The Foundational Operations Gap with Evan Kubitschek

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Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of OpsCast brought to you by MarketingOpscom, empowered by all the MoPros out there.
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I'm your host, michael Hartman.
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Today I'm digging into a topic that many teams feel, but few name what our guest calls the foundational operations gap.
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Our guest is Evan.
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Evan, I knew I should have asked you this.
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Am I going to butcher it?
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Kubitschek, kubitschek.
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Okay, I knew it was one or the other.
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I would have gotten it wrong.
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Founder of Grow Rogue, he works with early stage companies to help them build the right marketing operations infrastructure before things start to break.
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We'll discuss how infrastructure issues often get overlooked, what the warning signs look like and how to avoid or recover from an operations house of cards.
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So, alvin, welcome to the show.
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Thank you for having me.
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Looking forward to it.
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Yeah well, let's just dive right in.
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So let's start with that concept of what you call the foundational operations gap.
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What is that?
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What do you mean by it?
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How did you come to define it so?
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I've been in marketing operations for 15 years now, which is a terrifying thing to say 15 years now, which is a terrifying thing to say and I prefer to work with early stage companies, primarily because I have the opportunity to address this gap.
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And what I think of the foundational operations gap is the foundational layer of operational frameworks, scaffolding, architecture, however you want to describe it that I would say probably 90% of companies skip out on, and so it is critical that you address it early on, because I think that at a certain scale, it could be series B, it could be 50 employees the inertia of chasing revenue becomes so great that it's very hard to return to these foundations and justify the investment in fixing them, and so I consider it a foundational layer.
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If we're talking about specifics, I would probably say database health, and that could be defined broadly as having a minimum viable record.
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What is your definition of what a record should look like?
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Uh segmentation, speed to lead, data dictionary and an understanding of how your tech interacts with each other, your stack interacts with each other, what the uh order of operation should be, kind of that foundational documentation that I think doesn't really come naturally to a lot of companies and there's that inflection point that I talked about that many people skip and I think, to their detriment, because I've certainly walked into W2 roles for myself, where none of that exists and things break constantly because no one knew they could break or they're not interested in investing in that, because they just want to push out more campaigns built on broken architecture.
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So one quick question and maybe a deeper follow up.
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So it seems like I was initially going to say this sounds like what people would call tech debt, which, by the way, I used that term with my wife the other day and she was like what is that?
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I can't explain it.
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But it seems like it's more than just tech debt.
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I would define it as more than just tech debt.
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I think that tech debt is certainly involved and it's an important piece of that puzzle, but I think often, if you go back to sort of the first principles, of what business problem are we solving with this tech investment, or what is our point of view on what a record or a prospect should look like, how do we define that, let's put that to paper and have that documented for the entire team, the entire company, to orient toward.
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I think there's a lot more around process and people and not just platforms.
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I would almost rank platform last amongst those three okay in terms of how I would address these things, because I think, yeah, I wrangling the people together to define your goals, creating process out of those goals and then finally mapping that to where you want to invest your dollars.
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In terms of platform, in terms of stack, I would rank that third out of those three Okay.
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Makes sense, okay, yeah, so like one of the things I see often, maybe on the process side, when I've got, especially at large organizations, which I tend to see, what I think are sort of overburdened approval processes right Number of levels, time and then people wonder why we can't get stuff out the door, because we've got just too many steps and too many hands in the middle of it, with too many people who can veto something and so on.
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Right, is that an example of the kind of thing you look for?
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It is.
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I think that you're you're describing a level that might be beyond where I prefer to work, just because I think that's what you're describing is when that inertia has become too great, right when you you can't maybe return to address the process.
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You're too caught up in sort of the tactical swamp, the tactical hell of pushing out as much throughput through that process as possible, and that's the goal that the campaign ops team might be measured on.
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But what I would look for there is understanding the underlying system.
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Do we have actual ticketing systems defined?
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Do we have definitions of what the requirements are for someone to make it onto the calendar?
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Do we have definitions of how competing priorities work and how these things take precedence?
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What are the KPIs we're measured against?
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Can we justify these SLAs in terms of an actual calendar that makes sense for throughput for the MOPs team?
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Are those things defined in a way that maybe if you're under growth marketing, you're under a CRO, depending on who you fall under?
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But did they understand that?
