20 - Where "Leads" Go To Die

The marketing movement by Refine Labs. Welcome to the Marketing Movement podcast. My name is Sydney Warpaul. I'm a VP of Demand here at Refine Labs.

And I'm joined by a very special guest today, Hana Jacober. And she is joining me to talk about a fun topic, all things lead management, lead routing, lead flow, all the good topics under marketing operations. So this is what this episode is going to be focused on. But I'd love Hana for you to introduce yourself and tell listeners a little bit about you.

Yeah, thank you for having me. Hello, everybody. I'm Hana Jacober, as you know. And yeah, I've spent the majority of my career helping BB Tech startups to enterprise or really build their demand gen engines.

And also really kind of like add the partnerships and teams that they need expertise skill wise to do that. Because we know it's one thing to kind of have a strategy. It's another thing to be able to operationalize that strategy. And then the last year I've actually been working at Madhkuru, which series a startup.

And then most recently, I sort of went off on my own and now I'm doing consulting and coaching and lots of different things within that same lens of demand gen. And then definitely marketing operations and lead management. Super exciting new stuff that you have going on. We were just chatting before we jumped on to record.

One thing, me and you actually got introduced and we've met virtually before at a panel that we spoke on with the metadata demand event. So I thought it would be a great topic for you and I to riff on and let's get into it. So to kick us off, I would love your perspective of defining what like lead management is and like the different aspects of it. Because it's a pretty big beast of a category.

I think most people just think about lead flow. But lead management is like a whole wider topic. So I'd love to, from your perspective, get your view and definition on that. Yeah.

Yeah. The way that I like to define lead management is like definitely a huge umbrella. Just like the man. By the way.

So and it is a component of the man generation too. And it is the process used to manage leads from the time a lead is generated all the way through the funnel. And I don't care what your funnel looks like. It does not matter in terms of like visualizing your funnel.

It's all when it comes to lead management, it's what's inside the stages that matter. So think about moving a lead from net new generated to MQL to SQL to close one. Then what happens after customer, you know, likely comes back around. So what does that process look like?

Well, from a process standpoint, you know, who's doing what, who's responsible for which actions and then also from a technical aspect. Because we have more knows how many pieces of technology in our tech stack these days. And in order to make something like this truly work, we need to kind of bring all of our technology together and make sure that we have access to the right data to be able to report all this. Because the whole point of lead management is to build a process that is much more effective at measuring and adding visibility to your funnel.

So that could be translated to a variety of different reports and metrics and things that, you know, your team needs to see as well as leadership needs to see. So being able to really add visibility across your funnel and record on everything within every stage and even the time that it's taking people to move through different stages as well. And so that's a lot of stuff. And so included in that, like you're, you called out kind of lead general lead flow, but also lead scoring, like qualifying leads is a big part of that.

Think of like just triggers that like where elite when a lead moves, like why does it move and that's part of management. So lead scoring like even nurturing service level agreements, lead routing, how your sales structure is set up. So there's lots of different pieces of lead management and also some spillover into like sales operations as well. But that's kind of my my go to definition, if you will.

Yeah, I completely agree. It's like this huge bubble and then there's a whole bunch of like sub components underneath that make up this lead management. A lot of people will say like, Oh, like what's the lead lifecycle or, you know, and lifecycle stages and stuff like that. It's all, you know, under the same umbrella.

One thing that I think marketing teams take like the lead naturally on like lead nurture and getting people into the database and into your marketing automation system. And then once it kind of goes over into the CRM and there's actions on other teams, mainly like sales teams or if you're an SDR BDR team, whoever they report to you, these days, hot topic. And then, you know, then it's going to lead lifecycle is touching various teams. So marketing, sometimes product teams, if you're not a glad, you know, this SDR BDR team, AEs and they even post customer.

You're involving the customer success team for renewals and expansions and things like that. So with all these teams touching the lead lifecycle, like where do you typically start? Who's involved in like that initial lead management, like kickoff conversation when you're kind of going through either an implementation or revisiting your lead management? What does that typically look like for in your experience?

Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's typically this is typically at the executive level that it starts because they recognize that, you know, there's something there's some red flag, right? Like, why are we closing up? Or like, I can't find our win rate.

Like, this is a mess. I can't find our velocity. This is a mess. Honestly, stuff that like really doesn't contribute to like just looking at your revenue number and being like, here's where we are.

