The 2021 State of Marketing Technology with Marqeta CMO, Vidya Peters | SaaStr Software Community

Vidya Peters (CMO, interim CPO at Marqeta) presents at SaaStr about how "intent is the new lead": marketers should engage prospects when they first show intent (researching competitors, keywords, technographics, social/earnings/filings) rather than waiting for form fills. She outlines sources of intent data (Bombora highlighted), the need for an end-to-end strategy paired tightly with sales, measurement best practices across PR, web, demand gen, product and developer marketing, and the importance of a modern MarTech stack (built on platforms like Salesforce and HubSpot). The talk closes with practical vendor/PR/ABM advice, hiring tips, and audience Q&A.
Chapters
Thank you so much. Good morning everyone. Greetings from Amsterdam. It's a pleasure to be here with you all. By means of introduction, I'm Vidya Peters. I lead the marketing organization here at Marketa. I'm also currently the interim Chief Product officer and prior to this I led the revenue organization for a few months earlier this year before I helped take the company public on NASDAQ in June of this year. So very excited to be here with you all and share some of my learnings at Marketa, but also some of the learnings I bring from my prior roles. Prior to Marketa, I was the Chief Marketing Officer at Mulesoft. I was there for a little over four years, helped take them public and then helped them subsequently be acquired by Salesforce. So very excited to be with you here today at Zastro, one of my favorite conferences and share with you some of my learnings, my mistakes that I have learned along the way, leading marketing so that you can take advantage of that and get to some of those results faster than I did. So the topic for today is why Intent is the new lead and let's dive right in. What do we mean by intent? Intent based marketing, in my words is engaging prospects before they actually have the decision to buy. So it's when they demonstrate the interest in your solution versus after they submit an inquiry to you or a sign up to you on your website. So the reason I bring this up is when I started my career in marketing, we always thought about marketing to prospects and really thinking about focusing on the entire experience of bringing them to your website and then optimizing that to sign up and then, you know, convert conversion from there on. And I think that the game has changed so much over the last few years and now the name of the game is really Intent, which is you have incredible technologies that tell you when your prospects are even thinking or considering a solution in your space. And that's where I believe marketing sweet spot should be today, which is you need to engage prospects when they are even considering a solution so that you can ensure that your company is top of mind when they start to think about the shop buy process. So the old form of marketing was bring people to your website and wait for them to sign up. And when they sign up, you turn on the bazooka of all of the engagement tools in your arsenal. And today it's really about reaching prospects where they show intent because that intent may be very far from your website. It may be significantly before they even know your company's name. So, so where does that happen? And how do we know when prospects are actually showing intent? Here are a few ways. So intent shows up in many different forms in many different channels. And here are a few examples. They could be competitive sources, which is who is researching your competitors? Because you know, if they're researching your competitors, they're interested in a solution that your company probably can solve better. Who is dissatisfied with their current solution. So examples of this are who is currently facing a backlash because the competing product that they're using didn't work out? Maybe they're facing fines or regulations or issues. Or perhaps they just tweeted their dissatisfaction with a competing product. That is a great indication of intent that they are ready to look for a new solution. Keywords who is researching keywords in your space? Who is actually searching into Google and talking about finding a solution for a problem that your product is the answer for? And are those search volumes speaking, spiking or declining? Bombora is a great tool that does this. It's actually a free tool for a basic set of keywords that you can go sign up for right now I'm a huge fan of the tool and what you can do is sign up for alerts that you get on a specific keywords for your industry. So for example, for Marketa, I want to ensure that if certain companies are searching for card issuing and processing that they show up on my radar. And then I get this email actually every Monday morning and our team looks at these alerts and then looks at wow, those are companies that are actually exhibiting an increase in intent for card issuing products. We need to be reaching out to them before they actually reach out to a competitor or make up their minds building an in house solution when they really don't have to. Technographic so you can look at who's owning competitive technologies. Are they hiring for roles with experience using that technology? You can see the jobs that are open on their website and really scan and do searches based on what the skills that they're looking to hire for another source is. Do they work with a partner that integrates with your technology? That may be a great inroad into this prospect. And last but not least, social. It's all about the conversations your prospects are having in the public sphere. Have they been speaking about your solution space on