Redefining Success for Modern Marketing Operations - Wing It Podcast Ep 104

Speaker A: How do we wind this back? And it's this classic case of it's a large marketing department and everyone's busy trying to look busy. So they're streaming up all these things over here. Someone else is doing it over here. And all they're focused on is like, how do I deploy my automation journey? And because they have overlap in audiences and product lines, they're just like, oh, everyone in oil and gas should get this email.

Speaker B: Right?

Speaker A: And then the other product line holders thinking the exact same thing. So what happens? That oil and gas audience, they both receive different streams all the time. Everyone's confused. They don't want it. There's no structure or organization. And so that's what we're trying to unearth.

Speaker B: Mhm. Wing it podcast goosed digital.com episode 106 I'm gonna throw 106 out there. First one of 2026. We're going with 106. Who do we have? Kevin Butler, Michael Turksani. All right, we're back. Good to see you.

Speaker A: You too. Um, we've got a lot to talk about today.

Speaker B: All right, so we're kicking off the year we want to talk about. Um, I guess we've had some recent wins across some. What we might, well, what we're calling kind of larger scale M ops, rev ops type, uh, environments, if you will. There's a lot going on in these, uh, marketing teams and they need a lot of help. So we wanted to break that down for everybody and give an update on kind of, uh, what we think that means and a why we think things need to change and how we can help.

Speaker A: I think it's timely. I've talked to a number of organizations about this, big and small. So some more on the SMB side, some on the enterprise. And then even for us, and we've seen the same thing in our own business is a number of large deals that were tracking well throughout calendar 25 ended up pushing out, but then closed really rapidly in calendar 26, January and Feb. And what's interesting to me is having talked to a bunch of these other organizations, they're seeing the exact same thing. We're talking different industries, different sides of org, everything. And I don't want that. Don't know what it means from a macro business perspective other than perhaps it would imply that whatever concerns, um, or fears that existed in late 2025, for whatever reason, appear to be lesser. So where organizations feel comfortable making financial investments and growth. And it's probably a good omen as we carry forward in 2026, recognizing there's a lot of sensitivity and who knows. But I just thought that was interesting that on a small sample size of different orgs, they're all seeing the same thing too. So let's get into marketing and what we're seeing here.

Speaker B: Yeah, so we've, you know, we cut our teeth 10 years ago, a little more than 10 years ago, on marketing automation platforms really. And we're lucky to be in a number of very large kind of scenarios, different orgs that are either pretty pushing the envelope, wanting to use the tools and advanced strategies that they have through the automation systems that's evolved with their CRM over time. And new organizations that are again could be large or small in nature. And we're talking about larger teams today and just larger organizations today. Um, so we have a lot of field of view in terms of how these systems get implemented if they've never really been implemented before. We've seen teams that have kind of ruined these systems over time and then were brought in to kind of uh, revive them and reboot the strategy and, and we've been lucky to be alongside some pretty awesome teams that are doing some great work and using uh, these platforms at scale and how as an organization or as an agency we can participate in that, you know, and um, you know, I think if you're a larger team, larger organization, especially if you're on what we would call like more of a growth curve, like you said, more of a aggressive kind of sales and marketing plan. Um, you have a lot of demands. Marketing can't just stop overnight. So a lot of times these organizations have to sort of like upgrade the plane as they're flying the plane. And um, we all know that, you know, marketing, tech and marketing operations and it's changing quick. So um, you know, we've been in a few deals recently where we are seeing the symptoms of I would maybe what I would call dated strategies in terms of how you would sort of drive awareness in your audience and marketing leaders that are sitting in there being like, we know we need to change something, we just don't know uh, how to maybe go about doing that and how to do that at the same time. We're trying to build pipeline. So I thought this was a good topic just to sort of like first of all kind of define what we think a team of this kind of size and shape looks like for people. So we can kind of, you know, talk about the challenges at that level and then what are they actually experiencing or what have we seen them experience? At least Right now and then we can go from there. Sure.

Speaker A: Well, okay. A lot to unpack there. I think the biggest thing, from my perspective, speaking of perspective, is perspective is usually the path towards clarity. And I think a lot of the organizations that we speak to, they're so ingrained and heads down in their environment.