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Are they aware of that and are they supportive of you having boundaries and pushing back on these things?
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That is the type of work, sort of that foundational layer that I think isn't always in place, because many times I'll hear a phrase I hate, which is move fast and break things Right.
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Yes, there's a space for that.
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Yes, there's a space for that, but if all you do is break, things over and over and over and never return to fix them.
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of course, things are going to become tougher over time.
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Yeah, so is it?
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You use the term, or you had a phrase that you used with me when we talked before You're not scaling marketing or automated chaos.
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Is it like?
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Is that kind of what you meant by that?
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Is that what you just described there, or did you mean something else?
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I think that's accurate.
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I like to use an example of if you think about your kitchen, right, and let's say, in this scenario, your kitchen is a disaster.
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You got dirty dishes everywhere, there's food and ingredients all over the floor, you have no meal planning and I say, well, why don't we just buy a faster oven?
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That doesn't make any sense, right, right, there's lots of analogies that you could use in that scenario.
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But often people say, well, let's just buy this bandaid, and it usually comes in the form of a platform, a tech investment.
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That's what they want.
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Someone is sold on it.
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But when you ask about well, how does that play in our current stack?
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What problem does that solve?
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Could this be addressed with better process and keeping the same investments that we have?
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Those types of questions, I think, are skipped.
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So it's sacrificing that hard, upfront work on the altar of speed and efficiency, and if you don't address those upfront questions, I think you will get caught in this gap, and I see it quite often.
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Okay, yeah, I mean what you remind me of is early in my career I did work in consulting in a totally different space where we did a lot of work with, like, helping companies choose and implement financial and accounting systems Right, and one of the things we always coached our clients on when they were evaluating vendors was they're going to pitch you in all the bells and whistles that they could do, right, amazing reporting, yada, yada.
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We always had to remind them if you can't do AP, ar, gl, work every day and count on it to be right, then the reporting doesn't matter, right, I think the I've joked about this before, but I wish there was a way that we could put sales under some type of cross examination where they're bound to tell the truth about their platform in a sales conversation, cause certainly early in my career I have fallen victim to the siren song of a sales engineer or sales telling me that this platform is a panacea, will solve all of our ills.
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And as I've gotten more mature in my marketing operations career, you know I want a poc, I want, uh, to see your documentation.
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I want to understand, you know is, do you have robust integrations or is it just like a trade on IO or Zapier wrapper?
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That's sort of the things you learn to ask about the platform that they're not always willing to answer on the sales call.
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Those types of questions, I think, are just so important and it's it's getting harder and harder, I think, for those things to be asked.
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You know I look at Well, I think it matters that you asked the right questions I think about.
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I was looking at visualization tool for some reporting.
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I wanted it to integrate with Marketo and it did so.
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I was like okay, but I never really looked under the hood that much, I was moving too fast.
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It was relatively low cost.
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Well, it did integrate, but it integrated with stuff that, like was not useful at all.
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Right, I couldn't do anything with it like we wanted to, and so we ended up like spending a lot of time trying to make it work and like finally, I just tossed it because it was like shame on me, right, I didn't do that real level of due diligence that I should have.
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And I do think in today's market and how tough it is to justify software purchases, asking for a POC is not out of the realm of possibility, Like give me a couple months with the platform, we'll pay for it, but we need to understand exactly how it works and find the bugs.
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You know I've I've seen demo accounts without the full functionality, these types of things.
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But to your point, they may tell you that it integrates, and yes, it might integrate, but then you might find that that key data point or that key field you're looking to measure against doesn't or isn't available in some fashion, and then the whole use case falls apart.
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Yeah, no, it's funny you bring that up, I had forgotten.
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I've talked about this before a lot Like I wish the software vendors would do something more because, like, a seven day trial, 30 day trial usually is not enough time, right, to truly evaluate it, because it's hard to allocate the time from your team, right, and I've said like be to allocate the time from your team, right, and I've said like, be willing to offer a.
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It doesn't even have to be cheap, right, but like a reasonable cost, short-term license of what you would actually be thinking about getting so you could really truly evaluate it.
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I think that, like, so they're not totally giving up.
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I get that that's a challenge from a revenue, predictability standpoint and everything else for them, but it's like, yeah, I think it would be a better, I think it would be an option that more people would take advantage of than they probably think and maybe I'm wrong.
