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- [00:00]
Chris Walker
You're listening to Revenue Vitals with Chris Walker.
- [00:18]
Omar
Omar, good to see you. Oh, we got multiple OGs in here. David, good to see you again. Good thing you made it. We'll give everyone a second to roll through here. Casper's back. Some of the names are too small to read. Where the faces I don't remember, I don't recognize. Great to see you all here. A little bit of housekeeping. So we got this event this week, which is the. What's today? The fourth? My sister's birthday. I gotta give her a call. Then we have February 11, which is next Tuesday. We'll be here at the same time and then after that for three weeks. So the 18th, the 25th, and then whatever the first Tuesday in March is, we will be off at this event because I will be, for the first time since I started my businesses being taking a two week vacation. And so that has been what. We're almost at the six year mark of entrepreneurship and I kind of wanted to start there. There's been some stuff bubbling in my mind about that and I think it's an interesting. Thanks, Omar. Yeah, it's an interesting forum to sort of share some of this stuff that isn't fully formed. So I'll start there and then we'll talk, go to market after that. So whether it's in like an Instagram DM or like, I was at dinner on Saturday night and there was someone there that was earlier in their career. And I. People say to me relatively often, like, oh, I want to live your life one day. Or like, your life looks so good. I want that to be my life. And I'm flattered. It's nice of them to say that. I do think that my life is super dope. But I go back to them and say, man, hmm. I don't really think you want to. I don't say this, I just keep it to myself, but I go through it in my head because people see what it looks like now, but they don't see what it looked like eight years ago or five years ago or three years ago. And so you see, oh, this looks really great. But most people don't have the appreciation, right? You see Tom Brady win seven Super Bowls, but you don't see all the hard and all the work that they had to do, whether it's in sports or entrepreneurship or art or music or any type of creative or business endeavor. Things like, you know, having to turn down going to bachelor parties, golf trips, ski weekends, giving up hobbies, leisurely stuff, working six or Seven days a week, being under a microscope, criticized by your employees for making a wrong decision. If something goes wrong, it's all your fault. You can't blame your boss. You can't blame the CEO. The only person that you can blame is you. Having to read glass door reviews from an anonymous employee that, like, had a bad experience and decides to take it out, feel bad. People that are grabbing at your ankles. It happens to be every single day on social media. People trying to grab at my ankle to pull me down so they can pull themselves up. People talking about you in a comment or on a community. I get the screenshots and things like that. People expecting a bunch of things from you. No matter how good my intentions are or how nice I am to people, people are still some, not everybody, definitely not everybody. Resentful, ungrateful, things like that. To be making a ton of money on paper and not go and buy a house or buy a car because you're putting all the money back into the growth of your business while everybody else on social media is getting married and going on an engagement and having kids. Like, I intentionally made a decision that I'm not going to go on dates for three years because I'm going to build my company. Those are just some of the examples. And I'm not saying this for your sympathy. I'm also not saying it to deter you from doing it. But when you look at someone that's successful and say, oh my gosh, I want that life, think about what you're signing up for. Because most people are not prepared to pay the price, to delay the gratification for a long period of time to eventually get that life. And I'm not here trying to brag either. Like, I'm happy with how my life turned out. I'm happy and I love all the decisions that I made. But I think that I owe it to people to be real about it, that it wasn't fun. That there was many things that I had to quote, unquote, sack. I don't view them as a sacrifice. I view it as an investment. I viewed it as, in 2019, I had $3,000 in my bank account and a bunch of student loans. On paper, I was literally less than worthless. All I had was my time and my skills. And so what? I invested a lot of my time into things that I didn't get a return on for a very long time. And the actual return that I think people underappreciate in this journey is that the biggest return is the person that you Become your character, your confidence, things like that. In a journey, it doesn't have to be entrepreneurial. It can be literally anything people see like oh, the car or the vacation or things like that. Those things are nice, they are, but who you are is the best part. And you can do that as a in house employee, as an entrepreneur or anything. I like sharing these things because I don't think a lot of people tell the truth about it. I don't think people are super honest with what it takes to be successful. I didn't know what I was signing up for when I did it and part of my mission and purpose is to share wins, losses and lessons of my journey with both pride and vulnerability. I'm proud of what I've done, but I also am going to be honest about a lot of the stuff that most people will hide and I personally hate a lot of those things. I thought I needed to be tough and perfect and none of that stuff affected me. But I have a different perspective now, so I'm going to be a lot more open about those things. And so I don't know if every episode will start with something like that, but lately I've been like having many conversations that I'm giving advice on with like entrepreneurs or people like looking for advice. And these are the things that come up in the real conversation at dinner that I think are like raw and real and a nice switch up from CAC and ltv. So with all that said, let's get into the topics. I'm going