Speaker B: Mhm.

Speaker A: That they don't really poke their head up and really think about it critically. They're just trying to figure out what works and what not. And you know, we're in Olympic mode right now. And I'll continue with the analogies is we've got a lot of environments and scenarios of general athletes. There's good bones, there's good foundations, they're in good shape, but they're not in shape for their specific tailored sport or event. And as a result, the things they've been doing sometimes work and sometimes don't as it relates to that one specialized thing. And when we look at these environments, these martech environments, they are usually the culmination of a lot of good thinking, a bunch of tools being plugged in over the series of 1012 years as we've seen this growth and explosion of martech tools available. And now they're trying to make all these general things work within a very specific focus. And okay, so then we talk about these larger scale orgs and what does that look like? We could define it by number of people in a department or product owners or whatever. But what I would just say is the environment is you would have multiple lines of business, likely with multiple different audiences, at least different verticals, and probably two or more owners of these different lines of business. And where that's important or why is that's the moment in which it breaks apart. Because usually you've got multiple product line owners, whether it's product marketers, product owners, or even um, line of business demand gen owners who are so laser focused on that one product line that they're not really too concerned about other product lines. It's not that they don't care. Their focus is just singularly in one thing. And so then you have two people racing out to go do all these things and they know there's a volume of work that's required and a lot of marketing has got to go out. But often there's overlap between the products and the audiences. And the concern is product A and product B are marketing to and hitting the same audience, likely at the same time causing confusion, probably reporting erosion and ultimately not a tailored great experience for your buyer.

Speaker B: Right? Yeah. So when you're talking about multiple product owners. The example would be product owner A, so focused on driving the demand of their product, and we're all going to the same vertical. There's multiple verticals. So essentially there's a person now that's getting emails or messaging from product A, product B, product C, product D, potentially like in the same period of time. And because these are siloed groups, siloed maybe is, uh, a strong word, but because they've got their own plans and there's no real central orchestration or coordination of that overall, everybody's just kind of running their own strategy. And that's where you end up with like, uh, kind of a chaotic marketing environment. Right. A lot of times they're scaling up, uh, smart hands to sort of just get the work done. You know, just hundreds of emails a month or potentially type of thing and no one's really asking the question, like, wait a second, like, how does this make sense? How are we reporting on this? What's the actual goal here? What are we looking for? And I can see that as a product owner you're like, well, I just want to get my product out there. I want to, you know, my job is to grow my product. And that's also your job. And guess what, we're both going to the same vertical, the same people. Um, what are we seeing from an erosion of sort of, uh, ah, engagement or. I know you were talking earlier about before we started recording of people just opting out of these communications and sort of.

Speaker A: Well, that's the first major risk is you push too much volume of content to this audience and they do the nuclear option of they just unsubscribe, they're done with your brand. And email can be two things. It can be a channel full of noise, or when engaged properly, could be the most powerful channel. You have to directly speak to your audience in a super efficient, both on speed as well as cost manner. And so the problem is you've worked and built up this database, you've probably spent a lot of money investing in building that and acquiring these names to then go and kind of blow it on the last mile of just not having an organized track of communications and it's just too much and they're done with it. So that's probably the biggest risk. Um, let me stop there and just make sure that answers your question.

Speaker B: Yeah, I think so. I mean, when we're all kind of faced with this, and I think this kind of goes to the point almost around we're relying heavily on the product marketers, in many cases, the product owners, in many cases to really implement a marketing strategy. And if they probably don't have great marketing strategy skills per se, plus they're influenced heavily by um, a certain paradigm of thinking that they've been used to. So what do they do while I'm sending out an ebook or I'm sending out more information about my product that may or may not really be like you said, in the lens of like, is this content that I'm providing the audience is actually valuable? Meaning if the overall communication strategy was, you know, we're not leading with certain types of information, you know, we're very rarely going to deliver certain types of information. But what we are going to do is build up, you know, kind of a, um, uh, communication strategy around adding real value through those other messages. Right. It's going to be, I don't know, just throwing it out there, like tips or stats or things that might be helpful to the person that's receiving those. And maybe you give them the option through your subscriber page to pick certain things. But that's obviously a big strategy shift. Now you have to be thinking about, wait a sec, I'm not relying on that product marketer to jam another PDF down somebody's throat. It's like, we don't do that here. We do occasionally, but like we don't do that here. What we are doing is we've got a different approach to bringing value.

