Could customer marketing be the secret weapon your B2B SaaS company needs to thrive in today's noisy marketplace? Join us for a compelling conversation with Mark Organ, the CEO of Categorynauts and the brilliant mind behind Influitive and Eloqua, as we uncover the pivotal role of customer marketing. Mark reveals why marketing to existing customers for upsell, cross-sell, and retention, as well as leveraging their advocacy to attract new prospects, is becoming increasingly crucial. Despite its importance, many organizations still favor new logo acquisition. We tackle the organizational challenges that hinder customer marketing efforts, including the lack of alignment between customer success, sales, marketing, and product teams.
We dive deep into how marketing operations can amplify customer advocacy through effective collaboration. Discover the strategies that marketing and customer success teams can use to identify and empower potential customer advocates, even those who may not be entirely satisfied with the product. Mark shares insights into utilizing data from various platforms and communities to enhance advocacy efforts. We explore the potential of centralizing operations under a revenue operations (RevOps) function to harmonize goals across marketing, sales, and customer success teams, thereby boosting overall company performance.
Cross-departmental collaboration is key to success, especially in coordinating design efforts across product and marketing teams. We introduce practical tools like the broken importance matrix for prioritizing process improvements and highlight the critical role of the kickoff process for new accounts in reducing churn and fostering growth. Mark offers valuable advice for marketing ops professionals aiming to elevate their careers, emphasizing the importance of empathy, collaboration, and understanding the language of sales and engineering. As we wrap up, we express our appreciation for marketing ops professionals and invite our audience to share their ideas, feedback, and guest suggestions, ensuring our content remains relevant and engaging.
Could customer marketing be the secret weapon your B2B SaaS company needs to thrive in today's noisy marketplace? Join us for a compelling conversation with Mark Organ, the CEO of Categorynauts and the brilliant mind behind Influitive and Eloqua, as we uncover the pivotal role of customer marketing. Mark reveals why marketing to existing customers for upsell, cross-sell, and retention, as well as leveraging their advocacy to attract new prospects, is becoming increasingly crucial. Despite its importance, many organizations still favor new logo acquisition. We tackle the organizational challenges that hinder customer marketing efforts, including the lack of alignment between customer success, sales, marketing, and product teams.
We dive deep into how marketing operations can amplify customer advocacy through effective collaboration. Discover the strategies that marketing and customer success teams can use to identify and empower potential customer advocates, even those who may not be entirely satisfied with the product. Mark shares insights into utilizing data from various platforms and communities to enhance advocacy efforts. We explore the potential of centralizing operations under a revenue operations (RevOps) function to harmonize goals across marketing, sales, and customer success teams, thereby boosting overall company performance.
Cross-departmental collaboration is key to success, especially in coordinating design efforts across product and marketing teams. We introduce practical tools like the broken importance matrix for prioritizing process improvements and highlight the critical role of the kickoff process for new accounts in reducing churn and fostering growth. Mark offers valuable advice for marketing ops professionals aiming to elevate their careers, emphasizing the importance of empathy, collaboration, and understanding the language of sales and engineering. As we wrap up, we express our appreciation for marketing ops professionals and invite our audience to share their ideas, feedback, and guest suggestions, ensuring our content remains relevant and engaging.
Hello everyone, welcome to another episode of OpsCast brought to you by MarketingOpscom, powered by the MoPros. I'm your host, michael Hartman, today flying solo. Mike and Naomi will be back soon, I'm sure. So today I'm joined by Mark Organ, currently CEO of CategoryNAS, the leading global community of category-creating leaders. So Mark was CEO and founder of both Influitive and Eloqua. Mark is a serial entrepreneur, investor, consultant and coach. His entire career has revolved around B2B, saas and marketing technology. To date, he has coached 20-plus B2B SaaS CEOs and their companies. His background includes a master in neuroscience, which we may want to talk about at Northwestern strategy consulting at Bain Company and work as an independent, internationally recognized product and marketing consultant. So, mark, thanks for joining me today With delight. Thank you, yeah, I think I really want to go into the neuroscience thing. My wife worked for a brain research place at some point, but I think we could go off on a long tangent if we did that.
Speaker 2:
It's always fascinating we can weave in some brain stuff into our discussion on marketing.
