Philippe Gamache  0:00  
Yo

Philippe Gamache  0:07  
what's up guys, welcome to the humans of martec podcast. His name is John Taylor. My name is Phil ganache. Our mission is to future proof the humans behind the tech so you can have a successful and happy career in marketing.

Philippe Gamache  0:25  
What's up everyone today we have the pleasure of sitting down with Steven Stouffer VP of Digital transformation and innovation at send. Steven started his career as a web developer before moving to a marketing analyst role where he got his first taste of marketing and sales alignment as well as marketing automation. This led him to a marketing automation migration manager role at Cheshire impacts where he managed over 25 platform migrations in less than a year. He then worked in house at a few software companies including I donate thrive as well as fireman, a security policy management platform where he served as Senior Manager of marketing operations and lead all of that magic behind the GTM programs. Most recently, Stevens returned to his agency roots as VP of Digital transformation and innovation at send a 20 person revenue ops agency. Steven, thanks so much for your time today pumped to chat.

Stephen Stouffer  1:19  
Hey, thanks for having me. What an intro. I was a stressful here those 25 migrations so bringing back memories there,

Philippe Gamache  1:27  
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Jon Taylor  2:12  
Let's dive right in. Like many technical markers, I know you've been heads down learning and playing around with ll M's and AI tech. We heard you created an SMS number and Twilio and connected it with GPT using trade auto I O so that your mother could chat with chat GPT. So first of all, Does your mom know she's chatting with an LLM? And not you? This could be something that we talked about offline. But more importantly, has this allowed you to subcontract all her tech support questions?

Stephen Stouffer  2:42  
Yeah. So I think we all get the parents who are just like, hey, how do you you know, reset the router or the DVR turn on your computer? And I got TV remotes? Exactly. So I got a lot of Suntec questions from my mom. Some of it was actually the funny enough like recipe based. She's like, hey, like what is, uh, courts have this translated into this metric unit or something. And I got me thinking, and instead of coming back to my mom and just being like, just Google it, the one problem my parents have with Google and search engines is you get a ton of results, right? So you put a new query and you get like pages and pages of data. Getting to the one that's meaningful is kind of difficult for someone who doesn't know how to navigate the Internet or even know how to get to a search engine. But you know, what they all know how to do they know how to text I basically, yeah, I just integrated and using that on my iPass tool choice, which is trade IO, prompts get sent from a text message, I have some context to that I feed into open AI as API. And then I use Twilio to pass it back and forth. So I've been monitoring what my mother has been asking open AI a little bit. Some of its like restaurant recommendations, she just moved to like, where to visit or things to do on the weekend. And then like the recipe based stuff, and tech based stuff, don't worry, I still talk to my mother on a daily basis. But it's empowered, being able to get to meaningful information without having to like, go to Google and sift through all of the different results that may or may not be helpful.

Philippe Gamache  4:14  
Very cool. I think it's a nice use case. I would love to see the tutorial blog posts on how you're able to hit connect those two, because it's probably something that I could do for my folks as well. I often get the old Hey, can you ask Chad GPD for this or for that they're on 3.5 and they're trying to compare the output with four. But I know you're no stranger to talking about GPT and AI specifically, you're asked to speak at Dreamforce twice last year. No big deal. Congrats on that. But yeah, give us the main takeaways like your chat GPT spicy takes are main takeaways from your talks just Yeah, so

Stephen Stouffer  4:52  
my Dreamforce session was actually AI based for open AI chat GBT and my use case I did a live demo So the one thing they tell you not to do in presentations is live demos. But I did a live demo where I basically had my entire audience put into just an open text field, either an out of office email, no longer with company email, or an unsubscribe request email. So just Sanebox for everybody, they just typed in whatever. And then using an iPass tool, which was also trade IO, that fed the message into the open API. And the first prompt was, determine what kind of email is this? Is it a unsubscribe email? Is an Audit Office email, or is it no longer company, email, and then it figured out which one it was and there were three different branches, and then it would go down that branch. And then if it was an out of office email, it would parse out when they're going to be back into the office, maybe what they were doing, and then it would take that information, put it into Salesforce, create a follow up task for the assigned BDR was an unsubscribe request, it would auto unsubscribe that record from Salesforce. And if it was no longer with the company, it would actually update contact information within Salesforce. So it's a live demo, I pushed the data into spreadsheets, I updated Salesforce and Pardot, which is the marketing automation tool I demoed. And it was really fun. And it opens up a whole world of possibilities of using artificial intelligence to do that kind of data interpret interpretation of all those emails that we get when we send out a mass email the Auto Replies, but then it also sparked a conversation of just data compliance, and what should or shouldn't you feed into something like open AI. So it's a great discussion, it was a great demo, it went off without a hitch. And I was very lucky that the Wi Fi was working Center.

