Ops Cast
Ops Cast, by MarketingOps.com, is a podcast for Marketing Operations Pros by Marketing Ops Pros. Hosted by Michael Hartmann, Mike Rizzo & Naomi Liu
Ops Cast
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On today's episode, hosts Michael Hartmann, Naomi Liu, and Mike Rizzo come together for a candid midyear conversation about everything happening in the MO Pros community and the broader Marketing Ops landscape. From membership model updates and upcoming events to fresh research and evolving roles, this chat covers a ton of ground. Whether you're a longtime member or just tuning in, this is your go-to catch-up on where things stand in 2025 and where we’re headed.
Tune in to hear:
Membership Model Shift: Slack access is now a Pro-member benefit—hear the reasoning behind the change and how it’s designed to foster trust, safety, and meaningful engagement.
MOps Events Update: MOps-Apalooza 2025 is coming in hot—get the dates, location (hello, Anaheim!), and behind-the-scenes insights into the planning chaos (including a $350K food & beverage minimum?!).
New Research Drops: The team discusses the new State of Data-Driven Decision Making report, covering data quality, analytics gaps, and organizational maturity.
Expanding Roles in MOps: Naomi shares how her role has grown to include BDR teams and sales enablement, highlighting the real-world impact of cross-functional ops leadership.
Coming Soon: Cohorts & Community Building: A sneak peek at new initiatives to match members based on roles and responsibilities—connecting peers in meaningful ways.
Episode Brought to You By MO Pros
The #1 Community for Marketing Operations Professionals
Hello and welcome to another episode of OpsCast brought to you by MarketingOpscom, powered by all the MoPros out there. I'm your host, Michael Artman, joined today by my two amigos, Naomi, Mike, what's up?
Naomi Liu:We're here Been a hot minute. I know.
Michael Hartmann:We don't get to do this very often.
Mike Rizzo:I always look forward to them too. Yeah, I do too, and yeah's, we should do it more, like often, but we're all busy yeah, we always say that and I think all of our listeners are just as busy as we are. So they're like you're busy, I'm busy for sure.
Michael Hartmann:Um, yeah, so like it seemed like a good time for us to kind of connect, either either way. Um, whether we do this more often or not, maybe it could be like a quarterly thing, but we are recording this, like in the last few days of june 2025. So by the time this gets out, it'll be, I think, right around mid-year point. So it feels like a good time, like a milestone, to go like, hey, what's going on? Like where are we in 2025? What's going on in 2026 with the community and the world and everything else. But I know, mike, there was some big stuff that came out earlier this week about community. Why don't you maybe start there, like, what's going on with the community the rest of this year? I know we've got Mops Palooza coming up. We had the event earlier in the year. It's like what are big things happening now?
Mike Rizzo:Yeah Gosh, there's a lot happening in the community and I think the thing that I'm probably certainly most excited about is bringing everybody back together this year in October for Mops of palooza 2025. But, uh, as of this recording, it was like two days ago that we uh hosted our like sort of formal. What is membership all about? How are we reinvesting into the community? What new programs are we bringing to the community and how are we reinvesting into the community? What new programs are we bringing to the community and how are we trying to lean in on creating an environment that feels like trusted and safe and all of the above?
Mike Rizzo:We did that webinar, like just a couple of days ago, and got some really good questions from folk. I'd say the. The gist of, uh, the sort of like bullet points that I could, that I could give from that are um, slack is now a paid only sort of member benefit. Um, your membership actually comes with a live stream ticket to Mopsapalooza, so that's a $500 value that we bake in there for you, um, and the folks that are already in Slack today who got in on some of our legacy sort of like free Slack access as long as you're like actually participating. Um, you know we're fine with you hanging out Like, just don't just drop emojis. Occasionally, like you know, contribute, ask a question, answer a question question uh, we'll evaluate that every 45 days and if you've sort of been gone and dormant, uh, we'll move you over into our forum. Uh, and that was like key bullet point. I think number four. Now, if I'm counting, um, there is a community forum product. It's a proper forum, um, and it's been there for years, but nobody ever.
Mike Rizzo:People don't know that, though. Yeah, they have no idea. When you said that, I was like, oh right, oh right, that's right. Yeah, and it's been there for years, but nobody ever really knows.
Naomi Liu:I think people don't know that, though yeah, they have no idea.
Michael Hartmann:When you said that I was like oh right, oh right, that's right. I was like I know about it and I can't remember the last time I was there, yeah yeah, totally.
