December 5, 2022 • 59 mins
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In this episode, we talk with four marketing operations experts, each to talk about one of the major marketing automation platforms. Lara Black is currently Director of Marketing Operations at ExtensisHR and is a Pardot Pro, AJ Navarro is currently a Packaged Technology Operations Consultant with Shift Paradigm and is a Marketo Pro and George Samaras is currently Director of Marketing Operations and Technology at Coveo and is an Eloqua Pro. Mike Rizzo is currently CEO & Founder of Marketingops.com and is a HubSpot Pro.
Tune in to hear:
- Each expert tell us what they are most excited about in terms of recent changes or announcements from each platform.
- What is each of their companies is doing to engage with the marketing operations community.
- If there are any features that the user community is looking for that the vendor has not prioritized the way they have hoped.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Michael Hartmann (00:04):
Hello everyone.
Welcome to another episode ofOpsCast, brought to you by
marketing ops.com, powered bythe MO Pros.
I'm your host, Michael Hartmann.
Join today.
We are down to just Mike and meagain.
Mike Rizzo is my co-host.
Mike Rizzo (00:17):
Hey everybody.
Michael Hartmann (00:18):
Oh, I wasn't even gonna let you go,
Mike Rizzo (00:20):
Oh man, I just dumped right in there.
Michael Hartmann (00:22):
Right in there.
Uh, and the reason I wanna getgoing is cuz we have a lot to
cover and we have multipleguests this, this time today.
So we are excited to have withus, um, some marketing
operations experts each here totalk a little bit about.
So the mAJor marketingautomation platforms is kind of
our state of the union.
We did one of.
Early on in the history of thepodcast.
(00:43):
So this is our second round.
Um, we're gonna do this here,but I think we'll try to make
this an annual thing.
So joining us today are LaraBlack Rep, kind of representing
Pardot AJ Navarro, representingMarketo, George Samaras
representing Eloqua and.
Mike is actually gonna representHubSpot.
So here we go.
Lara, Lara is currently directorof marketing operations at
(01:04):
Extensive HR and is a part oppro, and I think actually she's
got that term coined.
AJ is currently a and AJ, thiswas new to me, package
technology operations consultantwith Shift Paradigm.
So, um, he's, he's Marketoexpert and then George is
currently director of MarketingOperations and Technology at
Coveo and is an Eloqua expert.
(01:26):
So thanks everyone for joiningus.
Lara Black (01:29):
Happy to be here.
AJ Navarro (01:30):
Proud to
George Samaras (01:30):
you for having us.
Michael Hartmann (01:32):
Right.
So why don't we, like, let'sstart off with the big question
cuz I, uh, my and I'll.
I think my general assertionright now is that there's not
really much happening in termsof true, uh, really innovative
stuff happening in this space.
So I want each of you to try toprove me wrong here.
So let's start with this, youknow, what are you most excited
(01:52):
about in terms of recent changesor announcements from the
different platforms?
And, you know, I'm gonna go lookand I'm might, I've got my
screen here.
I'll go with who's at the topleft of my screen, which is
Lara, why don't you start us offand then we can kind of rotate
from there.
Lara Black (02:06):
Pardot has had an interesting year.
Um, I'm excited about it, butnot necessarily in a good way
for their name change.
Uh, officially its
Michael Hartmann (02:14):
Oh, that's right.
It's That's right.
It's not part out anymore.
Lara Black (02:17):
It's Officiates name has changed to Marketing Cloud
account engagement powered byPardot, which will probably lose
the powered by Pardot in somefuture iteration.
It's a long mouthful.
It wasn't super well received bythe group of Pardot users.
We call ourselves thePardashians.
Um, but it is what it is, youknow, uh, everybody still calls
(02:37):
it par up, uh, even internally,when.
Consultants, uh, talk to theirclients.
They say, you know, we havePardot.
Um, they are trying to writeblog posts for both, both terms,
things like that.
And actually interesting, um,feature that they released is
conditional completion actions,which means, uh, traditionally
all pardo forms, everybody whofill out a form had the same
(02:59):
actions applied to them.
And you had to get reallycreative if you didn't want
actions applied to everyoneacross.
Now we can perform, say, Hey,this custom field is blank.
Do these additional actions tothem, and we don't have to eat
up a ton of automation rules andother paid features to do it.
Michael Hartmann (03:18):
Interesting.
I thought you were gonna gosomewhere with like multi page
forms, but, which I don't thinkanybody, any of these platforms
do.