Here's what we did. So it usually starts at that leadership level of like raising that pain point also because they have, you know, a lot of that budget. So, and I would say the pains are recognized much sooner with other people. And what we kind of also see is that you don't know what you don't know, right?

You just are doing something a lot of times you're inheriting a system or a process or just listening to somebody say, this is how you should do it is how I've always done it. And not really taking the time to evaluate that like, wait, this isn't very efficient. And why are we doing it this way? So my first meeting is usually with those, the leadership and I usually end up asking them like, I don't, I understand your pain points, like very clear.

You want to see the funnel. You want to see the life cycle and the various components of that and what gets you to your revenue goals. You can all work backwards from that. Like I totally get that.

But I usually ask them, like, what are the challenges of your team? You know, like, what are their pain points? The people that are actually sitting in this process that is currently not working. Like, I can't talk to you about that because you don't, you just, you're not doing it.

So I usually then try to encourage them to, I want to talk to the sales team or at the very least, like the sales managers who are as close to the BER, SDRs, AEs, whatever the structure looks like as possible, if I can't take time from the sales team themselves. Because if you can get to the individual, like they're going to share more with you and they're going to tell you like what the actual pain points are and what they like and they don't like about the process. So it's kind of like a, I mean, it's an audit, essentially, but it's purely from an information gathering perspective of I can hop in the system and look at stuff, but it is nothing is going to be more valuable than you telling me. And you're not going to be in your own words, what your process is versus what you want it to look like.

And so that's kind of where we start with those conversations. Yeah, that's very similar to kind of what we do here at Refine Labs. Obviously we are not like editing or changing people's sales force or marketing workflows, like we're not in operations, you know, agency or anything. But when we need to understand, in order to report on the funnel, get insights into actually what's going on, we need to understand their lead flow and their lead operations.

So just like you mentioned, audit. So we step one, we'll go in, poke around, just understand like what fields they're using, what reports they're already currently using, how they're trying to currently report on certain things. Then we typically meet with the marketing ops, sales ops, people will try to get insights from other team members, like you mentioned, of like what's not working for you. Why can't you do X?

What is the frustration point? You know, it's normally pretty clear in the data when there's a friction point in a process. It's also pretty insightful when you're stepping back and looking at it from a neutral lens or a lens that has no context of how it's currently been set up to say, Okay, why do you do that that way? Or is there a specific reason why you need this one action that you're doing in this process?

A lot of times you'll hear, I don't really know, or that's how we done it. Or yeah, I'm not sure. You're like, finding ways that you could remove some friction in that process. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Yeah. So just kind of evaluating and I like to map it out to like, if I'm, you know, I'm just like sketch out what I'm hearing, just so I can visualize the flow. Because it also allows you to visualize like where there might be people dropping off. Like you then say, okay, we go from this step to this step.

And you either have this option or this option, but what happens if this happens? Like there's nowhere for them to go. There's no, this should not have any point where there are people dropping off because that's where leads go to die is like the dark pit and where everybody forgets about them because there wasn't a place for them in the process. Yeah, it's almost like entry criteria and exit criteria.

And what is the definition for this stage? What is the entry criteria for someone to move into this stage? And what is that exit criteria? And to most, you know, most times there's only one or two main entry points to each stage, but there's a lot of exit points to each stage.

And that's what to your point, I think sometimes can get missed. They just focus on like the one or two exit points that they're focused on, but not necessarily what the action of the prospect or buyer might be. And one thing when challenging things of like how it's currently set up or why do we do it this way? It's it's coming from like a more buyer centric mindset.

And so, you know, like, well, how does that feel to the prospect of instead of getting this type of touch, they get that or they get routed here and no one, you know, they never hear from us again. Like, so it's also thinking about it. And from the buyer's point of view, that buyer journey, how do we we're not going to convert everybody? So how do we still still maintain data hygiene with creating a good experience for the external buyer, but also your internal stakeholders, the different teams that are responsible for those different things?

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And sometimes you find efficiencies that like scare people, right? Like, you know, at one point, we were all very scared that robots were going to replace us and like, AI is going to replace us, but it's like, we're finding efficiencies so you can prioritize the things that matter and earn more time and time and everything, especially if it's a gift that you're giving to your team. It's like, that is everything.