Mike Rizzo:I mean, look for every person that is on Slack. There's equally another person that can't install Slack right that is on slack. There's equally another person that can't install slack right, like plenty of you out there are using microsoft teams, or, or maybe nothing, for chat. I don't know. That would be strange. But, um, you know, for for all of you, there is a community forum product. It's at communitymarketing, opscom. Uh, you can use your marketingopscom login to go access it at any time. Um, and then there is like some paid channels and stuff like that where we're hosting all of our local meetups, for example, like local chapter meetups are going to be organized there. You'll get to see some of our content calendar in there.
Mike Rizzo:So I'd say, like that was the thing that was probably most substantively different and exciting about what has happened in 2025 so far is like the formal shift to move toward more of a membership model, that that makes slack a feature of that membership, but also investing, as I mentioned, into that right by giving you access to mopsa palooza on the live stream, um, at least at the, at the, at the pro level, right, like the initial sort of membership level. So, yeah, I'm excited. Um, those are all you know. I don't know they're they're important shifts that we need to make, uh as an organization, so that we can continue to go build out more of the explicit sort of like role-based community programming and um host some more like engaging sort of speakers and educational opportunity, these kinds of things um you know, were you on the webinar this week?
Michael Hartmann:I wasn't, no, yeah, so I was. I mean, I I think I thought there were a lot of good questions. I think a lot of it was just clarification on the details of, like, my membership is this one, how is it going to change? I mean, I suspect, if you haven't already, mike, you're going to get questions. I'm going to put you on the spot here because we hadn't planned this. What's the why behind it? Right, like I really enjoy being on slack and great community and as in and out occasionally, maybe like what's the so like, maybe it feels like to some people like they're losing out on something, but what's the? What's the back? Maybe there's a little bit more you can share on the why and then like, why is it like if? How would you tell those people that, um, they still have access to, to the, whether it's to that community side or whatever to to be able to get the same kind of connections?
Mike Rizzo:yeah, yeah, no, it's. It's a good question. Um, it boils down to like I kind of I lightly breezed over it right as I was, um, starting starting to describe some of the bullet points of the takeaways, but it boils down to creating trust and safety, um, and making sure that we have the right people in the community that are creating the right value. Um, I have to say, as a community, I'm incredibly proud of our members for stepping up and constantly, you know, engaging the way that they have um signaling if they feel like there's something that isn't quite right. Um, you know, I know there's a number of us that sort of act as like pseudo moderators to the community, and we'll notify our team to make sure that, you know, we have good participation and there's nobody like spamming and sourcing services or anything like that.
Mike Rizzo:But really it comes down to hey, I know that by being a member of this community, it is an agnostic environment, right?
Mike Rizzo:We, we don't, we don't adhere to any one technology, we don't service another agency or anything like that like we're here to invest in this practice area and we want our members to feel like we're invested in them, and what I can tell you is those that have historically been sort of just like on a free plan. They're not necessarily as engaged as those that have come in and contributed in other ways. Right right, even though we didn't have a membership before, there was plenty of people that were jumping in and hosting workshops. They were coming to our conference, engaging in lots of different other formats. Those are the people that are the most engaged and I think when you invest your time or your dollars, or sometimes both, you end up getting more value out of a community, and then that's really the why behind it right right is we want to create an environment that everybody's excited to be in um and they know that there's investment back in them gotcha.
Michael Hartmann:Have you what's been the feedback you've gotten so far?
Mike Rizzo:honestly just like makes sense. Yeah, generally speaking it, you know it's a, it makes sense. It, generally speaking it, you know it's a, it makes sense. It's uh, um, definitely the like hey, what does it mean to be active in 45 days? Uh, type of thing? Um, and so we just wanted to clarify that's like uh, some level of meaningful contribution. Usually that results in like asking a question or responding to somebody on a question. Um, you know, we can't, I mean, if it's not, uh, a widely known fact, just for this for the listeners out there, like, we can't see your dms, so we have no idea. Like, if, if all you do is dm people, we wouldn't know that. Um, so there is some level of like you kind of have to be um, engaged in some of the other public channels, right, that are that are visible. Um, yeah, so it's really, or?
Michael Hartmann:the or the there. I know there are private channels of slack, those. Those get heavy visibility of those too.
Mike Rizzo:It's just yeah we'll have some visibility, just as, like moderators, we'll have visibility into those because we're in those channels, um, uh, but like an app that, for example, because we're all kind of nerds, right. So the way that we're tracking this is, uh, when you contribute to the community, there's a date stamp that's stamped to your record, um, and it says, like, the last time you were active and if that lapses by 45 days, we'll know that you, like, you, haven't been around contributing in any any way. The apps that we have to be able to look at that they can't see into private channels unless we explicitly invite them into those. So, like, generally speaking, you know we're looking at mostly just public forum contribution type of stuff.
Michael Hartmann:Okay, right, yeah all makes sense, yeah see, that was the response.
