The Revenue Growth Architects (CS2)

Brian, Gany, and Xander wrap up the New Marketing Automation Platform mini-series with tips and tricks on how to ensure that you have a successful launch!

Learn how to:

• QA your new instance
• Enable your teams on the new systems and processes
• Ensure that your launch is efficient
• Sustain your build and optimize

These tips are very transferrable to launching any project and are sure to be helpful for your next initiative. And if you want to watch the whole series - check out the latest episodes for Parts 1-3.

We all talk about technical debt, but talking about it doesn't make it go away. One of our predictions at the start of 2023 was that technical debt was going to skyrocket this year, and companies would struggle to dig themselves out of that hole come 2024. That's one prediction we hope doesn't come true, but it's going to take more than wishful thinking to make that happen.

On this week's episode of fwd:thinking, CS2's Sr. SFDC Consultant, Grant Booth, joins us to discuss technical debt: why you need to prioritize fixing it and how to get executive buy-in for this critical project.We didn't stop there though.

This episode is a two-parter, and Grant will be back with us next week to dive more into the weeds of what CPU limits are, the types of Salesforce automations and flows and their impact on processing, and what a successful SDFC tech debt project looks like.

After hearing this episode, you'll definitely want to mark your calendar for part two next week.

In our second installment of #MOpsin10, we're covering how to build an analytics framework. We'll take you through what exactly it is, why it is so important and how you can start to build one yourself.

So if you're in MOps and run into issues with out-of-control report requests, spending too much time at the end of the quarter pulling data, or team members skewing data because they're looking at the wrong fields, then you probably need an analytics framework and to listen to this episode.

CS2's founder and CEO, Crissy Saunders, knows a thing or two about building a career in operations, starting an agency, and consulting in general! And over the past few months, she has received dozens of questions on LinkedIn from others looking to do the same. So this week, Xander sat down with Crissy to get her answers to a few of the top ones.

Whether you are looking to make a career change to an operator supporting the revenue team, looking to get into independent consulting or building a small agency, or thinking about how a create a path to ops leadership and beyond - this podcast is filled with great career advice you can take yourself or share with your team.

In this week's episode, we're talking about a topic that every MOps person should care about... data governance! And we're joined by someone who knows all of the ins and outs of data, Asia Corbett, the Director of Revenue Operations at Postal.io.

With a background in economics and finance, Asia gives us her insights on data governance based on years of experience working in the field. Now in revenue operations, she takes us through her best practices for starting a good data foundation, monitoring, and maintaining a healthy database. Most importantly, she talks about why data governance is so important and why you and your company should invest time and resources in it.

So listen in to this week's episode and get ready to feel empowered to take your business's data governance head-on! And don't forget to follow Asia on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/asia-corbett-02433b84/

This week, we're diving into the crucial yet often overlooked area of Opt-In Management and Compliance.

We're breaking down:

• Importance of Opt-In Management and Compliance: The relevance of data privacy regulations, how preventing fines from GDPR non-compliance can provide peace of mind, and how proper opt-in management can enhance email deliverability rates.
• Tips for MOps teams: Establishing strong data governance, understanding different data privacy regulations, and providing a pleasant buyer experience without compromising on privacy.
• GDPR Dashboard: Advice on why and how you should track opt-in regularly through a GDPR dashboard

Whether you're navigating the ever-evolving world of data privacy laws or seeking ways to make your opt-in management process more efficient and less of a headache, this episode is a must-listen.

In this week's fwd:thinking episode we're joined once again by Asia Corbett who took us through the fundamentals of data governance a few months back. This time we're diving deeper into data governance and how to actually operationalize it at your organization.

Asia walks us through her best practices for good data health and framework that she's learned over her years of experience. She also explains just how important data is for your company overall and how it directly affects your revenue won. Be sure to follow Asia on LinkedIn for the latest content on data governance: https://www.linkedin.com/in/asiacorbett/

This week we're joined by long-time storyteller and content marketer, Brianna Valleskey! In this episode, Brianna takes us on a journey to help us understand why an organization's brand recognition is so important especially right now in B2B marketing.

She goes over the benefits of brand awareness, what you can do to build up your brand, and how to measure the impact your content and brand are having on your revenue. Be sure to follow along in this episode for insider tips & tricks for creating and tracking the value of your org's brand and follow Brianna on LinkedIn here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/briannavalleskey/

We are back and talking about MOPs hiring and job searching again. But this time we are chatting with Garrett Erny, Owner and Independent Marketing Ops Consultant of Poppy's Tech Aid who just went through a long job search process after having a history of working in-house and agency.

As you can see, Garrett is now independent, but before going that route Garrett went through a few months process of trying to find a job. So, he shares with us the good, the bad, the ugly, and the surprising things he saw across his search so you hiring managers can take note and you job searchers can be aware.

Garrett also shared his extensive journey into the MOps space with us to where he is now, so if you are looking just for tips and his experience, feel free to fast forward to about 12 minutes in.

If you want to learn more about Garrett feel free to follow him on Linkedin and check out Poppy's Tech Aid.

When you have a potential customer perform a handraiser event, you want to make sure that lead gets to sales as soon as possible, right? In a perfect world, we'd see that lead with a sales rep almost immediately. Unfortunately, we don't live in a sales Utopia and many high-intent leads never even make it to a first meeting. In fact, the number of "ghosted" or no response leads is around 30% according to a new report from Chili Piper.

So in this week's episode, we're joined by Chili Piper's Senior Manager of Field Marketing and Community, Arthur Castillo, who helps us understand why speed to lead times have gone up and how you can help your org improve your lead velocity and overall customer experience. Arthur takes us through why your inbound lead experience can be a make-or-break differentiator against your competition and why traditional qualification and sales handoff needs a facelift. So tune in to this jam-packed episode for more info on why your speed to lead process might be negatively impacting your revenue and what you can do to fix it.

Get ready to get technical with us, because in today's episode of fwd:thinking, we dive into the art of building a successful nurture program within Marketo.

Colton Slauson, Senior Manager of Marketing Operations at CS2, joins us to share some valuable insights on how to approach this project.

Specifically, we'll be talking about how to:

• Start with a solid plan and identify your nurture audiences.
• Overcome common hurdles by creating a repeatable process with set guidelines.
• Prioritize effective reporting to evaluate and optimize your nurture programs.

We’re getting detailed today, so grab a pen and some paper and be prepared to take some notes.

For more information on Nurture Handling, check out Colton's step-by-step Nurture Handler Guide.

It's that time of the year. Time to prep for end of quarter business reviews and annual reviews.

Whether you're attending sales QBR's or prepping your own, there are key insights that you should be preparing to show what marketing is doing well and also highlight areas that can improve.

This week, Crissy, Charlie, and Xander discuss key metrics to highlight, and how to tell stories from your data. They also share insights into which teams you should align with prior to the QBR to make sure that your review is aligned with other revenue teams.

This is a must listen for anyone looking to be a strategic partner with their marketing and sales leadership teams!

With marketers moving toward ungating their content so that they can enable the modern buyer’s journey, many operators are being pressured to still inform the team on how they will report on the effectiveness of the content, even if there is no direct web conversion.

In this episode of The Revenue Growth Architects, our hosts prepare you to tackle this challenge. From categorizing your content types and deciding what actually should be gated (spoiler not all of it), to figuring out the reporting methods for your content’s effectiveness, this episode is no doubt going to clear up some of the confusion for you.

So tune in to get the details on how to make the case you need to get everyone comfortable implementing their more forward-thinking content plan while still getting the insights they need.

Are you struggling to measure the impact of your marketing channels and track the origin of your leads? You're not alone! This week on The Revenue Growth Architects Podcast, Nina Valtcheva, Director of Solutions Architecture at CS2, comes back to chat about how to unravel the mystery of SFDC Campaign/Channel Tracking and help you master the art of attribution.

