Hello everybody. And welcome back to another episode of the finite podcast. Today. I'm going to be recording episode with Dominick only. Dominic's the head of marketing at a B to B tech company called ably. And we're going to be digging really into marketing automation. Dominic's got a lot of experience with marketing automation products, my whole different number of them working in all kinds of different BSB technology businesses. And we're really going to dive into, I guess, the implementation process. So this is an episode that's relevant for anyone that's kind of at the beginning of their marketing automation journey and thinking about how to go about implementing marketing automation as a project, everything from doing the initial analysis to building the business case, to then actually going about the project or anyone that might be interested in migrating from one system to another. Dominic's been through it a few times before and has all the war stories to go with it. So I'm hoping that this will be a really useful episode for anybody that's considering some marketing automation work over the coming months. I hope you enjoy
Speaker 2:The finite community and podcast, a kindly supported by nine, three X, the digital agency working exclusively with ambitious fast growth B2B technology companies visit nine three x.agency to find out about how they partner with marketing team and B2B technology companies to drive digital growth.
Speaker 1:Hi, Dominic, thanks for joining me today. Hey Alex, glad to be here. I'm looking forward to talking with you. I know we've got an interesting discussion lined up all around marketing automation, all of your experience implementing it, but as we always do, why don't we start with a bit of background and intro to yourself, how you got into marketing current role background, where those kinds of things for our listeners? Yeah, yeah. We'd love to, well, I've been in marketing for awhile and predominantly worked for a tech companies, uh, sense businesses. I, uh, initially, uh, started off working in, in paid advertising and, uh, became a specialist in, in PPC and social advertising. And I really, I really loved that. I really thrived in that and, um, I was quite a data driven, analytical marketeer. Um, and at the, at the time I worked for, uh, uh, not in tech, I actually worked for a big travel site, but I came to the stage where I thought, well, I really love my job, but I started to see that there is two roles in marketing. You either become that specialist or you have more of a generalist profile. And I just didn't see myself, you know, ending up in PPC for the rest of my marketing career. So I really tried to get into a, more of a generalist role having exposure across the entire marketing mix, exploring different channels. So I, um, I had the chance to work for a company where I bet just that like a lot of, uh, emailed marketing, quite rudimentary at the time. But, um, we, we try to, um, do light clever things and, and be a little bit more sophisticated. That's a few years back now, but looking at clever segmentation and personalization and be really creative and, and, um, I got a feel how technology often restricted me with what I wanted to achieve, but that was kind of quite an interesting position to be in. Where do you start, do you, uh, think of technology first and then go away and think what you can actually do with technology or do you come up with ideas first and then try to match the technology to that? So I think it was then when I really got a keen interest in, in automation, marketing platforms and CRMs, and I, um, strive to be a marketeer that can run Omni channel experiences. And I probably have to admit where I'm far from doing a good job, but, um, uh, so I think this is a vision and you should always strive to be a better marketeer. So, um, I previously worked for, um, stack overflow, worked for a big market research platform, a company called vision critical global, uh, Canadian based company. And more recently I started, uh, heading up the marketing team in a startup ably. We, um, provide real time API integrations, mainly to developers and the price and accountants. So I'm really exciting. And, and all my roles, although bigger companies and smaller companies, all these three, four roles included an element of marketing automation and looking at CRM. And I think I got quite good in understanding sort of the strategic side of it, but then actually also, uh, was part of, uh, implementations migrations of the systems. And I had a bit of a glimpse how, how big these projects and sometimes overwhelming they can be. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Makes sense. Um, and tell us a bit about the marketing team generally. Is it just yourself now at APL? Have you got other people working with you on the, on the marketing side?
