Marketing Automation Platform “State of the Union” with MarketingOps.com Chairpersons

221202 – MAP “State of the Union” with MarketingOps.com Chairpersons
[00:00:00]

Michael Hartmann: Hello everyone. Welcome to another episode of OpsCast, brought to you by marketing ops.com, powered by the MO Pros. I’m your host, Michael Hartmann. Join today. We are down to just Mike and me again. Mike Rizzo is my co-host.

Mike Rizzo: Hey everybody.

Michael Hartmann: Oh, I wasn’t even gonna let you go,

Mike Rizzo: Oh man, I just jumped right in there.

Michael Hartmann: Right in there. Uh, and the reason I wanna get going is cause we have a lot to cover and we have multiple guests this, this time today. So we are excited to have with us, um, some marketing operations experts each here to talk a little bit about. So the mAJor marketing automation platforms is kind of our state of the union.

We did one of. Early on in the history of the podcast. So this is our second round. Um, we’re gonna do this here, but I think we’ll try to make this an annual thing. So joining us today are Lara Black Rep, kind of representing Pardot AJ Navarro, representing Marketo, George Samaras representing Eloqua and. Mike is actually gonna [00:01:00] represent HubSpot.

So here we go. Lara, Lara is currently director of marketing operations at Extensive HR and is a part op pro, and I think actually she’s got that term coined. AJ is currently a and AJ, this was new to me, package technology operations consultant with Shift Paradigm. So, um, he’s, he’s Marketo expert and then George is currently director of Marketing Operations and Technology at Coveo and is an Eloqua expert.

So thanks everyone for joining us.

Lara Black: Happy to be here.

AJ Navarro: Proud to

George Samaras: you for having us.

Michael Hartmann: Right. So why don’t we, like, let’s start off with the big question cause I, uh, my and I’ll. I think my general assertion right now is that there’s not really much happening in terms of true, uh, really innovative stuff happening in this space. So I want each of you to try to prove me wrong here. So let’s start with this, you know, what are you most excited about in terms of recent changes or announcements from the different platforms?

And, you know, I’m gonna go look and I’m might, I’ve got my screen [00:02:00] here. I’ll go with who’s at the top left of my screen, which is Lara, why don’t you start us off and then we can kind of rotate from there.

Lara Black: Pardot has had an interesting year. Um, I’m excited about it, but not necessarily in a good way for their name change. Uh, officially its

Michael Hartmann: Oh, that’s right. It’s That’s right. It’s not part out anymore.

Lara Black: It’s Officiates name has changed to Marketing Cloud account engagement powered by Pardot, which will probably lose the powered by Pardot in some future iteration.

It’s a long mouthful. It wasn’t super well received by the group of Pardot users. We call ourselves the Pardashians. Um, but it is what it is, you know, uh, everybody still calls it par up, uh, even internally, when. Consultants, uh, talk to their clients. They say, you know, we have Pardot. Um, they are trying to write blog posts for both, both terms, things like that.

And actually interesting, um, feature that they released is conditional completion actions, which means, uh, traditionally all pardo forms, everybody who fill out a form had the same actions [00:03:00] applied to them. And you had to get really creative if you didn’t want actions applied to everyone across. Now we can perform, say, Hey, this custom field is blank.

Do these additional actions to them, and we don’t have to eat up a ton of automation rules and other paid features to do it.

Michael Hartmann: Interesting. I thought you were gonna go somewhere with like multi page forms, but, which I don’t think anybody, any of these platforms do. Maybe HubSpot does. I’m probably least familiar with that.

Lara Black: There’s a good reason to have them in certain instances, but I think most of the marketing people would say, um, more forms, more fields, way bad. I don’t know. Um, I think we all want fewer forms, fewer fields, and are utilizing tools in the background to like backfield data instead of giving them more fields to fill out.

Michael Hartmann: Yeah, no, I, I think generally you’re right, although then everybody’s like, why don’t we have more information about these leads in our database?

Mike Rizzo: that’s the worst

Michael Hartmann: You right. All right. [00:04:00] Uh, I’ll, I’ll call George. How about you? Next, let’s talk about Eloqua. What’s, what’s exciting there?

George Samaras: Yeah, great question. So I’m glad you prefaced earlier that, uh, you know, there hasn’t been too many changes. It’s like , I was trying to think of a few big ones that we’ve, uh, we’ve got our hands on. Um, I would say so the big change I’ve seen with Qua in the past, uh, year is a lot of third party integrations now tools.

So less on Oracle’s, you know, Oracle rolling this out, Oracle’s been doing a. Like, if you look at the qui change log for the quarterly releases, a lot of stuff behind the scenes, primarily with the api, they’ve deprecated the soap api, a lot of, uh, new endpoints available and, and some pretty cool stuff you could do with the, the rest and bulk api.

But, um, as a practitioner, uh, what I’ve noticed as an end user is a lot more integrations from third party tools. I know, uh, I was chatting with the Syncy team, uh, I wanna say like last week. And, um, you know, like I, I’ll I’ll preface by saying I am the Eli person. I do consult in Eloqua. My day job, I use Marketo, so I play.

There, but um, you know, we’re talking about the Marketo integration, like yeah, [00:05:00] we just rolled out an EQ integration as well and I’m like, oh, that’s great to see. cause I, I know the. The big, the big challenge a lot of Equi users has had is being you need a really robust open API backed by developer to like build these integrations with, uh, other platforms and tools.

So to see other companies investing in Equis integration to like help us really kind of get data outta the platform and, and do some cool things is pretty awesome. Um, it’s not comparable, I’d say not. You know, not yet to, to, uh, other platforms like Marketo and HubSpot, but, uh, huge improvements there. Um, really making, you know, marketing ops practitioners lives easier.

They’re using Eli.

Michael Hartmann: Yeah, I was, I was using Eloqua four or five, six years ago, was at a Marketo shop, came back and using Eloqua now, and that’s like the big thing, like, oh, it’s like you can’t, can’t call out. The other thing I I, I don’t know if you use this or not, but they’re starting to incorporate, um, other capabilities to like SMS directly inside the platform that’s coming out too.

So I don’t know anybody who’s using it yet, but [00:06:00] um, I know it’s there.

George Samaras: Yeah, I know there was some other, back when I used to work at Oracle many years ago, it was, uh, there were some customers doing some custom solutions for that. Uh, I haven’t worked with any customers that have used it, but it’s, it’s, it’s cool to see these integrations coming, um, cause a lot of it’s a leg, I wouldn’t say a legacy system, but there’s a lot of people who’ve had it for many years.

Um, well entrenched in their marktech stack and they need to make it work. And this just made everyone’s lives a lot easier with these new integr.

Michael Hartmann: Yeah. All right. So we’ve talked, mentioned, uh, Marketo. So AJ, how about you tell us what, like what’s great happening?

