The Marketer’s Guide to Finance-Led Ops

Speaker A: I hear this from a lot of marketing ops practitioners is like, I always want that seat at the table. The big thing you really need to do is be able to tie things into what matters. That so what is very important. And a lot of times it's all about the dollar value. So the big thing you want to make sure you're doing is you're always framing things in the context of, uh, either generating revenue or saving us money.

Speaker B: This is revenuemakers, the podcast by six Sense, investigating successful revenue strategies that pushed companies. Hey, everybody, Imagine a world where marketing reports into finance. Okay, so that's probably a little scary. No offense to my CFO friends out there, but have something really interesting for you today. On, um, today's episode, we're talking to George Samaras, who is the head of marketing operations at a company called Atacama. And what we're actually talking about is, in his world of marketing operations being part of a larger revenue operations function, reporting into finance. So all of marketing does not report into finance, but George and his team does. And it gives a little bit of a different perspective on marketing throughout the business, how to work with finance. So we dived into that and we talked about what actually changes when you have that function within finance, how it changes George's perception of marketing and kind of how to think about things a little bit different. So really interesting conversation with George.

Speaker A: So let's get to it.

Speaker B: Foreign. George, thanks so much for jumping on. Been looking forward to this conversation because it's, uh, it's got a little interesting twist. So we're going to talk about marketing operations, but we're actually going to talk about marketing operations and what happens when it sits someplace you wouldn't expect. So in this case, the finance department or work for the cfo. You've been doing this for a while, right? This is not. It's, uh, not your first rodeo. It's probably your first rodeo maybe in terms of where you're reporting, but just like, talk about, like, where you've come from on the ops side and where you've been.

Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely, Adam. Uh, thank you for having me. So, um, I'd say the majority of, uh, marketing ops individuals usually sit within the marketing Org. Uh, obviously we serve the, uh, marketing Org the most, even if you don't sit directly in there. But, um, interestingly enough, my new role, I'm at Atacama. I joined the finance organization. I'm part of the revenue operations team. The, uh, revenue operations team sits under finance, which I'm starting to see on LinkedIn a bit of a growing trend there. Like revenue ops is usually kind of in its own silo or under operations but here under um, the finance org like we report directly to the CFO interestingly enough.

Speaker B: So when you talk about revenue operations because that's you know we've had conversations, I've had conversations in the past where like revenue operations essentially is operations across the entire team. It's cs, uh, it's sales, it's marketing. Is that what it looks like over there as well? Is it just sort of this overarching all the ops across all of the go to markets?

Speaker A: Yes, definitely. So for us it's uh, exactly that. The three pillars we got the, you know, the sales ops, marketing ops, CS ops. We've added in our org chart a bit of like an underlying structure. So like it depends how you look at it. I kind of see it as like almost like splitting sales ops into like actual sales ops and systems whereas marketing ops typically owns the systems. Like so for example like if I'm a marketing ops manager or director I'm responsible for like a marketo or a HubSpot. I'm responsible for a 6 sense. I'm responsible for basically all the mark tech tool sales ops. Just because it's a little bit more demanding, they typically split the role. So you have your salesforce admin sitting separately from M your actual sales ops analyst. And so in our work that's kind of how it is like for sales. Like there's a separate systems owner who doesn't do much of the reporting and analytics but does like the actual CRM administration.

Speaker B: And so in that world, and I guess it has this organization always sat under the finance work at a comma or is it just a doer thing for that?

Speaker A: No, interestingly enough I moved around a couple times. The revenue operations function was brought to life at out of come about 2 years ago I want to say and Atacama is a smaller organization, uh, young organization. So uh, I was brought under by Marta. Uh she was the uh, chief marketing officer at Atacama but she initially had joined as the chief commercial officer. She brought over uh a rev ops function, built it out. You know just the basics start off with this broader rev ops and then from there the different functions were were hired out. So there was a marketing ops, a sales ops and then a csops, you know was kind of hired and brought on board. But yeah, so initially that's where it sat under for a while it was a little under marketing and then ultimately went under finance. Uh where it's been now, I think I want to say for over a year at least now.

