Marketing Automation Platform – “State of the Union”

As a Marketing Ops professional, you are probably more familiar with one – maybe two – of the major marketing automation platforms (MAPs). Ever wondered how you could learn a little more about the others? Yeah, us too.

During this episode we will be joined by a great panel of experts for some of the big vendors in the MAP world: Michael Tucker (Marketo), Stephen Phillip Stouffer (Pardot), Ankit Sharma (Eloqua), and Ali Schwanke (Hubspot).

Recorded live on May 11, 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 ops cast episode nine. Uh, we’re looking forward this today. We’re going to have a really, I think, a lively discussion. We’ve got a number of guests, one that was scheduled that unfortunately won’t be able to be here. We’ll talk about that in a minute, but today we’re going to talk a little bit about kind of all the big major, uh, marketing automation platforms.

So we’re going to be talking a little bit about Marquetto, uh, Eloqua, HubSpot and Pardot, not in a particular order as usual joined by Naomi, Lou and Mike Rizzo. My co-hosts say hello to everyone. Um, for those of you who are listening, uh, live, please feel free to jump into the live chat, or if you are so inclined, raise your hand using the, um, you know, your interface here to ask to be brought on, on air and we’ll do our best to do that.

But to get us started, uh, today we are excited to have with us. Experts in marketing operations. And each one is sort of talking about, um, one of these different platforms. So joining us today are Michael Tucker. Who’s going to. On T team Marquetto Steven stuffer team par I’ll get Sharma for Eloqua. And, uh, we were scheduled to have Allie shwanky for HubSpot.

Unfortunately she’s had, uh, an unexpected challenge, so kind of covering HubSpot. We’ll do our best. We’ll be all of us. Uh, and hopefully it might, Mr. Rizzo will be able to help us as well. So given that help out, but I did just see Allie login to our other location, so she might show up. We will see. All right.

Awesome. All dependent on me. Stay tuned for more folks. Awesome. Great. If she can join even better. Well, if we, if we run out of time, uh, and aren’t able to cover that as enough, I’m sure we could find another opportunity to talk a little more on that. So with that, uh, why don’t we start with just introductions and, um, why don’t you kick us off with tell people about you and kind of what your, what your background.

Yeah, absolutely. Hey everyone. This is . Uh, I am the aliquot chairperson for more pros, uh, working as a senior manager of marketing operations for BMC software, uh, been using Eloqua for eight years now. Uh, I have a very brief experience with Marketo that I wouldn’t even count. Uh, but yeah, excited to be here and I’m talking to other more pros and, you know, marketing automation.

Awesome. Uh, how about you, Mr. Tucker, I’m gonna call you a Tucker now because there’s too many mikes in Michael’s here on this call. Sure. That makes sense. Hartmann. Uh, hi everybody. My name is Michael Tucker. So just in case you’re not familiar with the sound of my voice. I’m the Marquetto chair in the MO Pros community.

Um, I’ve been using Marquetto now for a little over six years and I run a consultancy in my day job called the conversion. So I work with all sorts of different firms, large and small, who work with Marquetto and really want to get the most out of it. Maybe they have it. And there’s certain features that they’re not familiar with, or they just need, um, extra help that has kind of been there and done that across the planet.

Um, I’ve been working in the Marchetto community, which is a big piece of Marquetto, uh, for, oh, I’d say about, about the last four years really actively, um, have been a large part of the Marquetto user groups, uh, virtually, uh, several years before the pandemic even happened. So, um, this year has been a, an interesting one.

From the Marquetto community at large, but it’s definitely something where we’ve all rallied around each other and just work to make ourselves better marketers, uh, using, using really a, a very strong enterprise level platform. Awesome. Steven, how about you? Hello? Hello? Yeah. Good to be here. Um, yeah, Steven Stouffer.

I am, you’re a part chair, a person at the MO Pros community. Um, I’ve been working with Pardot now for about nine years back when it was under exact targets. Um, And, uh, I’ve been in multiple different platforms like Marketo and HubSpot and, uh, Eloqua. Uh, but I, I bleed orange and now blue under the Salesforce ecosystem.

Um, I, a little bit about me. I’m the VP of marketing operations at success, which is a full stack marketing agency, uh, for Salesforce and marketing automation platforms. Um, If anyone’s in the MO Pros community or on Twitter, you’ve probably seen me. So, uh, stopping in and say, hi. Excellent. And I see Allie that you are, you’ve been able to make it so excited about that.

Um, do you want to give, give, give everyone a quick intro? Are you okay? Yeah, can everybody hear me? Yes. Awesome. Well, thanks everybody. I battled the personal issues today. So, uh, I had a little bit of heart disease come through, but we’re good for a little while here. Um, I have due to the Baupost community and F the founder of an agency that focuses on HubSpot.

So I’m your HubSpot chair. It’s got a year and excited to get, uh, dug into that. But I’ve been using HubSpot for about five years. I’ve been a partner agency for about four, uh, dabbled at a few others. And, um, worked at Salesforce as an admin. Uh, not on the part outside, just off the Salesforce, CRM side, part of that.

So excited to, uh, to kind of share what’s going on. And, um, Salesforce is, I’d say one of the ones that’s a little bit later to the game in terms of operations. So they’re trying to make their mark get excited to talk about that. Awesome. Well, what, since we’re, since your, you know, your time may be limited, why don’t we, why don’t we start with you?

I think the first big question that I have, and I’m, I’m excited to learn because I have exposure to a couple of these, but not all of these platforms. So hopefully this is going to be helpful for everyone to get a top level, uh, picture of what’s what’s new it’s, um, you know, uh, confirmed. Yeah, just as our, our perceptions.

So Allie, why don’t you start with us? Um, you know, what are you most excited about in terms of recent changes or announcements from, from HubSpot and, uh, this while we will go in turn for everyone for the same question. Yeah. Sure. So for those of you that have followed the HubSpot announcements over the last, uh, two months, they had, they recently announced a operations hub, which is brand new.