Speaker A: Well, the biggest thing that I see is product marketers, like true product marketers, they are so impressive, they're so good at knowing the audience, what's the right message, the nuances of an industry or vertical. It's amazing information to leverage. The problem is they don't know how to distribute it. And that's the role of the demand gen person. They have to be the orchestrator of all of this wonderful information.

Speaker B: Right?

Speaker A: And that's the gap rate that you've got to fill in as the demand gen comms owner. And so going back to the previous point, the worst case scenario is you lose the ability to contact that prospect.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: The secondary outflow or problem is that you risk the missed opportunity of engaging a prospect who could be in market critically evaluating you, your product, your company, and then as a result, you missed out on the revenue too. The challenge here too is for a lot of these B2B organizations, the total addressable audience or market is pretty set at this point. It's not really growing for the most part. So there's a finite number of organizations and people that you can really go market to. So if we don't have our act together and we're in the eyes of the buyers and prospects spamming them, then that's one less name that we think we can easily access and market to.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: So that's a really bad thing. And what that does long term is it probably strikes out an ability to sell to that organization or you're gonna have to find another way. And that's challenging. When we take a direct channel off the table as far as the marketing avenues we can go by and engage. So then, um, product is sitting here saying, I've got all the right messages and demand gen is not able to actually go and deliver it.

Speaker B: Yeah. And you think about many people are still in a hybrid work environment and, or remote work environment and direct mail as I could see another avenue of being able to attempt to reach somebody is very expensive in comparison. So you're not going to be sending maybe, uh, can't even use that channel because of the way your audience is spread out or um, you're certainly not going to use it very often. So email is still a really critical channel and still something that is very useful to your point, if it's done well. And I think that this is really where, um, going back to the marketing strategy or the overlay of sort of asking questions, what do we really want people to um, feel about our brand when they're, when they're like, how do we want to be known? You know, what is the. What if we asked a prospect or a customer about the types of content that we publish to them via email? What are they going to say? Right. Um, and I think you can, to your point earlier, like you can see that in the numbers to some degree, you know, well, they're not unsubscribing. Okay. You know, that's not necessarily, that's like you said, a nuclear option. That's not necessarily an indicator of somebody's satisfaction with the messaging or. And it certainly doesn't tell you like how would they view you as an organization? And it's tough. Like I think even, you know, even for us it's a good exercise to really ask the question of like, how do we want to be perceived? What is the. We might publish articles and PDFs in various aspects to support what we're doing. I'm sure we'll talk about some tactics, but in a critical channel, what do we want them to know? What do we want them to feel about Goose Digital.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: And I don't think people really Ask that question and that might then inform, well, okay, if that's the case and we want to be thought leaders and we want to add real value back to our audience, this is not going to be straightforward. We want those messages to be small, we want them to be occasional, we want them to fall exactly in these veins. There's always an opportunity to hit them with a PDF if we need to. Certainly they'll be available on our website, but that's ultimately how we're using the channel as a way to drive a really good feeling and a really good piece of value to the audience there.

Speaker A: Yeah. Okay, so what does email done right look like in 2026? I think to answer that question first, we need to go back to how things have changed and historically over the last, call it, five years, maybe a bit more. We said the buying journey is fairly dark for the first 60 to 80% of that sales cycle, meaning prospects and buyers are doing their own research through third party white papers like the Gardeners, the Foresters, Then they're doing their own reading reviews, they're doing other things. And then they'll engage two to three, maybe four organizations as a shortlisted vendor.

Speaker B: Mhm.