AJ Navarro: Yeah, there’s quite a few things, uh, personally that I’m, you know, starting to sink my teeth into that I’m excited for. And uh, the first one is, uh, Marketo now offers a priority override for trigger campaigns. So basically you can prioritize different types of campaigns to, depending on what you’re trying to accomplish with, with, uh, goals.

And so for a lot of the teams that I get to work with, [00:07:00] Sometimes, you know, they have a ton of stakeholders or a ton of programs, uh, firing off at the same time. And when you think of things of communication limits, you’re able to kind of prioritize which campaign takes priority. So that’s really cool. Uh, I’ve started to stick my teeth into using more of also the dynamic chat feature.

Um, and recently in October, uh, Marketo released, um, A better UI update to be able to auto arrange just some of the streams and the dialogue streams. Um, before it was a little bit messy and un methodical. So they’ve kind of enhanced that. So been playing around with that. That’s been really fun. You’re also able now to, uh, schedule meeting notifications, uh, whenever those happen within the dynamic functionality or the.

Chat functionality, uh, most importantly, I think, and, um, and I’ve always been hit or miss with the Marketo ui, but I’ve really liked the enhanced ui. Uh, when it comes to like some of the email template details, um, I am a huge [00:08:00] stickler on just understanding where things are used. Um, and so, Uh, the newer UI allows you to kind of see the email asset status, uh, when it was last modified, uh, who it was last modified by.

Um, as well as use some filters to narrow down by if it’s been approved or in draft or unapproved. So just making my life a whole lot easier when it comes to just, you know, easing that bandwidth. So those are some features I’ve been excited.

Michael Hartmann: Sounds good. Yeah. Um, that, that prioritization one sounds really interesting. I can think of many scenarios where that would’ve come in handy. Okay. Awesome. Uh, alright, Mike, your turn.

Mike Rizzo: My

turn.

Michael Hartmann: I know HubSpot’s not doing anything cause they never say anything about what they’re doing.

Mike Rizzo: Yeah. They don’t ever talk about anything that they’re launching. Nothing. No. Um, yeah, I, I’m excited to step in and rep HubSpot a little bit on this as, as a, a temporary chair for this episode. Um, [00:09:00] I have been, it’s hard. It HubSpot’s a hard one to talk about from just purely a marketing automation like performance kind of background.

Uh, we, we, at marketing ops.com, we use the platform, um, sort of through and through crm, through marketing automation. So, um, there’s a couple of things that I think are really interesting about HubSpot as an ecosystem. That, um, are kind of opening it up to continuing to move up market, um, but also the ability to service down market teams too, and even like services providers potentially.

Uh, so one of them is payments. They’ve actually struck a really, um, strong deal it sounds like with Stripe and, uh, essentially processing payments for invoices. Kind of going end to end quote to cash is entirely possible. I can actually, if I was an independent consultant or [00:10:00] something like that, um, I can actually set my meeting link to require a payment in order to book time with me.

So this is another sort of services provider kind of approach that is super interesting there. Um, but then we all heard about Operations Hub getting launched, you know, and the last time we did this call and it’s certainly continued to, to grow from there. Uh, I will, uh, fall on my sword a little bit. I subscribed to try to use Ops Hub , and I’ve yet to actually put it into operation within our own.

Um, but there’s some exciting things happening as it relates to when you think about the needs of a, of an operations professional. They’re doing a pretty good job, uh, thinking about like, hey, cleanliness of your database, or outdated workflows and lists. Like they’re really starting to lean in more to this idea of, Hey, try to regain control over your data.

Right? Um, subscribe to this [00:11:00] enhanced sort of data management environment that they’ve un unlocked, right? They call it data sets. Um, and if you’re on a particular plan, you can just have access to a data quality and an integrations view that allows you to look at really what’s going on inside my portal.

And it’ll automatically recommend like, Hey, these, these two records look like they’re the same, right? And so maybe you should do something about that. Um, and it’s still a bit manual. Boy, that’s a lot better than fetching data from an API or exporting it to some sort of CSV and doing merges and, you know, all those kinds of things.

Um, so I’m pretty excited about the way that they’re leaning in on this like operational category, um, and trying to help people maintain sort of a, a healthier database. I’d say that that’s probably the most innovative piece that’s happening right now.

Michael Hartmann: Interesting. Okay, so you said something in there that made me realize I totally missed something. So the, the reason we have [00:12:00] Lara and George and AJ on this, Mike as well is because they are chairpersons for each of these in the marketing ops.com community. So, Yeah, if you’re, if you’re part of the community and, uh, you have questions about these, they’re the ones probably are most likely to help you get to those, um, in the dedicated Slack channels.

So, Sorry about that. I missed that for sure. So anyway, yeah, so they, they, they’ve, uh, they’ve been back there behind the scenes helping the community with, with this kinda stuff. So appreciate all that. All right. So, um, I’m, I, I, I thought of another question here, but I may hold off on that. I, you know, Lara, your, your comment about, um, the name change prompted me, like, I, I think one of the things that.

Seen over the years, and it started when I first used Exact Target, um, which I guess is now, is that even still around a Salesforce marketing cloud.

Lara Black: Y Yeah, it is the, the story goes that Exac Target wanted to get acquired by [00:13:00] Salesforce, and they heard that Salesforce was looking at either buying them or buying Pardot. So they went and bought Pardot, so Salesforce had to buy them. To get them both.

Michael Hartmann: I, yeah.

Lara Black: and it got renamed Marketing Cloud, but it’s never really made strides in getting integrated on platform.

It’s still a separate login

and all sorts of

Michael Hartmann: Yeah. Um, and the reason I bring that up is

Mike Rizzo: years ago too.

Lara Black: Yeah,

Michael Hartmann: at

Mike Rizzo: over. Yeah. Cause I

was, I was like using the tool when that happened. , I had, the short story is I had migrated the team from like Salesforce to Sugar and I was using Pardot and then Pardot got acquired by Salesforce . And I was like, great, now I gotta find another map cause they’re not gonna support the integration to sugar.

And then everybody’s

scoffing at me

Lara Black: a while, but then they deprecated it and then you could still do it, but you had to like code your own api. Um, yeah, sugar crm, that goes way back.

Mike Rizzo: Right.

Michael Hartmann: Well, but I, but I do think in general, like all these, all these vendor, all these, you know, platform providers have been pretty good about building communities [00:14:00] and advocates, right? So I think probably all of you are in some way connected not just in the, the marketing ops community, but to each of those individual platform communities as, as their sort of, Um, advocates.

So I’m just curious, like what have you seen in terms of what they’re doing to continue either continue to or not engage with the community of their communities?

Lara Black: you know, I think with any, you know, Any time we talk about communities, there’s room for improvement, but there’s also budget considerations. And I get that. Um, Salesforce has been a strong, they call it the Trailblazer Community Sales. Salesforce has strongly promoted them. They give us a budget to be, we don’t get paid to be user group leader, but we get a budget to pay for food, drinks to, um, reserve a room, something like that.