to come out with a hard hitting one right now. It just continues to amaze me as I sit in the conversations. Both whatever a prospective customer, somebody asking me a question as I like consult the customers that my company Passetto works with or my other companies work with that all are coming and being like what's the benchmark for how much marketing should source, right? Or like, you know, marketing sourced 30% based on our model last year and now it's 40%. We think it's unfair, we think it's too little or you know, blah blah, blah. What metrics should we use to like communicate marketing success? And the take home message here is that when you actually think about that go to market is a revenue factory and then you compare it to a factory. And I've made this comparison before but this analogy is a little bit different. Let's say that you have a car factory, right? And you have the people that buy the supplies, the wheels and they buy all the stuff. You have another department that inspects the Wheels and the electronics to make sure that they're good before it gets assembled. And then you have the people that put the wheels on the car and put everything together. So you have three separate departments in the factory. And if you apply the same logic that every single B2B company does with their department sourced lead source model as a way to plan and measure, then you would say 30% of the cars got made by the people that put the wheels on. 40% of the cars got made by the people that bought the materials. 10% of the cars got made by the people that inspected the materials. Okay, Well I guess 40% of the cars got made by the people that bought the materials. So that means that we should hire more people to buy more materials. That's the logic that people use in a B2B revenue factory. And it literally makes zero sense. You need every single part to make the car, you need the materials, the people to inspect the materials, and the people that put it all together. In a revenue factory, you need the people that get the customer interested in buying your stuff, the people that get the signals to the prospecting team, the prospecting, the people that close the deals. If you don't have one of those parts, if you don't have prospecting that takes people and gets meetings, the whole factory doesn't work. If you don't have a website and you don't have anything where people can go to, the whole factory isn't gonna work. You could have all the signals and interest in you want. You don't have a sales team, you don't have the people that put the wheels on the car. You just have a bunch of parts sitting around there. And so this whole thinking that continues to get perpetuated in B2B go to market around, we need to plan and measure by which department sourced the opportunity or by whatever attribution model you use. 45 day look back, 30 day look back six months, some level of prioritization between partner marketing, SDR sales. I've seen it all, right? And the clear thing that I continue to see is that when things are going good and the economy is going well and things are working, that model works fine. You can just say, okay, it's all good. But when things go wrong and marketing sources 40% like they're supposed to and SDR, source, whatever, and say everybody sources the percentage that they're supposed to, but you miss by 20% on your new logo target and then you don't have the underlying data so you can't blame anybody. And you don't know why you missed. There's just this huge gap. And so what I'm now instructing our customers to do, and I think that a lot of people could take this advice is that I understand that compensation plans are built on this model, that changing your whole way that you know your teams are compensated, scored, things like that, especially at the lower levels in the organization, is a huge administrative distraction and is likely not the biggest priority in your company. And for some reason there's a very often an all or Nothing game in B2B where it's like, okay, if we can't do that, we have to change over here. And the change is so hard that we're not going to change. So I offer this and it's ironic that how many people get it, it's like, okay, so keep doing that. Keep running your team that way, Keep having your comp plans the same. Keep doing that for at least the rest of 2025. But when we make decisions and we get in the executive team and we report to the board, maybe we should have a different way that we look at the data that at least gives us a different perspective. And we could do both. We could now we could have two things that we can look at and when we have two things now, we can use them to check and balance. And then maybe 12 months later, 24 months later, we realize that the new one is way better than the old one. And then we can decide methodically if and when we roll that out across the whole company, adjust all of the lower level metrics and compensation plans, but it is not required to collect the data that helps you make better decisions. So there's this all or nothing. A similar all or nothing that I disagree with totally is like we can't have marketing ops and a centralized rev ops function. We can't do that. It's got to be all or nothing. That's totally made up the best thing to do that I'm now recommending. One, it shouldn't be marketing ops and sales ops. It should be pipeline creation ops and close ops, which is very different. Marketing ops usually doesn't cover the prospecting part. It should. So one, we should rethink the bounds of the operations and you could have a centralized function that reports to finance and individual parts that report to the revenue leaders and they all work together. You could. And so there's just a consistent all or nothing. Oh, paid sucks. We have to only organic or organic sucks. We can only do paid. There's so many either or all or nothing. The answer is oftentimes both used in the right way. When you think about it's like imagine that you're an artist, okay? And as an artist you have all these different brushes, you can paint on different things. You have all the colors that you could use, right? And a lot of the times what we do as either a