Maybe HubSpot does.
I'm probably least familiar withthat.
Lara Black (03:30):
There's a good reason to have them in certain
instances, but I think most ofthe marketing people would say,
um, more forms, more fields, waybad.
I don't know.
Um, I think we all want fewerforms, fewer fields, and are
utilizing tools in thebackground to like backfield
data instead of giving them morefields to fill out.
Michael Hartmann (03:49):
Yeah, no, I, I think generally you're right,
although then everybody's like,why don't we have more
information about these leads inour database?
Mike Rizzo (03:56):
that's the worst
Michael Hartmann (03:57):
You right.
All right.
Uh, I'll, I'll call George.
How about you?
Next, let's talk about Eloqua.
What's, what's exciting there?
George Samaras (04:06):
Yeah, great question.
So I'm glad you prefaced earlierthat, uh, you know, there hasn't
been too many changes.
It's like I was trying to thinkof a few big ones that we've,
uh, we've got our hands on.
Um, I would say so the bigchange I've seen with Qua in the
past, uh, year is a lot of thirdparty integrations now tools.
So less on Oracle's, you know,Oracle rolling this out,
Oracle's been doing a.
(04:26):
Like, if you look at the quichange log for the quarterly
releases, a lot of stuff behindthe scenes, primarily with the
api, they've deprecated the soapapi, a lot of, uh, new endpoints
available and, and some prettycool stuff you could do with
the, the rest and bulk api.
But, um, as a practitioner, uh,what I've noticed as an end user
is a lot more integrations fromthird party tools.
I know, uh, I was chatting withthe Syncy team, uh, I wanna say
(04:48):
like last week.
And, um, you know, like I, I'llI'll preface by saying I am the
Eli person.
I do consult in Eloqua.
My day job, I use Marketo, so Iplay.
There, but um, you know, we'retalking about the Marketo
integration, like yeah, we justrolled out an EQ integration as
well and I'm like, oh, that'sgreat to see.
Cuz I, I know the.
The big, the big challenge a lotof Equi users has had is being
you need a really robust openAPI backed by developer to like
(05:11):
build these integrations with,uh, other platforms and tools.
So to see other companiesinvesting in Equis integration
to like help us really kind ofget data outta the platform and,
and do some cool things ispretty awesome.
Um, it's not comparable, I'd saynot.
You know, not yet to, to, uh,other platforms like Marketo and
HubSpot, but, uh, hugeimprovements there.
Um, really making, you know,marketing ops practitioners
(05:32):
lives easier.
They're using Eli.
Michael Hartmann (05:35):
Yeah, I was, I was using Eloqua four or five,
six years ago, was at a Marketoshop, came back and using Eloqua
now, and that's like the bigthing, like, oh, it's like you
can't, can't call out.
The other thing I I, I don'tknow if you use this or not, but
they're starting to incorporate,um, other capabilities to like
SMS directly inside the platformthat's coming out too.
(05:57):
So I don't know anybody who'susing it yet, but um, I know
it's there.
George Samaras (06:01):
Yeah, I know there was some other, back when
I used to work at Oracle manyyears ago, it was, uh, there
were some customers doing somecustom solutions for that.
Uh, I haven't worked with anycustomers that have used it, but
it's, it's, it's cool to seethese integrations coming, um,
cuz a lot of it's a leg, Iwouldn't say a legacy system,
but there's a lot of peoplewho've had it for many years.
Um, well entrenched in theirmarktech stack and they need to
make it work.
(06:22):
And this just made everyone'slives a lot easier with these
new integr.
Michael Hartmann (06:25):
Yeah.
All right.
So we've talked, mentioned, uh,Marketo.
So AJ, how about you tell uswhat, like what's great
happening?
AJ Navarro (06:33):
Yeah, there's quite a few things, uh, personally
that I'm, you know, starting tosink my teeth into that I'm
excited for.
And uh, the first one is, uh,Marketo now offers a priority
override for trigger campaigns.
So basically you can prioritizedifferent types of campaigns to,
depending on what you're tryingto accomplish with, with, uh,
(06:55):
goals.
And so for a lot of the teamsthat I get to work with,
Sometimes, you know, they have aton of stakeholders or a ton of
programs, uh, firing off at thesame time.
And when you think of things ofcommunication limits, you're
able to kind of prioritize whichcampaign takes priority.
So that's really cool.
Uh, I've started to stick myteeth into using more of also
(07:15):
the dynamic chat feature.
