Audio === [00:00:00] ​ [00:00:00] Phil: What's up everyone today. We have the pleasure of sitting down with Jared DeLuca, director of operations at app queues,~ Jared started his career with a few internships in PR before joining market research firms. Um, sorry, I'll say that again. ~ [00:00:33] About Jared --- [00:00:33] Phil: Jared started his career with a few internships in PR before joining a market research firm. That firm was later acquired by UK based marketing data and analytics company, where he worked his way up to marketing manager. He then had a brief detour from SAS at Keurig Dr. Pepper in IOT marketing automation and connected panel ops. And finally, Jared landed at app use first in demand then senior MarTech and ops manager. [00:00:57] Today, Jared has been promoted to director [00:01:00] of operations at AppCuse. Jared super pumped to chat today. Really appreciate your time. [00:01:04] Jared: Likewise. Yeah. Thanks for having me. [00:01:06] Moving from Demand Gen to Front-End Development --- [00:01:06] ​ [00:01:06] Phil: [00:02:00] I'd love to start by unpacking that career transition from demand gen to operations and front end development. I think the front end part of it is a bit kind of unique, not super common. [00:02:58] I think a lot of folks go [00:03:00] from demand gen to ops cause you're. Especially in startups, like doing a bunch of everything, but I feel like the front end stuff, the engineering part of it is, is a bit unique. Um, was this kind of an unplanned fortunate move for you or did you like thoughtfully pursue this? [00:03:14] Jared: A little of both. So it was kind of, um, we had a need on the team, like everything else, you know, kind of like my transition from demand to ops in the first place, uh, was like, well, our ops person left, uh, who's going to pick that up. Probably the guy who relies on it the most, uh, demand guy. And, uh, so I was like, all right, yeah, why not? [00:03:32] And then, uh, similarly with front end stuff, it was like, all right, well, budgets are a little tighter. We don't have as much for contractors at the time, a couple of years back. And so it was like. I bet I could do some of that stuff. Like I was kind of interested in, um, some light coding anyway. I'd done a lot of HTML, CSS, uh, over the years, just like with email or landing pages. [00:03:51] And, um, I was like making something useful with JavaScript would probably be the next logical step. And so, uh, AppCue supported me on that one. Uh, and [00:04:00] they were like, yeah, go for it. Uh, if we can have somebody in house do that even better. Um, cause you know, like you said, marketing teams don't usually have a developer. [00:04:07] If they do, it's at a much larger company. Um, it was something that I was like. All right, let's, let's do it. I'm interested. Uh, and it's fun for me. Like we very recently, uh, had like a random project that I just decided to do in front of the TV one night. It was like our content person had, uh, had an idea and was like, wow, wouldn't it be cool if we had a lead gen magnet that did this? [00:04:28] And I was like, I bet I could make that in like an hour. Uh, and sure enough, that made something that was like at least a prototype in like an hour, and we might put it on the website soon. I don't know. But yeah. [00:04:39] How AI Tools Are Shaping HTML and CSS Learning --- [00:04:39] Phil: you think that folks who want to pick up a bit more HTML and CSS have it easier today because of chat GPT and all these AI tools than maybe you and I did, uh, coming up and into the space without, uh, some of those resources. [00:04:54] Jared: Absolutely. Yeah. Uh, it's definitely like, I, you know, I see a lot of articles and [00:05:00] podcasts and stuff about, you know, the junior developer going away as like a, a thing and like, It's kind of hard to argue, like if you have the, if you have the desire and the, and the wherewithal to know how, like, you still have to know what to ask for. [00:05:12] And I think that's the important part. Um, like everyone who tells me, you know, ChatGPT is replacing developers. I'm like, not really. Like you need someone who understands where to put that HTML and CSS. Like how to, you know, Ask for the right things or it's super helpful if you know, like specific, you know, styling and things like that, that you can ask for, uh, but it saves a ton of time in terms of the, you know, just the keystrokes. [00:05:34] Uh, that's, that's been my biggest takeaway for it so far is like, Oh, I can, if I know what I want, I can have chat GPT helped me out with it. And I can do that same coding that would have taken me two hours and probably 15 minutes. [00:05:45] Phil: Yeah. [00:05:45] Jared: Um, yeah. [00:05:46] Phil: love it. Especially for like QA code, like just reviewing it or. When you're pressing publish and it's just not working and it's been 20 minutes trying to like troubleshoot it and figure it out. I'll just paste it in chat [00:06:00] and say like, this is broken. It's not working. What's wrong with this? And it's never like a hundred percent right all the time. [00:06:07] Sometimes it takes a couple of prompts, but eventually like nine times out of 10, it usually finds. The issue with the code and especially I use it a lot for, um, like template language, uh, to personalize emails, uh, like oftentimes liquid or handlebars. This is like, so finicky with like one little thing, like capitalization inside of the, the, the code that you're using. [00:06:29] So yeah, I use it a lot for that. [00:06:31] Jared: Yep. You know, you missed a comma somewhere. [00:06:34] Phil: Yeah. [00:06:34] Jared: that should have been in a certain place or whatever. Yep. That's what I use it for all the time. [00:06:39] Phil: Yeah, [00:06:40] Jared: Yep. [00:06:40] Why Developers Avoid Marketing in Software Startups --- [00:06:40] Phil: I think the perception of marketing ops is a bit more of a technical marketer when you compare like everyone on the marketing team. But I think we're still a generalist in a certain sense. But your front end shops, I think, definitely qualify you as someone. A bit more on the extreme spectrum of, of technical practitioners [00:07:00] who also understand marketing, uh, in my opinion, this makes you a bit of a unicorn in the space and most developers for me and my experience are kind of allergic to marketing. [00:07:10] Like they don't find it interesting if they're working on the marketing team or in some type of capacity, it's kind of a tour of duty and they're just like moving on to the next thing pretty quickly. Why do you think that is? Like, why do you engineers prefer working on product than on marketing and helping marketers who are bringing in users for the product? [00:07:30] Like we don't have a product without the marketing team. Why are engineers allergic to marketing? Right. [00:07:46] Jared: the marketing side of things? And I don't know. [00:07:49] I think it's, uh, at least in my experience, mostly software startups, uh, like developers aren't necessarily allergic to marketing. They just don't, Uh, they just [00:08:00] don't even think about it. Like it's less of a, like, it's less of a consideration and more, uh, it's like their, their thing is, is building and coding. [00:08:09] Uh, and if you can take that and then do something with it, like get customers or, um, you know, whatever that might