Speaker 1:
Sounds good. There ought to be more of it, probably. Okay, so today we're going to spend the majority of our discussion on the importance of customer marketing and how our primary audience, marketing ops, professionals can be enablers for this. So maybe just to frame everything for us right now when you use the term customer marketing, what does that mean to you? And, secondarily, like, why should we care? Why is it important?
Speaker 2:
Customer marketing to me is all marketing to and through customers. That's my definition, but I think others have really adopted it now. So marketing to customers means that they already have bought your products and services and you would like to sell them more products and services, or you'd like to retain the business that you have from them. And through customers means that you market leveraging your customers to help reach new customers. So that's customer marketing, and it has gone from being a minor part of the marketing department to being absolutely mission critical for two reasons. So in terms of selling to customers, for many companies the best way to grow their revenue, the most efficient way to grow their revenue, is by selling their existing customers more things and retaining the revenue that they have. It's a lot easier than winning a new business. A lot of companies are. This really is the difference between them hitting the number or not.
Speaker 2:
How well they market to existing customers and through customers also has become absolutely crucial because there's so much noise out there. Prospects are just drowning in marketing messages and now salespeople are armed with the famous cheery as marketing. They are absolutely inundated. They really just depend on information that comes from trusted peers, and the best peers are happy and relevant customers. So in order to market more effectively, you really need to leverage your happy customers as well as you possibly can, and I believe that is a mission critical thing, and a lot of the pressure really does come onto marketing ops in order to make it all work. There's a lot of moving parts and we've seen marketing ops play a very central role in making customer marketing programs successful role in making customer marketing programs accessible?
Speaker 1:
Yeah, so some of this sounds. I'm glad you asked this question because I don't think in previous conversations I picked up the marketing to customers. Totally get right, upsell, cross-sell retention, like that, made sense, but through customers, I think, is the one that, at least in my head, I wouldn't have included, but makes total sense when you describe it that way. And in fact we've had a series of guests on over the past several months talk about some newer go-to-market strategies and approaches, and some of them include leveraging customer relationships to help extend your reach as a B2B company. So I think it makes sense. Yeah, that's, it's interesting. I actually I think you said that you think that's a become a more important part of most marketing organizations. I actually haven't seen that. So I see a lot. I still see a lot of attention paid to that new logo, acquisition kinds of stuff and less on that retention and growth within the current customer base. So are you seeing more of it now or am I? Have I just been in places that are behind the curve? What's?
Speaker 2:
yeah, I have seen more of it. It's very interesting because oftentimes when I would go do a customer call and if I'm going to do a customer visit, I typically am going to spend time with the C-level people or if it's a very big company, then VP or SVP, which still has command of a massive budget group of people, and it was always remarkable the discrepancy in focus between these folks that I would meet with in smaller companies at the director level and larger companies sorry, larger director level and smaller company BP level. There's a disconnect and you're right. I think there's just something. There's something really sexy about acquiring new logos, but in terms of what drives the economic engine, especially for software companies, which is a lot of the tech companies, which is really what I know well and where a lot of my customers, both at Eloqua and included it is really important.
Speaker 2:
I don't think that many companies are really good at selling to customers. I think it's a new muscle for a lot of companies and it's a new muscle for a lot of marketing organizations and one of the challenges is that you have a customer success or customer service organization that is in charge of customer relationship, and then you've got sales that's in charge of prospect relationships. And then you've got whether you've got marketing, that is, that really tends to be focused at the top of the funnel. So you've got fault lines between these departments and I think that's one of the reasons why you don't have. And then I would even throw the product organization into the mix, because you have existing customers are already using the product, yeah, and there's like different additions.
Speaker 2:
So if you look, you're thinking about cross sell, upsell, like how do you grow customer account? There's a few ways. That major ways of growing them is to get a customer to typically trade up to a higher edition, so from the silver to the gold, or from the gold to the platinum or whatnot, or the pro to the enterprise, and so that's one way. Another way is to sell more sort of consumables. So a lot of companies have you get X amount of consumables but you can get more of it and those are typically easier to sell and market and that's typically a customer success organization. You can do that without the help of the sales team. Then you've got the identification of like new divisions inside, let's say, a bigger company that you can sell to.