Speaker 1:No. I mean the beauty of working for a startup it's it's, it tends to be quite broad, which is amazing, which is cool. It's also sometimes a bit of a risk because, um, you are, uh, diversify yourself a bit too much, but, um, I have the product marketing function underneath me. We have a complains marketeer then content, uh, but then also the, um, the SDR function. So the inside sales function, and I think this is a really, uh, I mean, a hot topic in marketing. Where does this function, uh, traditionally more on the sales leads, uh, having this in the marketing team is, is really, really interesting. So with that comes, um, a UX as well and a bit of access to a frontend developer resources. Never enough though.
Speaker 3:Yeah, that's always the way. So we're going to dig marketing automation,
Speaker 1:I guess we're calling this implementing marketing automation, I guess it's kind of hopefully the coming together of all of your experience implementing, I guess, a number of different marketing automation tools into a number of different businesses and some of the war stories you've got on the ups and downs and the learnings and the bits and the bad bits. I think almost like maybe 10 years ago, some of the discussions we're having your own around website projects. And there were some marketers that have been through lots of design development projects and they probably have a similar quirks in terms of planning, migrations and training and all the things that catch people out. And I guess my observation is always that technology is one side of things, but people and processes kind of the two most important bits. And it's very easy to click subscribe on HubSpot, but whether you're going to get the most out of it as a completely different question. So yeah, I'm really looking forward to talking through the detail with you. I guess we're gonna approach it in a, in a pretty sequential way and think about where people should start. And I guess a number of our listeners probably within the business they work for probably are using some form of marketing automation, whether or not they're using it as well as they could, or they'd like to be as a, as again, a different question. But, uh, and I guess some of the kind of earlier stage startups or scale ups are probably not quite there, but once and automation is almost after me on their radar. So I think there's, there's going to be things which are useful hopefully for everybody. But I guess that kind of leads to the first question, which is really where to begin. Yeah. And before we start, I think you're, you're hitting the nail on their heads with a, yeah, it's very easy to just get going with, uh, whatever it is. Markets are part of the HubSpot, but actually the big piece is internal communications. You know, how you actually sell this idea to get Mar tech Kamboj internally. I think that's, um, that's a big, big challenge for marketers. And, um, especially in, in, in smaller companies, in smaller startup companies, because ultimately it's a big investment, it's a big investment, uh, not monetary, but then also the amount of resources you actually pump into this project, it can be extremely overwhelming. And you know, when I started to become a bit more interested in automation, marketing automation, I did a lot of research and there's not really a playbook. There's not really like a, Hey here's best practice stuff. And if you implement this system, this is what you have to do, and this is how you roll out. And this is how you set up a scoring system and the lead nurture system. And there's really no money or because it's so extremely customized to the individual needs of that business. And I think this is a really nice segue into, Hey, you, as a marketeer, you actually have to understand how your organization works to be the best way to start is you just have to take and dedicate some time to understand what technology do you have in place today. How does that all work often in smaller companies, it's a little bit patched together with a lot of different systems. So my more recent experience, I think I counted up to about 16, 17 systems looking at how a lead goes through the entire system. It touches on so many different systems and I'm just thinking of GDPR implementations on now. So it's just understanding what have you got today and really understanding who owns the system, how are different data sets synced across into different systems? We often see quite a lot of fragmented speaker basis, but we have customer data in Launceston. We have product information in another one. So it's a really big exercise to actually just understand how, how your current ecosystem looks like. And once you have gained that understanding and insight, and depending on how big the company is and how many legacy systems you have, and this might be quite a big exercise in the first place, but the next step is really to map this out. And, uh, yes, we do have tools, digital tools to help you with that. But I sometimes revert back to good old post-its in a, in a, in a meeting room and, and really try to map out and visualize that lead flow. And what I mean by lead flow is where are the entry points on the websites? How contacts are being created in these systems, where do you have to lead generation forms the account signups? And after that, what happens next? So it's really for you to understand how does a contact go through the different systems, which integrations, what data sets are, are synced across into different systems. So that's, that's a really crucial bit of understanding you have to undergo in the first place
Speaker 3:Points. You're talking about anything from contact forms, but I guess gated content and email signups, and kind of any, any point on the side that might capture it.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And that, I mean, in more modern times, we also have a life chats, other ways, how we create data on a combi from many different ways. It may just be from an offline event, a dataset uploaded directly into a CRM. And what does that mean for the other systems, if it doesn't come through the website and just understanding where are the entry points and it may not always be the website. It may just be an offline part as well.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it makes sense. And so visualizing that, I guess, literally just any kind of design tool you could use to kind of put together a flow and a map.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, I'm a big fan of a drawer IO, which is a free extension from Google, but then you can also use a paid tool Jeffy, which is just brilliant, but, you know, pen and paper will do as well.