So it's, you know, sometimes we find processes where we're like, you don't need to do that. You do not need to do that. And they're like, well, how are we going to do it? And that's our job, right?

Is to figure out how to automate it, how to actually, you know, translate that data into a way that is working for us versus against us. And so we're moving that friction. And I would go as far to say that sometimes I think that it showcases how complex we've made things in terms of an org structure. Like, do you really need 50 SDRs?

No. Do you really need like this, these many qualifications questions at this stage of the funnel? Why aren't you asking half of those up here and spending more time here asking about things that really matter to this prospect and getting to know them and building a better relationship versus asking these questions that are absolutely wasted your time? So finding efficiencies like that.

And sometimes people can get a little nervous, right? Because they're like, wait, that's my job. Like, what are you going to replace it with? And you have to challenge them to think about, well, what would be more valuable?

What's a better use of your time? Like, what would be if you could take a list of 12 questions that you use as qualifiers, what are the three that you really want to spend that time on? Let's move the rest and get the data elsewhere because what you're doing is not working. If you're spending an hour asking about all of these questions when you really care about three of them and the rest are really just to kind of help you understand who this person is.

Like, take them off your list. 100% agree that kind of goes back to like that more buyer centric philosophy or viewpoint is, you know, we don't need a list of 12 questions. Like, we actually need to find out what is most important to the buyer and then, you know, tailor, you know, certain questions or, you know, talk tracks around that because if you're going into it with, okay, I'm going to read off this list. And I'm going to do this checklist.

I'm going to make sure they have banned. I'm going to make sure they have all this stuff. You know, it's just, it's not maybe the most productive use of time for the salesperson or marketing person, and especially the prospect. If they're giving you their time, you know, you need to prioritize what their pain points and their needs are above your internal needs that might help you understand what pricing and stuff to put on the opportunity.

And you can see, like, this is where you can see the connection to something like LEED scoring, right? Because we're talking about qualification. And if the job of LEED scoring is to prioritize, identify and prioritize sales ready leads, then we should be thinking about what are some of these qualification questions that would make the job of a salesperson easier when we've kind of checked the boxes of a lot of these other things that identify these sales ready leads. So like when I do LEED scoring, a lot of people just have two categories, right?

Like behavioral and, you know, ICP or demographic explicit, whatever you want to call it. I have three. I have behavioral demographic and then also qualification because qualification, yes, it does have some overlap into demographic, demographic data, but I categorize it in a way when I'm talking to the team, especially the sales team as like, what are, what are the absolute requirements that you have? Like, it's not about them.

This question is about you that you have to do business with somebody. Like your perfect person can look like this, but they also need to have like these really kind of like specific things to either your software or your offering that aren't like necessarily readily available data. It's not like employee size. It's not like industry.

It's like you use this technology and you need to know about their integrations or you need to know about, you know, how many like a volume of some sort of, I don't know, like processing data, like it could be just really specific to what you're offering to them. And half half time, I'm not even necessarily scoring on those things. I'm just gathering that data. So then it can be passed through to the sales rep.

So they're not asking that question when they have a disco. They're asking all the other important questions. And sometimes we score on it too. Like if it really does make a difference of like, you know, yes, we would we win more opportunities when this, when this person has this over this is usually like what I asked them versus.

No, it's just really helpful for the conversation because then I can customize it knowing this versus this. No, I think those two distinctions are important versus what's helpful versus what has been proven out to increase win rate or increase skill size or increase, you know, be a leading indicator of a turn or something like that. Right. Like those are the main things that you would want to get that data, find out how to either get that data manually, get used a tool to get that data or find some way in your marketing program to discover that from prospect telling you.

Not in a sales conversation way. Yeah, exactly. All right. This is great.

I like this question. We always have fun talking to. So a lot like a big category that I think is even more of, I guess, top of the funnel, a little bit more in the marketing ownership is going to be lead capture. So how best practices around lead capture?

So lead capture can be, you know, your main point of capture primarily your website. But I mean, it could be other other channels as well. But what have you seen that's been helpful for lead capture, specifically on websites, things that you think about when you're auditing or looking at someone's lead capture process? Yeah.

I think we see a lot of the use of like, just forms all over the place, like forms for everything. It's like, like, we've had a global forum and like, and what I have a client that I've worked with for a really long time and I'm doing a new project with him. And we had told him, you know, let's, let's organize your forum in terms of funnel and offering of the content. Right.

