Real Talk with RevOps: What Ops Leaders Say About Texting

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Amanda McGuckin Hager: Hi, and welcome to our conversation, Real Talk with RevOps. I’m thrilled to have this collection of RevOps All-Stars with me today. I’ll start with introductions with Ali. Ali Rostiello.

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Amanda McGuckin Hager: Currently the founder of GTM Edit, which is a fractional slash consulting firm, correct?

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Ali Rastiello: Yes.

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Ali Rastiello: That is correct.

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Amanda McGuckin Hager: And do you want to just give everyone a little bit of your background?

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Ali Rastiello: Yeah, sure. I came up through Demand Gen and Marketing Ops, extended it to RevOps in my last role, so I really have a passion for looking at the entire GTM stack and process of how, we grow companies. And so, yeah, I’m excited to have this conversation with you guys.

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Amanda McGuckin Hager: Awesome.

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Amanda McGuckin Hager: And Mike Rizzo is the founder and CEO of Marketing Ops Marketing Community, Marketing Ops Community, just fresh off the heels of MOPSA, or Mopsapalooza, your community event, so do you want to give us a little bit of your background?

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Mike Rizzo: Sure! Yeah, hi everybody. I’m CEO and founder of MarketingOps.com, which is the official home of the Mopros community. Some of you may know it as the Mopros. It still is the Mopros, it’s just the name of the community out of MarketingOps.com.

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Mike Rizzo: We exist for…

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Mike Rizzo: practitioners that are looking to, you know, current or aspiring practitioners of marketing operations or go-to-market ops broadly. And the whole point is that we’re trying to take you from maybe a team of one or a few, and some of you are lucky enough to have more than a few, to a team of, like, 3,500 or more.

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Mike Rizzo: sort of have a brain hive to tap into, and we’re on a mission to create a tech-agnostic certification path for those who want to build and develop their career in this space, and it’s a lot of fun. So, yeah. That’s kind of… I guess me in a background, I’m in B2B SaaS. That’s, like, that’s the whole world that I came from.

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Amanda McGuckin Hager: Yeah.

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Amanda McGuckin Hager: I’ve been, I’ve known Mike for a long time, I’ve known Allie for a long time as well. Allie and I worked together about a decade ago at Rackspace.

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Ali Rastiello: My…

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Amanda McGuckin Hager: Mike and I were a little older. Mike and I, met probably 5 or 6 years ago, I think. Just as a brief introduction, I’ve been in demand gen marketing for a long time, but… and marketing operations has always been a part of that, so it was…

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Amanda McGuckin Hager: I’ve been following Mike and the Mopros community for quite some time,

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Amanda McGuckin Hager: It’s… I’m thrilled to have you here. And then Sarah McNamara,

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Amanda McGuckin Hager: Sarah is, I think a…

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Amanda McGuckin Hager: an inspirational and value-added-to-the-community leader in some of the content she puts out. She is the founding…

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Amanda McGuckin Hager: ops and go-to-market strategy lead at Vector, but also does this amazing newsletter, which if you don’t… haven’t subscribed to yet, I would recommend. It’s the Marketing Ops Strategist.

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Amanda McGuckin Hager: I have all of her resources bookmarked in my Chrome, because they’re so great and helpful. So, Sarah, do you want to just share a little bit about your background? I know you have a lot to offer.

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Sara McNamara: Yeah, I’m happy to be here. I started in marketing ops as a background, so that’s where a lot of my, kind of, tenure comes from, but I’ve since branched out into revenue operations, too. So I work in RevOps at Vector, a contact-based ad, kind of, marketing platform.

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Sara McNamara: And, yeah, I’d love to share my knowledge. Thanks for the plug of the newsletter.

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Amanda McGuckin Hager: or the newsletter.

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Sara McNamara: Thank you so much, that means a lot. It always feels like a win when someone says they bookmark something. It’s like a win, but also terrifying at the same time.

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Amanda McGuckin Hager: jump.

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Sara McNamara: So… so thank you. But yeah, excited to, talk texting. I think it’s gonna be a big deal moving forward.

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Amanda McGuckin Hager: Yeah, so,

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Amanda McGuckin Hager: I’ll just share, I am Amanda McGucken-Hager, I am the CMO, and recently also the CRO of True Dialogue, so I look at texting in both the marketing world of demand gen and nurtures, and, you know, sort of relationship building.

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Amanda McGuckin Hager: And also, in the sales world of, you know, connections, pipeline velocity, deal velocity,

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Amanda McGuckin Hager: So, I have been thinking about texting for a while, since, obviously, joining True Dialogue almost 2 years now, and just wanted to get us together to… I really am curious, like, how are the three of you thinking about texting? So…

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Amanda McGuckin Hager: That’s just the first question. You guys have some great professional experience, you’ve worked at some big companies, you’ve worked with some stellar, you know, the stellar community of other marketing ops, and just would love to hear from you of where are you thinking, what are you hearing?

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Amanda McGuckin Hager: mike, I’ll call on you first.

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Mike Rizzo: It’s a popcorn Mike. Okay, yeah, no, I…

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Mike Rizzo: What do I think about texting? I think texting is,

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Mike Rizzo: this, like, secret, unsung hero in the potential go-to-market system, to be honest, like, this motion.

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Mike Rizzo: I think…

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Mike Rizzo: I think it scares… it probably scares brands more than anything else, particularly on the B2B side. So, like, my lens is very heavy on the B2B side, right? Like, we’re all very used to, as consumers, like, interacting with text nowadays from businesses, but I think when B2B executives, even kind of hear the whisper of the idea of text message marketing, they’re like.

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Mike Rizzo: that sounds kind of scary. Like, how do you execute that? Is there some sort of limitation in the tech stack that I have to suddenly navigate? Is… do I own that? Is that an IT system? Like, I don’t really know. And then, you know, is there some new compliance? Like, there’s just all these questions that I think immediately should pop up for an executive.

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Mike Rizzo: But the reality is, like, the answers are out there, and it’s, like, so not hard to stand up, like…

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Mike Rizzo: So, I, I think, I think…

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Mike Rizzo: my purview is that B2B brands need to start thinking about it very actively, and the reality is, is that it’s probably already happening, you just don’t know, right? Like, your reps are probably texting your customers.

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Amanda McGuckin Hager: Right? Yeah.

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Mike Rizzo: And.

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Amanda McGuckin Hager: That’s what we’re hearing.

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Amanda McGuckin Hager: That’s what we’re hearing. I actually, had been talking with some pipeline intelligence solutions.

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Amanda McGuckin Hager: I think you guys all know what that… what that is when I say that.

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Amanda McGuckin Hager: And, one of them had come to us to say, our pipeline intelligence doesn’t actually capture SMS

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Amanda McGuckin Hager: as a signal.

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Amanda McGuckin Hager: And so, my customers are sitting down with their sales teams and saying, this deal hasn’t had activity in 2 weeks, how can you say it’s gonna be closing?

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Amanda McGuckin Hager: And the rep is like, well, I’m on text with them, like, I’m talking with them now. So, just to validate your point, yes, we’re hearing that as well, that the reps are all texting each other, and texting their prospects and customers. I don’t know, Allie or Sarah, if you are hearing that, as well.

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Ali Rastiello: experiencing it, so…

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Ali Rastiello: Yeah, so when I, you know, in my last role, I was the key person that bought every tech, every piece of tech in the go-to-market platform, right? Marketing, sales, customer support, all of those things were in my purview.

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Amanda McGuckin Hager: This was in healthcare, right?

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Ali Rastiello: and this was in healthcare, this was at Health Catalyst, and every deal that I made involved some level of texting. And in fact, when I posted about doing this webinar, the first person that liked it was a salesperson that I bought from, and I tagged him in my response, and I was like.

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Ali Rastiello: do you remember, like, the majority of our deal was done over text message. Right. Because we would, you know, we were having all of our conversations about, like, budget limitations and timing and all of that stuff.

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Ali Rastiello: in real time and text. And at the same time, I’m the RevOps leader trying to build activity tracking

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Ali Rastiello: of my sales reps, and I’m totally doing this, like, offline with him, so, like, there’s no tracking of that unless he’s putting notes in that he texted me, or, you know, anything like that. So…

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Amanda McGuckin Hager: Can we just…

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Mike Rizzo: And we all know how.