Um, and they also give us tools like we no longer have to use free meetup accounts. We get a. A reservation event management type [00:15:00] platform. And that’s all granted to us at no cost. Uh, as a user group leader. Um, I think there, there’s the official channels, which is things like the Trailblazer community and the Trailblazer community team is great.

Um, and there’s unofficial channels. Um, The Pardashians group that I mentioned is just users. It is managed by a, um, Salesforce partner consulting company in the ecosystem. Um, technically owns this Slack channel. They’re not charging for it. Their name is not plastered all over it. And they are welcoming, not just part up members, but also marketing Cloud members.

Um, and then there’s sort of in between communities, like there’s a marketing Champions community sponsored by Salesforce. We do have like an official like recognition and we have a point of contact at Salesforce and they send us swag. Um, and there’s like a limited number of US marketing champions. Um, but it’s a little bit of.

Leadership at Salesforce may not know about marketing champions, uh, the way that they should know about us. Um, and they [00:16:00] certainly overlook the trailblazer community in many ways. Um, so it kind of comes down to like how well resourced these platforms. Go to market and, and product marketing teams are, um, and how in the loop they are and how long they’ve been in the ecosystem.

Because as much as like Salesforce has turnover, like, and we, we all kind of laugh about like our Salesforce AE changes every quarter. Um, sometimes the marketing people there change too, and they don’t know who to reach out to, who are their, you know, proponents in the community. Uh, I think there’s a lot of improvement to be done for that.

But, um, then you have other great communities like the Mar ops community. Hey, you know, we love, we love chiming in for all the help. And I don’t just hang out in my own little Slack channel. I, I like have alerts set up so that if somebody mentions Pardo in another channel, like it pings me. Um,

Mike Rizzo: Yeah, you’ve really. Really jumped in on quite a number of the chats. I’ve noticed a few times. I’m like, wow. She’s, she’s a very savvy Slack user. Clearly

Lara Black: Oh [00:17:00] yeah. I love Slack, honestly.

Mike Rizzo: that’s awesome.

Lara Black: But I, I also love the people who come to us with questions and who aren’t afraid to, like, some of them will say, this is a stupid question, but, and like, I just wanna say, there aren’t any stupid questions. If you’re beginning, you have to ask the questions. Don’t be afraid to ask them.

Mike Rizzo: Mm-hmm.

AJ Navarro: I might need to take a tip from you there on how to set up an alert like that. I would love that.

Lara Black: Oh, I will show you.

Mike Rizzo: yeah, I

George Samaras: Ditto as well. On here on

Mike Rizzo: from, yeah, from a point, from a, from that point in particular, I think we probably have an opportunity as leaders in this community to like, just like, Hey, optimize your use of Slack, both internally and when in these communities, right? We should probably do a whole segment on that at some point.

Maybe that’ll be my course that I give to everybody.

Michael Hartmann: Yeah, you go. Um, AJ how about you? What’s going on? Like, how’s Marketo? I know that they, you know, the champions thing and all that was a big deal. So what’s, what’s going on with Marketo and their community?

AJ Navarro: I mean, everything’s good. I mean, the community, you know, it’s, it’s really still a lot of the community [00:18:00] that. Still rely on, you know, whether official or official, but from like an official standpoint, I, I think just the Marketo user groups and the Marketo champion hours. You know, I’m, I’m a, I’m still a stickler.

I try to attend as many as I can. Um, those are big things for me, you know. Really just constantly learning there. I, I feel like Marketo’s always supported those and, and just have kept those going, um, unofficially. It’s, it’s constantly like marketing ops.com or, um, the, I guess it’s the marketing ops, I think is the other one that’s run by like a TUMO or something like that.

Mike Rizzo: Mops Pros

AJ Navarro: Pros, yeah.

Mike Rizzo: be confused with Mo Pros

AJ Navarro: Yeah. Ops

Mike Rizzo: We’re all in the same space, so

AJ Navarro: Yeah, and I mean, everybody’s just been fantastic, um, you know, to just, to really learn from, uh, and it’s helped me grow, you know, and, and, and for me, especially like when, you know, again with marketing [00:19:00] kns, when we talk about just like some of like the, the summer camps and things like that, like even for me that counts as communities.

Um, my favorite part about the communities is just constantly being around the people that. Better than me. Um, cause that’s how, like, I get better and, and you know, there’s no, uh, stagnant, you know, and, and growth and all that. And so it’s great to see that a lot of the people that I’ve looked up to like. I am now like speaking next to them and watching them grow or getting to learn from reading their books, reading their posts and just, just those different things.

And so overall, I feel like Adobe’s done a great job, um, endorsing that and they will continue to endorse that. And I myself am just a big proponent on just community. And I said this a million times, Mike knows it, but I wouldn’t have my career without community. So it’s a.

Michael Hartmann: Yeah, I, I, I say often hear it that if [00:20:00] this kind of stuff had been around 15, 20 years ago, I think it would be, well, I wouldn’t be here probably, I don’t know. But it would’ve been different. George, what’s going on? I like, I, I think, I dunno how plugged in with the Eliquia community you are, given that you’re working both in Marketo and Eloqua.

So what’s your take on the Equi one? And I can add in my 2 cents worth if as well.

George Samaras: Yeah, great question. So, um, I think, so for, for, I, I would say it’s, it’s probably not as large, obviously as the, the Pardo and, um, uh, Marketo communities, uh, for obvious reasons, but I’ll say this, um, the users have really taken it into their own hands to create a sense of community. Obviously, I’ll, I’ll let go.

The sentiment on the Slack groups, you know, obviously, um, Mo Pros and MOPS pros are both big, uh, slack rooms for Eliquis support. I would say in addition to this, a lot of agencies have picked up because Eliquis becoming a bit of a niche thing now within the marketing ops world. Um, you know, there, there’s agencies that run, uh, events, you know, you’ll see ’em promoted, like there’s an equi experts group on LinkedIn that [00:21:00] there’s a few hundred members there.

Um, and so, uh, I know like Sojourns a big one. I think they run, I wanna say it’s. I’m gonna say monthly. Um, may, I might be wrong. It might be biweekly or monthly. They have a, an qui user group that they host. I know it’s on Thursdays. Um, and then I know Ziti Interactive, they’re another agency. They’ve been. Uh, setting up some groups for Equi users, not, not to the, uh, the same level as, so, but it’s, it’s definitely great to see some of the agencies picking up some of that community, uh, piece. In addition to that, on the official channels, I mean, there’s, there’s top liners, which is Eliquis, uh, Oracle’s like, um, or Oracle Marketing Clouds, like, uh, online message board.

