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- [00:01]
Carolyn
Hey, everybody, it's Carolyn here with the latest episode of Go to Market Live, Passetto's weekly show where we dive into everything Go to Market. So revops, data, architecture, marketing strategy, and so much more. And, hey, it's our first week hosting in place of Chris Walker. It also marks just over one year since Passetto launched Born from Chris's vision after leaving Refine Lab. So in this episode, we're breaking down the key themes we've seen after working with over 50 SaaS companies this last year and some of the common flaws that we're still seeing across Go to Market. You're going to love that rant. We get pretty passionate. So that and so much more on this week's show. Hope you love it.
- [00:40]
Trevor
You're listening to GTM Live, a podcast by Passetto.
- [00:49]
Carolyn
We've got Trevor here today. I'm not sure how many of you all know Trevor, but we sent out last week's email announcing basically as, you know, Chris Walker sort of moving on to his new endeavors. Trevor is one of the first co founders here at Passetto. He was here actually before I joined, probably about six months. And so he and I have been chatting in the last week or so. We decided, hey, we're going to co host this thing and tackle it together. And I'm really grateful for that because it's kind of daunting having to do it alone. So welcome, welcome to the new unified Go to Market Live. And I'm not sure long term if this is the name of the show that we're going to keep. We've inherited it from Chris who started the show, and we're going to take it over and see what comes of it. New format, new approach. And so we're really excited. And just quickly, I really want to say a quick thanks to everybody here. To be honest, it's a little daunting having to step in and take on something that Chris started. Obviously, some really big shoes to fill there. But I am super grateful for all of the really kind words that everybody here who's been a sort of a repeat listener has shared with us. And it really means a lot to have a consistent turnout, even though the original star of the show is not here. So that's super exciting. Really grateful. And my hope between, you know, Trevor and myself is that we can keep the momentum going and continue to deliver you guys content that we find valuable. So where do we start this week? We have a little bit of an agenda. If you saw the email, what we really wanted to do is unpack the last 12 months of Passetto. We started Passetto a year ago. I came in about halfway, but in that timeframe I think we've worked with 50 some odd SaaS companies anywhere from 10 million up to 200 million ARR. And there are definitely consistent themes that we've seen across every company. So we want to give you the no bullshit behind the scenes on what we've learned. But first, everybody really wants to know how we got here. Who's Trevor, who's Carolyn? How are we connected to Chris? And since Trevor was here first long before me, I thought I'd kick it over to him to give the 411 on how Passetto even came to be.
- [03:03]
Trevor
All right, thanks Carolyn. Nice to meet you all. Thank you again for joining us today. We really do hope to add a lot of value to your day here. I'm confident that we can. So a little about me I have my roots in traditional IT originally and turned that into a marketing ops journey that turned into a revenue ops journey that has led me to thinking about technology as a whole as it relates to solving rev ops problem solving go to market problems. So that is the systems, the processes, the data that goes along with all of that. I've watched this function and this area develop over my career. I've been fortunate enough to be sort of on the wave with IT as it's been developing and was really happy to be able to bring my technical skill to a business problem and sort of that's why I'm here. I want to help solve the business problem that a lot of you have with the right technology, with the right processes, the right data. And so how did I get here? How did I end up with Chris and helping start Passetto? I have my roots in more software companies, small software companies doing rev ops, marketing ops, business systems, systems, et cetera. At the end of my last software company we were acquired and I was starting to think about what I wanted to do next. That led to a conversation with Chris and actually with Sydney, who you probably know from previous episodes of the previous version of this show and it ended up being a great fit. They were at Refine Labs, they were solving a bunch of problems in the go to market space, the demand generation space that I had a passion for, having seen and tried to solve very similar problems in the orgs that I've supported and so sort of embarked on or I embarked on my journey with Refine Labs now a number of years ago and was focused on rev ops go to market ops technology solving problems for Refined Labs customers at that point. And we found that there were common themes that we really needed to solve. And that was the common question, what is working? What's not? How do we know? And how do we develop a better way of capturing that information and measuring that information in a way that's useful? We spent some time at Refine Labs doing this similar type of work and ultimately decided this is its own thing. Refine Labs, if you're familiar with them, is really focused on really, really optimizing paid channels. And doing some of that work is really its core. We decided that Passetto needed to come into existence to focus on this other thing. And so we are trying to solve for the more operational data measurement type of problems. We are working on really strongly defining the Go to Market architecture, as we call it, to say these are the things, this is the way that you go to market. These are the things you can capture and know about that. And here's how you would actually know if it's working. So that's what I think about every day. That's part of what, of course, I'll bring to this show. Talking about maybe a little bit in the weeds at times. Not just concept, but what are we really seeing? How are things really working? What have we been doing for our customers and how can that be applicable to things that you're thinking about and trying to solve? So. So that's how I hope to add that value to your day.
