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"SaaS companies are systematically undervaluing marketing ops professionals by rebranding their work with trendy titles while taking their contributions for granted until everything breaks.” — Sara
Sara McNamara has spent her career building go-to-market systems at companies like Slack, Salesforce, and Cloudera, the unglamorous, essential work that makes revenue teams actually function. As the revenue operations and go-to-market lead at Vector, she has a thesis about where ops is headed that challenges how many see their own roles. While AI rewires what ops teams actually do, she argues that strategic operations practitioners aren't becoming obsolete, they're becoming more essential than ever before.
In this wide-ranging conversation, Sara unpacks the marketing ops erasure problem plaguing SaaS companies, explains why attribution will never be a perfect science, and shares specific AI workflows that are actually working in her day-to-day operations. She makes the case that ops professionals need to upskill now or risk having engineers and upskilled marketers fill the strategic vacuum they leave behind.
Timestamps
03:45 — Building Ops at Vector: How Sara approaches go-to-market operations at a Series B company and the unique challenges of scaling ops infrastructure
07:20 — Career Journey Through Big Tech: From Slack to Salesforce to Cloudera, the lessons learned building revenue systems at enterprise scale
10:15 — Marketing Ops Erasure Problem: SaaS companies are systematically undervaluing marketing ops professionals by rebranding their work with trendy titles while taking their contributions for granted until everything breaks
18:25 — Ops Must Upskill or Lose Ground: Operations professionals need to actively learn AI tools now, or risk having engineers and upskilled marketers fill the strategic vacuum they leave behind
19:15 — AI Pricing Will Follow Uber Model: AI companies will likely subsidize usage initially to create dependency, then dramatically increase pricing once users are locked in
37:53 — AI as Data Hygiene Assistant: Use AI for observability and anomaly detection in your CRM rather than giving it permission to make changes
45:30 — Ops More Essential Than Ever: While there's consolidation pressure in ops, strategic ops practitioners who act as the 'adult in the room' for go-to-market are becoming more valuable, not less
59:00 — Attribution's Real Purpose: Attribution should be used directionally for channels and campaigns, not as a perfect science
01:02:40 — AI Will Amplify Marketing Chaos: AI will create more marketing 'slop' and turbocharged outreach, making attribution even murkier while elevating the importance of relationships and event marketing
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Creators and Guests
What is Making Sense of Martech?
Unfiltered takes on the biggest shifts in marketing technology. We spotlight what matters, who's leading (or lagging), and what's next. In Martech, clarity is power — and we're here to deliver it.
00:00:00:00 - 00:00:21:10
Unknown
Welcome to the Making Sense of My Tech podcast. I'm Jaclyn Friedman, and today we're kicking things off with this hot seat episode with someone who spent her career doing the unglamorous, unsexy, essential work that makes revenue teams actually function. She's a systems thinker, a straight talker, which I can relate to. And she has a thesis about where ops is headed.
00:00:21:12 - 00:00:41:17
Unknown
That I think will also challenge many of how you see your own roles. Welcome, Sarah McNamara to the hotseat. I'm so excited to chat with you. I'm a huge fan. Right back at you. And I have to properly introduce you a little bit. So Sarah is the revenue operations and go to market lead at vector. And one of the most respected voices in marketing and revenue ops space.
00:00:41:21 - 00:01:04:05
Unknown
She's built and scaled go to market systems at companies like slack, Salesforce, Cloudera, casual names that tell you that she's not theorizing things. She's been in the room where the revenue machine either works or really doesn't. All about it. She's also the creator of the Marketing Operations Strategist, a newsletter that has become required reading for ops and go to market leaders who are tired of complexity for its own sake.
00:01:04:07 - 00:01:26:06
Unknown
Right now, as AI rewires what ops teams are actually doing, she is one of the few with both the technical credibility and the strategic altitude to tell us what really means, what we're doing, and what we should be doing. While we can still build. Welcome. So happy to be here. Yeah. Okay. Let's dive in. So first up, we've got our rapid fire section.
00:01:26:08 - 00:01:45:18
Unknown
What was your first martech tool? I people ask me this question and I think back and I'm like, well, I mean there's like MailChimp account, like tech like I think technically, but I would say like when I, when I think like, okay, why don't I get more serious? I feel like Pardot, which is like another controversial tool. Oh, I'm the black one.
00:01:45:18 - 00:02:06:23
Unknown
I love Pardot. I think it's great. Okay. I know I'm I'm. I love part of that. Okay. We're I'm not going to take it lightly. You can't take it from me. Oh. They're trying. Next isn't doing it, though. And who knows what name iteration they're on this day and every single day. I love the name for Seacom. So helpful.
00:02:07:00 - 00:02:27:18
Unknown
But I'm not the only pardot. We did. We did have a whole session on, like, the renaming strategy. I don't I don't, I'm not following, but. Oh, yeah. I know people who still call like, it's like Marketo. Like, I don't know, Adobe engage. I'm like, what is that? But yeah. No. No point. I mean, first of all, like Salesforce specifically, I'll call it out.
00:02:27:20 - 00:02:57:00
Unknown
The URL still says Exacttarget. It's still like Pardot. What's good fam? Like it's I think that's what it is. You know what I mean? It's like they're so beloved that like, getting it is hard. They're so beloved. And also you make it worse by renaming it constantly. But that's enough shade on Salesforce for the moment. That said, one word describe each place Salesforce, slack and Cloudera and what it taught you about Ops and Cloudera.
00:02:57:02 - 00:03:14:12
Unknown
That team was like, amazing. And the way that the the marketing team functioned with operations. Like to me, it's like ops is the heart of marketing. Like we were a beloved team, which, like, I hate to say, it's kind of hard to find. A lot of marketers are like, not quite sure what to make of ops with the marketers.
00:03:14:12 - 00:03:38:01
Unknown
They're like, I still have great relationships with them to this day. Like it was very much like a beloved group. And ops was the heart of marketing there, like slack. If I had to summarize that, it's like a business can scale without ops. But oh man, is it messy. Like when you try to really scale, that's when stuff can can come back to haunt you.
00:03:38:03 - 00:03:59:22
Unknown
So bodies that were buried come back to life. Oh, yeah. All the skeletons in all closets. But I will say it was interesting because before that I was like, you need ops, you know, early stage to be successful. And it's like, yes, but you can live without it. You're just going to pay for it later. It's kind of like how I felt at that stage.
00:03:59:23 - 00:04:22:05
Unknown
And then Salesforce, I think there are ops builders and ops like kind of more maintainers, and I love building like I, I'm definitely more of like the builder mentality. So I was a huge take away. Yeah, for sure, because you need both. You can't just be one or the other, depending on the size of the company. Otherwise you're okay there.
00:04:22:06 - 00:04:47:05
Unknown
People are just keeping the lights on and hey, I respect it. I know it's not for anyone to do it. Okay. What is a tool right now in your tech stack or in general that you think is just generally underrated? Whisper is my latest obsession. It's like the voice recording app, and I know it sounds very basic, but it's so much better than the, like, more legacy voice recorders.
00:04:47:05 - 00:05:02:08
Unknown
You got to get him on whisper. I'm telling you, like, one of my ears came to me and he was like, Sarah, I barely type anymore, like whatsoever. And it saves me so much time. And I'm like, yeah, like, okay, I'm sure it's like my parents texts where it's all butchered and you're like, what are you trying to say?
00:05:02:10 - 00:05:20:21
Unknown
No, it's so good. Like, they're using AI to learn your specific kind of like intonation and get better and better understanding what you're saying. And then they also have formatting in there too. So for ops, it's like, no longer do I have to sit there and toil at like manual documentation. I can at least get like a good V1 in there.
