruiter? So I think this is going to be fun talking about. So we'll have back to back. We'll have episodes about the two sides of the job market for marketing ops, and that's the question we're trying to break down is why is it so hard to hire marketing ops pros? So just from a big picture, do you know are there any like systemic? issues or challenges given what you see every day with your clients and go from there.

Yeah, no, that's a good starting point, Mike. Really appreciate it. From a systemic standpoint, that's a tough word to start with.

Sorry, I almost hesitated using that word just because I feel like it's been overused in lots of different contexts lately.

So I'll use just the Marketo piece to start. So I wrote a, I wrote an article a couple of weeks ago just about the total number of Marketo certified experts in the country. I think there was 5,800 Marketo MCEs around the United States. And if you look on LinkedIn, there are about 8,000 jobs that require Marketo experience. If you think about just the supply and demand piece, that's just one of the 4 main marketing operations email marketing tools out there. So I think there's a big challenge right now with just the kind of entry point into this space and then the advancement to other roles within marketing operations. But there, I don't know, Highway Education, I don't know if you've heard about those folks. They're doing a really good job of trying to train the entry-level person to even get into this position right now.

Yeah. Yeah. I'm actually glad you brought them up. I assumed we would end up talking about them at some point and no better place than right at the start. When you think about trying to get talent into the market, starting off with an incredible program that they've been building alongside a lot of experts in the field. I actually just received an email from their founder and CEO this morning about some additional ways in which we want to try to work together to make sure more of those graduates find roles and all of those kinds of things. Yeah, it's like supply and demand is a massive issue.

Big issue right now.

I never would've guessed that just on that Marketo one, there would've been that big of a, of a gap between the supply and the demand side. Is, do you think it's, do you think that's an indicator? Is that consistent? If, let's just talk about the major MAP, marketing automation platforms. Do you think it's consistent for the, all of them, or do you think it's—

Without a doubt. Yeah, without a doubt. I personally, majority of our clients are either on Marketo or HubSpot. So obviously they want folks that have that level of experience and ideally they're coming from a company that used that same marketing automation platform. So there's no learning curve right out of the gate because you guys know more than I do. If I were to sit in front of Marketo, I wouldn't even know how to log in, even though I worked there for 2 years. Being able to just come in and be able to create immediate impact is what a lot of these hiring managers are looking for at the end of the day.

Yeah, they are. We talked a little bit about that on the last one too. And I think the palette for, and I'd be curious to hear your thoughts on it, Max, but like when you are working, I think my question on this is when you're working with clients on trying to staff roles, I would imagine, and maybe you could just talk us through some of what that engagement looks like as you're not scoping them for whether or not you can provide value to them, but more like There's a need, but are you doing anything to try to help them understand what that real need is? Or do they come in and you're like, all right, yeah, like you think you want this. And so we'll see if we can go find that.

Yeah.

Well, it's, it's so funny that you brought that up because Mike, you introduced me perfectly. I really appreciate it. I can't believe you even pronounced my name correctly. Not a lot of people are able to do that, but—

It's better to be lucky than good, I say.

So I used to work at Marketo, enterprise rep. I left because I realized the biggest challenge with B2B organizations wasn't, do I buy Marketo? Do I buy HubSpot? Do I buy Eloqua, Pardot, whatever the case may be? I left to start a recruiting company in this space because the biggest challenge was finding and building a team around those systems to be effective. So to answer your question around like the whole piece of scoping work and really digging into these roles, marketing operations is such a broad title. Some companies just, they just consider marketing operations as an email marketing role. Some companies think of marketing operations as an analytics person, somebody to oversee 6sense, somebody to work very closely with the sales operations team, somebody to run email, somebody to be the integrations person. So it's really multiple positions in one. So we're really, when we're having these kickoff calls with these organizations, it's okay, what do you have? What are you looking to accomplish? And how can this person bridge that gap?

Mm-hmm.

