The View of Marketing Ops from the CMO’s perspective w/ Paul Mosenson

In this episode we have a conversation with Paul Mosenson, who has led marketing, to get his perspective on Marketing Ops, Revenue Ops, and more. We touch on things like the value that the CMO sees in marketing ops, how to position marketing operations to be a part of the strategic GTM conversations and the need for ops to be creative AND analytical.

Recorded live on July 29, 2021.

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 19 of ops cast by the MO Pros and Michael Hartmann. Today I’m joined by my one of my co-hosts Naomi Lu. Mike Rizzo. Couldn’t make it today now. Let me say hello. Hello. Hello. So before we get started, um, for those of you who are listening this week, the week of the last week of July, 2021, just remember that your last chance to get to summer camp up in Seattle with the rest of the MO Pros is still there.

That is happening. Next week, August four through six. So go check out www dot MO Pros dot com to get all the details. So let’s get into it today. We have with us, uh, and we’re excited. Paul Mo Mo’s sin. Hopefully I, Paul, I got your name, right. I should have checked on that before. He’s the president and founder of new spark consultant.

And he’s here to discuss the view of marketing ops from the CMOs office. Paul is a revenue leader, fractional CMO and advisor. He is also an author, speaker and podcaster. In fact, I’ve been a guest on his podcast as well. His foot podcast is called fix the convince. I suggest you go check it out. In addition, he has also started building a sports-related app.

So I don’t think we’re going to get into that since he’s in Philly and I’m in Dallas. So. We don’t want to talk about that, Paul? I didn’t start. It’s finished. How are you? I think my app is finished, but anyway. Hi. How are you? Good. We’re good at glad to have you, so let’s just jump into this. Um, I’m ready, Paul.

Yeah. Paul, when I was, when I was a guest on your podcast fixed to convince, we did talk about kind of the definition scope, role of marketing ops, that versus revenue ops and other things. So from, from your seat as a marketing leader, um, when you think about marketing ops, what does that mean to you? So I’m gonna flip the question around, right?

What does that mean for me, from your perspective?

Well, to me, operations is like a combination of, you know, traditional marketing activities, you know, lead generation, your goals, um, your, uh, planning, um, your offers and the whole. Uh, buyer’s journey process, but layering in, um, you know, of course analytics and what MarTech you have to manage those campaigns, you know, whether it be a CRM, marketing, automation, landing, page tools, conversion tools.

So to me, it’s, uh, when you talk about operations, I mean covers lots of different things. It’s the, the method itself of building leads for an organization and using tools and platforms that optimize those strategies that we put together. Does that make sense? Yeah, so I think, uh, the word that comes to mind, I probably use more often than not as were enablers for that strategy and the, and we’re able to help execute.

Does that sound about right to you?

Yeah. I mean, you know, typical businesses that guess they can identify the operations category differently, but it’s really supporting the planning that we’re doing and utilizing, you know, the content sales, the team, and you really just, we always talk about marketing and sales together and tying that in because at the end of the day, it’s revenue growth.

Um, versus lead generation really that’s the bottom line. So, you know, in a best in class organization, you know, marketing and sales should be together. And I always preach that. Um, and sometimes you need operations people to help blend them together with the same tools and analytics so that we can report the bottom line to the C suite with how we’re doing.

Yeah. So it’s interesting you bring up analytics. We had our last episode, we talked quite a bit about analytics across the revenue spectrum, not just marketing, but marketing and sales and success. So, um, so, you know, as you kind of outlined, right. The view as a marketing leader of, of what ops role is. One of the challenges we hear in our community pretty regularly is that, uh, and from our listeners that the marketing ops role is not really seen as a strategic part of the conversation when it comes to a go to market strategy.

Uh, in helping that with an organization and that oftentimes we’re brought in towards the end of that and go, okay, well, how do you go, go make it happen? Right. Um, so what, what would you, uh, you know, how would you advise our listeners to. Uh, approach the challenge of getting a seat at that table for strategy when it comes to the go to market so that we can be consult consultative through the process and help steer and drive and, um, and you know, talk about what we really think is possible and maybe even stretch things a little bit.

Yeah. Um, I think it’s. I think the important thing is we talked about before is analytics and tying, uh, all the departments together. I mean, including customer success and retention, uh, because that’s important as well. Of course. Um, I mean, if we’re talking net new, it’s all a different thing. And I know that’s more exciting, I guess, but I think the thing is, is whatever planning that resilient.