Speaker 3:Yep. Makes sense. And so I guess then it's, as I mentioned earlier, this is as much about the people of things as, as just about the technology side of things. Um, and you know, you mentioned at the start that you've got the kind of STR role underneath you. So it sounds like you've kind of by definition, got a degree of marketing and sales alignment, which everybody is, is after, but I guess you still need to consult pretty widely with not just marketing and their requirements and people that might have been in the business before you, and being involved in past decision making and other people in the C suite, but also sales functions and other functions kind of in and around you.
Speaker 1:And it's quite an interesting exercise. It may be a bit challenging when you're just starting a new business because you may not have all the, all these relationship with these people, but actually, maybe that's a good starting point to actually understand other people's jobs and responsibilities and what they're looking for and how they can be successful, how technology enables them as well. So, um, more recently I did this exercise internally and again, it's not really something you, uh, you think about that, right. You know, you think of, uh, Oh, well, it's probably sales and it's probably marketing and well, perhaps you have a customer success function, but it has wider impact. Um, so, um, an exercise will be that you dedicate some time with individual stakeholders to ask them, what do you need from a system? How do you currently work? What's not working, how could it be improved? And I'm doing this exercise. It ranged from a, an SDR and works obviously very, very differently and has different requirements all the way up to a, a C suite persona who was more interested in dashboards and reporting and pipeline velocity than we have, you know, partner and alliances teams. And they're, they're interested in, in complete different metrics and, and information from this, um, even product to developers who are not typically in marketing. There are a crucial stakeholders because, um, when we think about the voice of the customer and or customer insights, they will be very, very keen to understand a little bit more, what are customers saying? What are the common pain points, uh, in prospecting calls? So if, if you actually have a conversation, Hey, would that be beneficial if you had access to some of the top 10 questions, prospects ask in, in sales conversations. So, uh, suddenly that sparks a bit of excitement then in, in these, in these stakeholders are, you know, that's perhaps not something naturally a relationship with marketing, but that's obviously a valuable insight I get from, from the systems. And this is when I refer to having, uh, these datasets in fragmented databases where different stakeholders, we don't have one source of truth and it makes it extremely difficult to have that customer insight.
Speaker 3:That makes sense. I guess, a fascinating part of this for me is the business case side in terms of, it's very easy for you as a marketer to come in and realize that you need this as a system, you need marketing automation, you know, from past experiences required. What about when, I guess you need to take others that are not so familiar with requirements along on that journey, what does that look like? And I guess what are the tips for kind of putting together a business case that gets you through that process?
Speaker 1:And, and that's definitely something I, I personally experienced and, and I felt it was quite painful understanding that the decision makers are not always marketeers. My background is I consider myself, uh, quite a technical marketeer and sometimes, uh, I, I struggled to actually sell my vision, you know, freight position to why I'm good at I'm good at understanding like why I need it, you know, to, to be successful in my role. Um, I'm good in setting up a nurture stream and scoring, but, but, uh, the bigger vision is sometimes quite difficult to position, especially, um, the decision makers higher up and, and these could be in, uh, in coming from an ops department or finance. Uh, of course they look at such a project and see a big, big expense and not direct revenue coming in from these systems. So it's actually really important that you, um, work on this business case. And what I realized it's really powerful if from very early on, you have an exec executive sponsor for probably someone in the C suite, you know, whether this is the COO or a senior leader. And, um, through these, um, requirements gathering across different stakeholders, you can actually also get a lot of sponsors on board and the advocates, uh, advocates for, for this project. So I think what's important for these key stakeholders is to visualize what you currently do and what you, uh, could be doing with the right tech in place. And, um, I mean, the stuff that always worked is having that centralized source of truth, where you capture, and it's a bit of a buzzword, it's a bit cheesy, but you captured that boy's off the customer in one centralized system and every CMO CEO will see value in this, right? So it's, it's getting the message across, Hey, what if we do nothing? These are all the things we won't be able to do. Right.
