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Brian Strauss: Welcome to another episode of collective wisdom by demand collective. Today I'm joined by Chrissy Saunders, CEO and Co. Founder of CS. 2. Marketing, a marketing apps agency that builds revenue growth, architecture to power, efficient predictable revenue growth.
Brian Strauss: Chrissy also serves as an advisor to Cincari Chili Piper, and also as co-founder and board member to women in revenue. Her extensive experience in demand and marketing operations is demonstrated through 14 years of successful marketing roles. Thanks for joining us, Chrissy. How you doing today?
Crissy Saunders: Good. Yeah. It's sunny here and
Crissy Saunders: San Jose. So it's been a bit rainy and dried, but it's nice this morning. So I'm feeling good.
Crissy Saunders: Yeah, feeling healthy. Yeah. Yeah. We just had the gnarly storm down here in San Diego everything was flooded all over social media. The whole thing is just like rivers where streets used to be.
Crissy Saunders: Wow! That's so. I feel like, that's not very. That's pretty uncommon for San Diego. Right? Yeah, we're we're normally like, really nice year round. So whenever we get like something, it's like chaos, even a few screen. Yeah, I love San Diego every I've been there a few times in the past, and every time I'm like I should live here.
Brian Strauss: but so kind of digging into things a little bit, you began as a marketing coordinator at adobe you made the jump to marketing operations and marketing, not adobe yet. So very early on Marketo. Oh, okay, so that's yeah. So maybe you could tell me a little bit about. You know, marketing. Ops
Brian Strauss: has changed significantly since then. That was 2010 when you join, and I think you took on in 2,012 like you know? What? What, how is the landscape changed? How was the role changed? And and what was it like being in those early days of Marketo?
Yeah,
Crissy Saunders: it. Things have definitely changed and involved, I think. back then. Everything was quite new, you know, working at Marketo. I think that
Crissy Saunders: it was nice because we were in an environment where
Crissy Saunders: we, you know, is a market automation, you know, platform company. And so we're evangelizing. Why, it's important to use marketing on automation and everything was pretty like rigorous and like mail down button up at market. At that time I feel like
Crissy Saunders: It was a very great place to start a career just because everyone was really like striving to do their best, like, really, top of their game worked around a lot of great marketers like John Miller now. And they just, you know, it's it was a great kind of incubator for people who are in were interested in marketing, but also
Crissy Saunders: just early on knew the importance of marketing operations. I mean, it was their target market. So it was. It was great, because, you. You know you got the resources or people knew the importance of like what you were doing.
Crissy Saunders: I started there like kind of like you said, as a general kind of marketer. At first it was like an internship for a few months, and then there, you know, the other didn't. A good enough job. No like you can stay on full time and during that time I was like really interested in Marquette and using it. And there wasn't a lot of like training or anything like, I think now it's
Crissy Saunders: more common to kind of. you know, find resources out there and things like that. But there wasn't at the time, especially in marketing Ops tues like we were almost evangelizing like what marketing was. Ops was as a role. There was some, you know, people in it that manage systems like that, like Eloqua.
Crissy Saunders: there were, you know, like a marketing kind of coordinator or email. They kind of called them email marketers at the time. Cause that's really what you use those platforms to do is really just sending email. There wasn't a lot more you could do with it until
Crissy Saunders: kinda like the Eloquas and marketers came out, and then they were introducing things, you know, like lead scoring and prioritization. You know, lead capture for forms, and it was very inbound centric, though, so I would say.
Crissy Saunders: and they turned more outbound. Actually, when you wanted to move up market. You go into Enterprise. But it was the you know it. The landscape for Mar Tech was quite small. You know. You go to the way that people bought tech back. Then was you go to a trade show, and you would have maybe, like
Crissy Saunders: the 10, or, you know, depending on salesforce is huge. So that was where you saw. Maybe, like. you know, the hundreds of sponsors there and stuff like that, because there was just a lot of different companies targeting more tech and sales tech. When we look at more tech. Specifically.