social? Have they been publishing blog posts or speaking at events about problems that they're currently experiencing that you can take advantage of? Another great source, especially if your prospects are public companies is to look at their earnings calls, reports, their 10Ks, their filings and See if they're speaking about problems that your product is very well positioned to serve. That tends to be another great source of information to know if your prospect has the intent for the solution that your company offers. So that's great. You know now what intent data is, you know where to find it. But that is not enough. That is just the tip of the iceberg. It's so important to create an end to end strategy for the use of intent data, which is how do you intend to now engage with that prospect? How are you going to position your product, your platform, better than the competing solutions will? How will you partner with sales to make that an effective engagement strategy? How will you know whether this is working? So what are the metrics? And I'm a big proponent of establishing metrics of measurement in advance of your marketing campaign. So what a lot of marketers make the mistake of doing is they launch their campaign, they say, hey, we're really going to go after intent based data for prospects and they wait for all of the results to come back in and they package that up and say, okay, what are the metrics that come out of this data that tell the most favorable story of the campaign? Unfortunately, it may help you in the short term, it'll make your campaign look great, but it really doesn't help you in the long run when those numbers don't pay out. So I'm a big proponent of setting the metrics of success and before you launch the campaign and then measure the impact of whether your intent data tactics are really working. And then of course, verifying the validity of those intent signals and insights you're getting, acting on those signals in a very coordinated multi touch campaign across sales and marketing and ensuring that you continue to refine those intent keywords. So for example, I may think that card issuing and processing is a great intent key keyword for my business. But as I look at the data, it may turn out that actually B2B payments is a better indicator because I find that customers who are searching for that have a better product market fit for what I offer, for what Marketa offers. So it's all about using the data to continue to refine your end to end strategy as it relates to intent data. And this engagement requires very close collaboration with the sales organization, with the revenue organization, because it's part sales and customer success. And this is what the lifecycle may look like. So you're probably sitting there and thinking, wow, this is great Intendata. I know where to look for it. I know the metrics to put in place and it's going to be a straight line to success. And the reality is it's going to be much more of an experience that has its peaks and valleys. You'll identify the intent. You may have some marketing outreach. So today we take all of our companies and then we feed them into marketing campaigns where we reach out to them and via social or email. And then they may not pay off. You may get responses from some and not from others. So how do you ensure then that you take the next set of data, which is based on responses and engagement, and partner with your sales team for SDR outreach? Now, the SDR may get traction with some accounts, then the conversation may stall again and you may brainstorm with sales to say, actually, let's bring some of these prospects into a webinar or an event. Perhaps. We're going to be at Saster and this is a great place to have a live conversation with them. And so constantly partnering with your sales team is critical because it's no longer a case of passing the baton to the sales team. You don't go anymore. Here's a lead and I will see you later. I'm going back to fish for some more. It's really a game of soccer where you're going back and forth and marketing's job is not done until the deal is closed. And it's still not done then because then the question becomes how do you expand those relationships and how do you, how do you leverage those relationships to then open up new connections? So it's a constant flywheel between marketing and sales until you are hitting the ultimate growth goals of the company. So you may be thinking, well, this is great. We have the intend data, we're partnering with sales and we're pumping as much money into our campaigns as possible. So this is where I'm going to ask you to be cautious and slow down. And because that's very much the old form of marketing. More spending, more campaigns, more headcount, it's more and more and more. And the most beautiful part about marketing, what has me really excited is how much it has evolved in the last two to three years. Today we have over 8,000 technologies that marketers have access to and it's growing every year. This is the Martech landscape and it just blows my mind. For everything from advertising and promotions to data management to account based marketing, there were only 900 solutions in this space in 2014 and that has grown by 10x. And so there is just a wealth of tools and opportunities here for you to tap into and it's constantly evolving. Which is why I always say that the marketing that I did 10 years ago is nothing like the marketing I do today because it's become much more of a technology game. And keeping on top of the latest technologies is to your advantage because you will have the advantage of all of the tools in your RC that help you be much more efficient with your dollars, much smarter with your