Speaker B: Okay, you were in op, you've been in marketing operations for quite a while. So I guess the first question is, what's different? You know, like uh, just at a high level, does it feel different and does it operate? Because again like you don't go as far as saying that marketing is directly accountable to finance, but finance has certainly a huge role in, you know, the budget process and everything with marketing. But this is a whole different angle.

Speaker A: It's the same, but different. So like obviously like a lot of the day to day stuff is very similar. Like you're running the mark tech tools, you're helping with campaigns, you're doing marketing strategy, finding different ways, you know, like different ways to slice and dice the data, to like identify our strategy and where do we go next and what do we do more of and what do we do less of? But being in finance, there's a uh, very strong emphasis on dollars, which I think is good. I think all marketers are feeling it now, uh, this day and age. But like I, I cannot stress like I've always worked under a marketing work my entire life. My last company, Covey, I was under the, the marketing Org. Prior to that at Ceridian, I was under. We had like a business operations team which was like kind of like a rev op service, but not the same as here. But here everything is very dollar driven. Like every time you know, I sit down with my cfo, it's always like, okay, what is marketing doing to pull levers to uh, either make us money or save us money. It's basically one of those two things. So everything is dollar focused. My reporting now is like, I feel like campaign reporting is almost like a world away compared to how heavy it was in a previous role where now it's very much like we're focused on pipe. Like, okay, this cohort of MQLs, how, how many of them translate into opportunities? How many of those opportunities made it into actual pipeline? Where's that pipeline sitting now? And we're constantly looking at those and slicing and dicing the different things we're doing to understand what's working and what's not. It's funny because I actually connected with uh, a former colleague of mine a couple days ago and we're talking about like nurture reporting. And it felt like almost like a world away from me because I'm like, I still do that, but it's like, I feel like that's like my like tier One reporting now where, like, my reporting is now very dollar focused. Very, very dollar focused.

Speaker B: And do you think sitting there, is your position having impact back on the marketing team? I don't think there's a marketing leader, a marketing team at this point. It's not thinking that they're accountable for pipeline of revenue. But are you sort of directly or indirectly changing behaviors or changing thoughts or thinking about, you know, how we're structuring your structuring campaigns?

Speaker A: Yes, there's a lot. Like, when I first kind of came in, it was kind of getting a lay of the land and kind of like, okay, we have like our, we'll say our three big channels, which are kind of like our paid media organic channel and our events channel. Those are kind of like, if I were to group everything into three big channels in marketing, that's what I look at the idea there was, um, I'm like, okay, well, let's see how many MQLs we have. How many of those are turning into pipe, or those being qualified by sales or business development team. And then how many of them are actually turning into pipe? And then we started looking at, like, the ratios and understanding, like, is like, hey, we could have 500 mqls from an event, but if it's not translating into pipe or that pipe is never closing, reevaluate our strategy. Are we going to the right events? Are we speaking to the right people at the right events, et cetera. That's really where I've been focused, was like, okay, let's maybe kill the levers on some of these. Let's pull the levers on some of these. And then a lot of the times, like, this is, uh, a little, like, counterintuitive to say to me, but like, a lot of times it's like what your gut says is typically right. Like, I knew my gut was kind of telling me a few things when I first came in. I'm like, we all know, like, paid's a pay to play game. But like, it's. It's a pretty reliable channel should you have the budget. And we saw interesting things like that. Interestingly enough, like, one thing I found was that. And I think a lot of people are combating this now is SEO is not the same beast it was from a couple years ago. Um, now we have geo, which is interestingly, and we're seeing it like every month. It's like, we can be pumping more organic traffic. We can be ranking great, but we're just seeing our traffic drop. And a lot of people now are Using that it was previously passage retrieved and now it's a generative response in Google. Or people are just having a conversation with ChatGPT and getting their answers when, uh, evaluating tools. I think like every SaaS company is combating that right now. It's not just us, but we definitely notice that. And we're kind of redeploying and reinvesting accordingly because we're saying, okay, like hey, we noticed this used to be our bread and butter. We need that bread and butter back. How do we want to redeploy what's not working today? And let's take some budget from there, reallocate it to see what we can do.

