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How’d You Get That Number?! is the show that asks B2B SaaS leaders one simple question: where did that goal actually come from?
Hosted by Daren Ladua and brought to you by Outset, each episode unpacks how career-defining KPIs, revenue targets, and growth goals were set in the first place and what happened next.
If you're building go-to-market teams or chasing big numbers, this is the real story behind the metrics.
[00:00:00] Mike Rizzo: A lot of it really truly, it started as a, Hey, I'm alone. Nobody knows what I'm talking about. When I talk to them about these problems, I would really like to talk to some other people about this. And so I was in this mode of build community for a brand and build a community for c community of practice.
[00:00:18] Mike Rizzo: Ultimately, what came to fruition was an opportunity to go focus on the the community MarketingOps.com. And the way we measured success initially was. Are people interacting?
[00:00:32] Daren Lauda: You are listening to How'd You Get That Number brought to you by Outset. This is the show where B2B SaaS leaders break down the real stories behind the goals, KPIs and revenue targets that shaped their careers, and how those numbers were set in the first place.
[00:00:47] Daren Lauda: I'm your host, Daren Lauda.
[00:00:52] Daren Lauda: I am super happy this morning to be talking to the Riz. I don't know if he actually claims that moniker, but he is the Riz Mike Rizzo founder, and CEO of MarketingOps.com. I've known Mike for over a decade. He's an awesome human being. He's been working out like crazy. I feel like I should flex right now a little bit just so I can kinda be near him on film.
[00:01:13] Daren Lauda: Um, I'm really excited to be talking to him today. Mike, welcome to the show. Oh man. Daren, you're too
[00:01:17] Mike Rizzo: kind. Thank you. We don't want any, uh, showing of muscles on the show. We just wanna show off our brains.
[00:01:23] Daren Lauda: There we go. It's all about the brains today. Listen, Mike, you know, I've known you for a long time. You have built something really cool in MarketingOps.com and the community you built.
[00:01:31] Daren Lauda: Tell us about yourself and the community for a second, so could get a good grounding in who you are.
[00:01:35] Mike Rizzo: Yeah, yeah. No, I appreciate it. Thanks again for having me on. I've, uh, it's great that like. After all this time we finally get to sort of like come back together and talk shop about things and Yep.
[00:01:46] Mike Rizzo: Obviously I know we've stayed in touch the one time you actually asked me, um, 'cause you were leading sales at the organization? We, we were both working at together. Right. And I think we were standing at, uh, a booth at a conference together and I. He said, when are you coming to the dark side? Welcome to sales.
[00:02:01] Mike Rizzo: Welcome to sales. I was like, never Daren. It's not gonna happen. Um, but yeah, for what it's worth, my background, I got my start in marketing operations, uh, and marketing in general at the, uh, ripe old age of, um, like 12 I think. So when I was real young, I had this idea that I wanted to be a marketer. I thought it was a very different kind of marketer back then.
[00:02:26] Mike Rizzo: And over time I did go to school for business and an emphasis in marketing. Got my start in ad tech and learned all about retargeting and pixels and ad networks. And it was eventually given the opportunity to go quote unquote, like figure out how to send a newsletter with all the air quotes, which was my foray into what became marketing automation and marketing operations for SaaS.
[00:02:53] Mike Rizzo: And so. Uh, I fell in love with the more technical operational side of that, and I've been doing it since probably about 2015 now, um, ish, like 2016 and like yeah, eventually I was tired of being a team of one at that company. You and I were at. I was on a broader marketing team for sure, but, uh, a team of one in terms of the world that I was living in, in marketing operations, the challenges that I had.
[00:03:22] Mike Rizzo: Eventually I endeavored to start an organization that is now known as MarketingOps.com, and it's a community of practice. We're full of thousands of marketing operations professionals. Some of 'em are current. Some of 'em are aspiring. And we're learning from each other every day, which means you no longer have to be a team of one.
[00:03:41] Mike Rizzo: You could be a team of a thousand and, uh, shorten your learning curve with people who have maybe been
[00:03:47] Daren Lauda: there and done that. So, yeah. Super cool. So I'm a member of the community, uh, proud member of it. I remember you doing this work even before the community existed, you know, over 10 years ago. And I credit you with.
[00:03:58] Daren Lauda: Beginning to get me thinking about marketing ops. I don't even know that I was thinking as much about sales ops back then. It was more about what's the sales process, how do we document it? But you got me thinking, marketing ops, sales ops, how do I think about this differently? The application to business process, the, the technologies, the ways to measure.