Um, it really is one of those things. They don’t build to compete with, uh, the rev ops conversations that are happening, sales and marketing aligned rates. Um, what I’ve noticed that a lot of communities, um, are add marketing ops is this is HubSpot has a reputation for releasing product before it’s fully.

And it’s not that it’s a bad product, it’s an excellent product, but it’s really one of those things. That’s a, that’s showing you what’s to come. So if you’re used to some of the more advanced, uh, features, maybe in like a Marketo setting from an operations perspective, those things aren’t quite available yet, but there is some good promise there of being able to really tie those.

Those sales and marketing activities together from an attribution standpoint, I’ve really kind of give the rev ops person of the organization, a hub to bandage. So you’re seeing a lot of, a lot more, uh, in terms of people here, the community, there’s gotta be a lot more opportunities job wise to make your market a company using HubSpot.

So if you haven’t brought that up in your role, if you haven’t really dug into what the features are there, if you could be. There aren’t a lot of voices about operations hub right now. Go ahead and own that in your company. And you’ll be, uh, you’ll be primed to, to grow. I’d say the other thing that’s interesting from a HubSpot perspective, uh, is, you know, they’ve, they really positioned themselves as the, uh, solution for small and medium businesses up to this point.

And they’re really going full steam. Like you could see it’s above their messaging, that they’re really going after companies on the enterprise level now. So a lot of their new products and features are at the enterprise level customer. There’s a new release that happened in the last three buts that a lot of us are very excited about.

Uh, there’s a lot more, uh, capability with custom reports and that even things like conversational intelligence from a sales perspective, you know, being able to analyze a, do some of the things that you might find like a gong, big fad, you know, customer their, their, uh, uh, platform. So the ecosystem is probably the biggest thing that I’m excited about the integrations, the native integrations, and then, uh, obviously operations hub as everybody.

Right. Yeah, I think the, it seems like the big, unique thing about HubSpot is that it has both the traditional marketing automation plus the CRM platform as well. Um, how about we go to Steven? Um, I know you also have somewhat, may have limited time today as well. So why don’t you walk us through your kinds of an update on, uh, Yeah, so Pardot and Salesforce, man, they’ve, they’ve been busy acquiring companies and, and, uh, doing all sorts of interesting things.

Uh, so some of the things I’m probably the most excited about is so, uh, you know, back when Pardoc was under, um, exact target, Uh, and then Salesforce acquired them. They’ve been trying to make this transition. We’re making the transition rather of just fully baking it into the Salesforce ecosystem. And they’ve made a lot of strides recently in the last year, even a year and a half between connected campaigns, um, of just getting that data, that rich data over into Salesforce.

So you can start leveraging things like process builder and flows, and really just bake it in, uh, to the ecosystem. Salesforce users already familiar with. So, so that’s really exciting. Um, another exciting thing would be, uh, the acquisition of slack. Um, I’m really excited to see how slack can, uh, be layered on to not only the CRM side, but also a marketing automation side.

Um, and then the acquisition with Tablo. So, uh, w when it comes to reporting and reporting tools, um, Salesforce, uh, Tableau are just industry leaders. So, um, Getting in and tapping into, uh, all of that rich data in Pardot. I getting that into Salesforce, uh, and it really just opens up the possibilities with integrations and microservices and any other things that you might have sitting on your marketing technology stack?

Um, so those are just a few things then I’m really excited about Salesforce. Uh, they’ve been making a lot of moves recently and it’s, it’s, uh, it’s showing and it’s, it’s really. I had completely forgotten that they had acquired Tableau and, and, uh, and slack. Um, and those are both closed already. Are they still working on closing those?

Yeah, I believe that I don’t want to speak out of turn here, but I, I believe that the slack thing is, is being finalized. Uh, I know that there wasn’t an announcement and then the Tableau thing is. Pretty much wrapped up. So I’m, I’m excited to see like once it’s fully baked into the, into the system and how we can start leveraging, uh, both those tools.

It’s, it’s going to be exciting, especially in this. Got it. And, okay. Um, how about with, with Eloqua? I that’s the one I started my journey on with, uh, through marketing automation. So I’m, um, I’ve lost touch with that community as well. Yeah, sure. Yeah. Eloqua I’d say is, has been making a lot of changes. So they have these releases our with numbers on it and smaller changes in the UI.

Uh, I think they were slow to start with, uh, in the beginning catching up with Marketo, uh, you know, marketing Marketo when it came into the picture, uh, the UI and everything was very easy to use. Uh, Alica, I think most of the time is more sophisticated in the sense that it’s very customizable and, uh, in most of the enterprise companies are using it.

They’re not a lot of users, but, uh, you know, Would you, as it, as it have very complex, uh, set ups, they’ve been using it for a long time, such as, you know, my company, uh, and some of the recent releases that they are working on, which is already there, uh, which is part of their, they call it the advanced intelligence add-on is, uh, uh, same time optimization, which is as, is being there as a concept for a while.

Uh, there are a lot of, uh, Add ons and vendors that are doing that right now, but it’s good that no Oracle has worked on it and, uh, as included it, uh, so they’ll help us, you know, find out a right time to send them messages, depending upon the activity of the users. When they’ve opened the email in the past.

A hundred percent foolproof. Uh, you still have to consider unique scenarios of maybe like if you have a webinar email going out, uh, or, uh, some people might not like it. Nobody wants to receive an email to him in the next. Maybe just because they woke up one day and opened it, uh, randomly, uh, 2:00 AM a S that’s one of the features I know subject line optimization is something that I am really looking forward to, uh, which should have been there a long time back.

Most of the developments that you see is utilizing AI machine learning on their part, in how they can better their product. So subject line optimization is the same thing. Uh, it looks at the history of all the emails and, uh, looks at which emails have performed better based on the keywords. So using the IPS machine learning piece of.