In this information-packed episode, we'll cover:

• The Where/What Challenge: Discover how to track how someone got to your content and what they converted on, and learn about the different methods to set up your SFDC Campaigns for better attribution
• Setting Up SFDC Campaign Tracking: Dive into the process of creating SFDC Campaign Types, defining UTM values, and setting up automation to streamline your tracking and reporting
• Reporting and Utilizing Data: Explore various reporting techniques and learn how to use the data to optimize your marketing campaigns and boost your ROI, and finally,
• Common pitfalls to be aware of, key monitoring strategies, and the importance of not setting and forgetting your tracking process

This episode is sure to help you take your campaign tracking skills to the next level!

Attribution seems to be a very hot topic right now. But do you know what it really is and, more importantly, how to do it the right way?

This week we have our measurement and analytics expert, Alison Rouse, back to talk all things attribution. We're diving into where things might be going wrong for you (hint: using attribution to prove your pipeline contribution to the C-suite is NOT the way to go about it). We also are going over how to fix these common misconceptions so you don't start "hating" attribution for the wrong reasons.

So listen in to this week's episode and join the attribution conversation!

On this week’s episode of fwd:thinking, we talked about how complicated marketing ops is getting, why you can’t focus on everything, marketing ops anxiety, and ways to audit your skill-set in order to achieve longevity in your career.

In this week's episode, we take a further dive into the MOps roadmap and we get to hear first-hand from Perkuto's Director of Solutions Architecture, Justin Norris!

Justin gives us a behind the scenes look at the steps of building, implementing, and maintaining a roadmap and why we should even care about this. He also gives us some great anecdotes and advice from his years of experience in the world of MOps.

So tune-in to this episode of fwd:thinking to find out more about the ever-important MOps roadmap!

Follow Justin on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/justinnorris/

Recency Bias. Bad data. Form Friction. There are plenty of reasons to question the usefulness of self-reported attribution. In fact, Charlie once believed self-reported attribution to be pointless. So what made him change his tune?

In this episode of The Revenue Growth Architects, we’re reconsidering self-reported attribution to find out what turned Charlie from cynic to supporter. We’ll debunk our previous criticism and discuss why if you're doing great marketing that engages your buyers, they should want to tell you.

Tune into this episode to find out why self-reported attribution may help you fill an important insight gap.

Do you have a marketing ops question you’d like answered? Reach out to us at rga@cs2marketing.com.

Marketing teams are working furiously to fulfill MQL quotas as the end of the year swiftly approaches. But are MQLs the best metric to determine your marketing team’s performance? What other metrics might provide a better indicator of the health of your business and the success of your campaigns?

In this episode of The Revenue Growth Architects, we’re breaking the MQL myth that more MQLs = hitting your revenue goals. We’ve packed this episode with discussions from how demand capture is not brand-building to why some sources like content syndication have such low conversion rates and what you’re better off doing instead. And we’re going deep on why focusing too much on MQLs over other metrics will lead you astray.

Tune in to this episode and find out how to use other funnel metrics that tie directly to opportunities!

Do you have a marketing ops question you’d like answered? Reach out to us at rga@cs2marketing.com.

As the landscape has evolved for marketing ops teams with what tools we use, the problems we solve, and technical solutions we are building, it feels like MOps is starting to closely resemble data engineering, software engineering, web dev, IT, and DevOps.

Because of this, it is becoming increasingly important for MOps folks to understand what is possible and how you can leverage code to develop solutions that are not only innovative but also can help your marketing scale - instead of creating even more technical debt. And our guest Jordan Bergeson, Senior Director of Marketing at Coalesce.io explains on this episode why it matters, shows off some cool uses cases for how it can be used, and talks through ways to get started no matter what comfort level you have with coding now.

This is a great listen for those interested in learning code or who want to spark ideas on what is possible and hire or bring in resources who can code, so I highly recommend giving it a listen, or better yet a watch if you can because we do screen share his use case which you can find documented here.

To learn more about Jordan, follow him on LinkedIn and check out his blog!

Wondering where to start when it comes to ABM Analytics? Well, you're in luck!

In this week's episode, we're talkin' all about ABM analytics- specifically how to operationalize and set up your data and reporting. We're covering target account tracking, engagement, MQAs, and everything in between.

So get your checklist out and take some notes on how to get your ABM analytics off the ground!

This week we are launching the first episode in a new series we're calling REWIND. In this episode, hosts Crissy and Charlie will give their thoughts and comments on a past episode including things that have maybe changed or adding on to advice they gave that they have learned since. After the 10 minutes of going down memory lane, you can listen to the full original recording. On this week's rewind we are going back to “5 Ways to Win Over the CMO” and not a surprise to us but all 5 still remain valid and true but we do have some extra advice to add that we have learned a few years later. We hope you enjoy this oldie but goodie from the archives!

Event-based marketing has drastically changed in the past couple of years, but it may have been the wake-up call that B2B marketers needed. Event expert, Julius Solaris from Hopin, an all-in-one hybrid event platform, joins us to chat through everything a B2B marketer needs to know about operationalizing successful events in 2022.

Julius takes us through the current landscape of B2B marketing events as well as where he sees the industry going. We cover a lot of topics in this episode around events including accessibility and sustainability challenges and solutions, creating value for your attendees in a remote setting where they may feel like their "losing out" on the face to face experience and how marketers can use event data to not only improve engagement but also the content strategy overall. This episode is jam-packed with so many helpful insights so be to take a listen and follow Julius on LinkedIn for more information: https://www.linkedin.com/in/juliussolaris/

What do you do after recording more than 200 episodes of a podcast?

Take a break!

In all seriousness, we have decided to take a quick hiatus from delivering new episodes weekly for a bit while we focus on a fresh new strategy for our content and what we add to this podcast channel.

It’s been a pleasure to deliver valuable insights and actions on go-to-market operations and strategy to you every week (since 2019!). But right now we just feel like it might be time to shake it up a bit.

In the meantime, we will be sharing past recordings we have done for other podcasts that we thought you would love.

Stay tuned for what is next from us and we’d love for you to stay subscribed here to make sure you don’t miss future updates. And we also ask that you follow us on YouTube for any new video content we put out in the meantime.

And if you are a fan and want to send us a special note and inquire on what is next - email us at rga@cs2marketing.com.

"All Models Are Wrong, But Some Are Useful" - British statistician George E. P. Box

We have quoted our good man George so many times on this podcast, and today's episode title is even inspired by it as we talk all about Pipeline Source.

Right now when jobs are on the line or teams are looking to show their impact, it can be very tempting to want to try to use pipeline source to give "credit" as to which team or channel (marketing, sales, partner) drove the opportunity.

Or, even if the intention is to not use pipeline source for credit, some teams are just identifying it in the wrong way.

So on today's podcast we will give you or take in under 30 minutes on:

1. All the reasons why pipeline source can be wrong
2. How to do it right if you still plan to use it
3. And how, even though it can be "wrong", it still can be useful

Take a listen and let us know -- are we wrong or was our advice useful? 😄

In this week's episode, we're joined by a long-time colleague, client, and friend, Sydney Sloan who is the CMO at SalesLoft. Sydney is well-versed in the language of Account-based Marketing, Sales Enablement, and Revenue Operations. So in our discussion today, we're going over how you can bring all of those factors together to create the most efficient and effective tech stack for your sales and marketing team and how to orchestrate their efforts.