Crissy Saunders: it was pretty small. You know what you could do with it. And so Marketa was looked at as very advanced. Which is, which is cool to be kind of at the forefront of that, and i
Crissy Saunders: I very much saw like an opportunity of like, oh, hey! If I get good at using Marqueto at market like, that's such a really good experience. So
Crissy Saunders: I kind of like use some of our university videos like on the weekends, I would, you know, lean into a few of my colleagues and kind of, you know, be like, Oh, can I build out lists for your programs? Can I start working on some of the programs? I also wrote a lot of content at the time, like we all wrote content. So some of the definitive guides, like we all contributed, and I like that because I was an English minor in college, and I can kind of flex some of my writing skills and stuff like that. But
Crissy Saunders: III just saw kind of an opportunity there. And I had some great mentors and a boss at the time. And yeah, so went just more into operation. So a and cause I was kind of unsure on what to do. I'm like, oh, I really like marketing, and I like, demand Jen. But you know I'm kind. Looks like I'm kind of good at this like marketing Ops thing. And so I kind of doubled down and and went into that. But
Crissy Saunders: the I think the pace of technology since then, and what you like, how many tools there are. And you know.
Crissy Saunders: data sources and things like that. I think the expectations have just like advanced, and what that means for marketing offices just and Revs. In general is like, there's these expectations that you can do at all. So why aren't you. You know where. Back? Then it was like, we need to do lead, score and find data. Let's just go out and purchase some data on accounts who are using our competitors. Let's then see how we can apply that to
Crissy Saunders: them. Or, Hey, we want to do direct mail. Okay, we'll figure out teaching this. Add on and doing some of these things in Marquette with Pers personally use the Urls, and I'll just develop my own direct mail program. But it was expected that.
Crissy Saunders: you know, things weren't so automated in advance, and in some ways a lot of that complexity of all the different platforms that you can use. And what you can do has set expectations really high for what marketing apps can do. But we're still dealing with a lot of the same problems like bad data.
Crissy Saunders: band aids like tech debt. Just I think because there's this pressure to
Crissy Saunders: advance everything. So I would say that that's a little bit of like, how kind of I got started there, what it was like working there and but also how things have changed. And I think we're going through another kind of evolution of more tech to you, with just the advancement of AI, and like, what does that mean for
Crissy Saunders: what marketers can do? But the problem. I think there's this false perception of like, oh, you can get advanced as advance of the using art artificial intelligence. But why you still having like issues just trying to operationalize a funnel project. And you know, they're not directly correlated, like, we still have the crux of everything data and OP infrastructure and things like that. That isn't just going to be built with a robot or AI or anything.
Brian Strauss: Umhm, yeah. And so like. do you by chance. And I know I feel like marketing apps. People have, like always have like a favorite. Do you have a favorite like a Mara Marketo versus Hubspot versus
Crissy Saunders: definitely not output but we've always been quite agnostic at the beginning. There was Marquette, just because of my
Crissy Saunders: my background with it, and having birthday.
Crissy Saunders: Yeah. And like, I think that everyone kind of like, oh, you can do so much with it. And you really can. Ii would say, now, between market and Hubspot, I feel like they're both getting quite like on par with each other. Especially in the last year, with Hubspot, we actually did a podcast about like Hubspot recently, and how they've made some huge like massive changes that can make them. You know.
Crissy Saunders: you know, on board with Marketo, or maybe even, you know, more advanced. So yeah, II think I don't really have like a favorite. But I would say, those are like the top 2. And then
Brian Strauss: oh, we lost you for a second here.