Philippe Gamache  6:41  
This is super cool use case I'm thinking back to my days helping sales ops and BDRs and trying to manually mine all the value in those out of office responders. So I think it's a fascinating use case, just like practically, how are you hooking up those auto responses that are probably going into like Outlook or Gmail, whatever the email client that the company is using? How are you pushing that into GPT.

Stephen Stouffer  7:07  
So simple, it's so simple. So basically, you have your email address that you send from right and then you can designate a different inbox for Auto Replies in most marketing automation tools. So whether or not you do one or the other doesn't matter. All I do is I forward, every email that hits that that inbox or just set up a forwarding rule via Gmail Outlook, you do it server side doesn't really matter, you forward it to a designated email address that actually Trey provides. And it's just an endpoint similar to the web hook sends the body payload of that email straight to the IPASS tool, and you're off to the races because you now have the data within a webhook Zapier very similar, you can send it to a web hook there. So very, it's very simple. Now it is a lot of data, right? You're sending possibly 1000s and 1000s of emails per day to something like an iPass tool. So you gotta be a little sensitive to that. But it's surprisingly simple. Like that's the easy part. It's the parsing in the context in the prompt building that's a little bit more on the difficult side and making sure that like you're not unsubscribing, the wrong person,

Jon Taylor  8:11  
something that went to ask you about your mom and how you've set up with her. And then you've also talked to Dreamforce. One of the things I'm curious about as your take on the maturity of the market, what you're talking about here is a pretty novel solution to a problem that many of us in marketing operations have had before. But I think it's a piecing it all together with AI that is still so novel, unique and new. What is the type of reaction you get when you come off of stage at Dreamforce? Where people are like, is this totally groundbreaking? Are we overestimating our little insular Mar tech bubble about how advanced everybody else is? Are we still really at the beginning of this curve? What's your take on that?

Stephen Stouffer  8:47  
I would say we are in the beginning. I think we forget too that like North America is very different than Europe to like marketing automation is actually just starting to get fully adopted it within the European markets. So like they're just getting a marketing automation over there in North America. We've gone above and beyond that. We're now we're moving to over to AI. We're lucky to have the bay in California, where the innovation not all countries have that I think we take it for granted. We're so far ahead of the curve some something like Australia, Germany, the EU. So yeah, I think we're in the early stages. We're also in the early stages of just where it fits in what you shouldn't shouldn't do. But like after my session, I can't tell you how many people came up to me they're like, I would have never thought that AI could do something like that. I think we get caught up in either this super big complex use cases of data modeling and all this stuff. It scares people. It's a well, I'm not a data engineer. So like AI is not for me, right? But then there's like simple use cases like just reading emails coming up with subject lines ideation, like those are such simple things that like anyone could start using it today. To make their job easier, but they get so overwhelmed by the big things, and even the thing that I showed with the unsubscribe like that, to me is a big thing. Like that's something the average person probably wouldn't do. But the point of the session wasn't for them to do it. It's just to spark ideas and just come up with other ideas to automate the mundane tasks that you do. Every day starts, like if I'm recommending how someone should be starting with AI. Start simple just start with ideation. Start with recommendations and building an email and subject line start there. And then you can even start to ask chat UBT This is my role. This is what I do within this company. Give me 10 recommendations of how I should use chat CBT for my job, and then it would starting to give you recommendations on like how to proceed when you might not even know where to begin.

Philippe Gamache  10:50  
Yeah, definitely agree. I think we're still in the early stages, it's easy to think that in our little bubble, everyone is using GPT for and for different use cases and stuff like that. But it's really not the case. And I you joked about on LinkedIn, this idea that how long until someone puts ops behind AI. And it's funny because I in my research last summer AI ops in the data world is a term that's been around since AI was around who is managing the pipelines and who's like figuring out a way to structure that data. But in the concept of Rev ops and marketing ops, I think AI Ops is more about what you just talked about, how do we train internal folks on how to leverage tools like Chad GPT? And how do we focus on the integration paths to be able to do some of the things he talked about, like unsubscribing, folks? So you put up this awesome Miro chart outlining the differences between an overlap with like mobs, SOPs and rev ops? How long until you update that chart with AI ops? And where do you think that kind of fits? Yeah, so