[00:04:14] Daren Lauda: So I'm grateful to you for that. I don't know if I've ever said that publicly, but thank you. You. Oh, thank you. Um, uh, when we were running around the offices trying to make things work and now. Little Easter egg for the audience. Mike actually suggested the name for this show, so How'd You Get That Number is the brainchild of Mike Rizzo.
[00:04:30] Daren Lauda: So thank you for that as well.
[00:04:32] Mike Rizzo: You're welcome. I appreciate it. Yeah. Yeah. For those that are listening, uh, Daren and I do get a chance to work with each other a little bit more frequently these days, uh, with Without Set and some of the work that he's doing there. And a few of the other folks that we used to work with, and this was one of the ideas we had, was like, let's do a show where we talk about the challenges of growing business.
[00:04:52] Mike Rizzo: And let's allow us to sort of flex between all kinds of different topics around analytics, data and revenue. Uh, and so yeah, How'd You Get That Number was where my brain went and
[00:05:02] Daren Lauda: somehow
[00:05:03] Mike Rizzo: that
[00:05:03] Daren Lauda: landed. Now we're here so well, and it's perfect. 'cause today I wanna learn, um, about the numbers you use when you built your community.
[00:05:11] Daren Lauda: I think there's some really interesting things to pull out and explore there. But before we get to that, talk about a big hairy number. You were assigned or you were given, or you put on your own the shoulders. And what'd you do? Did you chase it? Did you walk away? Did you say, heck no. Go after it. What'd you do?
[00:05:27] Mike Rizzo: Yeah. Yeah. Honestly, I know we're gonna talk a bit about like the community metrics and a little bit here. Um, this one is going to be centered in and around our activities in the community today. Um, most notably our event at our conference. For those that are not aware of what it takes to throw a conference at the level that we did it at, it was a million dollars.
[00:05:54] Mike Rizzo: And I, I put that number on myself. The community did ask for it to be fair, like they asked for it. And I said, okay, let's, let's try to go get it. And I guess if I had to do it all over again, I might, I might have tried to plan a little bit differently or something. I went in a little naive on exactly how that, uh, might be attained, but it was a million dollar endeavor to host the conference and I had to figure out how to go.
[00:06:21] Mike Rizzo: Cover that.
[00:06:22] Daren Lauda: Um, yeah, I was gonna say, you didn't have a suitcase of dollar bills just waiting to be spent one at a time, up to a million. I'm guessing. That had to be really stressful doing that for the first time. For those of you who don't know, we're talking like Disneyland level Anaheim quality event. I was there.
[00:06:38] Daren Lauda: I've been there. It's awesome. So how do you convince yourself, you know what? Million dollar budget? Let's go.
[00:06:45] Mike Rizzo: I dunno, I don't know if I convinced myself, I begrudgingly sort of like drug myself, uh, up the stairs every day with what felt like the world at my ankles pulling me down in terms of stress. In order to achieve such an outcome, I kind of turned a blind eye to the idea that it was gonna cost a million dollars and just said, let's just buckle down and figure out how to.
[00:07:13] Mike Rizzo: Make sure that people get paid and, you know, our vendors get paid and all those things. And I tried to break it down as much as I could. Uh, in truth tactically, the elements that we used to execute on, um, achieving paying our bills, really the, the end goal was host a good, a good event, right? Get people excited to come back and pay the bills so that we can do it again.
[00:07:39] Mike Rizzo: I actually wrote a little blog post about this, so if anybody wants to unpack it any further than, than just this conversation, you're welcome to go read it on our website. But ultimately, um, it meant selling sponsorship. It meant selling tickets, putting numbers out there to try to go hit some level of revenue there.
[00:07:57] Mike Rizzo: And then, um, what's fascinating about building business, as many of us know, especially if you're not like venture backed or you're maybe trying to be a little bit more. Measured in your growth these days? It's not growth at all costs anymore, right? We're we're seeing that. I think a lot of us will resonate with, hey, it's, there's a bit of a cash flow situation here and as a, as a executive, there's lots of different ways to try to understand the healthier business.
[00:08:24] Mike Rizzo: And in my case, not only did I have to cover a million dollars, but I had to have the cash flow to be able to pay the vendors and get to the finish line. We weren't sitting on some sort of investment that came from. Venture of any kind. And so, uh, to do that, I opened three credit cards and considered taking a lien on the house.
[00:08:44] Mike Rizzo: Uh, my wife thought I was absolutely nuts. And then I took a a hundred thousand dollars loan debt financing vehicle to be able to have the cash flow in place to pay the team, pay the vendors, get the hotel, the money that they needed from us, uh, and then sell the tickets and the sponsorships along the way.
