[Episode 4] B2B Sales and Marketing Disorder

Last week we covered OpenAI’s huge announcement that ChatGPT can now ‘see, hear, and speak.’ Joe had a chance to showcase the technology this week while on a trip to visit family. He took a photo of the foods in the fridge and prompted ChatGPT to provide a menu for the trip based on the contents. The results, as he said, were “mind blowing.”

A few days after the announcement, OpenAI announced that ChatGPT “can now browse the internet to provide you with current and authoritative information, complete with direct links to sources.”

Paying customers can now have access to information past September 2021 while remaining within the ChatGPT interface.

It’s made possible thanks to an integration with Microsoft’s Bing search engine. Readers may remember a similar announcement made in March 2023. The feature was soon-after removed because of concerns for ChatGPT bypassing paywalls. However, now ChatGPT recognizes robots.txt code, which allows websites to exclude AI from indexing their content.

“AI optimization is going to replace search optimization,” Joe said. “And if you’re not indexing your site and you’re in the B2B space why would you want make it difficult for people to find out about you through AI search and prompting?”

The misalignment of B2B marketing and sales

A recent analysis from LinkedIn found that the average alignment between B2B marketing and sales was 16%.

LinkedIn’s Customer Insights Team analyzed over 7,000 B2B companies and measured the percentage of buyers who are reached by both sales and marketing.

It’s “a number so horrific that it drops the jaws of every B2B CMO we meet,” wrote Jon Lombardo and Peter Weinberg for MarketingWeek.

The LinkedIn analysis found that high alignment can:

• Increase marketing generated revenue by 208%.
• Increase customer retention by 36%.
• Reduce sales and marketing expenses.

So how can B2B companies close the gap and improve the alignment in B2B organizations?

It starts with strategic alignment. Senior sales and marketing leaders need to have conversations about audiences and their teams need to correctly execute on that strategy.

While it sounds obvious, companies are not doing it.

These two teams need to pursue broader targeting. Given marketing’s capability to reach a larger audience quickly, it should adopt broader targeting to increase the likelihood of overlap with sales.

“There’s a lot of finger pointing in most organizations about quantity and quality and it’s easy to get into a posturing about why numbers and KPIs aren’t being achieved,” said Lauren. “If you’re working towards a goal and sales and marketing alignment, you have to talk to sales. Go for ride alongs, [have] win/lose conversations… pick the AE that doesn’t like what you’re doing and find out why.”

The future of process documentation

This week’s question from the MO Pros community is about documentation. While it’s not the most electrifying topic on the surface, it’s critical for companies to build a culture of good documentation.

The question poser is running into the issue of outdated documentation and poor visual mapping and looking for advice to get her team on board.

As part of her answer, Lauren suggested recording calls in Zoom or Slack while sharing your screen, summarize the process with visuals and save it to a common documentation channel.

And for those of us who prefer actual notes over video tutorials, Lauren said “take the transcript from your note-taker, upload it into ChatGPT and output it as a document.

Hot takes

• Will AI legislation become the next compliance concern?
• EU plans to introduce the AI act.
• Canada has introduced a voluntary code of conduct to complement upcoming legislation.
• The United States has an executive order with AI in the coming weeks.
• A LinkedIn post has had the MOPs world buzzing around the idea of replacing your B2B marketing automation platform with a less expensive B2C option. Is it a good idea?

Pairings & Plugs

As always, Joe brought in a vinyl record from his collection and for her first segment Lauren brought it a coffee from one of her favorite roasters in Arizona.

Lauren plugged her upcoming Virtual Marketo User Group (VMUG) on October 24 called “How to Transform Marketo with AI.” Joe plugged MOPs-Apalooza (November 5-8), where he will be speaking, along with Lauren and Andy Caron, President of Revenue Pulse.

Read The Transcript

Disclaimer: This transcript was created by AI using Descript and has not been edited.

[00:00:00] Joe Peters: Welcome to Launch Codes, the podcast about marketing operations, artificial intelligence, and more. Each week you’ll hear from experts as they share insights, stories, and strategies. Welcome to episode four. I’m your host, Joe Peters. On today’s episode, we’re covering major updates from OpenAI, the misalignment of B2B sales and marketing teams, Thanks the future of process documentation, as well as a couple of hot takes on AI legislation and B2B marketing automation platform switches.