Crissy Saunders: because I think that Hubspot is just a like, because they're you know, their own company. They haven't been bought, or anything like that, like they will, you know, continue to advance, and they've done a lot of the build versus buy type, expansion, and the rate of which they deliver like new features, and things like that is like kind of incredible, in my opinion. So
Crissy Saunders: we'll see. But they're on part kind of. I feel like maybe to surpass market that like they'll try and get more advancements out. But it still feels like we're kind of like living in the past sometimes. But there's a lot of great enterprise level features that Marketo has to around like programs and scaling those and
Crissy Saunders: but yeah, we'll we'll see how it goes. But both both I don't have favorite, both great but you know some of the other players like
Crissy Saunders: maybe let we use them a little bit less. For specific reasons. You ever watch a rest of development?
Crissy Saunders: No, he's like I love all my children equally, and then it cuts to her earlier in the day, and she's like, I don't care for him sometimes we but majority of our clients use those, too. So
Crissy Saunders: yeah, so so we're along this journey, you know, you did like a stint, I think Agari doing to manage. And there.
Brian Strauss: Where along this journey did you decide? It was time to take on something like founding your own agency. Right? Cs, 2. Marketing is everywhere. I see it in marketing. Ops, like, it's you guys are constantly having conversations around
Brian Strauss: things like the role of marketing Ops in today's marketing organizations being beyond just an order taker or a tactician and really playing a strategic role in an org. Where did you decide along that? That it was time to start that.
Crissy Saunders: Yeah. Good question. So to to your point, to like how things have evolved, maybe is kind of how I could talk about the evolution of CST as well.
Crissy Saunders: and I share domain the Cs 2 marketing. We're thinking about changing it because we dropped the marking. We're just Cs 2 now. But the but everyone, if they call us that, that's totally fine. But the so
Crissy Saunders: I think
Crissy Saunders: so on my background. You and you noted that I like went into a demand generation role. I had a global role prior to that at a company called Jive. And I, you know, set up all of their operations there. And ran a team and supported a team of global marketers. That's where I met my husband, Charlie. He was working there at the time, and he was in a mia, and we kind of have, like a long distance
Crissy Saunders: relationship and marriage. And then. During that time II moved to a new company because I thought it'd be weird to work with my husband. I was looking for a change, I think at the time
Crissy Saunders: I was pretty strategic in my role, but I was still on this like grappling like, do I want to go to the Cmo route or like.
Crissy Saunders: do I want to stay more in operations and
Crissy Saunders: and we still struggle with it today around, like, if does operations have like a ceiling or anything like that. But I so I still feel like at the time operations didn't get the respect that, like those other departments got and
Crissy Saunders: I like was really interested in the marketing side and knew how to do it. Anyway, I knew what the best programs were running, anyway, because II always provide all the data and analytics and so forth. So
Crissy Saunders: I took on more of a demand, general. But I was doing operations. I was doing? Demand. Chen, I was like running that Cr team. I then was like, almost like pseudo kind of Revs cause we needed sales operations. I was doing a lot
Crissy Saunders: and
Crissy Saunders: I kind of got like a bit burnt out. But the one thing that I really realized was like, I like
Crissy Saunders: just providing
Crissy Saunders: value to to clients and problem solving. And I didn't really particularly like
Crissy Saunders: some like office politics and things like that. And I wanted to kind of, you know, maybe try something new. I was looking for something with a bit more. Flexibility. I feel like anyone podcasts like talk about before. But
Crissy Saunders: I was just going through something personally at the time with my dad, and he was sick and I kind of wanted to have more flexibility to like work from home. Which now is like what everyone does mostly but I was always having to commute like an hour and back like each day to some of my jobs. So I, yeah, and then Charlie was moving out from England. And we thought, Okay, this could be a good time. Maybe we.
Crissy Saunders: you know, start something together. I was gonna maybe start it first, because he hadn't moved out yet. We had previously had like a kind of small business together. That was a kickstarter that didn't
Crissy Saunders: We decided to put on pause. And so we kind of had that itch for like entrepreneurship, really and so then I and I've worked with agencies in the past like every time I was overloaded I was then, you know, from the my boss being like well, why don't you just work with an agency?
Crissy Saunders: And then we'd bring them on to maybe take on a few projects that I just really needed done. And I just felt like it wasn't really great. I was having to fix all of the work. I feel like they didn't really dive into the real needs of like what our company needed. It was more like, Hey, we deliver this to every company. Here you go.