00:05:21:03 - 00:05:42:05
Unknown
And then you just do it, which sound, like you said, very unsexy. But like two ops is huge. The time to be stuck in that, that grinding. I actually think the unsexy things are probably the sexiest, because people forget how important they are and they want. I always call it like, that's always the shiny objects. And they want the new flashy this, that and the other.
00:05:42:05 - 00:06:02:13
Unknown
It's like, you know what? Actually back to basics is what's required more often than not. All right. What is the biggest ops myth you wish would just burn the steak and die. There are two big ones that come to my mind with that, which is like I would say okay big picture. I'm tired of hearing the ops is just support and governance.
00:06:02:15 - 00:06:24:08
Unknown
I would say if that was my job, man, I would say saved. I saved so many years of my life of just like trying to like, grow businesses and get people to do, like more growth oriented things and think big picture and be innovative. So much more than just art and governance. That would be so easy. I could just like dial it in, especially at this point in my career.
00:06:24:10 - 00:06:47:10
Unknown
So I just think that's a huge misunderstanding. And the more recent one I would say is I keep hearing these like martech vendors say, you know, we need a new role to manage, the more like, innovative systems growth piece of marketing. And I'm like, you gotta be kidding me. Like, oh, no one is managing or growing the system.
00:06:47:12 - 00:07:08:12
Unknown
Like, come on. But you know what? I'll throw some shade. It's always these, like, really tiny companies that, like, are offshoring or don't have anyone really in ops that are saying this. I'm like, okay, well, I guess that's your reality. It's not. I think so there's there's a fair amount of folks who are like, well, we need to go to market engineer because they know what they're doing.
00:07:08:12 - 00:07:34:17
Unknown
And like, actually, you realize this whole time we've been engineering it. So none of it when GTM engineering came out, I've been like, dude, I've been doing this work for years. Like, like there are new tools, right? Where are you? Same. Yeah. The same work? Yeah. The same principles. I think a lot of these organizations, when they talk about, like, we don't have anyone who's doing GTM engineering, they need to look at their ops team and say, like, are we staffing them appropriately to do it?
00:07:34:19 - 00:07:52:23
Unknown
Because there's a difference between, like, a lot of them do get stuck and a lot of like the triage and like trying to just like do general maintenance and growth of their existing tech stack. That might be why you're not seeing some of these like, new playbooks and tools get rolled out, not because they don't have the expertise on the team.
00:07:53:01 - 00:08:14:12
Unknown
Exactly. And I'll dare and say it feels like a lot of men who just want better titles, when in reality they're still doing the exact same work. And it's still unsexy. But yeah, doing cool stuff. But it's the same thing, and you just really want an engineer in your title. Yep. When you see a messy CRM, what's your first move?
00:08:14:14 - 00:08:35:02
Unknown
A lot of times it comes down to the people involved, but also like the company strategy. Like maybe they're kind of weird looking for a reason and sometimes those things are worth working around. Sometimes they're not, though. Sometimes it's like, hey, you just had someone in C who just had like a terrible opinion too. It does happen. Yes.
00:08:35:04 - 00:08:51:13
Unknown
You only got to find that out when you interview the people who are involved and really get a take, and then you also can get a sense for what kind of change you can do. And how rapidly. Sometimes I'll meet with teams and they're like, we are miserable, Sarah. Like, please, like whatever you need to do to fix it.
00:08:51:15 - 00:09:14:00
Unknown
But then sometimes you meet with people and they are very defensive. And it's like, okay, I need to approach this differently. 100% agreed. And I think in that same vein, speaking with the team, you learn the history because business evolves. The strategy of all the way in which things are constructed internally evolve. And so it's like, oh, this legacy thing that we had served us five years ago.
00:09:14:01 - 00:09:36:12
Unknown
But the models changed. And so it also, I think, helps you get empathy to be like, okay, I get why we're here, why we're like, I understand this was not a choice made forever. It just happened to be here. Last but not least. What is your hottest take? The spicier the better. I would say it's a tricky one.
00:09:36:14 - 00:09:59:08
Unknown
It aligns with what we talked about earlier where I'm just tired of specifically. It seems like the SAS industry like disrespecting marketing ops specifically. I feel like there's a lot of erasure there. You know, it's like, oh, rib ops is like the hot thing. GTM engineering is the hot thing. Now there's this marketing, engineering and all these like, different little titles being thrown around.
00:09:59:10 - 00:10:18:05
Unknown
And I think a lot of these companies just take for granted that things work because they have a really good team. And there's the like erasure of that. Like if, if I like in my newsletter, I'm always telling people like, speak up and really showcase what you do because it's so easy to forget if things are working well.
00:10:18:07 - 00:10:39:10
Unknown
And then these companies get themselves in these pickles where it's like they lay off the team or they cut the budget. And then sadly, it usually takes like six months to a year before they really start to like they're like, oh no, people were doing things. Oh, now it's a terribly broken and now everything is hard. Imagine that.
00:10:39:12 - 00:11:06:12
Unknown
Yeah. My hardest take is like, I think marketing ops professionals need to get better at marketing themselves internally. But I also think that a lot of these SaaS companies owe that team some recognition. Regardless whether they're allowed or not. I agree. My favorite is when the unfortunate happens and there's a layoff. There's how everything literally breaks because everything is associated to those individuals who hold the keys to the kingdom.
00:11:06:14 - 00:11:30:06
Unknown
It's like, okay, you set this dumpster fire for yourself, just like, you know. Well, there's also a lot of, like, supporting bad habits too, right? Like, yes, I think ops absorbs a lot of nonsense. Can mass is my hardest take. Actually. Ops absorbs a lot of nonsense that GTM professionals do. We hire this agency and actually like, they work out of a sheet and they can't do anything more.
00:11:30:06 - 00:11:46:11
Unknown
So everything has to be manual. You know, we're bad at event planning. And so at the last second is when we have to like randomly like, how are we tracking? What are we doing. It's almost ready that like we absorb a lot of that and it doesn't get talked about and you don't realize it until that person's not there.
00:11:46:11 - 00:12:14:04
Unknown
And then you're like, wait a minute. Oh yeah. I have to like, really plan ahead. Every company I've ever witnessed worked at, consulted with. That's always the reality. It's just your lack of planning is not my responsibility. But somehow it is. And I don't get recognition for it either. Yeah, that. And then also, I think of ops a lot of times is like the adult in the room when I go comes to go to market and it can be sales ops two.
00:12:14:04 - 00:12:30:17
Unknown
It's like all ops together, right? Like whatever you call it in your org are different teams, but there's a lot of like, well, we could just do it if ops would get out of the way and there's not enough questioning of like, should we do it? Or why is yes, say no. Because a lot of times there's a good reason why you can't do that.
00:12:30:17 - 00:12:48:19
Unknown
Times it's this isn't scalable or it requires a full reconstruction that doesn't actually make sense for the greater part of the business. So yes, we could just email our whole database like, yeah, you could just do that. But that's not a good idea. And so people are saying no, not just to say no. They're saying no because there's a good reason.
00:12:48:21 - 00:13:10:07
Unknown
Yeah. You have to really learn like the improv. Yes. And like yes, that's a great idea. How about we approach it this way instead? Yeah. To try to not hurt people's feelings even though it's business. It's not feelings. It's not personal. Let's set the stage. And you've said ops is shifting from a builder function to an enabler function in this new AI era.
00:13:10:09 - 00:13:32:23
Unknown
But I want to push you on that because too many ops people are these enablement people. And that really kind of sounds like a demotion. And to make that case that it's actually the office, it's I want to hear your version of this I story as well as where do you think ops are getting leaner, faster and more strategic, and another where ops jobs quietly maybe disappear.