It’s pretty active. Like, I’d say there’s about like three to four new posts a day, uh, like threads. Um, and like any questions people have, they get responses pretty quickly. Um, you know, I, I’ll say it like, like I said, it. It’s not obviously as busy, just based off the user base as some of the other tools, but there’s definitely an active community and, and agencies and users have really stepped up to kind of create that, uh, that sense of community.

Michael Hartmann: [00:22:00] Yeah, I, I think you guys sojourn, I know, uh, has done some work where, where I’m at now. And so they, they’ve asked, they’ve invited, you know, my, me and my team and some of the others in the broader organization, they have virtual, um, user groups on a pretty regular basis. So, um, interesting. There’s a theme happening here, Mike, what’s going on with I, I actually don’t know much about the HubSpot community at all, so,

Mike Rizzo: Um, you know, they’ve, they followed very similar playbooks to Marketo. Uh, I think they all sort of, it was, I think it was a, once you got one of the primary maps out there to sort of, um, the domino to fall, so to speak, on the use of like a platform like bevy for meetups and user groups and stuff. Uh, I think the rest all followed suit.

I don’t know who got in. But Bevy definitely benefited from getting one. Um, so they have a very similar sort of environment that Lara and AJ refer to around, um, [00:23:00] you know, offering a, an environment for you to host meetups. Um, they call ’em hugs, uh, Marketos call ’em mugs. Uh, I, I don’t know what part I call, or whatever Pardo’s called now,

pugs,

Lara Black: some user group leaders do call them pugs. I’ve just always said like the, I’m the Pardot Austin user group leader or something like that.

Mike Rizzo: There you go. . Yeah.

Lara Black: It’s the Trailblazer Community Groups, uh, like is the organization, and they give us like official channels.

Mike Rizzo: Yeah. Okay. That makes sense. Yeah, so, so very similar in that regard. They still have, um, funding that’s available if you’re a hug leader of a particular region. Um, they certainly give you funding to be able to support those events. As we’ve moved back to in person, you can now host the in person and, and get a little bit more from that, uh, bang for your buck in that.

Uh, I am not a hug leader, but I’ve participated in a number of those types of environments in Orange County and in San Diego. We have members of our community here at marketingops.com that are hug [00:24:00] leaders that I’ve worked with directly in person. Um, their community forum has remained pretty active. I’d say it’s one of the more robust community forums out there in terms of.

Uh, I think a lot of that is perpetuated by the incredible partnership ecosystem that they built. So the partners benefit greatly from, you know, being a top tier provider and supporter of that. Community forum environment. But what’s interesting is they have all these like subsets of communities that sort of pop up too.

So there’s your HubSpot developers forum on Slack. I’m in that one, uh, purely because I’m constantly wondering what’s happening with the APIs, , and which one’s getting deprecated next or new or, or what have you. And so there’s these little microcosms that they also sort of spin up to support the community overall of the various kinds of users.

And then most notably at Inbound, they definitely talked about [00:25:00] the idea of having a community centric sort of offering built into the HubSpot ecosystem. Um, it was very, uh, community led ended up being the message. And the presentation on the main stage for the keynote at Inbound this year was all about how do you sort of connect those dots between, here’s a professional, you know, Lara, AJ, you name it, your profile exists in the HubSpot ecosystem.

And if, uh, you know, if you’re in there, how do we then give you exposure to, to the broader network of other professionals in this space? Um, so it seems that they’re gonna lean in pretty hard on community. I think they’ve always been in that vein, but there’s something, there’s something brewing there that’s, uh, extra special.

And so I’ll be, I’ll be keen to see how that

Lara Black: That’s really interesting that they emphasized community at the keynote there because I feel like it’s [00:26:00] overlooked and people kind of are like, oh, marketing is easy, or like, oh, community is easy. But then you have these marketers who like, they don’t know who their mAJor proponents are and. I think they’re missing a really great channel to get product feedback from power users by not tapping into community.

Mike Rizzo: Yeah.

Yeah. They’ve done a, historically, they’ve done a really good job with tapping into their community, but like, You know, there was inbound.org for a while that got deprecated. Um, there’s a number of sort of movements that have happened in and around this space, but what’s the productization of community is super interesting.

Like how, how are they incorporating this concept of community that doesn’t feel like it’s conflicting with the idea that I’m a SAS provider, marketing automation platform, crm, et cetera. Um, so it’ll

Michael Hartmann: And from a user standpoint, like would that be distracting from getting day to day work [00:27:00] done if it was sort of embedded in the platform?

Mike Rizzo: Yeah, I think, I don’t know if it’ll go that far. I don’t work there at all, but

Michael Hartmann: No, no. I,

Mike Rizzo: far, but yes, I

hear

Michael Hartmann: so I, I guess I’m pre. Presuming some stuff. I think what’s really interesting here is what I was hearing a theme is because it, I think there’s been an evolution, right? I think when, um, when these platforms all started coming out, I think they all were pretty good about building community, finding advocates, right?

And, and really celebrating them. But it feels like, and maybe it’s just the nature of all these acquisitions that have happened and now, There’s these people are kind of finding their own communities, whether it’s through marketing ops.com or the MOS pros or. Whatever, right. These other communities to, to be sort of an extension of that.

So I think it’s, that’s pretty interesting that that’s evolved that way. Um, so let’s let’s talk about, you know, community feedback into the product development and prioritization. So that was something I was curious about [00:28:00] too. I know you talk, you each talked a little bit about. Things that you are seeing that you’re excited about from the platforms?

I’m curious on the flip side, right, are there things that you, you or you, you know, that the community is really, um, eager to see, be a part of the platform, but hasn’t, it hasn’t made it, you know? Um, and so let’s, uh, AJ I’m gonna start with you. Let’s talk about Marketo first.

AJ Navarro: Yeah. Uh, not only from the community, but just from a lot of the teams and that I work with as well as myself. I just, one thing I want to see is just more flexibility around just like the reporting. Uh, within Marketo, um, especially I would love the ability to like drag and drop and combine reports into one report within itself.

Um, I find that, you know, teams is including myself. You, you have to kind of create three different reports to look at three different things, such as like email performance versus link performance. I’d [00:29:00] love to just kind of grasp those and put those into one report and one window and. Take a screenshot of that and then maybe even send that as a, uh, weekly, uh, kind of update to a team or something like that.

You know, I’m constantly having to kind of export things and put them together. So that’s always been the biggest, st biggest stricter for me, is just a little bit clean up in just that reporting area in Marketo.

Michael Hartmann: So I’m just curious. Um, I can see, totally see the value of that for like a single team. But you, you guys are an agency, right? So I can imagine also would it be useful, and I don’t even know if this is public, to be able to create, here’s our. Standard, I hate to use it. Best practice dashboard, right? For Marketo, and we wanna replicate that across instances for our clients.