[00:09:02] Mike Rizzo: And I'll be honest, it was absolutely one of the best and worst decisions that I ever made at the, at the time. Now, all at once, best and worst. Yeah. Yeah. Now it's a great choice, right? Still headed the right direction, but we didn't know what the outcome would look like up until, I would say about five weeks before the event, four weeks before the event.
[00:09:23] Mike Rizzo: We more than doubled registrations inside of the last three and four weeks for the conference and for all of you who have. Ever bought a ticket to a conference? My ask of you is to buy it much sooner next time.
[00:09:37] Daren Lauda: Well, I'll tell you, I'm gonna look to the right at my screen real quick because I can see that the next event, MOps-Apalooza, is actually 115 days, 23 hours, 49 minutes, and 18 seconds from starting.
[00:09:50] Daren Lauda: I'm gonna buy my ticket today. To hopefully take some stress off. I mean, I'll do that right after this show. But I love an entrepreneurial story like that. This is one of the things that I love about this program. We'll talk to people who run a hundred billion dollar businesses or larger at scale. Here we're talking to a founder who said, you know what?
[00:10:07] Daren Lauda: I'm gonna start a community that doesn't exist. I'm gonna build it. I'm gonna launch a first show. I'm gonna take out some credit cards, commit a million dollars, maybe bankrupt myself. I don't know. I don't have any other way to pay for this thing, so I'm gonna go for it, take some debt and make it happen.
[00:10:24] Daren Lauda: And it was a success. And by the way, I know it was because I walked the room. I was there. Just the feel was great. You don't have any gray hair yet, so I don't know how you got through that without a bunch of gray hair. Um, and you're doing it again, so. Not see. Okay.
[00:10:39] Mike Rizzo: It's so, it is definitely here. There's a, there's a scruff.
[00:10:42] Mike Rizzo: It's up here in the sides. I just got a haircut though, so it's, it's hiding.
[00:10:46] Daren Lauda: Trimmed it in. Yeah, absolutely. Well, my, you can barely see my beard anymore because it's a short and b, almost all gray. Um, but, um, I think that's a really cool story and I couldn't be, um, uh, happier with the results for you. Like I said, um, I've done you for a long time and I thought it was really cool.
[00:11:01] Daren Lauda: To see it when I got there. Yeah. Thank you. So let's, let's unpack further then. I think that would be an interesting story. You know, we talk a lot about kind of rev ops, sales ops, marketing ops type of activities, M qls and SQLs and those sorts of things. But your story's really unique. You said, I'm gonna build a community.
[00:11:17] Daren Lauda: That's kind of step one. I. How did you go about thinking about building that? How did you measure success? Was it members? Was it paid members? Was it, am I profitable? How did you start to think about measuring success in the early days? And then how did it change as the community got bigger?
[00:11:32] Mike Rizzo: Yeah, yeah. All really good questions.
[00:11:34] Mike Rizzo: I'll try to answer from a couple different angles. One is, of course, the way that we think about our community today, where we were before. And that's evolved. And then the other sort of approach is if you were building something I'll, I'll sort of ebb and flow between those concepts, right? Because if you are someone who's aspiring to build a community for your business or community practice similar to ours, you can either heed some of my lessons or take a different approach and I'll try to touch on a couple of those options for you.
[00:12:05] Mike Rizzo: Especially if you're gonna build like a community for your users, right as well. So as you can tell now, my whole world is community. Every entrepreneurial idea I had was basically some level of bringing people together and talking about something. I once started a, an environment known as product feedback.io and it sounds exactly like what it was like people who love giving advice on tools and software and features that could maybe be paid for that.
[00:12:31] Mike Rizzo: So my, my brain tends to sort of think in terms of marketplaces in the community, in terms of measuring our community success. In the early days, I'll be honest with you, none of this was planned. We have a plan now, but a lot of it really, truly, it started as a, Hey, I'm alone. Nobody knows what I'm talking about when I talk to them about these problems.
[00:12:56] Mike Rizzo: I would really like to talk to some other people about this. I wrote a blog post Slack channel was created in 2017. Slack was still pretty new back then. Not everybody was using it. And people kept asking to join. And so as they joined, I endeavored to ask them, well, what would you like to see out of this space?
[00:13:13] Mike Rizzo: What could we do better? I had Boomeranged back to Mavenlink, which was the organization you and I met at, and they had actually tasked me with building their customer community and advisory board now. And so I was in this mode of build community for a brand and build, uh, community for a community of practice.