Crissy Saunders: and I didn't like that experience. And I'm like, Wow, I could.
Crissy Saunders: I could do better than this like II mean, like, II feel like there's a need, that is, and they were charging a ton of money for at the time, too. And so I think that was like kind of the crux of like, okay, maybe we should go on our own and do something. But we still had it be more marketing centric. So we. I reached out to people and my network, and we had like 5 clients from the start.
Crissy Saunders: We took the approach of like marketing Ops, but also a bit of demand like doing email marketing. And you know, Sdrs sequences and and things like that. And
Crissy Saunders: because of that. That's why our name was Csd marketing. But then over time, we realized, okay, where we can really provide like, true value is through the operations and over time that expanded into more of like rep, like, I would say, Rev. Ops, and what it is today. And that's kind of what we still do. We
Crissy Saunders: expand, we do marketing operations. But what we why, we call it revenue growth architectures. We feel like it's a lot more than just what people call typical marketing operations. So yeah, that was the kind of crux for it, and how it evolved, and is really lucky to have some great clients to start
Crissy Saunders: and some ended up being clients for, like 9 years, some in in evolution of one of our clients, has been one of our clients for the whole time that we started at Csu, their first client. And they're still a client today. And we're celebrating
Crissy Saunders: 10 years next next year. I think. Yeah, so it's really lucky in that way. And they do have been acquired, and we still get taken on. But yeah, and I have. We have some clients I started working with in, you know, early 2016, and they're still valuable clients of ours. So
Crissy Saunders: we have more of like an embedded type of service, and there's always things to be done, always things to evolve and I will say, though, as we've expanded and grown, we've taken a more purposeful instead of like, Hey, let's just execute on what you need done to hey? You come on board. We're gonna show you, and put you through like what found a great operational foundation is
Crissy Saunders: and guide you through that. And also our key main focus is to everything we do is around improving the customer journey. Creating operational efficiencies or providing data and insights. We do a lot of stuff in between there. But I would say, majority of all the projects that we do can in some way or somehow be, you know, filtered into those 3 value props.
Brian Strauss: Yeah, so that's yeah. That brings an excellent point where. you know, I think.
Brian Strauss: how do you come to these companies when you start these relationships? So many agencies are sort of like you mentioned. We're just gonna do what you're asking. We're just gonna do, you know, look at things that have already been done right? How do you bring proactive suggestions about that strong operational base, but also be proactive about opportunities for expansion and opportunities for more in depth, reporting or revenue structures.
Crissy Saunders: Yeah, so
Crissy Saunders: one of the re, so we have a blog post on it like what rem deep growth architecture is. But A lot of what we saw was with our clients that we typically ran a lot of the same projects in between the big rock projects. We help them operationalize a funnel which also meant, like their handoff. And who should, you know, become sales ready?
Crissy Saunders: The lead scoring or prioritization that supports that routing and and things like that? Their order of operations, how they're running campaigns, and then also their like simple attribution, like lead sourcing, and things like that.
Crissy Saunders: And then we'll do normally work on like operationalizing Avm. And then we have a small campaign operations arm and we'll usually set up campaign operations process, or we can do some execution on it. And then we focus on like data, and enrichment side, you know, segmentation, audience, segmentation. That all of the kind of integrations of your tools and tech stack and sales, engagement platforms and so forth. So
Crissy Saunders: that's kind of like our main things. And then the analytic side like you said and insights. And so, but we kind of map that all out, we're like, okay, what are all this? You know the main things like, okay, we went through like years and years of doing projects, and we like documented that. And then we went through also just all of our inbound messages from
Crissy Saunders: from clients. That we brought on board, or even from our contact sales like and we saw consistent themes. We need help with our funnel. We need better insight we are trying to do. Avm, we don't. You know where to start like, how do we operationalize that? We need, you know.
