[00:00:00] David: Earning the right to transform MarTech, it's much more effective to have a few really passionate people than a lot of lukewarm supporters. Uh, almost the same way you build like a little political campaign, right? You gotta find like the deepest, most passionate supporters to help you convert. The majority. [00:00:15] Politics really is about just empathy building. When I look at how do I bring the data team along, compliance team. Finance team along with my purchase or my vision for marketing operations or marketing technology. It just is about spending time in other people's heads and trying your best to like envision what that life is like, what are the challenges and the risks, and also the, the successes. [00:00:35] ​ [00:01:02] Phil: What's up everyone? Today we have the pleasure of sitting down with David Joosten, co-founder and president at Growth Loop. David is also the co-author of First Party Data Activation. In this episode, we explore how to earn the right to transform MarTech, why internal roadshows make MarTech wins stick. How to bring order to customer data with the medallion framework. [00:01:23] Why you should stop calling your CRM, the source of truth and why most CDP failures start with organizational misalignment. All that, and a bunch more stuff after A super quick word from two for awesome partners. [00:01:35] ​ [00:03:35] Phil: David, thank you so much for joining us today. Really excited to have you on the show. [00:03:38] David: To be here. Beautiful day here in Greenwich. So, uh, excited to dive in all these topics with you guys. [00:03:45] Darrell: Nice. Okay, let's dive right in. [00:03:47] 1. Earning The Right To Transform Martech --- [00:03:53] Darrell: So you've talked about some of the early failures and learning opportunities. Uh, you know, at the early days of growth Loop. ~One of the stories that I'm reading here was about the implementation.~ You, you were doing an implementation with a major tech company and your team enabled like 200 plus data fields, [00:04:00] but every new campaign still required additional fields. [00:04:03] This sounds very familiar. And after a few quarters, their VP of marketing asked you like, where are your quick wins? How do you know you'll deliver? Um, can you tell us like the background behind this story and the role it played in shifting your perspective about earning the right to transform MarTech? [00:04:19] David: Yeah, absolutely. So early on, uh, we were basically merging two worlds. The data and analytics world where people had been building insights and reporting and then eventually machine learning models with the operational, uh, side of marketing, of delivering emails, targeting paid media, et cetera. And when we brought those worlds together in the early days, what we found is, uh, the culture of working on these data and analytics projects was starting to infuse a lot of the work that we were trying to bring from the marketing point of view. [00:04:53] And so the projects around how are we gonna enable marketers to self-serve, build [00:05:00] audiences, uh, launch campaigns through this data engineering that had to happen to sort of enable that, uh, was viewed through the lens of how do we create the single source of truth for the enterprise. And when you do that, there's really, uh, multiple approaches you can take. [00:05:17] It's not one journey that everyone takes the same way. The journey that, uh, this tech company had taken was the, Hey, let's solve everything up front so that later on, you know, when people ask questions, et cetera, we felt like we addressed it all and try to think through all the corner cases. The problem with that approach is if you do it in a vacuum and you don't have lined up, use cases is really easy to basically spend quarters and sometimes even years, uh, building out what your sort of theoretical vision of this single source of truth could be in your data cloud or data warehouse. [00:05:56] And so in this case in particular, that's exactly what happened. [00:06:00] We had a, a fantastic advocate and a VP of marketing, uh, who wasn't just a marketing mind, but also someone that, uh, had implemented their own queries when they had questions and uh, reports, which is rare for a VP of marketing. That's exactly the kind of persona and profile that usually would be a great fit for. [00:06:19] Composable solution. And uh, he had a call with me like a few quarters in, uh, he had become a sort of a friend at that point, and he just said, Hey David, like, what, whatever you guys are working on with our teams here isn't working because we don't have the outcomes that I thought we would have by now. And so I explained, I, you know, here's the context, here's the data teams. And he is like, no, I get all that. I know that like I've been here, I need to see the quick wins. Where are those initial quick wins that I can point to, to my leadership team to say, Hey, there's initial success here that we're gonna build upon, that shows that this is gonna be the scalable way of the [00:07:00] future. [00:07:00] Uh, not to say you don't forego the long-term plan while you build short-term wins, but you can't sacrifice one for the other. And so those early wins, if you can pick not just like the most gargantuan challenge of the company. But like that international team that hasn't gotten support from Central for, you know, many quarters because like they've just not been a priority market or there's a product area at the company that's sort of like the third child, so to speak. [00:07:31] And the priority to you as well. Those teams, if you can get quick wins with them, they are eager to engage. They're gonna be your, your biggest and strongest advocates. Um, that's some of the, the learnings that I had early on was finding the balance basically between the long term and the short term, not sacrificing one for the other. [00:07:50] Phil: ~Yeah. Super cool. I, I love that like, thinking of the roadmap as like, does the whole thing that we want to build and we want to get to that eventually, but to get this like full bun from other people early on in the implementation process. Like, let's, let's get a couple milestone wins on our off on our belt.~ [00:07:50] ~And I feel like there, there's a couple folks that I've talked about similar ideas during, like big implementation projects. 'cause it takes so many people to buy in and get it through the door in the first place. And like~ this idea that you talked about, the, the team kept coming back with like new fields, new data items to add. [00:07:56] And like I've been on both sides of that. So I can empathize with the [00:08:00] folks that are just like, yeah, I think this is all we need. Let's go, let's do it. And then someone comes up with another idea or the business changes or a new customer comes on and there's like. Constant change, right? And so new ideas, new things, new data is required to come in there. [00:08:14] And, uh, yeah, I, I really like that example there. [00:08:17] 2. Why Internal Roadshows Make Martech Wins Stick --- [00:08:17] Phil: So David, let's say like you, we just got an early win. You obviously, you know, don't just want to share that in just an email or a Slack channel to, you know, the customer that you just had. [00:08:28] Maybe you're the internal MarTech person and like you've got that early win under your belt, but there's a lot more things left to make sure that it turns into more than just like this one-off success. Right? So talk to us about like what comes after that? Like are you creating evangelists inside of other teams? [00:08:45] Are you doing monthly, quarterly metric meetings, like with different, or doing like political maintenance? What does that look like? Walk us through that. [00:08:52] David: Definitely, um, if you're, if you've done the work up front to figure out what the North Star is for that [00:09:00] team, you're tying back this win to the larger vision, and you're doing so not just by sending out a Slack