00:13:33:02 - 00:13:59:07
Unknown
Like, are we automating ourselves out of a job? Which future are we actually living in? And how do you know what you know of a journey? Because I feel like almost overnight, with a lot of what cloud can do. There was just like a lot of, I would say, like hype, of delusion, of reality to like adjust to the last few weeks, two months, I've been doing a lot of thinking and a lot of talking with other ops professionals and leaders trying to get a sense like, okay, what are we going to do now?
00:13:59:07 - 00:14:22:02
Unknown
Because I it's a totally different world and it's going to continue to change. But I think you'll see, it's like a lot of my opinion, a lot of the standard philosophy is around ops. I think will remain. There's going to look a little bit different. So like to me, operations is enablement at its heart. Like everything we do enables, whether it's through technology g process data.
00:14:22:04 - 00:14:40:23
Unknown
I don't like when people say it's only enablement, but I do think on this in the same vein, I do think that enablement is a key piece and it can look different depending on what each organization needs. So I think in the world of AI, it just it just shifts. Maybe before we were enabling people through like campaign operations being centralized.
00:14:40:23 - 00:15:07:17
Unknown
And that made the most sense at the time. Maybe now with Claude and Skills and some other technology out there, we can enable people to self-serve lists. I don't think that's a huge loss for operations. Who's enjoying just pulling less like, not me. So like things like that. Well, yeah, maybe, but you know what I mean. I think that we are able to enable people to solve certain places that are beneficial to ops.
00:15:07:18 - 00:15:29:13
Unknown
I also think that we can be the beneficiaries of not having to build everything at every level. So, for example, I know there's a lot of hype around like, oh, you know, every marketer and sales person can build their own go to market engine. Not really right like it. It needs to integrate to something that needs to have a source of truth.
00:15:29:15 - 00:15:58:01
Unknown
But I do think there's great potential in the teams getting together and being like, how do we want to function? And then building what I call like widgets of like, you know, I need like, like for sales is a great example. I need a little tool where someone I'm speaking to can go in and enter some of their like non PII data and get a sense like, what could the impact of this tooling be if I add it or this, you know, whatever it is that's, you know, a very low risk thing for them to get started with.
00:15:58:01 - 00:16:19:06
Unknown
And then once they start to kind of figure out, okay, now we need to adjust this, adjust that, then bring it to operations and say, like we want the whole department to be able to use this, and, you know, make it more robust and maybe even I say like, add some of our little magic on top of it, of like, oh, hey, did you think that you can or did you realize you could bring in this data and make this even better or even more relevant?
00:16:19:08 - 00:16:37:20
Unknown
So I think we can benefit from a lot of the like, the ones that can be spun up by the people who are like specialists in their role. And then we just add our magic on top of it. Once we start to see that ROI now, we can have a whole conversation about the ROI piece, because I think there's a little bit of confusion right now about like, not everything is worth building.
00:16:37:22 - 00:16:56:17
Unknown
Yeah, no, I'm hopeful that like through that kind of model, we can avoid getting pulled into every little idea until it becomes something more, you know what I mean? Like, I don't like you were talking about. I was like, well, we could do x, y, z. We could build this little thing. But like, should we? What's the opportunity cost of that?
00:16:56:18 - 00:17:19:05
Unknown
I think that kind of model can help us. And then I think there's also a huge opportunity for people to self-serve on stuff that it was harder for them to do before, which again, like, I'm just I'm seeing the opportunity to get out of like the triage, like having to do everything I don't think it's a demotion. I think it can be a promotion.
00:17:19:07 - 00:17:40:19
Unknown
I think that it's up to us though, like I try to urge my newsletter subscribers. I'm like, guys, we've got to show up. We can't just kind of like watch and wait. Like, I'm I'm in cloud, like every day. I'm like subscribing to all the newsletter is like I'm trying to get, like kind of skill up as quickly as I can to understand and be a trusted person to work with.
00:17:40:21 - 00:18:00:10
Unknown
Otherwise you will see people take up like there's a vacuum that's going to be created and who's going to end up taking that spot? It could be engineering. It could be marketers who, you know, take some of these like GTM engineering schools and things like that, and they get upskilled faster. So I do think that there's a risk there, but I don't think it's so much demotion.
00:18:00:10 - 00:18:20:22
Unknown
I think it's we better, you know, catch the moment as it comes and then we can have room for more strategic work. And to me that's the biggest like promotion, right, is like, if I don't have to spend X amount of hours or my team, whoever, if we don't have to spend X amount of hours building manual lists, then we can reallocate that time to have the bigger conversations.
00:18:20:22 - 00:18:42:07
Unknown
So we always want to have we just never have the time for them. Oh yeah. No, it's my philosophy of mops and martech. The job is to do the backend work so that the end user is empowered to do what they got to do without you. And so if anything, to your point, like this is meant to free up more time, this is the advantage.
00:18:42:08 - 00:19:05:13
Unknown
But I'm also of the mind. At some point, actually using AI will be more expensive than hiring just a human. Considering like all of the the token leaderboards and what token maxing disgusting like the unacceptable nature. But it's like all of a sudden the humans are cheaper. So it's going to be like this interesting flip flop. I think at some point we'll have that inflection point.
00:19:05:15 - 00:19:26:11
Unknown
And we've seen this before, right? Like with Uber, Instacart, the play was always to subsidize usage and get people used to it and dependent upon it. And then to jack up the price. So that's actually an important piece I think we should talk about is like, as I've been doing my research, I'm like, okay, what parts of the business can we risk with?
00:19:26:11 - 00:19:46:00
Unknown
Like having it rely on AI versus like, how do we build a world where we're not reliant on it? Like it's as a cool thing to have, but if all of a sudden it becomes like $1 million a year, we are completely screwed. Like there's a lot of talk out there. It's like, I'm gonna replace my CRM with AI and I'm like, listen, I could yeah, we could be good.
00:19:46:02 - 00:20:10:09
Unknown
We that there's a lot better there to be said there in general. But I think even if we get rid of all those, are there issues right when it comes to like maintenance, implementation engineering, like the support, okay. It all lives an AI now and then AI gets jacked up ten times the price. Then what? Now you have an urgent migration or you're paying a million plus dollars or something.
00:20:10:09 - 00:20:35:12
Unknown
That could be $100,000. Yeah. So it's like vendor lock in in those moats. Or maybe not smart to fully rely on yes or no. Just a thought. It's good to be flexible, modular and yeah, be able to choose your own destiny as opposed to reliant solely on a singular suite of some sort. Exactly. So yeah, I'm trying to warn people like I the way I think about it is we should have our core GTM.
00:20:35:12 - 00:20:59:08
Unknown
I call it like the GTM data layer of like the CRM, the marketing automation platform. Maybe like snowflake, like a data warehouse, like little data marts for each department. That all I think we need. I think what's a little more up for grabs is like stuff where we could like signals we can use, like AI signals and use AI to orchestrate that stuff, because that stuff, ultimately we can always migrate back.
00:20:59:08 - 00:21:21:06
Unknown
But I'm not going to let my business get reliant on AI solely. That's going to be a disaster, in my opinion. Oh, 100%. I mean, there's numerous companies who had everything deleted as a result of it. And so I in that same vein, I, I consider that data layer the like if you think of a house that is the those are the steel, frame.
00:21:21:08 - 00:21:46:16
Unknown
Everything else is additive. But if you don't have the dependability, like if one model changes overnight, your entire thing could break. I know my artifacts and previously my GPT would do that and all of a sudden it gets dumb and isn't working. So yes, I think it's more of like, these are the accouterments. These are the I chose this type of kitchen cabinet style and that's your flavor of AI or your widget.
00:21:46:16 - 00:22:20:07
Unknown
You chose to build custom to your business and your unique use case. And so yes, full agreement. Okay. I do think one thing that is tricky about ops right now is figuring out how we're going to staff all this, right? Because yes, I find a lot of my users want to live in cloud now, which is great. But that's like a whole other surface for us to help manage, because a lot of them are not technical enough to know how to manage it on their own and understand all the pieces of data.