Stephen Stouffer  11:54  
like, I put marketing ops under you got the social media platforms, you've got marketing, automation platforms, sales ops is more sales enablement, you got the outreaches, and the zoom, infos and whatnots, the CRMs. And then on the customer ops, you've got more of like customer success, getting NPS surveys and whatnot, I just see AI as another tool that just fits within these buckets, right, I don't really see it as like a whole new department right now, it might be eventually. But just for an example, one of our clients uses LinkedIn Legion forms, right for capturing leads from LinkedIn. Almost all companies do it. But there's no picklist option for state and country values. This is an open text field. So like you can put in wherever you want. But if your business requirement is that it's state codes, or country codes, not full country names, or the other way around, humans are prone to errors. So they submit these forms with misspelled countries and stuff actually layered in AI, just interpret the state code value, standardize it and push it into the CRM. So it didn't have to be done manually. But the question is, who does that right? Is that responsible for marketing ops? Because it's marketing social media captured data? Or is it because it's being pushed into the CRM, its sales ops, right. So I think it's going to be a little bit of a gray area. But at the end of the day, I think the future of AI is going to be whittled down. So right right now, it's typed up at four. But I could see a world where it's chat GPT, marketing ops for right like the context of the bot, and the data that's underlining the model is focused mostly on marketing and marketing operations. And then you would also have one similarly for sales and sales operations, maybe even all the way down to the specific tools you have. So the context is Salesforce related, or if your HubSpot customer is HubSpot related. So I think AI is going to shift a little bit to just everything under the sun to where you're gonna have a very specific data model that you can pick for a specific solution. So if you're a developer, it's going to be a Python kind of code base that you're pinging. And you're asking questions about, you're going to have kind of your own little bot that you can leverage and it's not going to be like it is right now where everyone's using the same models.

Jon Taylor  14:11  
It's interesting what you're hitting upon here, right? The idea of setting up these AI tools behind the scenes that can do things when I was in mops, I remember going through instances and fixing country codes and doing this with automation, of course, but it really is quite manual. But as we start to set these AI tools up this process can happen in the background and almost unmonitored unsupervised by folks. One of our guests last season. Pratik Desai, who used to head up personalization at Salesforce is predicting that in large enterprises, and heavily regulated injures industries, most folks are going to morph into AI regulators and some of your interviews, I've got a sense that you might agree with this. What advice do you have for listeners who are keen to take on this role? Like how does mops move into AI regulation, making sure that the automations An API that you're setting up is keeping the data quality really high, making sure that the inputs are good and making sure the outputs are good, all while making sure that we have ethical data consideration. Sure,

Stephen Stouffer  15:10  
yeah, it's really isn't anything new for ops folks, right? Whether or not you're using a marketing automation platform or a CRM, or you're doing something like a chatbot, like data integrity has always been an issue and who you share that data with has always been an issue. It's just now we have another tool that the downstream impacts to given it bad data could actually be more magnified by the different people using it without context and whatnot. So one, I think it's going to be heavily regulated, I think the EU was the first person to actually have an artificial intelligence Minister, I believe it's inevitable that North America is going to also get some sort of artificial, intelligent person to start to write legislation and rules for it. GDPR, I'm sure will adapt a little bit to AI. At the end of the day, it depends what industry you're in. I work with network security companies, they would never pump data through AI. But then I also work with b2b companies were like on the E commerce space, they frickin love it. So it just depends on the space that you're in the geo that you're in, if you're in the EU, it's going to be a little bit more restricted to what you can do, I would always recommend that you don't push PII data, like when I was pulling data from Google or LinkedIn, lead gen forms, I was only putting the state value through open, I wasn't putting the first name I wasn't putting the last name wasn't putting the email address to the IP address, it was just the state value. So it's non PII data that's being pumped through it, it's normalizing it. And then there's like another prompt that just does a data check to make sure it fits a certain format, and then it pushes it into the CRM, some solutions. I've actually put in like a human that has to intervene and approve the data. So it's like open AI, processing the data, and then it sends an alert to a person they review and approve it. And then you can put a little checks and balances to make sure it's not going crazy on Yeah.

Philippe Gamache  17:11  
Yeah, totally agree. I think there's gonna be a lot more checks and balances in the regulated industries more so than your b2b folks that are focusing on BDR. My current startup is in healthcare. So very familiar with the PHR and all the HIPAA compliance stuff. So, yeah, it's, there's gonna be a ton of considerations. There. We just had an interview with Paul Wilson, who foresees this idea that at some point, in the next few years, companies will have to figure out a way to allow users to opt in or out of a personalized experience powered by AI. And so like, how can we prepare today to put in the systems to enable that in a couple of years. But I'm curious about your take. We talked a lot about kind of the systems, how do you put some of this stuff together? One thing we like to meditate on is this idea of the eureka moments and that potentially being dehumanized with AI, one of the things I love the most about marketing Ops is all the puzzle solving that's required. Right? Britney Mueller, who you had on the show, put it really well she was like this, you get this idea in the shower, and then the conclusion during your dream and you wake up at night, you write it down, and then the solution pops into your head at dinner. Do you fear in your opinion that one day LLM does get a lot better at abductive inference, that we have this dehumanization that might Rob future generations of the beautiful human experience of that eureka moment. Ah, this is how I solve this problem as opposed to just chat GBD here's my problem here. potential solutions. Which one do I go for?