Speaker 2:
So you can even see here how, when a product organization has to decide, what do we do with this new feature that we're creating, do we give it to everybody? Do we just give it to, like the enterprise and like the pro, customers have to pay more for it? There's a lot of very tricky decisions that we made and, honestly, most companies are really not good at it at all, like they're just guessing. They're just guessing as to what we should do with that feature. So where I actually see the most sophistication is with PLG companies or product led growth companies, where you've got prospects and customers that are all using the product and really commercialization built into the way that the product organizations think and it's much more of a smooth flow.
Speaker 2:
Like the difference between a prospect and a customer is a lot less defined in a PLG company than in a sales led growth company. So my prediction is you're going to see way more sophistication in the future, and the reason why is it will make the difference between companies really winning and losing. Companies that have this smooth on-ramp to go from a early stage prospect all the way to a superstar customer that's referring and that's like a smooth process, those are companies that win. That do really well. So maybe, to your point, companies are paying more attention to it, but not as much as they should, and you're going to see a lot more certification in the future they're selling and it's you get that active access to it prior to being a paying customer, whatever, so it'd make a lot of sense for them to be really honed in on customer marketing.
Speaker 2:
So, yeah, like probably your typical sales by growth companies, have a wall that we product and go to market, um, and it really almost feels like that. There's a virtual wall and you have the product side throwing things over the wall. Say, hey, marketing, go market this. Yeah, um, which was marketing sales always loves that they love getting things thrown over the wall, Uh.
Speaker 2:
But you know what? Sales and marketing hits them back just as hard, because sales will go and say I sold this. Do we want to upset the customer or not? And then product and engineering then scramble. In PLG companies the product and go-to-market are so completely interwoven that it's hard to tell the difference between one or the other. So there's great integration there, and I think that's one of the things that we're going to see more of, even in sales-led growth companies, because I think it's existential.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, it makes sense. I think I guess what I think about and you tell me because you're more into this. But it feels like also the capital markets, or the capital, whether it's public or private, they like the predictability. We know that we're going to retain our customers at this rate and they're going to grow at this rate and that's a big part of their growth. And if at this rate and they're going to grow at this rate, and that that's a big part of their growth, and you know if you can then layer on anything else where you're doing acquisition, it's bonus. But is that also a part of this, like why it should be so important is just like the financial markets care more about it for sure, yeah, if you again, if you have this really smooth on-ramp which means it's predictable, you have a predictable rate of upgrade.
Speaker 2:
from lower forms of revenue it's a higher form of revenue. You have a very predictable funnel there and that predictability is absolutely rewarded by Wall Street or by the VC private equity community as well for companies that are not private. Yeah, customer marketing really is something that I think every company needs to do a better job at, and they'll be well rewarded, both on the selling to customer side of things and the selling through customer side of things. Which is where I focused a lot in my last company at Inclusive was figuring out how companies can more effectively leverage their customers to do a lot more of the selling, the marketing, the servicing and the product management for a company.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, it makes sense. Okay, so our primary audience is marketing ops, revenue ops, folks, how, knowing this definition of customer marketing and what we just talked about, what are some of your recommendations for our listeners, then, on what they can or should be doing to help the organization be say, they're wobbling on this ability to do customer marketing? How can they help?
Speaker 2:
Yeah, it's a great question. My experience is that marketing ops is actually quite central to making customer marketing programs work, and if there's a reason why companies are wobbling on it, it's because maybe they don't have confidence that they can get the operations to work, especially all of the interconnections between departments that are required. So I think one of the most exciting things about customer marketing is, just how I think one of the most exciting things about customer marketing, the sale and not closing the sale, all kinds of aspects in marketing. Particularly, let's look at account-based marketing, which is an area where marketing ops is crucial, plays a crucial role. If you're going to market to multiple people into a target account, wouldn't it make sense to have a reference customer be part of that? So if you're going to pitch to a CFO, you've got a reference CFO that is providing a quote on there or can provide a reference as an example. Product marketing, right. So you're trying to come up with a new pricing system for your product. Shouldn't you have customers that are involved with that, or should you just do that in a smoky back room, which is where most pricing actually happens? I'm sure, but pricing should really be done with active customers helping out. Same with the messaging aspect of product marketing Content marketing.