be, like, it's not, it doesn't even cross their mind in a lot of cases, like as opposed to a product team or someone like that, who's kind of also in charge of bridging that gap a bit of like, all right, well, we need to find a market fit for it. [00:08:27] It's more like a lot of the developers I know are like, give me requirements and I will build the thing. Uh, and it's, it's less than about the next step down. And it is super valuable every time that I've got the opportunity to work. Um, in app cases, a lot of engineers that are like this, um, that do a great job of, of bridging that gap of saying like, well, what is the user experience going to be like, and like, how are we going to get people to use this? [00:08:49] Like asking those really good questions. Um, And I think it's common, common, um, like the smaller you are as a company, uh, for sure of like people who are thinking a little more end to end, uh, about [00:09:00] things, but, uh, the bigger you go, like when I worked at Keurig for a bit, there's like, Oh no, these are very much engineers of you, you asked for when you get what you asked for, uh, very specific. Um, so yeah, I think it's less, less about allergic and more like, uh, they, it's just, they don't have the time or bandwidth or interest to even think about what the next step is. It's like, I made a thing, I have to make another thing. [00:09:24] Phil: Hmm. [00:09:25] Jared: And I'm like, fair enough. [00:09:28] How Responsive Support Transforms Marketing Ops --- [00:09:28] Phil: As a marketing ops, folks, we like to think that we can master a certain tool, right? Like look at all the tools across our stack. Oftentimes. We're admins and we're responsible for like a good handful of them. And, um, when like issues come up, problems, bugs, whatever, troubleshooting issues by ourselves, reality is like some of these tools are so complex and powerful that sometimes you just need to lean on the support teams and like. [00:09:56] Chad, you feel a little bit on the side too, but like sometimes it's a [00:10:00] product issue. It's not, maybe not like the liquid code or the handlebar codes. Um, but like I find that the support team from our tech vendors isn't always an area that they're investing in to kind of the fullest degree. Um, I know app cues is a revenue hero, customer. [00:10:16] The sponsor of the show, and one thing that really attracted me when I discovered the tool and got to know the team was how innovated they are in the product, but also on the support side, like they offer 24, 5 slack next support. It's just like unheard of in the SAS world these days, like being able to jump on slack and connect with my CSM or a group of people that can answer my question right away. [00:10:42] I came up in the world of Marketo where I was just like waiting like a week and a half before I would ever get an answer from someone. And it was never useful. I was always wasting my time with their support team. Walk us through like how that's been game changing for, for app cues and then leveraging their, uh, [00:11:00] their 24, five SlackConnect support. [00:11:02] Jared: Yeah, so it's actually part of what drew me to Revenue Hero in the first place. We were using one of their competitors before that and, uh, and it was exactly like you described. Sometimes it'd take, you know, 24, 48 hours before I'm getting a response. The response is something I already tried, so I have to give them more context and try to understand, okay, what's going on here? [00:11:20] And when I started talking to the Revenue Hero team, They're like, Oh, yeah, and we have, uh, we'll fit right into your slack organization and you can ping us whenever you need for any issue, how small and, you know, in practice, uh, like we have a lot of, uh, we're lucky to have a lot of vendors that we do have shared slack channels with, um, which is great. [00:11:40] Yeah. Uh, and part of, you know, what we work with a lot of other small startups, uh, and so it's like. It's super nice to have that communication, but I still don't expect the level of responsiveness that revenue here is like really brought to the game like I haven't had that many issues. Thankfully, like their product also works great, but like [00:12:00] anytime that I have, it's. [00:12:01] Uh, where I'm, I'm like, Hey, uh, can someone explain to me why this person got this demo request? Like, I don't really understand. Um, I've looked at the logs and I can't really figure it out. And they're within five minutes. Somebody's like, Oh, well, you missed this thing. I'm like, ah, of course. Thank you. Uh, my bad. [00:12:20] But yeah, it's, it's so, so incredibly helpful. And like, Yeah. That alone is worth, was worth the switch for us just to have that level of support. Uh, because you know, demo demo requests for a startup like app user or a lot of companies is like, that's the lifeblood of the business, right? Like we have a free trial and the free trial is great. [00:12:38] And that's where the vast majority of our leads come through. But anytime we can get a demo request instead, that's, that's instant pipeline. Um, and it's like, You know, if something breaks with that, that's mission critical. Got to fix it yesterday. Uh, and, and revenue hero is super, uh, supportive and, and helping us on, on do all of that stuff. [00:12:58] Phil: Really cool. Yeah. I don't want to make the full episode [00:13:00] about Revin here, [00:13:00] Leveraging Lead-to-Account Matching in Revenue Ops --- [00:13:00] Phil: but I'm curious to ask you, um, like, uh, the, one of the most common features I'm guessing is like the lead to account matching. And I'd love to hear, um, how you guys are using that. Like, are you matching existing customers to CSMs when, uh, new folks are coming in? [00:13:17] Are you matching existing prospects to accounts that sales is already working on? And like, walk us through how you're leveraging that feature. [00:13:25] Jared: Yeah, so we haven't really started with the CSM use case yet. I could definitely imagine a world where we do that, um, probably in the not too distant future, but, uh, at the moment it's all, uh, prospect based stuff. And that's been huge for us. Like with the, like I said, we were using a competitor before and they also had some account matching, but it wasn't at the level of like the fuzzy account matching the revenue here it does. [00:13:45] And I think makes them particularly unique. Um, like, like I also mentioned, we have a free trial. And so We get hundreds of people signing up for the free trial every week, uh, and one of our biggest pushes a call to action. Once you're in the trial is why don't [00:14:00] you try talking to a salesperson? Uh, they can, they can help you with this. [00:14:04] Um, and so having that account, like they are already assigned to somebody, whether they know it or not, within five, 10 minutes of signing up for a trial. Um, they have a dedicated account executive and it's like, if we can match them to somebody right away, great. Thank you. Uh, if they're signing up with, uh, like a domain that's not exactly the same domain or if they're signing up with a personal email, but we can somehow do some matching, um, in HubSpot and Salesforce, we use a little of both, um, to do that matching on the person to get that, to get that right and get them connected to the right AE. [00:14:36] That's, that's huge. Um, so we, we definitely rely on that a lot. And then it's, otherwise our territories are super simple. So it's like, first step is account matching. If this person is owned or this account is owned, great. Uh, if not, it's headcount based. Like, what are you, uh, do you have more than 500 employees or, or less? [00:14:55] Uh, and you fall into a couple of buckets based on that, but it's, it's nice and easy.