Speaker A: And then they engage those organizations and that's where the visibility on the sales cycle begins for the organization. But I think things have changed again and some of this is AI and some of it's just buyer behavior where we said, okay, well, the sort of advent and growth of communities, peer reviews, all that stuff for some industries more than others, plays a much bigger role at the front of the research journey before the engagement with the vendor. But I think now we're seeing on top of the peer review, which still has relevance. We're seeing AI taking some of this and that's important because one, I think a lot of organizations would say they're noticing organic traffic dropping, they're not seeing referrals from AI searches, because AI just taking it all and delivering it inside of their platforms. And I think the other thing to think about, not to spark off or concerns of what to do here, but I also think AI is learning and getting smarter too. So before it would just scrape and crawl and then deliver back whatever was on websites. Now it's starting to think about how does it position things? What is it, uh, learning? It's not quite just spitting back. Whatever we've put on a website, it's actually describing in its own language. So that's going to put even more importance on marketing in general. Just say, how are we positioning ourselves in the market? How do we articulate our value props and differentiators, things like that. And so what that means now going back to how does it impact email is I think we should be thinking about email less so in terms of like top of funnel and awareness and more about getting down funnel into. Well, how do we start to organize email nurtures and drips and just general email communications around middle and bottom of funnel stage messaging?

Speaker B: Mhm.

Speaker A: Probably breaking it out Persona. You probably don't need a lot of Personas, but even as general as decision makers and influencers, maybe there's a third party or third group as well. But this idea of saying okay, what are the right messages for decision makers or influencers, that middle uh, and bottom stage funnel. Because I think even more of that research journey by your prospects is being done sort of without the vendor's visibility. So now we need to be tailoring our content and messages around. They're now ready. Here are the things you need to consider. Here's what separates us, here's how we really attach ourselves to value. Whether it's profitability growth, revenue growth, efficiencies, whatever those are, that's what we're going to have to start to do. And I think the other thing is getting more narrow and granular on what those talk tracks are. I think it's okay to have five, six, maybe 10 different bottom of funnel streams with four or five people in them at any given time. Most of these total addressable audiences aren't huge like we've been saying. And I think we want to go highly tailored and specific.

Speaker B: The couple things with that, uh, like email feels like even more valuable in the age of AI because you can actually, you know, reach out and touch someone, which you've always been able to do. But with them sitting inside of a chatbot window, the likelihood of them reaching your brand is becoming less and less. Right. So whereas in the past, you know, maybe Google keyword searches and you'd hit them onto a page or an ad, now we're seeing, like you said, I got my answer and look at the companies, I'm doing my research, I'm not even hitting your brand. So if I am going to get something from a brand via email, it's sort of like recognizing the importance of it at this point it's really, I feel like it's so valuable and so would the list be. And I wonder if B2B marketers should really be taking a page from B2C marketers as it relates to email. Because I think that B2B audiences are a little bit more forgiving. Oh. I get this email from this vendor and I don't, uh, keep them around because it's sort of like something that I should be thinking about, but it's not something like for my job. And you know, they are a big player in the space, but I don't see a ton of value in their email. So I'm not necessarily going to read it, but I'll delete it and I'll just stay on their list. Whereas I feel like consumers are much more, you know, cutthroat as it relates to their inbox. Right. If it's like I'm getting something that's just nonsensical, we're going to get rid of it. Right. Um, and that forces those, those, um, those marketers to really be like, wait a sec, what are we actually putting out? So I almost feel like maybe there's like a page that these companies should be taking around email from consumer marketing over email. And I don't just mean like retail. I mean like, if you're like a big member organization, consumer member organization, you know, and you're getting emails from these companies that you're a member of, like, those have to add value.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: They have to be, they have to be things that are going to sort of reflect on the value of the membership that you're paying every year. Right. Otherwise you're just going to like, basically get rid of it. And frankly, there could be a risk to that member organization that I may not even renew.

Speaker A: But something you said earlier is important too, is like, how do you want your organization or brand to be reflected or thought about?

Speaker B: Mhm.

Speaker A: And to me, this goes what we're saying too. If you develop a reputation as an organization where every email clearly adds a ton of value, I might not be in market today. What you're saying isn't particularly relevant to my needs right now.

Speaker B: Mhm.

Speaker A: But I'm willing to keep on the list and continue to open the emails and scan them. I think that's got a lot of value. And conversely, if the emails are junk garbage, they're unfocused, they will, one way or another start preceding you and your brand that way. I think the importance of maintaining that level of quality has never been greater. Um, I totally agree. So this is kind of like to me, the promise of email that it's always been is now finally here. Yeah.