They come over the subject lines or such as the subject line they’ll work better for your emails. So that’s more on the email side of it. Uh, they also have some account intelligence piece and people doing a lot of ABM stuff now. So, uh, and, uh, you know, as part of marketing operations and all of us, uh, being familiar with and all of these ABM technologies.

So it’s just more part of it. I don’t know how useful would that be? Uh, given the ABM technologies have really scaled up in the past couple of years and they have very advanced features and our CDPs and, and then data and everything. Uh, Yeah. And then the last thing is the fatigue analysis, which is also around emails.

So, you know, a number of emails that people are getting. So it’s just a report of fed, but one thing which is, you know, uh, which is lacking is actually being able to utilize that data, uh, and then controlling the email frequency and all of that. So, yeah. So on the recent developments that Alec was working.

Awesome. Yeah. As a whole sounds like a whole lot of stuff has happened in the last few years since I last was exposed to it. Um, and you you’ve triggered a thought that I want to get to with everyone after we let Michael Tucker talk a little bit about what’s going on with the Marquetto ecosystem. Thank you.

Yeah. What isn’t going on, actually, you just really exciting that we’re having this conversation less than a week after Adobe summit finished off, which is really the annual conference for the Marchetto engage. And now the entire Adobe experience cloud ecosystem, um, and you know, kind of to marry some of the different comments that everybody else has made about their respective ecosystems.

That’s kind of the big piece about what’s happening with Marquetto. You know, we’ve always had that. Place in the, um, in the, in the enterprise marketing, uh, sphere and, um, and really held a strong position with an within that kind of growing year, over year. But now really with this relationship with Adobe experience manager, you know, it’s just opened up so many more opportunities where, you know, Adobe is bringing in a lot of this artificial intelligence technology that really allows you to kind of.

Predict, what type of audiences you want to reach out to, um, to be able to match, uh, you know, not just for events that you want to be able to send people invitations to, but what are the right accounts? That you’re your marketer is your marketing clients should be targeting inside of their marketing automations.

Um, when you’re dealing with some of these larger databases, you know, Marketo works with, with all sorts of databases, um, that, that, you know, go of all sizes, right? So you can have several hundred thousand, you can have several million users inside of your, or audience members inside of your marketing database.

And so building out tools to be able to help. Orchestrates some of those different journeys that, uh, that, that, that you want these different prospective customers to go through in that purchase process, in that buying decision process, um, is, is really kind of the goal of what we’re trying to build out within the Marquetto ecosystem these days.

Um, if you look at some of the. Pieces that have been added in, you know, Adobe’s acquisition of Workfront. Um, uh, some of the, uh, the account smart lists within Marquetto itself is, is a feature that’s actually just rolling out tonight. Uh, that’s going to become available, uh, and, and you’ll just see a whole flurry of different launch point, uh, partners that are going to be growing basically in the ecosystem.

Um, because of these extra relationships, not just with Adobe, but with relationships that Adobe has had as well, too, uh, with partners like Microsoft. Um, so, you know, really when we look at the space, Marketa has always had really one of the largest groups of third party vendors that, that you can plug and bolt in all sorts of different applications, into Marquetto to make it do whatever your individual business wants it to be able to do.

But now that’s just grown so much more because of these extra relationships. And I think the count that was quoted during Adobe summit, uh, was, was about 4,200 different partners. So, uh, really kind of working on growing out that th that scale. So, so not just making the product better. Kind of bringing us, bringing that experience of the, uh, of the product to kind of match what the Adobe, uh, enterprise systems look like.

Uh, but then also being able to kind of match with all those extra partners that exist, uh, for, for whatever it is that you want to be able to do as an enterprise level marketing automation. Yeah, this has been really interesting to hear some of this again, because I haven’t kept up with all of them. And one of the things that I think I heard from almost all of you is a little bit about, um, whether it was, you know, AI machine learning, or just sort of reporting in general.

Um, Yeah, I, I’m curious to kind of get your sense each of you that, and this was just kind of unplanned one. So I’m going to throw it out there and maybe Michael, you want to go first? Yeah. How do you, like, what do you think, uh, are the strengths and weaknesses of the platform with regards to reporting?

Whether it’s, you know, the basic kind of reporting versus, um, kind of aggregate level kind of stuff about health of your database, or even getting to things like attribution or predictive modeling kind of stuff. You’re talking about me, Michael Tucker or Michael, Mr. Tucker. Okay. Yeah. I mean, I think that, that that’s a piece that’s evolving as, as people’s needs go, uh, uh, are evolving as well, too.

Like, I mean, let’s be honest about it, right? Marquetto has been. Uh, Ben been really doing this since what, 2006. Um, so, so you know, the needs and the capabilities of being able to track and report on people are changing over the time as well, too. Uh, I think if you look at mark Marketo’s reporting inside of the platform, a lot of it’s kind of been based on the activities that people are going through.

Right? What landing pages are they going through? What forms are they’re going through, but that’s really not the complete story. Uh, when you look at some of the things that, that. You know, the Marquetto leadership team and now the Adobe leadership team have done investing in Bizible for multi-touch attribution, um, investing in, uh, you know, one of the first connections that we’re seeing that’s really coming out of this relationship is with Adobe analytics, uh, and all of the wonderful features that exist inside of analytics.

So, you know, you really can’t look. Marquetto engage and, and just say, well, what are the analytics features inside of it? It’s it’s, you know, how does, how does the, the ability to get data, to get some of those, uh, interactions, some of the way that people are responding to engagements, and then putting that into a reporting of business intelligence tool that your firm use.

You know, you you’re you’re, you shouldn’t and you can’t, and you don’t have to be locked into doing reporting just within Marquetto. The whole point of Marquetto is that, you know, this gives you a platform to do that engagement piece of your marketing tech stack. And then, you know, usually a firm will have.