- [06:45]
Carolyn
I love too, Trevor, that that's sort of like one of the core reasons why you'll be so valuable to the show. Because we talk theoretically a lot about how to build a unified pipeline architecture and all this other stuff, but we rarely dig into the how to and the technical components. Yet you're such a big part of building sort of the behind the scenes of what we do at Passetto and making that possible. So I think that's, that's really key. But your entry point into Passetto from Refine Labs, where I got connected to Chris too. Like many of you here, I was a Chris fan girl, showing up to the show weekly, always coming with questions and just aligning so heavily with that narrative that, you know, we're on this MQL hamster wheel and the way that marketers operate is just fundamentally broken. And that stuck with me. I was a VP of marketing, a venture backed SaaS company, several million in VC funding. And then of course you get all this money and it's like, okay, now let's grow. And I had realized at the time that, you know, we're making new bets in new channels, yet we have no fucking clue how to track it. And I did not agree with that. Like, fundamentally, yeah, I wanted to grow. But how on God's green earth are you supposed to make smart decisions when you invest in new channels and you have literally no way in your CRM, in your tools to actually track performance and know what's working? I know, like, I knew long term, sustainably, that was not a smart decision. And so at the time, I was a huge proponent for investing in properly configuring Salesforce and, you know, all of these other tools to be integrated, to talk to one another and to give us a better way of making decisions. And I knew at that point, you know, what Chris was doing and what you guys started at Passetto just aligns so much with my own thinking. And I kind of went out on a whim and I messaged Chris, saying, saying, hey, you know, I am interested in learning more about what you're all doing. And he had said, well, we're actually hiring. And so that kind of led me to working with Trevor and Sidney and Chris at Passetto, and here I am. But with that said, I am a full believer in, you know, nothing happens by mistake. I think everything sort of unfolded for me professionally in the order that it was supposed to and sort of like in this divine timing. And so my words of wisdom, I guess, is if you're feeling unaligned with how your company is doing things, lean into that. Don't be afraid to push back. Don't be afraid to make bold decisions, go out on a whim, do something differently for, like, something you really believe in. So anyways, that's us. That's how we got here. Anything you want to add to that, Trevor? How we came to be that, you know, we didn't cover?
- [09:22]
Trevor
What else would I say? It's been a really interesting year of Passetto. We started out trying to solve a certain things from a certain angle. We've changed that a number of times as we've worked with a bunch of customers and we learned what was working, what wasn't, what things that we were hoping for that we would get from our customers were realistic and what things weren't. And I think we're probably going to talk a lot about that, whether it's this episode or future episodes. What are those things that you go in in our world, where we're going in and trying to help a customer understand and execut what they're doing? What did we Go in expecting them to be able to measure today and table stakes, operational data system stuff and finding. Gee, no, you can't assume that these basic things are happening. And that has really informed a lot of what we're doing now is taking a step back and thinking, well, gee, it's not safe to assume that we can just say, hey, give us all your data and we'll figure out some great insights. It doesn't end up working that way. As optimistic as we might be, as skilled as we might be, I've done this stuff a million times for many, many, many, many years. And it's not that the data doesn't exist and we need to focus on improving the basics first in a lot of cases. So I won't go into depth right now because I think we're going to talk about that here today, but I think that's just how I would describe this. Last year is a lot of trying something out, realizing that there was more to it and building onto that. And I think we have a great story now about how things should work, how we want anyone we work with to think about the world. And there are some very clear recurring themes about things that need to be fixed.