message, you want to actually take it on the road, right? The, the face-to-face road show, if you can get invited to the. [00:09:13] Weekly or monthly that's regularly held by other teams that you support or interface with. It could be the sales leadership, it could be, um, the data team leadership. It could be, uh, marketing, leadership, whatever side you're on and actually like, explain and tie it together that this is part of this larger vision. [00:09:32] You're gonna bring people along in a much bigger way because people wanna follow a, like, well articulated important mission with you. Um, and when you're doing so, the best way to speak to it isn't just, this is what, you know, I did or what we did even, it's actually to bring the folks that we're most impacted by the win to speak on your behalf for why it mattered so much to them and how they see that vision. [00:09:59] [00:10:00] Um, so find those advocates, uh, find the folks that are really passionate about the solution that you just brought to bear through that quick win. I think that, um, passion over, over scale or volume, right? Quantity isn't gonna solve this problem. It's really about finding, uh, mission-driven supporters for your cause. [00:10:21] So I think establishing that drumbeat and here's the expectations of what's next, and delivering on those expectations, giving yourself plenty of time, uh, as you do so, so you can pass with flying colors, I think all builds a drumbeat of trust and reputation that your team is set here to like, deliver for everyone. [00:10:41] And I think that, uh, all, all of that coming together through some like face-to-face regular cadence can make a world of difference for the outcome that you reach. [00:10:52] 3. Architecture Shapes How Teams Move and What They Believe --- [00:10:52] Phil: Um, one of my favorite ideas from your book, David, uh, I took the time to read most of it. Uh, can't say that I read all of it. It, it's definitely [00:11:00] meaty. ~Um, but super, uh, impactful topics like I think, you know, I, I've been in the whole package versus composable debate, uh, a lot over the last couple of years.~ [00:11:00] ~And, you know, the, the book that you wrote First party data activation is the, ~one of my favorite ideas is this like idea that technology, architecture, the stuff that like happens behind the scenes, like the plumbing, it's also, you can also think of it as strategic leverage ~that helps you think,~ that helps you with things like trust, agility and, and how the brand competes, like you've actually said in, uh, a different format that. [00:11:18] The most successful marketing transformations blend technical vision with organizational trust. Talk to us a bit more about like how architecture is not just plumbing, but also something that you can think of as long-term competitive advantages for, for companies. [00:11:34] David: Absolutely. Um, you know, I'm not the one that's come up with this quote, but there is such a strong power of defaults. So even just the way that you configure things for someone, people are unlikely to make big changes later on 'cause they get used to it. And so, uh, architects are like houses talk about this all the time. [00:11:54] They say, look, you know, here's my vision for your space. And, uh, people make trade offs [00:12:00] obviously among different competing things that they'd like. They like more lighting in the room. They want to have direct access, that the house to feel open, end to end, whatever those things are. And I remember talking to one of the architects that did this for residential, uh, homes and he said, you know, the, the problem almost is that people can get used to almost anything. [00:12:19] And so, um, you acquire these habits that are the result of these architectural decisions that happened long ago. And it's not conscious. You, you do it just by walking into the context and situation. Lemme make it more concrete. Um, when you're talking about, um, let's say governance. Uh, you usually have this trade off the data teams that work at these, uh, you know, large companies that have lots of data to work with. [00:12:46] Uh, usually 'cause they have either web platforms, mobile platforms, or even just the transactional data through ERP systems, they might acquire. In those contexts, the, uh, data team's really worried [00:13:00] about risk management, right? They think about, Hey, someone's gonna use this, which was really just initially built for reporting. [00:13:07] And if a reporting looks off, you can kind of go back and like, yeah, it just looks funky. Let's go and revisit the way that you calculated something as soon as you want to use it operationally. By which I mean you want to run a targeted campaign that will reach real customers. There's a different expectation that comes along with like the rigor and risk that that entails. [00:13:27] So if you look at it from like a data leader's perspective, oftentimes they think I can't give direct access to folks outside of my team because they don't have all the institutional knowledge, all of the, um, you know, built in risk monitors and things that they go through when they run queries and build reports. [00:13:48] So they get very nervous when you think about introducing marketers into the, the data environments. Outside of just like reading reports, what we're talking about is in the composable marketing world, [00:14:00] how do we enable the marketers to actually self-serve directly from that single source of truth? And by setting it up the right way, where essentially the data team does control and govern what is made accessible through like a medallion uh, approach or architecture, you can actually get the best of both worlds. [00:14:21] You have the data team controlling everything that comes in, what assumptions are made and how things are resolved, like identities from different systems to create a single customer record, what things should be permissible to use for targeting or not. They can make all those decisions upfront so that downstream of those decisions in the gold layer, the the view layer that marketers would've access to for both reporting and operations, they can then selfer. [00:14:51] They're essentially in a governed sandbox that is pre-configured with the kinds of decisions they're allowed and enabled to make by the data [00:15:00] team. So I've seen that work really well. I've seen it work even better when you have someone dedicated to data democratization. It was a role that I first encountered actually in the financial services sector, uh, where folks, folks were there to educate, to help be the bridge between the data teams that were building out all of these views and the, the customer of those views, the marketers, uh, marketing operations teams, et cetera. [00:15:27] So that's kind of how you try to blend the, the two worlds. [00:15:32] Darrell: Totally. I love that. And I think that your idea of, you know, default, you know, and what's there by default isn't just, uh, ways of working or like technical. I think it's also like cultural, you know, and I, I, uh, I once had a boss like several years ago, he was a good person, but he would always say stuff like, you know, you have to be careful of the marketers. [00:15:53] They're gonna just get in and break stuff. Or you have to be careful of the marketers. They're gonna ask for the moon. And you have to protect yourself [00:16:00] and the team. And, you know, for, for several years I took on that mentality, which is actually not really the right, the best mentality. It's not the most productive. [00:16:08] Um, and it is more productive to enable them and to like realize that you're on the same team. So, so, um, I think that that's why, uh, we, we, we really need to think about, you know. What is there by default and what, you know, we, when reexamine it often, um, you know, you, [00:16:25] 4. Bring Order to Customer Data With the Medallion Framework --- [00:16:25] Darrell: you mentioned it a little bit, the medallion framework and you talk about it like at length of the book. [00:16:30] Do you mind kind of like walking us through that, just like from the basics, um, like what is it and, and like how does it help both tech and business leaders. [00:16:38] David: Yeah. Happy to. And look just up front, there are other frameworks you can use. What we wanted to do in this book is provide a very pragmatic set of solutions and tools and frameworks for everyone to use that work in almost all contexts. Uh, so the medallion framework is a framework for creating your single view of the customer in your data warehouse.