[00:15:00] [00:15:00] Phil: Very cool. I feel like, you know, calendar booking tools, uh, and like demo form request. It's usually thought of as like just on the site and like homepage and pricing page. And that's where folks kind of like pigeonhole that, that, that, those use cases. Right. But you just walk through a couple of other ones where. [00:15:19] No, maybe you're a product led company, a bit more like app uses, and you're pushing folks to a free trials and option, like actually see what the product is, get your hands on it before you jump into a demo and have to chat with the salesperson. But once people become like product qualified leads or they're doing something in the product, then you can surface. [00:15:36] Demo forms. And there's also the use case of like existing customers who are maybe in a lower pricing tier who are getting close to like their limits or something like that. And you can surface like the option of chatting, um, with a, with a rep there. [00:15:51] Seamlessly Integrating Demo Bookings Within the Product --- [00:15:51] Phil: So talk to us about like how app queues has integrated. Revenue hero for app use customers. And like, are you leveraging that? Like [00:16:00] booking, uh, like showing those bookings basically, uh, like revenue here, a scheduler for specific segment of users or events when they do something in the product, are you making use of that today? Or is it high, high on your, your priority list? [00:16:11] Just curious. [00:16:12] Jared: Yeah, so it's something I'm working on now actually, uh, and, and by the time this episode comes out, I'm sure it'll probably be live. [00:16:18] Phil: Nice. [00:16:19] Jared: But, um, we, uh, we've got, uh, something that, uh, the RevenueHero team actually helped, helped us out with a lot. Um, because it was something that was a big challenge for us in, uh, in AppCuse, AppCuse content. [00:16:29] You can imagine. We are users of our own product, uh, and we're, you know, helping people do onboarding and things like that. We use that in our free trial. Uh, and something that you can't do in app queues today is, uh, have JavaScript in, in an app queues flow. And so that's kind of always prevented us from being able to present, um, things like, uh, like calendar bookings and things like that without using an iframe. [00:16:52] You can use an iframe and get around it in a lot of cases, but, um, Sometimes it, sometimes that's finicky and doesn't look right, [00:16:58] or, you know, you know, [00:17:00] You know, the struggles of iframes, uh, not to get too technical, but, um, the, uh, the nice thing about revenue here was they worked really hard on, on like building a nice proof of concept for us and said, Oh, have you just tried doing this, uh, to embed that calendar, uh, right there? [00:17:16] And I said, no, I hadn't, but a great idea. Thank you. I'm like super proactive about it. Um, and then I wrote up a, a nice doc on, on their docs about it. And we published something similar on our site. Uh, with like, Oh, you can do this now. Um, but we, uh, we, we don't use it today. Uh, like I said, working on it now, and it's something that we kind of surface in, um, like we have some persistent, uh, patterns in, in app queues, like checklists. [00:17:42] Um, so, you know, part of our free trial checklist is, uh, at the very end, why don't you book a demo with a sales rep? Uh, and, uh, what, like, it'll be a lot more seamless now, instead of sending them back out to the marketing website for a form, uh, Um, which is probably already auto filled, but you know, still an extra couple of clicks that they wouldn't have to [00:18:00] do if they were, could do it right in the product. [00:18:01] Um, and same for like, if they do specific actions, like you mentioned, hitting a limit or, uh, you know, interested in some kind of enterprise feature. It'd be much, much faster just to have them book directly, uh, in the product and that's, uh, coming very soon. [00:18:16] Navigating Multiple CRMs and Data Pipelines --- [00:18:16] Phil: So you mentioned that Salesforce and HubSpot, there are two CRMs that, that you guys are using. And, um, you also mentioned before we hit record that you're connecting all of those, um, Martech tools in your stack, as well as those two CRMs to the data warehouse. Um, Did you join app queues when they already had a data warehouse? [00:18:37] Was that part of your, um, onboarding process? Like this transition to the modern data stack, walk us through like that, that journey there and maybe talk about, um, like the challenges of using multiple CRMs and how that impacts data pipelines and pushing that back and forth to the warehouse. They're super curious. [00:18:54] Jared: Yeah, absolutely. So when I first joined Accuse, uh, and I'm sure an engineer would probably yell at me for this, [00:19:00] but, uh, we were using like Firebase for everything. Uh, and so I was like, all right, well, great. Well, like we can pull that out of Firebase, but it's going to be a pain. Um, and, and over the, you know, five and a half years that I've been here now, uh, we have transitioned to having like. [00:19:14] A real data warehouse. We use snowflake and all like the bits and bobs that go with that of getting those in the right places. Similarly, we were using HubSpot exclusively when I joined, which is great HubSpot CRM HubSpot for marketing. Everybody's happy. We brought on Salesforce a few years later, you know, we're growing business and we're trying to do some more advanced things with our sales team that we couldn't necessarily support as easily with HubSpot at the time. It was kind of a natural progression, but then it was the challenge of, all right, well, we, we have Salesforce now, uh, what do we, how do you want that to work with HubSpot and everything else? And I said, Oh, great. Let's, uh, let's figure that one out as we go. And, uh, so. Since then, uh, you, you and I were talking about a little bit before we started recording, um, of [00:20:00] like, all right, well, now the data lives in, in like three or four different places and it's all the same data, uh, and we have to make sure that it's all the same in all the same places. Um, but in now all these other extra places. And so using, uh, we still use HubSpot for marketing automation. It's our first, uh, the first thing that most people are going to interact with, with app queues is like. Filling out a HubSpot form somewhere on a website. Um, but then eventually Salesforce is what the sales team uses now exclusively a hundred percent. [00:20:26] And so making sure that all of those things and all of those pipes are connected correctly, making sure that, you know, one system isn't overriding the other one when it shouldn't be. Uh, all that kind of fun stuff. Um, that's been the, the, uh, the struggle and joy of the last couple of years. And I think we've got it down pretty well at this point, but, um, yeah, figuring out how do we get stuff from