Preferences in terms of how they want to be able to handle reporting or business intelligence. Um, and, and really one of the great things about Marquetto is there’s no limiter on what you can do with the platform, uh, to, to be able to match what it is that, that, that your business schools are from a reporting.

Yeah. Uh, yeah, I’ve my experience is this is kind of the same, right? To get to some of the business kind of answers. You got to pull the data out of. Mark had a, um, Allie, I’d be curious. I don’t know. You touched on reporting and analytics kind of stuff initially, but is there any kind of, what’s your take on it from a, for HubSpot?

Yeah. I mean, it’s similar to answer. It is Michael they’ve. They’ve made a lot of improvements over the last two years that it reporting, but I think the biggest confusion for post HubSpot users has been what’s what do you get out of the box? And what’s in like their custom reporting upgrade and then.

What’s beyond the upgrade. Right. Um, and so it really depends on, uh, you know, type of organization, um, for the types of organizations we work with a lot of times, they’re the reason why they track what they track isn’t even as, as drilled down as it should be. So, um, you know, what does this report telling me?

What should I be. Like, what data do you want? Why do you want it? What do you want it to tell you are the questions that people should be asking before they, they look at the reporting, uh, first as is often, no one should be part of the marketing ops community and not, uh, not say that, but I, I think the, um, the bigger challenges as of lately has been some of the reporting on like, uh, uh, product data.

So, um, Salesforce for example has a really robust reporting platform. And it has for the CRM perspective for years. And that’s where HubSpot is catching up. I think from a marketing perspective, they’ve nailed down the activities, the engagements, that landing pages they’ve got, all that stuff nailed down.

That’s where they started. So as far as like catching up, that’s really where they’re trying to get back into the ball game. And then, you know, clearly what this whole. Conversation. Um, you know, they’ve, they’ve released a whole predictive analytics module that’s on their marketing enterprise level. And, you know, in order to use that you have to have 500 data points in the first place.

So some of those things that look appetizing at first, you know, there’s, there’s still a ramp up period to make that data even plausible before you move it into a BI. Sure. It’s Stephen. I think you, you were, you were the one, maybe he brought in some of the initial conversations about, uh, the acquisitions, uh, at Salesforce that I think are tied to some of this.

So, uh, w what do you, kinda, what are you seeing in terms of reporting analytics out of part? Uh, yeah, I mean, there’s a full gambit of different ranges of different levels of reporting you can do. So you’ve got the out of the box reporting within part out where you can, um, you can do some reporting on, uh, the.

Uh, studio programs and emails and how they’re performing. Um, and then you’ve got the integrations with Salesforce, which I think we can all agree. And it’s really just the best in breed CRM here. Although I might get some pushback on the, on the HubSpot side, but I’m going to stand by that. Uh, And then, uh, you know, once it’s in Salesforce, I mean, the world is your oyster.

Um, and then once we’re going to layer on Tableau and some of the other reporting services that you can, um, you know, tap into the Pardot API with, it just depends on your skill level and what you’re comfortable with. But I mean, if you’ve got developers, I mean, you can literally make anything. You. Um, on the Salesforce side, using the default objects and the custom objects, you can build out a whole multitouch attribution reporting structure with within Salesforce, um, Larry non, you know, marketing activity and sales activity and any sort of connected services you might have.

Uh, Like SalesLoft or, uh, Clearbit or drift or anything like that. So, yeah, I mean, I mean, they definitely do a really good job about covering the basics in part, um, and then just enabling the end users on the Salesforce side of being able to really build out, uh, the structure that makes the most sense for the business.

Be it B2B or. Okay. Great. Hey, okay. How about, how about in the Eloqua Oracle sphere? Yeah, I think the reporting requirements have become more and more complicated these days. Right? So, uh, all of these marketing automation tools can report on maybe some pieces of it, like, you know, email metrics and all of it.

I don’t think people are really focused these days on how the emails are performing. Maybe that’s impacting a lot of, and reserves of, you know, people submitting forms and responses and all of that. Uh, but, uh, I can speak from my experience that, uh, V. Really use aliquot reporting. There are out of the box reporting that’s available.

It’s it’s good. Uh, like if we need any reports on their website visits, uh, if we have Eloqua cookies or email metrics opens and clicks, we can get all of that. Uh, but we use Tablo and connecting all the Eloqua data. You sort of need a data warehouse to report on, uh, all the Salesforce data and then also connect all of that.

To have a customized reporting attribution, but it depends on, uh, how big an organization is using the product. So if it’s a new organization, they can use it. But even, even for those cases, uh, rage reporting on the web activity, people are using all of these other marketing technologies are connecting, being able to connect.

All of that is feasible with all of these marketing technologies, which is a marketing automation platform. Uh, in all of these API APIs, which, you know, we were talking about, uh, it can really connect with any platform that is out there. So, but yeah, yeah, it’s there, but I, I don’t think we use it that extensively to be on.

Yeah. I mean, I feel like they all have certain components of what we probably all need for reporting and analytics, but none of them covers kind of the full range. It sounds like. So there’s probably some opportunity there. I know Steven, he’s going to have to drop. So Steven, what, you know, one last question for you, if we can, before you have to drop off, but you, I think really one question I have, cause I know you’re all advocates for the different platforms.

Is there any feature or function that you would like to see out of out, um, that you haven’t seen yet or, you know, is it in the pipeline, whatever that you would like to see come out sooner rather than. Yeah. I mean, I’m just, uh, really hoping that they can fully bake a part out within the Salesforce ecosystem sooner, rather than later, you know, there’s little pieces that have been moved over, but I’m really excited for the roadmap of where that’s going.

Einstein analyst. Um, you know, like I mentioned with slack and Tableau, I mean, there’s some really, really interesting things on the horizon and I’m just chomping at the bit for everything to get integrated. Um, but, uh, but other than that, um, uh, there’s some interesting changes happening on engagement studio, um, scoring, uh, grading, uh, part out forms, landing page builder, um, the emails, I mean, there’s a lot of, uh, Really, really cool things on the horizon.