[00:17:00] [00:17:00] It basically says, in the modern era of data platforms, you don't have to follow the, like, traditional ETL uh, frameworks. You can actually just load all of your raw data directly into the cloud where you're gonna be, uh, transforming it. So the first layer, the bronze layer, is really just about bringing in, um, the raw source data from your CRM system, your transactional system or ERP, from, uh, your paid media performance results. [00:17:33] Um, and basically your, your credit and incentives or coupon system. All of those systems that basically connect, you know. Customer data, product usage, et cetera. Um, you wanna bring them into one place, one environment that allows you now to start building a silver layer. The silver layer is you start to make assumptions. [00:17:53] You de-duplicate. You try to figure out, okay, there's these object concepts. There's obviously the concept of a customer that that [00:18:00] can be complicated. In the B2B world, you have a concept of like product SKUs. You have a concept of like, you know, purchase types. You have concepts of, uh, activities, right? So engagements between a customer, uh, and your brand or your, your company across different web properties or mobile properties, et cetera. [00:18:19] So now you have these in a format that most data engineers and data analysts would wanna work with. 'cause it allows them to have complete power and control over what they create. Next is sort of the building blocks for anything out of a clean data set. With those, they create gold views. Gold views are really for consumption by other teams. [00:18:41] They're the polished outcome and they have several goals. One, they're governed in the sense that, um, when you've made decisions about suppressing minors, uh, fraudulent accounts, you know, whatever you're going to do to make sure that it's the right set to target for marketing, let's [00:19:00] say that's already been pre-filtered by the time a marketer, uh, is gonna view how many active customers can I reach with this campaign. But it's also actually to save money. So you actually pre-compute the combination of tables to create a more flat view with basically think of it as more columns for like each customer record. A good example there would be, hey, yes, I could list out, um, every single like mobile engagement that's ever happened, and I will in the silver layer. [00:19:33] But I wanna summarize it and say, you know, in the past 30 days, how many, uh, mobile interactions has this person had? So I know, are they engaged on mobile? Do I need to try and engage them there? Or is it better to engage them over some other channel? Those kinds of, uh, optimizations can be built into the gold layer. [00:19:52] So at that point, when you have the gold layer, you have something that can serve multiple outside stakeholders from the data [00:20:00] team. Obviously marketing, uh, operations. You can serve the business, reporting for the executive leadership, uh, and you can support the data science teams and those that want to use that as a feature store to run machine learning models on customers. [00:20:15] So the goal is now they're all operating on the same source of truth. So there's not the discrepancies that come up when you're operating on, uh, data that's being reported by an individual email system over here. And that's where you're capturing sort of conversion data. Separate from the transactional system that the finance team's looking at when they're doing rollup reporting for executive leadership, which is separate from like the data team and what they know because they make different assumptions about suppressions of fraudulent accounts. [00:20:44] All of that needs to be the same across the whole business so that there's not the unnecessary confusion that leads to a lot of cycles of, uh, work around fixing and identifying these problems, but most importantly leads to an erosion of trust between the different [00:21:00] teams that are gonna have to collaborate and work together. [00:21:02] So that's the model. Bronze, raw data, silver, you've now modeled it, you duped it. It's like the source of truth, but it's decomposed Gold is consumption for everybody else, or you've optimized it for all the use cases you want. [00:21:19] Phil: I love it. David, I appreciate you walking us through. That adds a lot of color to, to some of the stuff that, that you walked through in the book, and it comes up a lot in, in different spots in the book as well. Um, I think that like, you know, the, this other theme that comes up a lot is. You know, [00:21:33] 5. The Real Enemy of Martech is Fragmented Data --- [00:21:33] Phil: obviously you guys are on the site of composability for, for building, you know, customer data architecture and you kinda coin it as the real enemy is fragmentation with a lot of these things. [00:21:45] And I think folks are always going to debate build versus buy point solutions versus platform. And, and the CDP world, you, you've definitely said, you know, the real battle is actually, um, isn't between vendors, it's against fragmented data. [00:22:00] Um, we in marketing operations still live in this world where a lot of us are slow to adapt, especially on the enterprise side. [00:22:08] People that have lived in marketing automation platforms and in CRMs like our bread and butter is still a lot of CRM tools. Talk to us about why the CRM shouldn't be the source of truth and why you think the data lake is the only place you should be building audience portability. [00:22:25] David: Yeah, it's a fantastic topic and obviously sometimes a contentious one. Um, the, the first reason actually is one I just mentioned, which is trust. So the challenge with using your CRM or your email automation system or marketing automation system as your source of truth is that that really is only for like your team if you are working within that subset of marketing operations or marketing. As soon as you want to be able to communicate what's happening within that system to other teams, you're gonna have to export, you're gonna wanna create visualizations for the [00:23:00] rest of the company. Um, also there are assumptions built into the data models that are restrictive when you're talking about a lot of marketing automation tools. [00:23:11] Uh, if you think about, um, certain tools like Marketo have been optimized more for like a B2B use case. Other tools, uh, in the marketing automation space like Braze or Klaviyo have been optimized for B2C or consumer marketing. So if you're operating in an environment where you have lots of different product areas, you have lots of different, you know, granularities of customer, you have agencies versus SMBs versus enterprise and you have a lot of complexity, it's very unlikely that your market animation system can just reflect the truth of your business. Then you have to ask yourself, what, what do we believe is our core competency? Who do we serve? And if you think you can understand your customers better and more accurately [00:24:00] by releasing yourself of those constraints, by centralizing that view, by building trust across your teams, then you're talking about a composable architecture. [00:24:09] You're talking about investing in that data layer. Um, granted it does for some companies mean they need to build a new expertise and functional area in data and analytics. Um, but I think about