AJ Navarro: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, one, it’d be helpful for our teams that are managing our internal Marketo, um, to see our overall performance. But [00:30:00] then two, it it’d be very helpful to show. Teams and on how to do that. Hey, here’s the best practice. Cause that’s exactly what we do, is we’ll make a bunch of best practice things on what we’ve seen, what’s working and innovate is necessary.

Um, but yeah, to take that and to share it with other people and, and to enable them on how to make the reports. Only because the reality of it is, is depending on the teams that we’re working with, not everybody has like a tableau or like a visible or an advanced reporting mechanism, you know, um, teams simp.

The tail end of it stops at Marketo, and that’s a whole nother conversation right on

Michael Hartmann: Oh yeah.

AJ Navarro: when they’re, when they’re getting, uh, a tool and they see it as the, the fix all solution. But, um, I think that’s just something a little bit more flexibility and might keep me honest here, but just some things that I’ve even seen, I think HubSpot really does really well is as far as like native UI and just some of the reporting capabilities there, um, that I want, would love to see in market.[00:31:00]

Mike Rizzo: Yeah, I, I actually have more recently had a lot of, um, time spent in a Marketo environment as well. And I have to say, like there’s, there’s some desire there for additional reporting, um, sort of the ease of use concept. I, you know, you can’t get away from the power of Marketo, right? Like, it, you can do anything you want in there, uh, pretty much, right?

Um, Trying to make that experience like smoother, I would have to, I’d have to agree. It would be nicer to see a little bit more on the usability side. Improvement.

Michael Hartmann: Well, Mike, since, since you’re, you’re already on here. Why don’t we like, do you wanna, what are you seeing that community. Or, or people you, you’re connected with are looking for, for HubSpot that maybe isn’t made it to their, to their, uh, their list of changes that have come.

Mike Rizzo: Uh, [00:32:00] it’s funny actually going the other direction. I don’t know that this comes from the community necessarily, but certainly from my perspective, having now, um, been able to use more recently the Marketo environment. It’s been a long time since I’ve been in Pardot, but, uh, gosh, the ability to clone an entire campaign from a folder structure and like the power that comes with, with that in, in creating scalability to your sort of marketing operations and campaign operations that happens in Marketo, that is entirely missing in the HubSpot ecosystem, right.

If I wanted to relaunch a, let’s call it a webinar campaign that had like five emails, maybe, you know, three to register, two, uh, to remind, and then, you know, a handful, one after the event and there’s a landing page and all this stuff that goes with it. Every single one of those assets needs to be individually opened and cloned [00:33:00] and rebuilt and all of those things.

Um, that’s pretty cumber. and so I actually kind of missed it earlier, but there’s a, there’s a hint that that might change. Like HubSpot recently, uh, released sort of a, a new and improved campaigns sort of beta, um, It’s not clear that that, that they’ll give you the ability to clone all the assets from that view.

But I definitely gave them that feedback and I was like, Hey, this is your view. This is the place, this is the time. Let us clone everything from this one spot. Um, and I think scalability across HubSpot, uh, it’s incredibly easy to use, but it is not as efficient, uh, when it comes to scale. So I’d say

Michael Hartmann: That’s, that’s the trade off it sounds like. Okay. George, how about, how about you on the Eli uh, equi front? Let’s, like you talked about some of the things that have changed. I haven’t, there’s, I’m sure more of it could be done.

George Samaras: Yeah, absolutely. So, and uh, [00:34:00] I’m gonna lean in a bit on my experience of, uh, using three platforms daily. Um, So, you know, I, I kind of log into them every day. I got the experience between the three that I kind of see and it’s like, you know, qui does some things really great. There’s definitely some areas for improvement.

I think the big one. Uh, and Michael, I, you mentioned you work, uh, with qui as well. It’s, um, The integration, uh, with Salesforce out of the box one, it’s a huge improvement from the program builder days, a lot faster, not fast enough compared to the competitors. Um, still waiting up to 15 minutes, uh, per sync cycle to bring in data.

Um, it’s good, huge improvement over what it used to be. Um, but at the end of the day, you know, when Marketo’s going every five minutes, um, it’s a little hard to compete. You know what I mean? Speed to lead, those minutes do count. Um, for me, a big thing is a little better, a little more out of the box. Uh, I would say reporting on integration issues.

I mean, like, that’s like my day in, day out. We’re always looking at integration issues. Marketo’s has the problems, but you get notified. You always get that email with, uh, all the leads that didn’t sync [00:35:00] over and you can go in and fix them up. And it’s pretty easy to sub smart lists to, to build it. Look what you gotta, you gotta get a little creative, maybe create like a universal form, have a blind form submit with, with the name of the form so you can understand, and then that triggers off an alert to someone to say, Hey, there’s an integration error from this step.

Go in and take a look. Um, but it’s, it’s not, you know, it’s, in my opinion, that should be something that’s kind of out of the box. Um, and for a lot of users who are not as crafty with, you know, coming up with these kind of custom. Out of the box solutions. It, it’s difficult and a lot of ’em don’t set it up and then they go into the program with all these integration errors and it’s a bit of a nightmare.

Um, uh, I, so I’d say for that for sure, obviously I, I mentioned at the beginning the third party integration improvement is, is great. Um, but not where it needs to be. Uh, I think there’s definitely some errors for improvement. Like the big one is, uh, I checked yesterday cause I checked periodically. Still knows Zapier integration.

Um, I know I might guess some

flagged for Zapier, but it’s, uh,

Michael Hartmann: it’s zap by the way. I just, we had, yeah, we had, it’s Zapier. Zappier makes a. Happier is what they

Mike Rizzo: what I was gonna [00:36:00] say. Zappier makes you happier. That’s what

they

George Samaras: make sure Okay. Zap you. I stand corrected

Michael Hartmann: Yeah.

George Samaras: Um, yeah, there’s no, uh, still no integration as of, uh, as of yesterday when I checked. And, um, you know, I, that’s kinda like my duct tape tool and I’m, uh, in need of, uh, making a quick patch and, uh, with Eliquis, uh, it’s still not there. So it’s that, that makes it a little tough.

Um, but yeah, so I’d say, you know, like I said, good. Definitely areas to improve compared to the competitors. But like, you know, obviously there’s a lot of things that Eloqua knocks outta the park and that the competitors can’t keep up with.

Michael Hartmann: Yeah. All right. Lara, bring us home here like.

Lara Black: I think there’s a lot of things that longtime par users like myself would love to see par dot deliver. We’re also supposed to get a few things very soon here. So for example, ever since they launched Engagement Studio, which is the replacement to like drip programs, it’s the very pretty flow chart where everything flows down and does logic checks to create a nurture.

Um, Their only weight increments have been in, in one day increments. Um, so they’ve [00:37:00] actually announced that they’re supposed to release shorter than one day increments in the spring 23 release. So we’re super excited. I would love to see one hour increments. I’m gonna guess that we’re probably not gonna get that, but I’d love it if we were.