So this, to me, this begs a couple of questions, and I'll probably be guilty as anybody else who's been in a hiring role position. So one, I guess, is for those of us who are hiring, are we putting too much stock into that specific platform experience for some roles? And then the second one is, 'cause you did, the way you just described what I think we all would tell you is more common than not, or more, at least more common than we would like to see, which is a role that has so much scope to it that it doesn't feel like it should be just one person.

Yeah.

Are we trying to get too much out of one, a person? And are they, are we, and are we being too, are we making it harder on ourselves as hiring managers because we're being so specific about skill sets that we're looking for?

Yeah. In my opinion, it's so, it's the biggest challenge that hiring managers are facing. Is they're not talking to enough candidates to be able to make a justified decision on who they want to move forward with. So yeah, the challenge that we're seeing in these companies is that they're solely relying on inbound resumes to hire somebody or personal relationships or posting something in, in, uh, in their community and LinkedIn or wherever the case may be. So the number of candidates that they're able to interview Is very low. And then not only that, but the low amount of candidates, if they do find somebody, chances are that person's already interviewing at multiple places. So they have to act quick. And depending on the size of the company, chances are bigger companies move slow. Even some of the smaller companies that we work with move pretty slow as well. But I think there's, there's 2 points. There's the not talking to enough candidates and then also placing such a big emphasis just on narrow focus. If I want a Marketo person that knows Six Sense, that also knows Tableau, that has Salesforce experience, maybe somebody that has HubSpot experience that really wants to get into Marketo, or that knows this, or that knows that can translate very nicely, could step into the job very quickly versus waiting another 3 months to have that person apply.

So I think then if I'm, I'll try to put words in your mouth. So if I play it back to you, is that you're, I think you're suggesting Indirectly that we as hiring managers should be more open to candidates who maybe don't check all the boxes. And maybe, I guess this is something that I struggle with how to find this because I've believed, I actually just recently hired somebody who didn't have the experience in the market automation platform we had. And I intentionally worked with our recruiters and stuff. So don't, I don't know that we'll find that. Let's open it up and look for people who have potential, right? And can learn. But that is such a harder thing to do is like, how do you look for people who have that ability to learn, are curious, want to know how stuff works, and are also interested in it from a marketing kind of domain level? And when I talk to other people in marketing ops who are in the hiring levels, typically when you ask them, what do you look for? What do you think distinguishes the best performers from others? It's those kinds of things, not their Technical skills.

Right.

Totally. Do you have any suggestions on how we find that or look for that or test for that?

Yeah.

At the end of the day, a tool is a tool, right? It's the person behind the tool that's going to get you from point A to the desired state. I think it really depends on company and the, and what pieces of the puzzle that you currently have in place and be able to interview you around that. I know there's Sarah McNamara is famous for this. She posts a lot about content around how not to do take-home assignments or ensure, make, make the candidates jump through hoops to go through interview processes. I completely agree with that. But I also have a sense where you need to have some level of technical conversation with these folks to really dig in to understand what do they know? What do they not know? And then create kind of pros and cons lists of each individual. Do the pros outweigh the cons? Absolutely move forward with them. If there's hesitation around the technical capabilities, Probably not gonna be the right fit for the role.

Yeah, it's, it's hard, right? Measuring for aptitude around like technical capabilities is one thing, but trying to figure out, are you curious? Right. Or are you willing to learn or what have you? That's a piece that I think we, we as a community are working on alongside you, Max, right? Where we're all pushing forward on educating leadership and hiring managers who maybe have never staffed for a role like this, that Those are the things that matter. I think you said it just a moment ago, right? A tool's a tool. If, and in our last episode that we recorded, it was, or one of them most recently, it was around this idea of what's your palette for that, that learning curve, right? That ramp up. Unfortunately, people start thinking about the need for a marketing operations role almost way too late.

Like when something's already broken. Right.

Either it's already broken or they're like, oh, we decided to buy whatever tool. Right. And now we need someone to manage that. And And they're like, so I just need someone to come in and manage that. And that, like, word of advice, that's the wrong way to build a stack, right? And we're advocating as a community, Sarah is one of those champion voices out there for, hey, bring them in, bring these folks in, into the conversation.

