Philippe Gamache  0:07  
Music. What's up, guys, welcome to the humans of martech podcast. His name is John Taylor. My name is Phil Gamache. Our mission is to future proof the humans behind the tech so you can have a successful and happy career in marketing. What's up everyone today, we have the pleasure of sitting down with Jaclyn Friedman, CEO and founder at Monarch advisory partners. Jaclyn started her career in account and relationship management before joining WeWork, where she would eventually settle into a global engagement marketing and operations manager. Role. She was the fifth marketing hire during the company's hyper growth stage. She later joined an email and lifecycle growth agency as the second team member and built out their New York City office, where she worked with startups reaching from seed to Series C. She then moved over to Grammarly has the founding marketing operations hire, where she built out the B to B mops team and leather marketing technology stack to support their transition to A, B to B to C Company. And recently, Jacqueline strapped on her jetpack and went out on her own as a solopreneur, founding monarch advisory partners, a full stack marketing ops and martech consultancy. Jacqueline, thanks so much for your time today. Really excited to chat.

Jacqueline Freedman  1:22  
Thank you so much for having me. I'm such a huge fan of this podcast and this community, so it's truly an honor to be here. Thank

Philippe Gamache  1:29  
you so much for saying that. Appreciate it. This episode is brought to you by our friends at Knack launching an email or landing page in your marketing automation platform. Shouldn't feel like assembling an airplane mid flight with no instructions, but too often, that's exactly how it feels. Knack is like an instruction set for campaign creation, from establishing brand guardrails and streamlining your approval process to nack's no code drag and drop editor to help you build emails and landing pages. No more having to stop midway through your campaign to fix something simple. Knack lets you work with your entire team in real time, and stops you having to fix things midflight. Check them out@knack.com that's K, N, A, K, and tell them we sent you. This episode was brought to you by our friends at revenue hero. I can't think of anything worse than finding out a lead waited a week for a response from sales. That's why we recommend revenue hero. It's the easiest way to qualify leads based on Form Values or enrich data and route them to the right sales rep. Their product is packed with a bunch of behind the scenes superpowers that ensures qualified leads are assigned to the right reps, following your custom round robin rules and sending key data back to your CRM, that means more qualified meetings for your reps. We all know they want more of those, but more importantly, no more waiting time for your potential customers. They back all of this up with the best product support out there, offering 24, five support on Slack, connect for all customers, no matter your pricing plan. So if you want to 3x your conversions with the same traffic, go to revenue hero.io and tell them we sent you. Your Sales Team will thank you for it. I think we actually first connected when you were still like Grammarly, and by the time that we got this set up, you had already strapped on on that jetpack and went out on your own. So first of all, congrats on making that leap, myself included. And a lot of other folks see this is a definitely a bold move, especially in this like hiring economic climate, right? Love to ask you talk to us about, like, the decision of going all in, What gave you that courage to take that leap? Did you already kind of like start Moonlighting, or kind of like launch in stealth on this side? And did you have a few clients before you made the decision? Love to hear that.

Jacqueline Freedman  3:52  
Thank you again. Yes. So the decision to start Monarch was truly a lifelong goal, and I was ready for metamorphosis. You can kind of be on brand. I come from a long line of entrepreneurs. Both my father and my grandfather have their own businesses, and I always grew up seeing how they conducted business. I feel like I was fortunate to have a front row seat to an MBA, essentially just talking with them about day to day efforts. And so it was always embedded in my bones, but I also knew I needed the right moment in my career where I had a differentiating expertise and I was a generalist for so long, where I got my hands dirty, doing lots of different things, and finally, when I realized, Oh, I actually have a very specific skill set that is rare, and so that's where I kind of got the courage, but, and this is a little bit of a preview of something we'll discuss towards the end of the conversation, but reflection and journaling and just kind of introspection is really important to me, and how I contemplate pretty much everything. I'm an overthinker, and anxiety is my superpower, and so I've been. Platings for about a year, about when I should do it, when the right moment would be and after a lot of late nights, early mornings, I finally kind of sat down and recognized what I had accomplished in my career. And so everything from scaling WeWork, who, at the time was decacorn, and I had the foresight to get out before things went publicly awry. But as well as facilitating an adored brand like Grammarly and their transition to B to C to B, as well as consulting startups of all different types, industries, styles, you name it, I'd gotten a taste of the highs and lows of leadership, scale constraints and opportunity, and that's why I realized, Oh, I'm ready for this. And so to your question, in terms of moodlining, in terms of, like, the tactical and practical, while I was at Grammarly, I'd been advising a number of founders in this space, purely because I just found the conversations interesting and challenging, not for any monetary gain, but because I I like to cool talk and and kind of talk through problems and identify solutions. So I felt very fortunate that I kind of had clients lined up before I even create an LLC and, and same thing, I've been very fortunate to have a number of colleagues and extended partners and vendors throughout my career who are my champions and recognize and understand my skill set and what I can deliver on. So it made the transition definitely more seamless than even I expected. So I feel very fortunate.

Philippe Gamache  6:27  
I wonder how many listeners have checked out the WeWork TV show on on Apple TV. I wanted to ask you, is that the reality is that kind of closed completely a while,

Jacqueline Freedman  6:39  
are we talking about we crashed, or the documentary, that's the question, the

Philippe Gamache  6:43  
dramatization, the one with, is it Jared Leto?