Speaker 3:And within that, I guess I saw some numbers recently from Econsultancy, which I think common what it was, but I think it was like in the 60% that said marketing functions that didn't have insights into, I guess, certain, or they didn't have to find budgets, or they weren't privy to information around revenue targets. And for me, I just understand how a marketing function can, can do what they need to do, unless they have a degree of insight around some of those numbers that really matter, because ultimately to build that business case, you need to, to somebody saying kind of just work backwards from Avenue ultimately. Um, so I'm interested, like how much, how much does that play a part? And obviously it's hard to say, like, if we get HubSpot, we're going to make X amount more revenue, like it's straight forward, but have you been in previous roles? Have you had, do you feel like you've had access to enough data to kind of put those cases together?
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, it's a real struggle for market too, to have that centralized database and, and in smaller businesses, it's probably a bit easier because, uh, we, we talk about smaller volumes perhaps, and, you know, it's smaller teams and you can just go across to the sales person and say, Hey, you know, what were the last 10 conversations you had? And that's kind of probably the, the, the blockers and the spanners, uh, the decision makers throwing the works. Well, why do we need anything else? Because we'd get everything today, what we need, but then of course, we're not building their system for today. We're actually building something which gets us through the next two, three years. Right? So this is a bit of a, more of a longterm strategy. And I think I'm getting that push back in terms of your investment. I think you can nicely kind of like tweak this pivot to the message in having using that customer insights and also creating a more personalized and contextualized experience on the website and going through these systems and ultimately it's, it is about increasing customer experience. And that experience starts from the first touch point to like conversations to customer success person has,
Speaker 3:I guess we're jumping ahead a little bit potentially, but I'm interested in, you know, when, when these kinds of projects have been a success and they've batted in for six months a year, I guess usually it's the case that once you kinda projects are underway and they're in place that the pressure kind of gets removed, but you feel like there's a need to keep going back to the C suite and project sponsors and really demonstrating where you've made an impact. And I guess if they're always going to be looking at the right numbers and the numbers that matter, but I guess there's a sense of almost like a sense of closure by saying, like, you know, thank you for sponsoring this project. This is the impact it's making.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Sometimes you can wait for the Pankey a long time, but, uh, well, I, what I enjoy doing is, uh, using the initial stakeholders or sponsors and because they suddenly have a bit more of an interest in collaborating with marketing because they get truly valuable insights and then insights enables them to do something meaningful. And these meaningful projects, we all end up in a presentation in an all hands in front of the entire company. And then I'll make sure that we have a little note, Hey, you know, sponsored by marketing. So it all comes back to, um, you know, how we then use the data or, uh, how we increased being a bit more sophisticated with our marketing tactics. So now I think indirectly, uh, that, that is a nice way of portraying the value of these projects. Yeah,
Speaker 3:Definitely. And I guess there's always going to be, again, coming back to people in process, and we'll talk a bit more about training and all the things that have to happen once, once a new system, like this comes play, but there's always going to be a serious amount of time and energy that goes into implementing a project like this. And it's going to need web developers potentially to hook things up to the website, and it's going to need potentially CRM experts to kind of tweak how all the data flows between different systems. And I was the marketing and sales team. We're going to have to do a fair bit of work. So is that something that you need, you feel you need to focus on in the, in the business case, in terms of saying, you know, this is, I guess, kind of hard to put a number on it cost wise, but you know, this is the amount of time that needs to go into this project over the next, however many months.