[00:13:33] Mike Rizzo: And I was experimenting back and forth with what worked where, and I had different measures of success in both environments. Ultimately, what came to fruition was an opportunity to go focus on the the community MarketingOps.com. And the way we measured success initially was our people interacting, right?
[00:13:51] Mike Rizzo: Like what kinds of channels, how many channels do we need to spin up? And is there sort of a daily pickup rate? That, uh, shows that there's traction, there are some benchmarks you can ask. I gotta
[00:14:02] Daren Lauda: interrupt and ask you. Go ahead. I gotta do this. I, I love this entrepreneurial story, by the way. This is gold for anybody who wants to think about starting a community.
[00:14:10] Daren Lauda: So pay close attention. You said, I, I felt alone. I wrote a blog post and I started. Yeah. So for those of you out there who are waiting and saying, it's too hard. I can't, I won't, I don't. Right? Mike said, I have an idea. I'm alone. I'm gonna start. That's super cool. And before he knew it, he was jumping to let's measure uptake and engagement.
[00:14:34] Daren Lauda: Right. That's a pretty big leap. It must have been growing quickly, faster than you thought, I'm guessing.
[00:14:38] Mike Rizzo: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. In 2019 that for some reason something shifted in the market, whether it was in interest in the idea of community or the category of marketing operations, um, we got picked up by search more regularly.
[00:14:53] Mike Rizzo: And so I was getting hit three or four or five times a week with, Hey, can I join? Can I join, can I join? Um, and that's not scalable, one to one. And I'm a marketing automation nerd. So I figured out how to scale the invite process a little bit more. Uh, and we started growing about 110 people a month in 2019.
[00:15:11] Mike Rizzo: And, uh, at that point was when I started asking for feedback. Like, okay, well what, what do we really need to be doing here to make this a success for you? Because at the end of the day, building a community is really not too dissimilar than building a product. You just have to talk to your users about the features and functionality that they like.
[00:15:30] Mike Rizzo: And get validation and then continue to go build that. In fact, at the top of this, I said that right. The conference was born out of our customers, our members asking for such a thing. So,
[00:15:41] Daren Lauda: so we're, we're sitting in 2019. The conference of course, doesn't exist yet. No, it's not even a thought. Probably I'm have be monetized at this point as you're adding 110 users a month.
[00:15:51] Mike Rizzo: No, but the writing was on the wall. I can't dismiss the fact that I'm a entrepreneurial human right, and that I'm a marketer. And I'm well aware of how difficult it is to get buy-in from someone who's a marketing operations professional. You know, frankly, we get sold software a lot and you know, we have to evaluate a lot.
[00:16:16] Mike Rizzo: We actually have to know a lot about the tools in order to make an informed decision on what to invest in for our staff, particularly in B2B, but definitely in B2C as well. And so I said, Hey, we've got. A hard to reach audience here. How do we balance supporting this community effort with some level of revenue in some form, right?
[00:16:40] Mike Rizzo: Um, and so I said, well, I'm sure there's gonna be some brands out there that want to talk to these folks. And so we first went down the path of sponsorship. Now I will tell you, when you're a 300 person, community, and community in 2019, was. Starting to become sort of the rage. It was like right at the tipping point of everybody wanted to be community led, quote unquote.
[00:17:04] Mike Rizzo: The monetization effort on the sponsorship side was, I didn't know how to sell it, didn't know what it was, didn't know what it would become. So it wasn't like easy to do, but I just started planting seeds and. I guess dialing for dollars.
[00:17:20] Daren Lauda: That's a good way to put it. So you
[00:17:20] Mike Rizzo: asked me before when you come into the dark side, that
[00:17:24] Daren Lauda: was it,
[00:17:24] Mike Rizzo: 2000,
[00:17:25] Daren Lauda: 19, 20, you started dialing and you were there.
[00:17:27] Daren Lauda: I was there.
[00:17:28] Mike Rizzo: That's awesome. I, I went, I went head first into that. That's fantastic.
[00:17:32] Daren Lauda: So until that point, you'd bootstrapped all the costs of the community was born by you. Was Slack freed you at that point, or were you paying for licensing, those sorts of things?
[00:17:41] Mike Rizzo: Yeah, no, um, slack has actually always been free.
[00:17:44] Mike Rizzo: Um, a couple times we unlocked some of the paid trial stuff, but I'll be honest with you, like if I had to do it all over again, I wouldn't have built in Slack. It's not truly a community platform. There's people at Slack that would argue with me on that one, and I'm, that's fine, but it is cost prohibitive to pay for it.