00:22:20:09 - 00:22:38:05
Unknown
And it's so easy to think that you know the data and then to be like, like set up a dashboard that's incorrect or like be confused is like, why does it look this way and not that way? And so that is something I'm thinking through. And I think a lot of companies do need to acknowledge is like, okay, cool.
00:22:38:05 - 00:22:54:23
Unknown
We have you know, we have the AI like kind of platform, if you will. And then we have the the house, like you mentioned it. But then we're having to manage both in a lot of cases. So like how do we start for that. How do we make sure it isn't like the same people getting stretched so thin.
00:22:54:23 - 00:23:27:04
Unknown
Yeah. And I think honestly the quickest and easiest is guardrails through governance. Like people hate that. Of course they will patch up they I'm not saying it's a pit. It's the unsexy things are what you're wired. If you have proper governance and role based access control, you're every single team has access to what they need to do their job, and if they need to exceed that, that's when they can reach out and be like, hey, I've got this.
00:23:27:04 - 00:23:44:14
Unknown
Let me show you the work. Let me share this canvas. But I'm trying to do that. Is that something I can do? And that's where I think we can then be not only the extra level of empowerment of like, you know what? That's a really great way to think about this. Let me tweak your access or do it for you so that now you have access to it.
00:23:44:19 - 00:24:10:01
Unknown
Yeah, it's tricky though, because the vendors want everyone to be all access. Like I have a lot of frustration, right? What vendors with hubs? I mean, I love HubSpot. I was listening, but I think I was one of a very small subset of users and companies. My main frustration with them right now and and like anthropic right, is like they have this quote unquote integration.
00:24:10:03 - 00:24:31:01
Unknown
It's read all right, all to everyone. Yeah. I refuse to use them. Like to the point where I have like, engineering has spun up their own cloud instance to try to work around like the weird permissioning of everything. And the alternative is you have to build your own MCP. Okay, cool. But that takes time. That's like snow or some AI engineering related skill.
00:24:31:03 - 00:24:49:17
Unknown
And a lot of orgs are like, why can't I just have it tomorrow? And I'm like, because we're building a whole new integration now. Custom. Yes. To enable any kind of permissioning like, why do I have Permissioning and HubSpot? But I can't tell Claude to respect a. That to me seems really silly. AI is my own hot take.
00:24:49:20 - 00:25:22:20
Unknown
I have yet to use MCP on anything for that exact reason. I don't trust its lack of governance and also it would be so easy. I would love to connect to MSPs but I can't trust it yet. There's not. It's too wild west and I am risk avoidant and I like to mitigate the risk within my control. And that is one where I'm like, yeah, no, not going to let that happen until proper rules, guardrails, anything frankly.
00:25:22:22 - 00:25:45:21
Unknown
Because yeah, to your point, not everyone should have access to everything. And that's not being stingy as being smart. Not everyone needs to know. I've got read only for everybody, but then you run into the situation where, and rightfully so, right? Like some departments want to have their own fields that they manage, but I can't. I have to set up a custom MCP to allow them to do that.
00:25:45:23 - 00:26:10:15
Unknown
And I have basically my understanding, is like, I might have to have an MCP for each role, which is is so crazy to me. Like, come on. Oh man, this is making me, love pardot more in terms of the granularity of custom roles and yes, and user types and yeah, you know, so many people don't it, but like, they did have a lot of things right before everyone else.
00:26:10:21 - 00:26:26:11
Unknown
I just need the AI vendors to get with reality. I know you guys want to drive adoption, but it's putting a lot of pressure on the people who are trying to like, adopt your platforms. Yeah, because users like, why don't we just turn it all on? And I'm like, well, I don't know, why didn't we ever just turn it all on?
00:26:26:12 - 00:26:51:16
Unknown
Like, the AI doesn't change that. Well, also, I just can make bad exponentially worse. And if you don't have your ducks in order, if you don't have your house in order, it's only going to make it that much worse. Yeah, it could have been a small little fire campfire, and that turns into a wildfire because you let it run rampant and then have the protections in place.
00:26:51:18 - 00:27:14:00
Unknown
Okay, you for tech companies ranging from hypergrowth startups. I can relate so much fun to Salesforce. So like the big bad boys one of the most complex go to market organizations literally on the planet. So many thoughts. Oh, Benioff. What does that range tell you about what actually breaks in ops regardless of the company size? Because we've you've worked at startups as well as the biggest of the big.
00:27:14:00 - 00:27:46:14
Unknown
To be honest, when I joined slack I had a bit of like an existential crisis of like, this company is still growing really quickly without really a great ops or like it was. They were understaffed. A lot of people are trying to like Self-Govern and Southfield. So I was like, man, is ops really? Like, maybe this is challenging my whole mindset around ops, but then you then you kind of see as as they grow and they try to compete with larger organizations that really do have ops together.
00:27:46:14 - 00:28:14:01
Unknown
And it's like, oh, that's what that's why. Like we are everything that you're setting up from like a series A, you know, all the way up to there is getting you prepared for that big fight of like a bigger vendor and the, like more kind of incumbent. And if you don't have your act together, that is painful. And it becomes, like a five alarm fire of like, oh, how do we try to scale and distribute at the level that they're doing?
00:28:14:01 - 00:28:33:09
Unknown
Because they have a lot of their stuff together and they can just turn it on and a lot of cases. And then also, I think at larger orgs, you do need more of that governance in the sense that it's just so much harder to communicate across large groups of people. And we all, even the best communicators, well, miscommunication.
00:28:33:09 - 00:28:59:18
Unknown
People get confused. What? People also are so inundated with slack teams chat, text, email. Where does it end? Comments. So yeah, even if you are a good communicator, half the people don't even read it, which is a dumb issue. And then you throw AI in there and it's like, I really am not reading it, but well, you're really getting the average of what I'm writing and presenting.
00:28:59:20 - 00:29:25:11
Unknown
Yeah, yeah, I think that that's where like in larger orgs, that's where you can sometimes encounter the, the reality of like, oh, ops equals gatekeepers. But I think that there is a lot of value in that as you scale. And I think it's not like we talked about earlier, it's not just people being gatekeepers to be gatekeepers. It's actually to make things work more smoothly and to be able to scale more quickly.
00:29:25:13 - 00:29:49:14
Unknown
You need to have some rules. Everybody. Yeah. To be able to be organized, it's like a community pool. You have lifeguards for a reason. You're not allowed to run for a reason. These are well known things, and you only get upset if they call you out because you're running to the ice cream stand versus if you're actually in danger and need assistance, they're going to help you.
00:29:49:14 - 00:30:09:06
Unknown
And you're like, wow, that was the best thing ever. You existed and saved me. There's a great metaphor there because the best lifeguards are not the ones who are doing these massive saves. The best lifeguards are the ones that can prevent them, and they prevent them through, like seeing patterns like and. Yeah. So I think there's a direct parallel there.
00:30:09:06 - 00:30:40:04
Unknown
We don't need it to be this dramatic. Everybody like I don't need to do like a huge save if we just get the fundamentals in place. Yes. It's like prevent first place, try to do the things before the thing and help. Okay, I digress, I want to get really specific and talk about the actual pieces of tech processes, data that you believe teams must own and I augmented go to market environment and the things that if you had to hand them off, you can no longer do your job.
00:30:40:06 - 00:31:06:09
Unknown
That GTM data layer that we've talked about, like the core systems, especially a CRM in some cases, marketing automation platform like stripe, snowflake, those key places where we have like sources of truth, we can I give those up? Like that would just be so painful for everyone involved and then like legally can become quite the quagmire. So I think we need to keep control of those.