Mike Rizzo:Makes sense yeah um, yeah, I just asked about 2026, I was trying to.
Michael Hartmann:I was trying to put myself in the position. As much as I can know and support all this right. I put myself in the position of someone maybe who's not as actively like, not involved with the what's going on with the what's going on with the community from an operational standpoint yeah, yeah, there's a lot.
Mike Rizzo:um, uh, I would be if anybody ever wants me to like lift the veil and talk about like the whole, the whole, like I'll do it with you one-on-one anytime you want. Um, uh, you know it's probably not worth like blasting it out to the entire world because people would be like really bored. But for those that are interested, uh, I'm more than happy to lift the veil and share that kind of stuff, because there's a lot that goes into managing this stuff right and we want to make it a valuable experience and unfortunately that has a cost and, yeah, largely that's been supported by our sponsors and I think we've done a really nice job of engaging with them and balancing the load between you know, ensuring our sponsors aren't just like getting a pitch slap into the community right right so you know we want to.
Mike Rizzo:We want to sort of continue to balance that and maintain a focus on member first. It's always been about our members and now we're just creating more intention for that environment.
Michael Hartmann:But yeah, I know there are other events coming up, but the next big one but community-wide is much blizzard, right, and it's late October, I can't remember the dates. Yeah, yeah.
Mike Rizzo:October 27th or 29th this year. Um, I just had.
Michael Hartmann:Uh, it's in Anaheim, california right behind Disneyland, san Diego's next year, yeah, while we're looking at San Diego next year this is.
Mike Rizzo:I did. I did that. I'm actually thinking about doing a public post about this, just to show the pain of what it takes to try to put one of these events on. It's insane. I did six sites visits in 10 days. Uh, and I'm, I'm sure, for those of you listening right now, I am shopping for 2027 venues right now, because it's that's what you have to do in this thing to book them a year out.
Naomi Liu:You have to book them two years out two years out, minimum two.
Mike Rizzo:That's like the norm and you know ideally beyond that for some of these places. And what's really scary is they ask for like money up front, right and so most of that that's based on your fnd minimum. Y'all, some of two, actually, out of the six, I want to say three or four of them were asking for a food and beverage minimum of three hundred and fifty thousand dollars. You guys, I mean?
Naomi Liu:I mean, we can do it, but like are?
Mike Rizzo:we eating caviar and steaks for every meal I mean, we can do it I actually it's funny.
Michael Hartmann:All of our, anybody who's involved with intimately with events probably goes like oh yeah, they keep it, they have a program. I have no idea if that's, I mean it's a big number, right like, but I don't know if it's the norm or if it's high, low like.
Mike Rizzo:I have no context I mean, and and it's all relative right, so, like for those listening, our event is approximately 450 to 500 people. Right, that's, that's what we're going to see in person, probably this year, and last year we had 437. The year before it was 330. So we are growing. But if you do the math, the $350,000 that you spend on food and beverage per head count, that's before taxes and gratuity. So if you add that on top, you're talking like a thousand bucks per head for effectively like two days of food. And you're not feeding them three meals a day, folks. You're giving them usually some light breakfast and a solid lunch. I don't know what we're eating to be able to do that, it'll like, even if we could afford that, we can't afford it. Just to be very clear. Like we cannot afford that, yeah, um, even if we could, I am confident that at that volume of attendees, that is actual food waste, like that's. That's what it's going to turn into is like we literally would just have to order food just to hit the minimum and it would just get thrown away, which I, which I just won't do business with venues that that want to stick to their guns on that kind of stuff. So, anyway, just to like give you the stark offset, there are other venues that offer a hundred thousand dollar food and beverage minimum, right, so it's like totally arbitrary, uh, for for the same amount of space, same cost of the room, nights. Like it's uh, it's all crazy, but anyway, uh, I digress.
Mike Rizzo:Mopsapalooza is october 27th through 29th 2025. This year. It's at the west end in anaheim. We are currently wrapping up our uh ticket holder voting phase, so if you have a ticket, you can go in and rate and review all the sessions and then help us create the community event that you want to see, that mobs of palooza. We'll announce all the speakers in the lineup in late july. The workshops are pretty well solidified at this point. Um, we have a lot of workshop hosts this year, which I'm really excited about. Um, and then I actually got a message from a couple of the attendees that were super fired up because they've always wanted to do Disney in Halloween, um, and so they're grabbing our magic pass and they're like, yeah, I'm going to Disney because it's going to be Halloween.
Michael Hartmann:I was like, oh right yeah, I forgot for the record that was not me. Hey, it's not for everyone, not my jam yeah I get it, that's okay. Yeah, yeah, I want to know what is naomi speaking, because that's what I want to go see naomi oh yeah, we're doing it.