Yeah.

And let's talk about the go-to-market motion and the strategy. You're saying it yourself, Max, like, how do you build a team That supports your go-to-market, your revenue team, and then add technology to that.

And it's like out of the marketing ops landscape, but Jason, like we're hiring a RevOps leader for a Series C software company out of the Northeast. And the person that was in this seat was pretty much an order taker. They'd have the SVP, the CRO would say, hey, let's do this, or let's do this, or let's do this. But you, the 2 SVPs of sales aren't Salesforce experts. They're sales process experts. They know how to get deals done. So now they're, they have this system that's completely broken and they're looking for somebody to come in and restructure everything, pave the way moving forward on how do we need to set up territory plans? How do we need to do this XYZ? But if they were to already have that done in the first place, there would've been a lot of time saved on all sides.

Yeah. And it evolves over time, like a Series C to have to come in and try to re-architect probably isn't outside of the norm, frankly. Like it happens a lot, at least in my experience, we Definitely raised a lot of money at the companies I was at in different rounds. And unfortunately we had some people come in and just tinker with tools before they ever got fixed. But yeah, you want to solve for that problem. Ideally you want to hire somebody in earlier rather than later, but it still comes down to a fundamental problem of supply and demand. And that investment, remember, like a keyword there, investment in the talent. Is expensive.

Yeah.

Sorry. We've been around for over a decade now, a lot of us, and we know a lot about this idea of what technology can enable an organization at different stages. But that, those salary ranges, like they're not entry level, but there's a reason for that. And hiring teams, growing organizations, you need to account for this idea. That role is a key, I would argue a key component to revenue generation. To that revenue generation.

Yeah, totally.

Yeah. My thought there is that if the CRO VP were honest, right, they probably made a mistake, but they probably thought all we, all we need, air quotes, all we need is a Salesforce admin. And yeah, this probably would be my guess of how that happened. Okay. So Mike alluded to these job titles and compensation. So this is one of my hot button topic issues here is that I, one of the things I see is comes in a couple of different flavors. One is one that we already talked about, right? Job descriptions that have so much in them. That it's like hard to imagine one person could really be successful in doing that. The other is consistency or mismatch, misalignment of the job title, the scope of the role, and then the compensation. And the best example I've seen is I think there are more and more director-level roles and titles out there that I'm seeing. But when you really break 'em down, especially I think at earlier stage companies or smaller companies, they actually look like It's a team of one, right?

Senior man. Yeah.

Yeah. And it's a ti— the title's there to get to the comp, right? More so than anything else. And maybe to attract somebody who's a unicorn, but really it's, I suspect it's really about the compensation because the, it feels to me like the data that's available to hiring managers and HR people doesn't actually reflect the real market.

Yeah.

Do you think that's accurate or mindful of it? Yeah.

No, absolutely. Absolutely. I think this is why we started this business 3 years ago is because internal recruiting teams typically don't have the level of experience because usually there's only one marketing operations person, 2 marketing operators. So this isn't like an account executive role where you need to hire 20, right? Or 10. So it's not like a repetitive thing. We're seeing marketing operations manager as a title. We're seeing marketing technology specialists. It's just so many, there's no uniform uniformity. Is that a word? There's no uniform approach around— Totally.

If it wasn't, it is now. Yeah.

There's no, this is the title, this is the compensation, because I think the people that, the organizations that are willing to invest into it, they know the importance of it versus somebody may hire a marketing operations person at a And want to pay $50K, $60K, but really they just want somebody just to babysit HubSpot and use it like a Mailchimp, right? So there's a lot of digging that needs to happen in these interview processes, not only from a candidate standpoint, but from the hiring manager standpoint.

Yeah. And it's, it's a chicken and egg problem, right? Like when you don't know what you don't know, sometimes depending on who's asking for the hire, Right? Sometimes they don't realize that there's going to be a need very rapidly. You can hire a junior marketing ops person. Maybe they are curious enough to come in and figure some stuff out and build something of value, but you don't know that what's going to rapidly come up is some sort of standardization of the, like, the way that data needs to move through your system. And this person has no concept of like how to do that yet. And that's perfectly all right if you've got somebody that can figure it out.