Speaker 2:
You want to go and create some content. What content should you write in the first place? Maybe you should ask your customers. They might be able to help you figure that out. And then, once you write that content, how are we going to distribute it? You probably want to have customers share that information with their peers so that even within the marketing department nevermind other departments, even within the marketing department, you have multiple sub-functions in marketing, like product marketing, public relations, event marketing, demand gen that all need to coordinate in order to maximally leverage customers. So marketing ops plays an important role in getting those different sub functions to work. And then you've got the functions besides marketing. So what I've seen before is you have marketing ops, start working and liaising with sales ops, with product ops, with customer success ops, in order to produce excellent campaigns that leverage customers to get more done in marketing, but also to help the sales function perform better, product function, customer success function to perform better.
Speaker 2:
So really there's little that goes on in a company that couldn't be made better if you had active customer involvement to make that happen.
Speaker 1:
So I just want to make sure I'm understanding what you're saying. So you talked about all these different functions within marketing and marketing ops and some of the other ops functions in the go-to-market area. Is your point that marketing ops can or should be a primary source of help to identify who those customers are that you want to sell through or to bring into some of those things, or is it something else? Some?
Speaker 2:
of those things or is it something else? Yeah, I think they can play a role in that. It's often a collaboration in my experience between marketing and customer success. But my experience is that customer success often underestimates how powerful a customer can be as an advocate and they think unless the customer is over the moon delighted with us, they really won't advocate for us, and that's actually not true. That's one of my sort of foundational insights when I created Influitive was that a customer in their advocate role is not the same as when they're in their customer role. They're looking for something different. So when a customer is in their customer role, they want to get a great return on investment in a product, they want really good service, they want a roadmap that anticipates their needs all that sort of stuff. As a customer advocate, they're looking for something else. So they're looking to be part of a movement. They're looking to be part of something that's bigger than themselves. They're looking to get social capital. They're looking to be part of a movement. They're looking to be part of something that's bigger than themselves. They're looking to get social capital. They're looking to meet people, connect with people. So look at some point if the company is not doing a good job of serving that customer. They will not be an advocate anymore, for sure, but they don't have to be over the moon happy. They could be 80% happy and they may still be a customer advocate because they're actually getting a lot of those benefits that they're seeking. So I think actually, marketing is better often at understanding who might be a good advocate for them.
Speaker 2:
And now the data coming out of customer success is important and we have CRM systems that do that. But absolutely marketing ops typically has a good understanding of all the different technologies that are being used by customers, maybe the only function that has a full understanding of all the different places where a customer is going to spend time In the product. We've got data in CR product in. We've got data in crm. We've got data and marketing automation systems.
Speaker 2:
We've got data and all kinds of different communities that are not the company community. So the linkedin community, facebook and instagram and and x and all these things that are outside. There could be a slack or a WhatsApp community inside the company or they might have a customer community like what we used to do at Influitive, what we used to power at Influitive, or many very capable competitors would have a purpose-built community in order to mobilize customers for advocacy purposes. Who knows about all of this stuff? Who has the ability to integrate all this data together? That's the marketing ops function, more than any other function in a company. So, yeah, they play an important role.
Speaker 1:
So this is something that just popped in my head. You also talked about marketing ops, working with sales ops and or customer success ops as well. We actually just recorded another episode recently. It isn't out yet, but by the time this comes out we'll be talking a little bit about RevOps and what it is becoming and what it should be, where it should roll up into an organization. But do you think that it would make things in most organizations make it easier to do some of those things you're talking about across those different teams if they were all under one umbrella of revenue ops function?
Speaker 2:
Yes, I do think that, and whether it's rev ops or it, in some cases I've seen it roll up into a VP ops or a COO. Yeah, either way, I think what you want is you want to have something that's centralized, but then you also have experts in different departments, and that there's some sort of system for keeping everyone coordinated.
Speaker 1:
So maybe the most important part is having aligned goals and objectives right Absolutely. If retaining and growing customers is an important piece, part of their goal should be to work together to enhance that.
Speaker 2:
Yes, yeah, absolutely right.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, I think that makes a lot of sense to me and actually, the more we've talked about it, I think part of what I think is still an issue across these companies is that they all have their individual, sort of siloed goals and objectives that don't always line up with overall corporate objectives. Kind of like your point about how, when you would go in and talk to a C-level client person, what they talked about was very different than what somebody did down the chain of command, if you will.
