Go-to-Market Data with Amanda Thomas

In this episode, we talk with Amanda Thomas about go-to-market (GTM) data. 

• How do you source it?
• What are the challenges and how should we be thinking about it?

We also got into the challenges with data hygiene and how to build a case for the investment in it for an organization.

Recorded live on May 19, 2021.

PASTE T

Hi, I’m Michael Hartmann, I’m Naomi Lou, and I’m Mike Rizzo. And this is ops cast, a podcast for marketing ops pros and rev ops pros created by the MO Pros. The number one community for marketing operations. As professionals tune into each episode as we chat with real professionals to help elevate you in your marketing operations career.

Hello, everyone. Welcome to episode 10. This is a big, big da for us here of ops cast by the MO Pros. Sorry. That’s right. We did it well, you know, raise the roof. Um, if you are a regular listener now, uh, you know, that we, um, used to do these. Um, unfortunately we’re not doing those live for at least for the near term, but we are going to continue doing this.

The good news is that we are now available on many other platforms. So if you haven’t already subscribed, please do on your favorite podcast player. I am Michael Hartmann joined again today by my cohost, Naomi Lou and Mike Rizzo. Hello everybody. Today, we are excited to have with us a five-time Marquetto champion, Amanda Thomas.

At two mouse, is it, did I pronounce it right? You’ll have to correct me if I get it wrong. And we are going to talk about data. I know that’s a topic we all care about in this world. We’re going to talk specifically in this one about go to market activity, data that, you know, enrichment lists, building intent, data, things like that.

So with that, let’s get started. Amanda, why don’t you introduce yourself for us? And we’ll get to. Yeah. Um, thanks. Well, you covered most of it, but I am Amanda Thomas. I am a marketing operations consulting. Uh, uh, to most, um, I work heavily in the Marketo platform and of course, that kind of translated into becoming a champion.

And luckily I’ve gotten that, um, recognition five times in a row, which is really great. Um, I’m based in Houston and I co lead the Marquetto user group in Houston. Um, and that’s, that’s pretty much it. That’s my intro. Yeah, I know. Right. And Texas is winning here cause there’s two of us here on the call from Texas.

So. All right. So, um, so you know, I think everyone who listens is going to be interested in this, but if they’re like me, when you think about data, I kind of cringe a little bit because I don’t know that I’ve ever been any place where data was always in great shape, including stuff for going to market, let alone reporting.

But, um, Yeah. If you’re marketing ops, bro, you think, you know, you know, I don’t know that anybody’s seen a situation. That’s great. You know, what’s your experience you’ve as a consultant, right? You see lots of different, uh, environments. Um, what is kind of, what’s your experience? What are you out there seeing in the space about data quality, how it helps or hurts hinders people for going through.

Yeah, well, luckily being a consultant I’m exposed to a lot. So, um, it definitely varies with each marketing system and each marketing team, like what they’re actually trying to collect and how they go about doing that. Um, I definitely find many companies with systems in place to enhance data and get that collection and they have a pretty good, you know, system in place to do so.

Um, Uh, but it’s also very common that a good percentage of their database is missing some key information. Um, so I think that’s, it’s kind of like a boat that people are cringe. You know, when they see what percentage of their database is missing something like industry or something that they use heavily and, and go to market strategy and, uh, and.

I always kind of try to convey that other companies are in the same boat with them. That they’re crunching too. So, um, but yeah, I think it, it, it just, it’s common that they’re, they’re trying. Right. And then they have something, um, kind of missing and, um, You know, they’re actively trying to use it and find what product kind of like best fits a certain persona, but they’re missing some data.

Um, and then, uh, the quality, you know, they’re, they’re kind of lacking and the quality measurement, I think, uh, some companies are, um, not really marrying when they’re actually trying to get, uh, that data to kind of compensate that database that doesn’t have those points. Um, they’re not. Checking to see how accurate it really is.

Um, kind of like pulling reports on what the prospect said versus what the enrichment data actually said. So, um, I think a lot of people are in the same boat with the, uh, data quality. Yeah. You know, it’s the one I always, I was thinking of is just the simple, what seems to be a simple request. Like, Hey, can we just send something to all our customers?

Oh, yeah. That’s Pandora’s box customers. Are you talking about? Yeah. And then like separate them out, right. Especially if you have enterprise accounts, right. Where you have oh yeah. 150 people at one account and you go, well, do you want to hit all 150? Yeah, totally. Um, Amanda, you said something about, um, just, you know, well, you, as a consultant, you’re interacting with lots of different, um, environments I’m sure.