[00:00:41] Today I’m joined by Lauren McCormack, the VP of Consulting at Revenue Pulse, and fittingly has just been awarded a three times Marketo champion designation for this year. Congratulations and welcome Lauren.

[00:00:57] Lauren McCormack: Thanks so much, Joe. Such a big honor, and [00:01:00] I’m thrilled to be back in this cohort of brilliant people across the globe, and it’s pretty cool to share in the celebration today with Andy Caron, a recently named president. She’s a four time Adobe Marketo Engage champion, as of today, so pretty cool to share that, that That distinction with her.

[00:01:21] Joe Peters: So basically what you’re telling everyone is that RP is the home of champions then?

[00:01:26] Lauren McCormack: You could say so. That’s a literal, a literal possibility that you could share that kind of information.

[00:01:32] I think at this point, it’s

[00:01:33] Joe Peters: The team’s been asking me to work in some dad jokes to start the podcast. So, you know, I couldn’t resist there. So in terms of our topics that we outlined, Lauren, what are you
interested in today? I’m super

[00:01:46] Lauren McCormack: excited to talk about sales and marketing alignment with you. I know we had some interesting, perhaps controversial takes on whether or not the MQL was dead.

[00:01:57] And I think I have a little bit of a [00:02:00] similar sentiment around some sales and marketing alignment. Traditional methodologies. So looking forward to that, especially. Plus, I don’t know, walking in for our viewers. I’m not even sure what Joe’s final take is going to be for the day. So certainly interested to see what the record is going to be today.

[00:02:20] Joe Peters: Well, yeah, we’ll we’ll save the, the, the cherry on top for the end of the. Podcast today. So as we move into the open, it seems like every week there’s some new announcement from open AI that is, you know, blowing our minds. And I’m going to say this week is no exception. So for those of you that are just tuning in chat GPT now can hear and speak.

[00:02:48] And so the image recognition has rolled out and I’m going to say minds have been blown. So that’s the first one, but we have three things that we’re going to run through. So let me run through the other two. [00:03:00] ChatGPT can now browse the internet with a bit of a plug in. So there’s that cutoff message doesn’t have to be a hard and true fact anymore.

[00:03:10] We’re able to browse to get up to date information. So that is the second one. And finally, The robots. txt now can exclude AI from indexing content and training on that content. So, let’s start with all three. Lauren, have you had a chance to try out any of the image recognition yet?

[00:03:32] Lauren McCormack: Yeah, you know, and I think it’s definitely better than mid journey.

[00:03:36] No offense to mid journey, but my kids would give me a hard time. Every time they saw me logging into discord and I would get lectures from my 16 year old about you know, the security issues of, of accessing apps from, from discord. I guess I raised him right. Is that what that means? If he’s cautious about Internet safety, but you know, it’s, it’s nice to see GPT meet us.

[00:03:58] I think where we’ve all wanted [00:04:00] to be at. It’s, it’s kind of been fun watching its limitations and its powers, but it’s interesting to see it growing.

[00:04:08] Joe Peters: Yeah, so I think, I think there’s two pieces here. So there’s the Dolly generation, which is coming, but now there’s also that image recognition part. So like, for example, I was visiting my sister out in Manitoba this weekend.

[00:04:22] And I took a picture of the inside of her fridge and her pantry. Uploaded those images and asked it what we could cook for dinner or what would be a menu for the weekend. And let’s just say minds were blown with that image recognition capabilities. So there’s, that is, that is just a new era of the AI being able to interpret images that were uploaded.

[00:04:49] Lauren McCormack: interesting. Google had that, visual search capacity and beta and I played with it a little bit when it first came out and it was just downright bizarre. And I don’t know, it’s, it’s an interesting opportunity for targeting. We, we thought it was creepy when our search results were fueling fodder. Now our cameras will too.

[00:05:09] Joe Peters: Yeah. Well, it’s, it’s, it’s a whole new, a whole new area of being able to. You know, we had those Google Translate being able to look at menus and translate things for us. Now we’re going to be able to take photos of anything and see what GPT can tell us. But the, the other news here is this idea of being able to browse the internet. Have you had a chance to play with that a little bit in terms of pointing GPT that way? Not yet.

