← The Agile Brand with Greg Kihlström®: Expert Mode Marketing Technology, AI, & CX
The Agile Brand with Greg Kihlström®: Expert Mode Marketing Technology, AI, & CX
MarketingOps CEO Mike Rizzo on Marketing Operations as a strategic driver of growth
00:29:22
Loading summary
Transcript41 lines
- [00:01]
A
Many leaders see Marketing Ops as the team that keeps trains running on time, essentially the plumbers of the marketing department. But what if I told you they're actually positioned to be the architects of your company's most durable competitive advantage? Agility requires moving beyond the transactional nature of campaigns and technology. It demands building a durable, responsive ecosystem around your brand. One that can listen and adapt not just quarterly, but constantly.
- [00:26]
B
Today we're going to talk about how
- [00:27]
A
to reframe the marketing operations function from a cost center or tactical execution engine into a strategic driver of growth. We're going to explore a powerful and perhaps counterintuitive way to do it by building a genuine community, not just as a marketing channel, but as the core of your go to market strategy.
- [00:49]
B
Welcome to season eight of the Agile Brand Podcast. This season we're going all in on Expert Mode, MarTech, AI and Customer Experience, talking with the people and platforms behind the brands you know and love. Again, I'm your host Greg Kilstrom and I help Fortune 1000 companies make sense of martech, AI and marketing ops. Hit, subscribe or follow to make sure you always get the latest episodes and leave us a rating so others can find us as well. And make sure you check out our sponsor, TechSystems, an industry leader in full stack technology services, talent services and real world adoption. For more information, go to techsystems.com now let's dive in. To help me discuss this topic, I'd
- [01:30]
A
like to welcome Mike Rizzo, Founder and CEO at Marketing Ops.
- [01:33]
B
Mike, welcome to the show.
- [01:35]
C
Hey Greg, thank you for having me on. I'm excited to chat with you and really love the initial positioning statement. So that was spot on. Yeah, yeah, no, love it.
- [01:45]
A
And I guess I should say welcome back to the show as well. So you're a returning champion here. So we'll maybe touch on a few things we touched on, but definitely looking to diving in. But before we do, why don't you give a little background on yourself and your role at Marketing Ops?
- [02:00]
C
Sure, sure. Yeah. So. Hey everybody, I'm Mike Rizzo. As mentioned, I'm the CEO and founder of MarketingOps.com today. That is effectively a marketplace. It serves two parts of the ecosystem, predominantly in B2B, but we do have a number of B2C folks in our network as well, which means that there are practitioners that are in the ecosystem, the community, and we serve them with content that helps elevate them in their career. We are moving towards becoming a certification body not too dissimilar from something like a PMI to the PMP certification. And then at the center of all of that is marketingops.com where brands come in and engage with our members in meaningful ways, where they don't just pitch slap them constantly, but really try to show them the art of the possible. And so yeah, my role today is all about curating excellent experiences, content networking and sort, sort of the path to becoming a certified go to market product manager and go to market product architect. That is what we're marching toward. But I have a breadth of startup experience, most notably in B2B SaaS, so I kind of built my career from there. Yeah, love it, love it.
- [03:13]
A
So yeah, let's start. And you know, I want to start with the premise I teed up in the intro. And you know, a lot of our listeners are marketing leaders and so you know, they are leading marketing ops teams or working with them at the very least. And this perception, you know, is often that they're kind of a service department that's focused on campaign execution, tech management, things like that. What do you see as the fundamental flaw in that as the sole perception of marketing ops and what's maybe what's something that would elevate that marketing ops team from that perception?