Speaker B: And I think if you have through your subscription management and you're using that to inform, well, what options are we giving a customer? I don't see a problem with having. Are you interested in long form product level detail that we send weekly? Right. Oh you are. Great. And we're a multi product company so we actually have five listed here. Do you want them? Um, uh, so I would call that

Speaker A: subscription management level two. Level one would be like what are you interested in right now you're asking well, what kind of short form, long form, what kind of mediums do you like in terms of consuming your content? A level three that organizations don't always think about, mature ones will who have been doing this for a while, they've got some pretty smart marketers is understanding various behaviors and bringing that into a theoretical subscription center. And what I mean by that is if you've got multiple product lines, multiple solutions on your website and you're able to track this recipient, this audience, where are they going, where are they clicking, trying to put together some sort of educated guess of what their interest and engagement is. If they continue to go to the same product line and they're exploring all about the product, that might tell us something that that's the kind of product they want. Additional messaging on M if they keep coming back, if we can see there's a series of interested visits and sessions, perhaps that would imply they're not just top of funnel, but now middle of funnel, maybe bottom of funnel depending on what particular pages they're viewing and how we perceive those in the sales cycle. So I think that can all influence and guide and shape the style of messaging and what in specific we're saying to them. So I think that would call that like a level three in terms of maturity and just bringing in this first party data to use more effectively.

Speaker B: Yeah. So switching gears a little bit to um, you know, maybe using, I don't want to say using an agency or sort of like the agency kind of plug aspect, but maybe reflecting a little bit on some of the experiences over the past year or so of being in these environments and um, why you know, they're going out to market and looking for another agency. So I'll throw a few things on and then let you go after. So we've clearly seen uh, interest in organizations that are um, you know, kind of fall into this category that we've talked about. And what I've noticed is that they tend to, they tend to sort of like have a trigger point that's either balls being dropped or just kind of like, you know, kind of mismanagement of, of the day to day function. If I've selected an agency and uh, they're part of the team and we do have a very large volume going on. They're operating as an extension of the team. They're probably more than likely in your asana, in your Monday, in your notion, in whatever system you're using. They've probably got a user account within some sort of a communications tool like a teams or whatever, so that they can literally be quite close to how your operation's running. But they're. To your point earlier, they're highly specialized, someone from our team. So hour for hour, dollar for dollar, you expect your agency to be able to kind of get it right the first time every time. Um, almost held to sort of like a standard that's maybe unrealistic because we're all humans at the end of the day right now anyway. Um, but usually there's a ball. Couple balls being dropped, right? And then that's when they're like, okay, you know, we need to kind of go out and look for somebody that's hopefully not going to drop balls on us. And that's usually when they look at more closely. Well, what is the Specialized. We ended up with an agency that does, let's say, going back to, you know, let's say salesforce, Pardot or marketing cloud. You know, are you guys doing that? They're a little bit more granular in terms of picking somebody now. And then the other area that we've seen is where, um, they're not necessarily like completely, um, disenfranchised with the delivery side, but they feel like there's a gap on the strategy side. And they do. They are starting to feel what we're talking about earlier around this thing is kind of coming. It's not really going. We're doing the work. Yeah, we're on a hamster wheel. But ultimately, like, we gotta change things. And in order to do that, I'm probably gonna need some support, a thought partner, you know, to help me strategically make my way through that.

Speaker A: Yeah, I think to me, the number one thing that I see in these environments is there needs to be someone who's thinking about the overall orchestration of these comms and the role they play in the. In driving actual value to the business, which is usually revenue or at least good opportunities. And to me, a lot of organizations are for the right reasons. They're so focused on a volume of marketing and work going out to these audiences. But it's really critical to ask yourself, are we conflating volume with quality and those things? If they're not working, it's going to be a problem. And we've talked about those problems earlier in this um, podcast. So to me, the biggest initial value that we as an agency and just a fresh pair of eyes bring is the clarity to say why are we doing this? And this doesn't make sense. And actually having the full view of something rather than that narrow singular. I'm only focused on my product line. And once you start thinking about it from a buyer or customer perspective, sort of like what is it they need to see that clarity comes to life.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: And we were talking about B2C before and I was sort of thinking it's like when the world transitioned to e commerce 10, 15 years ago, it was all like, customers buy where they buy. Don't make your business operations their problem. It creates a fragmented exposure experience. Not ideal, it's confusing. And the same thing is going on here with B2B. When we're talking about multiple product lines, uh, enterprise like environment with a big team all doing their own things. How do we strip that old process away on just pure volume and numbers will eventually get to where we want and bring it back to, well, holistically, what's the kind of experience and solution we need to put in front of our buyers? So that's the number one reason or area that I see agencies coming in on is that kind of clarity and perspective how to really strip away a lot of the volume, make it more simple, and then we can build on it in a modern way. But that sort of framework, that baseline approach to how we're going to do that, the central orchestrator of the what is probably the biggest.