We're covering how to roles of marketing ops and sales have changed in the past couple of years, where those roles have overlapped, and which teams should own certain types of tools. We'll also discuss everything surrounding your Sales Enablement Platform; what teams should own the strategy, who manages the platform, and what types of data you should be reporting on. Tune in to this jam-packed episode if you're ready to take your tech stack to the next level and be sure to follow Sydney on LinkedIn for more awesome tips and best practices: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sydsloan/

You may have heard about a center of excellence or operational excellence but do you know what it is? And do you know the value or how to architect for operational excellence at your org?

On this week's episode we sit down with Senior Director of Demand Marketing and Operational Excellence at Actian who takes us through what operational excellence is to her and how she has architected and positioned their people, process, and technology in a way that supports the marketing and sales teams to be aligned and reach their goals.

This is a must listen and I think you will have some laughs as well!

To connect with Kimmah, please connect with her on LinkedIn.

CS2'S Guide to Revenue Planning

It's the end of year and many revenue teams are looking to do their revenue planning and tapping operators to help work with finance to do so.

However, from our experience, companies are often missing the proper data or practices in order to revenue plan with success.

So want to be the hero and lead this important project successfully? We got you!

On the podcast this week, new host Xander Broeffle interviews Alison Rouse, CS2's VP of Solution Architecture and Analytics as she walks through CS2's guide to revenue planning.

They both dive into:

• Tops-down versus Bottoms-up data modeling
• The risks when only utilizing one of these models
• Foundational data points needed for both models
• How goals should be communicated and revisited by the revenue team
• And how to approach next year's planning if you already do have a strong data foundation

Get ready to take some serious notes!

In this week's episode we're helping you, the MOps extraordinaires, communicate with your teams better! We're going through the top four things you should be relaying to the revenue team to make your (and their) life easier.

We dive into topics like project timeline expectation, technical debt, tool efficiency, and attribution misunderstandings.

These are some great topics to start educating your revenue team on to prevent some common misconceptions and frustrations.

Measuring ROI on marketing is probably one of the trickiest things to do for operators and analysts.

There are so many things to consider from your campaign structure, how you track cost, and even what tools to use.

But this week, our very own VP of Solutions Architecture and Analytics Alison Rouse will dive into another meaty topic for analytics - and that is yup, marketing ROI!

On the podcast we will dive into:

• The definition of ROI and the different types you can measure for marketing
• What pitfalls or issues you can face when trying to track ROI
• What methods we see work best across clients and an overview on a few tools to use
• And, what you really to also track first before even trying to measure marketing ROI to tell the full story

If you loved our attribution episodes on the pod - you will love this one! Whether you are a CMO trying to understand marketing ROI, or an analyst tackling it yourself, it will be super helpful.

To connect with Alison and ask any follow-up questions for her, connect with her on LinkedIn.

Your website’s chatbot just might be one of your largest MarTech expenses. And this begs the question: Is it worth it?

Maybe you’d be better off with a simple (and cheaper) form. How likely is it that you’ll be able to get your sales team fully enabled in chat anyway? Would those meetings with prospects come through even without a chatbot pinging them from their browser?

In this episode of The Revenue Growth Architects, we’re taking a critical look at website chat tools, including how they’ve evolved and how we think about using them in marketing operations today.

So tune in to find out if website chat tools are right for your business or a drain on your MarTech budget.

Key Takeaways:

• The landscape of chat tools has evolved, with several options available on the market.
• While chatbots offer enticing levels of automation, getting the most out of them requires a significant amount of setup and maintenance.
• Focusing on creating a user-friendly website and exploring other avenues like online communities might be a better way to engage with prospects.
• There’s a strong case to be made for using chat tools for customer support and a product-led motion.
• The human touch is crucial when it comes to providing the best experience for your prospects.

Jump into the conversation:

[00:03:41] Chatbots are time-consuming compared to live chat.

[00:14:51] Are chatbot getting you more meetings or are they redundant?

[00:23:04] How to evaluate different chat tools based on their effectiveness.

[00:24:51] When determining the best char solution, consider simplicity.

We're back with Charlie, Crissy, and Xander discussing some of the biggest questions in B2B SaaS GTM.

00:00 Intro

00:27 Discussion on the newest outbound tools (e.g. Clay)

18:54 What people get wrong with ABM and how we define ABM vs. Account-Based Operations

37:49 Our new Go-To-Market Operations Framework

Hear more from us:

Subscribe to us on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCN-x5u0G03LWmU0Ds_4zR8w

Subscribe to our newsletter here: https://www.cs2marketing.com/revenue-growth-architects#subscribe-to-newsletter

Follow Crissy on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/crveteresaunders/

Follow Charlie on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/charliesaunders/

Follow Xander on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/xanderbroeffle/

Every B2B company has a funnel tracking process. And quite often, that process is seriously limited or broken.

Leads get lost, data is inaccurate, and businesses struggle to produce insights and accurate reporting.

I've seen this first hand, and so has this week's guest - Charlie Saunders. We've both spent years as consultants fixing broken funnels.

In this episode, we talk about the many reasons funnel tracking goes wrong and dive deep into the architecture of the scalable solution Charlie's team has developed.

Check out more episodes of Justin's podcast here: https://revops.fm/

If you want to hear more from us:

Subscribe to us on Youtube!

Subscribe to our newsletter here: https://www.cs2marketing.com/revenue-growth-architects#subscribe-to-newsletter

Follow Crissy on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/crveteresaunders/

Follow Charlie on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/charliesaunders/

Follow Xanderon LinkedIn: lhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/xanderbroeffle/

In this week's podcast, long-time marketer Chantelle Marcelle joins us to chat about content marketing and strategies. We also take a deep dive into why you should be building buyer communities in B2B marketing and how you can do it right.

Chantelle's marketing background started in journalism so she walks us through the importance of storytelling in your content marketing and how you can use that as an advantage across your brand. We also discuss strategies to operationalize buyer communities and then how to take data from those cohorts and show its impact as a marketing tactic to executives.

Tune into this episode to help elevate your brand through your content and communities and be sure to follow Chantelle on LinkedIn and check out her website for more tips and advice.

When trying to deliver features or projects that deliver on your business objectives, it can be hard to do this in a SILO. One way to tackle this is with team coalitions. This week on #Mopsin10 we're diving into team coalitions; what they are, why they're important, and how to start them to deliver on your key outcomes for the revenue team. So listen in to this episode to learn our secret sauce to getting measurable results from your MOps work.

Has your tech stack grown out of your control? Or did you inherit one that was already a mess? Then this week's episode is for you!

We're heading to the fwd:thinking laboratory to dissect the ominous Frankenstack. We'll cover how to identify if you have one (spoiler: you probably do), how to take back control, and prevent it from ever happening again!

So tune in to this week to get your stack back on track!

This week's episode is a great level-set for anyone who owns, inherited or may be implementing a new sales engagement platform (ie SalesLoft or Outreach) in their business. We're going to walk you through 5 best practices we've learned over the years about what to do when adding this type of solution to your tech stack.

We're covering a lot of great info including, platform ownership, email deliverability/opt-in protocol and lead stage mapping tips. So if you want to make sure you don't make some commonly made mistakes with your sales engagement platform, then be sure to check out this episode!

On this week’s episode, we are excited to have Darrell Alfonso joining us. We dive into Darrell’s transition from small-scale companies to working for Amazon, the importance of prioritizing, and tons of valuable advice for the MOps community. Tune in!

Alignment across sales operations and marketing operations is crucial to company growth and efficiency. They are the life line to supporting the revenue function. And whether you are under one team in RevOps or not, you really can have strong alignment and have a "power partnership."

Case in point: Veronica Lazarovici, Marketing Ops Lead and Doris Hu, Director of Sales Ops at Alma who were our guest speakers this week. Once you take a listen you will be so inspired by the incredible alignment and relationship they have between their teams - and even with a 6-hour time different between them!