campaigns, and at the end of the day, much more effective at reaching your prospects. In the past there's been some curiosity because, you know, there's 8,000 tools there. I've been asked this question of, well, what did you choose and where are you at Marketa? And so I wanted to just share with you a snapshot of the marketing technology stack that we have built here at Marketa. And we've built it all across the funnel, all the way from top of the funnel for brand awareness and to manager our PR down to abm, SEO, SEM and all the way to event marketing and web tools and build on the foundation of Salesforce and HubSpot. So this is a great cheat sheet. You don't have to worry about taking notes here. I believe Sastra will make these slides available to you. But also know that this is not a static picture. This is a point in time. And my fabulous marketing team is always assessing new tools that have entered the market that are able to help us be more effective, more efficient. And so this is, this is a very quickly evolving space. So take this as a point in time of what we are currently using in Marketa. And of course the answers may be different for you, and the answers may be different six to 12 months from now. I wanted to spend a little bit of time on measurements because we talked a lot about intent and running your campaigns effectively. We talked about the use of marketing technology tools across the entire funnel for marketing. But none of this matters if you're not measuring the effectiveness of your work. Because only when you measure will you be able to know whether your marketing is actually reaching those prospects and delivering bottom line impact for the business. And so I thought I'd share with you a little bit of my cheat sheet for metrics that we look at end to end so that you can be as effective as possible with your intent based marketing. So here at Marketa, we measure all of our marketing tactics right from top of the funnel to the bottom of the funnel, from PR and brand to web, demand gen, product marketing, developer marketing, and then of course the efficiency of our marketing spend end to end. And the reason I particularly speak about marketing efficiency is because it's very easy to spend a ton of money on all of these and buy all the tools I can get, put all the dollars I can across every marketing campaign, and win along every one of these metrics. But marketing efficiency keeps me honest at the end of the day and ensures that I'm getting the maximum return for every dollar I'm spending. So it's a great way to keep checks and balances within your own marketing funnel. So looking a little bit closely at what are the metrics within each one of these areas, here are the top three or four metrics I use in each functional area of marketing and I'll double click into each one of these for a few minutes. So, right for PR and brand, I start with looking at coverage in all of the media outlets. We look at total coverage, so how many mentions our company has received in that quarter or that year, and then the quality of that coverage. So what percentage of that was tier one business coverage? And by tier one, we think of the Wall Street Journal or Fortune, where the outlets that are most relevant to you in your space. And we measure the quality of the coverage, which is was it just a mention or were we actually in the title or the subtitle or a prominent portion of that article and what part of that was proactively secured. We want to ensure that we are also driving our own fate as it results in pr. We're driving the conversation. And so, you know, coverage that is not proactively secure is fantastic, but we also want to drive it to the specific PR initiatives that we're leading. And we take all of that, which are those absolute numbers. And we measure share of voice. So we measure the coverage that we got relative to our competitors and we also measure our coverage relative to peers and peers are those companies at a similar size and stage as ours that we really admire and look up to and want to achieve their level of presence and leadership in the market. In addition to that, to measure brand, we measure the direct traffic to the homepage, the monthly unique traffic, and ensure that is growing at a much faster pace than our revenue. This is the tip of the spear in terms of leading indicator and we want to ensure that our direct traffic is not trailing the business, but is leading the business. When we look at web KPIs, we start with traffic and the number of users and sessions and page views. And then we measure their engagement. Do they stay on our site or do they bounce? And when they stayed, how many pages did they engage with us on and how much time did they spend per page and ultimately did they convert which is did they share their information with us in return to read an asset or download information or just want to speak to somebody and reach out to them to learn more about our platform from a demand generation perspective, of course we measure the marketing qualified leads. That's the most commonly used metric. In fact, most marketers believe that's the only metric that you should measure. But I believe that's just one among many. But MQL is of course very important. But then we also ensure that we measure what portion of our MQLs convert to either the sales accepted lead or sales qualified lead, whatever is appropriate in your funnel and ensuring that we are also measuring the number of opportunities that we help mature. So did we how much of the pipeline did we help create? How much of the pipeline did we help influence by ensuring that we're looking at opportunities end to end. Our job doesn't end when we just create the