CMO or any other type of executive is say, oh, those people said that the green sucks, so now I'm not going to paint with green anymore. And they said that these brushes aren't good so I'm not going to use these. And you constrain yourself to these little set of things based mostly on other people's opinions. And so I think we need to be looking at we have all these different things, all of them are valuable when used properly. It's mostly about how well I execute, not whether the green is good or not. Green can be good when used the right way. And so I think there's a lot there at even like a mindset level that I think that people put a ton of constraints on themselves in a lot of their roles based on things that literally aren't real the either or choices and things like that. I got one more point I want to make and then I, I want to be intentional that we spend most of this time on discussion and questions this episode. So the last thing I believe I made the prediction not only for marketing but I think across the board in B2B companies that B2B companies should, that historically took so much pride in. We're going to do everything in house that you're going to see a sea change and we're already seeing it where a combination of AI offshoring and strategic experts that inject knowledge, IP strategy objectivity into your company that using those blended with in house employees, and I've actually been talking about this for five years, will be the model that most companies use. And that when you are selecting a vendor that is not a technology, whether it's a tech enabled service, a professional service, a consultancy, an agency, something like that, one of the first things that you need to decide and you need to clarify is am I trying to buy a set of hands or am I trying to buy a brain that I don't have? And that is a huge distinction because depending on what you need there, it should drive your decision in two very different directions. Many companies, you know what I mean, their marketing ops team has two people and they have a bunch of stuff and they're overflowing. It's a priority. They just need Hands, right? We know what to do. We just need people that can do it. Like you're just basically buying outsourced hands. Great, now you know who to look for. Other companies have a massive strategic problem that they do not know how to solve that requires intellectual property, strategic thinking and things like that. And if that's the case, then know that you're not looking for the cheapest set of hands to do the stuff that you already know what to do, you don't know what to do. And you need to be a lot more selective around what am I buying here and what am I trying to accomplish. So I think that level, whether you're buying an agency, a consultancy, many other things, you know, I just went through the process of repurchasing or changing my finance and accounting firm for my new company Pesetto. Last year. We were just getting off the ground. I just needed sets of hands. I, you know, this is the model that I need. Just do what I say, right? I just need the hands and I'm going to pay that way. I'm going to pay a small amount of money for offshore or semi commoditized work because I already know. And now I'm moving into this new space where I need people that have brains, that know things that I don't know and can do things that I don't know how to do. And so now I'm paying like five or seven times as much for an outsourced finance and accounting firm. But they have the models, they have the things that I need that I didn't have, that I wasn't getting from the other firm. And so just thinking about that as a distinction when you look for help, I think can be massively valuable and cut out a lot of the noise. It's almost laughable sometimes where a customer is talking to me like an executive level person is talking to me about solving a top three priority in their 50 or $100 million company, right? It's on their executive, the board knows about it, it's flowing down. All the director and VP level projects roll up to these top three projects and this is one of them. And then they say, oh, but we found this company in India that can do it for $2,000 a month and that's way cheaper than what you can do. You want to bet your number one company priority on a $2,000 firm in India, Be my guest. When you come back, the price will be 10 times higher. And so that's just something to think about here. I think that what I see Oftentimes not just in my own business, but even people that I consult, like individual entrepreneurs is that for some reason many people especially go to market leaders and I'm not sure why are pennywise and pound foolish that they scrutinize a $5,000 net new expense like it's their last $5,000 while they barely touch or look at the $20 million they already spend. And I think that there's something there regarding financial accountability that not everybody, but I think some people could learn from and really help their position in their career. Cool. Appreciate you all being here. I know that this event is changing. Sometimes I do it because this is the stuff that I want to talk about and sometimes it's things that people don't want to hear. I know I've been there before, but I think that it's the things that people need. I think that it's the things that a small select few people can use and like really get a lot of value from. And so I appreciate you all being here. I'm going to continue to take it and innovate and change and so but like I said, most of the time for questions and discussion today, I want to spend most of the time helping you all either with questions or with your own individual situation. So let's do that right now. Thank you.
- [17:43]
David
We got a lot of questions last week, Chris, that we didn't get to get to.
- [17:46]
Omar
Sweet.
- [17:47]
David
So before they start coming in for today, I'm going to ask one that was in the queue last week. So how do you balance the need for short term ROI that many CMOs and VPs of marketing are tasked with while achieving long term strategic objectives. So in a way that marketing doesn't get shit on for underperforming, how would you navigate that?