Naomi Liu:Yeah, we're doing another panel right.
Mike Rizzo:Yep, you, you and me, mike yep, we'll do a panel, should we should we um?
Naomi Liu:should we wear costumes like have it be themed spooky? Oh, that would be kind of fun right as your. I don't know what would the theme be?
Mike Rizzo:we'd have to come up with some like marketing puns, right like I was, like I was yeah, your favorite moves. I one time I wanted to like, uh, act like a pop-up banner and just like, just like, walk around and then, like like, step in front of somebody and just like, hold up a sign.
Naomi Liu:That's so funny.
Michael Hartmann:Like a chat bot.
Mike Rizzo:Yeah, yeah, like okay, but anyway I'm excited about it. Um, yeah, we had like 15 of our attendees buy tickets to come back right away. Um, this year it's awesome last year for this year, so so that's that's really exciting. But, um, yeah, beautiful hotel, a little bit more intimate, um, because it's like I've been there, weston, it's a.
Michael Hartmann:It's a nice venue, yeah.
Mike Rizzo:Yeah, really, really excited about it. They're about as old as our conference is, so about three years old, so I'm pretty pumped. But, yeah, that's gosh. I think that's everything for 2025 that has sort of been happening I did talk about on the webinar this week, and something else that I'm excited about is we're doing more research this year, releasing more of that out into the wild, so the first report is available to our members. It's the state of data-driven decision-making, the mouthful in go-to-market specifically, and there's a lot of really good nuggets in there around how data, data, data quality, and some of the teams are organizing around, um, the use of data for effective go-to-market strategy, um, so this is a way for us to go a lot deeper on some of that annual benchmark study stuff that we do with the state of the mo pro research.
Michael Hartmann:Is this a new one? Or is this uh because I know you do this state of the mo pros, which is no like coming into a third or fourth year, right? I think it'll be its fifth year, fourth year, okay, I don't know. So this is a different research.
Mike Rizzo:This is different research. Yeah, we're referring to these as pulse reports. We're going to try to pump them out roughly once a quarter-ish but effectively just like getting a state on like what's going on in our, in our industry, around very specific topics. So the first topic is around data and data quality. The second topic, that is, we finished the research collection phase and we're just going into design mode now for the study, but it'll be released in a couple of months and it's around rev ops and rev tech and just like wtf is going on in revenue operations, like what is this? Um, yeah, and and so that that that one I'm particularly excited about. And then the third one we're entering that research phase now where we're actually going to collect all the data from all of you, uh that want to participate. Um is going to be around more of your like kpis and benchmarks, right, like uh, what's?
Michael Hartmann:your salary level kpis a bit more.
Mike Rizzo:So yeah, performance yeah, more like your team, your marketing operations team and sizes like stuff. That where you're like how do I sort of understand me and my role, me and my team, me and my org relative to those that are out there. And then by pulling all three of those pieces together, we'll be able to also recreate the state-of-the-mill pro research and give everybody access to that at the end of the year as well. So, effectively, we're breaking apart the state-of-the-mill pro research, going deeper and then pulling it back together in sort of a bespoke study and releasing that, as you might expect, at moffsapalooza. So, yeah, are you?
Michael Hartmann:are you um? Are you open to ideas or suggestions for additional areas of research?
Mike Rizzo:of course, yeah, yeah, because it doesn't need to be the exact same like pattern every single time. Yeah, so, whether that's you or anybody listening like, you're welcome to tell us what you want us to study. Um, cause we've got a whole community of people that probably are interested in the same topic.
Michael Hartmann:of course, now I'm sure there's got to be something about AI and its impacts. I would be curious to. I think it'd be interesting. You're doing the RevTech one. I'd be curious if there's anything that we're looking into about what is happening in terms of technologies that might disrupt, like the entrenched players right, like I keep believing that there's going to be something that's going to come along and just be sort of a whole new ball game in terms of how things like a signal, like yeah, an alternative to salesforce that just doesn't do the same thing in the same way, but maybe just saying you know, so I'm just like anyway, but that's that would be interesting to me, like to hear about what's going on there, what people are seeing, what they're looking for yeah, um, interestingly, I met a team yesterday um, I'll give them a shout out, which obviously I I try to avoid.
Mike Rizzo:They're they're not a paid sponsor, uh of any kind, so just full disclaimer there. I literally just met them last night. They're based in Australia. Um, it's a company called the Zepic, z E P I C For those of you that feel like you want to go look it up Um, they they're doing something interesting. Um, they're really starting more with, like, the data layer, and I think that that sort of like scratches at what you're talking about.