Totally.

But if you don't know that's coming down the pike really quickly, you're gonna not know that you wanna look for that skill or that talent or hire that level at the start. So now you've made a hire who isn't quite equipped with the skills or the background or the experience to go solve the next challenges that are coming down, down the line. And you're a little bit frustrated 'cause you're like, darn it, this is gonna go slower. What are we gonna do? Guess what? You end up hiring a consultant.

I always push for the hire— All the consultants out there are like, you hire me.

Yeah. Yeah.

I always push for the hire level person because you're going to get a lot more. But again, hiring managers have a budget. They have a CMO that's saying, hey, this is what we can spend. This is what we can invest because we have X amount of other hires that need to happen. But we have a lot of organizations that we're working with that they're flexible and they just want to see the best talent on the market at the rate that they're looking for and allows them to make that decision.

Yeah. Oh, that's an interesting point. I was just, from an overall marketing team, there's probably a budget for headcount that goes across all the different disciplines. So can you think, this is totally off script here, not that we have a script, but just, I'm going a little different direction, but if you, are you seeing anything in terms of organizations on how, let's say they have multiple roles to fill in marketing and they don't necessarily know The priority order or where they should, where they're going to need to put more money into it versus somewhere else. I think of it like when we remodeled our house, we decided we're going to spend extra on the tile in the bathroom and the kitchen because that's where it's going to pay off. But in the somewhere else, we're not, right? We'll just do basic stuff. And are you seeing organizations think about all of that across the marketing function from a way they budget for headcount, especially when they're adding? In a way like that where they say, okay, we've got X amount of money and we're gonna, we're gonna allocate it as best we can to get the best people in the most important positions first. Yeah.

This brings up a, I have a client of ours in the Boston area, security software, and they just have a handful of roles they need to hire. And for them, a lot of the approval's already done quarter by quarter. So every couple quarters they say, we're gonna hire this amount. This is the budget that we have. And because hiring is so challenging right now, They're not necessarily thinking, let's prioritize this over this. They're trying to prioritize the best hire for that, for that given position. And if it's the marketing operations person first, great, let's bring them on. If it's the communications person, if it's the demand gen person, whatever the case may be, they want the right person for the job because they're all, all the clients that we work with are very fast growing organizations. And they know that there, there was an investment of then. And that money is to fund growth and growth is fueled by people. So if they find that perfect person, the demand gen person, even though they need to hire a marketing operations person as well, they need to bring that person on. Otherwise they might not have that person for another 3 to 6 months.

I get it. Yeah.

So they're prioritizing, uh, the right hire that is going to—

like, they're thinking like, I, I'd rather hire, spend more and hire the best person I can right now. Because they're probably going to be able to do more than what we're asking for them to do really in the role. And then we'll move on to the next one and try to do the same thing and kind of keep that ball rolling.

Right.

As they're—

okay.

That's an interesting one. My head is wrapping my head. I'm going around in circles here a little bit. Okay.

So.

No, it's an area that I hadn't thought about is I think, I do think, be it just another total aside, I think one of the things that I think at least some marketing ops people are good at is being creative with the budgets they've got, including it might be if they're like a hiring manager, being how they allocate that towards roles that they might get to fill or not.

Oh.

Or that versus consultants mixing that and trying to adjust as the budget might get shifted. But I'm curious, are you seeing, this is a total aside, are you seeing many of your clients where they're looking at marketing ops as doing some additional things that I think of as it could easily become more of a chief of staff for the marketing Org role kind of roles where it's got, maybe they're helping with budgeting overall for marketing. They're helping with the quarterly planning, annual planning.

That's super interesting.