that as it was an advantage five to eight years ago. But today it really is table stakes, um, to have a data and analytics function that's coupled very tightly with marketing and its objectives. [00:24:34] And so, you know, you're going to want to build that reporting capability for leadership anyways because they need to understand what's happening or they can't fly the plane. Once you do that, the operational use cases flow very naturally off of that. Now, for the folks that are stuck in that world, they're living in the marketing automation, they're struggling with like, okay, now I've got two sources of [00:25:00] truth. [00:25:00] I'm like operating between, um, here's what I've seen work well for companies that have been in that migration. What they did is they essentially said the, uh, data and the fields that are found in my marketing automation system are sourced from a variety of places, uh, but they represent my source of truth that I trust. Let's rebuild based on that schema, that target output, my marketing data warehouse or data mart. Then I'll have a one-to-one match that I can ensure exists between what I think my of as my source of truth and what exists in this marketing data warehouse. That's how I build confidence with the team that's using it in marketing automation with the data team. [00:25:47] That's the bridge. As soon as I've done that and can start to actually feed the marketing automation system from this single source of truth, instead of all of those sources one by one, I usually increase [00:26:00] reliability and observability, which means when something doesn't look right, something breaks, there's an alert system in place. [00:26:07] It's really built with engineering best practices in mind inside the data warehouse. I can check for duplicates, I can look for, uh, missing data timeframes 'cause there's certain dates that are not populated. All of those things that build confidence in the data. So I'm already starting to see some advantages by, you know, being a one-to-one match, swapping out the sources from, you know, all of the random ones that I've got coming in to this one source that's collecting from those. [00:26:36] Then I can start to think about in my roadmap, where am I gonna go from here? I have an extensible place that I can now add fields as I need. Um, I can start to create calculated fields and aggregations, build my reporting off the same thing that I'm gonna market with. You get all those benefits, uh, as you continue down that roadmap, but you've never lost the thread and forced people to [00:27:00] say, yes, I know you have your beloved, trusted source of truth, but I'm gonna overtake it and I'm gonna win. [00:27:05] It's not about winning. It's about finding like, how do we all walk the path together to like an extensible and brighter future? [00:27:13] Phil: Yeah. Such a great answer. David. I, I feel like there's, there's so many depths to this topic, like what is the source of truth? Like for a lot of people, like we, we made fun of marketers a lot here, but like, you know, marketers don't really care how the stuff is built behind the scenes. They just wanna make sure they have trusted data, data that they can trust, right? [00:27:34] Like composable versus packaged. The average marketer doesn't really care as long as they have data in their tools that they trust. The marketing ops folks, the data ops folks, we're the ones that like have those architecture discussions. And I feel like when we debate the source of truth, it's different than when we ask a marketer, what is the source of truth? [00:27:53] Because there is that whole argument of like, there's actually multiple sources of truth because the source of truth for sales is the [00:28:00] CRM and the source of truth for our lifecycle team is the customer engagement platform. They don't live in the data warehouse, but for marketing s folks and data teams. [00:28:09] The debate is different and like it's a, at a different level because where is that source of truth that is feeding data to the CRM and the lifecycle tools? And if you're doing it right, those tools are also feeding data into the data warehouse. So, um, it, it's a super interesting topic and, and Darrell actually polled his audience about this a few times. [00:28:27] Uh, and I was just bringing this up here. We'll put it up for the folks on LinkedIn or on on YouTube, but it was posted on LinkedIn. Um, so someone grabbed a screenshot of this when you were at like 500 ish votes, but Darrell was asking like, [00:28:39] 6. Stop Calling Your CRM the Source of Truth --- [00:28:39] Phil: what should the single source of truth be for data, for sales and for marketing teams? [00:28:45] And the options were CRM data warehouse, CDP or other, and most folks still today, and this was three months ago, said 53% voted for the CRM. But interestingly. If you combine Data [00:29:00] Warehouse and CDP, it's getting closer to the folks that think it's a CRM. Like if you combine Data warehouse and CDP, we're at like 45% versus 53% in the CRM. [00:29:12] So we're starting to like slowly transform here. And some folks even at Enterprise are realizing, alright, maybe my source of truth is the tools that I'm working in 'cause that's what I care about, but where's that data coming from? And I should care more about that because of a bunch of different things that you just talked about. [00:29:29] David: I mean, you think about what's in the CRM, yes, you're gonna have, you know, click data and things that are specifically generated by that CRM system or engagement with customers or, you know, customer support requests, whatever that c m's used for. Uh, it is the source of truth that 'cause it's the source, the original source by which that's captured. [00:29:48] But there's a ton of other information that you're gonna bring to that, that clearly comes from other places. And so, at some level, can you bring more reliability to that? You're right. Marketers don't care how the sausage is made [00:30:00] generally, right. And sometimes I think that comes at the expense of their empathy for the folks that are upstream of them. [00:30:06] Um, having said that, they do very much care about when things go wrong and like they sent out a campaign they didn't intend to target the way that they did. Um, and they certainly care about speed. So how do you solve those two marketing pain points is really what we're talking about with the reliability piece. [00:30:26] Um, when you're going and working with, I, I'm gonna pick on Marketo here just because I have a very specific, uh, example here in mind. Um, their APIs into and out of their system are very opaque. So, um, kind of information you get back to really know like what's in Marketo right now without going record by record is actually quite challenging to do from a data person's perspective. [00:30:53] Um, on the other hand, that's very easy to do in a data warehouse. So the challenge is I [00:31:00] have, uh, they, they call it the two generals problem and in computer science. Essentially I'm sending my message to say, Hey, I wanna update customer record number 1, 2, 3 with their most recent activity. How do I know that you got that message and that the messenger didn't die along the way? And so that, that problem still exists in the CRM systems in a way that's been solved in most data warehouses, right? I could look up customer 1, 2, 3, but I can't look up all customers at all times. Uh, in order to verify that those events made it in, they don't give you the sort of observability that you'd want. [00:31:35] And now on the velocity side, marketers want to go, right? Like if you think about a lot of the challenges that we saw in the beginning was marketers at large companies saying, I have to be part of a queue. I don't wanna wait my, and then they would just argue and escalate and say, look, I understand you got 20 campaigns to fulfill, but mine's the most important one. [00:31:52] And now because my VP said so, and when you get to