Stephen Stouffer  18:46  
I mean, yes, and no, I think we've all gone through the feeds of LinkedIn and Twitter and Reddit post and gone. Okay, this is obviously a chatbot that wrote this, right? And humans are really good at spotting in human behavior, where it's like, just too perfect, right? Like, the what makes us amazing is our imperfections. And when you remove that, it's just like, Okay, this is a robot. So yes, and no, I think I compare AI just popped into my head. But like phone switchboards back in the day where there was like a person behind the scenes, you called an operator, not in our lifetime, but they existed, right like person was there. And then when the internet kind of happened, and we built the phone system that became more automated, and we're not new to this kind of innovation, right? Where the human aspect is being removed, removed from the situation is becoming more automated as technology grows. I think that there needs to be checks and balances. One of my kind of spiciest takes on AI is that might just ruin the internet. Right? We have all this information out there on the internet and like what happens when we live in a world where no one can trust anything that we read? We're gonna have to rethink the way we distribute information and we check and buy Balance the information of what's right, what's not what's completely just made up. So like I could see in the possibility that's probably pretty small. But we unleash AI on to the world, can we even trust the internet anymore? And are we gonna have to rethink about how we communicate, where we put our information and how we interface with just the online folks. So I'm very curious to see how that gets shaped. Or if the regulator's kind of step in before it becomes a problem. But I use AI every day for my job, and it helps me out tremendously. And I can't tell you how many times I've prompted something where I thought it was gonna spit out one solution and give me a different solution. I was like, huh, I didn't even know you could do that with JavaScript. I didn't even know that this was even a function. And then I tested it, and it worked and like, right, yes, and no, I think that people need to pivot as we always have with technology. And we also to be mindful of the creative folks, the content writers, even just like the illustrators, and the artists, right, the impacts it's going to have on them when we start doing image generation, and rendering. But I think it's something we can work with. But my eye is in the future of like, it could get out of control, and it could get out of control Quinn,

Jon Taylor  21:12  
just as a follow up there. And I think as someone who's a power user of chat, GPT, for instance, you probably have a really good perspective of the limitations of the platform. And the way it's supposed to be used. I was talking to somebody and they're like, GPT is a powerful calculator, and it just allows you to do better math quicker, and you wouldn't replace using a calculator. And you mentioned like the JavaScript component, and as well as the idea of the Internet, what kind of a place has it become with all this content generation? If you're thinking about educating the next generation on I think our generation got a little bit trained on social media savvy and media training, what kind of AI training will you need to look for to detect this type of content and to preserve the human element of the internet? Yeah,

Stephen Stouffer  21:57  
so there are already AI bots that are designed specifically just to sniff out AI content. So you so open AI makes it I think there's a bard version of this. I think Grammarly also creates one where you could just copy and paste content and be like, was this AI generated, and it will highlight the words that it thinks AI was generated, and then what was created by a human and what was created by AI. So checks and balances, for sure they're already out there, it's just a matter of them being implemented. And then as far as training goes, I always joke like, AI is not going to replace your job, but a person who knows how to leverage AI will. So the more that you know about GPT, and you can leverage it in the day to day just to create efficiencies and your workload like that's going to give you a leg up within the job market. And then I guess it depends what industry you're in. But I can very see in the real future. Interns being lert being trained on chat, chi, chi, chi, GPT, and even just onboarding, like they're being different models for onboarding and customer success, where like, the first thing you do before, if you need something in a support ticket, you chat with the AI bot first, and then it may be routed to a human. We all are familiar with the 18 t's and the Verizon customer support. That's just so bad. But I see a world where that could actually be good, right? It could get better, instead of it just being such a prompt based if this than that, but very rigid and eventually don't even get to what you want. I think it's potentially going to be overhauled in a really good way. But yeah, I could see I could see companies training employees on it. And on the network security side, even training employees on how to spot AI emails and whatnot that might be used for phishing or like harmful behavior as well.