Jacqueline Freedman  6:47  
It is Jared Leto and Anne Hathaway. So I watched all of the content because, you know, you got to know. You got to see what else is out there. And we crashed. The series is is the closest to the truth, but it is nowhere near even scratching the surface of what happened. Interesting, everything you think happened 10x it, and that is on brand. It was a lot more than even what they put out there, but it had the kernel of truth and the ethos behind it, yeah. So I found it to be very little PTSD inducing, but it was, it was true to the story.

Philippe Gamache  7:30  
Very cool, yeah, definitely some really interesting in house experience, and now doing your own thing, getting a taste of different types of companies, different sizes. I myself like one of the things I love the most about mops is this idea of project management and kind of like mapping out different flows, shopping for tools. But as I've kind of like matured in my career, I've gotten less excited about writing emails and coding emails, and I love that on your site as reading through some of your services, and I love that you're focused on advisement and strategy. I wanted to ask you, like, do you find a lot of potential clients who want both strategy and execution? And how do you kind of gently say, No, I'm not writing emails anymore, but I'm happy to help with this instead.

Jacqueline Freedman  8:20  
Yeah, I understand, agree with you in terms of loving every aspect of mops. But there's also comes a time where maybe copywriting and actual hands on keyboard sending out emails is no longer the vision for the long term, and to that point, every client's needs are slightly different, which is fun for me, but also it just means that I set expectations correctly from the beginning and at the same time, if they are in need of life cycle or demand gen email execution, particularly over a longer period of time. If it's a short stint and just kind of an interim, it's one thing, but if it's something they're gonna need long term, I'd bring in some my wonderful partners, like my former employer, modular marketing, or Ragnarok, a great agency out there where I trust their expertise and I have a close relationship with and it's symbiotic relationship.

Philippe Gamache  9:11  
Very cool. Yeah, non paid shout outs. I'm actually working with Ragnarok. Also shout out to Steven and Anna's team there in New York City. So far so good. I love

Jacqueline Freedman  9:23  
Colby. A shout out to her modular.

Philippe Gamache  9:26  
I Yeah, there's, there's, there's a lot of these, like bigger agencies, right? That kind of got in love with this idea of building out, hiring full time folks that you know, there's a lot of project management that comes into, like, working with companies and doing a lot of training. But then there's a whole like, data engineering side, data management side, and so it's, it's been interesting to see this idea of solopreneurs that are doing this advisement, and how you're kind of partnering with a couple of different folks to kind of fill some of these gaps, and how. These bigger agencies are tackling this stuff because, like, there's, there's no shortage of mops, problems to solve right

Jacqueline Freedman  10:06  
exactly, and even when you do it right, you got to maintain so there's always going to be something.

Philippe Gamache  10:12  
Yeah, I love, I love startups myself. They're, they're kind of my gem. I've been in another startups most of my career. But like most of them, want both execution and strategy, right? And I think that my niche maybe is a bit more on, like, the scale up side. Have you thought about, like, what your ICP looks like when you're kind of thinking about going down this advisory role, for

Jacqueline Freedman  10:36  
sure? So this is the one of the first things I thought about right also one of the most daunting parts, like, before I even knew I wanted what I wanted to name the company, call it company, submit an LLC, or, like, what types of clients spark joy for me? What are the projects? And so as a result, I, like a little bit of a lot, so I kept a few different offerings. And so that includes coaching individuals, as well as advising leaders. And then partner engagements. And for the partner engagement, specifically, those types of clients are wearing more hands on keyboard part of the team for a certain portion of the week, month, or you name it. And with that specific segment, I have two preferred ICPs, so hyper growth, SAS B to C and B to C to B. Clients are starting to dip their toes into plg as well as B to B clients who really need the zero to one foundations or are starting again after adopt job or implementation of someone else who claimed to be an expert.

Philippe Gamache  11:38  
Very cool. So like, walk me through the process of like, how, how did you pick that niche like, did you kind of like, already know it? Is it based on previous experience where your kind of skills naturally lended to would love to love to hear that?

Jacqueline Freedman  11:53  
Yeah, exactly that. Okay, these are where I have the most experience specifically, and also they happen to be my life the most. And so I really just decided, Okay, I think looking upon that reflection, moment of looking at my career, seeing what else is out there, there's very few people with a unique skill set that can tout it as well. And so, like this sparks my joy. I can do it. Let's just, let's just do this. And so basically, the copy for my website I wrote, kind of all in one fell swoop, because it just had been storing in my brain whether I realized it or not. And so it just kind of was, let's put pen to paper and we're ready to go.

Philippe Gamache  12:38  
Makes sense. I just mentioned, like, the different services, like, there's like the coaching angle, the partner side and the advisory but even just like on the advisory side, there's like, a bunch of sub services there. Martech as a whole can just like, be unpacked into a bunch of different things like email and push and and all that stuff. I I've read, or at least I've seen, like a lot of freelancers or solopreneurs, that they pick this super tiny niche, and they like, they want to try to be the best person at copywriting for B to B in FinTech. And I feel like, at least so far, you've taken a bit of more breath. Approach to the services is that kind of because you're still figuring out, like, what is the one thing you want to double down on? Or is it because, like, I love all these things and they can help with all of those things. Do you think at some point you're going to, like, pick one of those things and just, like, double down on that? Curious to know, yeah,

Jacqueline Freedman  13:34  
it's really the latter. I just am passionate about all things, mocks, and I don't ever want to pigeonhole myself. Yeah. But also, I think from if you're thinking about it as a client, as someone seeking assistance, yes, there are times where you want an expert in one very niche area, but the likelihood, unless you've got your SEO running, you're doing paid advertising, you've got your name in the game, you're speaking at every conference, the likelihood of you finding your exact match, in my eyes, is smaller, and so I personally would rather be Jack of all trades with a cue than be very focused.