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Amanda McGuckin Hager: We all know sales.

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Mike Rizzo: Correct.

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Ali Rastiello: We all know how that’s gonna go. And so, I think that it is done a lot, I think, especially in, this, like, once a deal’s in pipe, the sales…

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Ali Rastiello: a lot of that sell is happening, you know, the updates and things are happening on text. I think a lot of the relationship building that they’re doing in customer service, or should be doing, I should say, would be happening over text if you have a good relationship with your customer. And I know that, you know, there are

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Ali Rastiello: my… I call them my BFF brands, that anytime that I get hired somewhere, I bring the technologies on, because I feel like they’re so important.

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Ali Rastiello: to the tech stack, and I have such good relationships with them, they’re on my text anyway, so as soon as I’m, like, in a new role, or I’m advising somebody, I’ll be like, hey, I’m texting you right now because I’m sending so-and-so your way, or I think that, you know, there’s a potential here. It’s just a way of life.

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Amanda McGuckin Hager: I don’t know that there’s ever gonna…

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Ali Rastiello: I shouldn’t say ever. I think on the marketing side, like, from a true, like.

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Ali Rastiello: the way that we do in D2C, because I’m also standing up a D2C brand, I think that’s a little bit different, because that’s more like impulse buying, and excitement, and, oh, there’s a… there’s a discount right now.

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Ali Rastiello: that’s not really the mentality or the thinking of how we sell in B2B, so I don’t know how much that would get adopted on the marketing side, but I feel like on the sales and customer side, all day long, if we could track all of that activity, that would be such a great indicator of signals.

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Amanda McGuckin Hager: Yeah.

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Amanda McGuckin Hager: agree. I mean, we talked previously getting ready for this, just about… and I use the word intimate, and…

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Amanda McGuckin Hager: it’s an intimate channel, right? Your friends, your family, my mom, my children, like, my best friends are in here, as well as my vendors, and my coworkers, and everyone else, right? But it is, almost like the bat line into…

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Amanda McGuckin Hager: Into your prospects and customers.

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Amanda McGuckin Hager: There’s a lot here to unpack. Mike, you brought up compliance, and Allie, you talked about activity tracking, and…

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Amanda McGuckin Hager: There is a compliance element with the sales that, one of the, the vendors I had been talking with was concerned about, which was customer data, right? If you have customer data on your reps’ personal cell phones.

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Amanda McGuckin Hager: And they leave… actually,

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Amanda McGuckin Hager: One of our customers is a bank who was saying that their, their wealth advisors were, texting with their clients, and when they left the bank, or should they be leaving the bank, they would walk out with those relationships.

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Amanda McGuckin Hager: In their own personal device, and so the wealth advisor ended up owning the relationship rather than the bank owning the relationship, simply because of the conversations taking place

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Amanda McGuckin Hager: Outside of the system.

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Amanda McGuckin Hager: So there… there is that… that level of compliance,

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Ali Rastiello: I think that would happen regardless, right?

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Mike Rizzo: Yeah, totally.

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Ali Rastiello: Like, that’s gonna happen no matter what, like, come on. Come on, brand, whatever you are, like, wealth management brand. We’re all gonna be on LinkedIn being BFFs anyway, so, like.

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Amanda McGuckin Hager: Yeah, that’s true. That’s true.

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Sara McNamara: I think on the flip side, though, I think there is some brand protection in the idea that you have some visibility into the conversation, and that it remains professional. Like, I’ve worked in kind of, like, the financial industry, and you do have some reps who’ll kind of go a little bit into weird territory at times, and…

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Sara McNamara: you would like to have visibility into that, right, before it becomes, like, someone’s calling into the office. Like, I actually had an old story where someone was allowed to set up their own subdomain and email a bunch of people, and they ended up emailing some kind of, like, recruiting-adjacent email to a bunch of customers.

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Sara McNamara: Because they weren’t centralized within RevOps, they didn’t have the visibility.

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Ali Rastiello: didn’t really know what they were doing, honestly.

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Amanda McGuckin Hager: Transparency and accountability was missing.

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Sara McNamara: Yeah, and the business didn’t realize it until, you know, one of the VPs started getting these angry phone calls, why are you sending… you know, we’re partners as brands, why are you sending my reps these messages that are, like, recruiting

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Sara McNamara: language. So if you can have that visibility, you can, you know, train people on how to best do this kind of stuff, and then also curb if someone is doing something that

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Sara McNamara: Is not so creative and a little more, like, brand damaging.

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Amanda McGuckin Hager: Yeah.

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Ali Rastiello: I like that idea, too, because, I mean, you do get that level of control when you, say, institute something like a gong, where you’re kind of monitoring

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Ali Rastiello: the… the conversations that are having in, you know, you’re having in meetings. So this would be another avenue of, like, wanting some level of control and visibility on that. I can totally see that.

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Mike Rizzo: Yeah, it’s… I think we all briefly kind of scratched at this the first time we all chatted, but… and it’s come up naturally again here, right? It’s just like, this is, again, just one of the questions that I think makes, adopting, like, text messaging, like.

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Mike Rizzo: you know, quote-unquote, like, scary for brands, or what have you, but, like, to the point of having the visibility into the conversation, like, if you…

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Mike Rizzo: you know, if you have this something in place to be able to monitor and see what’s going on and track the sort of deal velocity and all that stuff on a very intimate channel, as we’ve talked about, I can say, like, as a buyer, I feel…

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Mike Rizzo: really good when I have a relationship with a rep. If I’ve given them my phone number, it’s probably a really good signal that we’re headed the right direction, right? Yeah. And so, like, you want to almost encourage that for your sellers to have that, and then simultaneously, your sellers will probably feel like, oh yeah, like, this is feeling really strong.

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Mike Rizzo: you know, I’ve got a…

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Mike Rizzo: I have a great text message conversation going with a huge enterprise brand right now that wants to potentially, you know, support the community, and you bet your bottom dollar, I’m like, we’re best friends, right?

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Amanda McGuckin Hager: Yeah.

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Mike Rizzo: That’s a big sign.

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Amanda McGuckin Hager: Signal right there, that’s a big signal.

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Mike Rizzo: huge signal, but I think, I think this, this, this idea of, like.

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Mike Rizzo: You being an employee, you owning your relationships, or, like, to the degree that you’re an employee, you own the relationship on behalf of the brand.

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Mike Rizzo: I think it does beg the question, like.

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Mike Rizzo: you know, brands, if it really scares you that much, IT already probably provisions a machine to them for their, you know, laptop, at least for security and compliance perspective.

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Amanda McGuckin Hager: Just provision a phone. Just… give them a phone.

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Mike Rizzo: let them run with the phone, if that’s your motion, like, go for it. If you don’t want to do that, then get something like a true dialogue in place to at least start tracking and monitoring these things, but, like.

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Ali Rastiello: Yep.

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Mike Rizzo: go the next level, and just, like, give them a phone, because at this point, we’re all working on them anyway, and arguably, I think you should, just because I think it’s the right thing to do. Yeah. But, yeah. That’s my call-out to the companies.

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Amanda McGuckin Hager: I’m flashing back to moments in time of bring your own device, you know, when that was a new thing. Probably not a new thing anymore, but…

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Amanda McGuckin Hager: To your point, provisioning The equipment is probably best practice.

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Mike Rizzo: Yeah, I, I, I mean…

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Mike Rizzo: I think it’s… I think I’ve… yeah. I think it’s the right thing to do for a company to… to think about, if it wants to implement technology that has some level of observability across the go-to-market motions to also provide the hardware that can make those things happen. And I don’t know why phones have gotten left by the wayside, like, they’re…

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Mike Rizzo: They’re no more expensive than a laptop is.

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Ali Rastiello: Yeah.

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Ali Rastiello: I think it’s odd, too, because I always had a phone provisioned for me until…

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Ali Rastiello: probably when I joined BigCommerce in 2017, they didn’t provide one, and they didn’t actually, like, reimburse or anything, which was very weird, because for the first…

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Ali Rastiello: I don’t know, since I started, like, doing this in 2007, I always had a phone given to me by the company I worked for.

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Amanda McGuckin Hager: Yeah, I’ve carried

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Amanda McGuckin Hager: Yeah. My personal and my work phone, which is… there’s some freedom in that, too, right? When you can just put your work phone away, and you’re like, I don’t have to answer that.