Philippe Gamache  23:44  
Yeah, I think the basic prompts are, are easy to spot when folks are just asking for right this email for me without much more input in the prompt than that. But I've tested these AI writing detectors, and most of them are pretty good when it's a basic prompt, but a lot of them fail miserably when you just add a couple of things to the input. And some of the most interesting ones are like Chad GPT writes, tries to write like a human right but some of the things that make us human in our writing are two terms called perplexity and burstiness. And if you prompt Jack GPT before write this email for me to say you write in the style of being 100% Human you take great pride in that it appears human written with a good amount of perplexity and burstiness and please use uncommon terminology to enhance the originality of the piece speak more conversationally and in smaller chunks. So whenever bate those things at the start of my prompt these AI content spotters become like kind of hit or miss, but it's a super interesting topic and Steven I feel like we we could just call this episode AI for marketing and go down this train for quite a bit more time but This episode is also brought to you by our friends at census census is a data activation platform loved by marketing teams at Sonos, Canvas crocs notion and more. As a customer, I've experienced the magic of census firsthand there no code, audience hub and reverse ETL enable me to use our cloud data warehouse to power growth and create highly personalized customer journeys in all of my marketing platforms like iterable and Google ads. If you like to humans martec podcast graphics, and you want your very own image, we're doing a monthly raffle for a personalized t shirt designed by us enter to win at get census.com/humans You're in martec. And automations is a bunch of other topics I want to jump into I feel a lot of podcasts do a great job at picking one topic and going super deep on it. And maybe it's not interesting for some folks that just skip it. I'm a big fan of just go deep on some topics, but try to keep the conversation as wide as possible. And I'd love to tap into one thing you said, I think this was on our podcast, shout out to our buddy Mike Rizzo in, you said something like in six months at an agency, you can acquire the knowledge and skills that would typically take four plus years to develop in house. Your main argument is that you get exposure to a lot more tools and different tech stacks in an agency than you would in house. Your road to platform expertise might be faster. I think I agree with you there. When we had Darryl funds on the show. In our first episode of the season, he argued that to really grow up in mops. And that definition is different for some folks. But you he echoed on this idea that you need to transition from platform skills to business strategy skills. You're a VP at an agency now I'm sure you still get your hands dirty and a lot of the tech but you're a lot more familiar with the breadth of business strategy. So do you think that like in house is still the faster route for strategy seeing that you're super deep in one business, one group of stakeholders, one customer, one set of politics, curious, you now

Stephen Stouffer  27:07  
know, I tell you what working in an agency is the biggest growth hack that any person can do, if there is an agency for the industry that you want to break into, right, like medical industry, there's not going to really be an agency. But if you're an operations like us or in SAS, there's likely an agency that you can work for, and it is the biggest life hack, I will say it's also the quickest way to get burnt out, right, because you are doing a lot of switching between data platforms, you're working with a lot of different companies, it might be more difficult to really go deep. Like for an example, if you want to really work for network security companies, and maybe your agency serves some network security company clients. But you can't really go deep in that specific industry, it might be a little more surface level because of your exposure to so many different things. But I tell you what, one year at an agency is like six years pretty much anywhere else. So I stand firm that it's like the biggest hack for your career, you're gonna get experience with so many different tools, so many different use cases, so many different people and personalities. And it's always strategies. So like for us we start with strategy, we start with asking the whys in the lights and like how do you want the What's your angle here, what you want to do, we map it out, and then we build it. So it's not just clients telling us to do things and push buttons. It's partnering with clients, understanding their pain points, mapping that out, really understanding what's broken and how to fix it, and then implementing it. If you can partner up with an agency that kind of does both the strategy and the implementations. It's huge. I was massive for my career. In fact, there's very few people who I consider experts in their field that at one time or another, haven't work at an agency, there's something there right, if every expert in the field at some time has worked at an agency, you start to notice that kind of trend and you think maybe there's something to it.

Jon Taylor  29:02  
I tend to agree. I remember when I did my first tour of duty as a consultant working in an agent agency, I felt like a newborn fawn like I had no idea what I was doing. I brought some platform expertise, but I don't think it prepares you for all the different scenarios that you're going to run into. I got some great mentors at the time, who helped me through that like really awkward period where I was trying to figure out how the heck do I provide value to my clients? Do you want to talk us a little bit for through the beginning stages of your own career or the advice that you give to folks that you bring on who are brand new to the agency world? Eager like I was but maybe not quite effective? Like, how do you become effective as somebody working at an agency? Yeah,

Stephen Stouffer  29:43  
that's a really good question. Everything I've learned has because I've either failed someone else's failed on my behalf and they taught me to keep me from failing myself. Or I said yes to something I didn't want to say yes to so being comfortable, or getting comfortable being uncomfortable. is like the hallmark of working at an agency like 60% of what you're asked to do, you probably have never done before. So just saying yes, when you want to say no diving in, and just knowing that, hey, look, our clients not necessarily paying us because we're the experts like whether or not you think it or not, it's not they're paying you to figure it out. Like they're paying you to have to figure out this new thing, and keep up with technology and find problems that they don't have the time to find or just don't want to find. I would say just constantly push yourself know that you're not going to know how to do everything. And that's okay. That's how you grow. And then if I were to talk to myself back in the day, it's just like, giving my myself permission to make mistakes. And that's okay, I sent an email to a group of folks when I was working at chesh, I went to for a million different people, and it was just all lorem ipsum content in the email was like one of my biggest mistakes I've ever made in my career. I owned up to it to the client, they're just like, well, that's a mistake. Thanks for letting us know. Luckily, they didn't fire us because it was like a huge mistake. But I learned that you need to double check. And you need to check the textures and the HTML version, have someone else and have a little accountability from your teammates. Yeah, like permission to make mistakes and say yes to the things you want to say no to Tyler, I