Speaker 2:
Yes, yeah, absolutely. There's a number of these areas in companies where you need, for example, design is another really interesting one right, where you have designers that are in a number of different departments. Right, you got designers that are in product. You've got now, often they're in marketing. They're in different areas. Who is coordinating, like who's making sure that all the designers are getting better at their craft, and who's the one who's organizing like an overall design ethos for a company? So you need both. You need some expertise, but you also need a centralizing function, and in some companies this is RevOps. In other companies there's a VP of Ops or a COO or something like that.
Speaker 2:
In my company my last one, I didn't have a RevOps function. That In my company my last one I didn't have a RevOps function but I did have a VP of Ops person who was pretty deep on the go-to-market side of things, so really could have been a RevOps, but was in charge of all operations in the company, basically knew about every process that happened in a company, especially those processes that went across departments and made sure that we had a matrix called the broken importance matrix.
Speaker 2:
So you have a one matrix you have how broken is this process, and on the other axis you have how important is it. And if it's really important and really broken, then that's what we're going to work on.
Speaker 1:
I love that. Yeah, it's really simple. I love models like that for prioritizing.
Speaker 2:
I think it really breaks down One of the sayings I had is that many of the problems that we think are people problems in our company are process problems, and a lot of companies actually don't really have an understanding of the processes that are going on in their company.
Speaker 2:
So we had a catalog of really there's a hundred different processes that happen in the company. Some are really important and one I think we talked about before was, for example, the kickoff process, as we kick off a new account, which in my experience, is one of the most crucial processes to get right in a company. And that's because you've got a number of different functions from the selling company. So you've got sales and customer success, you've got an executive function, often coming together, and on the customer side, you have their decision maker, you've got their power user, you've got other people. It's really the only time where you ever have those people together in a room and if you get it right, basically the probability of a churn just goes way, way down if you get that kick and the chance of growing that account and making it bigger and more successful goes way up. And so, yeah, got to get that right and that's something that a RevOps or VPOps person will work on.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, and I was going to go there too because in my own experience and I was going to go there too because in my own experience and I hear from other people that the first bit of time in that honeymoon period of using a new bit of technology or whatever how well that goes determines a whole lot about how you feel about that product or service. Even 12 months, 18 months down the line, those first impressions are really hard. You can't get them back, absolutely. Yeah, and I will say that I was an Aliquot customer and that was one of the things that impressed me. I think that part of it was really done.
Speaker 2:
Thank you, I appreciate that and it actually got a lot better at Influidiv, at my second company. Part of it is interesting. One of my investors is Gail Goodman. She's the CEO of Constant Contact and her product's like $39 a month, but yet her kickoff meeting was really great. And it was great for a reason because it had to be so even at $39 a month. She had a real human being doing the onboarding and basically I just took her process and I tweaked it. But her kickoff meetings were scripted literally down to the minute, everything that was supposed to happen in that time and yeah, you get it right Again. For example, in many cases we talked about the broken telephone problem.
Speaker 2:
Companies don't know why they bought a product. So some VP bought it from a sales guy on the golf course or something, yeah, and then it gets handed down to some manager level person and say, hey, we got this for you, but they don't know the original reason why they got it. What are the key initiatives? What are the key metrics that we're supposed to impact with it? If you got the key decision maker together with the power user and other people in the room, the key decision maker says, well, this is the main metric we need to impact. We're going to impact, for example, customer growth. That's really important.
Speaker 2:
As an example, we want to grow our accounts. That's why we bought this thing, and these are the metrics that we are want to grow. This is how we know we're successful. And so now you've got both sides that are agreeing on metrics, that are agreeing on the key initiatives, and now the product can actually be strategic, like drive, real strategic and operational goals, and so, yeah, the probability of having a big success goes way up. But you need to have integration across departments. So, in order to get that kickoff meeting, the sales rep needs to communicate ahead of time saying we're going to have this kickoff meeting and you need to show up to it and this is your role in it.