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Ali Rastiello: Oh, that’s great.

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Ali Rastiello: So I just think that’s an interesting trend, too, that’s happened over the years. Or they pay for your personal device, which is what Health Catalyst did for me.

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Amanda McGuckin Hager: Yeah.

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Mike Rizzo: Right, which I think is the right thing to do, right? Like, there… we openly are recognizing that you’re going to use your devices for, you know, these business transactions, and we’re going to, like, subsidize the cost of that to some extent. I think there’s, like.

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Mike Rizzo: I know in California, there’s some state policies that actually require some level of reimbursement, to anybody working from home for, like, some portion of their internet. It’s like… so, I don’t know if it’s different across different states, but yeah, anyway, I… we’re rabbit-holing here on device hardware and stuff like that.

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Amanda McGuckin Hager: I want to say, I want to pivot to the marketing use case. So, I know we talked a lot about sales, and just kind of on the heels of the bring your own device or provision device, but let’s switch over into marketing.

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Amanda McGuckin Hager: I’ve been a… I almost say, lifelong, marketer, specifically B2B demand, demand generation, and I see a lot of opportunity for brands and texting, specifically…

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Amanda McGuckin Hager: You know, the ones off the top of my head are certainly event reminders, like.

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Ali Rastiello: Like, what we have here.

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Amanda McGuckin Hager: in-person events, like, with MOPSA, happening. I belong to another community, and, they were having an event, and in the middle of the event, they got Uber

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Amanda McGuckin Hager: credits or promotion codes for everyone after the after-party, right? So no one had to drive home or deal with that.

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Amanda McGuckin Hager: But they had no way to get them to everyone in attendance.

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Amanda McGuckin Hager: In real time, because they didn’t have a tech solution, in place, and so there are opportunities, sort of, event operations, day of event type.

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Amanda McGuckin Hager: opportunities there. And I think there’s also opportunity with, like, dropping high content, high-value content, right? I’ve got a new research report, or we’ve just…

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Amanda McGuckin Hager: issued, I don’t know.

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Amanda McGuckin Hager: Something, something else of, of excitement.

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Amanda McGuckin Hager: product launches.

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Amanda McGuckin Hager: But I’d love to hear… that’s what I’m thinking, and I’m clearly biased, so I’d love to hear you guys, you know, your perspectives on the marketing use case.

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Sara McNamara: I’m very bullish on B2B being a few years behind B2C, so I’m always watching, like, what are B2C marketers doing?

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Sara McNamara: And, like, one way that we started reflecting this at Vector is, like, right off the bat, when I joined, we just added a newsletter sign-up. We didn’t even have a newsletter. But it was like, well.

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Sara McNamara: we want people, like, people are following a company, especially of our size, for the people. They’re not following it because of a brand, per se, especially at that stage. But even some of the larger brands, like, I know people from Gong who have continued to follow throughout their career, and…

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Sara McNamara: So we set up that channel, and then it became more of almost, like, a personal newsletter, where we have, like, individual people at the company writing their own little editions, and then people get so excited to read them. Like, the reception of that has been huge, because you can hear the personality.

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Amanda McGuckin Hager: And I… I’m very bullish on the idea that.

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Sara McNamara: B2B has become far too serious, and especially with AI coming into the picture, I think things will become more and more rigid and boring.

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Sara McNamara: And I think the brands that will succeed will be the ones that have figured out, how do we become fun?

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Sara McNamara: Obviously, in a professional… like, we don’t want to be unprofessional, but, like.

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Amanda McGuckin Hager: Right, right.

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Sara McNamara: But do a little bit of just fun stuff that makes people smile, and you get those responses that are like, this was a joy to read, like, I’ve never read a B2B newsletter that’s been a joy to read, at least not in a long time.

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Ali Rastiello: Yeah.

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Ali Rastiello: I remember…

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Amanda McGuckin Hager: Awesome.

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Ali Rastiello: the days early on when I was at this company called The Planet, which is now, like, part of IBM, but they were a hosting company, and I mean, let’s get more boring than that. But they re… but they were targeting, like.

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Ali Rastiello: gamers, and this was back when you had, like, hobbyists doing lots of stuff before there was, like, much easier ways to set up your websites and things like that. So, there’s a lot of hobbyists out there, and a lot of, like, high… like, people that spend a lot of money on their servers to play games.

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Amanda McGuckin Hager: Oh, yeah.

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Ali Rastiello: And also, it was just kind of, like, the new tech world that was emerging, so we would do crazy stuff. Like, it was like, I remember when we first started out on Twitter.

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Amanda McGuckin Hager: We were like, there’s this thing called Twitter, and we can… I remember that.

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Ali Rastiello: I remember when Twitter launched, and I remember having the first conversations around, like, how do we use this? I wrote an article

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Ali Rastiello: a blog there about social media and how that was gonna change B2B in, like, 2007.

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Ali Rastiello: And, you know, it’s so wild to see, like, the creative things that we were able to do back then, that we just… I feel like marketing is, like, so stuck in a box, and they’re like, well, I need a nurture cadence, and I need to do a webinar, and I need to do the… like, nothing is.

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Sara McNamara: And everyone else is doing that.

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Ali Rastiello: Yeah.

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Ali Rastiello: Exactly, and nothing’s fun about that. And if you could… if we could get back to the fun, I think…

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Ali Rastiello: It would change the game in a lot of ways.

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Amanda McGuckin Hager: Have I told you guys about RCS, and what that is, and…

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Amanda McGuckin Hager: So, RCS, for those of you that don’t know, is, if you’re an Android user, you know this already. If you’re an iPhone user, it was, just supported in the last year or so. I think it’s now turned on by default.

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Amanda McGuckin Hager: But it… from a marketing and sort of RevOps perspective, it allows us to send what I refer to as, like, an HTML email in your text, right? You’re gonna have carousels, call-to-action buttons.

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Amanda McGuckin Hager: Interactivity, you can send polls, you can send surveys, like, it’s gonna open the world up.

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Amanda McGuckin Hager: from just a plain… I mean, really and truly, the text message is not that far off from, like, a Twitter message, right? 100 and… I think Twitter is 120 characters, and text is 160 characters, it’s all plain…

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Amanda McGuckin Hager: kind of boring, to your point. But RCS is gonna change that, and… and this…

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Amanda McGuckin Hager: Next year, I think, is gonna be the year of RCS, so… I’m hoping…

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Amanda McGuckin Hager: That that will allow… that will be the channel for which Fun.

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Amanda McGuckin Hager: And surprise and delight comes back.

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Ali Rastiello: The surprising, the delight piece was… is what’s missing greatly.

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Amanda McGuckin Hager: Yeah.

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Ali Rastiello: And, like, also, you don’t see… we see evangelists, like, I feel like Sarah is a great one. Mike, your whole community’s full of it. Like, there’s evangelists out there, but I don’t think companies are taking advantage of having evangelists for their brand anymore, like we used to do.

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Ali Rastiello: We had a whole roll.

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Ali Rastiello: at that first company where we were doing fun stuff, that was just an evangelist. It was a young guy that was super into, you know, the tech and understanding it.

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Ali Rastiello: And would do fun things. He had something like, do you want to see your server? And he had people on Twitter asking him to go take a picture of their little server in the data center, and we had, like.

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Ali Rastiello: 7 data centers at this point. And he would go, and he would stand there with his, like… and there, you could see their IP address, or whatever it was, to, like, I don’t know, and take the picture. It was cute. And it was cute, and people loved.

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Mike Rizzo: That’s awesome. I can’t send this stupid picture of my server. I definitely want to see it. Like, send it over. Show me the hardware.

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Ali Rastiello: Yes!

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Mike Rizzo: Honestly, I would have said yes.

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Mike Rizzo: This goes!

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Sara McNamara: Brands are starting to do that.

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Sara McNamara: I think brands are starting to do that again, but I think that… think about it this way. Even if you hire an evangelist, the channels they have right now are, like, LinkedIn, which is… the algorithm is a nightmare, most of the time.

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Mike Rizzo: Absolutely nice.

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Sara McNamara: We have email.