Yeah. Yeah. We talk, I think you and I sidebarred this a couple months ago and I haven't seen, I think I haven't seen the chief of staff in the marketing function yet. I do think it's coming. The, I think a lot of that responsibility is notoriously with the VP and the CMO and they need, they know they need this, but wouldn't it be great if there was somebody that knew about all the tools and the value that it can bring and they'd come to the executive team and say, we need the, we need this because of this, and this is the budget and here we go. So I think, I think we talked about it, uh, 2 months ago before I went on my trip, but I think it's coming. It's not here yet.

Yeah. But I'm not seeing it consistently either, but I see it here and there. Um, it was mostly at larger organizations, which makes sense.

Right.

But it, it feels like I'm seeing it a little more often and it may not be called chief of staff, but those That sort of helping with the budget and the planning across the marketing organization is something I'm seeing. And maybe project management, things like that.

The utility player. What do you call that in baseball?

The— that's it. I think utility player.

I think it's the utility player.

Yeah, actually. That's the guy with the big football jersey behind him. Yeah.

We have a guy here who's a D1 baseball player. I've never watched a full 9 innings of baseball in my whole entire life, so I can't believe I got that reference.

Yeah.

Awesome.

I've seen this conversation come up before though, or maybe I've just had it. Anecdotally or something.

We were with Michael, probably.

It could have been with Michael.

But I'm not sure what that says about me that I keep bringing up the same 5 things.

No, actually, I think it was with one of my, one of my mentors, which is CEO of StackMoxie. She and I have spoken a number of times over the years and we talked about her org structure and the way that she thinks about things. And we were just riffing on this idea of like where marketing operations sits in general. And, and one of the, I think it was with her, if I recall correctly, but we were talking about how marketing operations could fundamentally own like the budgets. And I said, what is, you mean like demand gen budgets too? Like ad spend and stuff? It's yeah, absolutely. And it sort of makes sense. Like when, if they might not say how much money needs to be spent, but they could at least have oversight on where is it going right now? How is that going? And how does that get reported back to the teams that are running those budgets?

Right.

Really interesting.

What's interesting about that too, how many clients— I know, Mike, you've done a lot of work in HubSpot for different organizations in your career. How many companies have you walked into and there's so much tech and nobody knows what it's doing or where it's integrated to or how you're using it or have any processes around it? So how much money do you think is wasted on a yearly basis? You started the conversation. I used to work at ION Interactive. The one of the CTO was Scott Brinker, who created the Super Graphic. So when I first started at Ion, it there was 200 martech platforms.

Yeah.

Back in 2014, 2015. Now there's 3,000, 2,000. Who knows the updated version whenever it comes out?

I think it's like eight.

I think they're aging. Yeah, I think they're aging eight or nine thousand.

So how much? Think of if you had to just give a rough estimate in your head. I couldn't even tell you, but how much martech is? bought in marketing at high-growth companies? And is it really being used to the most effect? Probably, probably not.

And I am at a big company. I were in the process and I'm actually just in a business unit of a big company and it, and just within ours, we're starting to consolidate small, sort of small chunks of marketing tech into my budget just to make sure it's all in one place. 'Cause it was scattered out. I mean, this is gonna be a slap in the face to all my friends who are like, I'll call 'em like marketers, demand gen and stuff like that, but My experience has been they're actually not that great at managing budgets. They're good about thinking about, right, okay, how much do I need to spend? Where should I spend it? But then the actual keeping track of it, where are we? What do we have left to spend? And, you know, what are we gonna do if we get asked to cut or add or do some, you know, shift priorities, right? That is, that's something I think doesn't, most of the marketers I know have not, that's not a natural thing that they seem to be really good at, right?

Like holistically.

Yeah.

Right. Like in the platform itself, it's as a demand gen, and I hate using that term.

I know. That's another one.

Demand gen is so much more than paid. Right.

But for those paid marketers out there that are managing those things, like in those platforms, you're doing a tremendous job of like constantly updating. I want to focus on the CPL, the, all of those conversion rates. But like holistically thinking about it across the board, you end up getting into a place where you need an operations person to pull back all that data so that you can analyze where the spend should go next. Or if, to your point, like if something was to be cut back, how do you know where to cut back? All those kinds of things.