Snowflake? [00:20:48] Thankfully, I've got a great partner on the business intelligence side that, um, Has done a ton of integration where a lot of custom, a lot of custom SQL queries and, uh, [00:21:00] in code Python that does a lot of the heavy lifting in terms of, um, getting that stuff out of Snowflake into the places where I need it. [00:21:06] Um, uh, and then anything that's like a front end and integration that I can do, um, like HubSpot, Salesforce, all that. It's like a, yeah, it's a nice. Combo of, uh, a little of everything, um, doing, doing all the orchestrating and, uh, hopefully we end up in a place where nobody notices. Right. Um, [00:21:24] like if you're, if, if you're good at marketing ops and like, nobody should notice or have any questions about why is that different than this? [00:21:31] Phil: Yeah. Yeah. It's the good and bad parts of marketing ops. Like, uh, when, when aren't broken, nobody screams, but when things are working well, no one's complimenting you or thanking you for your hardware. Cause it's in the background. Nobody knows. Right. [00:21:45] Jared: Yep. Oh, it just works. Perfect. That's what I want. Yep. [00:21:52] Phil: like I've done my job today, but yeah. [00:21:54] Balancing Snowflake and Segment in a Growing Tech Stack --- [00:21:54] Phil: Curious to ask you if you, uh, like internally, when you guys went the snowflake route, [00:22:00] did you consider like a CDP platform CDP instead of going snowflake? Are you still kind of doing the both of them? You just mentioned like having to work with, uh, an internal BI specialist. [00:22:13] Um, like my, my other sponsor on this show of brain is just thinking like reverse CTL. Did you guys evaluate like potential tools to just automate some of that? Like no code segmentation, audience building, like census does just curious, like a, on that journey there. [00:22:28] Jared: Yeah, so, uh, well, we, uh, we also use segment, uh, and so, yeah, we do have, again, a lot of redundancy in a lot of places, uh, for various reasons. Snowflake is, um, you know, much more about the history for us. [00:22:42] So [00:22:42] Phil: Okay. [00:22:43] Jared: Apcuse is, uh, generating, uh, I don't know, like, we have tracked some crazy billions and billions of data points at this point, um, with people using the product, people serving data to their customers, um, serving experiences, right? [00:22:58] So, like [00:23:00] Exactly the kind of thing that Snowflake is built for, right? Um, serving that kind of massive, uh, massive data in the background and being able to get it relatively quickly or easily. Um, and Segment we're using still for a lot of, like, real time stuff. So we use Segment for, um, What almost it's like a tag manager in some ways, um, for in the product. [00:23:20] So, um, when we're having a HubSpot or whatever, whatever it is, we have a lot of those things installed via segment inside app queues. Um, So it's more, more doing that part of it, doing the processing and then sorting to go to the various places like Snowflake and, uh, wherever else there's, you know, S3 buckets. [00:23:40] There's a million things that, that, uh, that, that is the go between there. Um, and yeah, it's, uh, yeah, it's always funny to me when you start talking, start up tech stacks and you're like, Oh yeah, you just kind of add and you very rarely delete. Uh, um, and that's, that's kind of where, where we are at this point. [00:23:58] Um, I'm sure at some point we'll probably [00:24:00] try to, um, pair things back or simplify a little bit, like we have at various times over the years, but, um, yeah, did that answer the question? [00:24:07] Phil: Yeah, a hundred percent. It's a pretty classic experience. [00:24:10] Navigating the Reality of Complex Martech Stacks --- [00:24:10] Phil: I feel like, and yeah, been in your shoes as well. And, uh, we actually chatted about this, the recent guest. Um, Vish Gupta, who is, uh, at Databricks recently just moved over to people. ai, but like, one of the main things we talked about was like the Franken stack, like adding stuff on, because this person was yelling and wanted to get that tool. [00:24:30] And then you're like five years into it and you're just like, holy shit, look at all these pieces to like, there's so much redundancy. And it's like, yeah, but look, look at our to do list. There's all this stuff that we need to do net new things. I'm supporting all these other teams. I don't have time to like simplify and like. [00:24:45] Martech stack minimization sounds amazing in theory, but like in practice, dude, I'm super busy. Like I don't have time to like focus on that shit. And that's just the reality of tech startups. Right. [00:24:56] Jared: Exactly. Yeah. Unless it becomes a budget priority, like, Hey, we need to access [00:25:00] tool. That's expensive. Okay. Well now let's talk about how we can do that. Otherwise, yeah, it's going to stay there until somebody has a need to remove it or change it to something else. [00:25:08] Phil: Yeah. [00:25:09] Jared: Um, and maybe I like to take that as an opportunity sometimes to, uh, to simplify things. [00:25:13] Like if somebody is bringing on something new or like. Has a big issue with something. All right, maybe now's the time we can revisit and maybe we'll kill a couple birds with, uh, with one stone, but otherwise it's, it's, it's bolting on more. [00:25:26] Phil: Yeah. Yeah. [00:25:28] Why Marketing Ops Needs to Level Up in Data Pipelines --- [00:25:28] Phil: I feel that, [00:25:29] ​ [00:25:29] Phil: [00:26:00] [00:27:00] uh, I think you'll agree with this one. No one is investing enough time and resources and data and operations these days. Um, do you think that the AI hype train has at least started forcing teams to reconsider resourcing in these areas to have clean data, have good foundational systems in place, How closely do you think marketing ops teams today need to work with data teams to understand pipelines and explain marketing use cases? [00:27:47] I don't know about you, but like I came up in marketing when data teams were not a thing, like they just didn't exist. If you were looking for help with JavaScript or just like a BI person to help you get data out of somewhere. Like you were shit out of luck. Like you were [00:28:00] completing, you were competing with product resources. [00:28:02] All the engineers are working on product now, most tech companies, or maybe I'm lucky in, uh, all my recent gigs have had one, but I feel like a lot of companies now have a data team whose sole focus is. Kind of like marketing ops, but they're servicing a lot more teams and it's all data pipelines and there's like security and privacy and all that fun stuff there. [00:28:25] So yeah, like, do you think marketing ops folks need to level up their understanding in pipelines and data warehousing and like explaining more marketing use cases to those data teams? [00:28:35] Jared: A hundred percent. Yeah. And that's, um, part of, part of what drew me to, uh, really like, Pursue marketing ops is like the next phase of my career anyway. It was like, boy, the writing's on the wall. Like we're, we're doing a lot more data all the time. We're doing a lot more system integrations all the time. [00:28:50] Everyone's asking questions that are really good questions. Um, and you know, thankfully, like as far as my career goes, it's been, uh, I've, [00:29:00] I've worked in