those points, you're eroding trust again. You have a lot of conflicts. If you could [00:32:00] build into the architecture, going back to your, your earlier question, a self-serve capability, that cuts out even just the, um, design step of targeting where I can get feedback on, Hey, what if I filter for this or wanna personalize on that? [00:32:16] And then get, you know, numbers back of here's how big the audience is, here's how much that audience spends today, other metrics that I might care about, even before someone on the data team looks at it to actually operationally activate it. That already starts to cut down on the time it takes to go from ideation to fulfillment in a big way. [00:32:37] And marketers feel much more like fulfilled satiated with their work when they can go from idea to activation much faster. Right? There's no doubt psychologically, like they love that. [00:32:47] ​ [00:34:47] Darrell: ~well, I, I wanna get to the next topic, which is, um, this really, I'm just like reading through this and I'm, I'm like loving it. ~ [00:34:47] 7. Building the Tech Stack People Rally Behind --- [00:34:47] Darrell: so one of the philosophies that we share is this contrast between building the perfect tech stack and building the tech stack. People will actually rally behind and just reading this question, just like, lights this fire in me of [00:35:00] like, yes, like this, this is what we've trying to been saying. [00:35:04] Um, but, uh, yeah, without giving away, I, I won't, I won't get into it too much, but I'd love to hear from you, David. You know, do you believe this is true? Why? Can you, can you riff on it a little? [00:35:15] David: Oh, absolutely. I, I couldn't agree more with it. I think that, um, actually going back to the 200 fields, that's the data version of this question in the marketing tech stack side of things. Um, there, I'm sure that there is some ideal perfect tech stack out there that you know exists. Um, even if it does exist, it's probably changing every six to 12 months as capabilities are constantly in flux between different applications and things. [00:35:44] So it's just not realistic that at your company you're gonna be like the perfect version of the tech stack. Um, you have to think back from what do you actually want to get out of it for specific teams, for specific use [00:36:00] cases, uh, and then optimize for that 80 20 Pareto principle. Um, you can usually, if you're smart about how you design it, build in extensibility. [00:36:10] So, uh, you know, a classic thing that comes up is real time. So, um, there are, you know, marketing technology buyers that say everything needs to be real time enabled, um, from the get go. Otherwise, I, I'm, that's one of the check boxes I won't compromise on. The problem with that is when you build for real time, it's a series of trade off. [00:36:30] One is definitely cost. If you do everything real time, it's incredibly expensive at scale. But two, it adds a lot of complexity when you start to do things in real time. When you think about answering basic questions like how many people are in this audience, um, at any given moment, you can't really answer that in a real time 'cause it's constantly shifting and moving and people are like changing in in categorization. [00:36:52] However, there's some really good powerful use cases that are real time. So what does an 80 20, uh, Pareto [00:37:00] principle look like applied to this problem? It basically says for, you know, 80% of the use cases, having something that's latent down to a few hours or even a day in some cases depending on the company, uh, is sufficient 'cause it allows you to ingest all of the data sources, come up with the best predictions of what you want to do next for each customer, and then layer on real time, um, for those specific use cases that draw upon that huge wealth of information you have about your customers in the cloud data warehouse. [00:37:32] With a few trigger signals. Let's say if someone's in this segment and they happen to do this action, I want to go in right now with a push notification or something that's gonna happen in the instant moment. Uh, they're in the flow of a purchase and we know something about them. We want to personalize that, that checkout flow or the, uh, the flow for advertising or whatever they're signing up for. [00:37:54] All of those things really matter in those moments. That's great. Augment what you have. Don't build the whole [00:38:00] system around the 20% because you won't finish. You'll be way over budget, uh, and ultimately you'll be chasing the white whale. [00:38:11] Phil: I love it. Yeah. We, we like to, to poke fun a at market as much as the, the big package CDP options here. But like, [00:38:18] 8. Why Most CDP Failures Start With Organizational Misalignment --- [00:38:18] Phil: one thing you've mentioned is that most CDP failure is when we talk about this whole thing of building that stack that people wanna rally behind versus the perfect stack like CDP failures according to you. [00:38:31] And, and some of the stuff in your book, and I totally agree, are failures because of organizational issues, less technical issues. Can you riff on that a little bit and maybe chat about like, how do you spot those risks early on and, and how do you like, kind of pinpoint the difference between org failures versus tech problems? [00:38:52] David: yeah, definitely. So first, like there are some tech failures. I think that there are like some packaged CDPs that like [00:39:00] maybe are built for real time and then you're trying to put 'em in an environment that's not got any real time sources of data. So like that is structurally gonna be set up to fail. [00:39:08] Having said that. Um, having, you know, been a, you know, sales person, a builder, an entrepreneur in this category, um, firsthand I've gotten to see from the initial stages of a sales process through implementation, through the long-term success or failure of customers, uh, what that journey looks like and finding those risk factors. [00:39:32] And what I found was, uh, like number one, the sale has to happen for all the key stakeholders sooner or later. What I mean by that is there are instances where, uh, people are very excited about a technology, they have the authority to make a purchase, uh, unilaterally, and so they go ahead and do so, and kind of like preempt anyone else's objections for that choice. [00:39:59] Uh, [00:40:00] sometimes there'll be a, you know, marketing leader because the marketing department owns a large share of the budget. For media and other things, they might be able to repurpose some and just buy a CDP. In other cases, um, you have data leaders who say, look, we're the technologists we know best and so we're gonna choose this without consulting marketing, and then they're gonna come along 'cause we're establishing the the game field for them. [00:40:24] When you do those things though, ultimately you're gonna reach the friction point after purchase, uh, when you've already committed yourself to a vendor. And so part of the things that we teach our team, just to be like transparent, is you've gotta pull all of those people in the room early because if there's gonna be an objection that's gonna doom this project later on, because the data team knows something that, you know, we don't, or the marketing team or the marketing technology or whoever's buying this, uh, doesn't know. [00:40:53] We want to know now. We don't wanna know six months after we've tried to implement and then failed. [00:41:00] And so the sale has to happen for all the key stakeholders. Before you really commit to the path. Um, that doesn't mean that people all get veto power and that you just stay in, in stasis. It means that everyone at least is heard and you understand how much credibility to put behind their objections on various things so you can find a solution. [00:41:19] Part of the reason I like composable is it's extensible and flexible so that even though someone might really