Philippe Gamache  14:14  
Yeah, yeah. It's an interesting debate, like if my current startup were B to B to C, health tech. And if I was to hire an agency or a solopreneur freelancer to help us out in our marketing automation tool, it'd be interesting to figure out, like, what is more valuable finding an expert who might not be an expert in the platform that we're using, but they have a breadth of experience in B to B to C, and they understand the health deck world, versus someone who, like, doesn't really have a ton of health deck experience, but they're a master at customer IO or at iterable, like, whatever the tool is that we're using. What do you think about that? Like, what's more important? Like, being an expert in the customer the business model? Industry, or the tech stack, and, like, understanding the ins and outs. Like, no, you can't build it like that, like, because that tool breaks with this and that. And there's so many nuances to martech, right?

Jacqueline Freedman  15:09  
Yeah, no, I hear you. It's hard. It's a little bit of both, yeah. So I think in a lot of ways, I mean, there are no certifications in terms of a college degree in this space. There are certifications. We can debate whether there's value to them, especially when they're paid, and it costs a lot of time and money, but I see value in either someone who's an expert in this specific space, and they are going to give you all they've got, or someone who's expert in this tool, who is super curious to become an expert, or have expertise in your dedicated space, for as long as curiosity is involved, and that'll kind of chime into something else we're going to talk about in a second. But as long as that is included, it's just something you have to tell, through interviewing, through asking how they think, how their mind works. Not everyone thinks that way, and so I think there is wiggle room and a little bit of a gray area, but there is value to each approach. It just depends on your company's needs, culture, the flexibility, the adaptability that you have and ingrained as a company, and whether or not you would allow for the same thing to happen for a consultant or an outside, third party contractor. Yeah, so

Philippe Gamache  16:32  
I'm guessing the transition that you're making to this next question I was gonna ask you, like, what the folks that are listening right now that are just like, I'm full time in house. I've got a body of work. And I'm starting to get, like, a couple of folks reaching out, like, Hey, do you do Moonlighting? Can you help me with this or with that? And they're starting to get that itch a little bit, and they're thinking about that next step of maybe becoming an advisor at some point or going off on their own. What advice would you have for those folks today in their like, in house roles? Is there things that they could be doing differently in terms of projects? Should they be like, picking up some of those moonlighting contracts, get a taste of like, what they want to do and specialize in? Curious? Your take there?

Jacqueline Freedman  17:14  
Yeah, I definitely am all for say, yes, yeah. And you can find out if it's a fit for you or not. That said, I'm a recovering workaholic, and So take my advice with a great assault, have your boundaries in terms of actual skills, soft skills, hard skills, to make that possible, to potentially become an advisor. We're all uniquely different. We have our own approach to things. We have our own unique DNA, and so because we all bring something different to the table, I mean, we're all going to approach things differently, but I do find two key approaches really valuable in the pursuit of becoming an expert, any any concept, anything, whether it's a hobby or a profession, so that you might get the chance to become an advisor. And two things, it's curiosity and active listening. So in terms of curiosity, I, in the most positive sense, blame my liberal arts education for my constant curiosity, really immersing yourself in and understanding your craft, really digging in into a 360 degree perspective of what you're doing, and understanding how every inter working piece works, so how it affects other departments, how it benefits your customer internally, as well as your external, paying Customers and foraging relationships. So you can be the nexus of innovative change, is where I found to be the most important. And you want to be that go to person, or the person who knows how to translate among different teams to make other team's lives easier. And as a result, you get to move forward quicker and better and faster. In terms of active listening, you're only as good as your listening skills, so conducting interviews, maintaining one on ones and touch points across different teams, means you can translate the root of pain points and problems and identify elegant solutions that everyone will unanimously, plus or minus, be on board With, because everyone's needs are included in what you're proposing. And I know I wouldn't be where I'm at today without the incredible engineers and data analysts and data engineers who up leveled my own personal understanding to the point where now I'm very dangerous in a nearly every technical conversation, even if I'm not writing a singular line of code, but because I'm overseeing the delivery of it, right, you have to be able to talk towards what you're speaking to, and it all is interrelated, and I think that is a trap a lot of people fall as being so hyper focused with blinders on if you're not empathizing with the team. Around you and understanding how things make them tick, or how your impact of what you're doing impacts their downstream tools or effects it's it's going to be difficult, yeah.

Philippe Gamache  20:11  
How do you translate that to being now kind of a third party advisor with companies like you just mentioned this idea of like mops is such a collaborative role, and you need to have that relationship building and doing one on ones with different people on the team as an advisor, obviously, like, you're on retainer, you're like, on an hourly rate, and maybe sometimes, like, the client isn't, like, yeah, no, you're not gonna have like, three hours of one on one with different folks on the team. How do you still have that like, mantra of building a relationship with different folks, and like having that sense of empathy when you're a bit more third party.

Jacqueline Freedman  20:47  
Yeah, for me, it's a requirement, if it's not an option, that it's not going to be a fit cool. And one of the best pieces of advice I ever received from my grandfather, your clients, make your day or break your day, and choose your clients wisely. And I've got principles and values for monarch as also as a human, and they were very closely related as a result. And if my client doesn't also have those, it's not going to be a match. And it's just like you're interviewing for a new team member. You want them to be a quote, unquote cultural fit. It's the same thing.