Um, but other things that, you know, marketing ops people would love to see are things like sink errors. Like I have to go dig for my sink errors. Um, I did a whole presentation, uh, What are sync errors? How do you resolve them? How do we even find them? cause most people don’t know that they exist. Um, there’s lots of things that they sort of have deployed and then didn’t finish.

So there was a, um, in Salesforce we would call it a list view, but it’s like, here is your filtered view of everyone who filled out this form. I’d like to customize which fields are displayed in that prospect table. They kind of released it for the all prospects table and never, and they promised us it was.

To everywhere else across the platform, but it never did. Um, and I mean other stuff like for people [00:38:00] who have the higher end versions of Part Out or who buy up to that plan, um, we would love the ability to pull in, um, Tags from objects like the opportunity object, we would love to be able to pull those fields into an email and send an email to follow up with, you know, an ongoing opportunity or something like that on behalf of sales.

Those are features that don’t exist. Some of them have been trialed and didn’t go anywhere, um, but I’ve also been pleasantly surprised with some of the things they have released. Like they released a. A setting to, uh, resy all prospects with one click instead of doing some fining like it used to. Um, and then it’s been out for several years now, but I still rely on, um, uh, Connected campaigns that is like the gateway drug to get all of Pardot data into Salesforce.

So where Pardot’s own reports are miserable and you can’t do much with them, you can’t customize them much. Now you can push a lot of that data into Salesforce and you can customize the reports [00:39:00] there. So through the connected campaigns object, as you build emails, you attach emails to it, specific Salesforce campaign, and now those become a custom object called a marketing asset object in Salesforce.

And I can now. Reports and filter for like, Hey, these many emails were sent and the campaign name includes, or whatever, and I can see all the bounce numbers and stuff right in Salesforce.

Michael Hartmann: It’s, I think it’s like this notion about reporting has come up a couple of times here, and it sounds like they, I think they all have. Uh, at least from my perspective, I know Eloqua and, and Marketo fairly well. I think they, they, they both have things with, like, I remember when I went from Eloqua to Marketo and I was like, I just went on the list of everybody who fill out a form and what they put in the form.

You can’t get that in easily in, in Mar Marketo equi. That’s like a, that’s a normal thing to do.

Lara Black: and it should be a normal thing. A hundred percent agree. Like, show me this prospect table and show me right there, and let me easily export all of [00:40:00] the people. If you can’t show ’em on screen, let me easily export it. And it just seems like a quick, easy win.

Michael Hartmann: Yeah, I mean it’s, it’s, I think it’s really interesting and the way I think about it, I think Marketo was built all around the contacts, right? So if you wanna understand what’s going on with a contact or an opportunity like that’s, you can get a lot of, in Eloqua, it seems like it’s built more around campaigns.

And campaigns in Eloqua are more like programs in Marketo. I think that’s the whole separate thing. Um, so that it’s just a different, I think it’s different starting point. And so I think that affected reporting. So like, I think we all have like, oh, we wanna get this piece of reporting, and then it’s not quite how it was built to do that.

Um, interesting stuff. Um, so I was just talking to you a little bit about comparing contrast in these, like, it sounds like several of us have used more than one of these platforms. I’m just curious, like Yeah. What are, yeah, I, I just out a couple of things that. , you know, I see. Kind of from the couple that I’ve used.

Right. I’d [00:41:00] be curious what your thoughts are about what you’ve seen, like where there the, the differences between key platforms on how they do something where you go like, I wish it did let things more like this. Right. It’s almost like we could come up with our, like, if we could come up with our own marketing automation platform that did everything we wanted.

Pick and pick different pieces from different stuff. So, George, you haven’t gone first yet. How about we start with you? cause you, you’ve already said you work with Marketo and Eliquid and you said a third one regularly, so I don’t even know what that is. So

George Samaras: Uh, HubSpot. So I’m in, I’m in all three. Yeah. So, uh, yeah. Um, great question. Uh, this one’s a bit of a tough one. Um, I, I get a lot of people asking me and like, people refer to me being like, Hey, like, you know, like I’m looking at implementing, I’m looking at migrating. I’ve been through a, I, I’ve done an equi of Marketo migration.

I’ve done a HubSpot to Marketo migration. Um, so I’ve been through it like, as like, you know, the lead at, at the organization. And, um, I always like my, my number one piece of recommendation. I’m like, are you. A thousand percent sure you wanna come do [00:42:00] this migration before you pick anything and you wanna switch platforms.

Cause I’m like, it’s, it’s one of the most painful things you’ll do in your career if it’s uh, it’s, it’s, uh, rushed. Um, but yeah, so I would say like for how to compare contrast, it really depends, um, on the organization’s size. Uh, the complexity, the team driving it too. Um, like, you know, like, I, I always say this, I’m like, if, if you are a marketing ops team of one and you got a campaign team or an acquisition demand gen team that just wants to get stuff out easily, and it’s a small organization, like for me, like HubSpot’s almost like a no-brainer.

It’s, it’s it’s scales. It’s, it’s super easy to use. You can, you can, it’s very easy to enable your demand gen users to go and build stuff in there. Whereas on Eloqua it’s, you know, you kind of need almost like a campaign ops team that has a marketing ops background to run it. Which typically you, it needs funding.

Usually it’s only larger organizations that have the budget for that kind of stuff. Um, and then Marketo’s kinda like the sweet spot in the middle. Um, I wouldn’t say it’s easy for, you know, like a demand gen users to get into. I [00:43:00] really, you gotta have like a tight knit train. There’s tools, uh, you can integrate separate conversation, but.

Uh, I, it really depends. It really depends on, on the complexity of the team, the complexity of the organization, the size of the organization. Um, but I, I, I would generally say like when I hear people being like, Hey, should we go to Eloqua? And we’re like a company of, you know, we’re startup or we’re in our, one of our serious funding.

I’m like, eh, unless you’re like planning on going enterprise or you have like a specific use case like, So you really need custom objects and how custom objects work in Eloqua. Yeah, I think it’s like a niche thing to, to Eloqua, but if you can get away with like the infinite fields on the contact record and you need someone that’s a little snappier, you know, uh, uh, Marketo might be your go-to thing.

Depends too on your CRM ecosystem. There’s so many different variables. I always just like, I always conclude with ’em, like, if you’re gonna be migrating, just be 1000% sure that you’re, that this is the right decision because it’s, it’s, it’s very tough to undergo. It’s, it’s expensive, it’s time consuming and.

It’s, it’s, it’s quite an undertaking for the marketing ops.[00:44:00]

Michael Hartmann: Definitely, yeah, I mean that, I remember Eliquis custom objects, like the ease of spinning those up was the game changer when I was choosing that. Um, AJ. How about you? Like what have you seen that you like, compare and contrast some of the the platforms.