00:31:06:09 - 00:31:33:06
Unknown
I think we need to really be focused on making sure that they're as clean as possible. We don't I don't think we need to own AI, but I think where some of the best positioned to really get the most value out of it, because the most value is going to be like cross-functional automation and more advanced use cases that a lot of users just aren't familiar with the data or, you know, can't coordinate across like groups in that same way.
00:31:33:08 - 00:31:52:23
Unknown
And so I think that that's a huge area that I think we need to show up in. And like a kind of like, thoughtful way. And then I think that process is the trickiest to me. I think I'm like, is still in the world of AI, trying to figure out, like what's worth fussing over versus what we let people learn through experience.
00:31:53:01 - 00:32:08:23
Unknown
I always say, like, people work with me in my career now. It's like sometimes people need to feel the pain. I know that sounds like violent, but sometimes you just gotta let them learn. They've got to feel the heat, not get. We don't want them to get injured. We'll like, prevent that, but let them feel a little bit of the heat and be like, oh, that's hot.
00:32:08:23 - 00:32:37:04
Unknown
I don't really want that. And like, we don't need to argue about it I love that. So I we've got technical here, but I want to get really concrete because I am sick of hearing you. Like yeah I use I look at my thing, I want to know actual use cases, the actual workflows where you're using AI and how it's changing, how you've operated traditionally, AI has become like my little assistant in a lot of ways.
00:32:37:05 - 00:32:56:22
Unknown
Like I have simple use cases, like I have a Google Sheet and I'll have like be chatting with Gemini to like move things around. Obviously I have to double check it. It's not like I'm just letting it do it all for me. But instead of doing like a bunch of manual calculations, it's pretty good. It's pretty well trained on sheets specifically, so I can do a lot of that work.
00:32:56:22 - 00:33:16:23
Unknown
Can I just double check to make sure like, okay, we're good. Like it looks directionally correct, but all the way to like I'm using like Whisper flow and Claude and Notion and then fathom for meetings to just like, pull in notes from like all the conversations that I'm having to help distill down. Okay. Like I don't have to sit there and manually take every note.
00:33:16:23 - 00:33:43:05
Unknown
Now I can have it, like kind of take all of that and then even like point out inconsistencies on like where people are saying different things. So like saving a lot of time and just like day to day stuff, you also can use AI like play functions and Claude to enrich sheets, which is great versus having to like recreate the same enrichment every time or like manually do.
00:33:43:09 - 00:34:00:04
Unknown
I can have a lot of like, like marketing leaders self-serve a lot of their own stuff. Now because they have enough experience and we can set those guardrails in place. But it's not. So like the total wild west of that I'm trying to set up themselves. But we can enable like, here's the playbook and then you just like repeatable, you can just use it.
00:34:00:09 - 00:34:21:02
Unknown
And then we are even looking at things like, AI for like signal orchestration. So when you think about like ABM, we can get all these different signals, but now we can actually have something looking at the data and reacting to what happens. Like, hey, we targeted this account. Now we see an open deal. Where did it go?
00:34:21:05 - 00:34:40:06
Unknown
Where are our assumptions correct that this was an ICP fit or not? And something where I felt a pain point in the past with a lot of like the different ABM vendors. This is either a black box where you don't really know how it's thinking, or it's you can't give it, or even if you can see, you can't give it feedback.
00:34:40:08 - 00:34:59:20
Unknown
And so I'm like, well, that's not really helpful either because it's not learning from all the new data that's coming in, at least not in the way that we want it to. So probably so yeah, we're looking at I call it like our signal house, but we're trying to build out, basically our own little ABM tool. Again, not not systems, not business load bearing.
00:34:59:20 - 00:35:25:13
Unknown
Like we can live without it, but it's just like a little more magic on top to kind of challenge some of our assumptions and really see the performance and like, learn and iterate from there. That's awesome. Yeah. I am a huge proponent of glass boxes, not black boxes. Yeah, nothing bothers me more. A great example and I'll say Einstein annoyed the hell out of me because you couldn't tell where the signals were coming from and you couldn't tweak it.
00:35:25:14 - 00:35:43:07
Unknown
And it it was a hard thing to prove, even to finance, to be like, yes, we should purchase this. Okay. What does it do? Good question. And all it takes is one lead getting surface to sales. And it's and they talk with them and they're like actually this is an agency. You know it's not relevant at all. And they don't trust it.
00:35:43:07 - 00:36:05:03
Unknown
They're like I don't this use it said I wasn't ICP. It didn't explain why I don't trust the behavioral school. Yes. Yeah. It has to pass through before all of that. But yes, I attempt to be overly redundant in terms of some of my logic to catch the things. Well, it's not always the most efficient, but it's definitely the most comprehensive, for better and for worse.
00:36:05:05 - 00:36:35:11
Unknown
Okay. We been talking about all the different things. However data hygiene once again unsexy. However, it is a thankless chore we've always done. And does I solve anything to do with data hygiene or does it actually just raise the stakes? Making your really bad data at scale be a larger liability than it even used to be? And it's already still, I mean, the amount of duplicates and so many people CRM it boggles the mind.
00:36:35:12 - 00:36:52:13
Unknown
I think it comes down to that permissioning piece where departments can own their own fields, and to a certain extent, we have to like, trust them to operate on their own. Right. Like we need to have like certain boundaries with them about like, hey, if you go and you completely screw it up, we are here to support you.
00:36:52:13 - 00:37:14:11
Unknown
But, I mean, we can drop everything, so we're gonna have to, like, still look at like, stack rank based on priority and all this stuff. So I think there is that I think when it comes to the more like core fields, I think what AI is helpful with is analyzing what's there. I found it to be helpful. You know, it's like you, you stop to like, manually export all this stuff in HubSpot and then try to like, do a bunch of mapping.
00:37:14:11 - 00:37:38:18
Unknown
And an AI can help you do that, like more quickly. I still would not trust it to totally operate on its own, but at least I can do a lot of that, like work to get to like a V1. And then you can always adjust as you go. So I think that that actually helps. Like I actually I have cloud looking right now into our HubSpot instance, and every day it's doing some basic checks on like what are integrations sending?
00:37:38:20 - 00:38:00:07
Unknown
Are there any weird data anomalies coming in, you know, deal movement? Like are any deals hanging out or seem like something bizarre? Like it's like another set of eyes to help me make sure that our data hygiene remains good. But I'm also not. I'm not telling it to go in and change anything. And these still need that human in the loop to have that judgment in my team.
00:38:00:07 - 00:38:34:11
Unknown
Yeah, I love that you're using it as observability because when I was in-house, the first hour of my every single day was just admin hygiene, observability. I had every list that would, if there was someone appearing there or there was a sync error here. Every single thing. That was my first thing to tackle, because that's broken. Either there's a larger story that needs to be addressed or something's wrong, but that's also me being overly duplicative and having all the checks and balances in place so that I can know exactly and pinpoint where the problems are.
00:38:34:13 - 00:38:51:16
Unknown
But I would have loved it. Are help helper to do that for me? Give herself more credit? That's smart. I would much rather deal with something when it's a tiny bleed and have that conversation than have it be like you're saying. You've figured out your database has been duplicated, and then that's going to take hours and weeks to fix.
00:38:51:18 - 00:39:11:08
Unknown
Yeah, I you saw like in part I'd have a bunch of, like just lists that would be looking for anomalies. But, but so that takes more cognitive load even with that to be like okay what all and then trying to like stitch together like different use cases of why things might be different ways. So I think I can help with like simplifying that.
00:39:11:08 - 00:39:37:00
Unknown
But I still think it's a good practice. Oh highly recommend. And I can always tell when someone doesn't do it. Brought to you by our sponsors. If there's one thing that's followed me at every stop in my martech career, it's trying to get good data into the hands of marketers. That's why I'm so excited to tell you about our sponsor, High Touch, a leading composable CTP, and I decisioning platform companies like Domino's, chime, Aritzia, and PetSmart.