To have operations there to support that with, okay, how are we going to measure it and how we’re going to measure it, not just on the marketing side, but on the sales side and how to take all that metrics and tie it together to validate performance or offer recommendations and suggestions for tweaks.

You know, typically it’s a marketing role. Like what do we look at? You know, I mean, you could say from one perspective, you know, website, conversion rate, you know, Uh, the, whatever we do and messaging and offers just to drive a name into the top of the funnel, but that’s not a. Real lead until it gets qualified.

And that’s where operations can help. Especially talking to the sales is, you know, identifying the ICP and the target audiences to confirm that qualification, whether that person is actually. Um, a qualified lead force. I mean, if you’re doing free demo and trial, they’re typically influential because they know there’s already a problem in a company.

And so they want to do the demo and see what the tool is or the services. Um, but after that, we need to track that person and. Damn, it goes back to the sales to lead score, that person or follow up, you know, at the end becomes like you talked about enablement sales enablement going through that whole cadence process of getting that lead to say, are you the right decision maker?

Should we talk to other people? Can we present our tool to other people? Then you go to the account based marketing and things like that. But it is the process, right. But operations has to support us with the. The data, the analytics and the tools to make this seamless of pipeline work to a company’s advantage all the way from inquiry to close and everything.

Again. Yeah, I think, um, a topic that’s come up quite often in the Mopro slack channel is, you know, how does someone in marketing operations be seen as somebody who is a bit more of a strategic thinker and can offer advice around, you know, campaigns and strategy and processes as opposed to just a doer.

Right? So somebody who’s. Very technical and taking the blueprints. I guess you could say that somebody is wanting to execute on a campaign and how do they get brought into the conversation earlier? And this is something that I even struggle with, um, you know, with my team, as well as I, you know, we’re often tasked as, or seen as the very technical, you know, pieces or.

Parts of the corporate marketing machine. And, you know, oftentimes we’ll have conversations with business partners about, Hey, you know, it’d be really great for you to bring us in earlier in the conversation because we can, you know, we see it all we kind of are the funnel and we see everything. And so we can potentially offer insight into, you know, some best practices or guidance like that.

You know, I’m, I’m curious how you think, um, you know, what would be the best strategy for folks to kind of approach that? Is it simply a matter of like raising your hand and saying. Can you involve us in these conversations earlier, or, um, you know, what are some, maybe some tips that you could potentially offer some of our listeners from?

Yeah. Well, let me ask you this thing on me before I answer that question. In your perspective in marketing operations, what are you great at and what do you provide that a CMO is missing in their department? I think for, and it depends on the way that your organization is structured. Um, at EFI, I structured our marketing ops team to be an internal center of excellence.

Right. So we’re kind of an internal agency that, um, uh, all of our, you know, our customers or clients, I guess you could say are internal facing. Um, and so we’re really good at being able to see, you know, Three or four points down the line where there’s potential points of failure for, you know, a potential campaign that maybe they want to run, or, Hey, we’ve been seeing some things that have been working really well in this particular business unit for this region.

Maybe this is something that you want to piggyback on because we tend to see everything end to end, especially when it comes to the data side, all the integrations where things could break, um, If certain pieces of technology in our tech stack are being under utilized, um, we’ll often suggest, you know, maybe you want to incorporate a touch point with video, for example, in this campaign that you’re trying to run, because we’ve been seeing a lot of success with that.

So I would say on a holistic side, we tend to see everything when it comes to utilization of our technology or lack of, I guess you could say. And, uh, um, just a lot around the data that I think most people don’t see. So, well, I think you brought up a good point. I think you’re talking about how to raise the level of marketing operations and to the strategy or the, you know, the reporting that we do.

But the point is is that you guys are specialists in the data side. You know, and maybe the CMO might be more, we should all know everything anyway, but we don’t, I mean, we’re going to have our strengths, you know, whether it’s, you know, running SEO campaigns and content campaigns. Right. But really, quite people always ask, like, if we do a white paper or a lead magnet, you know, um, and we target that, how do we know it works?

How do we. Track that person who was a mid-funnel lead, an inquiry, go in to, through the process and find those. You know, that announces of how often you should follow up what messaging you should follow up with. I mean, yeah. We could take a game plan and do all the buyer persona research and put together the topics and nurturing sequences every seven days, you know, and track.