AJ Navarro: Um, so I’m predominantly in Marketo, but I think from that perspective, I would really love just a lot of the UI enhancements that, like, just the userability of like HubSpot. Like it’s just very user intuitive because Marketo is very powerful, but it’s also like, it just feels kind of like black sometimes, like in terms of the ui, um, and things like that.

And even sometimes after the

Michael Hartmann: I’m, I’m sorry. I’m going through a website project and you made me think like, we want that website to pop.

AJ Navarro: The

Michael Hartmann: means nothing.

AJ Navarro: Yeah. And it’s, it’s just things like that, like, um, I just, there’s a lot of what HubSpot does really well, and, and I’m not even a big HubSpot [00:45:00] user myself, but a lot of the teams, I’ve done countless migrations from HubSpot to Marketo. And so I see a lot of teams like, well, how do we do this? And I’m like, well, we gotta kind of export this, and then you gotta launch it.

And it’s like, there’s not really a, you know, um, but, but those are the bigger things there. Um, And again, I’d lean back on just, just some more of the reporting. Like I, I, I do like, you know, I’m a, I’m a Salesforce user too, so I like just in Salesforce, the platform itself as just making the reports and being able to make the dashboards.

I think at a minimum it. You should be able to do that in Marketo. To some extent Marketo has the NPI to utilize, but even then, like I said, there’s not a lot of like drag and drop and, and create your own type of functionality there. And so for me that’s where it’s limited that it could use some improvement.

But those are just some of the differences.

Michael Hartmann: Gotcha. How about you, [00:46:00] Oh, go ahead, George.

George Samaras: reject AJ. It was funny you said about the ui. I had one of our campaign managers reach out to us, reach out to me today. She’s like, what’s happening with the Marketo ui? Why does it look like this? I thought they were gonna update it, and it was, it was just really random to get a demand gen user to, to comment on it.

So, like when you said that I, I was cracking up, it really, uh, brought back some PTSD from that conversation.

AJ Navarro: Oh yeah.

Mike Rizzo: Well, and with it owned by Adobe now, right? Like there’s like this, there’s this sense that like at somewhere, at some point someone’s gonna really care about this visual impact, right?

Michael Hartmann: I mean, it doesn’t surprise me that E was interface hasn’t really changed with Oracle buying it. Right. So

Mike Rizzo: Yeah. Yeah.

Michael Hartmann: Lara, how about you? What, like

Lara Black: So I’m, I’m kind of a unique person in that I’ve spent most of my career in Pardot. I did spend a couple years as a Pardo consultant where I migrated people off of Marketo and off of HubSpot onto Pardot. And some of it is in, they were sold too much product. Um, [00:47:00] and they’re, they weren’t using it to. It’s utmost.

So my Marketo to Pardot, uh, migration project, they’re like, we are getting charged so much, uh, for features that we don’t use and that don’t work, right. We just need to strip it out, strip it down, and that justifies switching platforms. Um, and at the same time, you know, it was very apparent that they didn’t fully understand that like Marketo is more powerful than Pardot in very specific ways.

Marketo, you can create custom fields that can do calculations. Pardot can’t do any of that. I can’t create a formula field in Pardot, and Pardot doesn’t sync well with Salesforce formula fields. Um, so there’s pros and cons to everything and I really think. Before ripping something out and bringing in your favorite tool.

Even if I took a job in a place that didn’t have Pardot, I would hesitate before saying, oh, we’re switching to Pardot because it’s expensive. There’s so much historical data. Um, un unless there’s lots of [00:48:00] features that I’m gaining and my, my price is gonna change significantly and in ways that like, I’m absolutely gonna benefit from, I probably.

You know, the, the, the people who, like, they have a new manager and they just love Marketo and that’s what they’re gonna part out, out and put Marketo in. Like, I mean, I get it, but I don’t always think it’s well thought out because now you have to rebuild landing pages and they need a different url and.

There’s just so many dependencies and so many touchpoints and engagement that you can’t benefit from it’s history anymore. Um, even if you work for a company that gets bought by another company and you both use Pardot, you have to decide which part of account you’re using and you lose all the history from the other Pardo account.

Like there’s so many factors beyond just the cost of a tool. You really need to look at who’s using it, what’s their skill level? Are you gonna hire somebody who’s more experienced in marketing operations to. or not? You

Michael Hartmann: Yeah, that’s good point. And Mike, you, you already [00:49:00] mentioned HubSpot and Marketo. So what’s your take on the trade offs and maybe there’s, you said you used Pardo a little bit at some point.

Mike Rizzo: I did, it was, it was long enough ago that I would not at all have anything important to say that part out at this point.

Lara Black: I’ll say the interface probably hasn’t changed much. It is prettier than Marketo’s interface though.

Mike Rizzo: Yeah. Yeah. If we had to stack rank it, probably like in terms of, uh, u i ux, beautification and ease of use, it’d probably be like HubSpot, Pardot, Marketo, and then equi. Like, I don’t know though about Eloqua.

Um, yeah, I think I, I sort of covered everything that I, that I think I could, I, I could express in terms of trade offs as it relates to the idea of migrating to and from, you know, I echo the sentiments of everyone here. Very costly, very time consuming, uh, wholly dependent on your actual needs. A while [00:50:00] ago, and maybe Lara, this resonates with you.

I’m not sure. I used to, when people would come to me and ask me, you know, Hey, what do we use? Right? Um, you know, I agree with you, George, if you’re sort of getting started, HubSpot’s super easy, right? There’s a freemium solution to everything that they have, right? So just jump into the free stuff. Um, and it scales.

It really does scale. It can get up to enterprise. But once you get into the nuance of. You know, I really need the campaign operations to work better. Like, there’s some other things you might want to consider there, but one of the things I used to say, going back to you, Lara, um, around sort of Pardot is this idea of are you a sales centric organization or are you sort of a decentralized demand gen lead funnel inbound organization, uh, to, to use the, the phrase coined by HubSpot.

Um, Because that might actually have an implication. Like if you want a tool that really enables your salespeople to do a bunch of stuff, [00:51:00] like Pardot falls right into that category, right? The alerts alone back in the day, that was like the number one selling point for every salesperson that ever saw it.

They’re like, oh, I could get alerted every time an email’s opened. Uh, and I would argue, you know, HubSpot has some of that components, some of that stuff now, and Marketo certainly does too, but it’s like sort of a work around. That’s, that’s sort of what I always used to say is like, if you’re a really sales centric organization, like as a jumping off point and you know, your go to market is like, invest in, you know, we’re not seeing it as much now, but invest in a lot of BDRs, , um, you know, maybe part, and you’re a Salesforce, you know, user as well.

Maybe that’s the right answer.

Lara Black: And, um, if you’re a Slack shop, uh, Pardot does have a feature for Slack where like those alerts that you talked about, Mike, those could come in Slack. So you could, um, instead of getting one of these ugly Pardot emails that says, Hey, somebody opened this email, uh, you can get engagement alerts in Slack.