- [03:50]
C
Yeah, yeah, I appreciate the question. So let's journey back just briefly in time when everybody was recognizing a few decades ago that marketing had the largest budget compared to even it. This was a super hot topic many, many moons ago now. Well, that's still fundamentally true. In fact, most of the money that you're spending on your sort of go to market motion comes from effectively a martech go to market stack. And ultimately the complexity of that technology is really what I would refer to as a product. Now each of them are a product in and of their own right of course that you purchase. But for many, many years, out of all of that money that these brands have been spending and these teams are investing in, there's always the question of are we getting the most out of it? And the team or sometimes just the person that is tasked with figuring that out, is more often than not a marketing ops professional. But the problem is exactly what you've hit on. And what we've all sort of observed over the last handful of decades is that they're inundated with executing on delivery work. We have to do an email campaign, a webinar, an event, upload a list from the event, you name it, deduplicate records and merge data, clean the data. There's a countless number of tasks that a marketing operations professional is inundated with which distract them from the ability to make the most out of your technology. And if you start thinking about your technology as a product in its entirety, and that product is meant to deliver against a core set of KPIs or a hypothesis or a bet that you're making in your go to market motion, then you need a product manager and an owner to figure out how to orchestrate the plays to best serve the needs of the business. And more importantly, you need to find the person who can translate the needs of the business, the goals, those bets you're making, translate that language. It's very unique to every organization. Right. Everyone's kind of got a different definition of what they want to try and they need to take that and make it, translate it into the sort of the capabilities of the tech stack, either the ones that you have today or the ones that you still need to invest in. And the only people that are really, really good at that are marketing ops professionals. But you need to stop treating them like a service department and give them the opportunity to fill that void. Right. And so that's how you can kind of move away from that and start thinking of them as product managers and architects to translate that language.
- [06:38]
A
Yeah. And I mean that sounds a lot more strategic than again the other framing. I mean, certainly there is the day to day work in any function of marketing or elsewhere. There's going to be a tactical function as well. But I mean, do you think that is the just the prevalence of marketing technology in the practice of marketing? Is that what has been driving now AI and all sorts of other things as well. But is that what's driving this kind of need for a more strategic approach or what do you see there?
- [07:14]
C
Yeah, that's a fair question. I think AI is accelerating this change. What everybody is starting to recognize or has already recognized at this point is that the only way to really leverage AI is with some pretty quality inputs. The context really matters, the data itself really matters. And so ultimately the best way to make all of that possible is by having like a nice approach, a standard sort of well thought out approach to orchestrate these motions. And then there's integration layers around all of that. Well, you know, it's fine to say that you want to adopt AI capabilities in a native solution or start, you know, weaving across the tech stack. But to do that strategically takes a lot of technical understanding, both on the capabilities of the platforms, but also of the unique nature of the business and who needs what information at any given point in time. Right. You may have BDRs or SDRs in your org, you may not. And if you're just sort of like doing a B2C motion, there are totally different orchestration plays in which you want to surface the right data to the right people at the right time. And so I think AI is just accelerating it more than anything else. And it's becoming apparent that I think to challenge your listeners or your viewers wherever you may be absorbing this content today, ask your leadership team or your board if you have the chance to ask them who's in charge of the go to market tech stack today? And I would venture to guess most of them would be like, I don't know what you're even talking about. Marketing has a marketing tool. Sales has sales, css, cs, whatever. Support has support. And the reality is that we've been building business a long time with leaders across technology. In fact, if you're building a software product, you have a product manager and an architect and an engineering team, and you've really intentionally built out systems that are meant to scale. But for some reason we've never taken the time to think about the entirety of the go to market stack as some, you know, a thing that needs that same type of person to hold the reins and say, well, don't those two things do the same thing? Why are we investing in one of those tools?
- [09:55]
A
Well, and I think, I think part of this too is, you know, it's the people process platform thing where, you know, they buy a tool, they stick it in and they think, you know, oh, now all our problems are solved and you know, we've all lived through this and cleaned up after this and everything. So, you know, to me, may, they may not be the only part piece in this puzzle, but I think Marketing Ops plays that role of, you know, to your earlier point, needing to know what the technology is and how it functions, but also how it needs to be used. Right. And I think that that last part is the piece that I think gets everybody right. And so I think Marketing Ops has a unique role in that to play, right?