Philippe Gamache  21:22  
Love that. That's a really good piece of advice. I think that easier said than done, for sure. Like, especially, I'm putting myself in the shoes of maybe someone who's like, five years earlier in their career, like in house, and I feel like myself too. I was so focused on being heads down and doing the work and trying to, like, impress my boss or impress peers on like, just look at this, like, automation flow that I built, or look at this email course. Look at the conversion rate on, like, free to paid, and I just like, I skipped out, or I didn't focus enough on that relation, building on, like, doing the one on ones. And maybe it's just like, maybe my introverted, uh, side of just like, No, it'll be heads down. I'll do the work. But now that, like, a bit more senior my career and I spent a lot more time planning projects and, like, building relationships with other teams and getting to know other people on, like, a deeper level, it makes a lot of these conversations easier. And so, yeah, I think your advice is really spot on well,

Jacqueline Freedman  22:22  
and it's interesting to hear you're also introvert, because I am too. However i One, one thing I fail miserably at is not so much self promotion, but team promotion of essentially marketing, marketing that is not my strength, and instead forging the relationships and alignment across different stakeholders, that is a superpower of mine. And so now you know that's maybe your difference, a differentiating factor for you that you can use with the knowledge of, oh, if I add in this soft skill a little bit, and just be mindful of it, I'll be able to do X, Y or Z versus me. I'm like, I need to learn how to promote myself, or talk about what the work I was doing, versus just being head down, accomplishing it. Those who are in the know know and like, you did a great job. Like, thank you. On to the next so it's a it's a balancing act that I don't know Dave Quinn has figured out just right, and that's where we all bring our own different player. The way you would approach project is probably different the way I would approach it, and that doesn't make it better or worse, just makes it slightly different.

Philippe Gamache  23:24  
How many projects have you played in that are talking about this debate of, like, build versus buy? This is something I've asked a lot of recent guests on the show, and I'm working on this, like, compilation episode of all of these different answers and answers and perspectives. And I think that episode is actually going to drop before we release our episodes, so folks are going to get a point of view of some of your answers before your full episode. But I wanted to ask you, like, I wasn't accustomed to this, like, build versus buy debate and startup plan. Like, it's just not a thing. Like, we we buy tools. There's no way we have resources to to build out our own tools. But then I had a stint at a bigger company, wordpress.com and we actually had a lot of internal custom tooling, and we had this interesting audience where, if we built interesting internal marketing tools, we could sell those at some point to our audience. So there was, like this idea of there is maybe some value in building this out, because we could repurpose this to our customers, but I it was essentially not supported by as many like services and like support people as there would be in a third party tool. So yeah, like, most of the custom tools that were built, like, didn't quite hit the mark, especially on the user interface, like it often was just like one of the things that was left behind. What are your thoughts on this? Like build versus buy debate in martech,

Jacqueline Freedman  24:45  
this is a topic I adore talking about, because I love to challenge the narrative internally at companies, much to many of my beloved engineers chagrin, if you want to build what has already been. Built by another company whose soul focuses at first, why are you trying to reinvent the wheel? Unless your purpose is trying to reinvent the wheel, then, of course, by all means, do it. But if someone's already doing it and dedicated to it, that answers your question, why? Exactly? I have a great example. I won't name names, but it was a it was a big company I worked at, decided, you know, we could do this better. We could build our own internal CRM. We don't need Salesforce, no such thing. And so they hired a few consultants who were specifically dedicated to hire to prove that their engineers were capable of building this out. Not only did those consultants prove this was not a worthwhile investment, and a company ultimately hired those consultants as full time w2 employees to manage, architect, run and build the team to manage our Salesforce, instance, and for me, that was a perfect example of showing it's already built by the best in the business, until there's something new. And I'm really excited to see what else is out there. There's some a new competitor hit me up. I want to see it. But it just is a great example of don't build something that already exists, and they do it really, really well. But then also to say, if you're seeking to build something, and it's not only going to become part of the company's core functionality, core tech, and you're gonna have a dedicated team supporting, maintaining and productizing it, and you did a cost analysis, and all is clear. Do it? Build the tool. Build the proprietary, proprietary tool. I'm all for it. However, there's something to think about in terms of the longevity for career pathing, right with custom built tools, particularly homegrown. ESPs, every team regrets it, they are pleading their case day in day out, to instead purchase a next generation platform to support not only their team's needs, but the entire company's needs, and just regular old personalization efforts, not taking a week to get a list, you name it. And if you think about this from a career trajectory and training perspective and standpoint, you can become an expert in the proprietary cool and that is great. However, the transferable skills of that is not always the most easily explained role. It's not irrelevant, but it's it's not a big name, it's not a top tier brand, and it's just something to think about in terms of transferable hard skills, of how you want to set up your team for success and the way you frame it.