Um, and recently in October, uh,Marketo released, um, A better
UI update to be able to autoarrange just some of the streams
and the dialogue streams.
Um, before it was a little bitmessy and un methodical.
So they've kind of enhancedthat.
So been playing around withthat.
That's been really fun.
(07:36):
You're also able now to, uh,schedule meeting notifications,
uh, whenever those happen withinthe dynamic functionality or
the.
Chat functionality, uh, mostimportantly, I think, and, um,
and I've always been hit or misswith the Marketo ui, but I've
really liked the enhanced ui.
Uh, when it comes to like someof the email template details,
(07:58):
um, I am a huge stickler on justunderstanding where things are
used.
Um, and so, Uh, the newer UIallows you to kind of see the
email asset status, uh, when itwas last modified, uh, who it
was last modified by.
Um, as well as use some filtersto narrow down by if it's been
approved or in draft orunapproved.
(08:18):
So just making my life a wholelot easier when it comes to
just, you know, easing thatbandwidth.
So those are some features I'vebeen excited.
Michael Hartmann (08:26):
Sounds good.
Yeah.
Um, that, that prioritizationone sounds really interesting.
I can think of many scenarioswhere that would've come in
handy.
Okay.
Awesome.
Uh, alright, Mike, your turn.
Mike Rizzo (08:40):
My turn.
Michael Hartmann (08:41):
I know HubSpot's not doing anything cuz
they never say anything aboutwhat they're doing.
Mike Rizzo (08:45):
Yeah.
They don't ever talk aboutanything that they're launching.
Nothing.
No.
Um, yeah, I, I'm excited to stepin and rep HubSpot a little bit
on this as, as a, a temporarychair for this episode.
Um, I have been, it's hard.
It HubSpot's a hard one to talkabout from just purely a
(09:05):
marketing automation likeperformance kind of background.
Uh, we, we, at marketingops.com, we use the platform,
um, sort of through and throughcrm, through marketing
automation.
So, um, there's a couple ofthings that I think are really
interesting about HubSpot as anecosystem.
That, um, are kind of opening itup to continuing to move up
(09:28):
market, um, but also the abilityto service down market teams
too, and even like servicesproviders potentially.
Uh, so one of them is payments.
They've actually struck areally, um, strong deal it
sounds like with Stripe and, uh,essentially processing payments
(09:50):
for invoices.
Kind of going end to end quoteto cash is entirely possible.
I can actually, if I was anindependent consultant or
something like that, um, I canactually set my meeting link to
require a payment in order tobook time with me.
So this is another sort ofservices provider kind of
approach that is superinteresting there.
(10:12):
Um, but then we all heard aboutOperations Hub getting launched,
you know, and the last time wedid this call and it's certainly
continued to, to grow fromthere.
Uh, I will, uh, fall on my sworda little bit.
I subscribed to try to use OpsHub and I've yet to actually put
it into operation within ourown.
(10:33):
Um, but there's some excitingthings happening as it relates
to when you think about theneeds of a, of an operations
professional.
They're doing a pretty good job,uh, thinking about like, hey,
cleanliness of your database, oroutdated workflows and lists.
Like they're really starting tolean in more to this idea of,
(10:54):
Hey, try to regain control overyour data.
Right?
Um, subscribe to this enhancedsort of data management
environment that they've ununlocked, right?
They call it data sets.
Um, and if you're on aparticular plan, you can just
have access to a data qualityand an integrations view that
allows you to look at reallywhat's going on inside my
(11:15):
portal.
And it'll automaticallyrecommend like, Hey, these,
these two records look likethey're the same, right?
And so maybe you should dosomething about that.
Um, and it's still a bit manual.
Boy, that's a lot better thanfetching data from an API or
exporting it to some sort of CSVand doing merges and, you know,
all those kinds of things.
(11:36):
Um, so I'm pretty excited aboutthe way that they're leaning in
on this like operationalcategory, um, and trying to help
people maintain sort of a, ahealthier database.
I'd say that that's probably themost innovative piece that's
happening right now.
Michael Hartmann (11:51):
Interesting.
Okay, so you said something inthere that made me realize I
totally missed something.
So the, the reason we have Laraand George and AJ on this, Mike
as well is because they arechairpersons for each of these
in the marketing ops.comcommunity.
So, Yeah, if you're, if you'repart of the community and, uh,
(12:13):
you have questions about these,they're the ones probably are
most likely to help you get tothose, um, in the dedicated
Slack channels.