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I would.
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I think I would agree with you on that.
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I think that you would find more people willing to to jump onto that offer rather than having to go all in on something that you know potentially they might stake their position at the company on, especially with some of these platforms being six figures plus If you're not absolutely sure that it's the right investment, you know.
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I'll give you an example.
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A client just secured two POCs in a row with a chat vendor.
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That went really well and we made the full investment for that client.
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That was multiple six figures and, to their credit, they were willing to extend that.
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There were conversations about what level of investment it would take for both of those POCs but they gave it and in the end they secured that revenue and I think that flexibility was what won them that contract and I wish more vendors would be willing to explore that.
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Yeah, I love that.
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So let's get back to this foundational operations gap so you talked about.
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You work mostly with early stage companies, so what are some of the reasons that these companies get into that situation and how do you spot it?
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So I think that the warning signs that I typically see with clients are it usually comes with their first round of funding or outside investment, and that typically means there's new speed pressure being put on them from their first board members or an expectation of some type of return with angel investors.
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But there is now outside pressure to grow at a certain rate, and I do think that, especially if it's VC money, you're starting to see a little bit of an adverse relationship between how growth, marketing, brand building works and the expectations around growth, and so that's where I usually initially see people sacrificing the foundational work for speed and growth at all costs.
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Speed and growth at all costs.
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I think that initially, you're going to see a lot of manual workarounds starting to happen at that stage, a lot of tribal knowledge.
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In terms of the team, it's usually a very small team.
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It might be an individual or maybe one consultant who's doing the work, but they don't want to pay for someone to be documenting what's happening or creating a data dictionary, so if that person departs, they're in a lot of trouble.
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There's no one to understand exactly how the systems fit together.
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Single point of failure.
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Single point of failure.
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Attribution questions can take days because no one's defined the channels and the offers that matter to the company.
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They're using something out of the box or they're just glomming reports together.
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They're not creating a single source of truth across the company.
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And so those are some of the typical things I see as warning signs is when you start to get this outside pressure at.
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As warning signs is when you start to get this outside pressure but also you're ignoring some of that foundational work sacrificed on the altar of speed or on the altar of growth, and it's it's very common, I think, with with sort of a seed or series a.
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That's when I start to see that inflection point, and if you go beyond that, it just accelerates.
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Right, that's interesting that the external pressures are a driver behind it.
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So when you talked before, you talked about process, and people is more important to you than tech, but it feels like some of this manifests itself with problems in the technology or being able to use the technology.
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Technology or be able to use the technology what are?
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What are like?
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What are you seeing in terms of you know priorities or like processes that tend to?
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I know you talked about moving faster because of the outside pressure, but what are like?
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Could you have any?
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Can you go down a little deeper on that, on what like what?
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Some examples of where that happens?
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Yeah, so, as an example, it's very common for me to see with clients that that need for speed means there has never been any definitional work around campaign operations or some type of ticketing or project management system.
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Very often there is nothing but a Google Sheet and requests coming in via Slack.
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Things are not threaded in a way where multiple people can reference them.
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It's kind of a game of tag of how things should be triaged.
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That's very often a failure point.
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And it doesn't have to be expensive.
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A very simple form, something cheap, like an Asana, a ClickUp, any number of project management tools, just the minimum viable system will get you quite far, but that is certainly one that I see not having a data dictionary.
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So, to the point of having that process around, how are fields being populated?
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I think there are lots of smaller tools.
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You think about clay, waterfall, enrichment, all of these smaller investments that can inform your core systems but very often they are not being documented in a way that lets you understand what is overriding your core fields.
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Where's the source of truth coming from?
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What is the direction of the data?
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What's the cadence of things being pushed into those systems?
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I'll give you an example with a client.
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We did a lot of work over one month and then I found out that there was a shadow system that no one told me about, where an SAP was overriding the account data every 24 hours and finance had full control of SAP and we had never touched it.
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So, of course, all of the infrastructure work that we were doing was useless until we addressed that root cause and no one had thought to go back and think about how that was completely muddying the waters in their CRM.
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And that's the type of thing that I think gets missed.
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It's not understanding how your systems communicate with each other, not defining what, the way they should perform and your expectation of how they should perform, and then defining the business problem that they solve what are they actually being implemented for and what does success look like for that?