I won’t say too much of a roadmap wise, but once it’s baked, once it’s, uh, some of the, um, all the data objects and stuff from the API, get layered in onto the Salesforce. It’s going to open up a whole new world to enable users to do some really amazing stuff. Awesome. Well, Steven, thanks for, thanks for joining us.

And if you can stay on great. If not, I understand. We all have of other things, um, So Michael Tucker, I do have to clarify you curious to hear your answer to that with regard to a Marquette. Oh, to just some of the features that are coming out and just call her, if you got to choose, like, what feature would you have added next?

Right. Oh, wow. Gosh. Um, you know, I think, I think I kind of alluding to kind of the same thing that Steven is talking about, right? Like I’m in the market of champion community. And so, you know, we, we have any unique insight and to, into kind of some of the things that are coming down the pipeline, I don’t want to give away too much, but you know, I will say that.

And today’s age with the way that people are communicating. It’s not just on landing pages or emails, uh, anymore. And where, you know, that’s certainly very, very relevant and extremely important, but we’re, we’re not limited to that. So I think what, uh, You know, initially, right. We’re, we’re just going through and you’ll see kind of a redesign in terms of the interface, but once that’s done once, once kind of Marketo’s full transition into the Adobe ecosystems in place.

Think beyond just the traditional medium that we’re thinking of. Think of all the video that we’re seeing lately. Think of all of the different interactive, uh, You know, the, the, the different chat messages, think of all of the different ways that you’re able to engage with your customers and the different platforms that they’re on.

Right. Uh, and then think about the way that they’re structured, especially since we focus on the B2B world, a lot of times in Marquetto, you know, what, what does account based marketing really mean when you’re trying to reach out to people? Um, it different influencers that purchase decision makers to try and close some of these accounts on the account-based marketing perspective and kind of reaching out to your, your CDP.

Uh, you know, your, your, uh, your ideal customer profile, your ICP. Um, and so I think we’re going to see more, uh, of, of that sort of use of Adobe sensei and the artificial intelligence, um, products coming into the mix. And that that’s something that I’m really excited to see is, you know, last year Marquetto, uh, really touted being able to do these predictive audiences.

When you, uh, go to put on an event, right? Who do you choose to invite out of? If you’ve got a million people in your database who are the 400 or 800 people that you want to invite to that event that are going to be a good fit and mark had a little go through and do kind of the machine learning to, to, to over time learn exactly who to invite.

Um, I think we’re going to see a lot more of those types of technologies that come into play. And that’s the, some of the things that I’m really excited about. Awesome. Um, Allie. How about you? What’s uh, you know, what, if there was one thing you could add to the HubSpot capability set, and I know it’s been growing a lot lately, but what would that, what would you like to see?

Yeah, I think digging into what users want to see native on the platform and what exists in the ecosystem. So for example, uh, Michael, you mentioned a couple of things about video, uh, HubSpot came out with HubSpot video last year, or maybe it was two years ago. Uh, which is it just, you know, awesome. You can embed a video on a landing page.

You can get some just very basic information, but if you want to. Really use those advanced workflows, that data like that web that you go into to try to figure out the next step is really, really complicated. Cause it’s like HubSpot video powered by big yard. And then you could also use Wistia if you don’t want to use vid yard.

So it kind of leaves the users on a little bit of alerts to try and figure all of those. Still a third-party plugin. So I’d like to see subordinated, uh, capabilities on the video side. Um, also the SMS text messaging has become a lot bigger part of our sales, uh, conversations these days that are, um, you know, interaction with users, uh, or I guess our own clients.

And so I’d love to see some data functionality on the SMS side, covet to those platforms that make it possible for us to, as marketers, not have to use third party tools to be able to. Trigger some of those SMS conversations. Uh, and then lastly, you know, there’s, there are some things on the, how people are using mediums like this.

So how do we embed things like audio casts and podcasts and tech talk and, and LinkedIn live video with all of that, into these platforms. Um, you know, your ecosystem’s there for a reason, cause there’s so many different things that we use, but I think really figuring out what is the B2B marketer in these industries want and then really catering to those people.

Uh, first and foremost, Awesome. Okay. How about with, with the, with Eloqua? Um, what would you like to see that you haven’t seen. Yeah, I think, I think in Alica, I would really, really like to see, uh, a better customizable way to integrate with, uh, you know, all of the other tools and technologies. So Eloqua has, uh, app store, uh, Oracle marketing cloud app store.

Right. You can get the apps and install it. Uh, most of the time. Uh, when we’re not being part of marketing operations, we have to integrate with one of the other technologies. And we all know how many marketing tools and technologies that are out there. Uh, and we see that the app exists in the app store, but when we go into integrating those, I know it just allows you to maybe do standard stuff.

Uh, it won’t allow you to maybe customize the integrations. I think that’s where it’ll be really helpful. And there are a lot of vendors out there they’re, they’re doing. Oh, very good job of integrating Eloqua with all of these other marketing technologies. So why not Oracle? So those kind of questions were posed as well, but I think it’ll be really helpful to be able to create this ecosystem right.

Easily customize it. Uh, and with our Eloqua instance, uh, we have a lot of staff. Processes, but then a lot of, because we are an old company, we have been using Eloqua for 10, 12 years now. So it’s very difficult to go in and integrate with any other technologies because you know, if they’d want to allow you to just customize those stuff.

So they’ll be the first thing that I’d really like to see there. And then some of the basic things. Should be part of any marketing automation, uh, technology, right? For example, email frequency management. Uh, right now we’re using a vendor. Uh, but I think that should be baked into any marketing automation platform.

So given, you know, nobody wants to receive. Two or three emails or 10 emails in a day, uh, they’re aware around or work arounds that you can do within Eloqua, but there is no out of the box functionality, uh, that will let you manage it more efficiently. So I would really like that to see in the future, uh, Oracle.