Philippe Gamache  27:39  
That's a great little long winded No, no, that's super good point. This episode was brought to you by our friends at customer IO, oversold on a legacy marketing automation platform that is still struggling to update its user interface. I've done a tour of duty with all the major marketing automation platforms, and many are definitely similar, but customer IO is the most intuitive and beautiful platform. I'm talking about the industry's top visual workflow builder to design and implement your unique messaging strategy, powerful IB testing features inside your workflows, not just on subject line sends, hold out testing functionality to see the incremental impact to your messages queue draft mode so you can QA messages and conditions in production with real users before anything is sent, copy workflow items so you don't have to repeat the building process again and monitor campaigns tests and keyless membership growth from your personalized dashboard. The icing on the cake, marketers using customer IO have seen a 20% increase in conversion rates from strategic messaging, so stop using clicky, old tools and adopt a multi channel approach that creates joyful interactions with your customers. Start a free trial without a credit card@customer.ao and tell them we sent you. This episode is also brought to you by our friends at census, the number one data activation and reverse ETL platform, loved by Activision, Canva, Sonos notion and more. As you might know, I'm pretty opinionated that the future of martech is composable, and that the single source of truth for your marketing data should be your data warehouse census helps marketers solve an age old marketing problem, getting real time complete access to your customer data without needing to write a line of code. Also, if you want your own face as a humans of martech style image, we're doing a fun monthly raffle with senses for a personalized t shirt. Enter to win at getcensus.com/humans I give me a bit of PTSD listening to your answer because, oh, I joined, I joined wordpress.com like, knowing that like this was going to be part of the role like I kind of found it interesting that I was going to get to wear this product manager hat and build out, or at least figure out, what is a roadmap to building out an internal ESP at a massive company like WordPress, and I

Jacqueline Freedman  29:56  
should talk after this. Yeah. More. For sure, I assume that

Philippe Gamache  30:01  
it was going to be a big team of engineers, like, supporting it, right? And at first it really wasn't. And we did get approval to, like, build out the team and get more folks, but after a while, like, I just didn't enjoy it. I, like, I realized that I was also, like, doing two roles at the same time, like trying to figure out how to build stuff in that tool, and, like, increase the onboarding rates and like, launch emails while, like, building out a roadmap to improve the UI of the tool. So maybe that was part of it. But like, as a marketer working on that, like internal build, I also, like, got myself into the shoes of some of the engineers who their counterparts and their peers were building the WordPress platform, and they were building internal tools for marketers, and there's just a different level of celebration when it comes to, like, launching new stuff. And so I feel like there is, and other guests have, like, mentioned this too, like there's this commonality that martech just isn't interesting for engineers to work on. And a lot of folks see it as this, like, tour of duty. Like, maybe they'll do it for a little bit, but it's like, it's a stepping stone to do something else. So if you're going all in on this vision of, like, building internally, and you're dedicated engineers to it, how are you going to, like, figure out how to hire more folks, because there is going to be turnover on that team, like they're most good quality engineers. Don't wake up one day and say, like, I want to build internal tooling for marketers. That's not usually the case. Do you agree? What are your thoughts there?

Jacqueline Freedman  31:34  
I definitely agree, unless you find the amazing engineers who are getting into it, and they are true unicorns. I have come across a few, and I'm grateful to them, and honestly, they're the reason why I've been able to up level my technical skill set, because they talk to me like I'm in kindergarten and I've slowly learned the fundamentals. But yes, I'm in full agreement that even if you follow the team, you have to be prepared for churn and turnover, unless you're hiring very specifically, but at the same time, you have to remember every ESP most ESPs out there is more accurate. They're the UI and UX of what exists as a core infrastructure of just ascendant domain. And if you're not focused on UX and UI, in addition to core functionality and features. Why are you building this? Yeah,

Philippe Gamache  32:25  
I'll ask you a hypothetical question on that point. Let's say that you work for an ESP vendor, and this ESP vendor wants to, like, tweak their positioning, and they have got two options. They can either really fine tune the craft and goal in on the technical marketer persona, the marketing operations person like yourself and really like hone in on that vision and how do we like word our product to get this person's attention? Or the second persona is the technical engineer, the engineer who might be in house, who is working on integrations and the pipeline to, like, power this tool and activate that data within the tool. And you can only pick one. Like, do you cater more to the engineer or the technical marketer? Oh, man,

Jacqueline Freedman  33:18  
you only pick one. You can have multiple profiles that speak to both if you're a B to B business, I would focus on the marketer. If you've got a really great technical marketer, you'll be able to bring in your engineers into the fold. That was one of my strengths, particularly at Grammarly. We, as an example, had to do a four week evaluation of ESPs. I didn't sleep for a month, but across 150 different data points, every single piece, not only did I validate through third party references, in addition to the ESP provided references. I had my engineers go through every single thing. It was a scorecard fully and we would not pass go if anything wasn't green. And you have to bring them in to the fold. They need to be fully part of the decision making. And because they are the backbone, you cannot well, most likely you cannot perform the duties of what we need your ESP to do. If there's triggers involved, or there's other things depending on the core infrastructure and how everything is set up, they are your partners. They might not be the decision maker, but their decision is required in order for you to move forward. Yeah,

Philippe Gamache  34:41  
great advice. Totally agree. Ideally, like you speak to both personas, but like, the person who's shopping for those tools, like you said, is the marketer the market prompts. Person is the one who's gonna like, identify that need work with the front end marketer on like, the use cases. And then once there's like. A short list, and you're going into that scorecard, then you involve the technical engineers. And so yeah, I think, like, if you have to pick the one, I