[00:05:39] Lauren McCormack: I’m looking forward to kicking it around. What have you been finding? I know it’s a. It’s been frustrating to have the limitations put with, you know, GPT being frozen in time cryogenically, like some kind of Star Wars creature. It’s nice to bring it up to current, but I would love to hear, I’ve, I’ve played with some of the other plugins that let it sort of have web browsing capabilities, [00:06:00] but unleashing the power of, of current time is going to be interesting.

[00:06:05] Joe Peters: I’m of two minds here. I actually really prefer. From a variety of different perspectives, the trained responses versus the internet searches, there’s a very big difference between adding a search to the end of your, your prompt and, and getting a response from that versus what’s the trained. LLM is is providing you. So I think for finding current things, if you’re going to do purchases or you needed to find up to date information on an event or something like that, 100 percent that’s going to be helpful. But when you’re actually using it as a strategic. Second set of hands. That, that, that I don’t, I don’t see that search capability.

[00:06:56] Joe Peters: And what I saw in being originally is, it’s very [00:07:00] similar, a little bit limited in, in sort of the, the depth of the response that’s given. But I think that’s a good segue into this last one on now. What do you think about sites being able to exclude the A. I. S. from indexing them? I

[00:07:18] Lauren McCormack: feel like all of our information and all of our personal secrets have already been scraped and it’s too little too late. But I guess it’s a novel idea to pretend like we can put the genie back in the bottle. I

[00:07:30] Joe Peters: don’t know. I, I, I think really you’re actually shooting yourself in the foot by, by limiting the AIs from indexing your site. Yeah. AI optimization is going to replace search optimization. And if you’re not indexing your site, then if you’re in the B2B play space. Why, why would you want people that make it difficult for them to find out about you through [00:08:00] AI search and prompting? So I’m, I’m not a big, I don’t know.

[00:08:06] Lauren McCormack: Did you have that existential moment when you tried to search yourself in GPT and you didn’t exist?

[00:08:12] Joe Peters: I haven’t tried that yet. That, that, that one is one I’ll have to, to try out. But that, that, that I’m sure would be a funny result. Yeah, yeah. Unfortunately, there’s quite a few Joe Peters in the world. So they might there might be a few others that that pop up other than myself.

[00:08:30] Lauren McCormack: Yeah, I think Adam, Adam knew Waterson tried searching for himself and had a bit of a moment when he couldn’t, and he’s got a distinctive name and he didn’t find himself in the early days of GPT. And I think, I think he took it as kind of a challenge. Like, well, I need, I need to exist here, you know, which is it. An interesting take and probably a good one for people that don’t want to index that. It is the future.

[00:08:52] Joe Peters: Yeah, but you’re, you’re right. Like the idea that we can put this genie back in the bottle is not probably a [00:09:00] great take on this, but let’s move into our second topic, which is the idea of the misalignment between B2B marketing and sales and. For many of us, the promise of marketing automation is alignment and solving for that problem that has existed since marketing and sales teams were formed. And so there was a study that came out of over 7, 000 B2B companies, and they measured the percentage of buyers who are reached by both marketing and sales. And so the average alignment between B2B Marketing and sales was 16%. And so there’s a great quote here, a number so horrific that it drops the jaws of every B2B CMO we meet. But that’s from marketing week. So I, I love that quote. And, [00:10:00] but, you know, sadly that isn’t something that is a surprise to us.

[00:10:05] Lauren McCormack: No, not at all. And it’s been, a topic of discussion, we’ll say for my entire career. I’ve, I’ve spent a couple decades working on, on sales and marketing alignment because I was an AE for, for years, right? I’m, I’m that weird marketer that’s been on both sides of the fence. That’s had to work a territory that’s been incentivized by commission that wishes I had during my, my days and outside sales, a marketing department to feed me leads, right?

[00:10:37] And I can appreciate the fact that there’s a lot of finger pointing in most organizations across the aisle about quantity and quality and close rates and SLAs. And it’s easy, I think, to get into a posturing. Where it’s like a blame shift of, of why numbers or, or KPIs aren’t being achieved [00:11:00] consistently over any kind of duration.