Crissy Saunders: we need to scale out our programs
Crissy Saunders: and so that fed it into it, too. So I supported that. So now, we have, typically like an assessment that we can run with a client who comes on board and for our funnel architecture, which is where we would have people start. Which kind of goes into a lot of those things I talked about
Crissy Saunders: and that gives us an idea of like what needs to be done, and also has, like our point of view, and we compared to like what is the best of standard for that. And then we'll like, usually start executing on that. And the benefit to you is, we've built a lot of things around that. So we have a we mainly work with salesforce customers, but we have a
Crissy Saunders: we have a custom object tracking method for life cycle. That we've developed. And we've rolled that out in the last year, and that's been great. So it's almost like a pinnacle of that where they also benefit from having this like great reporting and the best way to track a funnel. And it's all funnels. It's not just starting from Mq. But you know, outbound funnels partner funnels. We call it kind of almost all bound, and it's so useful and cohorted, and you don't have to join
Crissy Saunders: leading context together and anything like that. So and then we do source attribution tied to it for the tipping point. So it's been an unlock for a lot of clients, because that's like a lot of what they're looking for. And at the same time it develops a great sales process for them, which is also where we just see companies are really flawed. They think they have a process.
Crissy Saunders: I think they have stage definitions nailed down. They're like, oh, we do have an Mq sales ready person. Okay, what does that mean? Or or, you know, an opportunity? When does that get created? I was just in the salesperson, like, you know, decides that that meeting should be converted.
Crissy Saunders: And so yeah, so we'll we'll run it to clients now, usually do that, and if they're it well, if there clients who needs other things done, we still will do. Now, kind of like a scorecard where we assess like areas of opportunity. Across revenue growth architecture. So they can see
Crissy Saunders: kind of our diagram that we have. And we'll we'll mark off like, okay. You know you need help here, here and here. So always thinking about that, and will help kind of roadmap with the client on based on their goals from their company
Crissy Saunders: what they should prioritize and also based on their resources and stuff, but usually always starts with funnel architecture.
Brian Strauss: Yeah, so how do you go about when you know right now, for example, you know you mentioned like Mq. Right? And that's like a big thing. Mpel is dead. This is dead. Xyz is dead. How do you go about contextualizing that as more of a reporting structure with standardized qualifiers for each of those stages, as opposed to saying.
Brian Strauss: you know, when you have the philosophical debate that people have on the other end of it, saying, all these things don't exist, or they don't work anymore, right. And when from that side of things it's more of a functional thing. How do you? How do you have those conversations?
Crissy Saunders: Yeah, I think that the the way we structure it is kind of like
Crissy Saunders: for the client is, hey? Then, you know, a concept of an Mq. We agreed like probably don't call it an Mq. That's very one like Short sided. We actually call it what we try and get clients to call it is we call that stage sales ready. And the reason why we do that is because there can be times where someone is sales ready.
Crissy Saunders: The marketing didn't qualify it like a salesperson has just said, Hey, I wanna start working this lead or great lead. Okay, that sales ready in our opinion. So we're gonna start a funnel then. And that's an outbound funnel or partner has said, Hey, this person sales ready? Okay, now, let's create a funnel for that.
Crissy Saunders: And so I think for for us. It's like, what is Dad is like. You should just report on Mq. Ls. And just report on volume and just be gold on a volume for Mq. Ls.
Crissy Saunders: and you're also you're missing out when you're just using Mq. Or what you say is ready for sales from a marketing standpoint, and that's where you lose a big picture of what's happening. And your funnel data can be fragmented. And so we'll kind of educate the client on on that and also we have firm idea of all people like, oh, we don't need a person funnel like we can just work accounts. It's like, Well.