data for most of it, um, until app use really like, uh, the market research company, like, That was the lifeblood of the business was data, uh, panel data and getting it into the right places with the right hand. [00:29:12] So it was like we had data teams. Again, we were competing with customer facing teams. We're competing with, uh, product teams, all that. Um, but it was still somewhat seen as a priority in a lot of cases to, well, we should try to get marketing the data they need because what else are we doing here? Um, And I think it's only become more and more important. [00:29:32] And like you said, with the AI stuff too, like now it's, it's people trying to get AI insights out of all of their, uh, out of all their data. Like I remember when I worked, um, at Keurig, it was like, okay, well, I have the question, I know what I'm looking for. How do I get it? The information. And it was like, well, you got to talk to somebody who's a power BI specialist, and then you got to go and you have to go through 10 channels in order. [00:29:56] And they're like, well, actually we need to. Build a separate database that takes some of that stuff [00:30:00] from that database, and we can marry them together, and eventually we'll answer your question in six months. Uh, and it's, right, and it's like, well now I could just take that in a spreadsheet and upload it to ChatGPT and probably get an answer, uh, relatively soon. [00:30:12] I don't recommend doing that necessarily, uh, depending on your data or how much you care about the accuracy of that. Um, but I think, yeah, like the, I think the, It's a little of both of like the hype train for AI is probably a little bit overblown in terms of what it's capable of doing today and with what amount of accuracy, but it's also kind of exposed that level in the business and that need for answering questions like this and saying, like, well, why can't we get that faster? [00:30:36] I could just go use an AI or something like that. Like, well, it's not going to be right. Uh, like, let's slow down a little bit. I agree with you. And there's probably ways that we can leverage that to help, but, um, Nobody's stopping asking those questions, right? Everyone always has them. What are our customers doing? [00:30:54] What do people do in a free trial? And you're like, well, it's harder than it might seem to get that [00:31:00] answer. For a number of reasons. And we can all work on getting those answers better and faster. And I think that's what the AI portion enables. But if anything, I think it's more front and center than ever. [00:31:13] You know, with coupling in SEO and all that stuff to like, well, there's the Google black box of like, well, how do I know what's getting served anymore on on a surface if there's AI for the top half of it? And I know they do lots of varying of that, right? Like, um, like this. There's a lot less AI answers now than there were a few months ago because of people's questions in part. [00:31:34] And so, yeah, I don't think it's going anywhere. I think we need to it. Everybody in ops needs to understand a lot better where, where the data comes from, how it all works. Um, if I had a nickel for every time somebody asked me something and I said, Oh, actually I know exactly where that came from. I wouldn't have as many nickels as you'd think. but, uh, uh, but I'm working on it. Uh, and I think everybody should be, uh, cause it's important. [00:31:58] Expanding the Role of Operations in a Growing Organization --- [00:31:58] Phil: I want to ask you about [00:32:00] the, the, the difference between the role of a marketing ops person versus the role of a person who is in the operations team. And you've recently. Focused at app use on Martek and, and marketing operations, but your recent promotion is director of operations. And so I would love to ask you like, what, what is the, the, the scope of that? [00:32:25] Like, I'm assuming it's well beyond marketing. It's not director of marketing operations, director of operations. What is operations kind of entail at, at app use? Walk us through that. [00:32:35] Jared: Yeah. So it's, it's, uh, more or less like the, the crux of, uh, of three different teams coming together and their needs. So it's, it's, uh, primarily marketing sales and, uh, customer experience. And so, uh, when I talked myself into this job, uh, it was kind of like. You know, right now we have pretty disparate, uh, operations centers, or like, I'm doing a lot for, [00:33:00] uh, for the CX team anyway, I'm doing a lot for the sales team anyway. [00:33:03] Um, at this point, uh, our, our, uh, sales team reports into our VP marketing. So like marketing and sales are more aligned than ever as of six months ago. Uh, and so it's like. Naturally, the operations comes with that. Like I still reported to the VP of marketing. Um, but the, but the role is, uh, has definitely expanded. [00:33:22] And it's more like I'm dealing with the same stakeholders, but now I have a little bit more authority to, to try and throw my weight around a little bit. Like now our Salesforce admin reports to me and it's like. Okay. Now, if somebody asked me something to change in Salesforce or HubSpot, I can actually say, yeah, let's make that happen. [00:33:39] Um, instead of before it was like, okay, well now I need to argue for that person's time and make a recommendation and figure out all of that. Like, this is a way for us to move faster. Um, and, and, uh, more aligned to like, it's, uh, we don't, we didn't used to have. Uh, as is easy of a window into what each of the departments needed. [00:33:58] And we're using all of [00:34:00] our systems for, um, and so having a more centralized approach, like it's, I feel like it's like a lot of companies do is you get a little bit bigger, uh, like a part of the growing pain is boy, maybe we should have a centralized operations. Uh, everybody's asking for the same thing. [00:34:14] Why are we doing triplicate work, uh, when we could just be doing it once, or, or maybe it would be a lot faster using the eight other systems that the marketing team has already. Compared to what the CX team might know that they have access to, or whatever it is. Um, so for us, it was more about alignment, um, and it made kind of natural sense to me to, to pitch it as like, well why don't we, we could all save time and money if we do it this way. Uh, just put me in charge. Uh, and uh, yeah. [00:34:43] Phil: So you mentioned, you mentioned a few business teams there, like you've got sales, customer experience, customer success, and marketing, right? Kind of all revenue driving teams. And. [00:34:53] Jared: Yep. [00:34:54] Why Operations Encompasses Revenue Operations --- [00:34:54] Phil: I'm curious your takes on revenue operations, rev ops, and [00:35:00] like, why, when you pitch this new role or this new centralized team, why did you call it ops and not revenue ops? [00:35:07] What are your takes there? [00:35:09] Jared: Yeah, I mean, ultimately, like, if you're a good operations team, it's leading to revenue, one way or another, in my opinion. Um, and so it's kind of like, take an extra word out. Uh, like, revenue operations is operations. Um, and it's maybe more focused. Like, I think, uh, it's a lot of times it's bigger companies that have rev ops. [00:35:26] And they're like, okay, they do have a person who is doing, Just go to market