- [11:15]
Carolyn
I guess too, just to interject there, I think sometimes maybe not everybody here even knows really what Passetto does. So I'll give you the 30,000 foot view. We're part SaaS, part advisory. The objective is that we take your financial data, your revenue data, and plug into your CRM and produce a unified department agnostic data layer to basically give us back the core go to market KPIs that allow us within literally days to be able to isolate what's working, what's ineffective, where are your biggest problems, what are your biggest levers? And then we complement that by bringing in advisory level support to help you make meaning of that. And what do we do about it? So that's a quick debrief on that to anybody who's unclear about that. Because sometimes I have these conversations with people and I say, what do you know about Passetto? And I think sometimes there is that lack of clarity. But I had a conversation with, with one of you guys on LinkedIn and basically saying, you know, is what you guys do how Chris Walker talks about go to market on the podcast being sort of like a no bullshit perspective on go to market. And that really stuck with me because I think the answer is yes. I think the way marketers and go to market teams have done marketing historically has been riddled with BS. You get 20 page BS slides for your board deck. Nobody has the ability to very clearly articulate the impact of your go to market team, specifically marketing in a way that makes sense and that is easily digestible. And I think that's really what we're trying to solve is like let's eliminate all of this tactical nonsense and just be able to present to your board, to your C level executives, here's what's working, what's not working, and here's what we're going to do about it. And again, just like a no BS approach to fixing or accelerating go to market. So with that said, like I said, you know, we've worked with a couple dozen customers throughout the year, some who are still with us, some that are not. But what have we learned along the way? I think regardless of company size, like I said, whether you're doing you know like 10 million ARR or 200 million ARR, I think the core themes or the core challenges that most of these companies deal with honestly are very similar in so many ways. So let's talk about that. I think at a high level and Trevor, you can jump in too. But I think at a high level we can't optimize go to market or your go to market strategy without first sort of like zooming out and looking at critical core go to market KPIs. What is that? Your growth rate. How has that looked over the trailing 12 months last year? How is your growth rate gone up, gone down? What is that looking like? What is your churn like? Is churn really the issue for, you know, sort of like stagnating your growth? What is your retention? What is your net revenue retention when you sort of factor in your expansion revenue, what does that all look like? And I think more importantly than anything, being able to look at your go to market efficiency overall, or you know, we use the term sort of interchangeably between go to market efficiency and cost of growth. But ultimately, how much are you spending in your go to market? That's everything. That's your paid ad spend, your headcount costs, your admin costs, your travel costs, everything. How much are you spending relative to what you are getting back in both pipeline and new logo acquisition, Again like a core trend that we have seen with many of our customers, I would say like 90% of the time or greater is that their go to market efficiency is not great. They're spending 2, 3, 4x what they should to produce pipeline and new logo revenue and they really don't know why and also they just didn't even know it. I think a lot of times executives are really shocked to hear oh, that's how bad we are relative to sort of like the median benchmark range. So I think at a high level, before you can really drill into why is our growth stalling out or how do we accelerate our growth? Like what does that even look like right now? Identifying if you have a problem maybe and just knowing and being able to isolate from there, okay, how are we going to dig deeper? That sort of informs where you go next. But I think at the highest level, knowing those KPIs first before, you know, drilling into marketing or drilling into sales or anything like that really is the place to start.
- [15:26]
Trevor
I'll add a little bit there. If you've been in this general space, you know, marketing, go to market, etc. For any length of time, you are pretty familiar with the idea that you should be measuring something that sort of equals a true ROI kind of concept. Like everyone knows that, but do we really actually do it that often? I think we all know the answer is generally eh, it's hard to measure, it's messy. It's a lot easier to tell this story about individual tactical results. They're easier to measure and they're easier to sort of understand and explain but they don't actually tell you the big picture that you need to know. And so like Carolyn was just saying, sort of it all comes back to trying to tie the idea of a result really. Ultimately the result is revenue and there are results that are further up the journey, that are sort of leading indicators. But at the end of the day you really care about like are we, are we closing business? And then on the other side of that, what is it costing us to do that? And so we need to know that both at this sort of 10,000 foot view of overall what does growth look like, what are we spending and therefore how efficiently are we growing, what is it costing us to grow? But as you get into the tactical weeds of all the individual things you're doing, that same theme comes downwards into those levels. And you do want to know that same general calculation. We need to be able to say here's roughly what we're spending and here is what we're getting out the other end. We use the term cost of growth or efficiency rather than saying ROI because it's not true, literal dollars in, dollars out, it's more a ratio of spend results in any given period. This the idea that you can say, well we spent a hundred dollars on paid search three years ago and we got $98 out of it on the other end, ultimately we can't really do that. No one can really do that because it's just too complicated and just really wouldn't, wouldn't be practical to do. So we are thinking about it in terms of this overall efficiency ratio more so, which lets you see that in relative terms over time. So that's, that's ultimately what we're talking about here.