00:39:37:00 - 00:39:57:18
Unknown
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00:39:57:20 - 00:40:26:21
Unknown
And now back to the hot seat. Okay. We've been talking about how you've been thinking about the existing AI tools and how you've been leveraging them. But everyone is out to market looking for their next AI platform. And I love evaluations and procurement processes. Super nerdy, I'm aware. But what is a question for an AI native tool for your own go to market that people are not asking, and it's actually a huge risk?
00:40:27:02 - 00:40:47:12
Unknown
A few things I always need to be able to give AI feedback. To me, that's like my number one thing. If I can't, then kind of what's the point? Yes. You know, like because I could do that if I built it myself. And then also, I feel like you're missing a lot of the benefit of AI, which like is a little bit more of like kind of like that machine learning element.
00:40:47:14 - 00:41:03:05
Unknown
So to me, that's a big one. Like there was an ABM platform I was looking at the other day and they were like, yeah, we do AI. And I'm like, okay, tell me more. And they're like, you know, well, we just have the scoring. And I'm like, well, can you show me, like, how does it work? And they're like, no, that's our secret sauce.
00:41:03:05 - 00:41:21:21
Unknown
I'm like, okay, cool, hard pass. Yeah. What if your secret sauce isn't relevant to my business? I'll like, well, if we roll it out and that's like, actually your scoring, like, needs some adjustments to fit our business model. And they're like, yeah, we can't do that. And Jack, they ghosted me. That is like running something that goes there.
00:41:21:21 - 00:41:44:09
Unknown
Like you want to do something. I know they're like, we can bring this out name and shame. It seem I. Oh, okay. Okay. Good to know. Yeah. Well, just how do you market yourself as AI and you're benefiting from AI? But I can't even do, like, the basic. Like I understand why you can't like, like AI is the tax basis of it.
00:41:44:09 - 00:42:03:19
Unknown
And like you need to get it so that it's it's going to be consistent. I get that like you can't have the wild west of like giving feedback. I can't even tell it like, hey, actually this deal it was marked closed one. But it was like under the amount of revenue that we were targeting. And so like, maybe that tells us something about like this, you know, we start to see a pattern over time.
00:42:03:19 - 00:42:32:03
Unknown
Like, I can't do like basic stuff like that's not good. But I wonder if we can reconstruct it where it's like, you have closed one reasons to like. No one's ever really needed that one. But I wonder if that could be like a feedback loop approach. I don't know. Well don't ask that because you'll get ghosted. And no, it wouldn't be the first time I've been ghosted by a vendor and also wouldn't be the second time I've been asked.
00:42:32:05 - 00:42:50:19
Unknown
I think you're doing competitive research and hanging up on me, and I'm like, guys, I'm just trying to understand, trying to use it. The one other piece I think is worth mentioning is what is the opportunity cost? And this has always been the case, but I think it's like turbo charged with AI. There are a lot of vendors out there.
00:42:50:19 - 00:43:08:17
Unknown
You know, the new AI, CRM, the new AI marketing automation platform, and I want them to succeed. Like, I think they're doing a lot of cool stuff and they're challenging a lot of the legacy vendors or like, I guess, legacy, the incumbent vendors. But I think their legacy, their dinosaur.
00:43:08:19 - 00:43:31:09
Unknown
Some of them are trying to I think they serve a purpose, and I hope that they ultimately win. But I think that in Ops, we need to really look at the benefit versus the cost. A tool like HubSpot, they're trying to implement AI. They're again there, but I would say it's not quite the same as like the platforms that are built like post, I quote unquote.
00:43:31:11 - 00:43:51:13
Unknown
Yeah, it's the difference between being native, like AI native and oh no, we have to build a semantic layer in order to navigate and add on domain to be. Yeah, yeah. And I think my point was the benefit needs to be there because a lot of your users are used to the legacy tools and they know them like the back of their hand.
00:43:51:18 - 00:44:11:15
Unknown
So don't forget the enablement cost is going to take to move them that that ROI better be there to do that. Mass migration of people and processes and all the stuff. So to me, it's not it's not good enough to just say where I native. Cool. What does that actually mean? Yes. And also, are you just an open AI wrapper?
00:44:11:17 - 00:44:35:21
Unknown
Yeah. Which very many are. Okay, I want to take a step back. We've been getting into the nitty gritty. I want to look at our greater industry and talk about trends and things that you're seeing. Before I do that, the next question I think we already answered, unless you have a particular response you would like to say, we've touched upon it, but there's a lot of anxiety in in the ops community right now.
00:44:35:21 - 00:44:58:02
Unknown
People are worried as coming for their jobs. I mean, look at any layoff report, it's coming for everybody in some capacity. And you've take a really specific counter position that ops practitioners are about to become more essential than ever before and not less. And I want you to make the case, and I want to tell you to tell people why they should actually be helpful.
00:44:58:04 - 00:45:37:09
Unknown
I think that there's pressure in ops right now to consolidate. So I think you see a lot of like I think companies are now trying to push everyone under revolves finally, whether they're doing that thoughtfully or not. Questionable. So I do I do want to acknowledge that. I think, though, that I honestly would be more worried if I was a practitioner right now and go to market than ops, specifically, assuming that you're in like a strategic ops role, like if you're like the adult in the room for go to market in a lot of cases, that's like helping orchestrate things, helping make sure we can track like what all is happening, like growing systems
00:45:37:09 - 00:46:09:08
Unknown
that help grow revenue. I think you're in a very good position because you're needed that. A lot of people don't have that expertise. And I think, you know, if if we really are talking about potential like campaign managers being replaced by AI, who's going to orchestrate them, I can't think of anyone better than ops to do that. And even if you end up with like a leader that's orchestrating agents, I think they're still going to need a lot of like that track ability, scalability, like a lot of the key tenants of operations.
00:46:09:10 - 00:46:27:19
Unknown
I do think if you are in like campaign ops, I think that you need to take a hard look at how you're showing up. If you are just executing, I think you could be at risk. But I think if you are really helping the team drive outcomes, you know that you can show that. I think that that's different.
00:46:27:20 - 00:46:45:11
Unknown
And I would classify that as more strategic and you're a little. So I'm encouraging a lot of people to move towards the more strategic AI, high impact like kind of provable ROI roles. And we're talking about that kind of ops. I think we're in a great spot. I think there's super high demand, but you kind of have to slice it.
00:46:45:13 - 00:47:10:03
Unknown
If you're just kind of sending emails, then I wholeheartedly agree. Like AI is not going to take your job. It's going to take someone who knows how to use AI. You're going to be replaced by someone who knows how to use AI, doing the same job and doing it quicker, better, faster. If you're campaign ops, maybe be really good to learn broader industry things, or maybe get a little bit more technical, or maybe start to learn CSS.
00:47:10:03 - 00:47:37:03
Unknown
Maybe just it's all about kind of being able to be indispensable from multiple different angles. And that's not to say burn yourself out, learn all the things, but it's helpful if you're able to have your fingers in a couple different pies. I think there's that. And I think also it's like, I'm, you know, a campaign ops person I can launch, you know, can send like 500 campaigns in a year.
00:47:37:05 - 00:47:58:04
Unknown
How can I do that even more efficiently? And how do I help drive even better outcomes? Like, those are the questions you want to ask. And they're in more of like the strategy. See less of like the Executional see it because hopefully you can delegate some of the execution to AI or automation, whatever it is. I feel like AI is like a little overdone in some cases, like sometimes just automation.
00:47:58:09 - 00:48:28:22
Unknown
Oh, it's almost always just automation. I think you get to your point. What if instead of sending 500 campaigns, what if I sent 100 yet we yielded to the results and it's like, how do we think more efficiently, segment appropriately, really focus on customization within those personas, you name it. So I did want to touch on that because I think that there's a lot of hype around building everything custom, and I think that a lot of our tenants around that still apply.