[00:11:02] Maybe it’s weekly, monthly, maybe it’s quarterly, maybe it’s the year, but at the end of the day, how many CMOs whose jaws drop to the floor actually know what their team is saying in their outreach sequences? Yeah, do you know that? Do you know, like, and it’s, it’s funny. I was, I was talking with somebody on our team internally here at RP about sales and marketing alignment.

[00:11:27] And I think a lot of people make it this obtuse, obscure, elusive, you know, utopia and I’m like, when we worked on this project, when, when, when we were delivering this project, did we talk to sales? Yeah. And if we’re working toward a goal of sales and marketing alignment, we actually have to talk to sales.

[00:11:49] Like those conversations are non negotiable and it’s like a fundamental people. I think show up for the weekly or quarterly. You know business reviews, they show up [00:12:00] and they sit down with sales when they’re forced to. What about actually going for ride alongs? What about win loss conversations? What about talking to your referral clients?

[00:12:09] Talking to your best Flag waving fan of marketing is always going to tell you that you’re wonderful. Pick the AE that doesn’t like what you’re doing and find out why. Yeah. Cause you rather he tell, or she tell your, your CRO, or would you rather hear it from them? And they usually have ideas. Not always great ones, but sometimes good for, for campaigns, or they have at least feedback from the front lines that will make what you’re doing much more effective and it doesn’t do you any good to avoid those conversations and certain projects that you work on and deliver if you don’t deliver them in a silo.

[00:12:48] Will benefit the whole organization, put money in the pocket of sales and increase your, your reputation for being a good marketer within the company.

[00:12:57] Joe Peters: And so when you see those things like [00:13:00] the, the analysis was talking about what high alignment can deliver, you know, we, we hear these numbers thrown out all the time by, you know, increasing marketing generated revenue by 208%, increase customer retention by 36%.

[00:13:16] Reduce sales and marketing expenses as some of these promises that alignment provides. But what was kind of interesting was not only was it a diagnosis in this report, but it also talked about what some of the solutions are. So let me just quickly cover what those are and then we can. Chat a little bit about that.

[00:13:36] So the first solution was strategic alignment between marketing and sales. So senior marketing and sales leaders need to have strategic conversations about audiences and their team and the need to correctly execute on that strategy. And so that’s a pretty obvious one, but not something that we’re always seeing.

[00:13:57] And then broad targeting. Both departments [00:14:00] pursue a hyper targeting strategy. The small coverage of sales and marketing dramatically decreases the likelihood of overlap. So What’s your take on those two potential solutions? I actually just like your, your idea of the ride along and actually just saying, we need to talk more and, and totally

[00:14:21] Lauren McCormack: that was, that was the heart of, I think you know, I sat through formal solution selling training and for the marketing department, that was the key.

[00:14:29] It was like conduct win losses. So I think a lot of people have moved the exercise of creating an ICP. into some sort of academic pursuit that doesn’t actually reflect an improvement in targeting or an improvement in understanding who’s on the receiving end of your marketing campaigns. But at the end of the day, what we’re doing is supposed to be one to many, but it needs to feel one to one.

[00:14:53] So how are you going to talk? You need to talk to customers and prospects if you don’t actually talk to customers and prospects. Right? [00:15:00] I mean, it’s just like the kind of obvious notion of getting sales and marketing aligned by having conversations with sales. You also need to talk to people that purchase your product, find out why, why do they love you?

[00:15:11] What would they change? What do they tell their friends? What, what conferences do they plan to go to this year? You know, what do they like to read? Where can you meet them where they’re at? But then also the losses, the people that that chose to go to your competitors. That information is super valuable.

[00:15:29] And is anybody collecting it? Maybe you have a field in your CRM where you’re tracking clothes lost, and maybe you have a reason, maybe. And maybe you recycle those clothes loss leads. I hope. If you don’t, you should talk to us. But if you’re going to bring them back in the loop, you need to know why they didn’t work out in the first place.

[00:15:46] Was it pricing? Was it? Particularly compelling, you know features of your competitors, right? But the only way to really get at this good information, this vital information that makes you better at your job, that gets you to stop talking [00:16:00] about releases and, and features and moves you into actual human territory where you can improve people’s careers, where you can get them promoted, where you can make them into evangelists for your brand.