[00:18:00] Mike Rizzo: So we actually are still on a Slack free plan and. Basically your, your message retention is lost after about 90 days. Right. Which in a weird way, for a community, when you think about the psychology of a community, right? It's a resource for you to sort of go back to and ask for help. And Slack is most akin to live chat, in my opinion.
[00:18:23] Mike Rizzo: It's almost this instant gratification feature, right? And. When message retention is lost after 90 days on the free plan, there's actually an interesting psychology that happens there, right? It's like I kind of have to pay attention, otherwise I won't get to see some of the stuff and, and I think it falls into the like category of social media, right?
[00:18:42] Mike Rizzo: Like your feed, like sure you can scroll back infinitely, but really are you gonna do that? So I think in some ways there's some benefits to it. But we do have a community forum product that. Is a community like product, uh, just people don't use it enough. It's, it's kind of the problem.
[00:18:59] Daren Lauda: But when did the Community Forum product come into play?
[00:19:01] Daren Lauda: Was it up in 2019 as well?
[00:19:03] Mike Rizzo: It was, yeah. So we, again, having been at Mavenlink building their customer community, I needed, I had a desire to have a, a proper community environment where, um, and by that I mean for, for all of you who are maybe watching or listening, there are. Aspects of running a community that I think make it a success.
[00:19:26] Mike Rizzo: And one of those is the ability to have moderation, right? And appoint someone to be sort of an owner of a channel or, or what have you. So a concrete example of how we grew the community and really started to lean in was a appointing individuals to own a particular corner of, uh, technology. So we had a chairperson program and
[00:19:49] Daren Lauda: these were volunteers.
[00:19:51] Mike Rizzo: They are. Yeah, they were volunteers, and so we said, Hey, would you like to represent HubSpot, Marketo Hard, or Eloqua? If you're interested in that. Here's the ask. You are the face of that particular channel for a period of 12 months. You host a handful of meetings and discussions. You try to answer and prompt questions.
[00:20:14] Mike Rizzo: In that channel, you get an elevated status in the community. Um, and effectively you get to help, contribute and grow and have, you know, meaningful conversations. So you, you know, you get something out of it too. Out of being a volunteer in this way, I couldn't appoint them to be a moderator of Slack because that basically means I gotta give you admin rights to the whole thing.
[00:20:38] Mike Rizzo: And that's just not safe from a data perspective.
[00:20:41] Daren Lauda: I agree with that. Yes. Not safe at all.
[00:20:45] Mike Rizzo: Um, and so if you have a proper community platform, in most cases, you can distribute moderation capabilities to specific environments, da, da da, da, da, right? So that's kind of when you think about programming, and when I said a moment ago, building a community is not too dissimilar from building a product.
[00:21:04] Mike Rizzo: You really start to think about like, well, what are the features and functionality that I need to make my community a success? And it goes all the way down to user permissions, controls, and content. But you, you have to think about the whole strategy at the same time, because you might not start with some of those things right at the beginning.
[00:21:21] Mike Rizzo: You'll work your way to them, but you gotta know that they're gonna be there for you. And I, I would argue that buying MarTech is the exact
[00:21:28] Daren Lauda: same thing, right? Very fair. Sales, tech, MarTech. It's all true. Yeah, so we're sitting here in the early twenties. I dunno if COVID has hit yet or not. I'm in this story, um, almost, almost.
[00:21:40] Daren Lauda: But you're getting to a point now where you've got users, you're starting to monetize via sponsorship. You, um, have moderators and people really engaging who want to have a bigger position than the community built. This has gotta be about the time, somewhere in there where you say. I'm gonna quit my job and do this full time.
[00:21:57] Daren Lauda: Is that in this window?
[00:22:00] Mike Rizzo: Yeah, it's, it's close. I was given an opportunity to go help another company, build a community, but they said, spend a third of your time building this community of practice. Because it was helpful to have it, like it should exist. That, that they believed in me and they believed in the vision of the community.
[00:22:19] Mike Rizzo: And it was an early stage startup for those of you who look at my LinkedIn. It was, it was stack boxy, um, great company. They just wanted us to have success. And eventually when we all did go through COVID together and the market took a turn and layoffs all happened, I was a part of that wave from an early stage startup perspective.
[00:22:39] Mike Rizzo: And I had to go all in a couple years ago on the community itself. And so, uh, I'll be honest though, I didn't pay myself anything. Until last year.
[00:22:50] Daren Lauda: Wow. Good for you. Um, so like I was figuring out how to make it work. For those of you who don't know, I know where Mike's coming from 'cause I don't pay myself at Outset as we're building, so I know how hard that is.