Speaker 1:It is really not a pro a project marketing can own themselves. It is a collaboration. And I mean, it has a massive impact on how the business operates and in terms of resources, uh, I think being very, very clear from early on what the requirements are from the marketing department towards other stakeholders. And, um, yeah, I mean, you, you say it, right, like, uh, but you need access to more resources in front end development because there will be some tweaks on the website or actually setting up the whole firing up the system, some backend tweaks and a lot of the, um, customer information, regardless what CRM you use or whether you have a customized product system. We also need to think of API integrations between these different systems and, and some of the off the shelf automation systems do these, do these really well. And they are really open to communicate with the third party systems, but that's usually not the skill set of a market here. So you do rely on, on some engineering support. So that's definitely something you have to do from very early on portray which resources and how much you actually.
Speaker 3:Yeah. And then that leads on to the cost of, I guess, these platforms themselves and, and, you know, marketing automation products are not cheap and there's a cost associated with, with all of them. And I know that over the years, we've worked with HubSpot and Pardot and Marketo and Eloqua, and they probably all got more or less, I'll go up in cost in that order. I'm not sure how Marketo and a local compare, but what's the kind of process there. And, um, obviously that's a pretty, a pretty key part to the business case overall, but I assume you probably, um, as you've moved companies, you probably got some contacts at HubSpot. He can keep going back to and, and picking up the conversation with potential. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, they probably know they keep a keen eye they're quite interested in when you move companies. Oh, you know?
Speaker 3:Yeah. There's no escaping HubSpot generally. Right. I mean, they're doing it where everyone is.
Speaker 1:So I think what's quite scary is you have to cost off the system itself. Right. But some of the invisible costs is, Hey, you bring a lot of disruption to the business. You need a project owner, but that this is a person within the marketing team or, um, someone else. Right. But, um, at this stage, you have to decide whether the implementation or migration of these systems can be done internally or, um, does it cause too much disruption or even skills, you know, you may not have the internal skills of, do you need an agency that helps you rest in migration? There are some accredited agencies, for example, on the HubSpot side rights, they work with partner agencies, but then it's even like, um, it's silly, really annoying tasks. And mine example is translating a country drop down of 250 countries into 10 languages. Seems like really simple about it. It unknowingly takes like four hours to do something like that. Right? So you always need a bit of, you know, like someone at hands, you can just pass on these, um, these time consuming, easy tasks where you, you don't necessarily want to pay an expensive contractor to do that. Right. So, uh, again, going back to the resources, you may want to have someone who can deal with that, but, um, pricing is it's actually dangerous. I, I find when you actually, uh, reach out to the vendors after, you know, you get going off with your business case, uh, you start to have some conversations with, uh, whatever HubSpot markets are, part of you, name it, but is a difficulties how much you actually paid today versus how much you pay into for years. And these automation platforms are notoriously bad in displaying how much you will pay based on growth of your database. So it's actually going into these sales conversations with the account executives, from these vendors, you have to be very, very clear and say, give me, give me a two free years plan, how much I'm going to pay based on these factors. So, um, the actual, well, I have to go back to HubSpot where they have a nice looking pricing page, but you have a little lever based on the size of your contact database, and you can have a look into your CRM. And how many, how many contacts do you have today if you have 10 farmers and, okay, great. What is your forecast to, how are you going to scale or the next few years, and make sure that you understand how much you would actually pay for these systems when your contact records triple, quadruple. And these are really scary costs to look at. And again, you sometimes don't really take this into account. There is, of course also onboarding fees, make sure that you're aware of the vendor is placing a fee on just dedicating you some of their resources, you know, a customer success manager. Do you know how much that is going to be? I think when we talk about lead flow earlier, I think it's also extremely important because a lot of these systems are priced based on database volume. So you actually need to have, and think about that data, our database strategy, database hygiene. Do you perch data? Is it a good point to audit the amount of records you have? You know, is it necessary that you upload everything into an automation platform? You basically just pay for that. Right? So I think this is also something you have to come see that