You know, clicks to a website or blogs, you know, because part of the operations would be to take these people and say, Hey, there’s something going on here. And they first came into our funnel because of this content or this webinar. And now they’re engaged further, get them to sales, to follow up on, you know, sometimes.

Transition is not easy to do because listen, there’s no best practice. How do we know what lead scoring is? What’s the threshold, you know, is there a best, how do we know? Like they visited the site twice? Do we give them the sales now? Or do we wait for another hit? Right. I don’t know. Right. And a lot of people don’t know that and sometimes it’s just guesswork.

If he asked me, um, you just got to get a field, it depends how hungry the salespeople are. Right. So, and I think that’s where some of the. Strategy comes in to say, here’s what we’re going to do to start. We’re going to lead score them. You know, if we qualify them on title and band, things like that, that’s demographic scoring.

And then if you throw in the kind of content or pages visited, depending on how sophisticated the marketing automation is, right. Then you’re creating a model of here’s what we’re going to do to get these people in the sales. And the data has to support that. So that’s just an example, right? I mean, you could say, Hey.

Um, many of our prospects who closed or became opportunities visited our video more often than people who didn’t. So we should do more video. So I think the big picture is provide providing, you know, insights that compliment the CMOs strengths or weaknesses, right? So that you can tag team and do better marketing, which will mean better revenue growth.

That makes sense. Definitely. Yeah. I think that, that was definitely really helpful. And I think our listeners will. Get a lot of takeaway from that. Definitely. Yeah. I mean, I think what I took away is, yeah, maybe the approach is less big asking about being involved at the beginning of the strategy development, but showing that we think that way by looking at things that have happened in the past, providing insights from there that can be used in that process.

For the next campaign. The next strategy is I think that’s, that may be one approach to it. I think that’s the way I, what I took away from what you described Paul, is that that’s the way to approach it is to start showing our strategic thinking with stuff that we’ve already done. If we weren’t involved with it early on so that we can provide those insights so that to make better decisions.

Uh, as I like to say, like, where are we going to place our bets right. In the, in the next round? Um, that’s great. I appreciate it. So, so Paul, you know, you’ve been involved, I think, with a number of different either directly or as in your consulting role in another number of marketing organizations and lead teams.

Um, if, if you were to, you know, and, you know, maybe, maybe compare and contrast a little bit even, yeah. In the past, when would you have in, in the process of building out a marketing team started to think about incorporating an ops role versus saying. Content or creative or demand gen or whatever. Um, and then where would you, like if you were to start a new new team today, would you be that, would you think it would be happening earlier or later in the process that you would think about bringing, incorporating an ops team?

Yeah. If I was new at a company, certainly yet to assess the current people and what their strengths or weaknesses are. Um, but anything in marketing, actually, a lot of things in life really is. To the skillset. I know it sounds cliched, but left brain, right brain, um, analytical, creative. When I always prided myself on that over my years as analytical yet creative.

And what does that mean? That means you can use data, but you also know. You know, messaging and strategy and emotion, emotion, and logic, all go together. There’s a lot of, um, like triggers like that, that cause people to give up their email addresses and become leads. But the, so what I’m saying is you need to have a team that understands that and not afraid to use their gut, but also the science.

So from a team you’ve got to have a. You know that skillset of analytical and creativity. Um, and I don’t mean like copywriting as much, but kind of like, let’s do a test this way. I think this might work instead of just going numbers, numbers, numbers. I mean, you want to have people who can think and strategize.

You know, and offer ideas, right. Because you know, it makes the team better. And I would require that from everybody. Don’t think it’s just the job and I’m telling you what to do, for example, right. One collaboration, a collaborate, a collaborative mindset to say, okay, Um, what do you think if we AB test two landing pages because of the data showed that on their first test that this headline or whatever worked better, let’s continue modeling that and try to get more conversions, everything we’re doing and messaging and design analytics, whatever it is.

I mean, we’re all in marketing. We’re all trying to do one thing. Capture a prospect in an environment they’re in with a, uh, problem solving message. So it’s no, it’s not just the creative side, the offer side, but also the strategy side of the placement, you know, should we do webinars? Should we do ads?