So, Sorry about that.
I missed that for sure.
So anyway, yeah, so they, they,they've, uh, they've been back
there behind the scenes helpingthe community with, with this
kinda stuff.
So appreciate all that.
All right.
So, um, I'm, I, I, I thought ofanother question here, but I may
(12:36):
hold off on that.
I, you know, Lara, your, yourcomment about, um, the name
change prompted me, like, I, Ithink one of the things that.
Seen over the years, and itstarted when I first used Exact
Target, um, which I guess isnow, is that even still around a
Salesforce marketing cloud.
Lara Black (12:54):
Y Yeah, it is the, the story goes that Exac Target
wanted to get acquired bySalesforce, and they heard that
Salesforce was looking at eitherbuying them or buying Pardot.
So they went and bought Pardot,so Salesforce had to buy them.
To get them both.
Michael Hartmann (13:09):
I, yeah.
Lara Black (13:10):
and it got renamed Marketing Cloud, but it's never
really made strides in gettingintegrated on platform.
It's still a separate login andall sorts of
Michael Hartmann (13:17):
Yeah.
Um, and the reason I bring thatup is
Mike Rizzo (13:19):
years ago too.
Lara Black (13:21):
Yeah,
Michael Hartmann (13:21):
at
Mike Rizzo (13:21):
over.
Yeah.
Cause I was, I was like usingthe tool when that happened.
I had, the short story is I hadmigrated the team from like
Salesforce to Sugar and I wasusing Pardot and then Pardot got
acquired by Salesforce And I waslike, great, now I gotta find
another map cuz they're notgonna support the integration to
sugar.
And then everybody's scoffing atme
Lara Black (13:42):
a while, but then they deprecated it and then you
could still do it, but you hadto like code your own api.
Um, yeah, sugar crm, that goesway back.
Mike Rizzo (13:51):
Right.
Michael Hartmann (13:51):
Well, but I, but I do think in general, like
all these, all these vendor, allthese, you know, platform
providers have been pretty goodabout building communities and
advocates, right?
So I think probably all of youare in some way connected not
just in the, the marketing opscommunity, but to each of those
individual platform communitiesas, as their sort of, Um,
(14:12):
advocates.
So I'm just curious, like whathave you seen in terms of what
they're doing to continue eithercontinue to or not engage with
the community of theircommunities?
Lara Black (14:24):
you know, I think with any, you know, Any time we
talk about communities, there'sroom for improvement, but
there's also budgetconsiderations.
And I get that.
Um, Salesforce has been astrong, they call it the
Trailblazer Community Sales.
Salesforce has strongly promotedthem.
They give us a budget to be, wedon't get paid to be user group
leader, but we get a budget topay for food, drinks to, um,
(14:48):
reserve a room, something likethat.
Um, and they also give us toolslike we no longer have to use
free meetup accounts.
We get a.
A reservation event managementtype platform.
And that's all granted to us atno cost.
Uh, as a user group leader.
Um, I think there, there's theofficial channels, which is
(15:10):
things like the Trailblazercommunity and the Trailblazer
community team is great.
Um, and there's unofficialchannels.
Um, The Pardashians group that Imentioned is just users.
It is managed by a, um,Salesforce partner consulting
company in the ecosystem.
Um, technically owns this Slackchannel.
They're not charging for it.
Their name is not plastered allover it.
(15:30):
And they are welcoming, not justpart up members, but also
marketing Cloud members.
Um, and then there's sort of inbetween communities, like
there's a marketing Championscommunity sponsored by
Salesforce.
We do have like an official likerecognition and we have a point
of contact at Salesforce andthey send us swag.
Um, and there's like a limitednumber of US marketing
champions.
Um, but it's a little bit of.
(15:52):
Leadership at Salesforce may notknow about marketing champions,
uh, the way that they shouldknow about us.
Um, and they certainly overlookthe trailblazer community in
many ways.
Um, so it kind of comes down tolike how well resourced these
platforms.
Go to market and, and productmarketing teams are, um, and how
(16:12):
in the loop they are and howlong they've been in the
ecosystem.
Because as much as likeSalesforce has turnover, like,
and we, we all kind of laughabout like our Salesforce AE
changes every quarter.
Um, sometimes the marketingpeople there change too, and
they don't know who to reach outto, who are their, you know,
proponents in the community.
Uh, I think there's a lot ofimprovement to be done for that.
(16:32):
But, um, then you have othergreat communities like the Mar
ops community.