Speaker 3:Yeah. And timeline an interesting side of it. And that when you speak to the HubSpot, they'll tell you that they can onboard you. And I don't know, a week, two weeks they'll have someone there to help. And within a few clicks, you'll be up and running and nice and easy. But the reality is that as we've talked about this as a potentially a huge project, spanning almost all parts of the business, in some cases, what have your experience has been of timelines? Banner name
Speaker 1:Brutal, brutal. My last company, like the sea of the most senior marketing, I went to the board and said, Oh, we need a new system. We actually migrated away from Marquette. So, and implement a paradox. So he basically said into a, into this round that we'll be migrating the system within three weeks. And, um, when he told me that I was just like, uh, because, um, I think switching on the systems, it's done very, very quickly. It can't be done, you know, fairly efficiently, but there's so much more to this, right? I mean, you know what, ultimately it took us, I think about six months in my previous company, because it's not just about the system. It's, it's all that foundational work of, Hey, we have a new system in place. Um, the current lead flow, can it actually be replicated within that system. And, um, some of these automation systems are extremely customizable. So you can actually really have a detailed custom lead flow and you can, you can, the system will cater for that. And, uh, you know, I'm thinking of a Marketo instance where they do this really, really well, but often, uh, you have a bit of, um, a system you have to squeeze into the, into the existing ecosystem. And especially if you migrate away, if it's not your first project, but you migrate systems, uh, you, you just can't continue working how you previously did it because there are different quirks, there's different features. And I mean, one more story is part of it has this weird thing where you have limited automation rules, whereas in Marketo, that was unlimited. So we were going in and because we felt rushed, we committed to three weeks, a migration implementation, although that was insane. But so we were busy recreating that lead flow. And, um, suddenly we can be XR still all of our automation rules. And it was one of these when we talked about pricing, be very clear what you need and you have to ask these sales guys, okay. You know, where does, does the price go up? What is included? What is an add on, he ended up spending another free thousand dollars by just having additional 50 automation rules. I mean, it's, and it just blocks you, right? I mean, it's all stuff you didn't really calculate. And I mean, it's these things you take away from here, and then we can talk in a podcast about it, but then it's, it's a painful, um, experience, um, stack overflow of we, um, I was very early on implementing HubSpot, I think week two, they had an, I came on board, so it wasn't very exciting time to build all of this out. We realized that there were absolutely hubs. HubSpot is really good giving, charging you for add-ons. For example, we didn't have a reporting add on and they have like a premium feature for advertising. And, uh, everyone was talking about staff. We can do these, these cool things. We have hot spots. And then I had to basically go back to, uh, to the senior stakeholders and say, yeah, we can do this, but it comes out the price because the license you guys purchase doesn't actually include these things in the last company we had, we were on the standard HubSpot license, but we talked about how we want to personalize the vet experience and guess what that's actually only possible on the enterprise package. So that, that is just a, you're not making friends with the CFO. If you have to go back off to two weeks and say, Hey, y'all, I need a little bit more cash for this.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah. It's hard. It's just a whole list of questions you've got to ask in advance. Right. Because these things just kind of come out of the woodwork as you're going, and it's a, it's tough. And I think it's, yeah, I kind of personally think it could be made a lot clearer by the companies, the marketing automation tools themselves, and they could do a lot more to, to aid that process. But maybe they're moving that way. I know that as you say, it has the little slider that you can kind of drag up and down, but that's only one part of the picture.