So we have tofu, mofu, both of whom. And then within those forms, we're asking, we have different progressive profiling fields. And now that I'm working with him again, and they didn't have any of it, I assume they didn't have any of it set up. And I was asking him about his forms.

He's like, oh, I have an awareness form and a consideration form. I'm so proud of him for having it set up already. So like, definitely categorize your forms as much as you can, because you really are, you're probably going to want to ask the same information and then you're not having to like rebuild a form every single time. You can just leverage that form.

Obviously, there's always going to be a one off case where you're like having a webinar and you want to ask a very specific question or gather certain data. Not saying that's ever not going to happen. But for the most part, you really want to know the stage, right? And then have those appropriate questions with progressive profiling.

So having, you know, one to three forms is usually pretty reasonable that you can use across assets. And then I think to just being really mindful of what you're putting on the form, obviously, you know, it needs to tie to scoring back to scoring in some cases. But are you asking information that people are truly comfortable giving you at that stage? So mapping those various stages, like I'm not going to put a phone number in a tofu form.

That's just ridiculous. That's like asking, you know, your social security number, the first person or the first time that we met. Not okay. An example of like a tofu form is this like content or webinar or sign up or like event sign up type of.

Yeah, yeah. So like a top of funnel form would be related to top of funnel content, which could be, you know, a checklist, your white paper, a webinar, perhaps, and people categorize them differently, right? Like, and they might have one edge case where it's like, well, this is a webinar, but it's a, you know, it's a, it's a, yeah, right. So I would think of it through the lens of like, how do you categorize your content today and sort of map it to that.

So top of funnel, think of like, well, I wouldn't get an infographic, but if you're trying to say that. You know, my, you know, my opinion on this, like any top of funnel assets, unless it was a live event, I just get at all. Yeah. But that's, you know, everyone's got their own opinions on that and, you know, not going to go into a rant on that yet.

No, and I totally agree with you. Like only ask for the information that you need. If you can get the information elsewhere and you can rely on that data, do it. So like thinking about clear bit, for example, or like what we've done, what we did at MadCudy, like we tried for the most parts, either not gate or light gate.

Or sometimes we would do like a hybrid where we like allowed somebody to view the asset. But if they wanted to download it, then they had to provide their email. But what we're getting on the back end of that and, you know, something that like a clear bit will offer is is appending that data and like sending you, okay, we have their email. So now you have this crazy amount of data that is going to be pushed into your system by using a third party tool that's enriching it for you.

So that's a really interesting way to collect data that, you know, take it with a grain of salt, right? Some of it is really dependent on what problem you're trying to solve. Like what is the right data to actually assess and look at when we're thinking about that? Is it revenue is an employee size?

You have to kind of be careful about what you want to rely on and score on. But it's a really smart way to receive the data while also considering the user experience. Yeah. And I love the progressive profiling.

I think, you know, when you think about, I'm just going to say like high intent forms. So like even like trials or demos or top to sales or pricing requests or anything like that, we want to make that such a valuable conversion. And you know it's a valuable conversion because you can look at what percent of contribution to revenue it will bring in. Like that's the gold star.

So how can we make those forms most approachable, the least intimidating and the easiest to fill out, right? So if you have highly recommended enrichment tool, I know at certain stages of companies that's not always an option. But if that isn't option, definitely is an enrichment tool. It'll allow you to cut out things like, you know, company size, like the thermographic stuff that people are like, I know I'm just filling this out and you're going to route me and you're like judging me on how I fill this out.

Even like, you know, location, you know, country, state, if you don't need zip code or something like that's all internal. Yeah. And that's all internal stuff for you. That's not helpful to the prospect.

So, you know, your name, work email, and you can even enrich company off of work email. And some people like, you know, job title from enrichment, it's a match rates depends. But if that phone number, if it's a high intent conversion, like we want to call you, or again, you can use another tool, like a meeting booking tool or chat right now tool to get that conversion. And then we always recommend, you know, shameless plug for the how did you hear about us field for self-reported attribution.

But again, like we wouldn't tell you to put that field on every single form. Right. And ask someone that multiple times, you're only going to ask them at the most valuable conversion for you. So again, it's thinking about those forms and what's the most relevant at that time based on what you're asking them to do.