[00:16:13] The only way you can, you can kind of bridge that gap is by having good conversations with your customers and prospects. So I think it’s, it’s sensible relationship building. Marketing automation is a beautiful tool, but if it feels cold, if it feels, inauthentic, you know, it’s, it’s not going to do the best job possible for you or for the people on the receiving end of your, your communications.

[00:16:40] Joe Peters: Yeah, so really, you know, having a dialogue with prospects with clients with and internally is really at the key and getting as many data points as possible. Form your strategies and decisions. Well, let’s, let’s, let’s move on to our next [00:17:00] topic, which is one that is coming from the community a mo pros community question.

[00:17:06] And thanks to Mike and the gang for letting us take a question and have put Lauren’s feet to the fire here. So here’s the question that was posed. On marketing ops. com. I work with a company with a good culture of documentation, but I’m constantly running into the issue with outdated documentation or poor visual mapping.

[00:17:32] What advice do you have for me to support our team to get on top of documentation? And so Lauren, I know documentation is a topic near and dear to your heart. So for sure, take it away.

[00:17:45] Lauren McCormack: Well, I think it’s been a wonderful journey to see solutions, architecture, documentation go from, you know, a stack of printed crazy 150 page flow chart you know, [00:18:00] a treatise on, on, on what was built in the system to now being able to just pop open loom.

[00:18:07] Or even slack and just to say, okay, I’m going to, I’m going to share my screen. Here’s a rundown of what was built and you can verbally summarize with visuals. And record a documentation, save it you know, to some sort of commonly accessed Slack channel, you know, maybe you have a documentation channel in your internal Slack and, and you just put it in that repository and it’s, it’s, you’re done.

[00:18:35] I mean, documentation used to take days. And days, and it was the necessary evil for, for, you know, posterity in case you, you, you had to pass your instance along to someone, or you needed to remember what you did three years ago. Now it’s, it’s, it’s almost effortless. And if you really love having actual documents for your documentation, take the transcript from a note taker and upload it into [00:19:00] GPT and output it as a doc, if you really want to doc, you know there’s so many ways that this can be.

[00:19:07] Augmented this whole process can be updated to save you a lot of cycles and a lot of time. But, yeah, I’m, I’m happy to hear that. Somebody’s still documenting out there. I think a lot of teams have have let it go by the wayside over the years as, as we’re getting leaner, especially in 2023, you know, doing more with less with less staff, that is an area that I’ve seen kind of get sacrificed, but there’s so many efficiencies, I think, in that space that people just need to take advantage of.

[00:19:36] Joe Peters: Yeah, for sure. And just the speed at which you can do things now, recording a quick video, getting that transcribed and slapping that in for the, the future to be able to take that information. I know that that is just moving things along at such a fast speed instead of. Taking days to sort of map things out.

[00:19:57] Absolutely. And I think a lot of like [00:20:00] marketing ops professionals would, you know, prefer to keep work to themselves and, and they feel like explaining or teaching or sharing their processes with somebody else. Oh, that just takes extra time. But imagine if you have good documentation and you can pass that documentation along to somebody in a different time zone.

[00:20:20] And you can get this asynchronous work environment created across your team across geos where for for a team in a Mia to to wake up and and start building to pass it to a pack to pass it to North America, you know, to pass it to let him you can have an always on kind of demand factory. If you use your documentation to support.

[00:20:44] Governance and to support processes. You increase your efficiencies exponentially. If you don’t hold things back and you do document and you do knowledge share across your team.

[00:20:56] Joe Peters: Yeah, for sure. And we’re even seeing doesn’t even those [00:21:00] kind of practices aren’t even just for documentation, but just normal business operations, even for us with our teams and.

[00:21:08] All the different regions were big fans of short little video messages being in someone’s Slack inbox when they come in in the morning that’s passing the torch from region to region and a lot can be conveyed in two or three minutes in a, in a quick Slack video. So yeah, whether it’s documentation or just coordinating some of these things that are facilitated by the tools we have at our disposal is.

[00:21:33] Just incredible stuff, but yeah, okay. Well, we, we can, we don’t, we can talk about documentation forever, but let’s move on. And I just want to thank our sponsors Knack. So thanks to our friends at Knack for sponsoring today’s episode. Knack is the no code platform that allows you to build campaigns in minutes.