Crissy Saunders: how do you know who to work at that account? And also, what do you do with all the people that come through that aren't part of your target accounts or is tied to account like, how are you gonna work them? We've actually worked with like some like big main clients who
Crissy Saunders: they didn't even have a a person funnel and they missed out on a bunch deals, and finally it took like one deal, or someone coming through their CEO finding out, you know, and they looked to us and bring us on as a client to kind of fix some things like that. So yeah, I think it's taking
Crissy Saunders: commanding approach with our clients of like, hey, this is actually what we think is a good way to track things also, not having acronyms around your stages or something we suggest. But we typically find a middle ground. Hey? If your company's always been used to calling it this, okay, maybe we have the status, the Endql, but then we'll for a tracking purpose. We'll call that stage like sales ready or okay, you're really tied to client. SQL,
Crissy Saunders: that's fine. We usually call it meeting books, but you can call it SQL. But as long as we know that means like meeting booked, then it's fine. So, but we try and be as commanding as possible to say, Hey, this is what you should you should do, and and a lot of clients are receptive to that. If anything they want that I think a lot of the time. Early in consulting
Crissy Saunders: we were almost like 2 accommodating to clients, and sometimes we would make concessions on like what we think should be done, and it always come back to. Oh, well, now we want that, or now we're having this issue. And it's like, yeah, we kind of like said that that was gonna happen. So I think now, having the confidence to be commanding and say, like this is the way you should do it.
Crissy Saunders: and our assessment even has a lot of that. A big part of our assessment is just our point of view on things that like why they should do it a certain way. And you'll see that in our content, right like. That's why we have opinions on
Crissy Saunders: a lot of things. But it's been a lot of seeing what works and what what doesn't across clients for years and years and always thinking through. Okay, what? What matches the expectations of the buyers today, what matches the buyer experience today? What matches the company planning today? And that evolves. And that means we. We change our ways of doing things. We're always trying to keep things a bit more like forward thinking
Brian Strauss: when you go to these orgs. And you're kind of saying, you know, commanding, as you put it, which I love. You know one of the shortcomings for a lot of agencies is they don't. They aren't commanding right, and they are overly accommodating. And they're not really being the the expert in the room or being the order taker. Right? So when you come and you end up working with either a marketing leader or a demand in person.
Brian Strauss: One, how do you? You know, if there's no easy way to tell people that something they're doing is bad, right? Right? How do you tell delicate way? But also that reaffirms the value you bring into the team.
Crissy Saunders: Yeah.
I think we always start out a little bit of like surfacing.
Crissy Saunders: And this comes through in our point of view as well as we always start with like pain points like, Okay. are you feeling these pains are, is your team spending hours and spreadsheets trying to put like, you know, reporting together, and you're still not feeling confident you have, even like a cohorted view of like your funnel are is your time to lead, you know, like hours versus minutes are you
Crissy Saunders: getting? Are you? Is your team bogged down in errors and chasing things happening your systems, but not able to actually like, do strategic projects.
Crissy Saunders: all those things, and a lot of time they can't fight with like. Oh, we have these pain points. It's very clear. And so then we can then take this pain points and say. Well, these are the programs that or these are the projects that will get rid of that
Crissy Saunders: the case in point is always like the funnel data. So that's where a lot of like, I said, the funnel architecture and the data around that. What get prioritized for sales, how they're actually working their leads. It's all very like simple things and foundational. But there's always a lot of pain points to it, because it hasn't really been fully thought through.
Crissy Saunders: or that hasn't been invested the time into making it great. So when you lead with some like uncovering some of the pain points. I think that's where you get people like locked in and interested. And you're like, Yeah, I want to solve for that
Crissy Saunders: And then also tiny back to the business impact. So we really tried to understand, like the goals of the business. It's always like, you know, there's simple goals revenue. Okay, yeah, of course.
Crissy Saunders: but then there's also things like we talked about like operational efficiency. Like, is your team just like wasting time? Are you not getting programs out the door fast enough? Or you unable to even understand what's working in your marketing to actually do more of that good marketing?
Crissy Saunders: So there's there's a lot of like efficiencies, lack of insight to data. And then also, like, What's your customer journey like? And sometimes we even just like audit. That per client like we'll just in our assessment will do test leads. Okay? What happened to us like we did a contact sales, or you know what what happens? Yeah.