Should we do newsletters? Right. I mean, that’s kind of like a media plan anyway, but you want people to say, okay, well, Let’s support that with all the metrics that we’re going to do to support our marketing plan. So we’re a team and, uh, you know, so I guess to answer your question is it’s always good to have an operations person, as long as they’re, they can be number centric and loved tag managers and all the different data points.

But at the end of the day, we also want them to think creative creativity as well. And that’s important, um, in the role. I think it’s interesting. Just like just this week, there was a LinkedIn thread of among marketing ops, people that talked about, right. Is creativity part of the role. And, um, I th I actually, I believe it is.

It’s probably not what most people, when they think of marketing and creative, They think of graphic design videos, right. This, the more of the art side of it. But I do think there’s a creativity part of it that goes with the role that is, can marry well with the analytic part. Are you talking about creativity and analytical?

And I think that is definitely something that needs it’s, it’s a marriage that is, uh, Yeah. I think if you find good marketing ops folks, they have both of those. . Do you agree with that? Just curious. I don’t know if you saw that thread. I do. Yeah, no. Yeah, I totally do, because I think that, um, creativity is not always like what you.

Most people would define as being creative, right? Like a lot of my job is problem solving and you have to be creative to problem solve. It’s not always just a straight line getting from a to B, especially when you’re trying to solve for maybe a technical issue or solve for something that, you know, um, you know, one of our business partners wants to run a specific separate campaign, but we may not necessarily have.

Um, you know, tools and our tech stack to solve for that properly. So let’s do a bit of, you know, creative problem solving and how do we use what we have in front of us to solve for that problem? So definitely we are constantly problem solving and you need to be creative when it comes to that. So w we all have limited resources, right?

And we want to take, you know, make the most of what we have. What was that? Paul? No, not only that though, you know, whether you’re I’m a small company or an enterprise or somewhere in the middle, right. I’m a big believer in growth hacking tools. Why? Because they’re robust, they’re not expensive and they can solve problems.

And there’s plenty of them out there. Do we have to use Marquetto all the time. It’s robust, but I’m just thinking of an example you might say, Hey, you know, this one tool actually does a few things a little bit better. Why do we need all these things you don’t even need? Right. Um, so I think it’s also good to be creative with, um, like you said, the tech stack and say maybe there’s other ones out there, um, that can solve the business needs that there’s plenty of video tools out there.

Right. And animation tools. If he wanted to make better videos, that’s a creative side of thing that the analytical side of things is. Okay. We got the tool now what’s our strategy. Are we, um, how are we going to measure. You know, the effectiveness of those videos to drive conversions, right. Versus maybe a landing page that doesn’t have those videos.

Um, you know, and what’s the message. So anyway, that yeah, so that the tools and the platforms like that, there’s so many as you know, and, you know, you can look at the landscape and say, okay, there’s 7,000 now, which one do I use? But, um, but the end of the day is, is what we have in a department working efficiently.

Um, and are we taking advantage of all the bells and whistles? Maybe we don’t need half those bells and whistles. And so we can focus on, maybe we find another tool that only there’s tools like Zapier, you know, that integrates everything. It seems like. So if that’s the answer, that’s the answer. Right. So, um, and that’s, you can be creative with that and, you know, there’s so many tools out there it’s just a matter of what’s needed for the company and, uh, you know, and do your own demos.

So.

Yeah, no, you did. So, um, yeah, one of the other things I think, um, and this kind of gets to the relative, like newness of the whole marketing ops function, even though it’s been around maybe 10 years, I think there’s a lot of inconsistency about, um, What’s its scope and its definitely, there’s not one standard path to the role that I think that’s one thing we figured out what?

So, but one of the things that we, I think we get a questions about or see about is where should marketing ops sit within a marketing team? Should it report directly to the head of marketing or CMOs? Should it report into a head of demand gen or. Uh, revenue marketing or something like that. Just curious what, you know, what’s your take on like, should it be elevate, should it be at the same, you know, the level where reports to the COO head of marketing or should it be under, uh, more of a, you know, revenue, marketing kind of function?

Well, some of that can be crossed over, but, um, Here’s the thing you talked about, demand generation demand. Excuse me to my generation, to me is defined as all the marketing activities you do to generate top and mid funnel leads because you’re trying to present, you know, solutions to problems to prospects before they use a search engine to find the solution.