- [18:10]
Omar
This is so stage dependent and I want to frame this for a company that's let's just say 50 million ARR, right? So it's not like you're a millionaire and you're the first marketing leader and you're hiring five people and nothing's working and you got to go and figure it out. That's a different situation. Let's put that to the side for right now. Okay. You're a $50 million business. You already spend $10 million in marketing. The previous CMO got fired. Now you're walking into a 12 person team and a 7 1/2 million dollar program budget and $2 million spent on BDRs and then you got you. Okay. What you can do easily is you can look back in time over the past eight quarters and say what is the performance? Been at a top level business results on all of these investments? Not individually saying the Google Ad did better than this, not getting caught in the attribution, just looking at it broadly. You can take that whole baseline and then you know where you were eight quarters ago, four quarters ago, three, two, one, and where you are right now. And then you can take that and then you can go into the deeper level of details and you could say here's all the places where we spent money, here's where we are right now. Here's the adjustments that I'm going to make. I'm going to go and find the lowest performing things and I'm either going to move them and do more of the stuff that's working better or I'm going to introduce new things. And what is the goal for next quarter? Do better than last quarter, what's the goal for the quarter after that? Do better than the quarter before that. There's no time lag, conceptual stuff necessary here. And a lot of the things have nothing to do with the performance of the investments that I think people very underappreciate. Having your prospecting team prioritize who they go after better huge value. Connecting the handoff between MQLs and when the SDR follows up or whether it even goes to an SDR or just goes to an AE, automating that process, buying a $50 calendar tool to make that happen, figuring out how to route better, cutting out all the nonsense, the thousand leads that are just distractions that nobody closes and getting rid of them so your team can focus on the right things. Those things have almost nothing to do with the performance of investments and drive massive results in terms of balancing the short term and the long term. It's focusing the closest to close one first and then working up and looking at the lowest performing things, which oftentimes are super obvious. You don't need attribution data. You don't oftentimes they're sticking right out in front of your face. Right? 50% of the program budget goes to events and CAC payback is four and a half years. That's an alarm that your biggest investment in events is not performing. Even if you don't have attribution data to go deeper. It tells you right there because if $5 million of events were working, our CAC payback wouldn't be four and a half years. And so I think that, and I'm trying to figure out a way to communicate this right, that many People specifically in marketing, but across the whole go to market because I see it in rev ops just as much have been told these ideas for so long that they can't break out of the things that they've been told. And it creates such a constrained mindset about the way that we do something and how it's supposed to work. Where if you just zoomed out and said, I'm going to start with a blank sheet of paper, I'm going to solve this problem without all the preconceived notions or the things that I've been told, you would 100% not do it the way that you do it today. And I think that that level of critical thinking is one of the most powerful things that you can do for your career today. And I'm happy to answer a follow up on balancing the short term and the long term because I know that I bounced around there. But what people think about with short term and long term is, oh, short term, let's run lead gen. Oh long term, let's build brand. Wrong. Many times lead gen drives no results and doesn't impact anything in the short term. Not real metrics, vanity metrics and oftentimes brand is a huge waste of money. And they can just say, oh, our customers want this or we're doing it for brand and taking and it has a time lag of two years, so we're not going to see any impact and just throw away accountability for things that have no financial impact. Customers probably don't even see them. Right. We run our display, our ABM display ads for brand. Almost a hundred percent of them load on a page and nobody even sees it. You can prove that it loaded on the page that someone went to. You can't prove that someone saw the ad, you can't prove that they consumed it. Read the words. And so I think there are many times where brand investments make no impact. It's not a long term investment, it's a no impact investment. And so what I'm trying to get clear here is that the preconceived notions of we do these things for short term and we do these things for long term are mostly wrong. I put out a fucking awesome podcast and it goes out. I have five inbounds that week. What's a good podcast? I thought podcasts were long term. And there's many companies that run an ebook download and get a thousand leads and their SDRs call them and they literally get no meetings from a thousand leads and they call that a short term investment. What it's about is does it work? You can shoot a basketball. Doesn't mean you're going to be Michael Jordan. You can say you did something, but really what matters is how good did you do it. And the point with the painting and the example that I gave earlier is that all of the available tools can work when done the right way and done within the right mix. You have all these available options and it's more about did we do them right? Instead of did we do them? I see a lot of box checking going on right now. Oh, and rev ops are the same thing. Like I was having a conversation yesterday. Oh, we already do that. We don't need you. We already bring our financial data together with our CRM data and then we can look at marketing influence versus how much money marketing spend. And like, we don't need you. We already do that. And it's like actually what you're doing is causing the problem that you're trying to. You're why we're talking in the first place. I mean, people underappreciate. It's not about the doing, it's about the doing it right.
- [24:16]
David
I think that was a good answer. Thanks for that one, Chris. I'm going to bring on David next. I've unmuted you.
- [24:22]
Omar
David Goff. Good to have you back. Good to see you.
- [24:24]
Casper
Good to be seen. Good to see you too. I want to pick up on your rant number one from today a little bit, which is where you were talking about helping organizations change. And that's where I want to focus. My question a little bit is, as you've worked with customers or your company and other people on your team, are you noticing or how are you suggesting to facilitate this change? Because it seems very pragmatic. Don't throw out the baby with the bathwater. Do an A B test. Try this way and that way. See which one works best, optimize around that and gradually shift. So that makes the sting of change easier to digest. Because you're saying maybe it does, maybe it doesn't. Let's see. It helps reduce friction, perhaps with certain people. But beyond just that, which is already maybe a good step, what have you noticed that facilitates this change? Is it certain types of people, certain types of situations, or what gets in the way of people accepting that approach or that, or making that type of change. Whatever you've got. Just thought I'd open up the conversation on how to make changes.