[00:23:02] Daren Lauda: I admire, um, your wife, she went from. You're building a community, not paying yourself to helping you spend a million bucks. So she's really been along for the ride and a good partner on this journey. She the best. She deserve a lot of kudos.
[00:23:13] Mike Rizzo: The best. Yeah. She is absolutely the best partner when it comes to all this stuff.
[00:23:17] Mike Rizzo: And she's believed in everything that we're doing. And it was really fun for our kids to come to MOps-Apalooza the very first year. Oh, I bet. And so to see, like, they don't fully understand, but it was cool for those of you out there, small kids, you, you can appreciate, you know, a 4-year-old, actually at the time they were three and five.
[00:23:34] Mike Rizzo: They were like, whoa, look at this thing. You
[00:23:36] Daren Lauda: know? So it was pretty fun. And dad's a celebrity celebrity in that room, guys, so that had to be extra cool. That was awesome. Yeah. They're like, how come I can't talk to you? So how did you start to think about the community differently in terms of measurement and growth?
[00:23:50] Daren Lauda: I kind of heard that sponsorships, dialing for dollars wasn't really fun for you. I don't know that it worked exactly as you would've liked initially, but now you're at a spot where you're, it's your only thing that you're doing, um, but you're still not paying yourself. But does the way you think about measuring the community shift or is it still subscribers and growth and engagement?
[00:24:10] Mike Rizzo: Yeah, we, like any organization, you often have sort of a, a maturity in your journey, right? And you sort of realize what you want to become. I said earlier there was no plan. Initially. There is a plan. Now we had sort of a. I don't know. What do they say? Like, come to Jesus moment. I, I know there's another term out there for it, but we realize that we aren't building an events business.
[00:24:40] Mike Rizzo: We aren't building a media entity, even though in a lot of ways we're doing a lot of those types of things. We are a, have always been a community of practice and we exist to be a resource for, for people in their career in this particular category. Which is in our DNA and means that we're a membership organization.
[00:25:03] Mike Rizzo: And so the shift more recently over the last 12 months was bring in a fractional CFO, understand the real numbers of our business, where revenue comes from, how much is sponsorship, how much does the cost go into these events? What does our staff need? What do we all need to be able to sort of, sort of sustain?
[00:25:24] Mike Rizzo: And then how do we build a plan? That positions us nicely for a good, successful business, and that was what we've done over the last like 18 months or so. Now, I would say we are completely focused on driving membership revenue for the very first time ever, like literally as of a week ago today, we hosted a webinar that said, we're a membership organization.
[00:25:52] Mike Rizzo: Here's what membership means. Here's all the value you get. I'm kind of taking the Amazon approach, like $1 gets the other, you know, all the stuff, right? Or one, one membership gets you all stuff. And so that's what we're doing now is we're focusing wholeheartedly on, we've always been value driven, focused on the success of our members.
[00:26:11] Mike Rizzo: Now let's like prove to you how that can come to fruition through your membership and try to get off what I refer to as the hamster wheel of of sponsorship. Don't get me wrong, we love our sponsors. Uh, we will continue to provide the right kind of value for them in favor of our members, but it is much more sustainable to have a membership organization and a strong baseline to operate from so we can host better experiences and better learning opportunities.
[00:26:40] Mike Rizzo: So that's the big shift. Now it's like we're measuring membership revenue growth. More than anything else.
[00:26:47] Daren Lauda: I think that's really exciting. He built something that's really growing, something that's very cool. Having been to the local events like the dinners, having been to MOps-Apalooza, having been inside the community, I don't want to sound like I'm doing a sales pitch for MarketingOps.com, but I kind of am.
[00:27:03] Daren Lauda: It's, it's helped my career, it's helped me grow, and I've really been impressed by the way community members engage with one another. To help one another when you need it. I think it's a really cool thing you built, and I love hearing how you went from having an idea and feeling alone to doing it while you had a job, and then thank goodness Stack Mxi.
[00:27:24] Daren Lauda: You had a third of a job. Yeah. Well, you kept growing and going. It's a really fun arc to find out that you ultimately were spending a million dollars on an event. I hope you take a moment some days to go, holy cow, this is awesome. And just pat yourself on the back 'cause I think it's a really cool story.
[00:27:39] Mike Rizzo: Thank you. No, I appreciate it. And um, yeah, I am incredibly proud of our community. I'm proud of myself. I've never said those words out loud before, but I'm proud of myself for being able to do that, I guess. But really it's not about me, it is about our community. They've banded together in ways and they've shown up for each other.