All right. So sorry I took us down that rabbit hole. We felt, you know, we followed Alice and let's, I'll bring it back. Max, one of the things you and I think we also talked about when it came to why is it so hard to hire people is There's, I, maybe it's just a perception, but it may perception or real realistically, is it there? Is there a difference in the expectations or the opportunities depending on which side you're on for candidates that are either from large organizations versus smaller ones and the perception that they're maybe they're exposed to more, yeah, smaller companies, they're exposed to more of a broad set of technology versus large ones or more or less hands-on and things like that.

Yeah, totally. I, we tend to lean towards working with smaller organizations under 2,000 employees, under 1,000 employees, and they tend to like folks from smaller organizations because they think they're scrappier or they can do more with less. But I think my personal opinion, bigger organizations just want the right person because they know how hard it is to hire. So if somebody shows interest, they want to work at a larger firm. They want to snatch them up all day because typically smaller folks from smaller organizations wear a lot of hats. We've been talking a lot about this, doing multiple functions under MOPS, whereas like a bigger organization, a MOPS person, we've built out a marketing operations function at a publicly traded company and there was somebody for analytics, there was somebody for email, there was somebody to manage integrations. There was somebody to bridge the gap between Salesforce, the sales ops person, the marketing operations person. So we're talking 7 people in marketing operations and there's some organizations that we work with. There's one marketing operations person and it's a, and it's the director like you were talking about, Michael.

Right. So I guess from your experience, do you see, I guess there's a difference, right? If there's a candidate who's more, more interested in smaller versus larger, they're self-selecting a little bit.

Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah. Outside of that, do you Do you think that there really is a difference in, in that, those 2 experiences that if all other things being equal, which may not ever happen, that they wouldn't be as good a candidate?

I think smaller org— smaller software companies tend, or smaller B2B organizations, whatever the, however you wanna say it, everyone's skin it, tend to lean towards the smaller scrappy person because they, there's this misconception that somebody from a bigger org Is going to be slower or they're just going to be a cog in the wheel. I don't personally agree with that. I think it's all about the person. And we've hired folks for our clients where it's a smaller company, but they're coming from a 10,000-person company. When we peel back the onion, they're in a startup group within the larger company that is implementing tech for the first time. And they're handling that soup to nuts. So I think it really, like you, you were alluding to, it really depends on the person.

Yeah. And then it gets back to difficulty of evaluating some of those other characteristics or traits that are not as easy to go, I've either worked with Marketo or I haven't, or I've worked with HubSpot or I haven't, that kind of stuff. Just for the record, I would argue that some of those companies also put more stock than they should into particular industry experience.

Yeah.

But that's just my own sort of—

Yeah. That's a weird one for me when it comes, and it falls in line with the, you don't need to be in the office to be able to do this role. You don't need to like have industry experience necessarily.

I think, I think it's less industry. I get on calls with hiring managers and they want, we start the conversation and we want a marketer of Salesforce, Six Sense. this, and it's, here's this wishlist, but somebody with that wishlist is going to just come in and say, this is what I want. And it's not going to be the same comp that they have in mind. So there's got to be some concessions on both sides. And that's what people don't tend to realize. It's, yeah, you have a budget, probably going to be either at market, under market. And a lot of these people are so sought after right now. It's a candidate-driven market, even with everything going on. In the world, a lot of layoffs are happening, but you still see people are hiring. You still see the number of, number of Marketo jobs is through the roof. The number of account-based marketing jobs is through the roof. MOPS, the same thing. Even the marketing ops job board is probably some of the highest job postings that you, that we've ever had in the community. So I think as long as the expectations are set, you just got to hire the right person at the end of the day.

Yeah, totally.

Yeah. Out of curiosity, because this is a timestamped kind of thing, I don't really need to know probably what the salary ranges are at this point in time. We've got research.

How much time do you have on that?

Yeah.

But I'm curious more holistically, you get to recruit across the country for different organizations. Have you seen a shift in the line of thinking there? Because look, we need the right talent and we realize that we're going to pay them market rate. Regardless of where our headquarters is.