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If those definitions change constantly, you're never going to be able to measure success in a meaningful way.
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Yeah, I liked the term you used before and I've heard it before, but it's been a while.
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The minimal viable record, right, I think that's a concept that a lot of people probably listening or watching have never heard of um, and if they haven't, they should really start thinking about like that, because I think that addresses one of the common complaints from sales teams.
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Right, you gave us crap data.
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Right, crap leads, whatever.
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So it's interesting that that you know that is not as common, including places I've been to have something like that or definition of that.
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Do you also include definitions of um?
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Like on reporting, you mentioned attribution but like other reporting, where you have common definitions of how you define the metrics, how you calculated that kind of stuff.
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Oh yes, I could rant about this for hours.
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I have been in so many situations where a report is built by another team and there's ARR as a field, arrv2, arr latest, and the report is built with a field that's been deprecated or is no longer in use and all of a sudden it's a five alarm fire because their projections for their team's growth or pipeline has cratered them, not knowing that they are using a field that no one uses anymore.
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But the problem is no one has centrally defined what the measures of success are and what the definitions are and which fields are the ones that should be used.
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So ideally everyone would be operating from the same core set of reports and dashboards and that's the source of truth for everyone and that's locked down.
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But if you want to let people freelance, at minimum you have to have the definitions of what parameters, what reports they can build against and what fields are actually in use.
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If you don't have that, you're asking for people sniping at each other, having different definitions of success, disagreements at a leadership level, a board level.
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That gets really messy really fast.
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And that's another very common issue is you don't have the standard definitions of how you measure things.
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Yeah, it's, but I think people get caught up a little bit in like this is the right way to do it and they kind of, you know, dig their heels in a little bit sometimes.
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And I think you got to let go of that, because to me, like I, there's a few things where I would probably argue pretty strongly for this is the way we should calculate this particular metric.
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But in general I almost don't care, as long as we all agree what it is and it's it's a reasonable one, because I'm more interested in us being able to agree on it and be able to trust it that we're all talking about the same way in what it's like, because there's downsides to every one of these and upsides to them.
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So think I don't know, in in my early career I would fall on my sword and argue so hard for things that I felt passionately were the correct way to do things.
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And as I've suffered the slings and arrows of many, many years having those battles, I'm right there with you.
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It's so long as we are agreed upon the direction and we're going in the same direction, I'm okay with that.
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If we can agree that we want to revisit those metrics or the direction on some type of cadence so we can make sure we're course correcting, we're good.
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As long as we have a standard definition together that I will take as a win any day of the week, Couldn't agree more, all right.
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So we talked about a number of things about how, what it looks like when you get to this situation with the gap.
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What are some of the things that tell you you're kind of approaching that tipping point where you're going to be going into that systems are tangled or whatever it might be Like.
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How do you, how do you identify that if you're sitting in a chair right now listening to this, before they want to have to hire you or Evan?
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So I think the tipping point or the warning signs that I look for are if I go into your system and I can't understand within a couple of hours how things fit together, an architect's vision or an overall vision of how data, prospects, customers, should flow through your system, I think that's a big warning sign.
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So that typically would look like uh, completely disorganized programs and workflows, no naming conventions, no conception of centralized lead processing, lead scoring, generalized nurture tracks, some of these sort of core functions of a Marketo, of a HubSpot.
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If they're not in place and they're not organized in a way that is easy to consume, I think that's an early warning sign.
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What that typically means to me is that you're spot fixing requests rather than pushing back on those requests if they don't make sense in the broader context of your instance.
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And that's not an attack on anyone, right?
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Junior employees, it's very hard to push back against a CRO, a CEO, for what they want.
00:25:21.316 --> 00:25:33.307
But as you mature, you need to have a vision or a roadmap of how things should work in a point of view and fight for that point of view or push back against some requests.
00:25:33.307 --> 00:25:41.178
Another area that I look for is looking at the database right.
00:25:41.178 --> 00:25:43.181
So I'll give you an example.
00:25:43.181 --> 00:26:08.013
Uh, we had a client recently that had 700,000 records in their database, of which only 150,000 had been touched in the last three years, and so they are paying for 550 000 records annually that are getting absolutely no touches from marketing, no marketing comms of any kind, even translating that to the sales side.