Mike Rizzo:Hartman, I bet you there's more of them out there where, like you're starting with more of like a data first, um approach to building like a marketing automation platform. Um, versus, like you know, the boxed sort of objects. So for them it's like anything is an object, like you could literally like your chair as a, because they kind of they cater more to the b2c side. He was like explaining to me he's like, look, your chair could be an object and then each of the pieces of the chair can be features and assets and you know metadata of that object the arm, the skews, like all this stuff and like you could do that for like literally anything, and then you create a relational database and a crm and a marketing automation platform that allows you to engage with like highly personalized relationships between between these objects. It's arguably you could do in b2b too, but it was just fascinating to see the like.
Mike Rizzo:The approach to building technology now, I think, is going to change based on what we're seeing in the market. Right, like you look at what Clay's doing and kind of pushing the agenda forward on this idea of like go-to-market engineering and like sort of a build first, like slow down to speed up, kind of mindset, I think we're going to see that come to fruition in products too. Right, it's not. It's going to end up being like almost we talked about this years ago, I yeah we were saying like I feel like there's gonna be lots of warehouse native like things that are gonna happen.
Mike Rizzo:That's that that I think is upon us at this point I'm trying to remember, like who we there's.
Michael Hartmann:I can't remember who it was we talked to, but yeah, I remember that. Curious, naomi, would you like? Would you find it interesting? You think people would be like yours? I think it's one thing that's been interesting and I've talked to a couple of people. But I know like your scope of responsibility has expanded like a couple times now beyond wait, you can quote quotes right, traditional marketing, ops, right, um, do you think it would be like? You think there are things that would be useful for people in our audience who aspire to grow and expand and have different career paths? What are the challenges, what makes sense, what can be leveraged from what you've done into these expanded roles?
Naomi Liu:Yeah, I mean, I think, absolutely. I think part of the struggle that I've had is even just finding people that I can bounce ideas off of, that have been in similar situations. And so there was someone that I met actually at Adobe Summit earlier this year, where we were both in marketing ops and she also managed BDRs or an inside self team, and when we looked at each other we're like, oh my God, did we just find another like you know're just like wait what you know, sweet we were so excited.
Mike Rizzo:You're a four-leaf clover like me, I know.
Naomi Liu:Oh my god and uh, it just like it was. It wasn't planned, it was just something like I, when I mentioned like, my scope of responsibility, you could see her eyes line up and she was like what? So we immediately made a, made a, um, a note to chat post from it and yeah, it was great, and I think that's just something that has been rare, right. And I think when it comes to marketing ops, like despite the industry being a bit more mature now, it's still there's still a wide range of what people are responsible for. Right, I'll meet marketing ops people that part of their scope of work is like demand gen or copywriting or like being responsible for the actual like development of the nurture program, right, and whereas, like I am not, like we're purely operational, right, and then they're teamed that are not necessarily as involved in vendor evaluations or contracts or you know the financial side of things or even negotiating with vendors about you know the needs of the business, like kind of leave that to procurement teams or whatnot, right.
Naomi Liu:And so I think just understanding where the gaps are for people is that the company doesn't want that to fall under marketing ops or is it that there is? It's like chicken egg cart horse type situation, like you don't know what you don't know. And how do you get that experience unless you are trained on it right or it just kind of falls under your onto your radar? Um, so I think a lot of that is just finding like-minded people that overlap on the smaller nuances, the fringe things that can come up. And especially for me, aside from the BDRs, I'm heavily, heavily, heavily involved in sales enablement and sales onboarding. Sales manager starts like the second or third conversation they might have is with me, right which is here is access to all the tools that you need. This is our process. This is how you progress an opportunity forward. This is how, like a lot of that, all vendery, right, and that's interesting, trying to point them to the right team, right. So so yeah, it's a lot, that is a lot.
Michael Hartmann:I've been in similar ones where I always tell people I try to define marketing options. Pretty much everybody has a possibility for the tech stack, the marketing tech stack, and usually campaign operations or something like campaign operations and data and probably reporting analytics to some level and the amount can vary. But when you start getting things like you, I've had a small inbound BDR or SDR team. I've had responsibility for websites and the operations of those, not the content, but like the underpinnings and that kind of stuff. I have had content teams.
Michael Hartmann:Before marketing ops was a thing and then you touched on it right Managing budgets, managing resources whether that's headcount or consult and negotiating that. And I remember distinctly when it came time for renewal with a technology vendor, how me, my boss and our procurement person all sort of we strategized about the roles we were each going to play and how we interacted with them, right to the point. Like I was the one trying to like I'm on your side and my boss was the one beating him over the head, the pubic god was like I just need the numbers right. And unless you've gone through that right or had the opportunity like to be exposed to that, it's not something that most people get to do so. Maybe that's an opportunity, mike, for some additional like I don't know, like coaching, training, whatever you're smiling yeah, no, my head.