[00:21:55] Knack integrates with everything you need to make amazing emails and landing pages. [00:22:00] Visit knack. com to learn more. That’s k n a k. com. And so now we’re going to shift into our hot takes segment. And there’s a, there’s a few things happening in the headlines this week. And Lauren, what do you think about on the AI legislation?

[00:22:20] So we’ve, is this our new area of compliance concern? Cause we, we know that the EU is introducing the AI act and that’s going to be happening. I. Think in the early new year is the, what everyone is saying. It could be later this year as well. Canada has just introduced a voluntary code of conduct for AI.

[00:22:40] And there was supposed to be an executive order coming out by the end of the summer. Now we’re past that date. So we can only assume that something is coming soon. What do you think this means from our perspective in terms of some of the compliance things that we might be coming up against in the future?

[00:22:58] Lauren McCormack: It’s going to be interesting to watch. [00:23:00] I, I, I hearken back to when Zuckerberg was on the hill and I remember how painful it was to watch some of the members of, of You know, Congress in the House trying to get their arms around just exactly how social media even worked. I have serious questions and a few reservations around how easily, easily understandable.

[00:23:25] This is all going to be to our legislators. I’m hopeful, cautiously optimistic, but again, the genie in the bottle, right? It’s, it’s almost like a. Some sort of scout code of honor, like, we’re going to solemnly swear to do no, no, you know, damage, but I feel like the bad actors are just kind of laughing.

[00:23:44] Right? So I, I don’t know how, how savvy government is going to be and how, how much protection they can really offer us sadly, but I think it’s They have to put out for their constituents some sort of effort to show that they tried. It’s like a participation [00:24:00] move here, but I like

[00:24:01] Joe Peters: it’s a little bit more than that because it’s very rare.

[00:24:06] I would say I don’t I can’t recall very many times in my life that. And industry has come to government and said, Hey, regulate us. We need some guardrails that I’m going to say that’s a first for me. And so hopefully these industry leaders are assisting in. Those, what those guardrails should be. And my, my understanding is that there was a big meeting of the minds with Gates and Sam Altman and and Zuckerberg and I, and a whole, a few others I think that was a couple of weeks ago now they were meeting and, and giving some ideas on what should be going on there.

[00:24:51] So, but I think for us, when I look at it, I kind of feel like. Our clients are going to be thinking is, do we have [00:25:00] another GDPR situation here where, what are we doing and how do we stay compliant in all the regions where we’re operating at? That’s kind of where my head is shifting to. Yeah.

[00:25:11] Lauren McCormack: And I definitely, you know, gone through several rounds of compliance build outs over the years, whether it’s.

[00:25:18] It’s you know, can spam or California or EMEA and, and it’s ever changing policies. Right. But it’ll be interesting to see what compliance looks like and, and what we’re going to need to put in place to keep people

[00:25:34] Joe Peters: above board. And it could be just simple things like, you know, within your sites or your campaigns.

[00:25:42] Signaling if this has been, this is content generated by AI, that might be a rule, it could be, it could be in the terms of the website that no one reads, but that might be where you need to put a clause, who knows how onerous or how different these different [00:26:00] regulations are going to be, but what we can count on is that something is coming and Our clients and colleagues are going to have to take some action.

[00:26:10] There’s, there’s no doubt about that. That’s right. Okay. Well, let’s move on to the next one. Our next hot take, which is. Replacing B2B marketing automation platforms with B2C platforms. And so there was a little bit of a, a post that was popped that popped up in LinkedIn and got our antennas all fired up, which was the idea that and I quote, you can save a ton of money by replacing HubSpot, HubSpot, Marketo, Pardot with a B2C email tool.

[00:26:45] Iterable or braze, it’ll be different, but it’ll work just fine. You’ll need to find a replacement for CRM sync, lead scoring and lead forms capture. And but the, the, the other part to

[00:27:00] this, this assertion is that most of the marketing automation tools have not added new function to warrant the price increases that we’re, we’re seeing.

[00:27:10] So what’s your, what’s your take on this one, Lauren?