- [10:37]
C
Yeah, for sure. To use other analogies and terms, right? They can see the forest for the trees if you give them the time to be able to do so. Now to the earlier comments you were making. No, this does not mean that your Marketing Ops person who's in charge of campaign execution and delivery should suddenly become your product manager and architect. That is not a, you know, a transition you just do overnight. Nor does it mean that the person who can evolve into that role should vacate those responsibilities in Fact, they'll probably find a way to leverage some agentic workflows to support them in some of their capabilities. But ultimately my gut and what I've experienced so far in the market tells me that they're going to go build a service effectively their own product in something like a cloud or an AI agentic sort of cowork situation and then they're going to hand that off because they're a subject matter expert in your business, your go to Market Motion and your tech stack. They're going to say hey, I built this little service engine to enable our team to do something way more effectively. And if I had hired somebody net new and tasked them with this thing to go build this, that wouldn't have worked. But I built it and now I can hand it off to someone who's technically capable to go fill the role that I just left and I'm going to go work on architecting more go to market systems that support the business. Right. But I still need somebody to own what I was previously doing and so sorry, folks like AI is not going to totally replace people. In fact, I would argue that you need maybe not as many people, but you do need people to manage the technology and make it really Hum. Yeah, yeah.
- [12:18]
D
You know that moment when marketing wants a landing page design mocks it up and engineering says yeah, we'll get to it. Thousands of businesses from early stage startups to Fortune 500s are choosing to build their websites in Framer where changes take minutes instead of days.
- [12:33]
C
Framer is a website builder that works
- [12:35]
D
like your team's favorite design tool with real time collaboration, a robust CMS with everything you need for great SEO and advanced analytics that include integrated AB testing. Your designers and marketers are empowered to build and maximize your dot com. From day one, changes to your Framer site go live to the web in seconds with one click without help from engineering. Framer is also an enterprise solution, giving brands like Perplexity, Miro and Mixpanel the confidence they need to build their websites in Framer. Learn how you can get more out of your.com from a framer specialist or get started building for free today@framer.com Agile for 30% off a Framer Pro annual plan. That's framer.com Agile for 30 percent off framer.com Agile rules and restrictions may apply.
- [13:22]
A
Agentix certainly, you know it's kind of the buzzword du jour, right? But you know, it's real and I'm seeing some real even in the in some initial use cases, seeing Some real potential there. So, you know, there's hype for sure, but there's also some real tangible potential value. What does that look like? You know, because we're, we're talking about, you know, we've always been talking about managing people, we've been talking about managing platforms and their function and all that. And you know, is, should we should marketing ops and others perhaps should be thinking about managing agents in a different way than managing a platform? Is this, you know, is this an, you know, because some people refer to it as like you're going to manage AI whatever, you know, you want, whatever attributes you want to attribute to them. I guess just for lack of a anthropomorphizing them or whatever, I guess you could say, like, how far down, you know, from your perspective, like, how far down that path should we be going? Or at the end of the day, is it just software or. I don't know, somewhere in between.
- [14:30]
C
That's probably somewhere in between at the end of the day. But what I would say we're going to be managing workflows. It's really what it is, right? And there's a level of intelligence to these workflows now that we've just been able to access more readily now thanks to AI marketing operations professionals have been doing AB branching logic and lead scoring and ICP analysis and all these things to try to pull together correlative and causal sort of situations to help surface business for years. The difference now is that we can do that on a scale that is far more robust than it ever has been. And because we have the foundational knowledge of how to do that, we're really now understanding that, okay, I see how a workflow is better when I build different steps in the logic. And I know now that if I have one agent that is dedicated to a particular service, I will get better results if I string that together to say, now you hand it to this other one that is better at this thing. And so you will get to a place where you're sort of managing multiple agent workflows. But I think it ultimately is a product at the end of the day. Set aside my previous example of your entire tech stack as a product. I'll give you a really concrete one, if I may. I'm kind of rambling here, Greg.
- [16:04]
A
Oh, no.