Jacqueline Freedman  35:07  
totally agree with you there. But also, we're in the B to B, you can have more than one persona that you're selling for. So you can say four engineers, four data engineers for this, for that. And so I think there's even more opportunity for ESPs to be speaking on the technical side. I think a lot of it has been very fun and joy, joyful, delight, fluffy. And, you know, we need to start actually talking technically too, especially as competition keeps rearing all these different ESPs out there. There's so many that popped up in the past 10 years. I mean, if we've seen the Scott Brinker report and how there's 14,000 plus different more tech tools, and we're definitely due for some consolidation and mergers, for sure, there's just, there's competition, and the amount of times I see in communities, Hey, have you heard of this ESP? Or, like, have you compared all these different ones? It's like, well, you what is your industry? Why are you even talking about a B to C tool when you need a B to B tool? And there's just a lack of understanding of how folk are even marketing themselves as an ESP. And so there's a lot of room for clarity on all fronts. Yeah,

Philippe Gamache  36:22  
definitely. On top of being a big fan of not building internally and buying third party tools, I know that you're also a big proponent of the composable CDP, and I've gone down a bunch of rabbit holes on the show here, had a bunch of different founders and senior folks at different package CDPs, and some of the more reversible tools had high touch and census on the show. And we talked to some of the CDPs that were like, kind of in the middle, like, Acquia has a package play, but they're also kind of like, plug and play, choose your own kind of adventure. But like, I think you and I and other folks that have had this experience, like, we're really lucky to be able to work with these like, fast forward thinking tech companies who are playing with the latest and greatest martech. But it's easy to forget that most of the world is like, waking up to like, What the heck is a customer data platform, and how do I balance this? Like, you just mentioned Scott Brinker, like, if you read some of his reports, like, one of the questions he asked is just like, where is, like, the the central orchestrator in your stack? And there's a ton of people that just say, like, the CRM still today, and like, where's the source of truth of your data, and everyone's like, CRM and CDP is like, one of the fifth ones in there, and data warehouse is like, one of the bottom options. And it's just like, I don't know, it's easy for us to say, like, yeah, composable is the future, but the rest of the world is really slow to adapt here. How do you balance this? And what are your thoughts when you're going to market and chatting with, like, potential advisory clients.

Jacqueline Freedman  38:01  
No, you're right. This is probably one of the most interesting topics of our time, and I'll definitely say I am not reading into any product marketers hype, and this is probably my spiciest take. So I have yet to meet someone in the space who's been satisfied with their CDP, and that is just anecdotally, every single person, they tell me their CDP and go, Oh, I'm so sorry. And they all have a sigh of relief. It's a little bit of a calculated risk on my part to to approach it that way. But I have yet to meet someone that is like, what do you mean? I love it. And beyond anecdotal evidence, I mean, only 10% of folks say the CDP even meet for current needs, and only 1% say can handle their future ones. This is a report conducted by Forrester two years ago, speaking of big names in the industry like Forrester, CDP companies, Osby quaking in their boots, and yes, I'm from Texas and not congratulating themselves on Gartner, CDP, Magic Quadrant, for example. Though I understand the deed to in such a pay to play environment, I recognize I use GT, I've used Gartner, I've used forester, all with a grain of salt, but that does not take place of actual functionality and usability. And so I've consistently observed cbps Just vastly oversell and under liver on their promises. And I tend to focus a lot on product signals, which are super valuable and as a game changer. However, marketers deserve and need so much more than that. And so this is where I prefer the flexibility averse ETLs like high touch or census and or the specificity of a composable CDP, like high touch, where there's both an ease of use for minimal implementation, you just need to know what table to bring in, and you just you're off to the races, but also you're not doubling your storage costs, so you're making your procurement and CFO. Seems happy. And instead of having multiple different places where you're paying for the storage, you have one singular source of truth, which is your which is your data warehouse. And that is the way your your source of truth should be handled, where your financial analysis is being done. It is where every single important report at your company, assuming you standardize it to enough that you're all looking at the right things, and that's where it's placed. So in my eyes, having a solution that is warehouse native is the chef's guest, and also the proof is in the numbers. And I'll speak personally before I left Grammarly in collaboration with a number of team members, it was not just me, but we had connected over 25 different destinations or channels, in some cases, and we were syncing data, not only just for regular daily enrichment, but we were using it for commercial journey triggers, so lifecycle marketers no longer need to rely on engineering like they once did. We were saving in the millions of annualized dollars in paid advertising solely by having a daily sync for different subscription types and replacing a formerly once, once a month manual thing, if someone remembered, can do it, and I can go on and on about the ways this approach is more cost effective, scalable, flexible and actionable. But all that say I've been really, really really fortunate to have both the trust and autonomy to forge paths for long term scale. But that also requires a lot of a number of folks in collaboration and in combination of like minded individuals with a lot of foresight, like no company, I will not tell you there's no company out there that will say I want to be left behind, and and so we too as employees have the responsibility to ensure it evolves and to back that vision up with business cases and persuasive persuasive conversations with procurement and beyond that is in mind an informed responsibility of someone in the more ops, more tech space you need to be at the cutting edge, or you're just playing your cog in the machine, which is probably so bad to say, you can cut that out. No, no. It's