Now, when you talk about search engine, that’s inbound marketing. And so that’s like the paid search and the SEO and those kinds of things. So operations, easy involved with all of that. So to me, that’s a big picture. They’re running like the analytics of the marketing department, you know, supporting the COO.

You know, if they said there was a director of demand generation, they’re not involved with inbound because. You know, the other side of things I just mentioned, you might have an outsource paid search person or an agency or whatever it is, but, um, um, you’ve got to tie that together. So in my opinion, that role should go under the CMO as almost like a right-hand person to compliment the skill sets of the senior.

That’s great. So, you know, one of the other things that you and I talked about, um, when I was on your, your, uh, podcasts was about the even newer kind of role that we’re hearing about what it’s usually called revenue operations, right? Where it goes across marketing sales and where it makes sense, right.

Customer success ops, um, Well, just curious, like, what is your take on, does that, do you think that makes sense for more, more places? And if so, where would you think that would typically, uh, roll up to in terms of reporting structure?

Well, let me answer that this way. It’s an important role to expand that because at the end of the day, like we talked about marketing and sales being together. We the goal is if we get leads that sell, how do they sell? I mean, the salespeople can sell them, of course, but they still came in through a channel.

And what I want to know in order to optimize the sales team is. Where can we spend more money or more energy on those channels that brought in more sales, qualified leads. You have to analyze that, uh, obviously salespeople can get them to appointment setting and, uh, or tell a services or even trade shows and things like that.

Right. But at the end of the day, they can, they’re still going to go to a website. And make a judgment on whether they should do business with that company just because they gave up a business card. So, and so again, part of that is, goes back to marketing, which is how powerful the website is to build trust.

So, and trust covers marketing and all the way through close people, buy trust, they buy their solutions, but at the end of the day, they buy. So measuring all of that through the whole pipeline is pretty critical because the end of the day we want salespeople, their job is to close more deals. How do they close more deals, have more qualified leads in the pipeline?

How does that happen? Use the right channels, the right messaging and, and trust through the funnel. But so if a revenue person can cover marketing and sales together makes the organization much stronger because they can tie all the numbers together toward the, uh, toward the close. Yeah. I think that that idea of trust is a huge one.

I know, I know as a buyer, right. I have, I know, I can’t think of anyone off the top of my head. I wouldn’t share specifics anyway, but you know, where I’ve walked away from potential sellers, just because. Didn’t trust them. So, um, that’s, it’s definitely something that’s out there. Um, so you know, one of the, um, I’m just, you know, I wanted to go into that a little bit more maybe in that.

So w one thing we didn’t use. So it sounds like you agree, like revenue ops should be, it would be a good thing in general, right? If you could get it to coordinate efforts across the full funnel, all the way through to customer acquisition and retention. So. One of the challenges I keep hearing about for people who are in a revenue ops role, or thinking, or companies are thinking about is where should it report into.

And I think it’s, especially that the default is if there’s a, I think a chief revenue officer, that’s where it usually reports it to where I see people really struggling with where it should be is when there’s not a chief revenue officer. And then there’s a head of sales, a head of marketing and head of customer success.

Um, and where should, where with revenue ops sit. And that case. And just wondering, do you have, do you have a strong opinion or thought on how you would want to see it structured from that standpoint? Um,

yeah. So if that position wasn’t around, so VP of marketing CMO, right. They’re involved with revenue, of course, but they’re focused on driving. Top to mid funnel, you know, through the qualification process, sometimes appointment sending is paid for a point, you know, marketing side, depending on the company.

And then you have the VP of sales and their take their job is to manage the leads that are already in the funnel to get them to close. Right. So we’re having meetings and we’re talking about. You know, the revenue performance of the company and, and what it, there could be some conflicts, there could be, Hey, you know how it is in the old days to get us more better leads.

Right. Uh, but, um, but I think the revenue person can be almost like the conduit of the results and the numbers and saying, Hey, you know, we’re getting. A high conversion rate of MQL to SQL for example, but the close rate has been a little bit less than what it had been. Maybe it’s 10%. It had been 15%. So now we’re not like I’m just being funny here.

Not pointing fingers, we’re saying, okay, so here’s what’s happening now? How are we going to fix it? The. Right. Uh, you know, is, is can marketing provide better quality content for the salespeople? Maybe they’re not engaging as well enough anymore. Maybe we need to get an outsource sales coach or a sales enablement coach.