And I’m curious to know, just kind of dovetailing off of what you were talking about around data quality and just the differences between different clients. Do they come to you with the problem of data quality or is it like a discovery along the way? And. Oh, and by the way you have this like massive.

Yeah, like out of curiosity, more times than not it’s the discovery for sure. Uh, they, they are, you know, trying to, um, you know, implement something like lead source or. You know, something, um, like a traffic director for nurture, and then it just kind of like gets uncovered that they have a percentage of their database missing some information, but there are companies that, you know, come through us as well, that are just, um, they know it’s a problem.

They’re trying to fix it. Or they’re trying to implement a tool like enrichment data or something and 10 data. And, um, there, they already know it’s a problem. They’re just, they’re trying to make up for it. Work with us to hopefully solve the problem. Right. That makes sense. Yeah. I always wonder, like how many, how many people actually are paying attention enough to know that there’s already a problem in place and then they’re just seeking you out for that help or if it’s just a, you know, an element of the entire effort.

Um, that’s typically what I’ve discovered too, is you step into, you know, some organization and you’re like, okay, Yeah, you’re not really ready to do any of this stuff yet.

Um, when it comes to things like data and data hygiene, that unless you are directly impacted by it, it’s not something that a lot of folks think or care about. Right. They just assume that it’s something that’s there and that it should work. They don’t necessarily think that, you know, it’s something that’s an ongoing thing for data hygiene and data quality.

Right. They just, just don’t notice it unless you’re directly. One degree away from it. Um, more than that, you just, it’s kind of like, we just are all, we just all expect that websites, these days should be mobile friendly. Right? You don’t really notice it in the back. The backend work that goes into it until something doesn’t work right.

Or it doesn’t load properly. And I find that that’s a struggle a lot, right. Especially around trying to get funding or budget for maybe tools or even resources to deal with data hygiene and data quality, because it doesn’t, it’s not always something that’s friend of mine or top of mind. Yeah. I feel like that’s an opportunity for us.

I don’t know. What do you think, Amanda, as like a marketing operations person, right? You’ve been embedded in an organization. Um, but you’re also now a consultant. Um, but do you think there’s an opportunity there where, uh, on the front end of things you could maybe present to the team, whether that’s your, like your immediate team and marketing, or maybe a rev ops team that you report to, or the organization at large and you say, Hey.

Here’s here’s the landscape of opportunity we have in front of us. This is, this is what we know about our customers. Like who here wants to do something creative with this information. I feel like that’s an opportunity for us as like marketing operations professionals to say, if you get this foundational stuff set up and you’re collecting this information and it’s, it’s somewhat well-maintained, uh, You can get ahead of the opportunity instead of waiting for someone like kinda Naomi or saying like, unless it’s slapping you in the face, you don’t realize there’s a problem, right?

Like someone comes to you and says, Hey, I, you know, to Michael’s point, I want to send a campaign to all of our customers. It’s like, all right, well, which customers, so I don’t know. What do you think Amanda, like, do you think we have an opportunity to like present data to the organization and say like, let’s get creative or like, it’s not a place for that.

Yeah, no, definitely. I think, I think that can even stem from just looking at your database and something that. No you segment on today, like, well, if it’s industry or yeah. Your customer or not, um, but it pulling that database that doesn’t have that piece of information and just saying, this is the, this is the audience that we’re missing out on.

Like we’ve already paid for these people. We’ve already, you know, put the ads out there. We’ve already done all of this campaign work to get these people in our database, but we don’t have this information on them to actually. Target them or, you know, put them in nurtures or further campaigns. I think.

That always equates to like money, which is like, you know, you’ve lost money because you spent money on getting them in and you’re not doing anything with them. Um, and then all the money that you can get out of them too. Um, that conversation just translates super well. Like going up the ladder to, to convey that you need a budget to get this enrichment data and do something with these people.

Yeah. I, you know, I think this reminds me of situations where I’ve. Because we were moving so fast on other things, right. Trying to build a database and get volume and, you know, go to market that when I sat down and we actually did some pretty basic like pull from the database, like where’s the white space on certain fields and things like that.