00:26:08.033 --> 00:26:23.200
They're not being touched, and so I want to understand I can't tell you how much like that makes me hurt, like physically when I pointed that out to the poor stakeholder, she was so upset and I, you know, I wanted to let her down gently, but it was.
00:26:23.200 --> 00:26:30.125
The reality was painful that you had paid a lot of money over the years to not touch any of these folks.
00:26:30.125 --> 00:26:38.485
But I want to understand how are you using the database available to you?
00:26:38.485 --> 00:26:40.568
Do you have a plan to touch all of them?
00:26:40.568 --> 00:26:46.387
Are they categorized or segmented in a way that supports your sales function?
00:26:46.387 --> 00:26:58.066
Do you have concrete definitions of their life cycle, so the expected buying cycle that they would go through?
00:26:58.066 --> 00:27:02.578
Are you respecting their subscription preferences?
00:27:03.399 --> 00:27:18.564
That same client, as an example, you would find prospects that had received three wake the dead emails during that time, and then the fact that they had selected no, I am not interested was ignored and they were kept in the database.
00:27:18.564 --> 00:27:21.517
So it was good intentions.
00:27:21.517 --> 00:27:34.646
But the final step that should have happened, never did, and that's the type of thing that I'm going to hunt for is are you using the tool for its core functionality?
00:27:34.646 --> 00:27:36.780
That's the first thing I'm going to evaluate.
00:27:36.780 --> 00:27:42.098
Do you have a base level of organization and a vision for how it should be used?
00:27:42.098 --> 00:27:47.639
And very quickly, I think you can suss out whether or not that's happening.
00:27:47.639 --> 00:27:48.502
It doesn't take long.
00:27:48.975 --> 00:27:49.518
Let me ask you this.
00:27:49.518 --> 00:28:04.125
So I had a scenario where I inherited a Marketo implementation that was doing things in a non I call it non-standard way, right, so there's a lot of sort of I forget what Marketo calls it.
00:28:04.125 --> 00:28:16.528
They're essentially they have a capability that's built for, like nurture streams, right, I can't remember exactly what it's called, but the implementation I inherited basically didn't use that at all.
00:28:16.528 --> 00:28:27.096
It had some highly customized stuff to the point where, if we wanted to change out a single email in a thread, right, we were worried about it breaking things downstream.
00:28:27.096 --> 00:28:43.403
Um, yeah, so I mean, is that the kind of thing too where you're like I get it, like sometimes you get, if you get sophisticated enough, you can go sort of beyond the most common ways in which to use these platforms, and I don't have any problem with that.
00:28:45.358 --> 00:28:54.425
But what bothered me is that it was so complicated and convoluted and interrelated that we really were struggling with.
00:28:54.425 --> 00:29:17.308
We knew we needed to update content, but we were so worried about breaking something that we didn't, and so eventually, I mean it was all built based on the vision of an agency that I also exited fairly quickly after I got there, but we basically had to undo everything they did and took advantage of the built-in functionality instead, right?
00:29:17.308 --> 00:29:29.584
So I guess where I'm going is you know, I don't mind complexity if it truly adds value, but if it restricts what you're able to do, then I think it's a warning sign too.
00:29:29.584 --> 00:29:32.820
Is that the kind of thing you're talking about when you're using the systems as expected?
00:29:34.484 --> 00:29:35.047
Absolutely.
00:29:35.047 --> 00:29:48.427
My point of view is that you earn the right to add complexity to a system, and the way you earn that right is by nailing the basics that everyone can agree upon.
00:29:48.427 --> 00:30:03.868
And so the situation that you were in I see very often, and unfortunately it's past that inflection point, where any fix you might try and implement is like doing surgery on a patient that's awake.
00:30:03.868 --> 00:30:23.579
There are so many processes that are live and running that becomes exponentially harder to address those while keeping the lights on, while keeping campaigns running, and you can get caught in analysis paralysis just trying to figure out if I pull this thread, does the whole gordian not untangle?
00:30:24.501 --> 00:30:49.836
And you know I've got egg on my face, yeah, and so I do think that in every instance that I step into and that's why I prefer to work to your point with those early stage orgs is because that operational debt, tech debt, process debt, people debt generally hasn't built up enough where it's too painful to fix.