Mike Rizzo:I was gonna say that earlier, when naomi was like talking about the, um, sort of the serendipity of being able to find somebody that has like a similar thing. Right, like when we were talking at the by the way, none of this is scripted folks, so like it is absolutely just a natural conversation Um, uh, when you're talking about like finding someone that has the same skillset as you or whatever, um, those are the types of things that we're trying to do with the membership program, right, like we're we're engineering ways for you to find those connections. So you can imagine a program for Naomi where I ask all of the folks that are signing up now hey, give us a sense of your role and responsibilities. Right, if you actually build out your profile on marketingopscom it is a LinkedIn-esque style profile you can give us your job history, your work experience, your certifications and some of your skills and we eventually will be able to get to a place where we can pair you up in sort of these micro sort of groups for a period of let's call it a month. Right, where we can host discussions and go deep on topics or introduce you to each other like cohorts exactly, yeah, operative word cohorts, um, and and that's exactly what like we're, we're leaning in on, we're starting with more like role based, you know, are you a manager, independent contributor, senior manager, director, vp, or more so? At least you're within a peer group? That's sort of like some experiencing different things, but we can go a whole bunch of different directions, uh, and so when naomi shared that with me, that's exactly where my head went right. It's like, oh great, we should figure out a way to bring people together for some of the things that they're responsible for, um, which then also means that if you're listening to this, like, if you have other ideas of cohorts that we should try to pull together, send them to us, because that's what we want to do is like, make it easier for you to learn from each other and shorten that learning curve. So, yeah, that's a lot, though, naomi.
Mike Rizzo:Um, coincidentally, um, I did see someone posting yet again um on LinkedIn about, uh, the BDR, sort of SDR function rolling into like a RevOps marketing.
Mike Rizzo:Really, it was actually not even a RevOps org, because that's just like sales ops 2.0, but like it was actually a marketing ops function person. That was like, oh, I'm, I'm sort of like taking over on this now, or I'm like more heavily involved and I I personally think it's like a really good move for for the organizations that have the leader that can handle it. I think it's a super good move, um, but I do think it takes time to be able to and I would love your thoughts on it right now. I mean like it probably takes time and experience in role to like get to and I would love your thoughts on it right now. I mean like it probably takes time and experience in role to like get to a place where you can make an impact right, like you kind of have to know the inner workings of that's my sense anyways like you have to really know the inner workings of the business to be able to like be an impactful sort of leader for the sdr bdr function. Would you agree?
Naomi Liu:yeah, yeah absolutely, yep, absolutely, because, um, I you know and I was very honest with the team when I started managing them is, you know, I don't have a sales background. I get sold to online, right, or people try to pitch me, but I don't have a sales factor. And, excuse me, can we edit that out?
Michael Hartmann:Yeah, we'll cut it for you Very live.
Naomi Liu:Very live, yeah, but what I can offer them and I think this is something that has been very beneficial and has caused a lot of success since I've taken over the team is I am very data focused, right, and I'll give you an example.
Naomi Liu:So my example is if you can make and I'm just making, these are just I'm just making these up right, if you can make, you know 12 very highly qualified calls in a day, right, where you have done your research on the account, you look the person up on linkedin or sales navigator use you know kind of identify their history, found like a talk track that you can talk to them about, theme their history in salesforce, know where to look at and mark head out to see, like, what they're doing, are they engaging with our content or whatnot.
Naomi Liu:And I've trained doing all of that because you know I, my team on the op side, we handle all of that and you're able to make 12 calls a day. Let's look at the historical data that we have in terms of uh lead source and the conversion rates from. If you're getting compensated, for example, on opportunity creation or setting appointments for our sales managers, where what are the leads and the source, where you're going to have the best chance to set those appointments and create those opportunities. And then, additional on top of that, where are you going to uh, like, what is the close rate for those? All right, arming them with this information allows them to prioritize the calls that they're making in a given day. So it's not just like I'm going to dial for dollars type of situation right, first in, first out, and and so when they have that information at their fingertips and I'm training them where to look and how to prioritize and what they should be doing, they've been killing it honestly. Yeah, should be doing.
Naomi Liu:They've been killing it honestly, yeah, and they've been like yeah that's awesome, I believe it?
Mike Rizzo:yeah, I believe it.
Michael Hartmann:Well, I know I think we I can't remember what, but I remember we were on one of these with a recent guest named me and you were saying some things about like what you've learned, like I think there's also value in having a perspective of understanding what that team, that kind of function, has to do.
Michael Hartmann:Yeah, to help you in whatever you've historically been doing in marketing ops, because I'm not surprised, right? I am a big believer that understanding that contact with it. I believe there's a lot of people in marketing and marketing ops who don't understand that and then dismiss it or think it's easy or whatever. And I think having that exposure is valuable and I love the idea that you're doing it the other way too right, you're helping them understand what's available to them so they can do better.