00:48:29:03 - 00:48:46:17
Unknown
Like, I was talking with a marketer the other day and they're like, I set up this really sophisticated ABM landing page automation, and it's all in cloud code and it's all this. On the other, there are a lot of tools out there that do that. So so again, it comes back to opportunity cost. I did want to touch on that because I feel like not enough people are talking about that.
00:48:46:17 - 00:49:05:20
Unknown
Like I you burn three weeks creating a custom landing page builder. You could have bought it for, you know, 10,000 bucks total for the year. Then like what? What are we doing here? Oh for sure. I think a lot of just cost analysis of like, okay, if I build this, it's the same concept of build versus buy in the bigger, broader sense.
00:49:06:01 - 00:49:32:15
Unknown
Yes, PRS, you name it, CRM. Sometimes other people have done a better job, and it better to be able to ask them to service it. I want to talk about another myth, and that is, the more and more tech you have, the more mature your company is. And because you've worked inside some of the most sophisticated go to market orgs in the industry, did stack size actually correlate with performance?
00:49:32:15 - 00:49:53:10
Unknown
What did the best run orgs have at the bloated ones? Didn't tell us all the secrets. Yeah, I think I think my answer surprises people on this, which is like, I love marketing, technology and just like revenue technology, but I don't want all of it. I think it's a good like, I don't want to add stuff just to add it.
00:49:53:15 - 00:50:18:14
Unknown
I try to be really careful about like, what is the ROI? What is the opportunity cost? If we migrate to the system versus keep and like workaround some limitations of the current one. Like what you know, like I think that's that's huge. I think that regardless of size, honestly the companies that do well have those ops, people who are asking those questions and they are very critical about cool.
00:50:18:14 - 00:50:50:10
Unknown
There's a new CMO and they want to migrate from, you know, Pardot to Marketo. Don't get this ROI. Yeah. What is ROI? And like and a lot of those people are not empowered. And like that's a whole other topic. But that's the pattern I see when when companies are moving very efficiently and everything has its purpose and they're not overspending or over bloated, it's when someone's been in that seat or multiple seats in the team to ask those questions and be that strategic partner to the leadership.
00:50:50:12 - 00:51:15:10
Unknown
Those are the healthiest orgs, for sure. I love when someone comes in is like, great, we should consider reconsider. I'm like, why? What are the needs that our current system doesn't offer and don't agree on? There are some bad systems and you should migrate, but that is not the why. Oh why is what are we not getting from our tool in our tech stack that it's no longer accommodating our business?
00:51:15:10 - 00:51:34:01
Unknown
Yeah, I once joined a company and they were like they had a new marketer. They're like, we really need this. You know, it was like pre AI, but it was like this customizable, innovative landing page builder. And I'm like, cool. Like let's, let's demo it. What's going on? And then I looked and I'm like, we have 11 tools that can create landing pages.
00:51:34:03 - 00:51:49:23
Unknown
We have 11. Oh so like how do we like how does they had a how does that even happen. And they were looking at a 12. Well, so part of it is the whole like and like do you want fries with that martech platform thing that's gone on over the last few years? There's a little bit of that, right?
00:51:49:23 - 00:52:04:06
Unknown
Like some of them, when they bought it, it didn't have a landing page builder and then they added it, but no one asked for it. And so no one's using it and like, yeah, we're bundled in automatically. Yeah. It's like when you get like you pay for a landline even though you're only paying for your internet and it's just because they want to boost their numbers.
00:52:04:06 - 00:52:29:16
Unknown
Like, we know how this works guys. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. But yeah, well, a lot of it also is just like they did not have a properly staffed operations team. And so people just keep adding stuff and no one's paying attention to like, hey, what's the the cost efficiency of our stack and what is everyone using it for? So I'm a big fan of a centralized like Center of Excellence ops team.
00:52:29:21 - 00:52:54:04
Unknown
I have yet to see decentralized work. Granted, center of Excellence also cannot work too, but that is usually a cultural problem, not a system problem. But I guess it's to that question. Sorry to ask one that's not on here, just made me think of it like as it relates to the most successful orgs you've worked up, what was their model for how operations worked?
00:52:54:06 - 00:53:24:16
Unknown
Center of excellence? I think two things. Okay, I think when you already have a good foundation, it can look different based on the people and see. So the people in C are like really excellent. You can trust them. With AI, not everything has to be centralized, but if you don't have the basics in place, then you run a lot of risk that you're going to get someone like as the team grows, or you get someone in C who is not as experienced and skilled and knowledgeable in these areas, and they're going to go in and screw up stuff.
00:53:24:22 - 00:53:41:22
Unknown
I think having that operational system, regardless of what it looks like, that's the key and people need to know about it. And people need to live within it. And that typically looks like the centralized model, right? Well, and same goes for I think, cross-training, like just because you do different functions on the same team, someone deserves a vacation.
00:53:42:01 - 00:54:07:08
Unknown
And if a fire happens, we should all at least have some semblance of knowledge to know how to figure it out. We might not be perfect or as quick as, you know, the singular expert, but let's, Yeah, I'll be able to fish for ourselves. Yeah, robots go to market. This whole function has evolved a lot in terms of what it means, how it's defined.
00:54:07:08 - 00:54:32:12
Unknown
And I think that's also a very similar issue that Mops and martech have gone through, where there is no, to say, center of excellence. There's no core definition, there's no core. This because everything is so adjustable and flexible and adaptable and depends on your business structure and how many hires you can have. And I'm curious, where do you see the next few years for rev ups in particular?
00:54:32:12 - 00:54:51:11
Unknown
And I'm going to group and mar ops under wrap ops because I think they're just so closely related and really should just be called ops. But that's all for some dark color. Do you think they're going to finally have a seat at the strategic table, or is it going to continue to just be that sublayer, for example, under a CRO?
00:54:51:13 - 00:55:12:14
Unknown
It's a great question. I certainly hope so. I think I do think with I think we're becoming more and more strategic, especially if we can off like use AI ourselves to offload a lot of stuff that like it's just taking up a lot of time but is not the most valuable. I think the challenge that I see is that, like you said, the very loose definition.
00:55:12:16 - 00:55:28:12
Unknown
I think that creates a world where stakeholders don't know what to expect, and then that creates a further world where the company doesn't really know how to staff it, and you end up being like 1 or 2 people that are like, hey, we need the staffing. And everyone's like, well, do you really like what? What are other companies doing?
00:55:28:14 - 00:55:54:08
Unknown
Yeah. And so I think that's the biggest kind of like danger I see out there. So I do think like collectively we got to get our like act together on like what is the recommended staffing. Of course AI throws a whole other, kind of like wrench in the process. Oh, but I do think like I remember a few years ago, it was like in marketing ops, if you have ten stakeholders, you need at least one ops person and you kind of could span from there.
00:55:54:08 - 00:56:13:08
Unknown
That was like the kind of like recommended thing. I think we need something similar. And rev ops, I haven't really seen it out there because that's going to make or break, right. If we just get so stuck and just supporting stuff that we can't be strategic. It doesn't matter what the job title says, like we're living in, in the reality of like we just don't have the time.
00:56:13:13 - 00:56:41:06
Unknown
So I think staffing is key to that destiny. I do think that we have a huge potential and we just have to take it. But I think that, yeah, we got to figure out some benchmarks. Yes, benchmarks are definitely necessary. I also I have a hot take and I think it should be its own ops department, as in, the CEO should actually oversee the ops team, and then you actually have a separation of church and state.
00:56:41:08 - 00:57:00:20
Unknown
You have your center of excellence and the sales team, the, you know, the revenue org, the marketing team, you name it. Those are your your customers, those are your clients. And it's more consultative than anything because let's be honest, even in-house, you're a consultant, whether you realize it or not in this role. And so that's like my dream state.