These are the kinds of things that we can take the egos out of the room and just have a good conversation together with the reporting and saying, here’s what we need to do to grow. So it’s important if, I mean, I’m just saying is that could be a, a nice role for someone to manage all the entire funnel with analytics and, and give recommendations on as a team about how to improve performance, that the whole funnel.

Yeah. It seems to be an argument that it sits somewhat independently of any one of those functions. Right. Um, to be the. Uh, arbiter of the true numbers it’s uh, so that we’re not arguing about the numbers, we’re arguing about how do we not argue, but we’re working together and get the numbers going in the direction we want them to.

So, um, what, one of the, one of the things that you, I think if brought up multiple times through the conversation today is analytics. Insights reporting for ops roles. Uh, so one of the things that the community is being built around is to, to start to not only provide a way for other marketing ops folks to help each other out, but also to, um, Think about the way in which we start to formalize, like what does it mean to be a marketing operation professional?

So, yeah, I would guess that if you were, if we were to ask you, right, what would you think as a CMO type person would be an important skill set or certification to have, would be reporting or analytics or something that my friend, what, what other kinds of, uh, skills would you like to see from your marketing ops leaders or team?

I think we covered that earlier, as far as. Being thinking strategically. I think anybody who feels like, and I’ve done this when managing people back in the day, we want them to be involved with the strategy. It helps them learn. They can give new ideas if you like, if you go to work and you’re just doing your work, sometimes you lose incentive.

Right. But if you feel like you’re contributing, we want somebody to be. You know, a lot of the analytical people could be like introvert. They just loved the numbers, but, you know, to get, um, contribution from them with recommendations, um, and some Ilene, some insights or some opinions and being contributing to the, to the big picture, I think we’ll get a lot out of them.

So. I would want that person to contribute. If there was a sitting there looking at numbers and say, Paul, what did you think? You know, I go back to, well, you did. And what did you think first? Right? You give me what you would do. And then I would analyze that and say, how did you come up with that solution?

You know, back in the day, people used to say people who work for you, train them to take your job. Right. And because you never know what happens, but, um, and so I’ve always felt that. Oh, no positive side, because you want them to learn and grow. And, you know, if I come home at night saying I gave the boss an idea and they’re going to go with it, I feel good.

You know? So, um, so I think the skillset really is not really, like, it’s just kind of, uh, uh, just in their head to want to be a contributor and grow with a company versus just here are the reports. Here’s what we found out. Does that make sense? I think that’s really important because something that, um, I’ve been challenged with too, is that, you know, we, my team, we often will be asked to pull reports and, you know, we pull the reports and in the beginning of my career, um, I would pull all these reports and wow.

There’s like such great insights and information in here that I can see. And then I would just email it to the person who asked. And then I know exactly what they do is they look at. And then they file it into a folder in their email and they never look at it again. Yeah. And so I’ve learned, um, you know, now, uh, that, you know, at the end of the day, what they’re, they’re not looking necessarily for raw data, raw numbers and yeah.

Pretty graphs can be great that they can put it into PowerPoint, presentations or whatnot. But what they’re really looking for is they’re looking for. Short bullet list three to four points of, you know, what’s happening, what’s working, what’s not working some trends that we’re noticing. Um, and if there’s any action that should be taken on it, right?

They want that information distilled down because when someone actually asks that they and says that they want to report what they’re asking for is. You know, uh, uh, an executive summary exactly. Like a report card. How am I doing right? It’s like, that’s, it’s, you know, you go to school and you do your, your, your tests and your assignments and your, your, you know, all of your, your, um, studies.

And at the end of it, you want to report on how you did. Are you doing good? Are you doing not okay? How is it, how are you compared to your peers and where are your areas of improvement? Right. So I think it’s the same thing. And, you know, I’m encouraging my team to do the same as well. You know, and also encouraging them to use.

So we’re big mid-year users at EFI and also encouraging them to create short videos that will, you know, um, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. We use vagina. So explain, you know, some of the things that we’re seeing and, and it’s much it, I find that our business partners, um, appreciate that much more than just sending them like.

You know, a report that they have to then interpret, right. Because everybody interprets things like, so we know I can just say also, and the audience, hopefully they don’t take offense by this, but I challenge SEO companies. Right. I don’t, you know, and to me as a CMO, what does SEO and what’s your strategy here?