Um, and it, it is, um, [00:52:00] we didn’t really talk about what do you sell in terms of like, are you B2B or b2c? And it’s oversimplifying it to. Exact target, aka. Marketing Cloud is for b2c and Paradigm is for b2b, but a lot of it does line up. A lot of it does hinge on. When you have an email, uh, when you have a prospective customer, are you going to turn them over to a salesperson to pursue and close the deal, or are you driving them to an online store to make a sale?

Um, Pardot is very well positioned to do this handoff to the salesperson. Um, and Marketing Cloud has multiple tools that are made to like spray out hundreds of thousands of emails. You can definitely dip in both of them. People do crossover. I have some, uh, companies that I’ve worked with for years who have both tools.

Uh, the last company I worked for had both tools. Um, it, it really does. Come down [00:53:00] to how does it fit into your sales cycle and how invested are your sales team members. If your sales team members are working off the spreadsheets and they’re not really in Salesforce, like you probably don’t want Pardot, um, cause marketing’s not gonna get the, the background like opportunity data that they would, if sales is invested in, in using Salesforce significant.

Mike Rizzo: Mm-hmm. . That makes sense. This, this actually brings me, and I know we gotta wrap it here pretty quickly, but uh, maybe next time we do this HHartmann, we need. Bring in some users of, uh, inflection as they’re starting to develop like the PLG marketing automation platform. cause you know, we just talked about B2B and b2c, but there’s this whole other thing around like product led growth and how like any of us who have worked in SaaS organizations have, who have tried to do onboarding nurtures, or sequences or engagements based on app activity, we all know that that’s like dang near impossible. And any of the tools that are out there. Right. [00:54:00] Um, sounds like even in Eliquid probably be worse from an API integration perspective. . But

we might have to have inflection come in here,

Michael Hartmann: I, I think it would be interesting to find, um, something that I, I remember talking to a, like a revenue leader, um, somewhere in time during the pandemic who was made an argument, particularly for a relatively early stage company that you don’t need any of these market automation platforms.

You can get away with an email provider, kind of a relatively low cost one with, um, Some sort of crm and then something that is like a, I think he was using Segment, but something like that to help connect things together. Um, and it sounded pretty interesting, like, cause I think that to me actually that like, like I, the idea that you could simplify it to like, we’ve got an email platform, it just, what you’re gonna do emails, it can do a little bit of trigger stuff, but it’s not gonna [00:55:00] do nurture.

But I also am like, I don’t know, that nurture is still though that important really personally, like I just, anyway, um, so

Mike Rizzo: From what I’m seeing, it’s

still

Michael Hartmann: George, George is putting in the, in the, in the chat. He’s like, sounds like my old cmo. So maybe it is. I, I believe he was in Canada, so, um, may have been,

George Samaras: Yeah, it sounds uh, it just got flashback to the conversation I had about a year ago. Almost identical to what you were just saying,

Michael Hartmann: Uh, okay. May we’ll have to chat offline. See, I, I have to remember who it was. I honestly do not even remember. Um, yeah. But I think, I think it’s, it’s interesting, um, it’s really interesting to me that there’s a lot of commonality. Like there’s some things that they’re doing that is, is like all these platforms are doing some things that are good and are moving things forward.

sort of keeping the community engaged, but the community are, are sort of finding their own tribes, if you will. Um, but they’re also in some ways not listening to the [00:56:00] community either. And so they might be missing the mark from that standpoint. Um, so it’s kind of curious like where are they getting their input from for what they’re doing in terms of that

Lara Black: there’s a term in software development called shiny blue button syndrome. Um, and it really comes down to some executive says, I want that. Um, and it means that features that, Developers want to develop that would solve problems for users don’t get worked on because now we need to turn that button shiny and blue.

So people click it.

Michael Hartmann: Yeah.

Mike Rizzo: I love that.

Michael Hartmann: Are you all familiar with the oatmeal?

Mike Rizzo: Oh yes,

Michael Hartmann: Okay, so the oatmeal has one. It’s like how web design goes to hell. Yeah. It’s, go look it up. You’ll,

Lara Black: Yeah. The one that’s

Michael Hartmann: take me later.

Lara Black: The tree. The tree. The tree and the tire swing one.

Michael Hartmann: Well, no, I, there ends up being a, a cat. Yeah. in the

Mike Rizzo: Ha,

Michael Hartmann: design.

Lara Black: I think I’m thinking of a different one, but yes, I, oatmeal is [00:57:00] very on the nose.

Michael Hartmann: Yes, he’s brilliant. Um, wow. This has been like, I feel like we could have continued on more.

I’m sure we could have, um, really enjoyed the conversation. Uh, thank you, Lara. Thank you, George. Thank you AJ and Mike. Um, so I normally we would go around and ask for like, how can people connect with you? Why don’t we, I think we’ve got a little bit of time. We can probably do that real quick. So, AJ what, like, what’s the best way for folks to hit up with you?

AJ Navarro: Yeah, uh, just on my LinkedIn, so just linkedin.com, um slash AJ av. So AJ nav, that’s the best way. Um, Pretty active on the LinkedIn side, so always happy to reach out. And then of course, uh, and I’m in the community, so the market ops community, so please feel free to ping me, slack, me and I’m there as well.

Michael Hartmann: Sounds good. Lara, how about you?

Lara Black: I am at Pardot Pro on Twitter. You can also find my [email protected]. [00:58:00] Um, and yeah, slack is a fabulous place to find me. I think I’m the only Lara. LA A there, so come find me.

Michael Hartmann: How about you, George?

George Samaras: Same as the others. Uh, LinkedIn’s the best, uh, George Samari, uh, or uh, Slash GC hyphen Samari. Uh, same with Slack as well. I’m pretty sure I’m the only person has my name That’s in marketing apps, so, uh, pretty easy to find there as.

Michael Hartmann: There’s too many of us, mikes and Michael,

Mike Rizzo: That was such a low hanging, like you just teed me up. You know, I, I am the real Mike Rizzo for anybody who comes into marketing operations and market mo pros, like, no, I’m just kidding. Mike Rizzo. Uh, the other one is fantastic, so you can reach out to him too.

Michael Hartmann: that’s right. There is another Mike Rizzo, who’s also in the community.

Mike Rizzo: Yeah. Yeah.

Michael Hartmann: Well, thank you, uh, everyone. This was great. Appreciate you joining us. Uh, thanks to our listeners. Thanks, Mike. Love Naomi, and, uh, and our, and our thoughts here too. Thank her for, [00:59:00] for what we’ve accomplished over the last couple years.

Looking forward to 2023. Uh, continue to give us your feedback and give us your ideas for topics and guests. Or if you have a topic that you wanna talk about, let us know That too. You can reach out to Mike, Naomi, or me. Until next time, we’ll talk to you later. Bye