Philippe Gamache  42:13  
a it's a super fun topic. It's Yeah, something like I said that I went super deep on, and yeah, I was just chatting with, aren't you from snow? And they're working on the new marketing, the modern marketing data stack report. This is the third time they do it. And like, high touch census, like all of these, like forward thinking tools, are all kind of being highlighted. So instead of, like, the Scott breaker report, where it's like, just aggregating all of these tools and like putting them in random buckets. Like, if you know some of these tools, you look at like the category they're in, you're like, What the heck? Like, why is this tool in that category? But they take a different approach, like, they've got like, 10,000 plus customers, and obviously forward thinking customers who have a data warehouse, and they're like, building on top of that stack as, like, their source of truth. And so their report is essentially looking at, like, what other tools are these customers building on top of snowflake? And so that report just features that, like, what are the some of the upcoming tools that they're seeing a lot of their customers purchase and buy. So instead of like, here's a 14,000 marketing technology tools, it's here's a much smaller list of data tools that help marketers activate data. But also they focus on like, the collection piece, the ad piece. And this year, I think they're carving out a big focus on AI and Gen AI. So yeah, it's a it's an interesting place, and it made me think of like on your site, you have this spot where you focus on preferred tech, and you highlight some of the vendors, and you mentioned some of them already that you recommend and work with the most often, I think the majority of folks in BB martech are still kind of blind to like marketing automation and ESPs that are actually fun to use and like more user friendly than some of these legacy tools. What are your thoughts there? Do

Jacqueline Freedman  44:14  
you agree I am super particular? So, yes, I agree. So I the way I approach technology platforms is I am willing to befriend and partner with them, simply, if I have a really great experience working with them. And that is UX, that is the people. And I've been very fortunate throughout my career that I've worked with pretty much every major ESP and martech tool out there in some way, shape or form. And as a result, I have a lot of opinions, and I will try to restrain myself. So when I was in stealth mode with monarch, I knew I wanted to forge those relationships more formally, and so I also knew I wanted to focus on the next generation. Of tools and see where that future lies. And so that's all to say. I greatly respect the legacy tools. When they were released, they were groundbreaking, and we should be forever grateful for the fundamentals and core competencies and certifications that they all brought to the scene that hadn't been done before. However, these companies have also gotten very greedy, yes and pricey, and they haven't invaded in a very long time. And so this, in my opinion, opened up an opportunity. And so this made way for the platforms that don't require a full time dedicated architect on staff just to make it work. For example, it means you maybe no longer need to rely on data extensions or SQL code to get the segment you're looking for. And so I'm really excited about what's ahead, and I'm grateful for platform like humans and my tech for fostering a niche community for the folks like us that want to have these conversations or hopefully shed light on what else is possible. So hopefully everyone's starting to understand what all is out there and ask the questions. Just because you've heard of a tier one specific ESPs name doesn't mean it's the right choice, not only for you or for your business, but for the long term. Yeah,

Philippe Gamache  46:17  
yeah. I feel like even a couple years ago, most folks were just like, there's a couple of names that come to mind as like, the only tools that are series contenders in marketing automation. But more recently, folks have like, included three or other three or more tools that like, popped up just in the last like five, six plus years. And it's because they've looked and seen like, some of the features and the capability, and they're just like, and why am I still, like, slapping myself in the face every morning when I'm like, dealing with these loading screens, and it's the same freaking UI it's been the last like decade. So I love, I love your point there, like a match respect to them for for kind of grandfathering this space. But yeah, there's there's newer, fresher, interesting and more fun tools out there to play with

Jacqueline Freedman  47:08  
exactly and in that same vein, I'm grateful to teams like Scott brinker's team for in the martech weekly and other existing communities for doing their own evaluations of their own version of a quadrant, because, I think, as a group, and I'll only see speak specifically to the MAR ops group and community and martech community, we've come to learn what they say on those quadrants or in the in their own versions don't typically line up with the actual use case. And so I can't speak for any other industry or any other kind of niche technology space around that, but I think we've become wiser to Oh, you mean if you have this specific award, you paid for it? Oh, if you have this customer service award, because you have a CSAT score over 80% you paid for it, you realize 80% is not very good, right? That's like a minimum requirement, and you're touting it instead. And so I think we've caught on to the formally understood as product marketing tricks, and we're really digging in in our own ways. And so I'm really hopeful, because we're one of the most innovative communities in the group, because every day, everything changes, features, the way it looks, the legislation, the regulations, we have to be nimble at any time, and so I think we are a very special community in that

Philippe Gamache  48:34  
program. Yeah, yeah. No, it's super fun. Shout out to one who just announced recently that the they're doing DMw 100 again this year. By the time this drops, some of the voting will be out already, but yeah, curious to see who the winners are. This year is an interesting showdown. Last year. Jacqueline, this has been super fun. I got one last question for you before the happiness question that we end all interviews with. I feel like it's selfishly, really curious your your take there. I'm in this world right now, and before I joined the company, BWC is like, what the heck does that even mean? Is it like marketplace, not really. And I tried to spend time like, finding other companies that weren't just in the Health Tech because I feel like a lot of health tech companies are bwsc, just by default. But you mentioned that you spearheaded the cross functional infrastructure for Grammarly Consumer and Business Line transition from historically B to C centric company to a B to C to B Company. So my startup is B to B to C, so you're kind of taking a different stab on that, but essentially, like for you, product led growth company, right? Like was the mantra of making that transition. Super curious. If you can walk us through that

Jacqueline Freedman  49:46  
for sure. So this was probably the singular most difficult but also the most rewarding body of work of my professional interesting when I joined Grammarly, my sole purpose. Was to build up the B to B side of the business. And that side of the business was the small, scrappy startup within a robust, established and very beloved, beloved, very beloved B to C business, yeah. And though I was only hired to do the B to B side, and I did that, and I hired some of those incredible, absolute best people in industry, huge chats to Kelly medder and Carla Vince. Once they were in place, not only did I have the confidence that okay, I can kind of shift my focus, I took that step back and focused on the interoperability of our marketing system, and realized there were some geeks in the machine and no one else was seeing them. And so I, the Forever overachiever, also took on the unpaid, part time job. I'm trying to figure out how to connect our disparate B to B and B to C systems with the longer term vision of plg in mind. So ultimately, through a lot of conversations in that relationship building amongst all the different teams, thankfully, there's also a parallel path of we were onboarding Databricks and our own data warehouse into a singular source of truth. We upgraded our tech stack to the next generation, so that was tools including fivetran, iterable and high touch. And with all of the data in the right place, we were off the races with PQL, pq A's and leveraging them in Pardot and Salesforce.