Both Veronica and Doris dive into the benefits of their partnership, what impacts on the business there can be without the strong partnership in place, how they both manage their requests processes and stay aligned on their roadmap, their approach to aligning teams to "tech" and not "processes" and then how they support the whole revenue team with reporting and training and enablement.

Get your paper out because you will be wanting to take notes! And also, if you loved this - share it with your Mops or Sops counterparts!

Feel free to connect with Veronica here and Doris here on LinkedIn to hear more from them!

Change - some of us love it, some of us hate it. But no matter which side of the fence you fall on, change is inevitable, especially in business.

What's the best way to get buy-in from your team and make the change stick?

CS2's Senior Director of Marketing Operations, Joy Martinez, joins us on the fwd:thinking podcast again this week. She breaks down the do's and don'ts of introducing change in your organization, through these three key steps:

• Building great documentation
• Empowering your team through training
• And enabling them to be successful through open lines of communication

Whether you're a C-level exec, or just starting out in your marketing career, Joy's advice applies to you to get the most out of your next process improvement.

Step into your buyer's shoes on this week's episode as Xander Broeffle and Crissy Saunders explore the power of "secret shopping" your company's buyer journey. In Crissy's first guest episode since her maternity leave, she dives into why you need to regularly test out your buyer journey yourself to give you and the revenue team guidance on how to optimize and improve it.

In this episode, you will learn:

• Why to "Secret Shop": Discover the friction points in your buyer journey and understand the gravity of lost business due to poor follow-up or an overly complex journey.
• How to actually do it: Learn Crissy's tips for how to actually secret shop your buyer journey technically, what to look out for, and the importance of bringing in your key stakeholders who own parts of the buyer journey on this activity.
• How to turn your insights into action: Learn how you can use your findings to drive action and improvements to the buyer journey.

Tune in and let's get shopping! 😁

On this week’s episode of fwd:thinking, we are delighted to have a very special guest, Leah Allen, VP of Marketing at ModelN. We dive into the world of reporting and the metrics that you should (really) care about. Tune in!

In this week's episode, we've created a visual aid to help you understand how well your business' marketing/revenue strategy aligns with your ability to execute it through operations.

The Magic-al Operations Quadrant is a great tool to help you determine where your team may need to make changes in strategy, technology, or staff in order to be what we call a "Market Winner."

This episode is pretty visual so be sure to check it out on our site here: https://www.cs2marketing.com/fwd-video-podcast/the-magical-operations-quadrant

Documentation is the silent hero of operations, particularly when it’s done well. Yet many operators skip this step altogether.

In this episode of The Revenue Growth Architects, we’re sharing our top 3 tips for creating documentation so that you don’t skip it and people will actually use it!

We’ll discuss why documentation and project management are different, why your documentation practice should start with a good old-fashioned document, and how best to organize your various documentation so that someone looking for it can find it and make sense of it.

Whether you’re a full-on documentation pro or just beginning to appreciate the satisfaction that one can derive from proper documentation, we’ve got tips to help you up-level your Rev Ops documentation processes in this episode.

Do you have a marketing ops question you’d like answered? Reach out to us at rga@cs2marketing.com.

Happy New Year! In this week's episode, we discuss the Golden Rule of Marketing: Market to others as you would market to yourself and how developing empathy for your prospect can be the key to better strategic selling and marketing.

We walk you through a simple, yet effective exercise to get you and your team to start thinking in this way.

So sit down, grab a pencil & paper, and tune into fwd:thinking to improve your 2021 marketing strategy and really start connecting with your customers!

Are you ready to take your HubSpot game to the next level? This week on the Revenue Growth Architects Podcast, Gany Rodriguez joins to dive into how to maximise your use of HubSpot.

Get ready for a whirlwind tour of HubSpot best practices as we break down:

• Strategy: Learn how to approach your go-to-market process, whether or not to adopt HubSpot's built-in features or customize them to fit your own, and the ins and outs of opt-in/opt-out strategies and global forms
• Operations: Discover the secrets of operationalizing global forms, templatizing workflows, and managing marketing vs. non-marketing contacts
• Analytics: Uncover the power of HubSpot's campaign tracking and reporting features, including form submissions, workflow details and audits, and the versatile journey report builder

Whether you're a HubSpot novice or a seasoned pro, this episode is packed with tips and tricks to help you optimize your enterprise experience with this powerful marketing tool.

Making the case for budget and resources for RevOps or MOps is..... tough. Especially when you are trying to get the buy-in from execs like your CMO or CEO.

But why is it so difficult?

What are the negatives impacts that they care most about that are tied to being under-resourced?

What can you do to make it so you can get enough resources?

What types of resources or support should you be looking for?

Well, we cover all over that and more in today's episode.

Join Xander, Director of MOps from CS2 as he takes over as host for the first time and see what him and Crissy and Charlie have to say on the topic.

This week we have a new REWIND episode where Crissy and Charlie (CS2) will give their thoughts and comments on a past episode including things that have maybe changed or adding on to advice they gave that they have learned since. After the 10 minutes of going down memory lane, you can listen to the full original recording of “7 Essential Steps To Elevate Your Career In Marketing Ops”. Enjoy!

00:00 Intro

01:16 Funnel Attribution vs. Multi-touch Attribution

11:32 How to avoid the credit game drama between marketing and sales

17:59 The different biases

20:49 The data structure needed for each type

30:34 Which type to start with

34:33 Can you use multi-touch attribution data for funnel metrics reporting?

Hear more from us:

Subscribe to us on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCN-x5u0G03LWmU0Ds_4zR8w

Subscribe to our newsletter here: https://www.cs2marketing.com/revenue-growth-architects#subscribe-to-newsletter

Follow Crissy on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/crveteresaunders/

Follow Charlie on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/charliesaunders/

Follow Xander on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/xanderbroeffle/

When your company is focused on revenue growth, one of the most impactful things the whole team can do is approach working together like a unified team.

Not just separate teams aligned to each other, but one team that is unified on goals, strategy, and thinking about the experience for the prospect and customer through their whole journey.

On this week's episode, we have Chief Growth Officer at Klearly, Mary Blanks on to talk about why revenue growth is team sport, how approaching it that way can have some amazing beneficial impacts on customer journey and pipeline creation, and what it takes to move the revenue team to this way of working by managing organizational change effectively.

To connect with Mary, check her out on LinkedIn and make sure to follow Klearly, as they are about to also launch their very first podcast all around revenue growth best practices.

In some ways, helping a company go through a merger or acquisition is like a right of passage for a marketing ops professional. We know many folks or consultants who have helped support this large undertaking. But how do you do it well? How do you start the process? What challenges might you run into?

This week, Jessica Meyers, Director of Marketing Ops and Technology at Tebra (previously PatientPop) takes us through her strategies and experience she had had while tackling a merger at her current org.

Whether you are going through a merger or acquisition or not, there is some great advice on how to tackle the project, but also how to maintain a tech stack and database that is ready if a merger or acquisition does present itself.

To learn more from Jessica, feel free to connect with her on LinkedIn.

What’s the best marketing automation platform? It wasn’t that long ago that when clients were looking for an enterprise grade solution they did not consider Hubspot. At CS2, for example, migrating clients from Hubspot to Marketo was commonplace.

It seems the times are changing and Hubspot has stepped up to the plate to become a more robust platform that fit’s a company’s needs even as businesses grow beyond those early start-up stages. Particularly in the last year, there’s less and less of a reason to move off of Hubspot.

In this episode of The Revenue Growth Architects, we ask if Hubspot is now positioned to unseat Marketo as the top marketing automation platform. To add fuel to the fire, we’ll discuss how Hubspot CRM is giving Salesforce a run for its money as well.