Totally.

Have you seen that change?

We don't typically work— 98%, 99% of the jobs that we work on are 100% remote. So there are areas of the country based on salary requirements that our clients have that we just decide not to recruit from. But besides that, it's, it makes our job a lot easier if we're able to go outbound on LinkedIn to specific people that have that expertise, because you're going to get a choice of 3, 4, 5, 6 people to potentially hire versus 1 or 2 people from Florida that have the HubSpot or Marketo experience that they're looking for because they can sit on site in an office. So we shy away from even partnering with companies that have the, the remote No remote aspect of the job.

Yeah.

That's nice to hear in general that you're championing that. But also the key thing that I want to pull on there is that like you, your organization, your strategic decision is, and this is really a message to the hiring managers and hiring teams out there who I hope will listen to this, is that your budget is determining where talent can even be sourced from. If you're too low, like you cannot go after certain segments of the country because where they live, their cost of living is going to be out of there. So like, totally, please go look at our State of the MoPro research and look at the average salary ranges for different roles and different company sizes so that you can set a baseline that allows you to recruit from the whole country.

I'll be doing that soon. That's coming out.

Well, just to add on that too, that I mentioned the 5,800 Marketo certified experts around the country. I think half of them, maybe a third of them are in the Bay Area. You know what, Bay Area and Washington, a company in Georgia or Tennessee or Florida. Not only we're talking, not only are we talking about time zone differences, like a lot of our clients that are in Florida typically, or New York or Chicago or Boston, they, even though they're open to the remote piece, they kind of like to have them on the same time zone so that we can work same hour. Because obviously if it's a Northeast-based company and most of their clients, most of their employees are in the Northeast. It's gonna be hard to hire somebody to run MOPS that's 3 hours behind, and they're one of the only people on that team.

So here's where Michael and I are both gonna push back on this.

Yeah, like I'd—

so if I was a marketing ops person who's been doing this for a little while, and I guess I have now, I will say there is a distinct advantage to the company, not to the employee, to the company to have somebody on a slightly different offset time zone. And the reason for that is that marketing ops people need quiet time to go do the work. They're inundated constantly with requests. Yes. It'll never end. The backlog is always getting filled up and something is always a high priority. But if there's a chance that you could be working at 3 o'clock and it's 6 o'clock where your headquarters is, that's a huge win because you got about 3 hours of downtime where hopefully there are at least 80% less things coming I assume you meant 3 PM, but it could be 3 AM too, if that's how you roll. Sure. Yeah. I meant 3 PM.

That's a good snippet for, cause you guys know, I'm not a, I'm not a marketing ops person. I just interface a lot with hiring managers that hire MOPS and MOPS people that are looking for jobs. So that's a good talking point for me when I'm talking to customers.

I think it's a selling point. Like you should consider this candidate because here's why. Yeah. And this is potentially what they could be getting of providing value back to your organization because they've got the time to go focus.

Yeah. If to me, if that was the only thing was that they're off by 2 or 3 hours and they were absolutely, to your point, right, they were the right person, there's 2 options. Like one, you just let them flex their hours to what works for them. And if there's meetings that need to happen that are off out of their normal hours, so be it, right? They'll just have to live with it. Or you ask them to work the same hours as the majority of the other people, which either means they start late or they get done early, or I think a lot of people would be willing to do that. I will add even that, so both of my last, my current role and my last role, I've had pretty much teams either direct or through consultants, kind of people all over. So I'm in the middle of the country in Dallas right now. I've got people in the East Coast, I've got people on the West Coast, just hired another person up east. And then I've got consultants in Europe, and that actually, that has been super beneficial when we've got late, kind of late-coming stuff coming in that needs to be reviewed and QA'd or something for our marketing teams. So that person can kind of, they'll be up overnight, it gets reviewed, and we're ready to go. So I think there's some, it doesn't work for every team or every organization. I get it, especially if there's sort of a cultural component to it that's going to eject people who don't match that. But I think it can be, it can work to your advantage if you're a hiring manager. All right. So I brought up consultants and Mike, you alluded to it, I think tongue in cheek a little bit, but seriously. So given the challenges of the market as hiring managers or the high expectations of individual people with span of scope of their roles, Max, what do you think is, do you think it's a good option to look at Consultants or contractors or freelancers to help fill in the gaps where needed.