[00:27:59] Mike Rizzo: Um, and in this case, they've shown up to make some of these things a success and, you know, we're looking to do more of it. I do need everybody to sort of, you know, if they want it to exist, the market has to respond. We can't sustainably host MOps-Apalooza if this year doesn't at least break even to be perfectly, you know, Frank with the whole world.
[00:28:20] Mike Rizzo: That we can find ways to get there and we just need to make sure we find the right mix, that we're doing everything we can to make that happen.
[00:28:26] Daren Lauda: Fantastic. So listen, I'm gonna come back to you for the final question here in a second, but let's do the, um, the MarketingOps plug here real quick, which I'm gonna do for you.
[00:28:35] Daren Lauda: Register for MOps-Apalooza if you haven't already. There are great resources online. Um, if you need to convince somebody to help get reimbursement for work, I'm sure there are ways you can look at it and prove that it's really beneficial to you. Um, as a marketing ops, rev ops, or even sales ops employee, if you're an executive, come learn how to use these really critical functions.
[00:28:54] Daren Lauda: I think they're often. Underutilized or misunderstood by execs. I think you should come, whether you're a manager, director, vp, or a C-level individual, you need to be at this event. Your team members need to be members of the community, right? So let's make sure that's happening. What did I miss Mike, in terms of making sure we get people to join MarketingOps?
[00:29:12] Mike Rizzo: See, this is, I couldn't do it that well. So clearly I didn't step all the way into the quote unquote dark side of sales, but you
[00:29:19] Daren Lauda: get your toe in the water, you got your toe in the water,
[00:29:21] Mike Rizzo: but uh, no, you hit the nail on the head really. We do produce, uh, an annual research report that we release each year at MOps-Apalooza, and that is meant to educate the market top and tail.
[00:29:31] Mike Rizzo: So who you talked about coming to this event is, uh, anybody who's aspiring to either be in marketing operations, go to market ops, rev ops kind of functions, just wants to learn more about it. And if you're an executive who's trying to understand how critical. This function is to your department, or rather to your organization's success, it's a really great environment for you to come and learn from them.
[00:29:54] Mike Rizzo: They're not just gonna sit there and show you how to send an email. They're gonna talk about what are we doing to leverage AI and scale our go to market effectively? What are we doing to do lead routing and enrichment capabilities that unlock new revenue growth potential? How are we unblocking our teams?
[00:30:12] Mike Rizzo: From the challenges that they're faced with to effectively deploy, go-to market strategies. It is a very nerdy conference, but it is the kind of tactical that makes you walk away inspired and feeling like, oh, I can, I can go implement something today. So, yeah, please, and that, that, yes, it comes to life at MOps-Apalooza.
[00:30:33] Mike Rizzo: Our conference definitely come to the event. We'd love for you to be there, but it's. Every day in our community, right? That those are the things that we're dealing with. So if you're a member of the community, you get to sort of live that day in and day out as well.
[00:30:48] Daren Lauda: I love that you called it a nerdy event.
[00:30:49] Daren Lauda: Um, I've always said personally, this is a mantra for me. I'd rather be the king of the nerds than a peasant stud. So come learn how to be the king of the nerdy stuff that we do at MarketingOps.com, the event. I'm gonna come to you here in just one second, Mike, and I ask you the final question.
[00:31:06] Daren Lauda: I'll give you a second to think about it. Which is always, what's the one thing in go-to-market tech that we're not talking about that we should be, but before my hand? The ranges here to talk about that one. I do wanna talk about today's sponsor. That's eai, your AI twin at work. I love Eki. I use eki. I've got meeting notes with an LLM underneath, but let me use their words, um, to make sure I, I do my sponsor Justice built from every conversation to move work forward even when you're not in the room.
[00:31:34] Daren Lauda: Eki captures what matters in your meetings. It tracks your action items so you don't forget them, and it acts on them like drafting follow ups or answering repeat repeated questions for you, so you don't have to do that. Kind of make work. If your team is stuck in meeting overload or Baird and busy work, try eki free for seven days.
[00:31:52] Daren Lauda: It is completely free. I use it, I love it. It might just turn complaints about too many meetings into conversations and new ideas. Use referral code H-Y-G-T-N. How'd You Get That Number H-Y-G-T-N. To get started, we'll make sure on the screen you see the URL so you can register. So Mike, for the big question, what's the one thing that we should be talking about in go-to market that we're just not spending enough time on yet?