People throw that word out left and right. But the point is, it’s not about rank. It’s about generating leads and revenue and. You know, you could be ranked for the wrong keywords or I always challenge people. Yeah. You’ve got great blogs, but they’re not buyer centric topics. So there are learners and we want articles and content that may target a potential buyer.

That’s an example, right. Of a, of a strategy of a, when you look at these things and I would say, you know, it’s, it’s great to challenge and you challenge me. I challenge you. Um, why did you come up with that solution? Right. Or if that’s your company, same thing. What’s your, what’s your strategy? By Naomi, you can link in to me if you like.

So I guess it’s a being a, it’s working as a team and not being afraid to challenge and give those insights and say, Hey, I didn’t think about that before. Um, what’s the bottom line? What’s the bottom line graphs and charts mean one thing, but what’s the decision we’re going to make? Do we stay the course or do we pivot or do we change or do we test.

Yeah. I, I mean, I tell people all the time, right? The numbers by themselves don’t really mean a whole lot without context. And without the story that it’s telling, so it’s kind of, it’s kind of like, uh, and I was probably the same, I think, as a, as you enter your career and with these areas, right. It’s intimidating.

When someone asks you. Generate a report. Cause you think that’s exactly what they want. But what I know now is that more often than not, they don’t really know what they want. They’re guessing. So they want some numbers they’ll then come back and go, okay, well I want this other number or this other way.

So, uh, but we’re, we’re afraid to go, Hey, you know, here’s what we, we saw these numbers, we’re afraid to point. What we see is maybe especially if it’s a negative, right? Oh, that program didn’t work or that campaign didn’t work the way you thought it would. But I think it’s a really important too. To bring storytelling to it.

Right. And it’s, um, it’s one of the things I’ve learned slowly through my career about how to do presentations, especially if I want to convince somebody to do something, I always try to start now with, this is the, this is what I want, you know, this is what I recommend. Right. Here’s the recommendation. And then the support.

Whereas when I started my career, it was all that, exactly the opposite. Right? Here’s all the data points supporting what I think we should do. And what would happen is I’d never get. Last slide to say, here’s what I want to do when you approve it. Right. So that’s great stuff. So it’s at the, at the, at the end of the day, it’s not what it says.

It’s what it means. Absolutely agreed. 100%. All right. So Paul, this has been a great conversation. Any last thoughts or recommendations for our listeners about how I think in particular, right? The, the, how do we become seen as a strategic partner with the rest of the marketing organization? One and probably the rest of the whole marketing and sales and customer success functions within a company.

Yeah. Well, my suggestion is take writing classes. Learn how to analyze, be persuasive, be a salesperson, um, pick up all those traits. You’re not gonna be perfect at everyone, but understand if you want to grow in the field that you’re not just a numbers person, because then you’ll always be a numbers person.

You want to get promoted? You want a new job. You want to show people what you’ve done and what you’ve recommended. Take, take control and ownership of the numbers as if it’s your company and think about what will you do and present that would make the performance of your company even better based on all the numbers you’re looking at.

And if you find some interesting insights, present it and take credit because you did it. I love it. Yeah. Well, I, I w I, I like every one of those suggestions, the one I add, and this is my own sort of soap box thing is I tell everybody who works for me learn the basics of finance. If you don’t already know it, because ultimately if you want to sell internally, right, you need to know the language that is used internally by the people who control the purse, strings and finance and understanding how that works is a big part of it.

Um, Paul, this has been great. Appreciate your insights. Um, if, if folks want to find you connect with you online, whatever, what’s the best way that they can do that.

Oh, just look for polymers and send on LinkedIn. And, uh, you’ll see all my websites, including my new, uh, Alliance called your revenue growth team, where we combine marketing and sales and customer success together as one consultancy. So it’s a unique model, uh, to help companies grow. Um, there’s a focus on it and SAS, but we cover all industries.

Um, or if it’s just fractional CMO services, it’s new spark consulting. So. Paul Paul M O S E N S O N on LinkedIn and explore that. Fantastic. All right, thanks. Thanks. Always to my cohost, Naomi Lou, this week, Mike was not able to make it, uh, for those of you who are going to be at. Summer camp next week in Seattle area have fun.

We will. I miss being there. Thank you for listening. Uh, help, help spread the word for us and subscribe, rate, and review for us. Thanks until next time.