00:57:00:20 - 00:57:24:21
Unknown
I have mapped it out many times and made recommendations for it many a times. It never really came to fruition. But it should exist. I agree with you. No, I agree with you. And also that separation I think is really required because you get to in the in the weeds and or get overwritten just because of someone's seat at their own table.
00:57:24:23 - 00:57:51:23
Unknown
And hopefully we see that table soon because we deserve it. One of the last questions we haven't addressed it, but it's mainly because it can't exist without all of the things we've talked about. Attribution. It is forever an unsolved problem mystery. It's mystical, multi-touch, incremental, you name it. And for as long as I can remember, it's you can't do anything with it.
00:57:52:04 - 00:58:13:03
Unknown
So I as opposed to fix it because it is clearly a wizard. And from that, do you think we're actually closer to an answer solution, or are we just continuing to play dress up with our similar broken models? I have a hot take on attribution, which is like, I just don't. I think people focus on it too much.
00:58:13:08 - 00:58:38:05
Unknown
I think that it's never going to be a perfect science. I think every time we try to get almost get there, there's some kind of new technology or policy that rolls out that kind of blows it up anyways. By cookies, by pixels. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. My take on attribution overall, which informs my opinion on this, is that like attribution should be used directionally for like channels and different playbooks and things like that.
00:58:38:05 - 00:59:03:18
Unknown
And like maybe you can even get down to like different flavors of campaigns. But I think trying to overindex and make it this like perfect science is a mistake. I don't think even I can figure it out. I had someone ask me there, like if someone is on an incognito browser on their phone and they go to our website, you know how can I dismiss, like, how can I figure out who that is and give them attribution?
00:59:03:18 - 00:59:21:06
Unknown
If they then call and schedule a meeting and then it's like, what are we trying to do here? Like it's just it's like there's a dark funnel. You do know that, right? There it is. Yeah. And I think we need to figure out how to workaround it. Like when I joined, I added to our demo request form, like where did you hear about us?
00:59:21:08 - 00:59:45:20
Unknown
That simple is probably one of the more reliable pieces of information you're going to get on attribution. The zero party form will tell me exactly what I want to know, so I think we need to get comfortable with that. I think that attribution, like I hate seeing a marketing org focusing too much on attribution, because what that tells me is that they're having a an optics problem about what they're doing.
00:59:45:22 - 01:00:09:00
Unknown
I don't want attribution to be the solution for how marketing is proving that they're doing something. I think everyone should be driving towards revenue. And like, that's a I don't want people infighting about who gets credit for different stuff. To me that, yeah, that's a larger organizational problem. Yeah. The attribution will not solve, even if you like, figure out the most amazing thing.
01:00:09:00 - 01:00:27:14
Unknown
And yeah, I don't think the AI is going to be able to figure it out because a lot of the data is just in that dark funnel. Maybe I'm just a cruel marketer, but I remove every UTM and open things in incognito. I am that person. Yeah, because guess what? Marketing is art and science. But it's mainly art.
01:00:27:16 - 01:00:48:20
Unknown
Like there isn't. There's a magic to it, and the magic really is. If you want, you have to have good product. If you have a good product, your marketing is never going to really get you far in the long term. Overcome that. Yeah, you can overcome it for a while. Money is, it works. But there is a there's an upper limit.
01:00:48:22 - 01:01:09:14
Unknown
That said, you cannot rely on attribution to track magic. You cannot rely on attribution to have this type of conversation where it's like, oh, we learned that this one tool ghosted me. And for me, that's an automatic red flag. I'm like, you know what I mean? I've had number of I've submitted so many demo requests for so many things and never heard back.
01:01:09:14 - 01:01:26:09
Unknown
And I'm like, you know, it's an ops problem, but it also means it's a company problem because you didn't support your ops team or create one in order to be able to navigate these things. And that's an automatic like, yeah, you're just qualified. All these things, it's we get reduced down to like, it's never going to be fixable.
01:01:26:11 - 01:01:51:19
Unknown
It's it's never solvable. There's a magic to marketing that as human I can't predict humanity. It can tell you the average of humanity. And that is where a social science comes into play. Like economics. You can't actually predict it. I mean, it's same example of the magic of baseball, like the batting average for baseball. It's not a very high number.
01:01:51:21 - 01:02:11:14
Unknown
And you can be the best and you're not hitting it. Most of the time. So I can only build upon what you've built. And that's the infrastructure that we've been talking about this whole time. Without it, nothing is going to function the way you want, and it's going to be kind of messy and murky. And I don't know, the messy middle that is martech.
01:02:11:16 - 01:02:33:00
Unknown
I also think with AI there's going to be more like slop than ever and more like turbocharged email and phone calling. What is your LinkedIn look like? Mine as well. But I think that that's even going to throw more of a wrench into attribution, because a lot of it's going to be relationships. Like, I think event marketing is going to blow up.
01:02:33:02 - 01:02:59:15
Unknown
I think it is. It has been like communities are huge right now. I mean, I'm biased. I work that, we work. So I community's always been huge. But yes, I think the human component to everything is what nothing else can do. Like the humanity of us all is what's going to be the answer. And if you haven't, you can try to like learn Python.
01:02:59:19 - 01:03:29:17
Unknown
But also those patterns get outdated real quick too. Yeah, and on that note, Sarah, this has been exactly the conversation I wanted to have. Very specific, not a hype field, you know, buzz word I pilled, which makes me want to puke all of the just nasty new phrases that people are using. And I think it was really, genuinely useful to to talk through with someone who has operated at the scale that some dream of.
01:03:29:19 - 01:03:50:02
Unknown
And you've given a clear eyed eagle view of just where ops is headed and more importantly, what to tactically do about it. But before I let you go, who is someone we should have on the podcast? Ooh, that's a great one. I would say, Molly Boden Steiner, I hope I said her last name right. I like almost never say her like she is Molly to me.
01:03:50:04 - 01:04:13:00
Unknown
She is, ahead of Rev ops who, like I look up to a lot. She's amazing. Okay. And then just an introduction. Well, actually, Carrie Pickle Simon is another one, and she would have a lot to say on attribution. She is an attribution genius and who I like follow to figure out what to do with attribution at any given moment.
01:04:13:00 - 01:04:35:22
Unknown
Like, especially now and then. Mallory Lee is who I'm thinking of. Oh is another like amazing. So let me know if like I can try to make the connection. Thank you so much. Where can folks find you? Follow along. Because I know this is just the a small glimpse into all the hot takes and thoughts you've got. Yes, Sarah mcnamara.com is probably the most central place you can find all my links on there.
01:04:36:00 - 01:05:00:20
Unknown
And then also I work at vector. So vector ico I contribute to like the blog a bunch and there are other like amazing marketers on there, just sharing a lot of knowledge too. Awesome. Well, thank you so much. Thank you for having me. This is exactly the kind of conversation our industry needs. Not the hype, not the panic, just someone who actually has done the work and is telling the truth.
01:05:00:22 - 01:05:26:01
Unknown
Thank you Sarah for being so specific and generous with your time and answers. I feel like we've covered a lot of ground and this is the type of stuff you can't just get from a LinkedIn carousel or meme, so be sure to share this one. For the ops practitioner. Feeling overwhelmed? Your job is not disappearing. It's upgrading. So start with clean data, clear processes, and the tooling actually touches revenue.
01:05:26:03 - 01:05:53:05
Unknown
Find your people. And remember, I can only amplify what's already working. It cannot rescue what's already broken. Thanks for tuning in to making sense of MarTech. Special thank you to Christine Murtagh, who edited this episode, and an extra special thank you to Jenna Carter for believing in this passion project means business. Stay curious.