Speaker 1:
Right, and so, yeah, you've got the sales marketing integration there that that needs to take place in order for to have a great kickoff meeting yeah, some of that is what I would classify as meeting 101 right, making sure people know why they're at a meeting, why it's important they're there, what their role is. But it becomes really critical in this case, if you're the selling, to make sure that it goes really well, if you know what the impact is down the road. And the flip side is true too. So I'm thinking about an example of mine where I this was with a project management platform, saas-based I won't name names, but I went through the process. We selected them over some others and we got to the implementation. We had a consultant there and he was the person was fine, right, but not very didn't do a very good job of really helping us understand how we could best set up that product for how we actually did business within our organization. And it became, by the time he was done, we had something that really nobody could really use. And then we had to have our own people start to become experts on it and eventually, when they asked for it was time for renewal.
Speaker 1:
I asked for feedback. I was like, actually, before that it was like this person was not very helpful, right, it's too wishy-washy, nice enough person, but I get that but would not put a stake in the ground with. This is what I think you should be doing, and this is why. Or asking more questions and eventually they put another person on our account to try to clean up that mess. Right, and it was not a $39 a month thing, it was some multiple of that, and it was something we wanted to be more efficient at. It just wasn't doing that. So eventually that product, you can imagine, was when it came time to oh, we had to cut budget. Where is it going to go from? That was at the top of the list.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, yeah, old story, yeah. And who's really should be in charge of optimizing that meeting? It's going to be an ops, should be an ops person that is looking at hopefully they're doing surveys say hey, what did you, mr Customer, what did you think of that meeting? How do we improve it? And I think the marketing ops function is really well served to get more customer contact. I think marketing ops people that are interacting with real customers and not just technology are better marketing ops people. They have a feel, a feel for what it is that customers want to do and why they buy the product, and I think they will perform much better in their functions if they have some contact with customers, not just at the population, at the statistical level, but with individual, like real people who buy the product.
Speaker 1:
Absolutely no. I think that the story you can have a story you can use to reference when you're talking about the statistics. I'm curious. I love that idea of marketing ops folks actually getting more, whether it's they're sitting on a sales call or sitting on a customer success call or whatever it is where they're getting to see what that's like. I've not seen many organizations where the management team sees whether that's been seen as important or something they even think about for marketing ops, but I don't see a lot of marketing ops folks who actually want to go do that. So is that something you would say like, would you? Are you saying, if you're marketing ops and you're not getting customer face time, either just sitting on a call or something once a month, once a quarter, once a couple times a year, whatever that is, couple of times a year, whatever that is right Should you be advocating for that? This is something I think will really make a difference in how well I can provide value back to the organization.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, absolutely, because I think it really helps marketing ops anticipate what the future needs are going to be right. So I think that a lot of marketing ops people are constantly on the receiving end saying, hey, we want to do this campaign, can you make it happen? That's fine, they'll figure out how to make it work. But the truly great marketing ops people and the ones that get promoted and I know some marketing office people who eventually become VPs of marketing and how does that happen? That doesn't happen by just making the plumbing work. That happens by anticipating needs and saying they should be going back to VP of marketing and saying this is the campaign we need to run. We need to run this campaign over here because that actually will drive the demand better than what we're currently doing, and I think I can make that happen.
Speaker 2:
Right, that's a great marketing ops person that is in line to do bigger and better things, and I think that happens when you, yes, you have an idea at the sort of population level, but, again, you have a feel for things, whether it's sitting on customer calls. Trade shows are a great one, and I always had my marketing ops. People were always at events that we would run, whether we ran them or whether we participated in other people's events. Now, part of it is because you're doing a lot of campaigns at those events, but it's also a great opportunity to learn where, if you have a customer event, you've got 40 of your customers at a dinner. That's a target rich environment absolutely for someone in ops to get a concentrated understanding of how they provide value to those people.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, I've had the opportunity to go to events or things like that, or informal things like a dinner or whatever, and I've always enjoyed.