Or even, yeah, consultants, freelancers, even consulting agencies as well. I know there's a lot out there just to be able to give you the voice of reason, especially if the marketing leaders aren't leaning more towards the martech stack. Maybe they're more demand gen focused or corporate marketing focused, or I think it makes a lot of sense, especially if you're looking at implementing new tools like Six Sense is a big one. I know a lot of people, I saw something that Six Sense was one of the most, the top 10 most bought software all of this year. So how many people, you guys know how quick they're growing, being able to partner with a consultant that's done it, done 10 implementations or 20 implementations and can help you figure that out. It's going to, it's going to save you a lot of time and money and energy in the long run.

Got it. Yeah, I've had good luck with that too. Mike, you were saying something?

I was just going to say, yeah, I have to advocate for that a bit. These types of go-to-market motions, I think something as specific as like an ABM, for example, really is like, there's tools and then there's the people that need to project manage and see every last little detail of that all the way through leveraging the technology and all the little touchpoints that go into that. There's no way to replace that. If there isn't someone that is like wholly owning that function and their whole purpose is to make that thing successful, you will quickly see a lack of return on the investment in an ABM effort. So like, just those are really good moments to like tap into someone who's already done something and hopefully has a track record of success.

Yeah. And I've Not only done that for like specific expertise and say a tool or that kind of stuff, I've also just, and I've been lucky that I've happened to have engaged with several good firms where they provide an extension of the team. They're doing ongoing work and it's, it can either be project-based or it could be just, hey, we know we've got a high volume of operational stuff this coming month. Can you help us out? So. Big fan of that as well. Max, any final thoughts before we wrap this up?

Oh, I think I really appreciate the open-endedness of that one. We can go down a lot of rabbit holes.

I think— You're on the clock, Max. No, I'm kidding.

No, no shameless, no plugs here. Obviously the biggest challenge I think that hiring managers are facing is not talking to enough candidates. So whether you're going to work with a recruiter, you have your internal team, you're working with external recruiters, it's all about being on the same page for what you're looking for and similar titles or similar people that can do the job. The average time right now to fill these roles is 3 to 6 months, which is a ridiculous amount of time to have that seat open.

I know, just, it's, that's the reality right now.

Right. So if that is the reality, There's a couple really good marketing technology recruiting companies, not just, and not just ours in the market that can help bridge that gap. You know, most recruiting agencies are able to fill pipeline in 72 hours. If you have the budget, partner with folks like us. There's, I can name 5 off the top of my head that specialize in this. Seek them out and ask for assistance.

Awesome. Yep. Amen to that. Yeah.

All right. Yeah, I know you, you were trying to avoid the shameless plug, but I'm gonna give you the opportunity now to do that. So if folks want to connect with you and pick your brain or Engage with you guys, what's the best way for them to do that?

Yeah, LinkedIn. I'm on LinkedIn all day long in my life. Give me a shout on LinkedIn, Max Spanier. Would love to have conversations with anybody about recruiting, marketing operations, or craft beer. And big craft beer guy. And it's 4 o'clock on a Friday, so I need to, need to go for my first right now.

There you go.

There you go. I love it.

Uh, we're the thing keeping you from that. I don't know if that's a good thing.

Yeah. Speaking of time zone differences, it's 1 o'clock here and I'm like, man, I still have a whole day ahead of me.

There you go.

Thanks. Thanks so much, guys, for having me on.

I appreciate it, Max. Mike, as always, thank you. And I know we'll see Naomi again here soon, but, and then to all of our listeners out there, thank you for continuing to support us. And as always, we're looking for your feedback, ideas for topics and guests. So send them our way. And with that, it's a wrap. See you next time.