[00:27:14] Lauren McCormack: I see a lot of people usually slightly outside of the operations team that think that tech is absolutely interchangeable and they fail to remember the human capital piece of the equation and the. Tech itself might be interchangeable, but the skill set of your team and the mastery and the wisdom and the, the legacy data and all of the, the kind of the pieces that don’t look like a price tag.

[00:27:51] On a budget sheet are the ones I think that that fall out of the focus when you’re thinking about migrating tech, but those are the most [00:28:00] important pieces. If you don’t have a braze expert or an iterable expert on your team. Don’t dump your marketing automation platform, like I’ll just, I’ll full stop right there, but I know who posted this and he’s a wonderful human being in front.

[00:28:16] But I think in the comments we were all wondering if perhaps he was getting some sort of kickback from this post. And I think, I think yeah, I fall in that camp, but I’ve seen, I’ve seen wonderful tech stacks that have included braids or adorable. And I think they’re fantastic, but I don’t know.
[00:28:33] That you can swap tech without swapping team resources.

[00:28:38] Joe Peters: I thought there was a funny quote from Phil Fernandez, who was a co founder of Mercado is that when Braze stops using Mercado and starts using Braze for their own B2B marketing, you will know it’s time. Yeah.

[00:28:53] Lauren McCormack: Yeah. And I think Justin Gray posted something similar maybe like a month ago and he was [00:29:00] really cryptic about what his new tech stack was that was saving him so much money.

[00:29:05] And I think we were all following in the comments, but he never did reveal what the wonder solution was. I think at the end of the day though there’s lots of different ways to get marketing comms out the door. Your own unique tech stack is your choice, but make sure you’ve got somebody to drive the bus for sure.

[00:29:24] Joe Peters: Yeah, that’s right. We haven’t got to self driving marketing buses yet. That’s for sure. That’s right. But who knows what the future will bring us, but speaking of moving along here and the next stop on the next bus stop. Is our pairing section. So this week’s album that that you’ve, you’re having a little listen to is from temples.

[00:29:51] They’re from the UK beautiful album. They, they put together here. All of the lyrics have been handwritten on postcards. It’s kind of [00:30:00] cool inside there. And then the vinyl is this really nice kind of translucent blue. And the song that we’re playing is called Cicada, which is a little bit of a funny thing.

[00:30:14] Unfortunately, I probably listened to too much music too loud, so now if the windows are closed in the summer time… I don’t hear the cicadas anymore at that that high level frequency. Obviously, if I’m outside, sure. But it makes me laugh every time I hear that song, Cicada, because it’s just a friendly reminder that you shouldn’t have the volume on 10 for too long if you’ve got the headphones on.

[00:30:42] But anyway, a great album. The, the, the album is Exotico and just came out maybe a couple of months ago, but a great listen and just a beautiful. Presentation of the album in in two, two records in there. So four sides to, to, of great music to [00:31:00] listen to. All right, Lauren. So this is Lauren’s first time on pairing.

[00:31:04] So she’s pairing. with something different as you know, we had a book pairing last week and a beer pairing the week before. So what do you have for us this week, Lauren? So I brought

[00:31:17] Lauren McCormack: some coffee. It’s, you know, I’m recording, I’m recording at 9am here and I love Tonkin’s can do spirit, but I think it’s a little early for a pint.

[00:31:26] So I did bring some coffee. It’s from our friends at Presta. Here in Tucson they do locally roasted coffee and they’ve been in the community locally owned for like 10 years and they’re probably the boldest deepest darkest roast I can find here in town, but I do love you know, going down to the farmers markets are going down into the downtown area and and trying all the local coffee.

[00:31:49] So, today we have their, their Mexican roast and, it’s a Dana Montana organic washed and it’s got according to the label [00:32:00] notes of milk, chocolate, hazelnut and trail mix.

[00:32:05] Joe Peters: The trail. That’s a funny tasting note. I feel

[00:32:09] Lauren McCormack: like I buy the specific. Type of coffee from Presta based on what the sticker suggests.

[00:32:15] I don’t know that I’m picking up trail mix. But I love that notion, but I will say

[00:32:24] you can definitely get the chocolate notes and it’s a great cup of coffee to start the day and a great pairing for, for your vinyl

[00:32:31] Joe Peters: choice there. So do they do they, do you buy a ground? Are you a take home the beans and grind it yourself? We

[00:32:38] Lauren McCormack: are a whole bean family here. And my, my oldest son works at the farmer’s market.