teams, uh, just revenue focused operations. Um, it's like probably 80 percent of my job, 85 percent of my job is that. Um, but then there's like the rest too, of like general business things, and working with the product team, working with engineering, um, you know, working. [00:35:47] Like the other day, it was like, oh, we need to renew the trademark. Uh, like, who's gonna do that? I'll, I'll do that. Uh, why not? Anything you could think of that just kind of like lets the business function again, without people having to think too much about it. Like [00:36:00] if, if I do a good job, people won't necessarily notice, um, in a good way. uh, and yeah, so like to me, it's rev ops is just, um, like a, a more specific branch of the same thing. Most of what I'm doing is supporting the revenue teams, um, but not entirely. And so it's like, Take a word out. I don't know. We all, we're all too worried these days. [00:36:21] Phil: I'll do where it is. And I feel like we're all too worried about. What is that buzzword on my LinkedIn profile and on my resume so that if people are looking for a revenue operations person and I'm director of ops, am I showing up in those searches? Do I care about that? Do I really need to worry about that? [00:36:39] Like at the end of the day, it's a, it's, it's an interesting debate. Cause it all comes down to semantics and how you name stuff because director of operations in a health tech company, like my last startup, um, There is a ton of ops focus on the care providing for like internal actual, like members and people [00:37:00] that are using our app. [00:37:01] And so our director of ops was completely removed from our rev ops team and my marketing ops team, because they were focused on like operations for our care team. Like, how are we going to, uh, find specific, like. Coaches and counselors and all these states that have different legislations. And how are we making sure that we're covered in this and that? [00:37:23] And so like, I find that really interesting because like operations within different industries looks way different than your classic SAS, like app queues, but, uh, Um, yeah, it's an exciting role for you because like there's, you're getting your hands in a bunch of different pies in the company, which is a awesome experience and getting a taste of all these different things. [00:37:43] Jared: Exactly. Like I've had plenty of eight word job titles, uh, in my career and I was like, well, let's go, let's go back to like, what, what does it really matter what, like you said, like, who's going to search for me on LinkedIn? I don't care. I'm, I'm a person who likes to make things happen. And I like, that's part of, uh, you know, [00:38:00] director of operations in my mind, job description. [00:38:02] Number one is like, somebody has a problem and I can help fix it one way or another. Uh, yeah. Let's facilitate that rather than focus on, you know, like, well, well, this isn't leading to that or that's not in my job title. It's like, no, no, we have problems. We can solve them. [00:38:20] Phil: the industry from another buzzword. Uh, Jared, uh, folks, folks appreciate your work there. [00:38:26] Jared: Thank you. [00:38:27] How AI Could Streamline Lifecycle Marketing --- [00:38:27] Phil: There's, there's one thing I wanted to ask you about. We were chatting a bit about this. Um, when we had some pre interview discussions, um, this is kind of focused on marketing ops and lifecycle teams, this idea of right message to the right person at the right time on the right channel, like, um, there's, there's a lot of different challenges to doing that. [00:38:48] And your perspective is that. It's way harder than it should be. Um, I wanted to ask you, like, are you personally excited about these advancements in AI specifically catered to like [00:39:00] use cases for feeding content to a machine and letting that machine orchestrate all the messaging, the timing, the people, the segmentation. [00:39:10] Is that just kind of like black marriage shit and you don't think we're anywhere close to that? Do you think we're kind of close to it? What are your thoughts there? [00:39:16] Jared: Yeah, yeah. I think we're a lot closer than a lot of people think. Um, and I think, uh, I think that's, I think that's really cool. Um, and really powerful because, you know, we're, that's kind of the, the, the marketing holy grail anyway is, is being able to deliver those things. Without having to do the inputs, uh, in some capacity or at least, you know, some level of orchestration around it. [00:39:38] Um, it's like I was, uh, on a demo recently for, um, Intellimise. I don't know if you are super familiar with them, but like they they're doing a lot of this stuff for website teams today of like, let, let's just have a bunch AI sort out who gets what based on how likely it is to make them convert based on. [00:39:56] Whatever black box data points that they've got, all that kind of stuff, which I [00:40:00] was like, Hey, that's super cool. Uh, and, and worth a shot if it can make, if it can make us more money. Great. Uh, we're all in the business to make more money. And so, yeah, I think something, something that we struggle with at times that accuses, like, you know, Exactly that. [00:40:14] How do you, how do you get the right thing to the right person? Um, how do you get those, that all that data in the right places? Like we talked about extensively. Like I know I have this in HubSpot. I can use that in, uh, I can use that in app use. I can use stuff from Salesforce and app use. Um, I can use that in, uh, in my emails. [00:40:31] I can use it everywhere. Um, and, and the more portable that your data can be, the more likely you are to have success at, uh, you know, Getting the right message to the right person because you're, you're feeding in the same inputs from the same places and everything in theory should be alive. Like if you can send a push notification at the same time, you can send an email at the same time, you can send a, uh, uh, something in their product. [00:40:53] It doesn't matter if on the receiving end. I'm getting, like, I hope I don't get all those things at exactly the same time. [00:41:00] Uh, but like if I log back into the product and see the same thing that I got an email about yesterday, great. Like that's, uh, like that's good alignment and hopefully I'm more likely to do whatever the action is that, um, that the marketing team or whoever wanted me to do. [00:41:14] Um, and like, we can all use more of that. So yeah, I think, uh, letting AI take over for, for bits and pieces of that. Uh, it can't hurt like it's worth a try. Uh, and, and if it leads to better performance, even better, like we've definitely had periods of. Complexifying things and also simplifying things and it's like you know what like what if we just sent like we had we used to have this really complex Drip program for new free trials that signed up and it was like okay Well if they click on this button and they do this specific action And if they don't click that button then we can send them down this path, and you're like all right well now We have And I don't want to support any of these like this is we're creating a big trap for ourselves. [00:41:58] What if we just sent an email [00:42:00] every other day for the first 15 days of their trial? Like, you know, we've done all of that and gone