want a certain marketing automation system on one hand and someone else might want a different, you know, sales CRM or something like that, and they don't necessarily integrate together because you have this hub and spoke model, it gives you the flexibility to kind of bring people along, but still respect the fact that they're working on a shared source of truth. Then the second piece, the, I love the way you guys, you know, framed the rallying around, you know, finding the, the, the technology and the CDP or like the solution that other people will come to rally around. It really comes down to how passionate. [00:42:00] The few people that you can rally with you behind it are, [00:42:04] what I mean by that is, um, you're, it's much more effective to have a few really passionate people than a lot of lukewarm supporters. [00:42:12] Phil: Mm-hmm. [00:42:13] David: Um, one of my learnings in working with large enterprise companies was specifically finding the pockets of the most underserved was oftentimes actually the best strategy. So yes, sometimes you get to go in through the front door, work with like the, the biggest geographical market, the biggest product area, uh, and then just like win there. [00:42:32] And that's great. Um, sometimes though you'll get much more passionate supporters by trying to work on the frontier where folks really aren't served. Those folks have no alternative oftentimes, and so for you to be able to really meet their needs when you're building out these early, uh, 80 20 solutions can mean the world. [00:42:53] And so those people will be your fiercest supporters and advocates. And then the last piece is just [00:43:00] proving it. So the quick wins is part of that technical proof of concept. Figuring out a really good way to get everyone in the room to figure out what we need to prove for everyone to feel comfortable with the decision. [00:43:10] Going through a two week process of like running through that with everyone on board and plugged in and engaged at the same time. People aren't on, on on vacation, they're not like at conferences. They're actually plugged in for those two weeks to support the initiative. And then you have a readout at the end to tell you whether you made it. [00:43:26] There's all these like tactics and strategies that help you get the rallying force, uh, almost the same way you build like a little political campaign, right? Uh, you gotta find like the deepest, most passionate supporters to help you convert the majority. [00:43:40] Phil: Hmm. Such a cool way to think about it. I, I feel like this whole episode, David, has been like, uh, the poster trial of why AI agents and AI can't fully replace an entire marketing team because like the whole thing we just talked about is like the politics of building MarTech behind the scenes. There's so much collaboration [00:44:00] involved. [00:44:00] There's so much internal selling and like, I just have such a hard time thinking that at some point AI's just gonna come in and make all those decisions for people and the underserved teams that aren't getting what they need and we're not inviting all the decision makers to the table. Like, that's such a far off future to me. [00:44:17] And yeah, ~Darryl, you wanna take the next one?~ [00:44:18] Darrell: ~Yeah, I, uh, so~ [00:44:18] 9. Why Tough Conversations Strengthen Lifecycle Marketing --- [00:44:18] Darrell: one thing you mentioned as a key unlock for you is the importance of having tough conversations upfront. Um, and that really resonates with me. Um, and when it comes to like, lifecycle marketing teams that are trying to do personalized and targeted campaigns, these conversations are about how they're valued within the company and how they make the case as a, or their case as a growth engine. [00:44:39] Um, we talked a little bit about early wins and, and things like that already, but I just love to like, you know, what are these conversa these tough conversations that you feel really need to be had with the executives and with the marketing team to make sure everything goes through. And, um, you know, talk to us a little bit about like what kind of metrics do, [00:45:00] do people ask for and how do they really prove their impact when scaling bigger initiatives? [00:45:05] David: That's a great topic. Um, and one that I think about often when we think about a long-term success, not just like the initial success of, you know, any customer of growth loops or anyone adopting some of the practices in the book. Uh, ultimately a lifecycle marketing team needs to understand within a context of its executive leadership why it exists in the world. [00:45:27] And what I mean by that is, um, there are executive leadership teams that were built product first, um, or engineering first that were successful through word of mouth and other things that, uh, at some point. To stay competitive, look around and say, everyone else has a lifecycle marketing team, I should have one. [00:45:43] And so they start building one. Um, what they don't recognize is like, why did they bring on that lifecycle marketing team? Like an example I'll give you is, um, they will sometimes look to the lifecycle marketing team to fix problems that are actually created [00:46:00] elsewhere. Um, so, you know, if you talk to a seasoned lifecycle marketer that's focused on retention, uh, they'll tell you, you know, one of the biggest problems with retention is acquisition. [00:46:14] If you acquire the wrong customers or the wrong promises made the wrong expectations. Yes, you can use messaging to try and educate and, and get them to, you know, as much of the value as possible, but it may just not be salvageable within that customer relationship. And sometimes as acquisition teams are in the go, go, go mode, uh, particularly during like growth years where they really have to focus on acquisition at all costs. [00:46:38] You end up doing things that are, you know, very different than what the company did to be successful in the first place. You start acquiring customers that are outside of the ideal customer profile all the time. And then people look to the lifecycle marketing team to say, Hey, churn's gone up. You guys gotta fix it. [00:46:54] So there's this really hard but very realistic conversations between what is the [00:47:00] product team and the acquisition marketing team doing, and how does that relate to the world of the lifecycle marketer? Um, there are certain levers that the lifecycle marketer can't pull. Once you've acquired a customer that wasn't a good fit, you can't change the nature of that customer. Um, also where is the di like division of responsibility between product and lifecycle marketing? That's another whole topic that needs to be discussed. So, uh, I see battles all the time, especially in larger companies where product teams believe that they own all messaging to customer. Um, I recall one instance in particular where, um. [00:47:37] The product team sent so many messages to customers that it basically meant that the lifecycle marketing teams, uh, communications were lost in the flood, like they were a drop in the ocean. So, uh, that happens a lot. I mean, I, you know, I think about, um, especially complicated advertising products for B2B and things like that. [00:47:56] Like, there's just a lot of information you want to tell customers. The [00:48:00] product team has to know that if they're taking that space, it's coming at the expense of other communications. So marketers think very carefully and strategically. I can only send, what's the one thing that I want this customer to know to do, to feel, they think about that Everyone else at the company has to think about the limited bandwidth of customers too. [00:48:19] All that's the context. The goal though is retention. It's first 90 days engagement or revenue, or, it really depends on the, the business. Um, when I, uh, worked as a marketer at Google originally. It was first 90 day revenue. Uh, if you got someone on AdWords to spend