That was pretty obvious that there were gaps there that we. Yeah, we needed to either address or figure out how to now address this, that immediate one, but also put in place the things that would prevent it from happening in the future. And that’s not think to Naomi’s point, right? Trying to get that sold as an important initiative on where we need to spend our, you know, limited amount of capital and resources is sometimes hard because it’s, there’s not an obvious near-term return for that work.

Right. And that’s, that’s the challenge. I think we all run into. Yeah. One of the things that Springs up that we keep talking about, like missing data or data that’s not consistent or normalized or whatever, res you know, when you’re, when you’re saying across these different companies and maybe there’s there’s industry specific and things like that.

But yeah. What are you seeing is really critical kinds of data elements that people should be focusing on. Like, you know, pretty much everybody needs XYZ, right? Data points to be able to effectively go to market. And, uh, maybe which ones of those do you see the biggest gaps on typically?

Yeah, I think, uh, there’s, there’s four types of like data, I think, on, on building an actual like person or a record and, and holding them in your instance. And that would be, you know, your demographic information. So like your title, uh, your location, then your firmographic information, which is about your company.

So your company size revenue. Um, and then there’s behavioral. Uh, so what is the record actually doing? And then the intent data. What is the record doing outside of your website? Um, I think those are common, the common four categories of data that you should actually house on an actual record. And, uh, I think with the go-to market strategy, Uh, you know, whether it’s launching a new product or launching a new campaign around a product and trying to reach out to the database that you have, or even getting new people in, um, is looking at the data that you, um, you’re first missing.

Like you need to enhance these people with some of this data. Um, so whether that’s, you know, you don’t collect job title, you don’t know how to categorize based on like persona. Um, that’s something, you know, to make sure when you’re doing demand gen that you have that on your form or, um, As you’re trying to target people where you do have that information.

That’s a great target point. There are so many companies I work with where it’s persona a persona persona, and there’s multiple factors that go into defining an actual persona. And I think, um, once you dig into those factors like, oh, well we need jobs, title. We also need behavior. What have they actually interacted with?

And, and then that kind of like in. Forces you to, to find the data that you’re missing. A lot of people uncover it with that. Um, uh, trying to build out a persona to like better target their audience. And then they find out, oh, we are missing a bunch of information on firmographic data or, uh, information on the actual record and their behavior and their job title.

Um, so I think those. I sat a lot of different fields. I have a different data points, but I think a really common, so you know this and Naomi, I think you can jump in on this, I think, especially given your kind of the size of your organization, but one of the things that applies also to me, Amanda, is that there’s, there’s, there’s an implied.

Level of discipline that needs to be applied to how you capture and build that data out. And that’s great if it’s all done within marketing ops team, what I’ve always seen though is, you know, sales we’ll get a list from somewhere, right. It’s an event or they just go scrape their own stuff, like whatever.

Right. So how have you seen Naomi and Amanda? Both I think would be great for this, but how have you seen. Like, do you put in place like rigid requirements, like only lists are going to get loaded through my team and they have to meet certain requirements. Right. Putting that. Or do you, do you leave it open and try to address it after the fact?

Like how did, what do you think is the best way to deal with that? Um, I can, I can talk a bit about what we do at your thigh. And so it is very rigid. Um, you know, we are a large organization with data coming from various sources. Um, the majority of leads back when we had in person trade shows and were actually getting, you know, lead files from badge scans and whatnot, um, Let’s go through a lead import template that we were provided to folks on site.

And then we would load them into Marquetto, which would then go into Salesforce. Um, and then I partnered really closely with our sales operations team to, um, limit the ability for specific type of profiles to create just like leads on mass, like to be able to identify them because we don’t want people scraping the internet, for example, and just putting leads in like that, because that can cause other issues like spam traps, any pots, things like that.

And just. Overall data quality, especially with things like council, GDPR, and then more extended CCPA and all of the expanded, um, you know, data regulations that are coming. It’s just something that, you know, once we kind of get our legal team and our security team on board, it’s, it tends to be a bit of a, um, uh, it’s not as much of a battle that way when it becomes a company wide policy.

Yeah. A hundred percent agree. It should be very rigid, I think. Um, and then you can put something in place to, to catch those one-offs right. If you, if you do think that, uh, there are, you know, sales reps kind of scraping LinkedIn and just like manually entering people into your system, um, you can definitely in your marketing automation platform or in Salesforce, You know, trigger off of that to actually put them, you know, aside for a little bit or do something special, like run them through privacy compliant.