Speaker B: Now, given with finance involved, we could spend four hours in attribution if you want to go down that path. But you talked about those big buckets. But again there's so much overlap. You know, again like SEO, you've got folks that are coming in, they're influencing a journey. But it also could be driving in a conversion or mql. Like one, how do you think about that? And two is that your CFO ever has made a strong opinion about or participates in the conversation.

Speaker A: That's very interesting because that's actually like a uh, big conversation we're having today right now is like how do we want to handle attribution? I think every org I've spoken to, it's a little bit different without sharing too much. One of the challenges that was like, hey, like our attribution right now has kind of pitted us against each other. Like, you know, we kind of have our business development team, our sales team and our marketing team and we're kind of all just kind of pitted against each other because we're all fighting for that opportunity source. And so now we're trying to look at something of more multi touch approach and like how are we like influencing the journey? And there's ways to do that within Salesforce itself and then there's also ways to do it within uh, other tools like a hockey stack or dream data or another attribution tool like that.

Speaker B: Do you use one of those tools now or no?

Speaker A: We do not. We don't. So we're currently built an in house solution within Salesforce. It's something I initially developed in a previous role at Coveo. We layer it on with six sense data. So we actually have um, interestingly enough we have like our marketing attribution that we look at like the opportunity level. So there we can see like, hey, like are we noticing that you know, which touch points are occurring where and then we actually have uh, interestingly enough like a named and targeted coverage dashboard. And it's basically a dashboard of all our named and target accounts and we look at like how frequently we're covering them and we actually layer in six sense data today to see um, if we're able to um, see if we're seeing any account movement and then from there feeding it to the BDRs for outbounding. So any signals we're not necessarily seeing from a first party, we're seeing from like Bombora or something like that. The actual $0.06 dark funnel, we're able to feed that to the BDR team and they're able to leverage that.

Speaker B: Great. So you directly report yourself to, I assume to a rev Ops leader.

Speaker A: Yeah, recently started reporting to revops leader. Yeah.

Speaker B: So if we think about this for a second, right, like whether or not marketing operations sits in finance department, what do you think are maybe three or four and however many number of like key learnings you think this experience has given you that you think that you would say to other marketing ops leaders, hey, sitting in finance has opened my eyes to this or made me think about things differently that they could apply again whether or not they're reporting into a marketing leader or finance.

Speaker A: For me I think it really comes down like I, I hear this from a lot of marketing ops practitioners is like I always want that seat at the table. And you hear that quite a bit. Like I need to see it uh, at the table. I want to see at the table. I feel like I'm just kind of like an, you know, order taker or an IT team. The big thing you really need to do is be able to tie things into what matters. That so what is very important. And a lot of times it's all about the dollar value. So the big thing you want to be make sure you're doing is you're always framing things in the context of either generating revenue or saving us money, you know, for marketing revenue. So that's what I would really focus on. I think a lot of marketers get like really pumped up when they see some cool stuff within nurture, like, oh, hey, you know, like I built this email stream and the open rate went here and it's like you bring it to an exec. There's a lot of like, so what? And like finance especially is very black and white, very cut dry. You know, it's like, is this an, you know, debit or credit asset or liability? That's very much how things are looked at. It's very like spreadsheet driven. So I always recommend a lot of marketers have that approach. There's always that like, so what? Which is very important. And you need to bubble that up to executives. A lot of executives, whether they're in marketing or revenue or finance or even the CEO, they're always focused on like, how are we being most efficient as possible with our, with our spend during

Speaker B: budget season and kind of understanding, you know, where investments are going to go. You kind of talked about like levers that are pulled and so forth. But is finance like, for example, do you have like laser focus on cac? And I would imagine that's got to be very different, at least from budget season of like, finance is like, this is where we need to be on these kind of key metrics.