a certain amount, it predicted a lot of their long-term, uh, spend on the platform and success with it. [00:48:46] It was one of those things where unless you spent enough, you would fail, uh, early on and you needed to break through. Like you'll have enough to with advertising. Um, with, uh, indeed, I mean one of the biggest objectives, [00:49:00] uh, and indeed was, Hey, do you have sponsored posts? That's how Indeed makes money. The problem is if an employer went on and never sponsored their first post, uh, you could end up in a situation where they get used to the results quality without sponsored posts and they as ascribed that to just indeed overall. [00:49:17] And they say, okay, Indeed's like a mediocre, but okay, place to recruit. If they had just sponsored from the beginning, they would've seen Indeed's actually a fantastic place to recruit, perhaps. Um, but at other companies we worked with one in e-commerce space, it was all about churn. They could acquire customers at will. [00:49:34] With certain CPAs and yet they were losing customers hand over fist. So the tough conversation is what is the biggest problem that this company has? How do I partner with product? How do I partner with, uh, acquisition marketing to solve that problem? And then let's build a drum beat of measurement around every experiment that we run to change that together end to end. [00:49:55] And I think that's where the lifecycle marketing teams that I've seen that are just a level above [00:50:00] is they are equal business partners with those functions. 'cause they have those tough conversations up front about truth, the business and the customer set. And they have a metric retention or you know, gross or net or whatever it is that the, um, businesses really run on that you pick one or two metrics there. [00:50:17] And then we all share that metric in our experiments and what we're doing on a regular basis to prove like, hey, I am an equal business partner at the table with you all, um, to drive what's most important for the long term trajectory of the, the company. [00:50:31] Phil: I will solve your answers so much. David. I, I played that like lifecycle role a bunch of times in my career. And what you described about, you know, the lifecycle team was just hired to fix a problem that was maybe caused by product or maybe caused by another team. And then you're, you're joining and like building this lifecycle team and the product team is just like, what the hell is lifecycle? [00:50:52] Like why do you guys need to send emails? Like we own the push notifications 'cause we understand the ED scores and oh [00:51:00] man, like, yeah, you brought up a lot of PTSD for me. But I feel like there, there's a whole topic about like that the, the areas of opportunity, uh, the areas of responsibilities between product and life. [00:51:12] That needs to happen at an exec level or leadership level before we decide we're gonna hire a lifecycle [00:51:19] David: yeah. Definitely. [00:51:20] Phil: a lifecycle function. Or maybe sometimes it's actually like product marketing that owns a lot of these pieces because they're kind of pseudo marketers and they work with the product team already. [00:51:29] But there needs to be like top down understanding, like you said, having those tough conversations at first about like the engineering team, dear product team, like Lifecycle doesn't exist to spam users. Like a lot of engineers think that promotional messages equal spam and like we don't want any of that stuff in our product. [00:51:49] And so yeah, he just brought up a whole bunch of PTSD for me in that answer. [00:51:55] David: I, I, I appreciate that. I apologize. I think that it is like one of the things [00:52:00] that we all face, I've always felt terrible when I've met lifecycle marketers where all of those pre conversations never took place. And then they're operating the environment trying to do their best to move metrics. Uh, and yet like not only do they have like their, you know, hands tied behind their back because the channel's already been saturated by product. [00:52:19] They also have other fundamental, you know, problems like the customer set was acquired in a different way, and it's not an ICP. Um, and so like they really are not set up to succeed. That's always really challenging to watch from a career development standpoint. And I just, like, I look at, and that's really the leadership's responsibility. [00:52:37] I look at that as if that's the case at your company and you're in an executive position, regardless of whether you're on the marketing side, the product side, or uh, wherever it's your job for your team's sake and for the good of the company to go have that conversation with your, your peers or whomever, um, to try and get to a better, more aligned work product among [00:53:00] your teams. [00:53:01] Phil: Yeah. And, and to be fair to those like leaders, a lot of folks just think of marketing equals acquisition. Like marketing's role is just getting people into the product. And then anything after that, like marketing kinda wipes their hands, uh, from, from like any retention, activation, expansion type of metrics. [00:53:19] And then they're introduced to this idea of lifecycle. And like the growth picture isn't just about acquisitions. There's a whole ton of monetization that comes in the later parts of the funnel. And your average engineer is building out stuff in the product and maybe they've been handed push notifications and they need to figure that stuff out, but they don't have the growth background to figure out like those like habit loops to get people to come back into the product. [00:53:44] And that's where Lifecycle comes in. And [00:53:46] yeah, to be fair, a lot of folks don't, don't think of marketing as having that whole acquisition plus lifecycle. So there's a ton of education. [00:53:53] David: definitely the, the way I've approached those conversations is compound growth. So, uh, you know, there's, there's [00:54:00] no coincide to that growth loop's called a compound growth engine. Just like, you know, we look at a lot of other, uh, companies with similar capabilities. At the end of the day, when you go to a quantitatively inclined person, like engineers tend to be, and you say, look, if I can retain 5% more customers, if I can get 7% more revenue out of the existing customer set every year from now on, look at, and you just model it out, look at the growth curve versus if I don't do that at the company after five years, if you look at that, it's usually some multiple, uh, I haven't done the math on those specific numbers, but, uh, to the engineer it's like, okay, wide-eyed, I get it now. [00:54:40] Like if we can collectively move that needle, it is a totally different, it could be three x the company that we have today that we're all invested in for its success. And so working backwards from that, it's like, okay, now push notifications are a way that we achieve that different trajectory for the business. [00:54:57] Um, so yeah, it's changing their mindset around [00:55:00] like growth a little bit, but you know. Compounding is the eighth wonder of the world. You know, obviously that's not my quote. A lot smarter people have said that. Uh, engineers appreciate that just as much as anyone else. [00:55:13] Darrell: Totally, totally. ~Let's switch to a, a different topic. And, um, ~ [00:55:15] 10. Why Experimentation Culture Strengthens Martech Leadership --- [00:55:15] Darrell: so we've talked about the why the institutional side of MarTech, like, like building trust across the executive teams and political capital. Things like that are so important. In your book, you highlight how architecture has strategic leverage and how governance and privacy can accelerate trust. [00:55:31] So it sounds like you really think that the, the next wave of leaders are gonna be those who can navigate both that sort of technical architecture and politics. Uh, what's your advice for, you know, the next wave of, of marketing