I mean, everyone should go through privacy compliance processing, but, you know, um, put them in a different bucket to where you are. Getting them leaking into your email campaigns to make sure you don’t fall into one of those spam traps or, uh, anything like that. So I think it’s for sure the best practice be as rigid as possible.

And then have something set up to kind of alert you or do something to like push them into a different bucket. If people are being created outside of.

Yeah, it sounds very much like what we did when we got a bot attack, we put in place a process to quarantine potential, but right. So do the same thing with sort of questionable questionably sourced data, right. Is, is kind of the way. So the only follow up question for you, I’m curious, cause this, I I’m curious how you.

Agreement across the organization about supporting that rigid structure, because it sort of falls into the same bucket in my mind of like getting, you know, selling the idea of like focusing on data. Right? So this is one of those scenarios. So how did you overcome that? Well, it’s not a democracy, right?

It’s a flexible dictatorship really.

You know, it’s uh it’s um, it, yeah, it’s a lot of communication, definitely. Right. And close partnership with, um, our sales enablement and sales operations team who have, um, either monthly or bi-monthly calls with all of the sales reps and just like really reinforcing that. And then also on the marketing side, it’s like, you know, it’s something that I’m a big believer that it’s, you know, I can say it until I’m blue in the face.

My team can say it until we’re blue in the face, but having. I guess allies within the organization where we really partner with them and like our marketing business partners to really show them and have them understand why something is really important, especially, you know, I think we went through the GDPR exercise before GDPR became, became law.

It really opened their eyes and really allow them to see wow, like bad data and people who really don’t want our information can really impact the numbers and our campaigns. And like, what is the point of, you know, sending things or having this effort just for like inflated numbers type of thing. Right.

And so really having those allies internally that can then disseminate that information forward. So it goes across the organization. It really helps us. Yeah, I know I, when GDPR in particular in castle before that, I mean, I, but GDPR really, because we were global, was I really focused on what the potential risk was, right?

So this is really a risk mitigation thing. Would we be perfect? Probably not. Right. But we were going to do our best and that was part of it. But the, I think the other part that this requires is, you know, you have to have the confidence. That you know, what you’re doing is, is, is the right thing to do too.

And know that you’re kind of speaking on behalf of the customer, even if it’s counter to what some of the people in the organization to do. I, I, I mean, I remember having to have a tough conversation with the CEO of our company. One time we wanted to do something and I was like, I’m not sure we should do that.

Right. And ultimately we didn’t. Um, but I S I S. I made my point and I said, ultimately, this is a risk management decision. Right. It’s you know, there’s a trade-off. And so, um, it’s a challenge for sure. Um, okay. So let me, so let’s get into another challenge. So I know there’s a lot of companies out there that are getting moving towards, um, you know, account based marketing or account based, everything approaches depending on who you want to talk to.

Yeah, me personally, I’ve always been sort of skeptical about some of like the intent data parts that tend to go with that a lot. Um, but I’m hearing more and more good things, you know, I’d be curious, you know, Amanda, what your take is on kind of the state of an intake, intent data and ABM, and you know, what’s working, what’s not working.

Are there best practices about approaching it? Right. Adding certain things. First other things later,

Yeah, definitely. Uh, a lot of this going around in the past, like what five years now with ABM being a hot topic. Um, but yeah, maybe it’s I, yeah, I was going to say, I feel like maybe it’s been longer, but I don’t know, five years sounds about right. But maybe it is right. Like it’s, it feels like it’s been a lot longer because there’s just so much hype.

Definitely all over. Yeah. Everywhere. It’s everywhere for sure. And, and still it, I mean, and so the adoption of it, you know, people actually going after targeted accounts, like your whales are your big bets. Oh, I’ve heard it called many different things before. Um, but yeah, I think. Um, kind of the mindset of going around those targeted accounts is actually, okay.

Now we actually need the data around those targeted accounts to, to know, um, how to reach out and when to reach out. And, uh, I think there are two different things that a lot of these ABM tools kind of try to sell, um, to companies and try to get them on board to go along. You know, targeting to specific accounts and that’s the intent data.

Um, so data from third parties, data that’s collected outside of your website. And then also accounts lookalike accounts, you know, those accounts that look like your customers. And, um, I think one is a little bit more scarier than the other. I think, uh, intent data is something I’m like behind a hundred percent in the right way.