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Sara McNamara: super inundated, and also unreliable, right? Like, could just be a soft bounce for barely any reason. The server that day was overloaded. So you’re struggling to get that…

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Sara McNamara: voice out, even when people want to hear it, even when people subscribe. Like, I have to have all my subscribers respond, being like, hello, yes, I would like to say once again that I would like to receive this email. And even then, I’m sure they don’t get every email.

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Sara McNamara: Whereas… and also think about how often you change emails, too. From, like, a practicality perspective, the amount of churn of the last few years with the job market has been wild.

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Sara McNamara: Even with my newsletter to manage, it’s like, oh, that person’s already moved, like, twice in the last, like, year and a half.

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Amanda McGuckin Hager: Whereas, like, text is a lot more… it tends to be a lot more stable.

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Sara McNamara: And sticky into…

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Ali Rastiello: That’s stable. I’ve had my number since I was, 13. Yeah.

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Sara McNamara: But, Amanda, you and I were… you and I were talking about, like, I’m already getting… there’s, like, a local group called The Nudge in San Diego, where you can sign up and you can get local events sent to you, so it takes away that workload of having to, like, suss through all the announcements and stuff.

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Amanda McGuckin Hager: Yeah.

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Sara McNamara: And I love that stuff, I’m looking to get it. I’m sure there are sponsored posts in there, but ultimately, if they still are in my interest realm, then it’s like, number one, I’m getting it, and I’m likely to read it, way more likely than an email.

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Sara McNamara: And then there’s no algorithm to try to, like, push you to spend even more money to try to get it in front of me.

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Mike Rizzo: Yeah.

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Mike Rizzo: I… I’m in a,

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Mike Rizzo: I’m in this, like, health coaching program thing that I’ve been in now for a year.

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Mike Rizzo: I could tell you that I’ve attended exactly zero of the coaching, like, sessions so far, in terms of, like, the group coaching sessions, that are more like webinars, basically. But I definitely have it in my mind that I want to go, and guess what?

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Mike Rizzo: Not only do I get the little app, because there’s a community app, I get the app notification, but I get a text every single time, too.

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Amanda McGuckin Hager: Yeah.

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Mike Rizzo: Ask me if I’ve unsubscribed in the last 12 months from each one of those. Nope, never once. Because, in the back of my mind, I’m like, one of these days I’m gonna join that dang webinar.

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Amanda McGuckin Hager: Yeah.

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Ali Rastiello: Right?

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Mike Rizzo: Like, I would just… I’m passionate enough.

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Mike Rizzo: be aware, right? Yeah. Like, super sticky.

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Amanda McGuckin Hager: It is super sticky.

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Mike Rizzo: It is really sticky.

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Amanda McGuckin Hager: So I… just back to the marketing use case, any ideas out there? If not, then I want to ask you guys about AI, because I have to.

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Ali Rastiello: Oh, gosh.

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Mike Rizzo: I just want to, like, for anybody who’s either watching right now or, or watches this later, right, we talked a little bit about the idea of events right when you kicked it off, Amanda.

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Amanda McGuckin Hager: Hmm.

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Mike Rizzo: you might say, like, in your… in whoever’s watching this, right, go, oh, we don’t do events.

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Mike Rizzo: No, you don’t have to run Mopsapalooza, a 490-person conference, to say that you’re running events.

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Mike Rizzo: I’ll bet you do dinners. I’ll bet you go to a conference, and you know people who are headed that way. And the mere fact that you have access to another distribution channel that says, hey, by the way, I’m on site at booth number X as one of the sponsors, if you’re around, would love to buy you coffee.

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Mike Rizzo: That you do events.

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Mike Rizzo: And…

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Amanda McGuckin Hager: Yeah.

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Mike Rizzo: The fastest way to get someone’s attention when you’re in a field event is on their phone.

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Mike Rizzo: Via text.

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Ali Rastiello: Full stop.

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Mike Rizzo: you’re not gonna read their emails. Like, they’re like, nope, email’s gone right now. I’m here.

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Ali Rastiello: I fully agree. I fully agree. And I think,

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Ali Rastiello: there’s these aspects of that when you use an event app, but I don’t think it’s the same as, like, a direct connection to that person. So, I… I am in full agreement that, like, an event’s use case is huge for the texting piece, and there was…

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Ali Rastiello: I mean, this… this was a… I don’t even know what event it was, but there was one that was doing…

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Ali Rastiello: this was years ago, that was doing some… had some level of text capabilities and was sending out updates via text, and it was so much easier to know where I needed to go. I don’t remember if I was, like, I signed up through something to get them, I don’t know.

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Ali Rastiello: But, but I do think that’s a big use case. I love the idea of…

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Ali Rastiello: nurturing through that, as well. I just feel like, because it’s so personal, like, that opt-in is gonna be real important, and…

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Ali Rastiello: the MOPS community or the MOPS team that’s running this is gonna have to be very stringent, just in the same way that we were in the beginning of email, when we had to run around and be like, you can’t just buy a list, what are you doing?

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Mike Rizzo: Right, yeah. Like, right.

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Ali Rastiello: You know?

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Amanda McGuckin Hager: Right, there are compliance elements, there’s quiet hours, we could get into… we could talk for probably a whole other webinar on some of the compliance issues of what an opt-in looks like.

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Amanda McGuckin Hager: As of today, there is no… You know, in email, we have subscription types, right? So, if someone unsubscribes, something pops up and says, well, do you want to be in… get marketing emails, do you want to get event emails? Do you want to get product updates, you know, etc. Different opportunities to subscribe to

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Amanda McGuckin Hager: more tailored content. That doesn’t exist yet in text.

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Amanda McGuckin Hager: It’s either you’re in or you’re out. You’re opted in, or you’re not. And so there is an element of those early days of email of, being really careful and cautious.

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Amanda McGuckin Hager: But also, we’ve got to try things as brands, right? We are actually about to publish some research on,

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Amanda McGuckin Hager: opt-outs and times of messages sent and types of messages. So, there is some research out there on that. There is also research out there, if anyone is interested, on in-app notifications versus text messaging. It validates everything you just said. Allie,

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Amanda McGuckin Hager: in-app notifications are yesterday, people are ignoring them, silencing them, clearing them, right? Not paying attention to them.

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Amanda McGuckin Hager: Text message is totally different there.

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Ali Rastiello: Because you have to be there to… in case your family’s texting you, or something’s important coming through. So there’s no… there’s no way that you’re not… you’re ignoring that on your phone. Yeah. And if you are.

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Ali Rastiello: how do you do it? Because I…

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Mike Rizzo: Yeah, send us the messages on how, because I don’t know how

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Mike Rizzo: back out either. Yeah. Yeah, so anyway, I think, yeah, I think you’re doing… no matter what, you’re probably got an events motion, whether you’re attending or hosting, it’s sort of beside the point.

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Amanda McGuckin Hager: It could be a digital event like this, right? Right.

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Mike Rizzo: Exactly.

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Amanda McGuckin Hager: from your evangelist, your leader, your… whoever it might be, goes a really long way to that personal connection.

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Amanda McGuckin Hager: That we’ve talked about.

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Mike Rizzo: Yeah, and I think that’s the… I think that’s the unique sort of opportunity of texting in general, is, treating it like a more, you know, I think, Sarah, you were talking about this, like, this newsletter concept, right? And,

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Mike Rizzo: giving… it’s… it’s not like a standardized motion, so to speak, like a playbook or whatever, but I would say, hey, you know, if you wanted to treat it like a personal channel, and you said, we’re just gonna support our CEO writing a newsletter, right?

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Mike Rizzo: opt-in to hear from the CEO, and, like, give him a phone number, or her a phone number.

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Mike Rizzo: you know, the other thing is, like, give your CRO, or your head of customer success, or your head of product, like, give them the different channels to opt into, and I think you can still sort of circumvent the issue of, like, you’re either in or you’re out, you just have to, like, then provision different numbers for different.

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Amanda McGuckin Hager: episode.

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Mike Rizzo: And just lean into it, right? And it’s just like, oh, like, let’s think about, like, this really intimate channel. How do we bring that level of intimacy to those people from…

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Mike Rizzo: Not just the brand, but, like, the people who are at the brand.

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Mike Rizzo: And I think it just takes, like, a little bit of creative thought, to sit there and go, okay, now that we have this channel, how can we optimize the use of it?