Speaker A: It is. So we actually perfect timing because we just came out of our QBR for last quarter. In the qbr, we actually have a qmr, which is a quarterly marketing review that we put into the QBR that we present to the entire executive team. And for marketing, we actually, interestingly enough, uh, had like an ROI slide. And we literally look at like program spend dollar spent from the previous quarter pipe gen the following quarter created, uh, that was marketing source. And we have like an. It's a simple ROI calculation. It's not perfect. It's like, definitely we can add more complexity, but it kind of shows us a trend line. And then from there we're kind of like looking, okay, well if this is our acquisition cost for marketing, we're noticing our ROI is decreasing. That's interesting enough. So like, I can't share obviously too, too much information here. But like, you know, when we start noticing trends where say there's a decline in roi, everyone's like, oh no, we're being more inefficient. And that's where ops job is to go in and be like, are we being more inefficient or is it macroeconomic or is it something of how we measure things? Like, you know, hey, our pipe gen number could have been great relative to spend, but if 95% of all that pipe we generated went into close lost, we're kind of sitting there holding the bag, right? So the idea there is to kind of identify. It's like, hey, our ROI might have gone down, but if our closed one rate's actually going up, we're actually doing pretty good from a marketing perspective. So it's something we look at now. And so we're trying to just get more efficient. We've Switched it now from like looking at marketing pipeline generated to marketing source closed. One challenge there with a lot of um. And I think this is everyone in B2B SaaS. It's a heavily lagging indicator. The pipe you generate from an MQL to closed one. Most B2B SaaS companies is over a year. It's typically a long buying cycle. So like if you want to make some changes, you got to wait for while at the same time being asked to show that those lagging indicators will come to fruition in a couple of months or a couple quarters.

Speaker B: That makes sense. Do you think that this is the way to have this operations team sitting with finance?

Speaker A: I'd say it's org dependent. I can't give you, ah, just a, uh, yes or no answer. But I'll say this. As a marketing ops practitioner, I've never felt so close to revenue. And I think a lot of marketers, like, you know, when I first got into marketing ops 12 years ago, like marketing was always looked at as a bit of a cost center. And you know, that's when marketing automation tools kind of came in and like, oh, this is how we can close the loop on revenue. And obviously it's been kind of trending that way ever since. But like I, I truly feel now that I'm like tied to dollars. Like we're almost like scrutinizing like every single line item because we're able to see now with fidelity what's working, what's not. And really now at this point we're just trying to find like the leading and lagging indicators. We have to understand, like if we make a change now, we might not see the changes for like a year or two. But what leading indicators can we see today or in the next couple of months that can tell us that, hey, this might follow through. If I were to talk to myself a few years ago, it's, it's definitely the best way to look at marketing. Whether or not, you know, in your career you end up, you know, working under a CMO or a CFO or coo. Having this lens is very important. I highly stress a lot of marketers really focus on dollars and I'm seeing that trend overall. But there's still a lot of marketing ops practitioners that are still very focused on like the campaign metrics and how many MQLs. And it's really a lot more than that.

Speaker B: Do you feel part of the marketing team? I mean, uh, again, like, if there's a strong alignment, doesn't really necessarily matter. Where you sit. But there's a relationship change given that the dynamic there.

Speaker A: So internally they call me Switzerland because I'm technically supposed to be neutral. I don't sit under marketing, I sit under rev Ops. But I obviously have like an affinity towards marketing. Like my job is ultimately to help them out. It's honestly from like an org structure perspective, I think it's pretty good. I, I still feel part of marketing. Like I, I work with marketers more than I work with finance folks. Like uh, I talk to the accountants maybe once a week. But like marketers it's, you know, every 10, 20 minutes I'm getting a ping. So definitely more within marketing. But I have the ability, like if I see some things going sideways or things I don't necessarily agree with from marketing, I have the ability to pull that like kind of Swiss flag out and be like, hey, like as a neutral party this is not right and I can't go with this. Or as a neutral party I recommend this. And I think that's one of the important things of centralizing Rev Ops is kind of keeping as that neutral Switzerland esque party where it's like we don't really have a bias. Our job is to just be efficient for the organization. Whether it's great for marketing, whether it's great for sales, BD doesn't matter. We're here to be efficient.

Speaker B: That's gotta be refreshing in one way too, right? Because it's just like there's not about opinions. It's like, here's the data, this is what it tells you and let's just go.