Naomi Liu:Yeah, and I think that's been a natural progression into like the sales enablement stuff too. That you know, when a new hire starts, a new sales manager starts, it's like okay, of course they get Salesforce access and then you know this is, you know how stuff works. But it's also just really training them on the nuances, on you know how do we set things up and like, what are all of these features mean? Of these features mean, who are the BDRs that support them? What are all the tools that are available to them? Because there is a lot of overlap with sales and marketing tools, right, even if it's like Marketo Marketo has a Marketo Sales Insight, right, that acts as a plugin that can sit on the salesperson's outlook and they can also look in Salesforce and see what they're doing. So there a lot of like natural overlap with training and because a lot I think people in marketing ops should really take a um, raise their hand right and be part of, like that onboarding process when a salesperson starts at the organization, right, because we often talk about like, oh, marketing and sales alignment, but what does that actually mean? Does it mean just like you're talking to them or like fitting in a call with them. But how about really like spending that one-on-one time and training them on the marketing tools that overlap with sales? I think that's so important. Um, I spend hours with new sales people that join on.
Naomi Liu:You know, here's linton sales navigator. This is your license. This is how you use it. This is what you how you connect it into our salesforce instance. This is the bidyard. This is marketo zones insight. This is how you've heard all together.
Mike Rizzo:Okay, let's touch base in four weeks and see how you're doing yeah yeah, I love that it's that kind of enablement stuff that like I love that you gave some of the concrete examples of like exactly what you're sort of referring to, because like it doesn't matter how much we sort of shout it out into the ether right when, like I say all the time, you know I think a marketing ops professional is best suited to grow into a rev ops role everybody pre-funnel here's, everybody post-funnel and conversion and renewal and so on and so forth, that you get to have a contextual conversation about enablement and the art of the possible in a way that, generally speaking, other operations or you know, players don't have full visibility into that and they don't have the context. You, we in marketing operations, like we're forced to understand that full journey. Uh, because that's like that's how we evaluate the success of our, of our efforts and implementations of products. Like people don't understand and so like, arguably everything you just described, naomi, is rev ops right, but like you're a marketing us professional and you know, and you're enabling a sales team and you're understanding the, the, the journey, and like what, how something moves through to the next stage, and you know, and then you're training people on that.
Mike Rizzo:Um, I know we're coming up on time. I feel like it, like we could do a sneak peek maybe just uh, of the of, of some of the data we have, of, like, the state of the driven. Do you want to look at it or no? Do we have time?
Michael Hartmann:Sure, I think we have a few minutes right.
Mike Rizzo:Okay, here we'll do. I'll screen share so for those that get to watch this on video, you can go look at the screen. I guess I'll try to zoom in a little so that we can actually see. This is our latest research the state of the data-driven decision making in GoToMarket. I just clicked through to a couple of the subsections because we have a whole table of content here that sort of outlines what we went into For those of you listening.
Mike Rizzo:We went into data maturity and strategy, data usage and tools, challenges in culture, people and organizational impact, some forward-looking trends. We got some crowdsource curiosity, like basically some information on data strategy. That's the beauty of AI and open text fields these days and then we actually get a little action plan for you on, like how to operationalize against some of this information. So in this section, data usage and tools I just stopped on this one because I thought it was an interesting enough nugget. The question was what are your organization's top three data priorities for the next 12 months? And the number one, of course, was data quality and hygiene. Number two was unifying data across platforms, so it's like data integration. And number three it actually shows up sort of down here is automating reporting in dashboards All right, so I'll pause here, just any quick thoughts, as this comes as a surprise to either of you.
Michael Hartmann:I know, not in general, no, like my, and my gut reaction, though, is like the whole automating, reporting and dashboards. I think I it wouldn't be near the top of my list because I'm especially with the dashboard word I just I think. I think actionable insights would be more the way I would think about it.
Mike Rizzo:Yeah, especially.
Michael Hartmann:AI enabled ones.
Mike Rizzo:Yeah, dashboards for me are like I don't know they're almost a four-letter word.
Michael Hartmann:I could not agree more.
Mike Rizzo:It doesn't tell a good story. I don't know. I don't know why we even have the dashboard, Like is it a set it and forget it kind of thing. It's just not good. I did meet a team that's really much better.
Naomi Liu:The worst is when you make them and then we're in salesforce and then you can, because they don't display the most up-to-date information right and you have to like manually hit refresh yeah, and then the worst is like when you spend all this time building it it's a priority and then you go back in like a month later and it hasn't been refreshed for like three and a half weeks. It's half exactly why, like.