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Mike Rizzo: That fundamentally feels different from email, right? Like, email’s just like, oh yeah, we’re…

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Mike Rizzo: I’m just gonna send everybody whatever we want.

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Ali Rastiello: Yeah.

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Mike Rizzo: I would argue you should do the same for email, but most of us don’t. And since we’re talking about text, that’s just one thing that I would say is…

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Mike Rizzo: Yeah, I think nurturing in that way is, like.

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Mike Rizzo: Super, super relevant, and people are just used to buying that way now.

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Ali Rastiello: here.

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Mike Rizzo: And I will say.

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Ali Rastiello: Yeah, one of the things, Amanda, that… that stuck out to me was when I… I was…

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Ali Rastiello: mutual friends of ours, I won’t say names, but I was having, like, a little cocktail hour with them, and I was like, hey, I’m doing this thing for Amanda, and I was like, it’s really interesting, she works for this, like, texting company. And the first reaction was like, oh god, if people start texting me stuff about buying B2B technology, I’m gonna die. And I was like…

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Ali Rastiello: Wow, that was a visceral reaction to that.

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Amanda McGuckin Hager: But I think it’s because they haven’t…

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Ali Rastiello: thought… like, they’re just thinking about, like, how we get spammed for political stuff and things like that, right? And if you really have… you’re gonna have to do some education in the market about, like, how.

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Amanda McGuckin Hager: how they use it, specifically. Yeah.

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Ali Rastiello: and really show some, like, use cases for them, and, like, spell it out. Because I thought it was really interesting when I was like, wow, okay.

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Ali Rastiello: Yeah, I mean, I would say…

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Amanda McGuckin Hager: any brand, B2C or B2B, that is following the politician’s implementation of campaigns is probably not going to win favor, because there’s a lot of non-compliant opt-in, right? I don’t know about y’all, but I’m like, I’m like, get… how did they even get my number? You know, two or three…

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Sara McNamara: They write themselves out of the regulation, don’t you love that?

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Mike Rizzo: Yeah, I…

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Amanda McGuckin Hager: frustrating. That’s another topic altogether. But.

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Ali Rastiello: cocktail.

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Amanda McGuckin Hager: Not the best use case for any real brand, I think. And it does go back to that compliance, it does go back to that sort of being really cautious and careful. But I would also argue, Ali, that, maybe our potential friends are of a certain age.

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Amanda McGuckin Hager: because,

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Amanda McGuckin Hager: texting is truly sort of a generational thing, right? There are the digital natives that have grown up with this that are not checking email. Like, I have friends whose kids are in.

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Ali Rastiello: college applications, and they have to be like, have you checked your email to see if you got into the school?

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Amanda McGuckin Hager: And no, they hadn’t, right? So, email is kind of, thing, and…

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Amanda McGuckin Hager: phone calls, I think Apple has a setting on their phone, right? Not… at least I have mine turned on. Numbers that are… I don’t know, that are not in my contact list, they go straight to voicemail, right? I’m not even gonna take my.

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Ali Rastiello: I don’t think I have that turned on, but it has the thing now where this is a spam call. It’ll tell you, like, if it’s spam, potential spam, and it’ll also tell you,

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Ali Rastiello: That you can turn it on and they can say who they are, and then you can accept the call if you know who they are, which is…

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Amanda McGuckin Hager: that on. Yeah.

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Mike Rizzo: Yeah, and so those channels are blocked.

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Amanda McGuckin Hager: Exactly, yeah. Email and phone, I think, are less appealing to the younger generations. I know Sarah and I were talking

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Amanda McGuckin Hager: And if I may share it, Sarah, said, I almost prefer someone text me, because…

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Sara McNamara: Do not call me. Just do not.

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Sara McNamara: But I think a lot of that has to do with, like, don’t think about texting as the new email. I, like, fundamentally disagree with that. I don’t think we just want to send… we have a message we want to send from our company, let’s send it to everyone.

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Amanda McGuckin Hager: I think it needs to be more strategic than that.

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Sara McNamara: And my evidence there is, like, I feel like it started with email, then you started getting people just, like, spray and praying emails. Then people moved to, like, going on…

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Sara McNamara: like, Slack, for example, but now I’m a member of a million Slack groups, they all just at everyone, and then I, like, now I barely check the Slack groups, because there’s, like, too much going on. A lot of noise. It’s become too many announcements.

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Sara McNamara: So I think now people are trying to say, okay, now where do we go? I think text will be the next place, but my hope, and I’m sure there are gonna be people who are gonna abuse it, but my hope is that

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Sara McNamara: if we are really strategic about it as, like, a high-value place, the offering needs to be high value, and like I said, ideally, something that’s fun, or that, like, sparks some kind of joy to receive, right?

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Sara McNamara: if I’m in marketing ops, and I’m new, and I’m struggling in my role, if you are a MarTech company, and you can send me some really good advice, and, like, career stuff, something of high value to me.

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Sara McNamara: well, then you’ve got a loyal follower. If you just send me, hi, I’m… everyone always jokes about those bank notifications, like, hello, I am your bank. It’s like, there’s no value in that, or like, hello, I am a salesperson, and I want you to buy my thing. No value in that. It needs to be, like, a high-value offering.

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Ali Rastiello: Yeah.

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Ali Rastiello: I mean.

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Amanda McGuckin Hager: Personal invite, right?

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Sara McNamara: Yeah, I also think that goes back to…

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Ali Rastiello: Your content strategy as a marketer, and creating things that are very interesting and useful to people, versus, here’s a white paper.

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Amanda McGuckin Hager: Here’s… here’s the tech spec on, like, what we offer, like, make it interesting, and…

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Ali Rastiello: Make it connect to you as a human being, and your emotional responses.

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Ali Rastiello: before you ever get into the nuts and bolts of what it is. And I think that, you know.

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Ali Rastiello: in my experience, advising a lot of people, looking at a lot of marketing, that is so missed in B2B, of that human sort of connection that you’re supposed to be making, versus just, you know, I have a thing, I have a widget, and I think you need my widget.

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Amanda McGuckin Hager: Yeah.

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Amanda McGuckin Hager: I think you all have seen the trends and heard the trends, you know, we have AI coming up hot and heavy. I think one of you mentioned boring, right? It does start to feel really rote and similar, and…

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Amanda McGuckin Hager: In this market and in this environment, exactly what you guys said, the authenticity becomes where content used to be king.

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Amanda McGuckin Hager: Right? I think authenticity now becomes king of, like, that real human… exactly what Sarah’s doing with the vector newsletter, the… putting the human behind it, exactly what you’re talking about, Allie, with the evangelists, right? And…

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Amanda McGuckin Hager: And then Mike using all of that in a strategic way through the different channels.

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Amanda McGuckin Hager: Being really, you know, conscientious, I should say, and maybe intentional about using those channels.

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Sara McNamara: I think it’s gonna separate the winners from the, like, the losers of different channels very quickly. Like, I already see this on LinkedIn messaging.

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Sara McNamara: I’ve seen reps that just send a generic message, it flops most of the time, because people identify it. They’re like, this is not meant for me specifically. I also have worked with other reps who, like.

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Sara McNamara: Really look at the person’s profile, really understand who they are, try to see who they know, like, as mutual acquaintance, try to get some intel there, and be like, hey, you’re gonna be interested in this.

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Sara McNamara: And it’s… again, it’s not about…

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Sara McNamara: we want to sell you something, we want you to know about our product, it’s more like, hey, this could help you, you might be interested in this. And also, like, you know, it’s on our website, or it’s like, you know, there’s some kind of correlation there.

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Sara McNamara: Where then maybe you’ll eventually start to get to know the brand and be like, oh, this could be helpful in this strategy that I’m trying to implement.

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Amanda McGuckin Hager: Yeah.

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Mike Rizzo: Yeah. I think, for… it for sure comes back down to just, like, the amount of time and effort that a human can put into building a relationship. A brand can do that too, right? A brand can come off as such that it cares about people, for sure. It’s just, like.

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Mike Rizzo: I don’t know, I do think that…

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Mike Rizzo: the sort of landscape… again, I come from B2B SaaS, so we’ve watched this, like, dramatic shift in the, you know, spend ahead of revenue, you know, all the growth at all costs kind of a thing. It’s shifted now to more…

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Mike Rizzo: modest, measured growth, and I think because of that.