opportunity, but it it continues all the way until the deal is closed and then again ensuring that we help expand those deals and help propagate new deals as a result of that through a great referral program. Product marketing KPIs now many people think that product marketing is very difficult to measure, but product marketing is the engine for content creation, particularly our technical content. And it's great to see how that content is being downloaded and engaged with and how it's affecting pipeline. We also love to measure how our product marketing efforts are resulting in the adoption of new products, both in terms of number of customers on those products and also the revenue those products generate. And developer marketing KPIs we measure that by how big our developer community is. The activity and engagement of those developers are they engaging in our forums, in our social events, in our virtual meetups, and ultimately the conversion of trials. If you have that for developers, or as we do in Marketa, really ensuring that our developers are successfully able to launch new products in our sandbox. So here are my top four takeaways for the session. So I will leave you with Number one, Intent is the new lead. It's not about the lead form anymore. It's about capturing that customer when they exhibit the first intent, wherever that may be, wherever that channel may be. Second, engagement requires close collaboration with sales. It's a soccer game where you're going to go back and forth along the entirety of the lifeline of that opportunity until the deal closes. And after that, when the deal continues to expand and grow. Building a strong technology Stack is essential to be effective today. It's not just about how big your marketing budget is, it's about how much further you can help your marketing budget go because of the smart technologies you're taking advantage of. And last but not least, how you effectively and objectively measure your marketing end to end so that you can have a true north of what is working and what's not and can refine your marketing initiative to best be in service to the business. So with that I will stop sharing my screen and I am open to take questions I have a couple of questions that have come in here, so the first question is can you please repeat the name of the tool that sends alerts words? It's Bombora B A M B O R A. You can sign up for free for a certain number of words. It's also used by very strong ABM tools in the market. So demand base has Bambora already wrapped into it, Engagio has Bamora wrapped into it and then you get access to more keywords that you can use as a part of it. But just go on bombora.com and check it out. I am a huge fan of them. I have no investment stake or anything. It's just been a wonderful tool that we have benefited from marketing and I'd love to see them succeed. What are some common mistakes you see startups make when building out a marketing technology stack for the first time? There are a few common mistakes. I see the first being that marketers tend to go for the oldest or the most established marketing technologies. And I caution you against this because the whole space is evolving so quickly that anything that was even built 10 years ago May be considered legacy technology. Now there may be up and coming technology that is much smarter and is built on modern platforms that help you be much more nimble and get you much more real time insights than some of the older technologies. So don't just pay attention to market share or how large they are, but really do your research on analyst ratings coverage that you see for the technologies. Meet with as many vendors as you can. What I often like to do is particularly for up and coming technologies, I ask for a short trial, a 15 or 30 day trial where we can play around with with their product and actually see how it works and that gives us better confidence in making that decision. So don't feel like you have to make write a check for tens of thousands of dollars without actually trying out the tech first. So that's one common mistake. A second common mistake that I see is that people build their marketing technology stack and feel like their job is done and they will just put it to the side and then go back and focus on their campaigns. Having a marketing technology stack is like having a living and breathing organism. You are changing, the company is changing, your needs are changing. And so it's so important that you are evaluating your tech stack on an annual basis, if not more often, and also assessing newer players as they're coming onto the market and always ensuring that you are taking advantage of the latest and the greatest that's available in the market. So again, don't just rest and let it be, but keep your eye on the pulse of what else is available in the market and take advantage of it. And third is tying metrics to your technology stack. Very often people will invest in a technology stack and not really know how it's performing. So ensure that you have metrics tied to each one of your investments. And you're asking the hard questions of is this paying off at the level I expected it to in very objective terms. So those are a few common mistakes. Another question, what are some tips for companies that are investing in PR for the first time? I love PR as a tool. It is so important for growing earlier stage companies because it really helps you create a presence and a name in the market. And my advice if you're just starting to dabble in PR at the company is try not to do it. Building an in house team from the get go. And the reason is that it takes a minimum number of people, it takes certain network reach for PR to be