Jon Taylor  31:15  
want to pull out one thing you said that I thought was really good advice, which is clients pay you to figure out things for them that you don't necessarily need to be an expert, right? They're like an encyclopedia of knowledge. But if you're a journey person, somebody who can help them on the journey. So fantastic advice. Really appreciate you diving into that question. Yeah,

Stephen Stouffer  31:33  
I don't know. But I can figure it out. It's a really powerful thing to say to someone because I can't tell you how many people either create just a BS answer, and it just loses trust. I cannot tell you how many times I've told someone, I don't know. Let me look into this and get back to you. I'll figure it out. That's super powerful. And at the end of the day, that's what our clients really need this for. Yeah,

Philippe Gamache  31:55  
bullshit answers. Or you can see them live typing on another browser on chatting. Yeah, asking the question. There's

Stephen Stouffer  32:03  
probably not the time or the place.

Philippe Gamache  32:06  
Though, good advice. I feel like we could keep going down this this debate a little bit. But I want to ask you about email. We had the super interesting guests on the show last season, who blew my mind a little bit with one of his takes, and I wanted to get your opinion on this. You've obviously got a deep background in email performance enhancement, and you've written about the dining importance of clicks and opens and how people obsess about this way too much. Penny Aquila was the CEO of opti move was on the show last year. And he suggested that the mere presence of an email in the inbox could potentially spur purchases. And this is more of the b2c lens than b2b but I think they both apply. But despite this skepticism for many marketers, this concept supported by experiments, and incremental testing might redefine the value of email deliverability. You by the time this episode hits the airwaves, we're going to be deep into google yahoo or mega Dawn email deliverability changes. But how significant Do you think this idea of email delivered to the inbox? The person seeing that email, maybe reading the subject line but archiving it like not opening it? But so you never get an open on it? Never get a click on it? How significant Do you think just that delivery is driving potential purchases, and potentially being the sole crucial factor for email?

Stephen Stouffer  33:28  
I don't know about a crucial factor. But I know that there's a lot of billboards along the highway. And if you've got 10 seconds, five seconds to read a billboard that's not much different than a subject line in your inbox. Right? It's just the message up in front of you for a quick second. And I think that there wouldn't be any billboards if there wasn't something to that. So I'd be very curious to ask this person how they feel about billboards and tracking ROI of those. It's a little bit of a shadow funnel, if you will, right. It's almost impossible to track the ROI of something like that. But being top of mind is important. I can't tell you how many times I've gotten like an email from REI where nothing in the email was interesting to me, but I clicked it. I bounced around the website found a yeti tumbler that I fell in love with. And then I bought that it had nothing to do really with the email but because it was top of mind or I was driving along the highway I saw Rei and the email popped in my head subconsciously and I just went in there and I bought something is there a way for them to track the ROI of that from time sent email to purchasing something in the store? Maybe But yeah, I'm sure there's something to that but I don't think there would be any anything we could do to really track that and keep up with it. I think if we follow good principles we do what's right by our customers we don't over communicate we send relevant information and we do targeting everything else will fall into place be it directly trackable from opens and clicks I know apples kind of auto opening auto clicking stuff so that gets a little hairy but Like, I've always told people and this goes on a little bit, I know we're jumping to SEO here. But like people want to like hack SEO and to create the best pages No, just build the best page for the person, the algorithm will catch up, right? Do the same thing for email, do what's best for the customers send good content. Because if someone reads that article, they could be like, Oh, well, just sending the emails, the most important thing, I don't have to worry about the body of the content, I have to worry about what's in it, if I'm just going to focus on the subject line, like that is the wrong thing to take away from that topic. So do what's best for you and your business in your industry. Make good content for your customers, make your customer a first approach. Everything else will fall into line. And don't worry about whatever the theme of the week is for tracking or attribution.

Philippe Gamache  35:50  
Yeah, I think that's great advice. The way that he was proving it out was through incremental tests, like 5050 tests, massive audience didn't get an email at all. And then a massive audience, sorry, massive audience did get that email. And then they looked at how many people from the audience that didn't get the email ended up purchasing, and the purchase number was bigger than the number of people that clicked through on the email. So that's, like, spurred that thought, like, the the email landed in inboxes. And maybe there was a bunch of other touch points, and we'll get into multi touch attribution. But I agree with your point about that, even if we agree with this being an important factor, just like a billboard is, it's not to say that you shouldn't care about body of your email, and only focus on the subject line. So yeah, thanks for harping on that. Yeah, there is another topic that I'm curious if you have a spicy take on it. But the question that we've asked a lot of frequent or recent guests is martech. Really for engineers. We chatted with Sarah about this in Episode 100. Last year. Not sure if you're familiar with him, and Casey winters, the former CTO at Eventbrite, and he's an instructor at reforge. On his personal blog, he wrote this article that lives rent free in my mind, and I love asking martec folks about this, he titled it, the problems with martagon why martec is actually for engineers. And he's got a lot of points in there. But basically, martec is a response to engineering constraints and martec will likely decline due to competition from in house enterprise companies that engineers are building platforms for successful more tech companies are essentially catering to engineers, not marketers. Steven, curious your thoughts, sir.