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Mike Rizzo: we’re now seeing a resurgence in the focus of the brand’s value and its relationship to its customers, which is wonderful. And then the value of investing in brand is now getting more attention, which then trickles down into these motions, which…

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Mike Rizzo: you know, despite AI and all of its ability to do things

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Mike Rizzo: You know, sometimes at that scale, etc. It’s just not quite as personalized, but it can give you a significant leg up if you just then put the human in the loop to…

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Mike Rizzo: to sort of tie in the loose ends and build in the relationships, and a brand can do that, they just need to spend a minute to think about, like, what does the audience care about? And I think that just is this, like…

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Mike Rizzo: You know, this is the intersection of my mops and my community manager role when I was at a company formerly known as Mavenlink, building their customer community.

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Mike Rizzo: we… like, yeah, we had a product, right? And we were talking about features and functionality and stuff like that, but…

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Mike Rizzo: at the end of the day, they were people, and they were worried about their margins and their profitability as a project management company. You know, they’re worried about running a business, making it run profitably, their staff being overworked or under, you know, underworked, or whatever, all of these things, and so… just spend a minute, like.

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Mike Rizzo: go find research, do your own research, provide them the value, and deliver that through a text, right? And say, hey, you know what? I know, I know, Amanda, you’re thinking long and hard about org structure right now.

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Mike Rizzo: And even though I have nothing to do with selling you org structure management tools.

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Amanda McGuckin Hager: In fact, I’m totally something else.

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Mike Rizzo: I still thought that this might be helpful for you, and here’s what I found, you know? Let me know if you found this interesting. I would love to have a conversation about some other things over coffee sometime, right? It’s like, oh, shit, sorry, oh, shoot! Like, that… you know what? Thank you for that, that’s super.

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Amanda McGuckin Hager: It was gonna be a spicy conversation. No, it’s all good.

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Mike Rizzo: But in any case, like, the idea is a brand and its people can bring… meet the people where they’re at, right?

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Amanda McGuckin Hager: Yeah.

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Mike Rizzo: about what they care about. You know, Sarah does a wonderful benchmark study, or has done a benchmark study on salaries. We do one for our annual research, too. Just delivering that to somebody.

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Mike Rizzo: That’s great, right? We’re not trying to tell them how to go increase their salary every day, but they want to know.

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Amanda McGuckin Hager: Yeah.

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Mike Rizzo: You know? So…

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Amanda McGuckin Hager: Absolutely, that’s high-value content. I mean, that’s what I was thinking of when, you know, dropping… being able to drop or share high-value content, kind of like a product launch in some ways, only it’s a content launch, right? I think that’s a great use case for text, especially in a community.

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Amanda McGuckin Hager: That you know have shared in similar interests, or your followers, or,

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Amanda McGuckin Hager: you know, your brand aficionados, if you’re a B2B brand.

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Amanda McGuckin Hager: We have a few minutes left, and I want to ask you guys, so, let’s say that you’re working with a company, and their leadership, sales, marketing, I’m not sure, any… pick one, maybe CS, comes to you and says, we need to do text messaging.

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Amanda McGuckin Hager: So, as a MOPS slash RevOps

355
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Amanda McGuckin Hager: leader, what is your first step? What do you do? Where do you go? What do you think?

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Amanda McGuckin Hager: What do you need to… what do you need to know?

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Ali Rastiello: I would… my first thought would be, let me figure out what companies do this. You know, like, just a quick…

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Amanda McGuckin Hager: like, a Google search, or ChatGPT, like, hey, tell me companies that do these things.

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Ali Rastiello: And have good controls, and have good, like, some level of reputation.

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Ali Rastiello: And then, so then I would do a short list, and then I would go start…

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Ali Rastiello: looking at websites, understanding what they had to offer, signing up for demos, but I’m… my biggest concern would be.

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Ali Rastiello: I want to know what kind of controls I have over it, what kind of reporting on the back end I can get so that I can see what transactions are, actually happening, and, how can we measure this in terms of

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Ali Rastiello: the lift it’s gonna give us, in the… in whatever motion we’re looking to do this in, right? Whatever team it is, doesn’t matter. But those are the two things, right? Controls, and then…

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Ali Rastiello: How we… how we measure it, and what benefit is it gonna bring us?

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Amanda McGuckin Hager: Yeah.

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Amanda McGuckin Hager: What about Mike and Terry? Same?

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Sara McNamara: What’s the strategy?

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Sara McNamara: Because…

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Amanda McGuckin Hager: That you want to know?

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Sara McNamara: We’ve talked about, if they come to me and they’re like, we just wanna…

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Sara McNamara: Spray and pray a sales message.

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Sara McNamara: We need to talk more about this, and what we’re trying to do with it, like, that’s not gonna work, that’s gonna be wasted money.

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Sara McNamara: So yeah, I would probably start there, trying to understand, like, okay, how has this come to mind?

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Sara McNamara: ideally, like, maybe someone sees this webinar and they bring it to their team. Like, to me, that’s the best spot to be in, is to, like, come to the team with a strategy of, like, here’s what I think we can do, here’s some benchmarks that I think we could try to hit, at least, and maybe exceed.

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Sara McNamara: But yeah, definitely, if they’re not ready from a strategy perspective.

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Sara McNamara: then I would want to talk more about that, and do some education, and try to get them on the right page to be successful with it.

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Amanda McGuckin Hager: Yeah, I’m flashing back to your LinkedIn, feed, and that your answer is just perfectly you. I have seen that in all of your…

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Amanda McGuckin Hager: not all of them, but in many of your LinkedIn posts.

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Amanda McGuckin Hager: how are we gonna use this, right? That’s… that’s really important. So, what about you, Mike? Flash back to when you were not running a community, but actually in-house somewhere.

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Amanda McGuckin Hager: Or to conversations with some of your community members that are in-house.

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Mike Rizzo: Yeah, yeah, I mean, you asked the question, like, what do you do first?

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Mike Rizzo: I’ll be honest, like, just because my brain operates that way now, and I know that there’s resources, I’m gonna go to my community, not marketing ops the community, I’m gonna go to my network of people that I know.

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Amanda McGuckin Hager: Yeah.

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Mike Rizzo: And just say, hey, who’s doing this, right? And if that happens to be the marketing ops community, great, or RevGenius, or RevOps Co-op, or whatever, right? Like, go to your community and see who’s doing what.

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Mike Rizzo: And then I think from there, it’s definitely, if I was a practitioner in that role, a thousand percent, I’m gonna ask why. Like, what’s going on. Hopefully they delivered that message sort of right out of the gate.

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Mike Rizzo: But… it’s… it’s a really delicate role to be in in MOPS and RevOps, right? Like…

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Mike Rizzo: The question is asked from an absolute place of love, right, and great intention. The… let’s talk about the strategy and the why that Sarah brings up all the time is, like, often seen as, like, us being kind of jerks, and, like, that’s not at all what it is, and it’s definitely not us trying to get out of work.

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Mike Rizzo: It’s just us trying to make sure that the work doesn’t get out of…

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Mike Rizzo: hand, right? Yeah. Like, spirals out of control. Yeah. Yeah.

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Ali Rastiello: I’ve often gotten, like, you’re the girl that does the b-boops, why do you care why we want to do this? Yeah. Like, you know what, you know what I mean.

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Ali Rastiello: They’re just like, you’re the technical person, like, you don’t understand marketing strategy, and I just want to be like, you need to sit down for 5 minutes, and let’s talk about the fact that I came from demand. You know, like, you know, you have to… and it… it does cause a lot of friction, because

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Ali Rastiello: you’re like, I’ve been in your role before. Like, I can tell you exactly what your thought process is right now, so let’s talk about, like, the best way to do this.

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Ali Rastiello: And it always does have this, like, rub to it, and I don’t know, maybe it’s because I’m very blunt, but also, that, you know, I think it does put you in a hard place. And I’ll say in the last couple of roles that I was in, I was the one driving the…

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Ali Rastiello: Yes. Like, nobody in the teams were thinking about anything, because they were a little bit immature, in terms of, like, technology and thinking more…

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Amanda McGuckin Hager: Also, healthcare.