- [17:52]
Carolyn
I'm going to jump off on to the second one and I have a really strong perspective on this and it's interesting because whenever I talk about the attribution word on LinkedIn and when any, anybody talks about attribution, it's just, whoa, people just fucking love to talk about attribution. So anyways, my next point is that first or last touch or any sort of single touch attribution used to set targets to directly measure marketing or sales performance on its own will fail you every time. I believe that, you know, single touch attribution, whether it's where the person originated or the last thing they did before a deal was created, I think when you look at attribution in a silo, in a vacuum, on its own, you are set up to fail. And I think this is a disease. Honestly in go to market right now and I'm shocked that teams are still fricking using this approach to set targets and to evaluate performance. I just saw it recently, we were on a call with one of our customers, close to 2 million ARR in revenue. And Chris has talked about this before, but you are trying to make smart decisions on where your next bet is. And they're sitting here and you've got somebody from sales talking about why crediting the BDR if they had a touch in the last 30 days is the most effective way or you know, marketing had a touch in the last 30 days. Let's give the credit to marketing. Please tell me how that is as a smart way of measuring go to market. It is not. I think attribution has a place in the KPI set of KPIs that you look at, but it certainly should not be the one thing that you look at to make a smart decision. I just had an email exchange with a, with a customer this morning. We're working with them right now to basically clean up CRM and you know, install some standardized processes for tracking go to market performance. But right now they have I think a lead source record on the deal object and that's how they use it. That's how they credit basically teams and know how a deal was originated and they're using that to know that, hey, our ABM approach is like an effective way or whatever drive new deal origination. And I think that's problematic. I said that and he asked me, well, why? And it's looking at a single point in time, right? Whether it's, you know, like the last touch before the deal was created, it's looking at a single point in time to look at, hey, what potentially drove this deal. First of all, it's manually set by and oftentimes skewed by a rep. Secondly, like I said, it's looking at sort of like one snapshot in time. What about all of the other interactions that happen leading up to an opportunity being created that are just ignored because Trevor and I see it all the time. Rarely is an opportunity or a prospect completely cold. Stuff happens before. So why are we not recognizing all of the signals or interactions that happen leading up to a deal? It's just mind blowing to me that we still look at go to market this way, but I think that teams don't really have an alternative solution. And so that's what we always go back to because we don't know any better. And it's like the best chance we have at attributing some sort of credit to a deal, it's broken. I've seen it myself. I've seen how this pits teams against each other. I come from that world when I was sort of in house as a VP of marketing constantly. Well, you know, sales source this and you know, they came to this webinar and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Until you can separate what happens with your prospecting layer with your marketing layer and look at those two things together, but separately, you don't have a good answer into what's driving revenue.
- [21:21]
Trevor
Yeah, Caroline, that last statement really hit what I was going to pop in and say. This idea that so much of what you hear about as attribution ends up being this thing about like credit. Did this come from sales? Did this come from marketing? Which one should get credit? Are we actually building a BDR commission structure based on this skewed view of the world? Which of course you see an awful lot and matters to a lot of people and affects how they get paid and all that. So there's all these, these biases and motivations for that. They're not two separate things or they're not mutually exclusive, I should say, right? Your prospecting is happening. Your BDRs are working on things that they go find themselves. They're working on things that the marketing team has warmed up. If you really truly had good coverage of signal data, what we call signal data, sort of those interactions, individual small interactions with a person, you would probably find that there's almost no such thing as a truly cold outbound that has not been introduced to some kind of marketing thing. That's important. And we need to be able to look at those two things simultaneously and say here's why we think we're prospecting. So some of them are going to be called outbound, some are going to be marketing scoring, some of them are going to be hand raiser from a web form, all those things. But in all cases, it's probably not the only thing that that person we're about to call on the BDR side has been exposed to, been engaged with. And so it's important to, to be able to tell both those stories layered on top of each other so you can understand, hey, well when, when cold outbound is happening, what are the things that people typically have seen engaged with on the way there and then separately, what are they engaging with while the prospecting is happening? So we, we also can talk a bit about breaking, breaking the journey up into these different phases. And they're different pieces of the story and they each tell us something different about where certain types of marketing tactics, channels, etc. Are finding most traction, most often used, most often relevant to the individual. And this is something that I think marketers always want to know, need to know. I'm simplifying it down into the core pieces. It is harder than I'm saying to actually get there, of course, and I'm sure we'll talk about that, but that's where we want to get to those different layers, including what you're spending, including the prospecting work that's being done, including the interactions, engagement with marketing work. You have to know it all.