- [16:06]
C
The product that I built at marketingops.com, we offer membership. We make it pretty affordable to try to invest in your career. It's like, shoot, if you love marketing ops and technology or any part of the technology ecosystem in marketing. It's like 350 bucks for the year to join. Great. We got a pretty sizable database and lots of them have not ever signed up for membership. And to be fair, we haven't really focus too hard on it. And so I said, hey, we need to really start focusing on this piece of the organization. And I brought this up with a colleague of mine who runs a similar organization for partners. He says, you know, I said, hey, I'm planning to hire somebody offshore for this to help me out. He goes, well, why wouldn't you just use an agent, right, and build your own little AI agent to do that? I was like, okay, fine. So here I am, Greg. I'm working through my Claude sort of project. It knows everything about my business. I'm saying, hey, I need you to build documentation and a system to help me onboard a person. Actually, quick pivot, we're going to make this an agent, a coworker agent situation. Fast forward, it's done. I point the coworker to the folder and I say, execute this. The steps in the folder, it's magic, right? It goes into my database, I have it hooked up to HubSpot. It finds the 10 most likely candidates who might want membership and personalizes an email to each one of those people and drafts them in my Gmail inbox. And at this point, this is where everybody on LinkedIn publishes and they go, I figured it out, I did it. I just spent 12 hours. I am a superhero, I am God, whatever, right? But the reality is on the other side of that execution, it was about 80% accurate. I could probably work on it more to make it better. But what I realized, Greg, and for all of you listeners out there, if you ever task yourself with trying to figure this stuff out, the reality is that I am not going to have the time to optimize that system anymore. Yeah, yeah. So I can have it run a cron job every day, scheduled 9 o' clock in the morning, my time, draft me 10 emails, I'll review them, I'll hit send. But am I going to tell it if it was successful? Am I going to have it suggest ways to optimize things to me? Am I going to suggest ways to optimize it? Should it be two emails, three emails instead of one? Should I somehow signal that that person actually signed up? How will it know it is not being taught or trained to look for any of that information? And certainly I could write those steps, but those are all things that I now need to go spend time on. And this is what I was saying before where I said, hey, I'm an SME in my business, I know what we need to accomplish. I've built this tool. I now need somebody to go focus on optimizing it in pursuit of the core KPI for our organization, which is membership. Right. And so like just really holistically illustrating the point that like this stuff's all great, but you still need somebody to keep making it better. Yeah. And maybe one day the costs of compute will drop enough to where the agent can just like self optimize constantly. But today that's not the case. Right. You have limits on your credits and your systems. So. Yeah. Also there's just things that happen in conversation and in the real world where you're like, you know what, Today's a really bad day to send those emails because, you know, I don't know, there's a, a pandemic was announced. Like, let's go back in time. Right. Like, who knows, like there's things that just happen. Right. And so a human should be in the loop.
- [19:35]
A
Yeah, no, I, I know what you mean. I mean I, yeah, this, you know, I, I have a, I have a lean team that runs this show. Even, you know, it's, but it's highly, highly automated. And yet to your point, I, there's things where, you know, when I have time, you know that whenever I, which will never happen, but you know, when I have time, I'd like to tweak this one thing to make this one thing a little better, you know, but yeah, it's. You'd have to have a system that listens for everything and knows everything and that, you know, that's, that's not pot. Now it's possible to make some automations, you know, or some improvements at scale. But, but yeah, agreed, agreed.
- [20:14]
C
Yeah.
- [20:14]
A
Actually I want to talk a little bit more about your community actually. And, and sure, you know, I know you, I know you mentioned it, but you know, certainly this is, you know, marketing operations. Definitely not a new profession, but I think the approach that you're taking with it and just the visibility that you're giving to it is, is unique and just wanted to get your, your perspective on, you know, how has, in addition to the automation and things that you mentioned, how has building a community kind of changed over the years since you've started this?
- [20:47]
C
Yeah, yeah, for sure. No, it's a good question. So I first started just to touch on my background again briefly for everyone. My role had always been in sort of B2B software companies, often on the demand gen and marketing ops side. But I boomerang back to one of my earlier startups to help them build their first customer community and advisory board program. And there was a lot that goes into that, taking it from 0 to 1. I think the, it's funny, I sound like a broken record but like when it comes to building any type of community, it really is the same thing as building a service or a product for the market. The best way that you can possibly do that is to talk to your end users. Right. And so the things that we are doing in our community today are probably sort of like a best practice motion for anyone looking to build community. And it's just talking to people and saying, hey, categorically what do you want to talk about? Right. How should we structure this in an information, sort of information architecture manner?
- [21:58]
D
Right.