- [25:28]
Omar
Cool. So let's talk through like the a B test, incrementality, blah, blah, blah. So Most marketers aren't engineers. Most marketers aren't scientists. Most marketers are not statisticians. When you create an experiment, you define your hypothesis. You define the measurement that you're going to use to be able to do it. You use a calibrated scale that everybody would agree to, that if the experiment got repeated, the other person measuring it would measure the same thing. That simply doesn't happen in the marketing department almost never. And the key is that not just marketing can believe it, that when you give it to the cfo, they must also believe it. And there's a huge disconnect between the things that marketing does to measure their stuff versus what the rest of the business uses. And that's the gap that I'm trying to help close. I'm not trying to tear marketing down. I'm actually trying to empower everybody to connect their stuff to the thing that everybody else looks at in the company. And so I think that the reason that these things go wrong is that regardless of what the conclusion is that comes from the experiment or the A B test or something like that, if the rest of the company doesn't buy into it and it can't be repeated, then you have nothing. And it's why, like, my business started as a consultancy last year, and 100% of the time, what it ended up being was we looked at your data and here's our opinion of your data. And then you looked at your data, and here's your opinion of the data, and it's just two people's opinions of it. Right. And whether it's me and the CMO or the CMO internally and the CFO of the company or the chief of staff and the CRO, it doesn't matter. It's two people's opinions looking at incomplete, inaccurate, poorly structured data. So it's just people's. What I'll call an experienced, informed guess is what they're doing. They're using their experience, connecting it with incomplete data to come up with a guess around what it is that not everybody would look at it and come to the same conclusion. That's why these things fail and break down.
- [27:38]
Casper
Well, as you speak, a thought comes to my mind, right? We have our beliefs, and if you were taking an equation of our belief, it's like idea one plus idea two plus idea three equals belief.
- [27:50]
Omar
Sure.
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Casper
And to change the belief, I've often used that idea of the equation to say you've got to add something new to the equation to change the value of the opinion. So idea one and two and three, Yep, we can agree on that. But you hadn't thought about idea four and five and maybe they're worth considering and that might ultimately change your overall opinion equation. You know, the results. So as I'm hearing you speak, is there something that you've noticed that you're bringing in? What is your extra variables, if you will, that you might be bringing into your conversations that you find people are nodding like, okay, no, I see that that makes sense and I see how that might change what I had currently or previously believed. I mean, you may not have noticed something or you will start to notice something, I don't know. But I'm curious if you have noticed something.
- [28:44]
Omar
Change doesn't happen based on philosophy or opinion. It happens based on business results and data. And the way that you get there is by setting up a structured set of data that everybody in the company agrees to and can report on. And so right now what happens is the SDRs use their own data coming out of outreach and they take their program dollars and their headcount and it's poorly calculated and they make their own report. And then you have the demand gen team and then an agency that's hired by the demand gen team and the events and the PR team all making their own stuff, randomly putting in numbers, picking the attribution model that suits them the best and rolling it all up and then they all get to the top and the CFO says, none of this stuff makes sense, none of this stuff matches what we're doing. And so the disconnect is that the data is not consistent or widely adopted across the company and mostly comes bottoms up. And bottoms up has value, but it has value mostly for managers and directors. And the only way you get consistency is through a tops down set of data and structure.
- [29:49]
Casper
Okay, so I think part of the answer I'm hearing from you, these aren't your words, so that's why I want to echo them and see if it's true. Is part of what facilitates the change is that you're an outside agent that doesn't come with a bias towards a particular set of data or a particular set of processes. And you've got credibility among the different constituencies to say, yeah, he kind of knows what he's doing, he knows what we're all trying to get at. And so that credibility plus not being inside one of these reporting groups trying to justify their existence becomes a facilitator of its own. That wasn't what you were trying to say, I don't think. But that Seems to be a little bit of the outcome that I'm hearing, which is classic, you know, to say it's great, groundbreaking insight that David just had. It's not. It's kind of classic situation. And I'll, you know, I don't need to kind of take up more time on this one point, but I was just curious if you've noticed there's a particular kind of partner that you might discover in your client relationships or a particular situation where people are more ready for a new idea and less objection.
- [30:56]
Omar
Yeah. So pretty sure this response will rub some people the wrong way. Maybe not people on this call, but people that listen to it afterwards. For sure that the person who should fix this is the finance leader. And it should get pushed into marketing. And you should say, here's what we're measuring. Here are the objectives, here are the goals. You can build your own reports if you want, but just like sales has a scoreboard, here's yours. And the reason that I say that is because it's a career and political risk for the CMO to do it themselves. I understand. You bring that topic up, the CFO is going to say, no, we already got it. You try and push it harder, you're at risk of getting fired for no reason. You got a cushy CMO job. I get it. Like, it's not worth it to put your neck on the line for something like this. And finance feels the problem. They have to go to the board meeting every single quarter and say, we don't understand what's happening in marketing. We hear that it's working. The decks look nice. Our metrics aren't going in the right direction. We don't know what to do. We can't hold people accountable. We don't know how to change course. And the empowering part for a marketing leader is to realize that the thing that you bring to the business that nobody else can is building a fucking awesome narrative. Having the right competitive intelligence, the right positioning, putting together a great website, being creative and building great campaigns, leading a rockstar team, hiring the right people, holding people accountable. That's the best parts about being a cmo. It's also the most fun. So why do we feel like the CMO needs to own putting together a fucking spreadsheet and measuring the ROI or figuring out what our data and attribution strategy should be? No, they should get served that up so that they can drive the plane that they're supposed to drive. You know what I mean? They should have all the gauges and all the different stuff to be the best operator that they can. And right now we're making them do things that are frankly, outside of their skill set and a totally different reason than why we hired them. And this is a finance and strategic ops problem that is not being solved by revops and needs to get solved by finance. And the same thing goes for a Chief Revenue officer. What do we want our CRO to do? We want our CRO to build a world class sales team, to hold people accountable, to build great cadences for the manager and VP layers, the forecasting process, having the right tools, getting the right training, optimizing the process so our sales cycles get shorter. We want our CRO doing those things, not being in a spreadsheet, trying to calculate this stuff. And so I think that we've asked revenue leaders to do these things and I think that it should be put in the place where it belongs. Like all the problems rooted in marketing today are actually finance problems that just negatively impact marketing. And I spend enough time trying to do this that. And I posted this on LinkedIn and it's 100% true. I posted it six months ago. There's just more data to support it. Now. When this problem gets funneled into the organization through marketing, 95% of the time it fails, even with the top 1% of CMOs that I know that have been my customer for five years. And when it comes to the CEO and the CFO, it immediately gets funded and makes a big impact for the company. And so I'm not trying to say, you know, marketing can't do it. I'm just giving you the hints about all the times that it worked. We have had more than 50 reps with this now. So I see the pattern about when it works and when it doesn't. And it's outside of skillset, organization size and things like that. It's about who's actually accountable, feels the problem and can fund it.