Speaker A: Definitely, definitely. And I think it's good too because like what I've observed, a lot of marketing orgs either have like really good pull at the executive level and when they're going into board level QBRs, or it's like kind of marketing is kind of looked at as kind of like, you know, the fun team or whatever. And I think also for us it allows us to kind of show that marketing is driving value, is revenue generating. You know, a lot of execs, they look at sales as kind of the revenue generators because hey, they're the closers, you know. But marketing also does quite a bit. And it's really our job to kind of translate like what marketing is doing and showing to those people who kind of care just, you know, primarily about the pipeline numbers, that hey, marketing is actually being efficient with your dollars and it's not just, you know, a brand awareness function or anything like that. So it's a really unique position. I'll say this is the first time I'm like, you know, I get pinged by the CEO here. Like, um, it's at that level where I got some really good visibility. And it's. It's great because now he can, you know, lean on me and be like, I need you to be objective with the facts for marketing and understand you serve both. So kind of like a trusted resource. I'd say once again to all practitioners, you know, watching or listening to this, like, great from a career perspective there.

Speaker B: Yeah. Well, I mean, I think the visibility, right. Again, like, the fact that finance is surfacing that. And again, I mean, it's probably good and bad, right, because, like, there's some strong programs and there's some not so strong programs, but it's not like, oh, marketing's just bringing their fluffy data. It's like, you know, there's certainly organizations where there's a lack of alignment and everyone's got their own dashboard and their own version of the truth, and it's like, they don't match. So, like, that argument is over. And then you're raising this up to another member of the C suite. I mean, that's gotta be a huge one at the end of the day for visibility, for sure.

Speaker A: Definitely. Definitely. And we all, we all use the same data. That's the best part is, like, our data set's the same. We don't see anything different. We're also younger org from a Salesforce, uh, perspective. We only had Salesforce for about two years. Most other companies I've worked at, like, Salesforce is like, you know, Salesforce have a driver's license now. So it's, you know, quite a bit older. But here it's interesting. So we have, like, pretty new clean data. And, um, we're all pulling from the same source. Like, you know, everything. We have Tableau layered on. We have six Sense plugged in. And, you know, we're just pulling in all the data from whether it be six Sense or Tableau to see that data. So, yeah, and we all have a centralized source of truth for that.

Speaker B: I mean, we could go on about this all day because it's such a relationship, this, the dynamic, the cmo, cfo, all that. But I have a question I like to ask our guests. It's a fun. Has nothing to do with what we just talked about, but, oh, uh, boy, it's. What is the most ridiculous thing you've been asked to do in your career? And it doesn't. It could be ridiculous, bad or good. And We've gotten some pretty interesting answers from statute limitations, have definitely run out on that to something more positive but curious if anything stands out for you.

Speaker A: One that pops up recently from earlier this year and not necessarily a bad one, but kind of just like an, um, oh my gosh, unrealistic one was, hey, we want to get an agentic AI implement tool implemented for our marketing business development team. We need it scoped out of, procured and implemented in two weeks. I remember that it was, it kind of came in like, I remember it's like second week of January, just coming back from the holidays shortly thereafter that came in and like, yeah, we need it done. I remember it was like, yeah, second week of January, we need it done by the end of the month. And I'm like, our security review is not even going to go that quick, let alone like us actually shopping around for a tool, learning it, implementing and things like that. So I think every OPS practitioner can relate to this. I see it all over LinkedIn. We always get the crazy turnarounds, you know, that you. No one else on earth can handle. But, uh, but here we are. So I'd say that's the most recent one that's coming. I've got some like, silly ones and funny ones and things like that. But that, that's one, uh, I think more thematic with, you know, the AI trend these days.

Speaker B: Yeah, well, I mean, that's the most timely one I've heard. So that's a really, that's a really good one. So, uh, well, George, I appreciate this is a great conversation and great perspective. I think that a lot of our listeners will, uh, will take and take some actionable items out of it. So I really appreciate you jumping on.

Speaker A: Awesome. Thank you for having me, Adam. I appreciate it.

Speaker B: Thanks for listening to this episode of Revenue Makers. If you're looking for more info on how to stay on top of the latest marketing trends, check out our resources in the show notes and subscribe to the Secret Sauce monthly newsletter.

Speaker A: You can do it at the bottom

Speaker B: of every page@6sense.com it's packed with practical tips and insights that can help you level up your marketing strategy. See you next week.