00:30:49.836 --> 00:31:12.840
But addressing that and using I typically describe it as 80% best practice, 20%, your practice, right, it's not always going to map 100% of what Marketo suggests you do, hubspot suggests you do, but start with 80% and then you earn the right to do that last 20%.
00:31:12.840 --> 00:31:18.039
That can be very difficult and take the most time, but you adjust it to your business.
00:31:18.039 --> 00:31:32.668
But start with what everyone else is doing, what is best practice, and then, as you conquer that, you nail that you earn the right to get to the more complex, bespoke things you want to do specific to your business.
00:31:33.253 --> 00:31:37.699
Yeah, I like that idea that you have to earn the right to to do heavy customization.
00:31:39.363 --> 00:31:41.206
Yeah, I think that you know.
00:31:41.206 --> 00:31:49.921
I think that you know there's a misconception also that simple means easy and that is not the case.
00:31:49.921 --> 00:31:55.881
It's simple laying these things out for a client, but that does not make it easy.
00:31:55.881 --> 00:32:23.449
Right, the upfront work of defining what a record should look like in your database, defining segmentation, what is the customer journey for your nurture workflows all of those things are much harder than the technical build of them in a marketo, in a hub spot, and so that people and process side is, to my mind, the much harder piece to get right than the platform itself typically.
00:32:24.155 --> 00:32:24.980
We're on the same page.
00:32:24.980 --> 00:32:26.942
Let's switch gears a little bit.
00:32:26.942 --> 00:32:43.801
So for those folks who are listening or watching, who are in the seat going like, yes, we have this operational gap, I want to go fix it and I've talked to my boss, or my boss's boss or whoever, and they don't get it.
00:32:43.801 --> 00:32:52.684
They don't understand how do you go about the process of pitching, selling, convincing the organization that you need to address it?
00:32:55.455 --> 00:33:26.002
So I think every org is different, but typically the lens that I will take with clients if I'm working with a bin market company or a company that's a little more mature I look at three lenses that I typically see leadership caring about, that's growth, efficiency and risk management and risk management and so I think those lenses give you a rubric to work through to justify this type of thing.
00:33:26.002 --> 00:33:45.295
So very often I think, especially with mops, we're nerds, we're geeks, we love tools and you can get lost in talking about the technical capabilities or what a platform can do without.
00:33:45.394 --> 00:33:46.882
Look at how cool this is, yeah.
00:33:48.276 --> 00:33:51.403
Without tying it back to brass tacks.
00:33:51.403 --> 00:33:52.788
What does it get leadership?
00:33:52.788 --> 00:33:54.000
Why should they care?
00:33:54.000 --> 00:34:01.828
And so I think that you know some examples, examples of a growth connection.
00:34:01.828 --> 00:34:13.184
So a database cleanup enables segmented campaigns that, on average, perform three to five times better than mass emails, right?
00:34:13.184 --> 00:34:26.729
So if you are not doing any type of segmentation, you can tie it to we're going to do the same level of effort as today, but you're going to get three to five times more effective results or efficiency.
00:34:26.729 --> 00:34:37.230
Eliminating manual process frees up team capacity of the equivalent of one to two full time employees.
00:34:37.230 --> 00:34:41.697
One to two full-time employees right.
00:34:41.717 --> 00:34:43.581
If you're talking about campaign operations or instituting SLAs, you measure those.
00:34:43.581 --> 00:34:55.377
You can start to justify, because you know how much time it's taking, how much more efficiency you can wring out of the same systems with a robust process or risk management.
00:34:55.377 --> 00:35:05.217
What would happen tomorrow if the person who built that beautiful mind nurture system you laid out departed?
00:35:05.217 --> 00:35:08.185
I'm guessing there wasn't documentation.
00:35:08.185 --> 00:35:16.601
The agency was probably long gone and you've got two weeks to try and write documentation from scratch, if, if they give notice.
00:35:17.983 --> 00:35:25.821
So all of those things, I think as examples, you can tie them to the things that leadership care about.
00:35:25.821 --> 00:35:28.833
You're still doing the same work you'd like to do.
00:35:28.833 --> 00:35:33.528
It's just a tweaking of the messaging of the positioning and how you present it.
00:35:33.528 --> 00:35:47.269
So there is an element of learning to how to speak leader, how to speak executive, and you just have to learn how to tweak what you're talking about a little bit for it to resonate with them.