Tune in for a thorough discussion on Hubspot that might make you rethink your preferred marketing automation platform.

Do you have a marketing ops question you’d like answered? Reach out to us at rga@cs2marketing.com.

Is your campaign operations process a little chaotic? Do you want to scale up your campaigns without adding stress? In this week's episode of The Revenue Growth Architects, Jerel Allen and Ruben Rangel, two of CS2's top Campaign Ops experts, sit down to discuss the do's and don'ts of campaign operations that will help you scale your campaigns like never before.

In this episode, we dive into the key components of a best-in-class Campaign Ops process, covering aspects like:

• The importance of having a project management tool and a well-defined request process, and the necessity of training, enablement, documentation, and optimized MAP assets

• The necessity to have clear roles and responsibilities, reporting, and regular meetings or check-ins

• The essential technical and soft skills you need to own and manage your COps processes, and

• Some of the most common challenges faced in developing and maintaining a robust Campaign Ops process.

Don't miss this opportunity to learn from the pros and discover how you can avoid common pitfalls to revolutionize your campaign operations.

Over the last year an interesting debate has heated up around Marketing Automation Platforms (MAPs like Marketo, Hubspot, Pardot) and if they are necessary in this modern era of martech.

The argument against MAPs is there are new more focused best in breed tools (like iPaaS, data warehouses, data automation, more advanced B2C emailing tools) that when architected together are more powerful than a jack of all trades, master of none MAP.

So in this episode of The Revenue Growth Architects, we’ll examine the aspects you should consider when deciding if this is the right strategy for you.

We will discuss pricing, capabilities, scalability, and complexity. We’ll compare marketing automation platforms to point solutions. And how you can perform an audit to see if what you’re paying for is the best tool for the job.

Tune in to find out if a marketing automation platform makes sense in 2023, and which of the available options make the most sense for your marketing ops team.

Do you have a marketing ops question you’d like answered? Reach out to us at rga@cs2marketing.com.

Crissy sat down with Finn on The Founder-Led Marketing Show and had a wide-ranging conversation on:

- How to Build a GTM Ops Team

- How to Track a Buyer Funnel

- How to Build Unified Reporting

- And lots more!

Hear more from us:

Subscribe to us on Youtube https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCN-x5u0G03LWmU0Ds_4zR8w

Subscribe to our newsletter here: https://www.cs2marketing.com/revenue-growth-architects#subscribe-to-newsletter

Follow Crissy on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/crveteresaunders/

Follow Charlie on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/charliesaunders/

Follow Xander on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/xanderbroeffle/

In this episode of Revenue Growth Architects, Matt Cronk, Director of Marketing Operations at CS2, joins Xander to discuss why it's necessary to "tier" your MQLs and how it can drastically improve both your lead follow-up and improve the buyer experience.

In this episode, we cover:

• How you should treat your 'Handraiser' or 'Hot' leads compared to your 'Warm' leads to optimize both of their journeys.
• How lumping all MQLs together can skew your analytics and risk misguiding your optimization efforts.
• Some handy tips on separating online and offline hot leads, activating this in your systems, and effectively reporting on the data to get better insight into the performance of your different types of MQLs.

If you're aiming to bring more precision to your marketing efforts, improve lead handling, and ultimately drive more revenue, this episode is your essential guide.

Welcome back to another episode of our series, #MOpsin10! This week, we're breaking down our best tips to help you improve your Speed to Lead - the process of an inbound lead getting followed up with and connected to a salesperson.

In this mini-episode, we'll give you action items you can take back to your own organization that will help you gain an edge over your competitors. This is a super important topic for MOps pros, so be sure to take notes as we cover enrichment, lead routing, automation, and more in just 10 minutes!

If you missed last week's episode - Technical Debt to Technical Equity Part 1 - you're going to want to give that a listen first.

This week we're bringing you part two, featuring CS2's Senior Salesforce Consultant, Grant Booth, for the second week in a row. We're covering topics including:

• Apex CPU Limits - what it is and why it matters
• Why you should move to flows
• How to build and run a tech debt project

Disclosure: we recommend checking this episode out on our YouTube channel or our website, cs2marketing.com, because Grant shares his screen as he walks through some great examples of salesforce automation, workflow rules, process builders, and running tests and analyses.

If you're deep in technical debt, and are desperate to reach technical equity, this episode will help.

Building a new Marketing Automation Instance from scratch is the perfect time to get things right and set yourself up for success. In this week's episode of the podcast, and 3rd installment of the "New MAP" series, Gany and Brian share best practices around setting up your essential operational programs for efficient processing. They also share how you can set up your instance with best practice templates that align with your Center of Excellence.

This episode is an interesting one folks! Listen in and hear Xander, Crissy, and Charlie debate on the best way to operationalize account stages for ABM.

Defining the stages for a person funnel is easy. We have that nailed down. But nailing down the BEST way to handle account stages is still a new area where we are evolving our thinking on how to advise on the best way to set it up for most organizations. To date its been more bespoke based on the client and their goals.

During our debate, we tackle everything from what the account stages SHOULD be, how your person funnel can play a role in setting them up, why ABM tool stages are not the same as account stages, and what metrics your leadership actually wants to see and how the account stages and potential account status or tier can help support that as well.

So tune in for an episode and see us battle-test our thoughts and see if it might change the way you think on account stages as well!

Do you have a marketing ops question you’d like answered? Reach out to us at rga@cs2marketing.com.

On this week's episode, we welcome one of our favorite guests - Alison Rouse, Chief Architect and Analyst at CS2, to talk about why using a custom object to track your funnel is our preferred method.

Historically marketers have been stuck with some less-than-ideal solutions to track their funnel properly. Whether it's only on the lead/contact object and losing out on multi-journeys and causing inaccurate data, or having to invest money into solutions that are separate from your CRM, trying to track the funnel has always felt "hard."

Well - Alison has a solution that she has developed for our clients that uses an SFDC custom object and it has made us all true believers.

So sit down and hear why you need to think about adopting this approach and the benefits you will see from using it! And if you are interested after the show to learn more, reach out to us on our website www.cs2marketing.com.

In this week's episode we're joined by Francis Brero who is the Co-founder and CPO at MadKudu, where they are working to help B2B companies use predictive modeling and AI to improve their operations and drive more revenue.

Francis takes us through all of the facets on today's AI in marketing. We chat about how to get your team onboard and comfortable with AI, where it can be the most (and least) useful in your business and how it can even help improve your customer experience.

So if you've ever been interested in learning more about artificial intelligence and data science in B2B marketing, this is definitely the episode for you! And be sure to sync up with Francis on LinkedIn or check out MadKudu here.

Does your team have a clear insight into the customer journey, especially when it comes to email? Is your customer (potential and current) experience aligned to what their expectations are? Do you have clear definitions for when each department in the revenue team interacts with them?

If you answered no to any of these questions, you might want to check out this week's episode!

This week we are discussing customer journey ownership, mapping and documenting your customer journey, how to audit/implement necessary changes, and everything in between! So listen in to get a head start on improving your customer's experience before it turns into chaos.

On this week’s episode of fwd:thinking, we talk about the uniqueness of MOps stress, tips on how to deal with it, and share real-life examples.

So many in MOps are tired and burnt out but it doesn't have to be that way. Tune in, reduce your stress, and do your best MOps work.

Are you struggling to understand the difference between funnel metrics and MT attribution? Have we got an episode for you! Special guest Alison Rouse joins the Revenue Growth Architects to set the record straight and help you learn about the challenges of analyzing data, the importance of strategic thinking, and the tools that can provide better ROI and data analysis.

Your budget just got cut and you are on a hiring freeze, but your marketing team's goals stayed the same. How do you deal? Where should you make the sacrifices and what should you stay invested in? And how can you articulate to finance why you actually need more to deliver on those goals?