Speaker 1:Um, the way how I did it, I listed all the requirements in a, in a spreadsheet and I've got the three, four vendors at the top and I have to put a lot of research into this. Okay. Can I do this with this system? Yes. You know, maybe I need to validate this for an account executive, but it's these little things that are extremely annoying time consuming, but, but EPAs are crucial.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah. So let's talk about training. Cause I think it's obviously a key part to making sure that these systems, by then it's training something that you obviously HubSpot Scott and this kind of online material and courses. And I think that's one area that actually does quite well in terms of its online kind of certifications and training. And none of them are sure of, of documentation. Is this something that you start the right people kind of doing the learning, even whilst you're still kind of in the planning phase and I guess, ideally you don't want to launch a system and then everyone starts training. It's kind of like a workstream master app and alongside the work.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's, it's very important that you think of training as you actually well, prior to the migration, right? So I'm thinking of that lead flow. You would, by now have probably optimized. It changed sometimes you're forced to change with different, you know, features from platforms. Uh, so it's not going to happen overnight. And adoption is, is a process that that'll take weeks, especially for, um, a sales department that is used to work in a certain way. Not always enjoying working with these systems. I heard a lot of salespeople complaining about Salesforce and it's too admin heavy. And then you just come in with new processes and new training. So again, this is something you have to see very early on and, and have these sessions repetitively. So training videos, work group sessions, but then it's also a, I hate to say a bit of micromanagement initially to force the change if necessary. I mean, some of these systems are really great because you can, you can restrict the systems, you can restrict the data and Pines. So I'm probably thinking more of a CRM solution where you kind of force adoption and by just have mandatory fields or things like that. Yeah. So a very, very crucial adoption at the least what you want is to have a brand new system and, and no one wants to use it, right, because it's too clunky complicated, no one understands it. Right. That's also a big part of having a successful migration.
Speaker 3:Absolutely. And then I guess finally that better of getting everybody working side by side and the shared visibility of all of the numbers that matter. And we talked a bit about sales and marketing alignment and, you know, sales are saying to marketing, where am I leads and marketing a st sounds like what's the quality of that lead. And I guess when you're sat side by side, as you said, that's quite easy to do, but I guess a lot of the point of these platforms and marketing automation products is that it should give everybody more shad visibility and make reporting easier across the whole business. Has that been your experience?
Speaker 1:I mean, there's a lot of good examples. If I'm honest with you, there's a lot of amazing examples where I found myself sitting in a meeting room where sales and that there was an engaging discussion and challenging for marketing, but talking about a lead scoring threshold. And it's those conversations, which, I mean, they're not always nice to have, but these are the discussions which I consider this project to be successful because it really forces you to sit in my meeting room. And if you get to that point where a sales is actively engaged and contributes towards refining and improving the system, I mean, that's, that's a really powerful statement and engage sales team with marketing, right? Same on the customer success side. I would, I would argue why we did a lot of customer marketing activities. And I think that was obviously all trickling down into the individual CS reps, whether it was just having better data, but to documented data hygiene. And I think, um, it's painful in the beginning, but ultimately everyone read benefits from it. Right. But it's reporting C-suites or just tactically a CS going into a QBR session and just looking back, okay, what was the last conversation I had with this person, if this key account, you know, what's going on within the account with contacts and
Speaker 3:Making that data actionable and insightful. So I think these are the really nice examples. Sorry. Yeah, definitely. I think that's the key, there's just so much non-actionable data out there that you can just get lost in. And I know I'm the same way. So yeah, I lost in a Google analytics account for days, but when I actually asked myself what I'm going to do with some of the insights and that's again a different question. So yeah, I definitely agree with that. So that's been a really good overview. I think. I mean, I always love recording these episodes cause I just think we, when we dive deep into something, it's a really nice way of giving people that wherever they are on the journey, whether they're already using something or whether they're not to migrate to a different platform, but some nice clear tips and things they can take away and actually reflect on and think about, hopefully not have to go through the same war stories that you've been through peer review and support. So thank you for sharing your time. It's been really, really, really getting some, having me. Yeah. Pleasure. Thank you very much, Alex. Thanks Tommy.
Speaker 2:Thanks for listening. We're super busy at finite building the best community possible for marketers working in the B2B technology sector to connect, share, and learn. Along with our podcast. We host a series of events here in London, so make sure you had to finite.community to subscribe and keep up to date with upcoming events.