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Ali Rastiello: healthcare, and the other one was HR, which they were actually more fun about some of the stuff they were doing, but it’s…

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Amanda McGuckin Hager: compliance, like, their legal and HR both have.

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Ali Rastiello: Yeah.

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Amanda McGuckin Hager: Sorry, not legal, healthcare and HR both have legal compliance, a lot of it wrapped around. Wrapped around it, right, yeah. It makes sense, they might be more conservative.

400
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Ali Rastiello: They’re just… they’re more… yeah, conservative isn’t a good word to put it, but they just hadn’t…

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Ali Rastiello: been shown the way of, like, how technology can help them grow, and they just didn’t think that way. They were… especially at the health company I was at, it was a lot of brand marketers that were in-demand roles, so they just didn’t think about that technology piece ever.

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Ali Rastiello: And they never, like, came up through that, and so it was a lot of me and my team sitting down with them and being like, here’s the technology you need. You keep saying you need to do ABM, for example. Well, there’s technologies that will help you do it the right way.

403
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Ali Rastiello: And help you understand how to do it. And, like, you’re telling them what the strategy is, and they still can’t…

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Ali Rastiello: wrap their heads around it.

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Mike Rizzo: It’s, yeah, it’s a, this is totally, like, why the community and what Sarah puts out there, and what you are doing, Allie, and sessions at MOPSA, and so on and so forth, right? All these, whether it’s this webinar, or workshops, or whatever, like, this is exactly why we keep trying to push the agenda of, like, guiding

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Mike Rizzo: organizations and leadership to start looking at the folks that come out of a marketing ops background as your go-to-market strategist, as your go-to-market tech stack product manager and architect.

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Amanda McGuckin Hager: And it’s just a conversation of the art of the possible.

408
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Mike Rizzo: It’s not a, I know how to do your job better than you conversation.

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Amanda McGuckin Hager: Yeah.

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Mike Rizzo: It’s just that I… modern mark… like, the most succinct way that I think you could deliver the message nowadays, Ali, is… is… at least I’m obviously.

411
00:51:44.700 –> 00:51:58.800
Mike Rizzo: from my perspective, is to say, hey, modern marketing doesn’t happen without technology. And I know technology really well, which means I’m forced fundamentally to understand the broad-stroke motions of the go-to-market.

412
00:51:58.890 –> 00:52:00.600
Mike Rizzo: like, ecosystem?

413
00:52:00.600 –> 00:52:21.119
Mike Rizzo: I need to know generally what ABM is, and SEO is, and SEM, and text message. I need to know just generally about GDPR and compliance and all those things. I have to be, at least at a sort of broad-stroke level, aware of those things. It doesn’t mean I’m going to be your expert demand gen person, but I am going to try to unlock some possibilities for you. So let’s have a really exciting conversation about…

414
00:52:21.120 –> 00:52:23.049
Mike Rizzo: Go to market, and the channels, and the tools.

415
00:52:23.050 –> 00:52:23.370
Ali Rastiello: Yeah.

416
00:52:23.370 –> 00:52:30.330
Mike Rizzo: And if it’s text, let’s go talk about what that looks like. And to circle back to your question, Amanda, like.

417
00:52:30.330 –> 00:52:38.900
Amanda McGuckin Hager: I’ll… I’ll immediately go into a build versus buy question, right? There are… there’s plenty of tech for you to be able to tap into building your own.

418
00:52:38.900 –> 00:52:43.120
Mike Rizzo: Sort of, like, capabilities around, sending text.

419
00:52:43.140 –> 00:53:02.629
Mike Rizzo: Yeah. But then there’s the go-buy solutions that equip you to solve some of the things that Ali’s questioning, right? Like, does it integrate? How do I report? What controls do I have? Exactly. And those are the conversations that I think are exciting for all of us to bridge that gap in the someone came to us and said they want to do text messaging.

420
00:53:02.630 –> 00:53:07.990
Amanda McGuckin Hager: Yeah. I love that you said the art of the possible, I just… I love that.

421
00:53:08.790 –> 00:53:10.059
Ali Rastiello: We’re all gonna steal it now.

422
00:53:10.060 –> 00:53:10.390
Amanda McGuckin Hager: Yeah.

423
00:53:10.390 –> 00:53:30.060
Mike Rizzo: Right. I definitely say that probably far too much, and I’m positive I borrowed it from somewhere else. I don’t know where anymore. I definitely got it from somewhere else, so if someone figures out where I got it from, please tell me so I can give credit where credit’s due, because I did not pick that up. Yeah.

424
00:53:30.530 –> 00:53:32.100
Amanda McGuckin Hager: Sarah, you were gonna say something?

425
00:53:32.350 –> 00:53:49.889
Sara McNamara: Yeah, I think… I think there is a bit of a, like, a come-to-Jesus happening in B2B SaaS right now, with some of the economic pressures, and the pressure to not only conserve dollars, but also grow. I think B2B SaaS for a long time, especially in the sales world, got away with

426
00:53:49.890 –> 00:53:52.369
Sara McNamara: You want to do ABM by 6 cents.

427
00:53:52.380 –> 00:53:56.529
Sara McNamara: But the reality is, a lot of those customers were not ready for Sixth Sense.

428
00:53:56.530 –> 00:53:58.789
Ali Rastiello: And I resent the idea.

429
00:53:58.790 –> 00:54:13.580
Sara McNamara: like, Mike is totally on point, but I resent the idea that we’re saying no by saying you shouldn’t spend $100,000 on something that’s gonna completely fail. Like, there’s, like, a 99% chance without a strategy that it’s gonna fail. And we’re… and my evidence is we’re starting to really see that.

430
00:54:13.580 –> 00:54:23.069
Sara McNamara: a lot of marketers are now trying to get out from under those ABM platforms because they’re like, this is not working, why did I buy this? Like, I was not ready for this.

431
00:54:23.200 –> 00:54:30.559
Sara McNamara: So I just wanted to plant the seed, like, my hope is, like, we talked a lot on this call about the strategy behind it.

432
00:54:30.710 –> 00:54:33.110
Sara McNamara: And to me, that’s the most important.

433
00:54:33.650 –> 00:54:39.640
Sara McNamara: I think… Amanda, cover your ears, in theory, but, like, Can go with different tools.

434
00:54:40.450 –> 00:54:58.129
Sara McNamara: That, to me, is not the most important. Now, certainly, if you have certain requirements, then that matters with the tooling, but it’s more about what are we trying to accomplish with this, and then what is the tool that’s going to help us get there, that has, like, the best functionality, the best support team, the best… maybe they’re visionaries in the space?

435
00:54:58.130 –> 00:54:58.730
Amanda McGuckin Hager: Yeah.

436
00:54:59.010 –> 00:55:04.430
Sara McNamara: I hope people walk away with that, not that we just need to buy something to do something, because…

437
00:55:04.880 –> 00:55:06.529
Sara McNamara: So often, that just completely…

438
00:55:06.530 –> 00:55:08.109
Ali Rastiello: The next best thing, yeah.

439
00:55:08.450 –> 00:55:19.120
Amanda McGuckin Hager: and I… I, applaud you and agree 100%. I am… I am biased with a… with a company who employs me, and I adore this product. However.

440
00:55:19.240 –> 00:55:30.309
Amanda McGuckin Hager: it’s not the right product for everyone, and, but I would be foolish to say that it is, right? I want… I want all of us in good spirit, to get the tools that

441
00:55:30.540 –> 00:55:34.959
Amanda McGuckin Hager: solve for the use case and the strategy.

442
00:55:35.260 –> 00:55:41.649
Ali Rastiello: Use case, strategy, company size, where you are in your maturity level as a company, as a…

443
00:55:41.650 –> 00:55:42.020
Amanda McGuckin Hager: Exactly.

444
00:55:42.020 –> 00:55:48.529
Ali Rastiello: growth org, or whatever it is, I think that that’s really important. One of the things that I walked into…

445
00:55:48.680 –> 00:55:54.380
Ali Rastiello: Health Catalyst the day they bought an ABM tool. Like, the day they signed the paper, and I was like, why did you.

446
00:55:54.380 –> 00:55:55.349
Amanda McGuckin Hager: Day one.

447
00:55:55.480 –> 00:55:56.470
Ali Rastiello: And I was like.