On this week's episode, we have a MarTech veteran and now VP of Marketing at Metadata.io, Jason Widup on to discuss all about what to do when your budget is cut and all the ways he handled it himself in his current role during this "slow down" and in past roles.

We answer all of those burning questions above and more so this is a great one not only for MOps but anyone in marketing.

To learn more about Metadata.io go to their website here or follow them on LinkedIn. And to continue the conversation with him, connect with Jason on LinkedIn here.

So many times we create process with our internal users in mind without really thinking about the impact on our end users. And now more than ever when our prospects are taking on the buyer journey on their own and really value their privacy, it is time we took a difference look at how we create and operationalize that customer experience with that in mind.

On this week's episode, our very own Director of MOps, Xander Broeffle takes us through why this is important and how you and your marketing team can really change their mindset when operationalizing projects like an opt-in strategy or preference center to name a few and all while thinking about how to respect the end user's privacy and match your marketing to their expectations.

After listening to this, you will want to hear more tips from Xander, so follow him here on LinkedIn!

Do you know what technical debt is? Though the term has been widely used across product engineering teams, technical debt describes what results when development teams take actions to expedite the delivery of a piece of functionality or a project which later needs to be refactored. Does this sound familiar to you?

Now that marketers are dealing with systems that are getting more dated and with more hands and tech touching them, we are seeing tech debt on the rise. And on top of it, timelines and expectations to deliver projects are not changing, so many teams are just adding to the problem.

We were lucky to have Lindsay Rothlisberger, Head of MOps and Email at Zapier join us on this episode to discuss all things tech debt and why it's hindering your marketing. We cover signs that show you may have a lot of tech debt, reasons why operators and marketers need to care, ways to prevent or combat tech debt, and what some folks are doing wrong when trying to eliminate it.

If you enjoyed hearing from Lindsay and want to hear more from her, connect with her on LinkedIn here.

Coaching is a tool that typically is only available for executive and on top of that is usually only used as a tool to help someone who is underperforming or a situation that needs remediation. But it shouldn't be this way and coaching can actually be an amazing tool for executors and managers in their roles so they can be productive and happy.

On today's episode we sit down with Hana Jacover, who is the owner and Chief Hyper Officer at Hype House Consulting. Hana has a long history of working at B2B tech agencies or in house in demand gen so not only does she empathize with all of us marketers, because she was us, but she is now coaching high performers in our space who are looking for the tools and advice to be happier and more fulfilled in their jobs.

During the episode, Hana gives us some amazing tips and exercises we can all do to better at self advocacy, setting boundaries, prioritizing, and being more productive. She also shares some of her top applications and books to help you as well.

If you are thinking this podcast has nothing to do with doing your job in marketing better - think again. It might be the most important advice.

To connect with Hana Jacover feel free to connect with her on LinkedIn or follow her @thehypemama on TikTok!

Inheriting a new instance can be tricky. You need to understand the context around how things were built, align with the marketing strategy, and identify the business goals related to your marketing automation platform.

Once you've uncovered the why, you need to focus on uncovering the "who". Who are your key stakeholders? Who's in charge of using the system, and what are team expectations? And then finally, focus on the "how". How do you get the information you need out of a new instance? What's the first thing you tackle?

On this week's episode of the fwd:thinking podcast, CS2's Senior Manager of Marketing Operations, Chelsea Byron, breaks down the do's and don'ts of inheriting a new instance, and provides several key takeaways.

If you or your company is in the middle of this process, you'll definitely want to tune in.

Welcome to another insightful episode of the Revenue Growth Architects podcast, where we untangle the complex world of marketing operations. Today, we're joined by Grant Booth, a seasoned Salesforce admin with a passion for clean data. Buckle up for an intriguing ride into the depths of Data Normalization, and learn how you can save yourself hours and headaches down the road.

In this episode, we're demystifying:

• The Basics: What is Data Normalization, really? Often referred to as data cleaning, we'll discuss its role in simplifying complex data and eliminating redundancy, ensuring you're not slowing down your processes with countless redundant values.
• The Why: Why should you care about Data Normalization? We highlight its importance in facilitating easy and reliable reporting, fostering standardized data, and contributing to simplified automation downstream. We'll discuss why minimalism is key in retrieving and grouping particular datasets.
• The How: How can you do Data Normalization efficiently? We'll explore strategies for future-proofing your data structure, determining the 'correct values', and how to categorize for simplicity. Most importantly, we will share detailed steps you can do to leverage CSV supported automation out of both Salesforce or Marketo to make this scalable and easy to maintain.

We're not about blocking data - we're here to transform it. We want to flip the script on the old adage, "Garbage In, Garbage Out" and make your marketing ops work smarter, not harder. And at the end of the day, it all comes down to your ABC's - Always Be CSV-ing.

00:00 Introduction

01:01 Is Attribution data divisive? Is it the data's fault or is it a people problem?

21:26 GTM or GTFO: reacting to a video on measurement

31:18 What term should we use: funnel, lifecycle, pipeline or something else?

Hear more from us:

Subscribe to us on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCN-x5u0G03LWmU0Ds_4zR8w

Subscribe to our newsletter here: https://www.cs2marketing.com/revenue-growth-architects#subscribe-to-newsletter

Follow Crissy on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/crveteresaunders/

Follow Charlie on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/charliesaunders/

Follow Xander on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/xanderbroeffle/

Charlie joins the RevOps Lab podcast to talk about tracking funnel metrics across the entire marketing and sales funnel.

What you’ll learn in this episode:

- How a CRM can help you with tracking and if it is the only source of truth

- Which potholes to avoid

- How the reporting is done with a custom object

https://www.linkedin.com/in/charliesaunders/

RevOps Letter: https://www.getweflow.com/revopsletter

Janis on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/philippstelzer/

Philipp on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/janiszech/

Weflow: https://www.getweflow.com/

Third-party intent data is a buzz-worthy topic in B2B marketing and sales, but is it useful intelligence or so much snake oil? In this episode of The Revenue Growth Architects, we’re sifting through an industry report and our own anecdotes to think critically about third-party intent data.

Gain insight into the challenges of using third-party intent data effectively, learn the results of a revealing MIT research report that may shed some light on the subject, and find out what transformed our initial excitement into skepticism.

Tune in for this investigation on third-party intent data to understand if it’s a useful tool in your operations tool kit or a data source with a lot of drawbacks.

Read the MIT report referenced in this episode: "Is first- or third-party audience data more effective for reaching the ‘right’ customers? The case of IT decision-makers".

Do you have a marketing ops question you’d like answered? Reach out to us at rga@cs2marketing.com.

When it comes to building or adding to a tech stack, the "less is more" approach is typically our go-to response for clients but, of course, what is more important than size is how the tech is actually used and if it really supports the process and objectives for the teams. However, due to some great marketing and overly excited team members, sometimes the original need for that new addition gets lost along the way. In this week's episode, Mollie Bodensteiner, Director of RevOps at Syncari, takes us through how operations teams can really build efficient tech stacks focused on their organization's people and processes and how to avoid the "Shiny Objects" that can lead them astray.

Mollie's years of experience in RevOps have helped her understand that technology is never the solution by itself, it is only as good as the processes it supports and the people who execute them. So be sure to tune in to this episode to learn why focusing on people and process first can help your tech stack stay lean and efficient and how to best manage and implement new tech in your org. And be sure to follow Mollie on LinkedIn for more great insights: https://www.linkedin.com/in/molliebodensteiner/

Over the last year, there has been an over-reliance on using email as a channel from budget-starved marketers because it’s “free” and is the quickest way to get in front of potential buyers.