Hey, you know, we love, we lovechiming in for all the help.
And I don't just hang out in myown little Slack channel.
I, I like have alerts set up sothat if somebody mentions Pardo
in another channel, like itpings me.
Um,
Mike Rizzo (16:50):
Yeah, you've really.
Really jumped in on quite anumber of the chats.
I've noticed a few times.
I'm like, wow.
She's, she's a very savvy Slackuser.
Clearly
Lara Black (16:59):
Oh yeah.
I love Slack, honestly.
Mike Rizzo (17:01):
that's awesome.
Lara Black (17:03):
But I, I also love the people who come to us with
questions and who aren't afraidto, like, some of them will say,
this is a stupid question, but,and like, I just wanna say,
there aren't any stupidquestions.
If you're beginning, you have toask the questions.
Don't be afraid to ask them.
Mike Rizzo (17:15):
Mm-hmm.
AJ Navarro (17:15):
I might need to take a tip from you there on how to
set up an alert like that.
I would love that.
Lara Black (17:20):
Oh, I will show you.
Mike Rizzo (17:21):
yeah, I
George Samaras (17:21):
Ditto as well.
On here on
Mike Rizzo (17:23):
from, yeah, from a point, from a, from that point
in particular, I think weprobably have an opportunity as
leaders in this community tolike, just like, Hey, optimize
your use of Slack, bothinternally and when in these
communities, right?
We should probably do a wholesegment on that at some point.
Maybe that'll be my course thatI give to everybody.
Michael Hartmann (17:41):
Yeah, you go.
Um, AJ how about you?
What's going on?
Like, how's Marketo?
I know that they, you know, thechampions thing and all that was
a big deal.
So what's, what's going on withMarketo and their community?
AJ Navarro (17:54):
I mean, everything's good.
I mean, the community, you know,it's, it's really still a lot of
the community that.
Still rely on, you know, whetherofficial or official, but from
like an official standpoint, I,I think just the Marketo user
groups and the Marketo championhours.
You know, I'm, I'm a, I'm stilla stickler.
I try to attend as many as Ican.
(18:15):
Um, those are big things for me,you know.
Really just constantly learningthere.
I, I feel like Marketo's alwayssupported those and, and just
have kept those going, um,unofficially.
It's, it's constantly likemarketing ops.com or, um, the, I
guess it's the marketing ops, Ithink is the other one that's
(18:35):
run by like a TUMO or somethinglike that.
Mike Rizzo (18:38):
Mops Pros
AJ Navarro (18:39):
Pros, yeah.
Mike Rizzo (18:40):
be confused with Mo Pros
AJ Navarro (18:43):
Yeah.
Ops
Mike Rizzo (18:44):
We're all in the same space, so
AJ Navarro (18:46):
Yeah, and I mean, everybody's just been fantastic,
um, you know, to just, to reallylearn from, uh, and it's helped
me grow, you know, and, and, andfor me, especially like when,
you know, again with marketingkns, when we talk about just
like some of like the, thesummer camps and things like
that, like even for me thatcounts as communities.
(19:06):
Um, my favorite part about thecommunities is just constantly
being around the people that.
Better than me.
Um, cuz that's how, like, I getbetter and, and you know,
there's no, uh, stagnant, youknow, and, and growth and all
that.
And so it's great to see that alot of the people that I've
looked up to like.
(19:28):
I am now like speaking next tothem and watching them grow or
getting to learn from readingtheir books, reading their posts
and just, just those differentthings.
And so overall, I feel likeAdobe's done a great job, um,
endorsing that and they willcontinue to endorse that.
And I myself am just a bigproponent on just community.
(19:48):
And I said this a million times,Mike knows it, but I wouldn't
have my career withoutcommunity.
So it's a.
Michael Hartmann (19:56):
Yeah, I, I, I say often hear it that if this
kind of stuff had been around15, 20 years ago, I think it
would be, well, I wouldn't behere probably, I don't know.
But it would've been different.
George, what's going on?
I like, I, I think, I dunno howplugged in with the Eliquia
community you are, given thatyou're working both in Marketo
and Eloqua.
(20:16):
So what's your take on the Equione?
And I can add in my 2 centsworth if as well.
George Samaras (20:22):
Yeah, great question.
So, um, I think, so for, for, I,I would say it's, it's probably
not as large, obviously as the,the Pardo and, um, uh, Marketo
communities, uh, for obviousreasons, but I'll say this, um,
the users have really taken itinto their own hands to create a
sense of community.