- [23:59]
Carolyn
That's just bringing me thought on a common theme that I think we've seen with some of our customers that basically have an enterprise sales motion, significantly larger deals, significantly longer sales cycles. Commonly those companies are sales driven. Majority of their deals are sourced through sales versus leads that come in or inbound motion. I think that's fairly common. But what's problematic there is that if you look sort of at like the historical way of measuring marketing performance, those marketing teams are measured on MQL volume in a lot of cases when they're not inherently inbound driven organizations. Yet you have all of this influence that marketing has once the opportunity is created, leading to close one Potentially accelerating a deal by however many days, what have you, but having really important touches in that journey of the sales cycle that are ignored. From my point of view, a marketing team can be highly influential to supporting those organizations and supporting the sales reps in closing deals. Yet because we're so focused on these top of funnel metrics, you're ignoring all of the capabilities that a marketing team can have in the rest of the buyer journey. It's wild to me, I've never understood it. But to Trevor's point, I think the way that we're approaching that at Passetto is giving companies sort of like an easy way to better understand that journey really easily. And which I love, doesn't require spending two weeks, three weeks leading up to a board meeting trying to frigging figure that out yourself. I've been there scrutinizing reports retroactively, manually sifting through my CRM data to try and piece the story together myself, when realistically there now is a much easier way of, of being able to do that.
- [25:45]
Trevor
I think in the board deck scenario what you also see especially from marketing is, you know, sort of a tendency to cherry pick whatever can be measured and then whatever tells the story that wants to be told that does nobody any good really. You know, I make marketing not the target of the board meeting scrutiny for that one time, but at the end of the day it's important to show all the things and understand how they're doing. And so yes, having the framework of we're going to measure this same stuff every single time it is defined this way. Here are the systems and processes we have in place to make sure it gets measured. Obviously the company overall is going to benefit from that and that's of course.
- [26:26]
Carolyn
Important for everybody, the cherry picking for sure. I think every department leader wants to go into a board meeting or executive meeting, qbr, whatever, showing that what they are doing is working. And that does often involve cobbling together a story that is a little self serving. And I think to some extent everybody's sort of been in that world. But I think the most productive thing a leader can do is call out when your shit's broken and come up with a strategic path forward to fixing it. So all of that stuff on attribution is sort of like why we think it's broken. I think leads me down two paths. One, I don't think you can have good reporting without attribution. I think you will always reach this end state where you're sort of at a loss on like what to do next. You might have sort of like the top level core go to market KPIs, but you don't have the granularity in your attribution data to understand the buyer journey or sort of what the prospect is doing from awareness all the way down to closed one. So I think attribution is important, I just hate the way it's used. But what we've learned is really around data architecture. And you know, Trevor, you had said this earlier in the show, but like a lot of the companies we work with, we sort of come to this point where we're. You have so much gaps in your, so many gaps in your data that you can either go on operating to some extent with go to market blindness and not know what's working and not know how to fix it, or you can go down this other path, which is to build what we call like the unified pipeline architecture and get all of that fundamental data in CRM to actually fill that void and fill that black hole of data. I can't say that we've worked with a company yet that had great data. Every company has had shitty data. And I hate to say that, but it's just so true. And the number one thing across all of them is contact to opportunity associations. Like let's just connect the damn contacts to the opportunities and bridge that gap to start. But anyways, that's like one of a million things that, you know, company best practices, people, you know what they should be doing. But we have seen so much shit when it comes to data.