- [34:24]
Casper
That's really, really interesting and I appreciate that. Do you feel that what you bring to the conversation that the CFO doesn't have is the missing link so that the CFO can do this idea appropriately as opposed to inappropriately, you know, the wrong dials, measuring the wrong things.
- [34:41]
Omar
Yep.
- [34:41]
Casper
They're all repeatable. Yep. We can all agree on them, but they're kind of not the right things. And that what you're doing is by being the credible marketing source, working with finance to help set up the dials so that they can choose to turn on the engine and the analogy starts to become A bit thin. Let's stop there.
- [34:59]
Omar
Yeah. Like I think that I'm the credible business and finance source that can bring it to the revenue leaders. And so it's a flip like the whole time in my career. Yes, I executed business strategy through marketing for much of my career, but it was business first and then marketing was the best way to get it done for a long time. And it still is today. It's still the number one opportunity in companies thinking about marketing differently, measuring it the right way and improving the return on the investments that happen through that budget that would make the whole revenue factory work better. It's unless you have a massive churn problem, that's the biggest opportunity. And so I think that finance wants to fix it, but doesn't have go to market expertise. Right. So they then delegate it to the revenue leaders. And the revenue leaders, whether they like it or not, have never been asked to build financial calculations and look at expenses line by line and do not have the intellectual property and the reps to do it. And so you have this gap where both people want to fix it and neither one have the crossover skills to do it. And all I'm doing is offering the IP in the process of understanding both sides of the equation and helping people get it done.
- [36:08]
Casper
Appreciate it. Thank you so much. I really appreciate it.
- [36:11]
Omar
Yeah, Great conversation. Great to have you here.
- [36:13]
David
I have a bolt on question to that from somebody who can't come on live. So it's sort of a two in one question. Chris. So a CMO or a VP of marketing who's banging their head against the wall trying to come up with a solution, they're not aligning with their executive team or the C suite. What's your advice to them? Just like from a personal standpoint and then second to that, how would you maybe guide them in like running this through the CFO and sort of like folding them into the mix?
- [36:41]
Omar
I facilitate these across executive teams right now. And many times the finance leaders is the first one to recognize the problem. And the reason that they do is because they're getting pressure from the board. So pressure from the board, what am I going to do? CAC is going up, growth is slowing down. I understand sales from opportunity Created to close 1. We can forecast that, we can measure it, we can hold people accountable. Anything that happens before the opportunity gets created, I don't have the visibility, I don't know how to measure it. I can't manage it. Like the sales process, that's what I need help with. So like that can happen. Sometimes if it's coming from the other direction, I think that having the direct conversation with the CFO you want to understand and be able to. We can all look at this and we can all look at the same report and we can all make a decision off of it confidently. And right now we're unable to do that because of the way that we look at the data and the way that the reporting process happens. This problem is multifaceted. It's a finance problem, a data and operations problem and go to market. Specific expertise is required to put them all together. Frankly, our Rev Ops team isn't going to fix it. And I'm not sure that I can fix it either. And I think that we need to get some help to do it. And you surely don't have to hire my company. This is. I don't do not bring you here to give you a sales pitch. But the question was how? I think being vulnerable, admitting that you have a problem and admitting that you don't internally have the resources to fix it. And when it ends up being a top three company priority and you're hitting your plan for the year hinges on it, you know, you're a $50 million company. Why are we going to pinch pennies and try to do it ourselves when we can guarantee it gets done fast and that it gives us a much better chance to hit our plan so that the C level executives aren't on the chopping block in 18 months instead of just out saying, hey, director of Rev Ops, you can fix this, go and figure it out. And it takes them 18 months. And then when the 18 months is over, you don't even really have a usable thing. So I just think it's prioritization almost around it. And I think many CMOs do it the opposite and say I can fix this. And then what do they do? They go to all the best practices that don't work. Implementing the four funnel MQL model, building a CRM data architecture in the absence or without the structure of how you're going to look at the finance data with it. Following what you hear in a CMO community about how somebody did it that worked at a company that IPO'd in 2017 and they haven't been practicing person for the past 10 years, but they keep talking about what they did 10 years ago and you look at marketing mixed modeling or multitouch attribution or some hot new tool as the solution and you take ownership over the problem and try those things. So I think that's where I See, things go wrong, I guess. And to be super clear, the problem is that the intersection of finance and go to market. And so if you are not intentionally thinking about how does the finance and expenses play into this, then you will not fix the problem. And secondarily, if you only look at it by department, I can save you six or 12 months. It will fail. And so like those are two things that are, I hope will fast track and avoid some type of decision. So for funnel model split by department, not gonna work immediately. You know, hiring a rev ops firm to fix your CRM data, beneficial. More visibility, not going to fix the problem because you're not thinking about the finance data with it. So those are a couple of shortcuts for people as well.