[00:32:18] Mike Rizzo: People are kind of talking about it, but they're not go-to-market engineering. Is this thing happening? What people are not talking about is the go-to-market stack is a product and you need strategists and leaders to own the entirety of your go-to market stack. Like a product and engineering is execution focused.
[00:32:46] Mike Rizzo: You still need a strategist and an architect to ensure that it meets the needs of the business and you're not falling into the exact same problem that we've been falling into for the last decade plus, which is by a tool and under utilize it, buy a tool because it has a feature, and not think about, oh, it has 10 other features we should be leveraging as well.
[00:33:08] Mike Rizzo: So the market needs to shift focus and stop getting all focused on this idea of, I, I don't get me wrong, I love go to market engineering. Conceptually, I think it's important. It needs to exist. It pushes the envelope on slowing down to speed up. And by that I mean with the use of AI and tools, you can really get hyper-focused on how you want to reach your audience and build out a very.
[00:33:37] Mike Rizzo: A tactical plan to do that, but there's still a layer that needs to encompass, well, how is the rest of the organization leveraging the go-to-market stack and how does it all fit together? And who's responsible for that? And you might guess my argument is it comes from marketing operations background, but we need people to start talking about go to market as a product, not just.
[00:34:01] Mike Rizzo: As a tactic.
[00:34:03] Daren Lauda: I love this idea. Um, I love, I'll be, um, lemme rephrase that. I'm gonna enjoy watching it take shape. Um, as somebody who's been in a world, um, we're primarily born and raised in sales, um, and sales might have its Salesforce and marketing might have its HubSpot and we stick a bunch of other tools all around it.
[00:34:22] Daren Lauda: I go to people who have or see customers who have ZoomInfo and chorus and gong. I'm like, well, wait a minute. Some of these things probably could have come together somewhere. Yeah. We've got ZoomInfo and Apollo and cl. Okay. Thinking about this as a product, taking as much advantage of as you can holistically to better the business.
[00:34:41] Daren Lauda: I think that's a really important concept, and I do see people talking about process. Revenue, architecture, those sorts of things. But you're right, I don't see people thinking about the product set as a singular go-to-market product and managing it that way strategically to make sure we're getting the results.
[00:34:56] Daren Lauda: Um, I think that's a really cool idea notion. I'm gonna have to pay more attention to that.
[00:34:59] Mike Rizzo: Thank you. Yeah, we're, we're really working hard, um, at MarketingOps.com. The, the vision that I never fully, um, shared is effectively becoming the PMI of the PMP certification. Actually, so what does it mean to be a certified Marketing Operations professional?
[00:35:15] Mike Rizzo: And at our top end, you can eventually become a certified G-T-M-P-M. So go to Market product manager. And the idea there is exactly to, to eventually be able to be the person that an executive or board turns to when they are asked, who's responsible for building your go-to-market stack and managing it.
[00:35:36] Mike Rizzo: They know who to turn to now, and it's gonna be somebody that came out of a marketing operations background because they have to look at the funnel from before we even know who that person is, to who they are when they become a customer, and what makes them renew again. They're literally one of the only functions that looks at that entirety.
[00:35:55] Mike Rizzo: And I think that, uh, we have a really good opportunity to finally take charge and, um, and be a great strategic advisor to the executives in the room.
[00:36:04] Daren Lauda: I love that as a CEO of a startup right now, I keep telling my team, I want to understand the customer journey from raw lead or unknown entity to churn.
[00:36:15] Daren Lauda: Everybody says renewal, but I wanna know all the way through till when you leave us and be able to map that, see it, and it sounds like. Um, the certifications you're gonna bring forward are gonna make sure people know how to do that well and hopefully get paid for it and be a part of the executive team for the conversation.
[00:36:30] Daren Lauda: Mike, thank you for the time you shared today. I know you're a very busy person. You now only have 115 days, 23 hours in 20 minutes and to ops, so I put you behind about a half hour, but I will see you there. Thanks for being on the show, Mike, and we look forward to having you back again soon if you'll come back.
[00:36:45] Mike Rizzo: Absolutely. I would love to come back, Daren. Thank you for having me on. And uh, for anybody who wants to follow up with me, just find me on LinkedIn or drop me a line at MarketingOps.com, but I appreciate it.
[00:36:56] Daren Lauda: Mike's out there, find them. It's worth it. Take care, all. Thank you. That's it for this episode of How'd You Get That Number?
[00:37:04] Daren Lauda: Make sure to follow or subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, and if you want to keep the conversation going, connect with me on LinkedIn. I'm Daren Lauda. Thanks for listening. See you next time.