- [21:59]
C
How do you want to consume content and engage with others? Who do you want to engage with? How can I best facilitate those kinds of engagements? Right. And, and you'll quickly, you know, come to discover that there should be a channel in our case, you know, there should be a channel for AI and there should be a channel for analytics and then there should be a specific channel for HubSpot and Marketo and Eloqua and all the, you know, Braze and all these software companies. And so the approach to building community hasn't changed too, too much over the last, I don't know, 10 to 15 years or so. And community had its little flare up hot moment about six years ago or so. And I think the investment in a community just needs to be done with great intention. If you can take the time, if you have any inclination to build your own community or you're building one on behalf of your company, take the time to go look up what CMX had popularized. So it's a community for community managers, the meta community. Yeah, it's the meta community. They had popularized a model called Spaces. I still think it's a pretty sound framework and it's an acronym or whatever for effectively what type of community are you going to build? Is it a service, is it a product, is it an advocacy? You know, is it meant to basically be lead gen or brand focused? Is it attached to your brand or not? And, and then don't stray from the decision that you make and lean into it. For us, we, we exist as a tech agnostic, sort of, you know, practitioner community. So a community for professionals, which means that we're not really in service of generating leads for a software company or anything like that. We exist for our members at the end of the day. But I would also exercise a ton of caution if you're thinking about building a community. It's just it needs, I think out of all possible go to market motions, it can be incredibly fruitful, similar to like an SEO play. It's just it takes a long time to see the fruit from the tree and it also takes a lot of effort, a lot of human capital effort to do that. Because suffice it to say, people are connecting to people and you should probably have a person to help them do that. But it's a very worthwhile investment to make. So sorry if that didn't really answer your question. I kind of branched a few places.
- [24:34]
A
I think it's good. I mean, I think you've built something great and definitely look forward to seeing it continue to grow. I mean, Marketing Ops is definitely something that I work in and around pretty much most days. So I think it's great to have a place like that. So, yeah, great job.
- [24:54]
C
Yeah, we're really excited. We hope that soon that question that I posed earlier for all of you to challenge your leadership and board with, we hope that the answer to who's in charge of your go to market tech stack will be somebody they will know. It's someone that came from Marketing Ops and hopefully it's somebody who ended up getting certified through our program. But even without that, I think you're all, if you're in that role or you're interested in it, you have more capabilities than are currently being impressed upon you to go exercise. So we're excited to help hopefully carve a new career path and create a new foundation of leaders for organizations. It'll be fun. That's great.
- [25:39]
A
Well, Mike, always great to talk with you. Thanks again for joining. I got one last question for you before we go. What do you do to stay agile in your role and how do you find a way to do it consistently?
- [25:51]
C
Yeah, what do I do to stay agile? I try to tune in to as much of my broader ecosystem signals as I can. And so I take time to to basically put in big time blocks to do deep work and stay focused while also allowing me the space to choose whether or not I want to go deep on a project or sort of explore what's going on in the world. And so my ability to stay more agile is creating those intentional time blocks to either work or learn from shows like this or some of the
- [26:31]
B
I
- [26:31]
C
like to listen to books, so that's how I tend to try to absorb information. Not the least of which also comes from our actual community members who are talking shop every day, I would imagine.
- [26:44]
A
Yeah, love it.
- [26:45]
C
Kind of help. That's great.
- [26:47]
A
Well again, I'd like to thank Mike Rizzo, Founder and CEO at Marketing Ops for joining the show. You can learn more about Mike and Marketing Ops by following the links in the show notes
- [26:56]
B
this episode is brought to you by Tech Systems. They're leaders in full stack tech services, talent solutions and helping companies put it all in action. You can learn more@techsystems.com that's teksystems.com and thanks again for listening to the Agile Brand podcast. If you like the episode, hit subscribe and drop a rating so others can
- [27:18]
A
find the show too.
- [27:19]
B
And if you're interested in continuing consulting, advisory work, or if you need a speaker for your next event, feel free to reach out. Just visit GregKilstrom.com that's G R E G K I H L S t r o m.com the Agile brand is produced by Missing Link, a Latina owned, strategy driven, creatively fueled production co op. From ideation to creation, they craft human connections through intelligent, engaging and informative content. 10 until next time, stay curious and stay agile.
- [27:52]
C
The Agile Brand.