00:35:47.269 --> 00:36:01.350
And that's something that I think is the difference between an individual contributor kind of the manager, senior manager you want to make that leap to director and above you have to learn how to position it to those leaders.
00:36:02.956 --> 00:36:08.228
Yeah, I'm just curious because I had recent conversations with other guests.
00:36:08.228 --> 00:36:14.928
One who is a CMO basically said the efficiency one is one that he didn't even really care about.
00:36:14.928 --> 00:36:20.267
Right, that tying it to growth and what I would say is profitable growth these days.
00:36:20.267 --> 00:36:29.560
Right, like there was a time not that long ago when it was just growth, but to me it feels like it's the environment shifted to where profitable, profitable growth is matters.
00:36:29.560 --> 00:36:33.984
But like, have you just curious?
00:36:33.984 --> 00:36:35.490
Are you?
00:36:35.490 --> 00:36:43.486
Do you see the same thing that if you could tie stuff to growth, it tends to be better received and you get more movement?
00:36:43.486 --> 00:36:50.028
Or have you seen kind of just as much success with the other types of storytelling, if you will?
00:36:52.536 --> 00:36:58.164
I think for my corner of the market, growth of those three resonates the most.
00:36:58.164 --> 00:37:24.339
Growth of those three resonates the most, but efficiency, I would push back and say that is a very close second, and the reason for that is, for a lot of the clients that I work with, they tend to be early stage VC backed companies and so, yes, they want growth, but, to your point, they want sustainable growth and they don't want to light cash on fire to get it.
00:37:24.339 --> 00:37:28.783
So efficiency, to my mind, is a very close second.
00:37:28.783 --> 00:37:46.082
Make marketing more efficient without having to invest additional dollars, just through better process and better definitional system architecture.
00:37:46.082 --> 00:37:56.136
That is a very compelling messaging message in my mind, and that's certainly something that I found to be successful in some of the orgs that I've worked with.
00:37:56.136 --> 00:38:01.847
Uh, but yes, I think growth overall is still the name of the game.
00:38:01.847 --> 00:38:08.384
It's just, I think, sort of the the zerp era, growth at all costs.
00:38:08.384 --> 00:38:10.909
Has that's gone away a little bit?
00:38:11.269 --> 00:38:28.687
yeah, well, and I think, if you touched on this, but it feels like that middle one, if it was efficiency and effectiveness, right, which are sort of two sides of it, cause I think effectiveness is another one, but it also depends on metrics that you are focused on.
00:38:28.687 --> 00:38:29.776
It feels like that's.
00:38:29.776 --> 00:38:38.446
That's another piece of this puzzle, okay, so I think we're going to have to kind of wrap things up here.
00:38:38.446 --> 00:38:59.346
So, as we wrap up, so if you were going into a client and you were talking to the mops leader or the CMO, whatever I don't know who you end up typically talking to like what advice would you give the mops folks listening to?
00:39:00.088 --> 00:39:19.348
Like how yeah, we touched on this a little bit trying to tell a more compelling story about how to talk about the value of what they're doing, especially if they're pitching for these ideas that I mean, one of the things I think people struggle with with these sort of fixing the gaps is they're not always as obvious in terms of the output.
00:39:19.348 --> 00:39:21.300
Right, there's downstream benefits.
00:39:21.300 --> 00:39:30.775
So, cleaning up your data, it makes your segmentation better, faster, cleaner, right, more effective but you don't see the results immediately.
00:39:30.775 --> 00:39:33.885
So how do you, how would you coach someone to talk about that?
00:39:35.716 --> 00:39:46.571
So I think the first thing you have to do is establish some level of communication cadence so that people know what you're doing.
00:39:46.571 --> 00:39:54.169
And I think that is a challenge for a lot of people in mops is that you tend to be more of the Wizard of Oz type role.
00:39:54.169 --> 00:40:04.209
You want to be behind the curtain, you want to make things run, but if no one knows you're there, they're not going to realize the work that you're doing is making everything run on time.
00:40:04.209 --> 00:40:06.420
You know, in our last conversation we talked about this.
00:40:06.420 --> 00:40:08.707
Like no one cares that the trains run on time.
00:40:08.707 --> 00:40:20.067
They care when the train is late or the train breaks down, but unless you make the work visible that goes into making everything run on time, people won't care.