Crissy Saunders: and I think, showing that. And uncover, like, I think
Crissy Saunders: trying to get people lined on the call will usually surface where there's issues. But we also approach it with a lot of empathy. We're like, Hey, a lot of this is hard, or Hey, you've been. You haven't had the resources to date to do all this stuff. I think one of the things that I really like. I maybe did it early on when I went in consulting. But I have we. I always tell the team not to do this is like.
Crissy Saunders: really try not to go into an org and be like.
Crissy Saunders: Oh, my gosh! It's so bad like. Who did this like? What happened here, you know, and do not point fingers or anything like that, because, as we know, like
Crissy Saunders: people can come in at any point, change things, make things a mess. But also these companies, and we work mainly with startups and scalps, but
Crissy Saunders: they have immense pressure around like getting things done. And a lot of times they just don't have the resources to do it. And so the people that are yeah. And and you know, people like you probably in demand, Jen and we work a lot of demanding. People like they sometimes are are the marketing off person, you know, and they're trying to balance like, okay, how can I put in some infrastructure while also, just, you know, getting
Crissy Saunders: getting programs up the door like trying to develop a strategy for programs, running webinars doing this events and things like that. It's just impossible. So
Crissy Saunders: so yeah, we try and lead with empathy for the client to to say like, Hey, we know there's probably a lot broken here, and you probably have great people on your team who've been trying to like fix this. But we're just the extra pair of hands to really guide you and give you the map of how you should do it, and also to help you execute cause. There's so much to be done. There's so many competing priorities internally. There's a lot of enablement to be done. So let's just help you get there.
Brian Strauss: Yeah, yeah. You mentioned you know the demand marketers, who often have to serve as their own marketing Ops person, right? Because lot of org. Still, I think.
Brian Strauss: don't always value the investment that's needed for a healthy marketing Ops and Rev. Ops. Org where, when you work with, demand Gen. Folks right? How often do you run into overlap of responsibilities? And what are your thoughts in terms of? Should a demand Gen person be able to launch their own email campaigns, launch their own life cycles of programs like, where where do you see that line?
Crissy Saunders: Yeah, we see it a lot, especially early stage, like startups.
Crissy Saunders: which I think is okay. But I don't think that you can have that be going on for so long, or if anything, you need to get an agency to kind of help them like Cs 2 or someone else.
Crissy Saunders: because
Crissy Saunders: there's it's just too hard like. And I'm really all you're gonna get done is campaign execution in some ways, or then making sure those leads and get to an Sdr. Salesperson. There's not really much that's gonna get done beyond that, in my opinion.
Crissy Saunders: Maybe they'll be like administering outreach or something or sales, often doing sequences. But beyond that you're not gonna have. They're not gonna have the time to do anything else. So
Crissy Saunders: And if they are, they're working really long hours, like I am. Maybe I've done in the past. So anyway. But the
Crissy Saunders: I think for us like we'll actually chance like still work with those folks. It is a lot better when they have someone dedicated to operations and revolves. You can just get more done.
Crissy Saunders: And but I do think that a ha like a hybrid model is really great. So as far as like running your own programs and emails and things like that, I think it's great for expansion folks to to do that
Crissy Saunders: and then set up structure for them to do that. So like program templates and things like that, and then queue final qa to be done by a marketing Ops team. I also just suggest, like campaign operations. Just be separate from
Crissy Saunders: the rest of like Rev. Ops and Mark, like marketing up. Whoever's in charge of Rev. Ops or marketing Ops. Just not have a big part of their role be campaign execution cause they're also not gonna get anything else done. It's just too much to be done there.
Crissy Saunders: yeah. And it's just very reactive. And and so you probably you can do it, maybe at a very, very startup level. But if you want to go anything beyond that, it's not advisable. So
Crissy Saunders: even if he is to our client leads, and a big like the rest of our projects. And stuff like that is always separate from campaign operations and execution. A team is just focused on doing that because it's it just operates in just a different fashion. It's very timely. There's a lot of collaboration back and forth. And if you're doing that all all the time. You're not gonna have time to say, like.