Stephen Stouffer  37:31  
Um, I don't think he's wrong, necessarily. I think it's okay. So I'm gonna say I think he's right. But I think he's, I think there's some messaging being missed there. Yes. I think it's being catered to engineers, I think you need to have a technical background to really unleash the power of all things, AI and to not create a whole bunch of problems with data integrity and systems, integrations and APIs, and blah, blah. But I think the engineering role is being decentralized. I think that 10 years ago, 15 years ago, there's an engineering department that tickets would be opened from marketing tickets would be open from sales, customer success, such as and they'd be flowing through one department. I think it's been decentralized in that marketing is hiring engineers for marketing. Sales is hiring engineers for sales, and we're getting these engineer type roles. But within the departments themselves, it's not its own department, like maybe it was. So I think the technical role of folks on the marketing side, the sales side is increasing. Like, I can't tell you how many content folks who are writing emails and her writing social media posts, but they also know HTML, and they also know CSS and they also manage some Zapier account, which is a softs integration tool where they know JSON, and they're starting to work with API's a little bit. So I think the lines are blurring a little bit, I think, to create a robust system and a robust company that can scale you do need engineers, and they need to be engineering focused. But I'm just not seeing them in their own department anymore. They sit on the sales team, they sit on the marketing team, they sit on the customer success team that even sit on the finance side for NetSuite and QuickBooks integrations so yes, but

Jon Taylor  39:19  
decentralized.

Philippe Gamache  39:20  
Yeah, yes. But the lines are blurring for a lot of professions and jeje. BTS is only blurring things even further. Yeah, I

Stephen Stouffer  39:29  
can't I see engineering pop up all the time for like marketing folks, sales ops folks, you tell me the difference between a sales ops person and a sales engineer or an engineer. They all a lot of them know Python, they know Java scripts. It's just they put those skills to use in different systems and in different ways. And sometimes it's just completely overlap.

Jon Taylor  39:50  
Yeah, I think it's a fascinating it's a fascinating topic and I know you you have a technical background yourself and in your role now you manage different teams. So I Be curious just to bring us back to this human factor, right? Like, we manage lots of technical teams, we've got lots of technical components, but there's still human beings at the center of what we do on a day to day basis. You've emphasized in some of your posts online about using the human factor to solve solving challenges. What are some things that you've learned in your experience around the human factor that we should be keeping in mind, when we're working with martec and martec? Tools?

Stephen Stouffer  40:25  
A lot of problems can be solved by just walk over the room to another department and asking a question and talking to a person. I think a lot of our clients and even similar folks internally, we like, we jump at the idea of creating a new process, a new integration, a new something. But we're solving a problem caused because a person isn't following a process sales isn't updating their opportunity stages. So like, we could create automation to our heart's content. But at the end of the day, maybe a person just needs to be talked to and I'm hesitant to ever try to build a solution to something without fully understanding the problem. And oftentimes, it's a person behind it, not a system. So I think that we need to do like a person first approach, I always tell my team just assume good intent, assume someone is trying to do the right thing. They might not be, but it's because maybe someone didn't communicate that, hey, look, you're not using the the approved picklist. We don't want to make this a restricted picklist, please just put in this value versus this value and have a conversation and boom, it the problem solved. And you don't have to build like a whole new integration to just overcome maybe a little bit of that human error, which is inevitably going to occur.

Jon Taylor  41:42  
Just as a follow up and back to the mom thing, like our parents generation is struggling just like their generation before. With all this new technology. My sister works as a bank teller right now at university. And she says you'd be surprised at how many people are still resistant to using online banking. Do you think part of the problem that we have in Mar tech is created because we're adopting and moving so fast on tools that no offense to the people here, but like the three of us are technical, like having a new process, doing more automation, connecting AI, with our marketing operations back into second nature, but actually, for a lot of folks on the ground and doing the day to day work? This is all extremely overwhelming, not to mention, as you mentioned, Europe is coming online with marketing operations. Now we're throwing AI to the mix. Yeah, the

Stephen Stouffer  42:29  
tech debt is real. It's somedays, I get overwhelmed, right, like I'm in it. And I'll step into a new org or a client org, or even our own internal org. And I'll be like, Whoa, wait a second. We've got Gravity Forms, we got Pardot forums, we've got long text forms over here, there's kind of decentralized, like, what the heck is going on, we have so many tools. And I think it's important. One, whenever you're investing in that new tool, you just take a look at all the other current tech stack. And odds are, if you buy something, you can probably get rid of something. Or if you're getting something, it's replaced a few different things. So you can start to remove it. I saw that a lot actually, in 2022, and 2023. People were consolidating tech, they weren't buying it over the last 10 years it was by you need more data, you need zoom info, you need clear, but you need this, you need that. And then I feel like over the last three years, we've taken a step back and we're like, Well hold on a second, we have so much that we just don't even use. Let's go back to the basics. Let's clean things up. Let's map out who's responsible for what different tools and let's, you know, really get that under control, and then go back to those first principles of, you know, making good systems and strong systems that scale versus just buy. So like I love that that transition has been tweaked a little bit from buying tech to now we've got so much shelfware and people are just looking to cut that. And I think things like Salesforce and HubSpot with the different ecosystems, they've done a good job about creating a home for people where they don't have don't feel like maybe there you have to buy a bunch of different tools for different point solutions.