Obviously, I'll, I'll let go.
The sentiment on the Slackgroups, you know, obviously, um,
Mo Pros and MOPS pros are bothbig, uh, slack rooms for Eliquis
(20:45):
support.
I would say in addition to this,a lot of agencies have picked up
because Eliquis becoming a bitof a niche thing now within the
marketing ops world.
Um, you know, there, there'sagencies that run, uh, events,
you know, you'll see'empromoted, like there's an equi
experts group on LinkedIn thatthere's a few hundred members
there.
Um, and so, uh, I know likeSojourns a big one.
I think they run, I wanna sayit's.
(21:06):
I'm gonna say monthly.
Um, may, I might be wrong.
It might be biweekly or monthly.
They have a, an qui user groupthat they host.
I know it's on Thursdays.
Um, and then I know ZitiInteractive, they're another
agency.
They've been.
Uh, setting up some groups forEqui users, not, not to the, uh,
the same level as, so, but it's,it's definitely great to see
some of the agencies picking upsome of that community, uh,
(21:27):
piece.
In addition to that, on theofficial channels, I mean,
there's, there's top liners,which is Eliquis, uh, Oracle's
like, um, or Oracle MarketingClouds, like, uh, online message
board.
It's pretty active.
Like, I'd say there's about likethree to four new posts a day,
uh, like threads.
Um, and like any questionspeople have, they get responses
pretty quickly.
Um, you know, I, I'll say itlike, like I said, it.
(21:48):
It's not obviously as busy, justbased off the user base as some
of the other tools, but there'sdefinitely an active community
and, and agencies and users havereally stepped up to kind of
create that, uh, that sense ofcommunity.
Michael Hartmann (21:59):
Yeah, I, I think you guys sojourn, I know,
uh, has done some work where,where I'm at now.
And so they, they've asked,they've invited, you know, my,
me and my team and some of theothers in the broader
organization, they have virtual,um, user groups on a pretty
regular basis.
So, um, interesting.
There's a theme happening here,Mike, what's going on with I, I
(22:23):
actually don't know much aboutthe HubSpot community at all,
so,
Mike Rizzo (22:27):
Um, you know, they've, they followed very
similar playbooks to Marketo.
Uh, I think they all sort of, itwas, I think it was a, once you
got one of the primary maps outthere to sort of, um, the domino
to fall, so to speak, on the useof like a platform like bevy for
meetups and user groups andstuff.
Uh, I think the rest allfollowed suit.
(22:47):
I don't know who got in.
But Bevy definitely benefitedfrom getting one.
Um, so they have a very similarsort of environment that Lara
and AJ refer to around, um, youknow, offering a, an environment
for you to host meetups.
Um, they call'em hugs, uh,Marketos call'em mugs.
(23:07):
Uh, I, I don't know what part Icall, or whatever Pardo's called
now, pugs,
Lara Black (23:14):
some user group leaders do call them pugs.
I've just always said like the,I'm the Pardot Austin user group
leader or something like that.
Mike Rizzo (23:20):
There you go.
Yeah.
Lara Black (23:21):
It's the Trailblazer Community Groups, uh, like is
the organization, and they giveus like official channels.
Mike Rizzo (23:27):
Yeah.
Okay.
That makes sense.
Yeah, so, so very similar inthat regard.
They still have, um, fundingthat's available if you're a hug
leader of a particular region.
Um, they certainly give youfunding to be able to support
those events.
As we've moved back to inperson, you can now host the in
person and, and get a little bitmore from that, uh, bang for
(23:47):
your buck in that.
Uh, I am not a hug leader, butI've participated in a number of
those types of environments inOrange County and in San Diego.
We have members of our communityhere at marketingops.com that
are hug leaders that I've workedwith directly in person.
Um, their community forum hasremained pretty active.
I'd say it's one of the morerobust community forums out
(24:09):
there in terms of.
Uh, I think a lot of that isperpetuated by the incredible
partnership ecosystem that theybuilt.
So the partners benefit greatlyfrom, you know, being a top tier
provider and supporter of that.
Community forum environment.
But what's interesting is theyhave all these like subsets of
(24:30):
communities that sort of pop uptoo.
So there's your HubSpotdevelopers forum on Slack.
I'm in that one, uh, purelybecause I'm constantly wondering
what's happening with the APIs,and which one's getting
deprecated next or new or, orwhat have you.
And so there's these littlemicrocosms that they also sort
of spin up to support thecommunity overall of the various
(24:52):
kinds of users.