Yeah. And I think the other thing I would say that like I see a lot of a lot happening in the top of the funnel, that very much impacts the bottom of the funnel is just tracking sources. It's going to be its own podcast episode. No, it could be literally its own podcast.

Why attribution sucks? No, just by your final house. Yes, I will. I will talk on that podcast any day.

No, I mean, just thinking about like, are you using hidden fields? Are you tracking UTMs? Are you stamping dates? Are you stamping UTMs first and last?

Like you are not going to be able to attribute back to anything if you're not doing those things. And you can try to use right like some of the out of the box tools like HubSpot offers, great analytics, great analytics. However, a lot of it's not customizable to really get it to make sense for your business. But you can kind of mold it in a way where you're getting the best of both worlds and you're using those analytics.

But then you're also using your own information around how your organization needs to work and operate and kind of categorize things and like mapping them together. And that's going to get you to an end result where first of all, it's scalable and second of all, you'll be able to actually record on the things at the end of the day that you want to record on. So that's one thing that I would say is a big, a big, a big, hairy topic. And one that's especially relevant today, I get a lot of clients that when they want to figure out their attribution.

And it's crazy what, you know, adding some dates, stamps and some stamping fields and, you know, some workflows will do to the ability to start to see and be able to report on some of those things. It's funny because no matter what topic I talk about on like, or not even me, but just on this podcast, we've talked about like marketing ops a couple of times, UTMs, attribution and sources always come up on every single call. Like, no matter, like it's not even real, like exactly what the topic is because it's related to everything and it's such an important thing. So plus one on date, stamping, plus one on adding the hidden fields behind the forms and just also double checking that you have all of that working correctly.

Also, you know, making sure that you have like the cookie accepting the cookie, all that kind of stuff set up because the more people that accept that is, you know, good for right now until who knows when. And even like, you to persistent UTMs, that's a whole other topic of like, okay, well, if they go to this page, but then they go to the next page and everything drops, everything's going to come in. That's direct, right? So having a strategy or a standardized process around persistent UTMs on during that session, that that is also very helpful.

Like, it's a huge kind of thing that people don't realize. I think they go to like a landing page through a, you know, UTM like a paid campaign or something. It could even be like organic, right? And they have a specific UTM, the minute that they go to another product page or they're poking around, they go to your resource section that UTM drops.

They fill out a form and, you know, just looks, you lose all of that stuff. Yeah. Yeah. That's the topic.

Which is like kind of the reason why it really, it's made up. You know, it is important. I understand like I'm all about it. I'm all about setting it up so you can see the true story.

But I think what we see happening is the manipulation of data to the point where it's only to benefit one or two roles or one or two people in a role. And it's not true. It's not the truth. It's like it's not telling the true story.

And therefore we're not actually able to craft the journey that our prospects deserve. So I think, you know, I have this like love and relationship with attribution just because that part of me really thinks it doesn't matter. And part of me knows that it's always going to have to matter. And so I'm like always fighting myself on that one.

100% agree. Like you have to have it. But I think to your point, you have to have the right mindset around it and not just take, I'm going to take a piece of pie to prove my point and say that's the whole story when, you know, it's just a piece of the story. So all right.

So let's get into, you know, once we have them filling out forms and once like once we start passing leads to the sales team, there's a huge opportunity to how operations, no matter if that's not even your title. But if you work and you're trying to enable any of the sales team, how you can actually help them. So notifications, tips, alerts, automated workflows. What do you typically, what are your like go to for helping smooth that process out?

Yeah, I mean, I have a go to like alert structure where I typically just start with an email and pull in, you know, I think the most important thing about these alerts is adding quality information in there. So they are understanding the full story of, yes, I understand that this is an MQL. But why, you know, like I don't really care unless I actually know the reason why because then I have a problem statement, right? Then I have a problem to work from of like, I know why they became an MQL.

And so now I can tie all of that together and have a really smart conversation with them. So giving, giving sales the information that allows them to kind of visualize that journey and tell the story of where they got or how they got to where they are and why it's important. And then anything else too that will help them really just sort of disposition them and have a better conversation. And so this can come in the form of many different styles of alerts.

And I honestly, I just like to ask the sales team because they're so inundated with like Slack and everybody is right. So I think it's a personal preference and sometimes we can set it up that way. You know, it's not the most scalable thing. But if you, you know, are a small team and for now you can only handle a text or a Slack message or, you know, things get lost in your inbox or whatever the case may be like, I think it's really important that we figure out what works for us and ensure that we can receive information in the way that we're able to digest it.