So I think, uh, you know, collecting that, that data, that of things that are occurring outside of your website should be taken into account for, you know, scoring for, uh, placing people in the right nurture, the right campaigns. Um, It can definitely be used to, uh, enhance what you have already. It definitely should not replace what you have.

I think behavior with your specific brand is, has more weight to what you should be doing and how you should be going after these people. Then data intent data, I guess. Um, the, yeah, the second part, those lookalike accounts. I think that, uh, It’s kind of a better list purchase. So at least they’re at least they’re looking at like, it’s a very harsh, but it’s a good, it’s a, it’s a better list purchase, right?

So they’re at least looking at your, your customers, right? So information that you’re kind of doing, you should be doing, hopefully you. Um, is analyzing your customers. What are the demographic firmographic, behavioral, like attribution, what data do you have in your customers? And then try to find people that kind of fit that same lookalike, right?

Uh, as that account and I, and I think so in that way, it’s better, you know, than just like a cold list purchase, but you do have to be super targeted on. Now reaching out to these people. Um, I just think that there are a lot of companies that kind of take these, you know, these, these accounts and they try to do like a very general, like welcome to their brand with.

There’s so much,

and there’s so much data behind those, right? So, I mean, you know that they match your customers so they should be matching what you’re doing for nurture what you’re doing for your ad campaigns. Um, for your targeted audiences. So you should make sure that they’re matching your specific target audience buckets, and then be personalized and specific when you reach out to them.

Not just like a general brand, like, Hey, this is my brand. You know, you should be very specific and calculated when reaching out to these because they are sensitive and you should also expect to hire them subscribers. You know, these people might fall off a bit because they’re just a little bit cold to your brand, but that’s my hot take on ABM and what those.

Yeah, I think what’s fascinating about the ABM category as well, just on the client success side of things too is super, super interesting. Um, I’ve been seeing a bit of that, uh, just within the organizations that I’ve been talking to and, uh, They’re leveraging the information, you know, sites like G2 crowd have all the power in the world to say, Hey, your customer is like scouting out.

Uh, one of your top competitors, FYI, um, which then becomes this like really awkward conversation. You have to find a way to bring up something. That’s my client’s success, but you know, it’s really cool. And if used well and use right. Kind of to your point, right. Um, it can help save an account well before, you know, ideally well, before it actually turns from you.

So, uh, it’s really, really fascinating. Big brother’s watching. So, you know, you use the, the, the, you said, um, you think a 10 days is good if you use it the right way. I think that’s what you said. Like, could you drill down to that a little bit? What do you mean by the right way? Yeah, so I think, uh, I think companies are rushed to kind of prove ROI of a certain tool and they, and they, uh, Get it and onboard that tool.

Um, and part of that is, uh, let’s revamp the entire scoring model because we have intent data. And instead of just using that to enhance what you actually have. So the behavior on your, um, on, on your website, that, that is, you know, the main behavior that you want to capture. You keep in your scoring model, that’s going to meet.

More to your brand then, uh, you know, this person downloaded this white paper from tech target or something, you know, not to call out specific company. Really what they did is they, they, they, they filled out a form. They may not have read the okay. Exactly. So it’s good to use to enhance, you know, what you already have, but it’s definitely something that should be, um, accompanied by what you, what.

Are seeing on your actual website and what you’re seeing with your email interactions and your sales interactions. Um, and that’s what I mean, like by using it the right way, don’t completely revamp, um, maybe use some of those intent, you know, data points to modify your sales alerts. So just like, um, What Mike was just talking about, you know, if a customer of yours is actually interacting with G2 crowd and looking at something, maybe you just gave a little bit more information to your sales alerts, you know, let your customer success team know that that’s happening.

Um, if you know, someone is interested in a few different things that are different from what you believe they’re interested in from the behavior on your website. Maybe that’s something that you include in the sales alert, like this is the product we believe that would be best fit for them. Like because of their behavior on our website, uh, behavior outside of our website, these are some other topics they might be interested in.

And you can use that, um, you know, in a good way without revamping everything to, to just try to prove ROI on the actual. Right. Yeah. I think one of the things I’ve heard, uh, about how people have been using a tent data is particularly on really, um, say outbound cells sort of motions in particular, right.

And prioritizing for helping the prioritize for the, for those, whether its SDRs or AEs, you know, which account should they be targeting today? Right based on that intent data. So if there’s a surgeon in tent, right, that’s an indication. So as long as they match the other profiles, right. They’re part of the target account list.