Michael Hartmann:Thank you for wasting my time on there's an opportunity for sales enablement and training.
Mike Rizzo:Yeah, well, in section two, under data maturity and strategy, we found that most marketing organizations are still in the process of maturing digitally and we get into some of the nuance here we talk about. Like, we asked the question how would you rate your organization's digital maturity? And, uh, the bulk of them said that it's sort of intermediate. They're like operationalizing some data practices, but it's still pretty siloed. And then, uh, the next sort of two highest were around more like developing and advanced. So we're seeing this sort of um really like I don't know, introductory, intermediate segment take the lead, and then it's like a split between those that are just getting started and those that have some level of maturity and advanced capabilities, which is interesting.
Mike Rizzo:This is over 270 people that are answering this, so it's not like insignificant findings. Right like we're. We're surveying a pretty large landscape of folks here. Um, and then, just in the interest of time, I'll sort of rifle through a couple more for us. We saw that about one in five study participants have no dedicated analytics and reporting full-time employees, ftes which is pretty shocking.
Michael Hartmann:Yeah, nearly half of them had analytics and reporting as a high priority.
Mike Rizzo:Exactly right. Yeah, when you start to look at the correlation between the high priority and the lack of full-time employment, that starts to give you a signal for, well, where is a hiring effort going to be made? Or where do we need to contract, or what skills do I need to ramp up of my own to be able to support the organization? Um, that's how you can read between the line on some of this, some of this data, of this data, and then I'll just sort of the last one is some of the crowdsource curiosities peers on data strategy. Um, the question study participants would like, would most like, to ask their peers relates to data governance and data quality, and what we did is we sort of chunked all of these things out in terms of rankings of questions by the study participants themselves. So, for those of you that want to come in and have a conversation around data quality, governance and assurance, we would love for you to participate and contribute some of your thoughts.
Mike Rizzo:But there's questions about like what is your data governance strategy? And then, how did you implement a unified, multi-touch revenue attribution model? These are all top of mind for our community and if you go download this report, it is available. Like I said to our pro and pro plus members, if we do get it sponsored, we'll release it to some folks for free. Unfortunately, folks, the inner workings of building these is it's very, very expensive and we want to create high quality research, so these are first available to our members. But if you do go get this, there's lots, lots of really good information in here. We'd love for you to sort of join in on the conversation, but it was a nice transition because you, naomi, were talking so much about data and how it enables your ability to have a successful sales org, right? So, yeah, I figured it'd be fun to sort of highlight some of those things that's awesome well I know we all got a jam yeah it's always fun, so thanks y'all any
Mike Rizzo:last thoughts before we we head out no, just hit me with your ideas, folks. This community is for you, built by you.
Michael Hartmann:The podcast intro is it's powered by all the mo pros out there right same is true for everything else we're doing, so you know, let us know, we're here for you I always love when people you ask the question anything else that people know and then they go into something else, just like you did.
Mike Rizzo:Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, call you out on it. Yeah, it's all good, all good, all good I'm just gonna sit there and smile next time there you go.
Michael Hartmann:Just a pretty face. There you go. Oh, I forgot, just like I've been wearing my 2023 mops with palooza shirt lately too, so love it, I love it.
Mike Rizzo:I found a stack of marketing off stickers.
Naomi Liu:the other day I was like oh, nice yeah.
Mike Rizzo:Make sure you hand those out at the next local chapter meetup that you sort of quasi run, Naomi.
Naomi Liu:I missed them.
Michael Hartmann:There's one in the DFW area this morning and I just couldn't get to it. Oh bummer, that's all right.
Mike Rizzo:Excellent, I've got a bunch of Monopoly boards I'm giving away at MOPSA this year. For sure there's I don't know, I'm staring at a bunch of them. I got to end those out. But we're only going to be giving out shirts to the Magic Pass attendees this year because, um, we're just trying to be reasonable about costs and make sure we can host a good event. So we got one of the early ones, the quality of the, the, the speakers and the truth.
Michael Hartmann:Yeah, I don't know.
Mike Rizzo:Yeah, I mean especially if we end up having to pay 350 000 for food and food and beverage.
Michael Hartmann:Just kidding, we're not doing that.
Mike Rizzo:We're not doing that.
Michael Hartmann:Awesome. Well, again, thanks to you all. It's always fun. Thanks to our listeners for continuing to support us. As Mike said, we're always open to ideas, knowledge for the podcast topics, for guests you can reach out to any of us but also for feedback on stuff for the Riz community that you can take to Mike. I don't want to hear it.
Mike Rizzo:Let's take it to the Rizzo, that's right, all right, until next time.
Michael Hartmann:Bye, everybody, bye everyone, thank you. Bye.