- [40:15]
David
Alrighty, we'll jump to Casper next. Just unmuting you now. Casper, go ahead.
- [40:19]
Chris Walker
Perfect. Yeah, so really interesting stuff, by the way. I had one question, but then I actually wanted to change it.
- [40:25]
Omar
Okay, so I probably have time for two, but yeah, go ahead with your first question.
- [40:28]
Chris Walker
Yeah, I remember you made a post a few months back where you essentially realized that the CEO and the CFO was the best suited to fix these problems. And you were trying to start with the CMO or maybe a VP to, you know, get it through first and that failed. What I'm interested to hear is some more details on why you think that failed. Obviously you have talked about it now, but it's interesting that a lot of CMOs and VPs are still accountable to revenue targets for that department. And you also mentioned that they were like, well, why can't we just hire somebody in India, you know, just for 2,000 or whatever. And I have seen the same things. I've talked to a VP, for example, and they spend like 2 million a year on marketing and they only, you know, they want to get some help or build some infrastructure to actually measure these things. And the budget that they allocate is like nothing.
- [41:17]
Omar
It's like literally nothing.
- [41:19]
Chris Walker
Like 30,000, I think I had one like 35,000. And they spent, you know, 6 million over three years. But at the same time, you know, that VP is also accountable to revenue. So it's like they are accountable, but then at the same time it's like they're not really accountable. So yeah, maybe you have some thoughts on that.
- [41:34]
Omar
So when you think about all the questions that people want to answer that nobody in the executive team can answer confidently, or at least everyone can agree on it based on data, where's the place that I should spend my next dollar to get the highest return across the whole go to market. Tech tools, agencies, consultants, am, CS sales, solutions consultant, marketing programs, headcount. Like nobody can answer that question. Where do I deploy my pipeline creation investments where my sales team gets the highest win rates, not based on the accounts that you get, based on where the investments go, channels, programs, things like that. How do I direct my prospecting team to get twice as efficient by focusing on the right things? Can't answer that question. What are my highest performing investments that I should figure out how much more I can do of them so I can pour gasoline on the fire that's already been started? All of those questions, the answer is rooted on return on investment. You're looking at what is the most effective way to spend the dollar. It's not just about I got some touch points and it worked. It's about what's the best dollar to spend. And so when you recognize that, you start to realize and the reason that the CEO and CFO want to solve it is because they are the financial leaders of the company. They are the people that get accountable to the board around things like cost of acquisition, cost of growth, go to market, efficiency, growth rate, they have to own that and so they have the acumen to do it and they feel the pain a lot more. And instead we ask our marketing leader whose job is to hit a pipeline target and they have usually underfunded relative to their pipeline target. And then we're going to ask them to take 1% of that budget to measure it. And the reality is that finance should fund the measurement of the go to market. They should fund all that type of stuff so that the go to market leaders don't have to waste their program budget to be able to have to make the choice between a headcount that they need or a data project. And so that's the conclusion that I'm coming to right now. And I think that it's some combination of finance and go to market ops responsibility to serve up the revenue leaders, every single thing that they need to make decisions. We should not have people building ad hoc reports and digging deep into the data and different things like that, at least not consistently, that most of the things that an executive needs should be served up to them. And that's I think, a good North Star to be focused on. Another really smart CMO that I talk through, one of the main qualms with like whether it's centralized or decentralized, it doesn't matter, is that the revops function is focused on grading you. It's focused on telling you this was the target that we said. I'm not going to weigh in on whether it's the right or the wrong target or whether it's the right or the wrong metric. This is the metric and then here's how we measured the metric and you're doing good or you're doing bad. And that's what they do in many companies. And it needs to be not grading. Measuring is important, but it needs to be guiding. It needs to be, here's the metric that we set. Actually, this is the wrong metric. This is what it should be. Here's how we build it, here's how we measure it, here's how other companies are doing it. And then we measure it and oh, we're only 80%. We know the right metric and we only landed on 80%. Here's the three things that you should consider doing to get that number to a hundred percent next quarter. And RevOps team simply, they haven't been a CMO before. They haven't carried, most of the time, carried a bag before. They haven't been a sales leader, they haven't worked in finance. How are they going to tell our CMO what to do? They're not. And so we asked this function to do so many things that they are just simply not capable. They have many talents, many of them that I don't have, that I respect a ton and they're valuable. But we can't ask people to do things that they're totally not qualified or capable of and then expect that to work. The main point here is that I feel very clear now that finance should own solving it and funding it. I think that's the big part here. Yeah, yeah.