But what are the hidden costs of bad email practices? Are buyers numb to email since it’s so oversaturated? And are you hurting your brand and deliverability more than the small returns you get from your “spray-and-pray” tactics?

In this episode of The Revenue Growth Architects, we’re rethinking B2B email strategy as the world heads into 2024 and how to adjust your tactics and engagement tracking knowing email is much harder to master and also with new guidelines from Yahoo and Gmail coming in February 2024 for bulk email senders so they can ensure their messages are getting delivered.

Tune in for an episode filled with tips on how to get the whole revenue team to improve how they approach email sending and ensure you start to see more success with it in the next year.

Do you have a marketing ops question you’d like answered? Reach out to us at rga@cs2marketing.com.

Product-Led Growth is all the rage right now and has infiltrated it's way into B2B SaaS and many sales-led first companies are dipping their toes on the PLG waters and deciding to launch this new strategy.

The only problem?

Companies are underestimating all the changes and things you need to do strategically and operationally in order to make it work. And you can't just apply your same sales-led processes, team, or data structure to it and assume it will work.

So what are the most common mistakes we see sales-led first companies do?

Listen in to hear from Xander, Crissy, and Charlie all the things to avoid so we can't tell you we told you so ; )

In this episode, Xander is joined by CS2's Director of Solutions Architecture, Nina Valtcheva to talk about an essential need for your business, data enrichment.

If you can optimize your enrichment process, you'll improve your database's health, completeness, and accuracy - a win for both marketing AND sales teams!

Join us as we break down:

• What is data enrichment and why is it useful
• How to build a business case if you don't already have a data enrichment tool
• What to do (and not do) when setting up a data enrichment tool, and
• How to measure the impact data enrichment has on your business

At CS2, we're all about working smarter, not harder. Enrichment is one way you can improve the quality of your data and make it easier on your sales and marketing teams to connect with your target market.

Are you struggling to keep up with 'industry' benchmarks? Do you even know what yours are? Do you think they're useful? Well, we think they're a bit pointless and in this week's episode, we're discussing why we think so.

We get asked this question A LOT- specifically, anything around funnel reporting. So in this podcast, we'll go over why we don't find industry funnel benchmarks helpful and why you should actually be focusing on improving your marketing overall.

How well are you tracking your SLAs? And perhaps more importantly, how many of them are you tracking? Measuring your speed to lead is all well and good, but focusing on it exclusively doesn’t solve all your funnel velocity issues.

In this episode of The Revenue Growth Architects, we’ll examine the other SLAs you should be measuring to have a holistic view of how prospects are moving through your funnel. How long has it been since the last touch? How long are you letting meetings sit before they turn into an opportunity? How long are opportunities in flight before they close? We’ll touch on all of these and more.

Tune in to find out how we’re thinking about SLA management and how aligning on SLAs with your SDR, Sales, and Demand teams will help you improve funnel velocity.

Do you have a marketing ops question you’d like answered? Reach out to us at rga@cs2marketing.com.

If you have a small marketing operations team supporting a marketing team creating a lot of campaigns, you might be interested or even have a decentralized campaign operations model where marketers can create campaigns and send emails themselves.

This can be great for giving your team more time to be strategic on other projects. But how do you do it well? What processes and documentation need to be put in place? And what happens when your marketing scales so fast, the decentralized model starts to show some signs that it is not working anymore?

On this week's podcast we will dive into all of that with two incredible women marketing operators, Amy Goldfine, Head of Marketing Ops and Geraldine Gudino Garcia, Marketing Operations Manager at Iterable.

Both Amy and Geraldine have had experience with adding processes and enabling the decentralized model at their organization and share their experience and tips with us all. And, (SPOILER ALERT) they also go into why they are planning a to change to a new model this year.

This episode is so informative and jam packed with great advice and things to consider if you have or you are thinking of putting in a decentralized campaign ops model.

To learn more from Amy Goldfine, check her out on LinkedIn or go to her website MarketingOpsAdvice.com and to learn more from Geraldine, you can also connect with her on LinkedIn.

With two hundred episodes officially under our belts, you’d think we’d take a victory lap. Not so! Instead, we’re taking episode 200 as a time for reflection on our marketing ops blunders, gut-wrenching mistakes, and embarrassing moments.

From botched mass email sends to public speaking freeze-ups to Marketo interesting moments gone wrong, are you even doing marketing ops if you haven’t experienced a pulse-quickening mishap from time to time? Tune into this episode to learn from our mistakes and find some commiseration for yours.

Do you have a marketing ops question you’d like answered? Reach out to us at rga@cs2marketing.com.

In this week's #MOpsin10, we're digging into a highly debated topic- the MQL. In this ep, we're contesting the popular opinion that "the MQL is dead" and showing you why they're not pointless, just misunderstood and utilized wrong. We want you to stop the hate for MQLs and instead get back to the true roots of a "Marketing Qualified Lead" and why it was developed in the first place.

By definition, an MQL is a metric showing a lead who has indicated interest through marketing activities so how can that be wrong if you're setting the right standards? Tune into this quick #MOpsin10 to get back to the basics and understand why your MQL hate is misplaced and where you should maybe be putting in the work to make it great again!

Gany and Brian join the podcast this week to continue the New Marketing Automation Platform Series. Here we talk through key admin settings needed for a brand new instance.

Join us as we chat through:

- Domain Registration and Setup

- Dedicated IP Warming

- CRM Sync

- and More!

Whether you're implementing for the first time or auditing an existing platform, this practical episode has a lot of valuable insights for you.

We must stop neglecting soft skills. It is holding us and the entire marketing ops function back.

Soft skills help us navigate work more effectively and in MOps they are just as important to our professional growth as tech skills.

This is why we were really stoked to have an awesome guest on fwd:thinking this week. Our friend, previous client, and Crissy's old boss Kristen Alexander.

Kristin was the global brand marketing leader for Disney, led marketing at Agari and the marketing platform Certain. And now she is the co-founder of Ox, a SaaS platform for training soft skills.

We dive into the world of soft skill development and touch on:

• The three most important soft skills for people in b2b marketing/ops
• Where the biggest gaps are in soft skills
• Why you need to treat soft skills training like working out and other positive habits

If you want to move up in our career this one's for you.

These days we are hearing from so many marketing teams that they just need to get some "quick wins." Well, in marketing having a quick win can be tough, but Crissy thinks there is one great source of data to inform some actions to get quick wins. And most of them don't require any spending.

So what is it?

It's your funnel data!

In this episode of Revenue Growth Architects, join Crissy and Xander as they dive into the importance of tracking your funnel properly, and how you can look to your conversion data for insights that you can put into action to improve your pipeline and revenue.

Get ready to hear how you can move away from random acts of marketing to show a win and move toward prioritizing strategic decisions that can really provide fast improvements and results.

Looking for the next promotion in your career? Are you hungry for growth, but not sure if you're interested in managing people? We've got you covered.

On this week's episode, Claire Pockell-Wilson, CS2's Senior Manager of People Operations, joins Xander to discuss how to shift career development talk into a new perspective. We're challenging conventional wisdom, discussing not just career growth, but how you can lead, inspire, and instigate change, regardless of your current job title.

We break down some alternative routes for professional growth that don't have to necessarily involve conventional ladder-climbing, such as:

• Self-Driven Growth: Own your 1-1s, separate career discussions from tactical talks, and identify opportunities for skill enhancement. Make your growth journey your own adventure.
• Fostering a Growth Culture: Understand how clear progression paths, learning and development budgets, and feedback cycles contribute to a robust growth culture. And bonus - learn how to evaluate these aspects right from the first interview.
• Helping Others Level-Up: Dive into the world of delegation, succession planning, and stretch assignments. Discover how promoting others' work and effective escalation can accelerate team growth.