Speaker B: And I think what we talked about earlier, before we hit record, was that, you know, you can find smart hands kind of anywhere now and whether that's freelance pool or whatever. So you uh, know there was a period of time where knowing these systems and navigating these systems was kind of like 2/3 the battle, if that, maybe even more. Um, that's really, I think changed. You know, if you're a marketing person and you want to go out and find some support to build some emails in one of your plans, platforms or build landing pages or forms or programs or whatever, you know, you can get those skills. Um, we certainly have number of certifications across platforms, build, you know, build up staff from junior levels to be very capable in these tools. I think what's harder though is having an agency that really understands, I would call it really revenue operations in a sense really that sales and marketing alignment and has um, really gets that piece and the people that are working on it from an account and strategy perspective, that they understand that stuff. All their ideas may not be great or for your business, but that is fundamentally where they're coming from. They're not coming from it from a hardcore technical perspective and what's possible in the data and the systems and stuff like that from a purely technology point of view that can oftentimes not really be practical. They're also not just looking at it from uh, okay, yeah, you know, uh, this is great. Like the fact that you're giving us hundreds and hundreds of hours a month of work. Great. This, this care and feeds us. We're super happy about that and they're not. But they don't have the ability to ask the question that like we really, this is the house of cards here. Like if we continue to run this type of program, it's not going to be a couple hundred hours a month because it's not actually working and it's going to come down to maybe nothing. Um, and I think that's really kind of an interesting kind of thing. And I don't know how agency leaders suss that out, but it probably comes through in the sales process. And talking to the initial strategist when they're considering them as an agency is like all of a sudden it's like, oh, you guys actually understand the demand gen problem, you guys understand the uh, product marketing problem, you guys understand these things. Oh, you guys are gonna manage the execution as well. Right. But, but that's super key. And it's not one person in your company, it's like the entire organization gets this, they're using it for their own marketing and sales, that kind of thing. Right.

Speaker A: But like you said before, fair or not, agencies are held to a different standard from the get go. And I actually do think that's fair. Like I get it, that's um, that's what we enter into as an agreement. But like I said before, perspective is the path to clarity. And we can go in there and ask the question, why are we doing this? And it's not that we're so much smarter, it's not, it's that you can see how along the way an organization internally might have asked that.

Speaker B: Mhm.

Speaker A: And then what they do is say, okay, I understand the numbers required here. If I send out a certain amount of volume of email, I get a certain number of hand raisers which leads to then a certain number of opportunities and revenue. But, but then along the way things change and we don't continue to revisit that question. We keep operating under that assumption. And then a year and a half goes by and you've put together a million other journeys and there's emails, and then your counterpart in Product B is doing the same thing in that product line. And then before you know it, all the overlap's going on and it's a big tangled mess of emails and communications that don't make sense to the buyer. Your reporting's probably all over the place and you can't gauge interest versus not if they're even still on your list. And then someone has to come in with a fresh pair of eyes and say, hold on, why are we doing this? And what value is it driving today? Not what was the intention 18 or 24 months ago? Right, right. That's kind of, to me, a good agency, a really good, call it, um, execution, orchestrator, like fancy words. But someone just going in and saying, if I'm going to coordinate a bunch of things, what are those things really designed to do and are they actually going to do them? And so some of it, to an extent, is peeling back all the complexity that's developed over the years and coming in super simple with a very basic but thoughtful approach. And then we can add on the other stuff later.