Because then we're going to be able to actually spend the time to digest it and actionize it. So I like to ask the teams what they prefer and all those whatever they want. It's usually all possible, not like that big of a left and something. Unless they want like a helicopter flying to their house.

Yeah, I would. I'm 12. It's a target account. Yeah, I think that when thinking about alerts and alert specifically, like you said, text, maybe an alert task assignment in Salesforce, whatever object you want to use in Salesforce.

Honestly, you can use a custom object. It could be Slack, Slack's a big one, but it's also email to understanding like prioritizing the types like we don't want to be alerting for everything. Right. To figure out what's like a P1 alert like they filled out a demo request or it's like this account that is one of your top 50 accounts did something.

I don't know. So like you need to categorize the types of alerts because I'm learning for everything. It's not helpful either. Right.

I think you have like P1 alerts, P2 alerts, and then just that's it. Like all the other data can be reporting that you could build or you could have it in certain areas where people can access when they need it. But the P1, P2 alerts and based on those, you might pick different alert channels, right? Like, yeah, yeah.

Slack versus in Salesforce or whatever CRM or self-seam uses. And even other teams that might want visibility into those alerts, but not get them all the time. Like we said, we need to be alert summary for the teams that don't need it in real time, things like that. Yeah.

Yeah. And I mean, I've had teams that want to in a list. They want to in a dashboard. Like there's so many different styles that I think it really depends on like how your organization works.

And then also at the individual level, if your team's not too crazy big or at least like enabling them to like raise their hand and say this would be really helpful. And I would say to like the only other kinds of alerts I would add in there, which goes a little outside of the handoff is alerts around SLAs. So if you have service level agreements that aren't being followed, even just as a reminder, like I like to say, sometimes we just need a little nudge or like use it as your to do list or whatever it may be. But if you're supposed to be changing the status and you didn't change the status, like you got to get a reminder.

Somebody's got to remind you because you obviously didn't do it yourself. And at least then just kind of like adding some accountability, adding some visibility to other teams as well. Like it's not to get anybody in trouble. It's to help us fine tune the process and make sure like you are, I hate to say this, but like you are working a machine.

And if you stop, all these other things are going to be impacted by that. So it's kind of that like when you're in a factory and you hear that like, burp and like the red alarm goes off. Like it's it's a less dramatic version of that. It's a it's a yellow alarm.

Yeah, I think service level agreements. So for people that listening, like, I don't know, you know, give me an example of that like service level agreement might be, let's say that you do an MQL and the team that's supposed to be responsible. That needs to follow up contact or, you know, disposition that that MQL within 12 hours or 24 hours, whatever the that's whatever is agreed upon. That's the service level agreement.

And then you can build in if you're using date time stamps, you can build in and then processes like, okay, the MQL stamp in time is this. If it exceeds X, we're going to send an alert to the owner or, you know, whatever that is. So that's kind of like a, I don't know, real life example for people following along to this episode. Yeah.

Yeah. And this kind of goes back to like your original point. If you have various types of MQL's, which I think is a really smart thing to do, then you can change that, you know, you have a different alert for an MQL that might be accelerated through the process versus an organic kind of like taking their time. MQL that doesn't necessarily raise their hands, but has shown enough behavior and matches, you know, ICP wise to become an MQL.

So we talked a lot about just processes overall, lead, flow management, a bunch of different topics. I wanted to get your take on the team that actually gets this done and how the team that actually operationalizes all of this. And like what support they need. Because I think it's just a huge topic in the operations, marketing ops, RevOps, whatever, growth ops, everything that you want to call it.

It's much, much more than execution. So I'd love your insights on this topic. Yeah. Ops is awesome.

We're just like nerds that like to get shit done. I feel like I feel like the biggest thing is like, why didn't why didn't we know about that sooner? You know, like, I would have told you, I would have told you this, I would have had all these considerations and I would have made these really great suggestions too. Because I'm thinking about what are you going to, how are you going to, how are you going to deal with that data?

Like when you do this with your system, like how is that even going to work? And so we're kind of thinking about again, like through very much of the operational lens. And so those technical details that you're not necessarily thinking about when you're like, yeah, this is going to allow me to report at the end of the day on this. But there's a lot of different intricacies that go along with that.