00:40:20.067 --> 00:40:23.533
Visible that goes into making everything run on time.
00:40:23.533 --> 00:40:24.315
People won't care.
00:40:24.335 --> 00:40:26.717
So for me, what does that look like?
00:40:26.717 --> 00:40:32.776
For my immediate leader that's managing up a weekly email of what I accomplished and why it matters and what I'm doing in the coming week, it might be every two weeks.
00:40:32.776 --> 00:40:39.159
Team Slack post something to the marketing team about what you did and why it makes their lives easier.
00:40:39.159 --> 00:40:40.564
Tie it to their goals.
00:40:40.564 --> 00:40:42.620
Do the same thing with sales.
00:40:42.620 --> 00:40:51.947
I think you will find that people are a lot more willing to invest in your efforts when they know how it affects their bottom line, how it affects their goals.
00:40:51.947 --> 00:41:01.089
And then the other piece is I want to get in front of as many complimentary stakeholders as possible.
00:41:01.349 --> 00:41:04.182
Right, take RevOps out to lunch.
00:41:04.182 --> 00:41:05.560
Take sales out to lunch.
00:41:05.560 --> 00:41:07.041
Take product out to lunch.
00:41:07.041 --> 00:41:08.661
Take marketing out to lunch.
00:41:08.661 --> 00:41:10.843
Understand what they care about.
00:41:10.843 --> 00:41:16.927
Document that so that you can talk about it in a way in their language.
00:41:16.927 --> 00:41:19.500
Right, a lingua franca across.
00:41:19.500 --> 00:41:23.858
Okay, well, I know product cares about this, sales cares about this.
00:41:23.858 --> 00:41:34.428
I am sitting at the center of this web and I can think about what is something I can work on that helps me but also touches on products, touches on sales.
00:41:34.428 --> 00:41:40.099
You're going to get buy-in on that effort because it's touching multiple areas at the same time.
00:41:40.099 --> 00:41:54.791
The more you know about the connective tissue across orgs that kind of plug into what Mops is doing, the easier it is to message your impact and the easier it is to show that as you are pitching things and creating your roadmap.
00:41:56.452 --> 00:41:56.873
I like that.
00:41:56.873 --> 00:41:58.836
I would add finance to that list.
00:41:58.836 --> 00:41:59.478
Yeah, I like that, I would.
00:41:59.478 --> 00:42:00.259
I would add finance to that list.
00:42:00.259 --> 00:42:13.318
Um, yeah, and then the other thing I just to kind of what I heard is ask don't assume what those people like, what they care about, what they, how they think about stuff.
00:42:13.318 --> 00:42:16.373
That's, that's a good bit of advice, right, and just be humble.
00:42:16.373 --> 00:42:21.467
I just like I want to learn what matters and I think that that would go a long way towards helping that.
00:42:21.467 --> 00:42:26.144
Evan, it feels like we barely scratched the surface on this one.
00:42:26.144 --> 00:42:27.802
I know we probably could have gone a lot longer.
00:42:27.802 --> 00:42:32.124
So thank you for thank you for the time, for the insights.
00:42:32.124 --> 00:42:32.906
It's been a lot of fun.
00:42:32.906 --> 00:42:38.681
If folks want to connect with you or learn more about what you're doing, what's the best way for them to do that?
00:42:40.076 --> 00:42:41.121
I got two ways for you.
00:42:41.121 --> 00:42:46.081
So you can find me on LinkedIn, Evan Kubitschek.
00:42:46.081 --> 00:42:59.067
I post quite often lots of memes, lots of videos, but the foundational operations gap is the space that I like to play in, and you can also find my little corner of the internet at grow roguecom.
00:42:59.067 --> 00:43:04.463
If you're interested in addressing the foundational operations gap at your own place, reach out.
00:43:04.463 --> 00:43:05.585
I would love to chat with you.
00:43:06.748 --> 00:43:07.088
Perfect.
00:43:07.088 --> 00:43:08.581
Well, again, thank you, evan.
00:43:08.581 --> 00:43:11.986
Thanks always to our listeners and supporters.
00:43:11.986 --> 00:43:13.280
We appreciate all that.
00:43:13.280 --> 00:43:20.540
If you have an idea for a topic or a guest or you want to be a guest, feel free to reach out to Naomi, mike or me and we'd be happy to get the