That’s one of the ones they’re supposed to be following up on, then that can help them do, you know, dry, like focus on the ones that are priority today and that can change over time. So, um, yeah, I think, you know, my percentage is just my own perception. Right. I think I mentioned, right. I was skeptical about some of these things early on is just, cause it seems like everybody’s.

Captures this data in the same way or a very similar ways. So how do you differentiate? But, um, also it just fit my, you know, one of it was, you don’t want people to use it in a way that’s not, shouldn’t be used. Right. You don’t want to be like, oh, I saw you were looking at G2 crowd and you’re looking at like that, that I think would be a mistake for just about anybody even with first party data.

Right. So, you know, I know I had, I had an inbound team on under me before. Yeah, we shared a lot. We looked at what happened on inbound, you know, our first party data. And we helped that inform how we phrase follow-up questions and things like that. But we didn’t say, oh, we saw you were looking at this piece of content or that piece of content, because we just didn’t want to put them off.

And I think certain audiences, especially it would be put off. Like I, I used to sell your work in organizations or sold into engineers or, uh, It people and they’re like, they would be completely turned off right. In general. Right. Um, so, um, yes. Can speaking of this a little bit, right. So one of the things that I should probably know more about than I do right now is this, you know, this pending status change where there’s going to be, you know, less ability, especially through Google, right.

To track third-party. Data. Yeah. How do you see, I guess, two, two questions that, like, how do you see the suppliers of data that are somewhat dependent on third party cookies and things like that? How are, how do you see them sort of getting ready for that? And then how do you see organizations that use that sort of anticipating that?

Are they given, putting a shift more towards our own website data? Or are they investing more in there and that tracking, like, what are you just like, what are you seeing in the market? Yeah. Um, there’s definitely a lot of companies that I think are just trying to ignore it for now, or for the most part, let’s just put it off for a different time.

Um, but I think there are some companies that are raising these questions, right? It’s like, how, how do I actually get this information? Um, if all of these privacy controls are being implemented, um, and. Uh, from, I wish I honestly knew a lot more about this subject than I do, but it’s a tough one. I mean, I think you have to, you know, keep up because there’s, uh, changes happening all the time with this.

Um, so, uh, The it’s hard to just like, know everything that’s going to occur in the next six months or 12 months, um, with all of these changes. But, um, I definitely see, you know, there’s a lot of information from Stanford, white men that I get from slack channels and. Community posts and all of this, and he seems to keep up to date with it.

So I kind of just, uh, read through him what he tells me, um, to pay attention to, uh, um, maybe, maybe that’s a whole nother topic. We need to de deep research. Yeah, for sure. I know there’s a lot more research and prep for that. And yeah, I know like what I read most recently, um, uh, what is how, like the referred to data isn’t coming through to actually, um, populate your hidden fields?

You know, if you’re pulling from your refer data, um, That you should be working with your partners. So like your third party resources to put something on the page that actually left that data passed through from your refer. Um, so from what I, what my limited knowledge is telling me is that there seems to be a workaround for almost everything that’s actually released.

So, um, you know, whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing, Um, but I think that these, uh, intent data providers are doing just that like it’s their entire business is to make sure that they can pass on that information. So I’m sure they’re working with companies with like those intent data providers. If you’re using an AVM tool.

I’m sure they’re all working together to try to make sure that information keeps passing through your URLs and then your, your hidden fields on your forms. So it doesn’t feel like there’s as much taxed in the industry as there was a GDPR and CCPA and castle before that. So, yeah, absolutely. And then of course, yeah, your website.

Obviously you should, you know, that should be like your number one source of everything. So as long as you have your codes on your website, you’re tracking the behavior there, you can use Google analytics still, right. It’s still a thing. So you can pass info from that. And I think, yeah, I think companies will be fine.

Um, absolutely with like nothing major needs to be overhauled, I think. Right. Um, Two more questions I think. And then we’ll, we’ll, we’ll kind of call it a day, but just, you know, there’s a ton of options out there with data providers. I mean, I started my career in kind of direct database marketing, direct marketing.

So there, there were list providers back when we were doing that too. But, um, Yeah. How, how do you coach your clients through that? Like if they go, okay, we think we need either intent data or we need data to augment our database or fill in white space. Right. Whatever it is. Right. How do you kind of guide them through that process of making a selection and kind of evaluating the vendors out there?