effective. So if you're just starting out, reach out to an agency. Take advantage of the tremendous number of agencies that are out in the PR space. Marketa in our earlier days used Bospar Communication. We really like them in our early stages. Now we use icr. Huge fans of ICR for our more mature stage. And what I like about working with agencies is a few things. They have incredible network reach and access that is very hard for you to hire and bring in house with say one fte. Now at a later stage when you build and scale your company to a much more mature stage, you may be able to build a PR team with say three or four PR members and that's a great time to have it all in house. But if you're just starting out in pr, partner with a great agency, they bring you access. They also bring you opportunities that you may not have access to where the PR agency may be having conversations with the networks on a set of different topics, but actually find an Opportunity that your company is better suited for. That's very hard to find when you're doing it all in house. And last but not least, of course, they've seen the breadth of use cases, they have the breadth of experience that they can advise you. The one caution I will say is do not outsource all of your PR to the agency. So I've also seen companies make this mistake where they go, well, that's great. Agencies are wonderful and they will run my PR strategy for me and they simply won't. You need to own your PR strategy. You need to be very clear on what you're looking to achieve. Nobody understands your company and your platform better than you. And so you need to be in the driver's seat. Asking the agency to help execute on that strategy and vision and holding them accountable to those outcomes, that's an important part. So the work is not outsourced, it's a partnership. And I think that's what people often forget when they start to work with a PR agency. So work with an agency, but don't forget your responsibility in that partnership. It's the only way it can be successful. Any thoughts on how website marketing will evolve in the next five years? Absolutely. I think that email will be completely redundant. This whole idea of a database and having outreach will be a very archaic method. I also believe data privacy will start to take much more of a forefront and people will have, as we're already seeing, just enormous fatigue with email. So what that means then is that the web channel will have to become much more intelligent, much more predictive. I could see a situation where every visitor on your website as they're coming in will have a score based on their propensity for interest in your product. And you can offer them a tailored experience based on that. We're nowhere near that, but that's where I believe the future will be because there's very little patience now for push style marketing, which is I'm going to push you a bunch of messages and hope that eventually I will harass you to succumb into some action. And I really believe we'll move to a pool form of marketing where you arrive on the website and I'm able to serve you a tailored experience that then entices you to become to want to learn more and become interested in what I have to offer. And so the marketing technology landscape here continues to evolve. It's grown by 10x in 6 years and I think there's more to come there. There will be some level of consolidation, but we'll continue to see much more innovative products as it relates web marketing. How do you see measurement to better align marketing with sales? This is a very important area because I think that the relationship between marketing and sales is very well due for an overhaul. And I think a lot of marketers make the mistake of having a marketing strategy and starting with that. And I believe the work starts with a go to market strategy that marketing and sales write together, which is who are you going after in the market, what is the best way to reach them and how do you partner together across sales and marketing to make that happen. And so it's much more of a closely aligned partnership and once you have that aligned go to market strategy. I'm a big believer in shared metrics, which is it's not marketing metrics and sales metrics. It's one set of metrics that you both are accountable for and you may have different leading indicators that ladder up to those. So as an example, your end metrics may very well be the new revenue that you have to deliver for the year or the add on revenue that you have to deliver for the year. And that could be the shared set of metrics that you own along with sales and marketing. But the leading metrics for marketing could be a series of marketing sourced opportunities, marketing influenced opportunities, and a different one set of ones for sales. But the idea being is that they both ladder into a common shared of success metrics. So one unified go to market strategy up front, one unified set of metrics, different methods and initiatives laddering up to those and different leading metrics leading up to those would be my answer on that. Which places does marketo run ABM advertising campaigns? And which sites today do you find are the most efficient source of ad source leads? This is a wonderful question because because the sources of adsource leads unfortunately are few and far between. It seems to be we are in a land of monopolies and the cost of Google sourced leads is only skyrocketing because they're able to. There's pretty much the lion's share of the traffic lies on Google. We're able to also source some leads on Bing, but the proportion of traffic there is much lower. As for our ABM advertising, we're running them in our social channels use Terminus, we