- [45:40]
Chris Walker
And I think also what I have experienced is that it's almost like, you know, marketing leader wants to solve this problem, but to solve it you need sales and finance too. Right. You know, you have marketing programs, but you also have all these sales team doing, you know, taking about all the signals like you just like it's almost like they want this perfect marketing measurement but they don't realize that to have that you need the other functions too. Otherwise it's not going to work. You can't just only have marketing itself.
- [46:04]
Omar
It's so true.
- [46:05]
Chris Walker
Yeah, yeah.
- [46:06]
Omar
Another reason why a function that sits outside of the go to market, right. Rev Ops doesn't really sit outside of the go to market most of the time it's sales ops rebranded and they run the sales process. Right. That's like what they do. They integrate the tech, they look at the data. They build, the reports, the comp plans, the territories. It's sales ops, right? So they are not actually out and they report to a CRO most of the time they are not outside of the goto market. Somebody outside of the go to market that is agnostic to the department structure is also best suited to fix this. Again, another reason why I think finance is well positioned. I also think that finance could own go to market ops or go to market architecture and you could have sales ops and marketing ops and CS and A M ops that continue to do all the stuff that they do. I don't think that it's an either or there, but you need somebody outside to set what I'll call setting the architecture or building the playground that everybody else plays in. Here's how we set the data, here's what we collect, here's how it's structured. And then everybody else plays within that system, runs the processes, makes it works, improves the processes, aligns the teams. There's value at both levels. But we're asking tactical people to do strategic stuff right now and that thinking that they can do both.
- [47:24]
Chris Walker
Awesome.
- [47:24]
David
Well, we've got two minutes left. I have one more question in the chat if you have a sec to answer it, Chris.
- [47:29]
Omar
Yeah, let's do it.
- [47:30]
David
Yeah. Do you think that this is actually like becoming much more complicated than it needs to be? It feels like it's super fragmented with all of these different Point Solutions and SaaS products. Like what do you think? Are we overcomplicating all of this?
- [47:45]
Omar
Especially marketing measurement is wildly over complicated and most of the reason is that it's not rooted in actual business metrics. It's like continuing to work down tactical and tactical touch points, statistics, impressions, website visits, not even website visits segmented by like website visits that were direct to this page. And that becomes like an indicator for a company or a reason why they should keep funding something or not. And I don't exactly know why this is the case, but I just observe it is that most technology is built to automate processes of tactical execution. And there are actually very few technologies that are built for the C level executive. And that's just an interesting insight to think about because what technology vendors usually, not always, but usually do, is look for something that people already do and then figure out how to allow you to do more of it faster, automated, at a lower cost. Think outreach, think any of them right. Like I give you a way to do something that you're already doing better. That's why it's the easiest to sell in. That's why it's mostly tactical. It's an easy to make an ROI business case of you already do this manually, now you can do 10 times more of it automatically and it's much harder to build and sell something that solves a strategic C level problem. You have multiple departments, you have multiple levels in the organization. You need to understand multiple parts of the org. The sales process is way harder. It's way fucking harder for me to try to sell this thing than to sell refined labs or to sell an ABM technology to a single stakeholder inside of a company. It's way harder. A lot of people don't focus on solving these problems because the path of least resistance would direct you into a totally different way single stakeholder tactical problem known process that they already run. But to get back to the question just I really do think that everything is in the measurement is massively over complicated in some ways usually the tactical marketing stuff and in other ways is ridiculously oversimplified being let's take the department credit, split it between four departments based on who spent the money. Way too simple. Not enough critical thinking. The same thing that people have been trying to do since the MQL waterfall of 2012. It was just SDRs and marketing back then and now we've added sales and partner now and so I think it'd be a generalization to say everything's over complicated. I think parts of it are over complicated and parts of it are under complicated or too simple. Cool. Want to be respectful of everybody's time and getting on out of here. So appreciate you all. We will be back next Tuesday and then just if you want to now because the calendar invite won't update the 18th 25th February and then whatever the first Tuesday in March is, we won't have this event so you can, you know, slot something else in for your time rather than showing up and realizing we're not here. So just a quick heads up there. We'll also send out some emails so you're aware, but we can't update the invites on your calendar so you'll have to do that yourselves. As a reminder, appreciate the questions and engagement. If you all had certain thoughts that you didn't want to ask questions on or some feedback about the content or direction that we're going, feel free to shoot me a LinkedIn DM as we're evolving this event. I really want your feedback so would appreciate that as well so we can continue to make the event both valuable and like innovative and thought provoking. So thank you all, and we'll see you again next week. Bye.