back and forth. And, uh, the reality of like what works best is somewhere in the middle. Like you want to have personalization, but you don't want to have so much personalization that the team managing it can't manage it. [00:42:17] Um, and so like, if AI can help with that, I'm all for it. [00:42:21] Phil: Yeah, I think one of the interesting components to this is quality assurance. [00:42:26] The Challenge of QA in AI-Driven Messaging --- [00:42:26] Phil: Like, how do you QA the machine, especially if you're like, it's one thing to be like, to still have a content team who creates this content library and the machine is restricted to only a certain finite assets, right? That the content team is writing all that's QA'd. [00:42:45] And so, you know, you're not like, Sending anything bad or like wrong things to the wrong person. Like, what are your thoughts on how do we, how do we get to this model where AI is taking the wheel in a sense and [00:43:00] orchestrating that messaging while still. Feeling confident, especially in like health tech companies and financial industries, like where, you know, sending the wrong HIPAA data or the wrong financial information to the wrong person at the wrong time, like could have like massive negative repercussions. [00:43:19] Like, what are your thoughts on QA in this, in this world? [00:43:22] Jared: Yeah, I think that's part of why we're so far away from that being a reality like in the in the regulated industries, you know, like in in SAS, you can kind of do whatever you want. And so like it's a great testing ground for a lot of this stuff [00:43:35] Phil: So true. [00:43:35] Jared: and it's You know, somebody gets, somebody gets the wrong email, you send an apology email, like, [00:43:41] Phil: Yeah. [00:43:41] Jared: easy enough, hey, our bad, uh, and then maybe they click through more because you sent an apology that sounded nice and heartfelt, you know, like, uh, like sometimes that works to your advantage to make a mistake, uh, like that, um, or have, uh, computers make a mistake like that, uh, when you're talking things like, yeah, finance or healthcare or, um, or [00:44:00] education or any of those things that have really tight restrictions like that. We're way off. Um, as far as like using at least any tools that I know of that do this kind of stuff. Um, it's not like the controls just aren't there yet. You can definitely specify and say, Hey, don't, don't do this. Uh, like you're just creating a bigger list of things to not do. Uh, at least in my experience, rather than creating like a, uh, okay, here's how we want you to do thing. [00:44:26] Uh, cause that can lead to, you know, Um, it's like, okay, yeah, do that, but also don't do these 150 things. And we're going to add to that every day as we come up with new bad ideas. Uh, uh, and like, yeah, I, I don't see that changing anytime in the, in the super near future, but I'm sure it will. If somebody is working on it, [00:44:45] How AI Can Uncover Incremental Lifts --- [00:44:45] Phil: Someone asked me the, one of the pieces of it that is the most exciting to me, like you were talking about these drip programs that had multiple endpoints and managing like the beast of like a workflow that it's [00:45:00] become like, Letting AI figure out what is the lift, what is the incremental impact of having an extra branch if someone clicks on that button or sending a message or maybe like not sending a message and letting someone go into the product like it's so complex in email and automation teams to build out these like drip programs and journeys. [00:45:24] Without like, also thinking about testing them and like, are we building holdout tests or are we doing AB tests? Like that piece of like letting AI take control of it. And, and at least trusting that there's like math and science baked into those decision models. Like that, that part excites me because in a lot of drip teams, there, there isn't any thought to like, yeah, we just like redid our onboarding emails. [00:45:49] Like, Oh, cool. Like, are you like doing a 50, 50 tests? Are you controlling that? Like. Now kind of had a baseline before, and now we're just looking to see if we can beat that baseline. But like, we're doing this during the [00:46:00] summer, during like the peak of the season. And it's like that, that part of it excites me. [00:46:05] Jared: Yeah, no, Sam, uh, and you're exactly right. I mean, like, we're, we're doing that with a couple of things right now, where it's like, why don't we just change it, and we'll see what it, we'll see if it's better than before. Uh, and like, having that level of, of insight and information that we can, We can like it exists, um, or being able to do those tests a lot faster. [00:46:24] Totally agreed. That's, that's the, like, that's the sweet spot for not having to need a huge team to do things anymore. Like that, you know, there's a reason why we do a lot of the, well, let's just put it in production and see what changes. It's like, well, cause we only have two people that are managing that. [00:46:40] Um, when you're like, you know, when I worked at Keurig, it was like, we had a team that was, uh, that was email marketing. Uh, for emails and on that team, there were specific people that are like, Oh, I just do the promo emails or like, and like my role was, uh, working on the connected brewer program. And it was like, Oh, I'm the guy who's supposed to be [00:47:00] thinking about the drip programs and things like that for like, we can feed that some data and we can do some customization and information that we couldn't do before. [00:47:07] Thankfully, I'm one person doing more or less this one job. Um, But it's like the smaller you get, the, the more it's, it's a lot of just, how can I make the technology work for me instead? And so if we can get to that point where it's like, yeah, the AI already thought of, uh, already thought of doing two holdout tests and, and then they came up with this new version that we can test against this other version. [00:47:30] Great. I'm all for [00:47:31] it. [00:47:33] Phil: It's so, it's such a different ball game in bigger companies at a short stint, uh, uh, wordpress. com, uh, that the bigger, like automatic companies, like 7, 000 plus people. And we had an internal experimentation product that was supported. Biodata team, a bunch of data scientists, we're building out like internal models. [00:47:53] And it was like just a different world and like startups and companies that I've worked at before. [00:47:58] The Intersection of Data, Coffee, and Connected Devices at Keurig --- [00:47:58] Phil: But I wanted to ask you two last [00:48:00] questions for you, Jared. It's been super fun. Um, you just touched on Keurig and your kind of brief detour from SAS. Um, and. Like it was two and a half years. So like, not super brief, like still a ton of time to, to learn a bunch of stuff from, from that bigger enterprise world. [00:48:14] Uh, but it was around the time where Acuri had merged or like Dr. Pepper had merged with Snapple and you worked on their beta program for their internet connected coffee maker. Talk to us about that experience. Yeah. [00:48:27] Jared: weird and interesting. So it was, uh, it was, uh, as I was winding down in the, uh, that market research space, I was looking for, uh, something new. And, uh, they had approached me and said, Hey, we're working