Philippe Gamache  44:10  
Good advice, given we feel like to keep jamming on this topic and several others, but we're short on time. So when asked you one last question, you're a VP of mops, big conference speaker, frequent slack group helper at Salesforce MVP nominee this year as well, congrats on that coffee aficionado and also big outdoor adventure. One question we asked all of our guests is how do you remain happy and successful in your career? How do you find balance between all the things you're juggling and working on while staying up? Yeah, so

Stephen Stouffer  44:38  
my response might surprise you. But there is no balance. I have to choose, right. I have to choose during September that it's going to be a little more conference heavy. And I'm not going to be able to maybe hang out with my friends quite as much. But it's important that it's a conscious decision and you say hey look, this month I'm going to have to dedicate to this so maybe my friends are going to have to take a look Little bit of a step back. But that's intentional. It doesn't sneak up on me. But during the early summer months, I don't do quite as much podcasts right now. It's beautiful here in Dallas and Dallas about 70 degrees, but normally it's pretty cold. So like podcasts, webinars, online events I love doing in this time of year. But can summer if you guys were to ask me to jump on a podcast, you might get a different answer. Because my priority is shifted away from that and being with my friends and being present. So my balance is I choose like, I don't have a work life balance. I choose maybe work a little bit more for one week or one month and I choose life on the other side. So I balanced it just by picking. But I I'm not a tech person outside of my day job. My home is pretty automated. But beyond that. I love unplugging a love getting into nature. I love coffee, I love camping, and I love just getting away from it all and I feel like I can write that's how I recharge. And then I'm prepared for these types of conversations where we do like deep dives into AI

Philippe Gamache  46:03  
awesome advice. Really appreciate that Steven, lots of wisdom there. Maybe we'll do a part two at some point you and JT can just go down a rabbit hole on camping tips that don't do enough. There we

Stephen Stouffer  46:13  
go into Rei wants to like maybe sponsor one of these podcasts. I'm here for it.

Jon Taylor  46:18  
Let's do it.

Philippe Gamache  46:21  
Amazing. Thanks so much for your time Steven, really appreciate it.

Philippe Gamache  46:28  
This episode was brought to you buy iterable where will you be on April 30 2020 for AI and creativity are colliding and iterables signature activate Summit is the place to be the automation game is changing and you've got an opportunity to be a key player. Are you ready? Not just should you attend the conference, but you actually have an opportunity to win a full VIP experience. iterable is giving away a grand prize package that will whisk you away to San Jose for the summit and take care of everything in style. We're talking of a full pass to activate summit that's $1,000 worth of learning, networking and inspiration with hundreds of marketing's brightest minds, a swanky VIP dinner to mingle with fellow attendees and speakers. A luxurious three nights stay at Signia by Hilton San Jose picture plush comfort and stunning views just steps away from all the action and also a round trip airfare within the US to leave all the logistics to iterable. Just focus on packing for your excitement. Entering is super easy. Just head over to iterable.com/activate before April 2 and register for either in person or the virtual experience which is free. And that's it, you're officially in the running so don't miss out on this chance to win a trip that will boost your career and ignite your marketing Mojo. Head over to iterable.com/activate and enter today. If you're still listening, first of all, thank you for being here and as a reward for your attention. I'll leave you with my favorite newsletter. Check out the marketing operations leader newsletter written by a friend of the show Darrell Alfonso, you might know him we interviewed him in episode one of one of the podcasts sterols, lead marketing ops at big names like indeed and AWS, and his newsletter is packed with practical advice and frameworks and new ideas to help you manage your marketing function. He launched it at the end of last year and he's already collected over 1000 subscribers. So go to substack.com and search for marketing operations leader and you'll thank us later. Our second favorite newsletter is the humans of martec newsletter of course, we'll be experimenting more with this in the future. But for now think of this is the best way to get notified when a new episode drops. And you'll get a breakdown of the summary of the episode and all the key takeaways. So you know if this is an episode, you want to listen check out. Maybe you want to watch it on YouTube or just read the GBT power summary blog post. It's the best way to support the show and help us attract more sponsors. So if you'd like to show you like our content, you can support us by signing up at humans and martec.com. Again, really appreciate you and we'll catch you next week.

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