Speaker B: Yeah. It's why we don't love, you know, percentage of media spend, for example, as a metric, because it incentivizes the agency to just spend more money on paid media channels. Right. There's no quality or business outcome element of that. Right. In that conversation. And, um, it's the same. I think it's similar, but a little bit different. But I do think agencies will be very happy with a nice big execution contract. Right, right. And then they don't really want to ask the question of, like, well, is this adding value or not? Um, and because we like the hours, you know, maybe day, like, if we were to optimize this thing, it would be less than that. And I think that that just has to be part of the conversation. Our view has always been that everything that the agency does over time, you know, ultimately is going to map to some sort of a human overhead. You know, there could be some tech in there and stuff like that, but m. Ultimately there's going to be. It's an extension of your team. But the difference is that going back to that standard being held is that the agency needs to be optimizing along the way. And a good agency, to your point, is going to be looking at us being like, we don't want to push 35 buttons manually. Why can't we turn this into a journey? Here's a smarter, better way to do it. Sure, it's going to cut down efforts here. We won't spend as much time, but I'm sure you're going to give us other work. And nine times out of ten they do. So it's that optimization and it's that realization that like, we want to be doing smart work, not just more work, um, but also if you're as the

Speaker A: agency, identifying this doesn't make any sense or I'm not seeing the value in what we're doing. It's only a matter of time if they're not already there. But the client's also asking that same question. So you might as well get ahead of it. Show you're a critical thinker, show you're honest in putting their values and needs ahead of anything else. It's going to come to light eventually.

Speaker B: So maybe one last thing and then we'll wrap it up here. But one thing you mentioned earlier was just around the reporting kind of, it's all over the place now. It probably is the way it all works. And I think that surprising to me, the number of organizations, larger kind of team environments that we're talking about today where they do not have a handle on their reporting or on their insights and really what they're trying to achieve and how to align all these. And look, I don't blame them. It's such a chaotic environment. There's things moving 1,000 miles an hour, every direction possible. But I think part of your point earlier of like, why are we doing this? It also begs the question of like, well, what are we measuring? Like, what is the ultimate measurable here that we're going to create or that we have to know that we are moving in the right direction. We all know that, you know, how organizations, uh, have historically looked at MQLs and SQLs is kind of like old hat and didn't make a lot of sense. Um, but I think that that's part of like the rethinking here is that the business needs to know, can we continue, should we continue to invest at certain levels in marketing? What progress are we making? And these teams do not really have a handle on. Well, this is the number that we're aiming for, right?

Speaker A: Yep. Well, again, like, you know what, what stage do we perceive the buyer to be in? Because those fundamental goals will differ.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: If we perceive them to be top of funnel, then I don't know if we're looking for hand raisers and if they're bottom of funnel. I don't think just opens is going to be good enough. So to that point I think we've got to think through where do we perceive them to be in their journey and as a result, what can we measure then? And then is it, are we engaging them? Are we putting the right messages, the right assets in place so there's simple answers to bigger questions? I suppose.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, 100%. And there could be probably another episode we could do around like, you know, kind of multi asset, multi channel, you know, attribution or just reporting in general to sort of like help these teams wrap their head around strategies at least that we're seeing across the board. Probably doing some of it already, but just around, you know, how to put all that together so that it is more business aligned, you know, and simple things like if we are measuring, you know, certain page areas of the website and certain downloadables and certain videos views and the snips and clips on social and all these things kind of get rolled up into a product area to be able to measure, to your point, just different aspects of the funnel so that they can look at it and be like, actually we are um, seeing a lot of this in this particular area and we're happy with that. We see value in that. We see that trend line kind of in a positive light and that it is improving. And then some things like unsubscribes in the case of email that we've talked about where it's such a damaging metric. Um, and probably tracking that right back to um, something around where did it, you know, what was the trigger point? What was the final thing that sort of broke the camel's back? Um, but anyways, that was good. Anything else you want to add?

Speaker A: No, there's a lot to chew on there, but um, certainly a lot of topics within this. We could probably revisit with more detail in the next podcast.

Speaker B: Yeah. All right, so if you're a large scale M ops rev ops environment, uh, give Kevin a call.

Speaker A: Solve all your problems.

Speaker B: Yeah. All right. Till next time.