Speaker 1:
I'm probably more of an extrovert than some of the people who are gravitating towards marketing ops, but I love asking questions about stuff right and understanding what motivates them, so I think that would be great. You also mentioned, I think, the ability to speak. I think this benefit also of sitting in on those calls with other teams is you start to learn to hear how sales talks to customers, right, and or if you're sitting on something else, you could start to understand why you could actually help facilitate marketing's creating content that doesn't align with the way sales actually talks to customers and provide me that bridge there. And it also helps that you can then speak that language. You can understand, I think, a lot of marketing in general. Marketing folks, marketing ops, folks in general have this very disdainful view of sales and sales ops, right, but I don't think they've ever sat in their shoes either and it's really fucking hard. You know what I mean I agree.
Speaker 2:
No, I think empathy is really important in departments Typically marketing and sales are a little close together, but yeah, like, for example, sales and engineering are probably like the furthest apart.
Speaker 1:
I can imagine.
Speaker 2:
And, yeah, I used to have monthly get togethers, typically over alcohol at the time, rum tastings or whiskey tastings or whatever and you'd get engineers going to sales reps and say how do I help you sell more for sales, to go back to engineering and saying what do we do that drive you crazy and how do we stop that? Yeah, I'm a big fan of cross-pollination, of having people meeting together, of even having people swap roles, having people from one department go into another department, and that's part of why is that you just get a little more glue happening in companies driven by empathy.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, I think that's great. So we are probably at the end of our time here, mark. So I know we started talking about customer marketing and we covered a lot of ground there. Was there anything that we didn't cover? You would want to go like oh, I want to make sure the audience hears about this.
Speaker 2:
Before we move on, let's see. I saw one question in there what's the difference between a good marketing ops person and a great marketing ops person? Yeah, which is actually one of my favorite I, the good versus great, my favorite questions to to ask, and I touched on it a little bit, but I see it's interesting because a lot of terms and marketing come out of the military right. Think about even a campaign, a strategy targets this is directly the language that come out of, like the artillery function of the military. So it's odd, we target customers. What does that mean really? But so in that case, if it does have this military background, then what are the ops people, marketing ops? So I see them as like the military engineers, and the military engineers have a very long history, going way back to the Romans, building siege works and digging trenches and all this kind of stuff, and you could imagine that there are some military engineers that just do what the general said hey, this is what we're trying to do, make it happen. But then there are some brilliant people that go back and say we could do this If we invest in this resource. This is the objective that we may be able to achieve and I think what a great marketing ops person does is that they have a really solid understanding of the strategy that is trying to be that that we're trying to to do. So they're not just on the receiving end. They understand the strategy, they understand the key metrics and then they can really innovate and increase the productive capacity that's happening in marketing so they don't just do production. A great marketing ops person increases the capacity for production, the capacity to communicate with more prospects in a higher quality way and develop them towards sales.
Speaker 2:
And you know what I'd say? Only 20% of marketing ops people that I've ever worked with really think that way. 80% are really very tactical. They love technology, they love numbers and spreadsheets and they do a good job. They're solid e-players Good job. There's a top 10 or 20% that really is a cut above that thinks strategically, understand what the company is trying to do, understand their customers, increase the productive capacity and consequently really drive results. They get promotions and or, in many cases I've seen they start companies of their own and are very successful as entrepreneurs. So I hope that some people are inspired by this and think bigger about their function to accomplish more and include customer marketing in that, because I think that's a great vehicle. To achieve strategic success is by marketing to and through customers more effectively. Totally.
Speaker 1:
Agreed, that's great stuff. I appreciate you picking that up and articulating that it was. Our audience sometimes doesn't hear that kind of stuff from others that have the kind of background that you have, so that's very helpful. So, mark, if folks want to keep up with you or learn more about what you're doing, what's the best way for them to do that?
Speaker 2:
Sure, so there's. So I have a website for anybody interested in coaching. That's categoryknotscom. And then follow me on X at Mark Oregon, and I'm also on LinkedIn Mark Oregon on LinkedIn, another place for a post. And, yeah, happy for anybody using Marketing Ops. If you have any questions about your career or whatnot, you can reach me at mark at categoryknotscom and happy to help. I love your function. I would not have been able to have anywhere near the success I've had if I didn't have phenomenal marketing ops people in my company, so I'm grateful for the function.
Speaker 1:
Fantastic, mark. Thank you so much. I appreciate it, and thanks to our audience for continuing to support us. If you have ideas or feedback or suggestions for guests, or you want to be a guest, you can always reach out to me, mike or Naomi. Until next time, bye everyone.