Okay. Awesome. Yeah, I don’t, I don’t remember seeing anything like that. Marquetto either, so maybe that’s coming there. But, um, so one of the things I know we lost Steven unrelated to the, uh, part, uh, stuff, but I know that I was an exact target user and it was one of the first times I really saw like how, uh, one of these vendors really tried to engage with the community of their customers and users.

And really build some loyalty. Right. Which is clear even in this conversation, but be curious, like, what do you see, um, each of these companies doing, uh, to either like engage, re-engage improve the engagement with the community of users out there, um, whether it’s, you know, you know, helping each other out or it’s to help drive, uh, product roadmaps, whatever that might be.

Um, Allie, I’m probably the one I know the least about is, is. It’s HubSpot. I’m curious what your take is on. Sure. Yeah, they’ve done a lot in the last couple of years to not only go to the community and get feedback, but they’ve, uh, you know, they’ve always had a community forum. Uh, I should say always it’s been around for a while.

Uh, but they’ve really, um, recognized. So it would probably hit me for saying this, but the power of the B2B influencer, right? Like it, I don’t know that any of us would call ourselves influencers, but I think that people take advice from other people and they want to know what it’s like, just like this podcast.

I want to know what it’s like from other users to know what it’s like to use. In Marketo. So HubSpot’s realizing that, and they’re doing a good job of having people source content for their blog. Having people source answers with their community. Uh, they’ve got, um, they’re growing their HubSpot partner network, like crazy, which for partners like us is, uh, a little bit of a competitive edge because it’s like, okay, now there’s more people, the pool we gotta, you know, we gotta try harder.

We gotta push ourselves. But at the same time they’re doing what any organization does. Well, they’ve got a lot of high-performing partners and they’re creating the finish line farther and farther ahead. So you got to keep pushing harder and harder to hit those tiers. So, uh, you know, it’s, it’s an inherent blessing of being a HubSpot partner to be in the know of all those things.

But it’s also kind of this, this curse because, um, there’s so many things. We just find out on a continual basis sometimes at the same time that our, uh, that our community does. So, uh, we, we actually host a channel on YouTube about HubSpot tutorials for the reason of, uh, we thought there was a gap in the market of, of showing how to do things that HubSpot with video.

And, uh, and we definitely found that that was true. So I imagine there’s people in the Marquetto community that are doing the same thing, as well as, uh, Eloqua and Salesforce, but. They’ve they’ve got virtual with everything because we can’t have our, you know, like the, everyone flocked to the motherland, uh, at Boston once a year.

But I imagine when that event comes back, we’ll probably have this like giant where you did it ever was going to be wearing orange for like a box. Awesome. Michael. So she, she brought up Marquetto as well. And another sort of, what, what do you like, how are you saying that evolving in terms of the engagement with the kind of community of eco community folks?

Yeah, absolutely. You know, our Marketo community has been extraordinarily a cornerstone really of, of Marketo’s growth and success over the years. And very much the same point that Allie kind of made is, is getting that feedback directly from the people that are out on the field and working with the product every day in and day out to build a respect of marketing teams and the businesses that those marketing teams support really gives you a sense of.

That you just can’t get in any other way. Um, so really over the years that I’ve been involved in, uh, in Marquetto as, as a customer and, uh, as an agency and coming up just inside scoops as an agency partner in the, in the Adobe ecosystem, uh, now with the conversions. Uh, it’s given us, uh, uh, really, uh, insights in terms of, um, of, of being able to see all of these new Marketo users come in and contribute and give their insights in terms of what they’re doing within the community.

So, uh, what does community mean from a Marquetto standpoint? You know, there’s a nation.marketo.com forum that. Um, that, that internal, uh, customers have always used to be able to share knowledge. We call it ghost knowledge, right? Knowledge that you really isn’t documented anywhere, but you get just from getting, uh, insights and access to the platform over the years.

Um, but then above and beyond that, there’s a really vibrant system of user groups that exist. There’s over 92 user groups and really what’s happening with the user group community. And I can speak having really spearheaded. The virtual user group content for almost four years now. Um, you know, that’s starting to really internationalize.

So one of the largest user groups in the Marquetto community is actually in Japan. They have over 4,000 users that are in, that are meet on a monthly basis, um, for user groups. But, uh, you know, we’re seeing growth in Australia where. Actually I’m one of the projects that I have working on right now is, is launching that in India and, uh, being able to produce content, not just English, but in French and in German and, uh, and coming soon in Hindi, um, and Japanese as well too.

And. And I think one of the things that, you know, we talked about, I run a monthly series that recaps all of the different user groups every month. And one of the things that was shared at the, at the end of last year is that Latin America is kind of a new area. So we want us to start growing Spanish based content.

Um, a lot of our clients, especially, you know, the fortune fifties of the world operate in many, many, many different languages around the world. And, you know, marketing automation is not an English, uh, only is not, is not centric only to people that speak English. Um, so, you know, we really want to make sure that, uh, as a, as a community, that we’re representative of the, of the customers that we serve and then the ultimate audiences that those marketers are trying to communicate to.

Awesome. Yeah. It’s um, by the way, we have recently started getting some insight into the listenership, to the podcast, and I’ve been sort of surprised about the global nature of it so far. We’ve got folks in Europe and Asia too. So I think your point about this being a global kind of a challenge is, is right on on it.

Um, so I, I, you know, Allie mentioned right, the, the annual HubSpot conference that in. Michael mentioned the Adobe summit, both of which I think are for virtual, but I think I hear Dreamforce is there way it is. That would be for Steven. Nevermind. But what’s going on with Eloqua and their community. Yeah, they have, they have a conference annual conference, modern CX conference.

Uh, uh, so that has gone void short as well. But I would say in a mess, the personal interaction and communication, uh, it’s not the same. Uh, but we, apart from that annual content, we have smaller user groups, like, you know, Marketo and, you know, other marketing automation platforms. So that gives us a chance to like, you know, in Toronto or other areas.