And then most notably atInbound, they definitely talked
about the idea of having acommunity centric sort of
offering built into the HubSpotecosystem.
Um, it was very, uh, communityled ended up being the message.
(25:14):
And the presentation on the mainstage for the keynote at Inbound
this year was all about how doyou sort of connect those dots
between, here's a professional,you know, Lara, AJ, you name it,
your profile exists in theHubSpot ecosystem.
And if, uh, you know, if you'rein there, how do we then give
(25:35):
you exposure to, to the broadernetwork of other professionals
in this space?
Um, so it seems that they'regonna lean in pretty hard on
community.
I think they've always been inthat vein, but there's
something, there's somethingbrewing there that's, uh, extra
special.
And so I'll be, I'll be keen tosee how that
Lara Black (25:54):
That's really interesting that they emphasized
community at the keynote therebecause I feel like it's
overlooked and people kind ofare like, oh, marketing is easy,
or like, oh, community is easy.
But then you have thesemarketers who like, they don't
know who their mAJor proponentsare and.
I think they're missing a reallygreat channel to get product
(26:15):
feedback from power users by nottapping into community.
Mike Rizzo (26:18):
Yeah.
Yeah.
They've done a, historically,they've done a really good job
with tapping into theircommunity, but like, You know,
there was inbound.org for awhile that got deprecated.
Um, there's a number of sort ofmovements that have happened in
and around this space, butwhat's the productization of
(26:39):
community is super interesting.
Like how, how are theyincorporating this concept of
community that doesn't feel likeit's conflicting with the idea
that I'm a SAS provider,marketing automation platform,
crm, et cetera.
Um, so it'll
Michael Hartmann (26:55):
And from a user standpoint, like would that
be distracting from getting dayto day work done if it was sort
of embedded in the platform?
Mike Rizzo (27:02):
Yeah, I think, I don't know if it'll go that far.
I don't work there at all, but
Michael Hartmann (27:06):
No, no.
I,
Mike Rizzo (27:07):
far, but yes, I hear
Michael Hartmann (27:09):
so I, I guess I'm pre.
Presuming some stuff.
I think what's reallyinteresting here is what I was
hearing a theme is because it, Ithink there's been an evolution,
right?
I think when, um, when theseplatforms all started coming
out, I think they all werepretty good about building
community, finding advocates,right?
And, and really celebratingthem.
But it feels like, and maybeit's just the nature of all
(27:31):
these acquisitions that havehappened and now, There's these
people are kind of finding theirown communities, whether it's
through marketing ops.com or theMOS pros or.
Whatever, right.
These other communities to, tobe sort of an extension of that.
So I think it's, that's prettyinteresting that that's evolved
that way.
Um, so let's let's talk about,you know, community feedback
(27:55):
into the product development andprioritization.
So that was something I wascurious about too.
I know you talk, you each talkeda little bit about.
Things that you are seeing thatyou're excited about from the
platforms?
I'm curious on the flip side,right, are there things that
you, you or you, you know, thatthe community is really, um,
eager to see, be a part of theplatform, but hasn't, it hasn't
(28:17):
made it, you know?
Um, and so let's, uh, AJ I'mgonna start with you.
Let's talk about Marketo first.
AJ Navarro (28:24):
Yeah.
Uh, not only from the community,but just from a lot of the teams
and that I work with as well asmyself.
I just, one thing I want to seeis just more flexibility around
just like the reporting.
Uh, within Marketo, um,especially I would love the
ability to like drag and dropand combine reports into one
(28:48):
report within itself.
Um, I find that, you know, teamsis including myself.
You, you have to kind of createthree different reports to look
at three different things, suchas like email performance versus
link performance.
I'd love to just kind of graspthose and put those into one
report and one window and.
Take a screenshot of that andthen maybe even send that as a,
(29:09):
uh, weekly, uh, kind of updateto a team or something like
that.
You know, I'm constantly havingto kind of export things and put
them together.
So that's always been thebiggest, st biggest stricter for
me, is just a little bit cleanup in just that reporting area
in Marketo.
Michael Hartmann (29:27):
So I'm just curious.
Um, I can see, totally see thevalue of that for like a single
team.
But you, you guys are an agency,right?
So I can imagine also would itbe useful, and I don't even know
if this is public, to be able tocreate, here's our.
Standard, I hate to use it.
Best practice dashboard, right?
For Marketo, and we wannareplicate that across instances
(29:48):
for our clients.