448
00:55:56.660 –> 00:56:02.989
Ali Rastiello: can we dial that back? And I actually went to the vendor and was like, hey, can we undo this? And they were like, LOLs, no, you can’t.

449
00:56:02.990 –> 00:56:04.219
Sara McNamara: Good luck to you.

450
00:56:04.530 –> 00:56:06.030
Ali Rastiello: And I was like…

451
00:56:06.970 –> 00:56:13.350
Ali Rastiello: But I know that they can’t do this yet. Like, just through the interview process, I knew they were nowhere near that, right?

452
00:56:13.350 –> 00:56:14.500
Amanda McGuckin Hager: Premature, yeah.

453
00:56:14.500 –> 00:56:15.030
Ali Rastiello: loop.

454
00:56:15.140 –> 00:56:15.860
Ali Rastiello: But I think…

455
00:56:15.860 –> 00:56:31.850
Sara McNamara: I think that’s… I think that’s why talks like this are important, though, because we’re, like, there’s educating of the market, but, like, honestly, even I’m still educating myself on what’s possible with texting. Like, Amanda, you’re teaching me a lot about, like, what is coming up soon.

456
00:56:31.860 –> 00:56:44.429
Sara McNamara: So we don’t need to jump to it right away, like, to me, the most important thing is, like, getting a feel, a lay of the land of what’s out there, so then we can get to that point where I’m like, I understand what I can do with this, and I have a plan.

457
00:56:44.430 –> 00:56:56.199
Amanda McGuckin Hager: Yeah, I mean, exactly to your point, B2C, your earlier point, B2C’s been doing this for a long time, right? We’re all getting those text messages, the promotions, the… your orders on the way, texts, etc.

458
00:56:56.530 –> 00:57:04.570
Amanda McGuckin Hager: B2B is, generally speaking, historically, not very far behind, and I think now is the time to start looking at…

459
00:57:04.830 –> 00:57:20.940
Amanda McGuckin Hager: how is B2C using it? Are those use cases applicable at all to the B2B motion, and in what way? And then there is a lot of education, right? There’s the compliance, the opt-in, the pricing, the models, the carrier pass-through fees, the device level, I mean.

460
00:57:20.940 –> 00:57:25.069
Amanda McGuckin Hager: The user access level, there’s a lot to learn, and…

461
00:57:25.280 –> 00:57:33.520
Amanda McGuckin Hager: I’ll be honest, before stepping into this company, I had no idea what any of that was, right? So I’m… I’m learning along with everyone.

462
00:57:33.950 –> 00:57:40.229
Amanda McGuckin Hager: So we are almost at time. I want to thank you all for coming.

463
00:57:40.340 –> 00:57:46.229
Amanda McGuckin Hager: and sharing your thoughts. I do have the highest respect for each of you as…

464
00:57:46.380 –> 00:57:50.460
Amanda McGuckin Hager: professionals, and I’d like to say as friends at this point, so thank you.

465
00:57:50.840 –> 00:57:58.250
Amanda McGuckin Hager: Any last burning desires? Any last… if you had one thing to say on text?

466
00:58:01.490 –> 00:58:13.790
Amanda McGuckin Hager: I’ll go first. If you have not started an opt-in, kind of like Sarah did at Vector, they didn’t have a newsletter, but started an opt-in, if you have not yet started a text opt-in.

467
00:58:14.050 –> 00:58:22.489
Amanda McGuckin Hager: Policy, understanding the opt-in language, putting it on your checkbox forms, whatever it might be, now would be the time to start doing it.

468
00:58:22.630 –> 00:58:32.540
Amanda McGuckin Hager: just like Sarah’s newsletter that she mentioned, when you get the content ready, it really stinks to have no one to send it to, right? You want to start building your database.

469
00:58:32.690 –> 00:58:37.089
Amanda McGuckin Hager: Now, if I left anyone with one word of advice, that would be it.

470
00:58:37.250 –> 00:58:48.510
Ali Rastiello: Yeah. Mine would be just choose wisely. Like, think about what you’re gonna send through that channel, and make sure that it is…

471
00:58:50.800 –> 00:59:01.760
Ali Rastiello: what you think that person’s gonna… is it gonna delight them? What that experience is gonna be for them? And don’t just think about it as another way to blast it.

472
00:59:02.410 –> 00:59:04.849
Ali Rastiello: like, a tech spec to it or something.

473
00:59:04.850 –> 00:59:09.050
Amanda McGuckin Hager: We do not, none of us advocate for that.

474
00:59:09.210 –> 00:59:10.040
Ali Rastiello: Spaghetti markers.

475
00:59:10.120 –> 00:59:15.360
Mike Rizzo: Hate it all. Spaghetti baghetti. See what sticks. Mine is,

476
00:59:16.110 –> 00:59:26.259
Mike Rizzo: You’re often looking for new channels in the B2B sector, or just unlocks and opportunities and motions. This is untapped for a lot of us,

477
00:59:26.430 –> 00:59:38.520
Mike Rizzo: So, you know, give it some good thought, and then in the process of giving it some good thought, do all the things we talked about, strategize and think about it, but, build yourself a racy model.

478
00:59:38.790 –> 00:59:57.740
Mike Rizzo: And try to understand who’s responsible, who’s accountable, who’s consulted, and who should be informed, and go through the whole… it’s RACI, for those of you. Go through the whole RACI process to decide how you want to implement any technology. But definitely for this one, because it’s untapped.

479
00:59:59.070 –> 01:00:03.020
Mike Rizzo: And I think that that’ll give you some good legs to stand on from a strategic point of view.

480
01:00:03.290 –> 01:00:04.540
Amanda McGuckin Hager: Yeah, that’s great advice.

481
01:00:05.050 –> 01:00:05.950
Sara McNamara: I think

482
01:00:06.060 –> 01:00:20.550
Sara McNamara: stay human-focused, think about the recipient of the messages. I think that’s something that B2C does pretty well. Like, not perfectly, but they tend to, if you subscribe, they send you stuff that you’re gonna be interested in, not just like, hello, we sell clothes.

483
01:00:20.620 –> 01:00:24.289
Sara McNamara: So I think, like, the personalization aspect.

484
01:00:24.320 –> 01:00:35.959
Sara McNamara: And then, Amanda, I think you had a great point, too, which is test it out. Like, put out, like, hey, want to sign up for text messages, and get a sense of what interest there might be, and then also who shows up.

485
01:00:35.970 –> 01:00:46.510
Sara McNamara: Like, if you put that out there, and it’s just other sales reps trying to sell to your company, then maybe that’s a sign that either the positioning’s not right, or your, yeah, or your audience is not ready yet.

486
01:00:46.550 –> 01:00:57.730
Sara McNamara: So I think start, you know, learn more and more, and see what other brands are doing, especially in the B2C space, because not everything is translatable, but a decent amount could be.

487
01:00:58.380 –> 01:01:01.119
Sara McNamara: And then start small and kind of go from there.

488
01:01:01.310 –> 01:01:02.980
Amanda McGuckin Hager: Yeah, I agree.

489
01:01:03.360 –> 01:01:12.729
Amanda McGuckin Hager: That is great. Thank you guys so much. I really appreciate it. I will, look forward to connecting with each of you, hopefully in real life soon, and…

490
01:01:13.270 –> 01:01:14.040
Mike Rizzo: Shoot me a text.

491
01:01:14.040 –> 01:01:15.420
Amanda McGuckin Hager: Yeah.

492
01:01:15.420 –> 01:01:16.270
Mike Rizzo: That’s you.

493
01:01:16.270 –> 01:01:16.909
Ali Rastiello: I’ve never been…

494
01:01:16.910 –> 01:01:17.670
Sara McNamara: This is good.

495
01:01:17.990 –> 01:01:18.510
Mike Rizzo: Thanks.

496
01:01:18.510 –> 01:01:22.060
Ali Rastiello: This was one of the best ones that I’ve been a part of, so thank you, Amanda.

497
01:01:22.060 –> 01:01:23.590
Mike Rizzo: Yeah, thank you, appreciate it.

498
01:01:23.810 –> 01:01:27.529
Mike Rizzo: And I will end with that. I will text each of you. Thank you.

499
01:01:27.530 –> 01:01:28.070
Sara McNamara: Awesome.

500
01:01:28.190 –> 01:01:29.830
Ali Rastiello: Bye. Bye.