leaders and technologists? Like how can we level up, what advice do you have for our listeners? [00:55:49] David: Yeah, there's, there's several pieces. I mean, one is you don't have to understand all the nitty gritty of the technologies. Uh, certainly not. It helps too, if you're curious and intellectually [00:56:00] interested in that sort of thing. Um, you do have to understand the implications of it. And the best way to do that, um, is to surround yourself and work with peers that also are having to make decisions about these technologies. [00:56:12] Have experiences you don't have, um, read about it, et cetera. And so you're, you're looking at, okay, if I choose this path A versus path B down the road two years from now, what does that mean? What kind of business do I have? The other pieces are, uh, experiment, know how to experiment early and often. Um, so I don't just mean experimentation as in like an AB test within marketing. [00:56:36] Yes, of course you have to do that and try to optimize. I mean, how do you build experimentation culturally within yourself and within your team to say, to do it well? For example, it doesn't just mean more experimentation. It means how do you set safeguards and bounds through which you can test things out. [00:56:56] People can bring as ideas without the full weight of the [00:57:00] business resting upon those things or the full outcomes so that you can build confidence gradually. You can roll things out, but you're constantly reinventing the way that you do things, not just what you do. Um, and you know, I think some of the folks that have done proofs of concept, um, partnered with other teams to build like an initial campaign that operates with a machine learning prediction for the first time. [00:57:25] Uh, these are the kind of folks that I'm talking about and the kinds of experiments that I'm talking about. Um, it doesn't mean you're committing to these things. The way that you bring it to your team is one of like innovation and excitement. Um, so many of our innovative features came off of quarterly hackathons where we dedicate a week with the team and it was always amazing to me just the how much further out of the frontier and how much closer it really was people were thinking and people were executing. [00:57:54] Um, within that environment because they're released of the expectations of [00:58:00] the day-to-day responsibilities. Um, and then the third thing is just like politics really is about just empathy building. So when I look at how do I bring the data team along, how do I bring, you know, the compliance team, finance team along with my purchase or my vision for marketing operations or marketing technology, you gotta sort of put your mind in, walk in their shoes. [00:58:25] So for a data person, that means their worst day is when they get an email coming from a board meeting or some C-level review that the report that they produced for this thing was totally wrong. And you know, all of a sudden they have to question and scrub all of their operations and data engineering pipelines, right? [00:58:46] They want to avoid that day. Or even worse, like actual customer emails go out that are like. You know, saying the wrong sort of thing, saying something totally inappropriate because like, it was really like they, the defunct folks that they emailed to their families, who knows? [00:59:00] Like there's all these horror stories. So when you think about that mindset, you think about how do I help this person risk manage better with finance? How to obviously help them justify the expense that I'm asking them to take with like executive leadership. How am I talking about compound growth with other marketers? How do I want to motivate them? [00:59:20] It's probably through like the ability to bring their ideas from ideation to fruition that motivates a lot of marketers or some, it's the, the business outcomes or some other collaborative team thing, right? Finding those things to bring people along is a, is a huge skill. Um, and it just is about spending time in other people's heads and trying your best to like, envision what that life is like, what are the challenges and the risks and also the, the successes. [00:59:46] Phil: I love it. Politics is really about empathy, building, bringing people along with you and yeah, walking in their shoes, understanding what they care about, what are the metrics that [00:59:56] are like keeping them up at night. Yeah, exactly. [01:00:00] [01:00:00] 11. How to Use a North Star to Stay Focused in Leadership --- [01:00:00] Phil: David, this has been super fun conversation. It's, it's flown by, uh, we got one last question for you. [01:00:04] You're a founder, president, frequent speaker. You're also an author, but you're also a dad of three, and you must be super busy in your personal life as well. One question we ask everyone on the show is, how do you remain happy and successful in your career, and how do you find balance between all the things you're working on while staying happy? [01:00:22] David: Yeah. Well, uh, I'm probably not one to give advice. I try my best, uh, like anyone else trying to manage lots of things. Um, I try to just be very intentional with my time and ask a lot of like, why. So, um, especially as an executive, um, some folks you're, you're, especially as a servant leader, sometimes you do get into a very reactive mode of operating where. [01:00:44] Problems come inbound from all, you know, different directions and you could literally fill your days only responding to them without having sort of a north star you're working towards. Um, I found even with customer implementations early on, same thing was [01:01:00] true. Establishing the North Star, what we're, why we're doing this thing together, why we're spending the time working backwards from that was the best antidote to, uh, feature request number of 312 because someone had thought of a possible edge case that might come up next year, right? [01:01:16] And it's like, oh, I understand that, but here's the North Star. How does that fit into the North Star? We all agreed on the North Star, like, let's make sure that we're true to that because the only way we go fast is by being very targeted in our efforts together. Um, so I think the same thing holds true with like the kind of time I get to spend outside of work, being out in nature, being with my kids, um, all of those things, like what does this activity mean? [01:01:43] From his point of view. From her point of view, I got both a son and two daughters. Uh, and kinda what does it mean to me? What does it mean to my wife also to get the time if I'm taking them out for something. Right? All of those, those things. And being more intentional about 'em, [01:01:56] Phil: I love it. Intentionality is leads to happiness. I, I think I like that [01:02:00] classic image where like a kid is sitting down on a park bench, uh, with their father and they both have like a thought bubble and the father's thinking of like money and like traveling and expenses and this and that, and the kid is just thinking about sitting down at a park bench with their [01:02:16] David: that they're dad. [01:02:17] Yeah. [01:02:17] Phil: such a different mind switch there. [01:02:19] David, really appreciate your time and this is super fun. Uh, we'll. [01:02:23] Out to all the cool reports that, uh, growth Loop is working on, obviously Growth Loop site, and, uh, the book, uh, folks will encourage folks to check out the book. Appreciate you writing that and, uh, sharing some time with us today. Thank you so [01:02:34] much. [01:02:34] David: Yeah, absolutely. And the book's available on Amazon, uh, now, thankfully already, and as well as manning.com. Um, check it out. I'm always here. If you have any questions about the book, if anyone wants to contact me on LinkedIn, always appreciate hearing from readers. Um, and thank you guys for like the time and for such thoughtful questions. [01:02:52] I had a blast. [01:02:53] Phil: Awesome. Appreciate it.