So I think just like being that strategic partner, which is something that people in ops will always talk about, like loop us in as early as possible. Let's have that discussion together. We are building something technical in with technology. And like that's literally our job is to help find those efficiencies and build these processes in a way that adds the most value.

So the fact that ops isn't included in those discussions is like totally a slap in the face. And I think that like it creates a lot of technical debt, right? Because down the road, you're having to undo all these things or completely rip out what you had to go into this more efficient process that probably would have been recommended to you in the first place had you looped in the ops team. Of course, there's always things that come up and change and priorities change and all of that good stuff.

But I do think that we're moving in the right direction and building this relationship. And I do also think that ops is such a powerful role. I think it's like underrated for sure. And you have this crazy balance of understanding the business at so many different levels.

You're thinking about how everything's connecting. And then you're also thinking about operationalizing that. You're also thinking about the customer like you're really thinking about everything. So I think ops is in a really great position to lead a lot of businesses and be on the executive teams because your entire career or your entire, you know, per view has really been quite expanded compared to many other departments.

Yeah, I couldn't agree. We were the best operations teams that I've worked with or been a part of there. They're literally leading the business in in terms of data and forecasting and insights from data because they know how the business runs. They've architected the infrastructure essentially for how the business runs.

So, you know, it's much more, you know, you might have people that are more dedicated to execution work. That's like actually building workflows and sandboxes and testing and Q and like putting the pieces together. Sure. But you also have probably people that are thinking about how do I enable the team and the customers with technology that we have.

And how do I educate them and train them and make sure that they it works for them, which is kind of what you're saying in your audit, right? And then the leaders or the people that I think excel the most is like they said they're looking at it from a different lens and they're pulling out insights. They're pulling out, hey, this seems off and they're servicing that to other leaders. I mean, they're just as much as a part of the planning process, the forecasting process.

The, okay, we're going to strategy conversations like you're going to need ops in there because if you change your strategy or you change something like you can't just change the strategy or change something without including them. And so I think people are now seeing that a little bit of a wider lens and not just like, oh, you're marketing ops, you run Mark Heddow or HubSpot. It's not necessarily, or I don't think anyone should look at it like that anymore. Yeah, yeah, much broader than that.

And I think too, like there's such an important training component when it comes to ops two. Like we empower teams like we make, we make the magic that you want to happen possible. You know, it's like we're like the fairy God people back there working on your campaigns. And we also need you to be able to understand why we're doing the things that we're doing because if, you know, we hit by bus or like we set up something and then we leave, like, it's really important that an ops person has the time and the space to document the process.

And I know that a lot of ops people, especially in solo ops positions have this huge pain point of not being able to document their work because they don't have time. They're working on too many things. So that gets you to a point where if you left, you know, you're kind of screwed and you have to have somebody else sort of step in and trying to understand what the process is. And then also training, you know, ops shouldn't be responsible, fully responsible for understanding how a campaign works at the highest level, you know, like, even if it's just like a very, here's what happens when, you know, here's what our lead management process looks like here's like the very high level of what happens.

You know, here's who owns this process. Here's who to go to if things break, here's what systems they're in. So even just having that kind of documentation and training, I think it's really, really important. And I think something that ops has an opportunity, if given the time and the space to add more value to it across the company, I think that you're seeing more headcount allocation dedicated to those teams.

You know, it very much depends on like the size of your company and the stage of ads of like, okay, how, you know, based on how many marketing and sales, how many like go to market employees, you have what size should your ops team look like? Like you should have someone in ops from the beginning and then just like as the marketing department grows or customer success department grows, like so does the operations department grows within the business. So I've seen that like, you know, definitely there's a lot of open roles. People are expanding those teams.

Obviously that job market is pretty hot right now to find like top talent and things like that. So I think it's moving in the right direction, but I definitely definitely agree with everything you just. Yeah, I think so too. I bet you know, I'm like, I'm so biased too.

Like I literally started at Mount Kudu, like an O to operations. Like that was like my jam and I just have always worked very closely with ops if not doing the work, you know, myself with teams. And so it's like, I just yeah, completely onboard the ops train forever. Well, I love it.

And this was such a great episode of digging into lead management, lead flow, all that good stuff, our hot takes on the topic. So thank you so much for joining me. It's been awesome to chat with you again. Thank you.

Yes, it was awesome.