Crissy Saunders: get stakeholders together to workshop your life cycle stages, you know. That's just not gonna happen. Yeah, yeah. They
Brian Strauss: that, I think, is an important distinction that a lot of companies don't make is
Brian Strauss: Rev. Ops marketing outside of the House versus campaign Ops is, I think it takes away from the ability for folks to really narrow down and focus in on the things that really like. They should. I think I had a CEO who was saying
Brian Strauss: who it was all about, you know. Always be helpful to your team, helpful to others. Be willing to jump in. But don't forget the job you're paid to do.
Crissy Saunders: That's yeah, very true. And I think that in some ways it's like you gotta be a little bit all hands on deck in a way, at like a startup. And so I think, then you can't operate in that fashion. But
Crissy Saunders: if you have a lot of demand gen marketers. Or if you're running a ton of programs, if your budget is like millions of dollars for marketing like, you need to have the equivalent and resources to help get that done. And it's just a different. It's just a different way of like
Crissy Saunders: thinking and operating. I do think, though, that campaign operations is a great being close to that, or having done that as part of your career is is just good to do, because then you know what's possible. You know how things should be set up. Pushing yourself also to maybe run like Avm programs or figure out the infrastructure, for that is great, because I think a big thing
Crissy Saunders: for me, and where I see the role of the Vps and operations moving more to Vp of Rev. Ops is you're gonna you want to flex both sides. You want to first understand, like, what's great marketing. How do you report on that. How to campaign set up
Crissy Saunders: understanding of the attribution side and you know, final attribution, things like that. But then also understanding like for the business. What that means, as far as like Sdr process, how sales work? Opportunities.
Crissy Saunders: and more efficient fees. There, I think you need that like gamut of like the whole thing, literally from like lead in your system, and all the way through to like customer, and beyond that.
Crissy Saunders: and the the operational person who can kind of understand the intu intricacies, and you don't have to know everything. You don't have to be building flows in salesforce anything like that, but knowing what's possible, and also having some of those technical skills and then building that with a blend of like business savviness, and what needs to be done from the business, and what is good marketing? And what is the like buyer experience today? And how's it evolving?
Crissy Saunders: That's gonna be what's like a Vp. Of Rev. Ops, and then maybe even turn into a Cm. One day.
Brian Strauss: Love that I love that that's great advice. Great insight there. I think that's a great place for us to wrap things up.
Brian Strauss: Thank you again for taking the time to talk with me today.
Brian Strauss: Yeah. All right. Any final things, you want to share any final thoughts or anything you want to plug?
Crissy Saunders: Yeah. So I think for if for those who are listening and like podcasts, we have a podcast by Cs 2, called the Revenue Growth Architect's podcast used to be called forward. Thinking. But we changed the name last year. You can check that out on our website. Cstm, and
Crissy Saunders: we have a lot of great content there, too, or you can follow myself. Just Chrissy Saunders. also my co-founder, Charlie Saunders, and a lot of the team members at Csu in general. Post a lot on Linkedin. But yeah, connect with us there. And we're always taking kind of questions and topics for our podcast. That you can email rga at cstarking dotcom for
Crissy Saunders: Yeah, if you wanna hear us tackle something. But yeah, I love being I love finally meeting you, Brian, because I know you've been following us for a long time, and we'll comment back and forth on Linkedin. So it's so nice to finally like talk with you, which is
Brian Strauss: exciting. So thank you so much. Yeah, thank you. So thanks for joining us for another episode of collective wisdom. And thank you, Chrissy, for being our guest today. Really look forward to seeing the great work you and Charlie continue to do with Cs 2 for those listening. If you're a demand marketer looking for a tight, knit community of demand. Gen. Experts be sure to apply to our community demand collective at Demand collective. I/O,