- [28:47]
Trevor
Yeah. So I'll comment a little bit. Donna asked about, we talk about signals. Where does that fit into all of this? You know, I'll comment here a little bit about coming off of what Carolyn said, we see some very clear weaknesses in almost every organization. Of course, as, as Carolyn's already said, opportunity, contact roles, it's a big one. We see things as simple as the definition of the amount on the opportunity. You ask some organizations and you can't even get a fully straight answer for what does this opportunity amount even mean? Some basics like that what is a new business or new logo opportunity versus an expansion opportunity? What is the value of that opportunity? What contacts are you selling to? All those kinds of things, they are no brainer kind of things. You would assume that those are just a given, but we don't see them. And so linking sort of walking from there to the idea of signals and this attribution stuff that we've been talking about, what we want to see in this greater architecture is you've got your opportunity, you've got this prospecting layer as well, which I'll maybe talk about in a little bit. But we see that as the work before the opportunity to identify if there's even an opportunity, usually the BDR sdr. You've got your contacts that are involved in that prospecting cycle, in the opportunity cycle itself. And then we need to know what are those people, those contacts, actually interacting with. And that is a problem that is honestly very hard to solve. There are various ways we see it done. We have some opinions on all of it, of course, but I'll sort of lay out what do we typically see. What we often end up working with because it's what organizations have or have some of is if you're in salesforce, campaigns, campaign members. That's a critical point of understanding here. We did these things, we executed in these channels, we had these campaigns. Here are the people that responded in a positive way, measurable way to those individual, tactical, channel focused, campaign focused things. And so we often take that and use that as sort of that first layer to say here, here are some signals, these are things that people are engaging with. And we are able to then take the data and walk from those individual interactions to the people, to the, to the times that we prospected to those people or to the times those people were involved in opportunities and apply various attribution model approaches to it. I think I don't want to just keep beating this attribution drum today, though I can certainly talk more in technical detail later about what do we actually do with attribution. But the point is we're connecting dots between here are these people we're selling to and here's what those people are engaging with. We know that just campaign data is not the whole story. Not everything is easily trackable that way. And it has some downsides to it. It's great at offline type things or in person or virtually in person things, events, webinars, et cetera. It's not so good for web engagement. It would require a good bit of extra work to try and track that correctly. So we know there's some gaps and there are attribution solutions out there, bizible, et cetera, that are doing a little more, getting the web visits and so on. And so we would, when that stuff is available, we would fill in the gaps with that as well. We do ultimately want to say here's all the interactions that are happening digitally, here's what's happening with in person channels when it is digital. Here the external Channels that are driving those, those things. And we want to then take that and make that the sort of big ecosystem data set of, of all the interactions, knowing that you're never going to get to all of them. Donna just mentioned here, dark social, non trackable store, non trackable stuff. Yeah, it'll always be a problem. We can include how'd you hear about us? Sort of question on forms. And that helps, certainly. But of course it is full of gaps as well. You can't really get to the really soft stuff. That's early, early, early on in the journey. So I guess all that to say no matter how much you build this thing up, you're still taking it with a slight grain of salt. That is a given. Anyone that thinks they have every single thing tracked is mistaken, fooling themselves, whatever, but all you can do is acknowledge where you want to get to, how these things fit into the greater ecosystem of measurement and architecture and just keep taking the insights as best as you can get them and keep iterating and keep iterating and build new things, make decisions with the data you've got and keep doing it. So that's signals in a nutshell. We could go into what do we think about the types of signals that are really out there and what is the kind of information that you should be tracking when you, in an ideal world, when you do track a signal? We have a lot of perspective on that. I think that would eat up the remaining time. So I'm not going to go into that. And I think we put a pin in it and that might be a great opportunity for a deeper dive on signals, attribution models, et cetera, in a future episode, probably. But yeah, at the end of the day, if I'm going to summarize the architecture as a whole, you have your signals, you have your prospecting life cycles, you have your opportunities that result from those prospecting life cycles and then you have what you spend and then you have your overall business results in terms of total ARR and all those individual components, what's new ARR, what's expansion, ARR, et cetera. And we're putting that in various layers through this repeatable measurement stack.