We'll also delve into the skills and challenges that come along with assessing readiness for growth, figuring out what you want out of your career, and the role of skill assessments in shaping career trajectories.

If you've ever wondered "what's next" in your career, this episode is tailored to you.

Ready or not, 2024 is here! What is on your 2024 roadmap? Does it include partner program operations? Or are you tackling your email strategy and deliverability? Or are you prioritizing a new AI project?

In this episode of The Revenue Growth Architects, we’re looking at all these topics and more as we count down the nine marketing ops topics and projects that are top of mind for our clients heading into 2024. Find out how we’re thinking about customer retention, ops team convergence, custom object funnel tracking, and much more for 2024.

Tune into this episode of The Revenue Growth Architects for insight into where companies are and should be investing their resources in operations this year.

Do you have a marketing ops question you’d like answered? Reach out to us at rga@cs2marketing.com.

00:00 Intro

01:35 The biggest UTM mistakes companies make

13:59 What we have learned deploying 15 Lifecycle/funnel custom objects into complex B2B SaaS Salesforce environments

30:38 How to level up how you communicate and interact with leadership if you're in GTM Ops

Hear more from us:

Subscribe to us on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCN-x5u0G03LWmU0Ds_4zR8w

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Follow Crissy on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/crveteresaunders/

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On this week’s episode, we take a look back from the beginning of 2020 and confirm which predictions we got right, which ones we got wrong, and what we learned through a wild year.

We also dive into which predictions will carry on into 2021. Tune in!

2020 proved that having a strong operational foundation was the key to success for the move to relying on all things digital. Companies that had the most strategic advantage to stay agile during an uncertain time were the ones who had their sh*t together operationally.

In this week's episode, we're talking about how having strong operations can be a key differentiator in make your marketing and your company successful and truly be a competitive advantage. Topics we cover include;

-Scaling online programs

- Easily adding tools to a tech stack for supporting digital events and activities

- Implementing reporting structures to determine where to spend money when your budget gets slashed

- How to use (not abuse) email as a channel of communication and as a PART of a marketing strategy

This week we're back to dive into the MOps content you all know and love. In this episode, we're going to give you our top three tips to help you stand out as a forward-thinking MOps leader. Go from good to great in your role with these topics and you will not only elevate your career but you will also learn how to level up your strategic value in the business.

If you're interested in diving into this topic (and many more) then you definitely should check out the OpsStars conference and check out our workshop: Good to Great: Top Three Differentiators for Forward-Thinking MOPs Leaders. Register here: https://events.ops-stars.com/events/details/opsstars-opsstars-presents-opsstars-powering-the-modern-revenue-engine/?code=MAINSITE

Despite the naysayers predicting its untimely demise, lead scoring as a buyer prioritization tool still has a lot of life left. But if you’re going to score your leads, you better do it the right way.

In this episode of The Revenue Growth Architects, we identify three of the most common lead scoring mistakes folks tend to make and (crucially) what you can do to avoid them.

For starters, we’ll look at why lead scoring should actually be viewed more as buyer prioritization and has less to do with just their activity and should be more aligned to the fit and buyer intent. We’ll also answer why having the proper data is key for lead scoring and why you should be iterating and improving your lead scoring efforts over time. Tune into this episode for a primer on lead scoring best practices guaranteed to make this prioritization tool one of the sharpest in your marketing ops arsenal.

Do you have a marketing ops question you’d like answered? Reach out to us at rga@cs2marketing.com.

How’s your handle on the differences between funnel metrics and multi-touch attribution? We see a lot of confused marketers confidently referring to one when they actually mean the other, and we think it’s high time to set the record straight.

In this episode of The Revenue Growth Architects, we’re quickly (in around 10 minutes) demystifying the confusion around funnel metrics and multi-touch attribution by discussing five key differences. These include how funnel metrics and MT attribution are measured, what they’re best at, the biases each introduces into your data, and how difficult each is to track and analyze. Tune into this episode to finally (and completely) understand the differences between funnel metrics and multi-touch attribution.

Do you have a marketing ops question you’d like answered? Reach out to us at rga@cs2marketing.com.

Charlie and Crissy joined Chris Walker on the Revenue Vitals podcast to talk through the intricaies of funnel/pipeline architecture vs. MT attribution.

The conversation spotlights the foundational importance of understanding how funnel tracking sets the stage for a company's go-to-market success, transcending mere marketing analytics.

The discussion provides a nuanced exploration into the stark differences between funnel tracking and multitouch attribution. While both concepts play vital roles within a company's data-driven decision-making processes, they each serve distinct purposes.

Chris, Charlie, and Crissy dissect common missteps companies face, emphasizing the need for a strong, actionable understanding of buyer progression and sales optimization.

Over the past 9 years of running CS2, we have worked on A LOT of funnel projects. So much so that funnel architecture is a key foundational area where we feel like we drive the most impact for clients. Why? Because most of the time organizations are not doing it the right way and we have truly taken the time to figure out the best way to operationalize the funnel and what small things should be avoided for better adoption.

In this episode of The Revenue Growth Architects, we’re taking you through rebuilding the funnel from scratch—and how to do it the right way. We’re getting rid of endless lists of acronyms that require a collection of footnotes to understand. We’re defining conversion points with clearly demonstrated value. And best of all, we’re doing all of it in a way that anyone in your business can easily comprehend.

Tune into this episode to learn how to build a funnel that your revenue team will adopt and your whole organization clearly understands.

Do you have a marketing ops question you’d like answered? Reach out to us at rga@cs2marketing.com.

In this week's #MOpsin10 were digging into our favorite polarizing topic, attribution. In this episode, we're specifically going to be talking about what we see a lot of marketers doing wrong with it comes to attribution.

We'll briefly dive into why the hate on attribution is misplaced, a topic we've covered thoroughly in a past episode. We also cover why attribution shouldn't be used to prove your worth and why you may not be getting the full picture from your attribution model. So tune into the quick episode to get the low down on what you may (or may not) be getting wrong with attribution!

2022 was another unexpected year that we couldn't predict in the B2B SaaS and tech space. During the summer, companies were all in the thick of a talent war and now heading in 2023, many companies have had to do layoffs and are on hiring freezes.

But even though this space feels unpredictable, we wanted to come to the podcast like we have done over the years with our team's predictions for 2023 in marketing, sales and operations and B2B SaaS in general.

Join Xander Broeffle as he sits down with Crissy and Charlie to talk through predictions provided by the team and give our commentary on whether they agree or not.

This episode is always a fun one so listen in and see if any of our predictions match up to yours!

Fwd:thinking is back! And in this week's episode, we're joined by seasoned start-up marketer, Sruthi Kumar who is currently the Director of Demand Generation at TripActions. Sruthi has been immersed in marketing her whole career and has worn dozens of hats. This has helped her develop a wide-ranging skillset and become a marketer with a wide range helping her get closer to her goal of becoming a CMO one day.

In this episode, Sruthi takes us through her field & content marketer journey and deep dives into her best strategies for integrated event campaigns, pre, and post-Covid. She walks us through planning, hosting, and extracting data from the events to best inform business decisions. So listen up for a great jump back into fwd:thinking and be sure to follow Sruthi on LinkedIn.

In this week's episode, we're joined (again) by a very special guest and our VP of Solutions Architecture, Alison Rouse! In a previous episode, we chatted with Alison about attribution and you all loved it. So in this episode, we're diving deep into building an Analytics Framework.

If you've been following our content, you may notice that this is a topic we discussed in our OpsStars workshop. However, we were only able to give a quick introduction to the analytics framework so in this episode we're really digging into why you should build, where to start, and how to successfully execute an analytics framework in your organization.