Yeah, I think, uh, Yeah, it’s definitely, it’s definitely common. I think, uh, first starting with what you’re using the data for, I think is going to be super important and it’s going to guide the rest of your conversations, um, because that guides how you’re going to collect the data. Like what matching you’re doing everything else that you’ll need to look for with specific features within any of those tools.

So I’m kind of going through how you’re going to use that data. Is it to verify the data that you have is correct? Is it to fill in your white spaces? Is it to, um, you know, enhance. Uh, you’re targeting and what you’re doing with campaigns. I think that’s like the first starting point of evaluating these vendors.

Um, yeah. And then I think, uh, that guides everything else, right. Is your, is that data going to flow through multiple, uh, multiple data warehouses or your Salesforce and your marketing automation platform? Like where does that data need to live in order to do what you want to do with it? And then that.

Determines how simple the tool needs to be or complex depending on your tech stack. Uh, I think that’s a good time. Yes, exactly. Can you pass it through one and use that tool to pass through others? You know, or do you need, you know, API calls, whatever. I mean, there’s, it can get complex, but absolutely some simplicity wins every time for sure.

Um, obviously. ROI, like you’re going to have to prove that it’s worth renewing and using this tool again next year after you purchase. So I think, uh, there’s a lot of. Companies that will do. I know when I was evaluating for a specific brand, like when I was in-house before there, the companies we were looking at would provide proof of concepts.

So they would actually give you, um, some lookalike accounts. They would give you some intent data. And then you can see like, okay, with our conversion rate, as of what it is today. If we had these in here and let’s say the conversion rate was a little bit higher because it’s a lookalike account, what would that actually equate to?

And then be able to kind of. Predict your ROI, um, to make sure that it’s not a purchase that everyone hates and like it’s just a waste of money. So I think that’s a good starting point when you’re looking. All right. So this leads me to my final question, because what you just described right. Doing that ROI modeling is a kind of a, a pet peeves, not the right word, but it’s something that I am passionate about for marketing obstacles that you need to play to be effective.

You need. No at least basics of finance, right? Yeah. Um, cause you have to pitch stuff like this and understand the value. So kind of putting it back on you, like, so if there was such a thing as a certified marketing operations professional, right? Some, some sort of program where you could get that, like, and from your perspective, Eh, two things like, what would that mean to you?

Right. Do you think there would be value in it? What would you expect where she saw somebody with that? And then what do you think would be key things that should be included in that sort of, Ooh, that’s a good one. Uh, yes. I definitely think it would be valuable, uh, you know, depending on what’s actually behind it.

Um, I think, uh, Yes. If there’s like a, uh, because you know, you have certifications for individual platforms and I think that’s great. It, it, it shows that you’re, you have mastered that tool. Um, and you know, that tool very well, but marketing ops as a whole is so much more than like your marketing automation platform.

Um, and I do think that yes, it needs to be very focused on. You know, revenue, operations, how would you actually put together a tech stack? Um, you know, how would you manage data? How would you, you know, uh, manage privacy compliance? Um, I think those are good things to like include, how do you connect with the SA how do you work with sales operations?

You know, um, there’s, there’s a lot behind that and it could mean many different things, but I think if it was clearly defined. This is what, um, you’re, you’re tested on or you’re evaluated on to get this certification. I think that’s super beneficial, um, because there’s definitely a difference again, between being certified in a marketing automation tool and then actually knowing, uh, about the marketing operations profession and being able to.

Uh, consult, you know, whether in-house on that profession or with other companies, I think it’s definitely, it’s going to be a kind of like having a CPA raw versus, you know, being certified in SAP, right? Yeah. Yeah. Something like that. Awesome. Well, Amanda, we kind of sprung that one on you, so. Thank you for being a good sport.

Um, again, thanks for your insights today. It’s been great. Um, thanks to, to, you know, me and Mike, uh, and for everyone who’s listening in. Um, so thank you so much for listening and being part of this. We do want everybody to be, to join in. If you have suggestions for future topics or guests, let me know. You can find me on LinkedIn or at the MO Pros dot com.

Um, so. Yeah. And if you want to keep track of this podcast, join us at the MO Pros dot com forward slash OpsCast. That will be one. And you can also, uh, subscribe through Spotify and Google and apple podcasts and a few others now. So please do, uh, rate it, review it. We appreciate it. And thank you, Amanda again for your time.

Thanks so much for having me.