To go and network and the stock each other, look at how people are using the platform. Uh, apart from that as a user community, you have forums, uh, you know, is, is something with which we call top liners, uh, which has been there for awhile. Uh, it’s a really great platform to voice your opinions, ask questions, or even, uh, in award on ideas, which is interesting feature.

So you can go on, create an idea and vote on the feature. And the article team really looks at it and sees, and it makes sense to include that in the future releases or at least work on it. Uh, and apart from that, I think one of them, the main thing is. Getting people familiar with marketing automation platform.

So certifications and educations are some of the courses that, uh, article Eloqua has are free. And then it asks you to register and pay for it, which is a little pricier, but, uh, you can go in and get certified. So I think certifications, all of those things, uh, increases the users that we have in marketing automation platform.

And then also these meetings and user groups are, are doing its job. Excellent. Yeah, it sounds, I mean, it sounds like every one of these, and I think this is kind of one of the things that attracted me today. Platforms is the amount that they invest in really building a tight knit community of advocates right.

And supporting each other. So, um, it sounds like they’re all doing a lot of the same things. Interesting stuff. I want to switch gears a little bit and move off of marketing automation platforms specifically, and talk a little bit more generally about, uh, marketing operations as a profession. One of the things that, um, the MO Pros and Mike.

Kind of vision for this was to be in a place for marketing operations professionals to learn and grow, you know, potentially, you know, look at building out some sort of certification, uh, model for this. So one of the things we, I, I mean, I think all of, all of us would be interested in the audits would be interesting if you were to, you know, if there was such a thing as a certified marketing operations professional or something like that, you know, like what’s one thing that you think would be, non-negotiable like, this has to be in.

The, you know, the, something that people would have to qualify to get that certification. Um, I I’ll open it up. I don’t know who wants to start. So you, any of you take a shot at that? Yeah, I can, I can start and I think there’ll be a great thing, uh, to promote marketing operations as a professional. I think one thing that we, we usually do.

And then we talk about marketing operations is the processes part of it, right? So they are tools and technologies that are out there, but it can only be as good as the processes that we have in place. Uh, and there are, I know a processes don’t differ, a marketing or patient’s processes differ from one company to another, uh, based on their requirement, uh, and, and everything that goes into it.

Uh, but for example, Uh, it’ll be a very good thing to include, like lead scoring, lead routing, uh, just, uh, you know, being tool agnostic and just talk about how, uh, people should set that up. Uh, just a generic approach, and then maybe talk about how you can implement it, uh, in all of these marketing automation platforms and not just marketing operations processes.

It’s, it’s become so much wider now that it includes, you know, ABM technologies, ABM processes, uh, or. Everything that is there right now. Uh, you know, ABM is one of the things when the, one of the buzzword and, but there are a lot of things, a lot of cool processes that people have in place. So I think from my point of view, uh, not just including the technologies, but also, you know, talking about processes in detail, I’ll be a good thing to include.

Uh, you’re speaking of. Who wants to go next? I could jump in a little bit, actually. I love these questions by the way. And I love that we’re, you know, really approaching that, um, that conversation around, uh, the, the MO Pros doing kind of a designation around this, too. I think that we’re in a good space to do it, given that, you know, we’re platform agnostic within the MO Pros community and speaking as the Marquetto chair, I’m I find it interesting to see the content that we’re having just in this discussion.

And so, um, you know, one of the things that I think to kind of just talk about that kind of inter relate-ability to different products, right? Uh, that I, I liked when I went through some of the HubSpot academy courses, is that conversation early on about. The business case for why you do marketing automation, why you do marketing operations.

And so I think it’s important to be able to have an element in there that talks a little bit about what we’re trying to do with the customer journey at the end of the day. And, uh, and, and really kind of says, okay, we know how to build an email, you know how to build a smart list. We know how to build a, a default program in Marquetto.

What are we trying to do with that at the end of the day? How do we, um, what is that process of building awareness, interest, desire, action, uh, or whatever other model that you want to use from, from moving somebody from an unknown, uh, lead inside of. In Marketo, we call it, you know, revenue cycle analyzer.

Right. Um, and what, what is that, you know, what does that lead in, in, in terms of your lead life cycle and moving them all the way through to a customer? What, what steps do you have to take them through? Um, I think it’d be great to have something along the lines of, of, of you don’t have to get into all of it, but it’s just enough to be able to know as you’re working on the technical side of things in operations, Well, here’s the actual rationale for why we’re doing this.

And I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been working on a project and ask the question about the business case for doing this specific task of the project. And that opens up a whole different way for people to rethink about things. And maybe that process of bringing up a task in itself relates to project management skills, which I think is another piece.

But, um, you know, I I’d say if you can think of both of those things that the business, the business systems thinking, and, and then also the project management side of things, those are skillsets that I think really compliment well, that, that, that, that we don’t get enough of in the certifications. Okay.

Yeah. Kelly, how about you? So this is the detriment of going last, Michael at stole all my answers. I’m sorry, Ms. Totally. Okay. Yeah, anybody that, that knows me, knows that I talk a lot about the unsexy side of Barkat Hagan. And I think that, um, we see this a lot in conversations about HubSpot. They see all the features that all the tools, all the things that it could do and they, they kind of go, well, what would I use?

And it’s, it’s backwards. It’s really thinking about, you know, the business case of, of all of those things that. As an entrepreneur where myself and somebody who’s, who’s been through startup competitions, it helps, you know, counsel, um, you know, venture backed companies like that, that conversation comes innately because of the situations that I’ve been in.

Whereas I don’t think enough marketers have had enough time at the executive table to really see how those conversations go, because I often joke that we as a marketing operation, Uh, folks spent, you know, 85% of our times convincing people that we know what we’re doing. If 15% of our time doing the things we’re doing.