Philippe Gamache  51:31  
Very cool. Yeah. Must have been a super fun project. It's interesting going from B to C to B to B, yeah, just getting a different taste of that. But it makes sense. Like, at first, when we were talking about that, I was like, B to C to B, but obviously Grammarly was like the go to like, Chrome extension for a lot of consumers. And then I'm guessing, like the shift was just like, how do we go up market? How do we like roll this out within different businesses and all the employees within that company? Right? Exactly.

Jacqueline Freedman  52:06  
And not to Special shout out, what the business offering is, but it offers things that people in the market were looking for, right? It keeps you on brand. It helps you stay within the style guidelines of what your company of, it's a marketer's dream, marketer's dream, but also support and Customer Success person's dream, too, of ensuring you're following exactly how the company wants you to be speaking externally. And so there was a niche waiting to be filled. And so it was really just building upon the 1015, years of momentum to usher in that new enterprise era.

Philippe Gamache  52:48  
It's been such a fun conversation. I really appreciate your time. I got one last question for you. We asked this at the end of all of our interviews. Jacqueline, you're a marketing leader, solopreneur and advisor. You're also a coach, a dog lover and indoor and outdoor plant scientist. One question we ask everyone on the show is, how do you remain happy and successful in your career? How do you find that balance between all the things you're working on while also staying happy?

Jacqueline Freedman  53:14  
Probably the absolute hardest question of the entire podcast, let's go back to talking about march back and marketing operation, I'm just kidding. I'm forever seeking this answer. As mentioned, I'm recovering workaholic, and it's gonna be a lifelong journey of something you work at every day. And so I strive towards balance in a few ways. And so it's more strategies than actually achieving. But I ground myself through a few different modalities, therapy and journaling. I really try to fill my cup by going to as many live concerts that can, and also spending as much time as humanly possible with my two rescue Sharpay boxer mixes that are just squishy, and I like to cuddle with them and and last but not least. But of course, my my fiance, like we have a dedicated date night on the calendar for us each week, and also just my safe haven that supports and contributes most truly to my happiness.

Philippe Gamache  54:08  
Awesome, very cool answer. I think that there's a lot of wisdom in focusing and self reflection there. And yeah, I could probably take tips on the workaholic side of that myself.

Jacqueline Freedman  54:20  
You know, it is a it is a journey. There's a 12 step program for a recent it's a day. I feel

Philippe Gamache  54:27  
like there's almost like a different category of like, workaholics who are stuck in a job that they hate, but they need to, like, continue to grind and they like part of them just can't let go at it. But then there's a category of folks who just love what they do, and sometimes, like, time just escapes. And you're just like, chilling and watching TV, and you're just like, You know what? Like, I wouldn't mind to code this email right now, or I wouldn't mind to, like, look at this martech report, and this is like, two different flavors. One of them is a bit like, healthier than the other. But there's still, like, a healthier middle there

Jacqueline Freedman  55:03  
exactly. It's a combination of the flow state of I'm in it, I love what I'm doing, and it's like, oh no. I look at the clock and I've missed out on maybe some really important life things that are more important long term. Yeah. And so it is kind of the typical like priority urgency matrix, except we have to use it for your personal Yeah,

Philippe Gamache  55:25  
awesome. Thanks so much for your time. Really appreciate it. This is super fun.

Unknown Speaker  55:29  
Thank you,

Philippe Gamache  55:39  
folks. Thank you so much for listening this far. Really appreciate you being here. I just wanted to call out two quick things before I go, as well as give a shout out to other martech creators that you should check out. The best way to support the show is by signing up for our newsletter on humansmartech.com I send you a quick email every Tuesday morning letting you know what episode just drop. But I also include my favorite takeaways. So if you don't have time to listen to that one. No sweat. I've got you covered with learnings anyway. And proceeds from sponsors this year have allowed me to venture into YouTube. Though, recently launched a YouTube channel where I publish full length episodes. If you want to see my radio face, check that out. But I also do clips from different episodes, so if you don't have an hour to sit down for an episode, you can search by specific topics and just listen to that one answer to from that question. And if you can't get enough from our tech content, I wanted to give a shout out to some of my friends and awesome creators in the space. We featured Justin Norris in episode 107 this year. And if you haven't checked out his podcast and newsletter, revops.fm you won't be disappointed. Justin is a technology hipster with a polished voice of reason, and he's interviewed big names like Wesco, Joe Rowley and John Miller, but he's also got solo deep dive episodes like how to create a knowledge base for marketing ops and how to use AI, a guide for marketers. Check out our show@revops.fm that's it for now, folks, thanks so much for listening. Much for listening, and we'll catch you next week. You.

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