use Engage IO and we run it on LinkedIn and Twitter and some of the social channels. But we also do targeted Outbound which starts with a very defined list of target accounts that we're going after and we partner with our SDR team to reach those Prospects through multiple channels, inviting them to our webinars, inviting them to our events. Now it is all about experimentation with all of these channels because with some campaigns we find that some channels are a lot more expensive. When we initially started ABM and Marketo, we found LinkedIn to be a very expensive channel in terms of the return that we saw. But since then we've been able to become more efficient. So it's really all about tweaking your marketing campaigns to be more effective with that channel. So my advice on this would be the channels are few and far between, but the number of variations you can try with marketing campaigns and the universe of Personas that you can go after on your target accounts is something that you can also modify. The messaging creative is what you can modify. And so the key there is experimentation and really finding what's right for your business and right for the result that you're looking for. Are there any tech offerings in particular that you recommend for developer relations? So we have been using the Chorus platform to build our developer community. We've been thrilled with that. I also have a lot of old mulesoft friends at Bevy and they're great. They offer a great platform for events, for developer meetups. There's a ton of new and exciting technologies in the developer community space and you should definitely take advantage of that. Research all of the different options there. I'm sure the Martech landscape slide that I have would have a whole set on developer tools and community. The important part with developer community though is not necessarily the tool, but it's really about how you're going to make it valuable for developers because developers hate any form of marketing. So please don't market to your developers. The most valuable thing you can do to build a developer community is bring like minded developers together, help them connect with each other, and you mostly stay out of the way. And I say this in the most magnanimous way possible, which is don't try to sell them content, don't try to sell them your product, help them be successful, help answer their questions, give them resources, but really don't market to them. And I think developers trust only other developers. They want to ensure other developers are successful. And so just create the space for them to be able to do that, to have those conversations. And those are I think, the much more important ingredients for creating a great developer community. How can product marketers capture intent? So it's very similar to how we all capture intent, which is then think about your upcoming product and what is the problem? It's Solving for and who would be the right Persona that you think would be suited for this product? Put those together and start to track the intent for those. So for example, Marketo recently came out with a credit product, then the intent words would be credit card processing and the Personas would be head of payments at a leading company in our target account list. So we would bring those ingredients together to then capture intent and then to have a campaign that's very suited for the launch of our credit product for our product marketing team. So I think the questions are very fundamental to how you set up the intent based lead. Ask those questions, find the appropriate channels and use that as a basis to run your campaign. Is PR the top three priorities for an early stage startup company? I think this would depend on how you define early stage for your startup, but I believe it is and the reason is PR creates an incredible halo effect for the whole company. And there are companies that I've seen that haven't even GA'd their product yet and I've been advising them and they would say, well, I'm not sure where I should invest yet. And I would say, well, if your product is not ga, you're not going to generate demand for it just yet. You have your pipeline of beta customers, you focus on that. It's not really about product marketing because that's much further than the funnel. So then my advice would be at that early stage, really invest in pr. Because the beauty of PR is that it helps you with recruiting, it helps you with fundraising, and it helps you with creating awareness with prospects in the market. So it helps with multiple forms of brand awareness and it's definitely one of the top levers I would recommend for an early stage company. Now the caveat I would say is that if you're so early stage that you're seed level, please don't invest in pr. It tends to be expensive and at the seed stage you're still trying to determine who your product is for, what the product does. So at that point I would invest all your dollars really in the product and development aspect of the business. What should we be considering when deploying intense signal data for EU based accounts given privacy regulations in the market? This is an excellent question and one of the ways we've tried to do it is to use information that's in the public sphere. So if you go back and refer to my slide on where you can capture intent, there are many sources that are still in the public sphere and available to you to capture intent. So one of them is in social channels. It could be in the PR of the company themselves. It could be in their earnings reports in in their 10K filings. Those are great ways to capture intent. Also, you may still be able to access databases where you can capture which