on, you, you've been working on a product with a panel of, uh, doing data. Um, in marketing. [00:48:45] Sure. Yep. Those are all true facts. Uh, so here's what we're doing. We're working on a internet connected brewer. That's gonna feed the data back to us that we can then run marketing programs on top of based on the data on the coffee consumption. [00:49:00] And we're gonna be doing it in this test phase where we're creating a panel to get all this data that we can give it back to our partners. [00:49:05] Well, that sounds like a pretty natural progression to me, at least at the time. Uh, and it was only once I got in there when I was like, Oh my God, this is so different. Uh, working at a, uh, a giant enterprise like that is totally different and working with these kinds of teams and, and, uh, all this kind of product. [00:49:23] So it was like, Uh, it was in some ways supernatural, like, Oh, you're gonna be in the innovation unit in the business team that's like, Just, it's like a little startup inside of Keurig. And I was like, okay, I've heard this before, but, Uh, yeah, sounds cool. Uh, and it was cool, and it like, I think, uh, you know, looking back, like I have, uh, A lot of mixed feelings about my time there just because some was, there's a good and bad with every role. [00:49:47] Uh, and, um, but the, the good, I think that really led me to where I am now, um, was doing like the, the in between things of, of, uh, interfacing with the engineering teams and the [00:50:00] data teams and with our partners, um, you know, like going back to Starbucks and, and Duncan and saying like, okay, yeah, so we got this data, right. [00:50:07] Uh, what do you think? Is this useful? Uh, like here's, we can slice it this way and we can tell you these things about your, your coffee drinkers that you might not have been able to know, um, when they're at home drinking coffee, which, you know, you have all the data in the world about your stores and what you're doing, but like, do you know what they're brewing in there? [00:50:25] Uh, if they're curing at five o'clock in the morning, probably not. I don't know. Um, and so it was like, it was really cool to, to me to just be like in a problem solving role of like, Well, we need to get this to this place, this data in the right, uh, in the right things, we need to integrate it with these systems. [00:50:41] Uh, so we can start sending messages, doing all that testing that we were talking about, right? Of like, well, what if we, what if we sent this email to them instead, or we really need them to connect? Like our, one of our biggest problems at the time was how do we get them to connect the coffee maker to the internet? Like, there's not a lot of motivation to do that, as you can [00:51:00] imagine. [00:51:00] Phil: Right. And getting people to opt in. [00:51:02] Jared: Yes, exactly. And you're like, well, my coffee, I mix coffee still. Right. Even if I don't do that. Uh, however, uh, like here's some incentives and, and figuring out what works best and all that stuff. So like, it's exactly, I think what led me to, to be like, Oh, actually I really like talking to technical teams and I like translating that back to product and business teams. [00:51:25] And uh, I like being that interface between everybody who can hopefully, um, you know, solve the business problem and make us more money. Like that was what was like. Really interesting to me. And I was like, all right, I'm going to get out of here. Go back to software for a bit. And I'm sure I'll end up doing the same thing five years from now. [00:51:41] Yep. [00:51:45] Phil: marketing ops is like, we can bounce back and forth between industries. We don't have to stick to one industry, but yeah. Yeah. I like you sass is, uh, where I've spent the most time, but yeah, took a tour and beat a, beat a, beat a C, took a tour and beat a C. [00:52:00] Um, but yeah, it's been, uh, it's been a fun experience. [00:52:02] Uh, just really fun conversation. I got one last question for you. [00:52:05] Finding Balance in a Busy Life --- [00:52:05] Phil: Uh, you're a director, team leader, a home cook. You're also a husband, a musician, and an amateur podcaster. We'll link out to, uh, your film podcast, uh, in the show notes. They're clearly, you've got a ton going on. One question we ask everyone on the show at the end is how do you remain happy and successful in your career? [00:52:23] How do you find balance between all the stuff you're working on while staying happy? Hmm. [00:52:28] Jared: good question. Um, and, uh, something that I struggle with sometimes, like I know everybody does. Right. Um, and, uh, for me, it's, it's comes back to like, who Who am I doing this for? And, and that's what makes me happy, like always asking that question, who am I doing this for? Um, you know, when I'm, uh, in my, in my home role and like, I do have our, a lot of our cooking and, and, uh, a lot of other things. [00:52:54] Like I work from home, uh, my wife works, uh, at, uh, at. Repairing musical instruments has to like go [00:53:00] into a shop and do like super niche super interesting Um, but like i'm here so I can throw the laundry in or Uh, or whatever that might be. Um, and it's it's who am I doing this for? Uh, well, it's my wife and that makes me happy to to make them happy and same for Like, when I'm talking, thinking about, okay, who, why am I trying to do this operations task? [00:53:22] Why am I trying to do this thing? Well, it's for the marketing team, or it's for the CX team. And I want them to be happy, and that gives me joy to, uh, to think about, like, Okay, I made someone else's life better. Even if it's only a little bit and it's something that they might not even think about that much, they probably would if it was broken or not, [00:53:40] Phil: Yeah, [00:53:40] Jared: uh, or, or not working. [00:53:42] And so like, same with podcasting. It's like, who am I making happy with this? Mostly me and my buddy. Uh, you know, the, the, the 50 listeners or so, I like to think that they, uh, that they get some joy out of listening to us. But like coming back to it, it's like, why do I do this work every week? Well, it's mostly for mostly for [00:54:00] me. [00:54:01] Um, and so like. It's okay to do things for yourself too, and I think that reminding myself, um, that, like, think about who you're doing it for. Is it for the customer? Is it for your colleagues? Is it for your spouse or, you know, your friends or for doing something for yourself? I think that's all, all valid reasons and just like always a good reminder of like, okay. [00:54:23] This is what matters at the moment, um, is, is making somebody else, uh, happy or make their life a little easier, make somebody laugh. Um, like that's, I don't know, for me, at least that's what it's all about. [00:54:35] Phil: I love it. Super cool perspective, Jared. Uh, yeah, we're doing this, this interview for, for the humans of Martek out there that are, you know, trying to figure out what the heck is the difference between RevOps and marketing ops and ops, and do I need a data warehouse, like how do I work with my data team? [00:54:51] So I think there's, there's hopefully a lot of, um, value that folks got out of this chat. I know I did personally. So thanks again for your time, Jared. This is super fun. [00:54:59] Jared: [00:55:00] Thank you. I appreciate it. It was a blast.