Right. Um, and you know, change management and project management is often the hardest part of our job. So if there’s, if there’s some soft skills. To help us, uh, take the things that we know and really evangelize them throughout the organization. Uh, those are good skills of it. Also. I love the idea of having a shared library that defines a lead consistently, regardless of platform.

Oh, speaking of that, like Wikipedia for marketing so that we don’t have, because marketers are really good at marketing, which is why they bake up all of their own words all the time and they’re all different. And so, you know, sometimes we create our own, uh, problems because we tend to make it too cute.

What are we just need to speak the same language? Oh man. I’m not even kidding. Go ahead, Michael. I love that too. And it almost makes me rethink, you know, we always talk about documentation. And, and it would be nice to be able to actually put that into some sort of best practices, I think would be a piece of that as well too, is, you know, we’re, we’re starting to produce that more of the conversion store too, is to kind of build standardized documentation for clients.

And, uh, I can’t tell you, you know, it’s, it’s a little less directly tangible to be able to show the return on investment for. But I’ll tell you when there’s turnover or as time goes on and we get into the weeds on different types of, uh, different types of systems. Um, there’s certainly grateful to be able to have that, to come back to you afterwards, to be able to reference what one of these guys actually build out for us.

And what does that do that one component versus this other component do for our overall MarTech stack. Yeah, I find it. I find this really interesting because none of you brought up technical skills really. I mean, I think the closest may have been like project management or building it, you know, but none of them were technical, like technical skills.

They’re all kind of things that go with. The ability to interact and deal with people, which is part of what I love about operations is that you’re interacting with lots of different kinds of people. And, um, I think it’s it also, it’s just, what’s disappointing is you see job job descriptions for postings, for people hiring and they don’t have that stuff.

They actually have all the technical stuff. Yeah, I don’t have, like, I’m not a technical person. I’ve been doing marketing operations for awhile. Uh, so I don’t think you need technical skills. It’s good to have, uh, to be transplant. It’s good to have technical skills, but that’s not the main thing in marketing operations.

I always joke around, you know, Naomi’s on this call and she and I went to the same college at different points in time. But I think one of our first conversations where, you know, back back in the day when we were both going to school, you used to go and, uh, Great. These giant computer books, there used to be a shop around the corner called half price, computer books, where you could get used computer books at a discounted price.

And, you know, that was always the thing to be able to pick up the technical skills was to read through these huge volume of pieces of books and see what kind of cool things you could build that. It’s starting to commoditize more as time goes on. So, you know, one of the things is, is, uh, is, is, uh, technology skills are very important and they still are, but they’re also becoming ubiquitous.

So the pieces that really help you in your career is moving beyond the technical skills to some of these soft skills that we mentioned earlier. I love it. I, uh, I bought a, a C-sharp book, like, I don’t know, 15 years ago. And I, I had like a, I don’t know, probably my favorite beverage at the time. I don’t know what that was, uh, sitting next to it.

I think you could probably scroll back and my social media feed and find it somewhere, uh, asked me if I ever finished. Uh, definitely finished the glass that was next to it. Never finished the book. So yeah, I’ve found that all my technical skills have called at the time where I don’t know how to do something, so I got to figure it out for the first time.

And that’s when that C-sharp book, I’ll be like, oh, I got a C-sharp book here somewhere. That’s what I use it. And so I agree, uh, plus having your really, really good community of people that know the answer. I think like, like this, like if someone knows how to do something technical at sideboard of the platforms, learning from other people has become my bread and butter.

And I think that that’s really where the worlds. I think that’s what makes, uh, so many of the marketing operations professionals really good at their job is, is their ability to self-help. Uh, I talk about that a lot with, with our client success operations, uh, guy over at my organization and, and I think.

What resonates with him. And I, the most is that we often just find ourselves, you know, Googling a solution or finding our documents and really going through those things. And so, you know, Michael, I heard you loud, Michael Tucker, I heard you loud and clear earlier where you’re saying, you know, documentation is key and setting up standardized documentation and having a standard way to represent what a lead means, you know, to speak to Allie’s point.

I think. Uh, all of this stuff is like market validation for some of the thoughts that I’ve had around creating a certification for MO Pros. But, um, at the end of the day, like you still have to have people go seek out that documentation. There’s a thread on LinkedIn just this morning from Justin Norris.

And he, he was talking about like, if you could automate the things that you do manually in your marketing ops career, uh, what would those things be? And one of the responses was like, you know, whenever somebody says, you know, how do I do something? Uh, just respond with the documentation. That’s already been built for that.

And then it’s like, yeah. You know, and Justin says, well, maybe we could build a chat bot to help that. And I was like, yeah, but then they’d still have to engage the chat bot. They’re still going to ping you, man. It’s not. Well, this is, I think it’ll be good to have. Oh, this is fantastic. It sounds like I, I, Mike, I know we’ve talked about this.

I think we do need to come up with a, uh, an episode where we just talk about certification and all these different things that would go into it, just because I think it seems to get everyone going. Uh, but we are kind of at the end of our time, I really want to thank everyone who has listened and is either listening live, or it will be listening to the recording.

Thank you to Allie and and Michael Tucker and Steven stuffer. Who’s who had to drop early. It has been really helpful for me. I know, hopefully for others to learn a little more about those. And, um, if you have our listener and you have other suggestions or interested in being on. On one of these episodes, please feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn.

Uh, I’m sure everyone here is also on LinkedIn. If you wanted to reach out to them or of course go to the MO Pros dot com community, you can also get to past episodes including this one. Once we posted live, um, And subscribed to many now, uh, platforms we’ve added a number of them over the last week and a half or so at OpsCast dot MO Pros dot com.

So ops C a S T dot T H G M O P R O s.com with that, I’m going to call it a day. Everyone. Thank you so much. And we look forward to our next episode actually next week. So we’re going to be talking about dirty data, dirty data.