companies are using your competitor offerings. I believe. I mean, I live in Amsterdam and I still get a ton of outreach of companies selling databases of customers who are using competing solutions. So that may still be a good source of information for you to figure out the intent data in Europe with the new privacy law Any tips for a new hire auditing a company's current marketing landscape? Let me read that question again. Any tips for a new hire auditing a company's current marketing landscape? I'm not sure I fully follow that question, so if you wouldn't mind asking that in more detail, I will be happy to answer it. Are you curious about Are you trying to understand the marketing technology landscape of your company? Or if you could just elaborate, I'd be happy to answer that. The next question is from Ashish. One of the top pressing things for us is around getting attention of C level executives, especially in context of too many companies trying to reach out to these same executives. I think this is so important because C level engagement is almost the gold mine that everyone is trying to reach and they have probably the smallest attention focus, if you can imagine. I will speak personally since I'm now leading product and marketing. My first hour on a Monday morning is spent clearing my inbox because I get at least 100 emails from various technology providers, various solution providers trying to get my interest. And the truth is it's just too much. I cannot process that many inbound interest emails. So my ask would be this. This is that people overestimate the decision making power of a C level executive. And here's why. Because when we talk about decision making for say marketing technologies in the organization, the way I approach is I lay out the problem for my team. I say here's the issue I'm seeing. For example, we have a ton of content on our website, but it's not getting consumed. What is the issue here and what technology can help us address this? This. It's so important for me that my directs are able to mobilize to be able to understand the landscape in that area. To answer that question come with recommendations that they and the team are super excited about. I think it's a very outdated view that we believe that C level executives wake up every morning, assess every technology, write the check and hand it over to their team. It dies on the vine. It's almost maybe an outdated form of leadership I believe where I'm never going to saddle my with a technology that they are personally not excited about that they don't believe is going to deliver success for their domain for the part of the business that they own. So my ask of you is this which is figure out the real decision makers in the business. I bet they're not always the C level executive, they are a key influencer. They may be the people signing on the check at the end so they are important to engage. But maybe your first outreach is to someone on their team that needs to understand the solution at a more meaningful level before they pull in the C level executive to engage on the actual purchase. How do you stay up to date on all the new Martech products coming out? This is a really good question because I get there's so much and it's changing so quickly. What I like to do is actually do a lot of third party reading. So while I may not be able to take every call or every email that comes into my mailbox about a new marketing technology, what I do like to do is read up on a lot of reports that are summarizing the key marketing technologies for the year. So just most recently I was reading about the ABM landscape and I assure you this is really important because it changes dramatically every year. So if you read the ABM landscape from 2020 16, it's drastically different from where it is today. So pick a major, whether that's social or ABM or marketing automation technology and read from an unbiased third party perspective. Read about the landscape, read the pros and cons and use that as a thought starter. I also love to come to conferences like Saastra because this is a great place to see some of those technologies surface and learn more. But I believe that marketing now is a learning craft where you have to keep up to date with how quickly it's evolving and changing. And a big part of that is keeping up to date and staying aware of how quickly this landscape is changing. Any tips for hiring marketing operations role roles? You know, I always hire for intellectual curiosity and people who have the ability to be curious and learn and want to have impact and move quickly. And so I've never for these roles said well, has this person done marketing operations before now? If they have, that's a tremendous add on. But think about it. If marketing operations has grown by 10x in the last 5 or 6 years, you can imagine having 10 years of experience in marketing operations is less relevant than maybe some of the attributes that you need for someone to be successful in this role. And so I'm most interested in someone who wakes up every morning, is curious about technology partners. Really well with sales organization, is very numbers driven, has an innate curiosity to make things better, to be operationally more efficient. And I prefer just hiring for attributes because those are always valuable, no matter what changes in the landscape. And I believe that may bring us to the end of the questions. So last call if there is anything more. All right. Well, it's been such a pleasure to be here with you all. Thanks for taking the time to chat with me today, and I hope you have a fantastic sester. Definitely one of my favorite conferences. And here's to a great week. Thanks, everyone. Everyone.