[00:32:43] And every time I go up to one of the vendors and they ask that question and I say whole bean, I can just see them smile like a knowing smile, like good job, good job. But there is something special, I think about You know, grinding and the process, the whole, I mean, you’ve got an absinthe fountain behind you.

[00:32:59] So [00:33:00] you understand the process of a beverage.

[00:33:02] Joe Peters: Yeah. Well, the smell of freshly ground coffee other than the, once you finish grinding it, no one likes the actual process, but the aftermath That smell and aroma is something else.
I, it

[00:33:15] Lauren McCormack: opens it up. And I think there’s something Pavlovian now at this point with our little grinder, you know, it doing its work.

[00:33:22] I know it’s in

[00:33:22] Joe Peters: store. Yeah. That’s, that’s funny. The whole family comes running. Okay. So I think we’re, we have a couple of last plugs for pairing sections today. So I know you wanted to talk about something that you and Lucas are up to.

[00:33:38] Lauren McCormack: Yes our brilliant Lucas is going to be on a mug, a Tucson Marketo user group meeting that we’ve got coming up in 22 days.

[00:33:49] So, we’re talking October 24th. It’s going to be 9 am West Coast time. If you’re not. In Tucson, it’s okay. This is a virtual event. You can join from [00:34:00] anywhere in the world. You can sign up and I’ll send you the recording. You don’t even have to be there in person, but we will drop a link in our, our comments and and be sure to come and hear about the transformative power of AI in your Marketo instance.

[00:34:16] We’ve got a lot of interesting, topics on tap deciphering good leads from bad thinking about lead scoring and classification, even finding the best days and times to send your, your comms using the power of GPT. So if you’re interested at all, please do join us and we’ll see you there.

[00:34:34] Joe Peters: Yeah, that Lucas has definitely been diving deep in terms of AI integration with Mercado.

[00:34:40] So there’s going to be some fun things for everybody to hear about. Yeah, he’s really, really pushing the limits. He’s

[00:34:48] Lauren McCormack: brilliant. And I, I’m also delighted to host Tyron Pretorius from Telnix. So he’s gonna be the, the power duo, right? With Lucas on [00:35:00] our upcoming meeting.

[00:35:01] Joe Peters: And then one final note is also for for those of you that are interested in what we’re really looking forward to as a great conference the first weekend of November, Is mops, MOPAP Palooza.

[00:35:17] Lauren is a, a virtual speaker. And Andy and I will both be presenting, well, Andy has a has a session. I’m on a panel, and so it’s really shaping up to be a hyper-focused MOPS event that we’re really excited about. So you can find out more about that on marketing ops.com. We’re, we’re not getting it.

[00:35:37] We’re not. Getting any kickbacks or sponsorship money from Mike. We just think that it’s going to be a great event for those of us in the space and a chance for the community to get together. And

[00:35:49] Lauren McCormack: it’s in Anaheim, so Joe, you gotta, you gotta pick out some mouse ears.

[00:35:54] Joe Peters: Well, I’m not too sure about that. It’s not, I’m not too sure about that.[00:36:00]

[00:36:00] I, I, I, my last Disney excursion was Keeping my daughters happy with the princesses and waiting in line for photos. And I think it was even autographs, which is also kind of a weird thing, but.

[00:36:13] Lauren McCormack: the

[00:36:14] Joe Peters: way it should be. Yeah. I think my work’s done when it comes to Mickey. But anyway, maybe there’s a Star Wars thing that could draw me in, but anyway, that’s for another conversation.

[00:36:24] So thank you everyone for listening. Lauren, thank you for coming on the podcast this week. We really appreciate your insights and you can subscribe, rate, and review whether you like Spotify, YouTube, Apple podcasts, or Google podcasts. We appreciate your patronage and you can also stay connected with us on LinkedIn.

[00:36:50] And we actually have a newsletter that just dropped I think last Thursday or Friday. It’s also called Launch Codes. We sort of take the best. Elements of what we’re [00:37:00] talking out of the talking about on the podcast in the newsletter. So sign up for that as well.

[00:37:05] Lauren McCormack: Take care Thanks for having me