- [35:01]
Carolyn
People love to talk about signals and so do I. So I agree. I think that should be a topic for another show because that's actually one of the things that attracted me to Pesetto to begin with. I kept hearing Chris and Sydney at the time, like talking about signal analytics and I was trying to basically hack together a very similar solution at the last company I was at to be able to do that. And this sort of leads me to, I guess the last point. I think we can touch on one more point and then get to Q and A. I've seen a few questions come through so we should make sure to leave time for that. But the last thing is who owns RevOps in an organization? Who owns GTM strategy in an organization? And I think I've had differing views on this. Initial days of Passetto, our champion customer really was VP of Marketing cmo. And at the time I could see that marketers are so desperate to solving the RevOps problem on their own. But what happens, you know, we get a few months in, we make headway, we really learn sort of like what's working, what's not and we want to change things. But can CMOs do it on their on their own? Can VPs of demand gen do that on their own? I think the answer is no. And I've led down this path now too to have this new opinion of I actually think it's irresponsible and unproductive to put that on a marketer. I think a marketing leader should be focused on strategy, should be focused on execution, should be focused on building awareness, should be focused on building brand and creating demand and capturing it and doing all of these amazing things. But instead they by default are sort of pigeonholed into this corner to figure out this, this RevOps problem. And I say this not, this is not a sweeping statement. I say this for, you know, companies that don't have a sophisticated RevOps person in house on as a full time staff but they are forced into solving this problem. And I don't think that they can. I think this issue of unsophisticated rev ops spans every team in the go to market and needs a dedicated quarterback or champion to own it. If marketing tries to do this on their own, it will fail. Maybe it doesn't always, but I think it'll take 10 times as long, be 10 times more complicated. And also what's happening to your marketing when all of this is happening, when your marketing leader is focused on data and CRM architecture and best practice and process and all this other stuff. What's happening to your marketing in the meantime? It's being sacrificed and it's not being the powerhouse that it should be. And I remain pretty sovereign in that belief. Now I used to feel as a VP of marketing that I could fix it, but now I see having worked with various customers in the last few years that it is not productive and it's not a recommendation or a path that I would go down.
- [37:43]
Trevor
Yeah, I'm going to admit to being biased because I come from the other side of this. Of course I see that roles like mine are the solution. So of course I'm going to say that. But yes, where I've seen things work really well is where you have Rev Ops as a function. Of course that. I mean everyone wants something like that, I think. But I don't think it's that simple. I think it has to be someone that comes from an understanding of go to market as a whole. RevOps is meant to be this, you could call it go to market Ops. In fact, before the RevOps term came out, that's what I called myself, Go to market Ops. And it has to be someone that really does understand all the moving parts. What I've seen often is you end up with something that's called RevOps that is either really a sales guy that turned out to be a little bit better at putting some structure around some things. And so they sort of wandered into the ops category and it ended up being called Rev Ops. But it was really sales ops with a very sales heavy component. Seen it a bunch of times. And it's, it's not what people think it is. I mean that's a valuable function. But their expertise is in maybe quota setting, maybe some work on territories. But from a very, very sales specific way of thinking about territories, you need someone technical, really actually technical because it's an architectural job. It is about pulling the pieces together. It's not about these point specific issues. It's about understanding how they all go together. And they have to have spent some time in marketing too. Yeah, Donna, great point in her last comment here that they had a bad experience with RevOps that just didn't quite understand what was the whole thing, the whole world together. And that sucks that you had that bad experience. Donna. I definitely understand how things get there. So I think that's the point is if you're building a Rev Ops team, if you're hiring someone to do that work, they need to have that well rounded experience across, across the whole thing. Otherwise they're going to bring a lot of baggage and a lot of bias from one way or the other. They come from marketing ops or they come from sales ops or whatever. None of those things on their own make a RevOps team. And I personally feel that they should own business systems as well. So that's my strong opinion. I've always owned Salesforce, owned all the marketing, marketing Stack owned, commission structure, technology, all that stuff, like it all has to come together in this one view of the world.
- [40:24]
Carolyn
And I think just on the topic of data architecture is I see it so backwards now where companies don't start with their data architecture and fix that first. It's like they jump to buying all of these different point solutions that, you know, integrate or don't integrate with CRM or whatever. And then they're like, oh, I'm not getting anything from these point solutions. And it's just I've had that experience actually with an attribution platform where I'm like, oh, this attribution platform sucks. And it's not the attribution platform, it's actually the data feeding it. And I think too one of the core challenges that everybody in Go to Market is up against is making all of this solving the problem in an easy way. Because I think from the perspective as a CEO or cfo, it's just like, okay, like just go do it, go fix the problem. But it's just like it's not that simple and it impacts multiple stakeholders. And yeah, it's a little bit of an arduous process, but it doesn't need to be. If you've got the right, I guess the right champion or the right partner path, you, you choose to go down. Okay, nine minutes left. Let's do some Q and A.
- [41:32]
Trevor
We have a question from Tyler. From a little while back I have been paying attention to questions. So here we are. So Tyler says, how do you get the owners in C suite to understand that the silo measurement isn't working? That's the biggest pain point I face in the clients I work work with. Obviously it's a little organization culture specific. You do have to navigate every single organization a little differently. I think our initial top level answer would be tying it back to dollars gets everyone's attention. So you get the CEO cares, the CFO cares, the CRO cares, etc. And so you get the big voices in the room to have this common goal, which is we want to make money and we won't want to spend money unnecessarily. And so getting it all into that context really helps jumpstart the conversation in the right direction. Because frankly the siloed versions of those measurements can't do that. They won't do that. That's by definition, they're outside of that context. So bringing it all back to ultimate revenue results and ultimate sort of spend investment, those two things are everyone's ultimate goal in that executive team. In the board meeting, et cetera. And well, super tactical siloed measurements must still exist. Like you should still measure the click through rate on your emails, whatever. But those are team role specific measurements. The person that designs your email campaigns needs to know those things. The board doesn't need to know those things and it's not going to help them make any better decisions. And so yeah, drawing that line on what is for the business and what is for a function is really important as well. And that's definitely something we all saw throughout the many years of marketing and marketing ops and whatever, trying to figure out how they could participate in more organizational level metrics. A lot of stuff got rolled up into those contexts that just didn't belong there and it made it undermined the rest of the team's respect for the marketing function in a lot of ways. I watched it time and time again. Why are you showing me this? It doesn't matter. I want something useful and then it just becomes an argument again. So yes, right back to the business results. That's my answer.
- [43:51]
Carolyn
And if you don't have them reflecting back on my career history in the marketing function, if I could do one thing differently single handedly, the thing at the top of my list would be to establish a better, tighter relationship with the CFO and FP and a team from day one. And that has been one of my biggest regrets. Something that I think could have led to more success I guess would be to establish that relationship because I think in a lot of times finance views marketing or going to market as like this cost center. Oh, they're spending a shitload of money. What are they even doing? Blah blah, blah, blah blah. I think if you can get real and sort of like put your pride to the side and just say, listen, maybe I don't have strong financial acumen, but I want to be productive and I don't have the data that I need to be able to make smart decisions. Like let's change that. I think just having an honest conversation out of the gates and getting a little bit vulnerable could go a long way.
- [44:48]
Trevor
Reading through, we've covered I think all the outstanding actual questions. Donna had a lot of really good comments in here for all you on the event here. If you haven't read through them, really interesting stuff, I don't have time to read them all out of course, but she's got clearly a lot of interesting.
- [45:04]
Carolyn
Experience she's seen and Donna shows up week after week. So shout out to Donna because we really appreciate that. All right, so thanks for joining us. I think it was a good start to the new format, so really happy to have everybody here. Please keep showing up if you think it's valuable. One other thing is Passetto actually has a partnership with Winning by Design. So one thing that we want to do a little bit more of is bringing on guest speakers so you're not just hearing from us all the time. So look out for that. We've got some stuff in the works for the next few weeks and if you have any suggestions, hit us up on LinkedIn, send us a message. Personally, I'm always receptive to feedback and the reason I'm here is to be of service to the community, basically. So anything I can do to help you all, I am definitely open minded to that.
- [45:51]
Trevor
Paul's asking if this will be uploaded, podcast, YouTube. Can you tell everybody where it's going to be?
- [45:57]
Carolyn
Yeah, good question. Thanks, Paul. And hey Paul, I saw you joined a little bit later, but thanks for showing up. Yes. So Chris is carrying on his show with a new name. I think it's called Decoded. But more on that soon we are going to be under a brand new channel, Unified go to Market Live. We'll send out the link when it's all up and live and share it with our subscribers. Good question. Thank you. All right, y'all, thank you. See you next week. Cheers. Bye.