AJ Navarro (29:50):
Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, one, it'd be helpful forour teams that are managing our
internal Marketo, um, to see ouroverall performance.
But then two, it it'd be veryhelpful to show.
Teams and on how to do that.
Hey, here's the best practice.
Cause that's exactly what we do,is we'll make a bunch of best
practice things on what we'veseen, what's working and
(30:12):
innovate is necessary.
Um, but yeah, to take that andto share it with other people
and, and to enable them on howto make the reports.
Only because the reality of itis, is depending on the teams
that we're working with, noteverybody has like a tableau or
like a visible or an advancedreporting mechanism, you know,
um, teams simp.
The tail end of it stops atMarketo, and that's a whole
(30:34):
nother conversation right on
Michael Hartmann (30:35):
Oh yeah.
AJ Navarro (30:36):
when they're, when they're getting, uh, a tool and
they see it as the, the fix allsolution.
But, um, I think that's justsomething a little bit more
flexibility and might keep mehonest here, but just some
things that I've even seen, Ithink HubSpot really does really
well is as far as like native UIand just some of the reporting
capabilities there, um, that Iwant, would love to see in
(30:57):
market.
Mike Rizzo (31:01):
Yeah, I, I actually have more recently had a lot of,
um, time spent in a Marketoenvironment as well.
And I have to say, like there's,there's some desire there for
additional reporting, um, sortof the ease of use concept.
I, you know, you can't get awayfrom the power of Marketo,
(31:23):
right?
Like, it, you can do anythingyou want in there, uh, pretty
much, right?
Um, Trying to make thatexperience like smoother, I
would have to, I'd have toagree.
It would be nicer to see alittle bit more on the usability
side.
Improvement.
Michael Hartmann (31:42):
Well, Mike, since, since you're, you're
already on here.
Why don't we like, do you wanna,what are you seeing that
community.
Or, or people you, you'reconnected with are looking for,
for HubSpot that maybe isn'tmade it to their, to their, uh,
their list of changes that havecome.
Mike Rizzo (31:59):
Uh, it's funny actually going the other
direction.
I don't know that this comesfrom the community necessarily,
but certainly from myperspective, having now, um,
been able to use more recentlythe Marketo environment.
It's been a long time since I'vebeen in Pardot, but, uh, gosh,
the ability to clone an entirecampaign from a folder structure
(32:21):
and like the power that comeswith, with that in, in creating
scalability to your sort ofmarketing operations and
campaign operations that happensin Marketo, that is entirely
missing in the HubSpotecosystem, right.
If I wanted to relaunch a, let'scall it a webinar campaign that
(32:43):
had like five emails, maybe, youknow, three to register, two,
uh, to remind, and then, youknow, a handful, one after the
event and there's a landing pageand all this stuff that goes
with it.
Every single one of those assetsneeds to be individually opened
and cloned and rebuilt and allof those things.
Um, that's pretty cumber.
(33:05):
and so I actually kind of missedit earlier, but there's a,
there's a hint that that mightchange.
Like HubSpot recently, uh,released sort of a, a new and
improved campaigns sort of beta,um, It's not clear that that,
that they'll give you theability to clone all the assets
from that view.
But I definitely gave them thatfeedback and I was like, Hey,
(33:27):
this is your view.
This is the place, this is thetime.
Let us clone everything fromthis one spot.
Um, and I think scalabilityacross HubSpot, uh, it's
incredibly easy to use, but itis not as efficient, uh, when it
comes to scale.
So I'd say
Michael Hartmann (33:44):
That's, that's the trade off it sounds like.
Okay.
George, how about, how about youon the Eli uh, equi front?
Let's, like you talked aboutsome of the things that have
changed.
I haven't, there's, I'm suremore of it could be done.
George Samaras (33:57):
Yeah, absolutely.
So, and uh, I'm gonna lean in abit on my experience of, uh,
using three platforms daily.
Um, So, you know, I, I kind oflog into them every day.
I got the experience between thethree that I kind of see and
it's like, you know, qui doessome things really great.
There's definitely some areasfor improvement.
I think the big one.
Uh, and Michael, I, youmentioned you work, uh, with qui
as well.
(34:18):
It's, um, The integration, uh,with Salesforce out of the box
one, it's a huge improvementfrom the program builder days, a
lot faster, not fast enoughcompared to the competitors.
Um, still waiting up to 15minutes, uh, per sync cycle to
bring in data.
Um, it's good, huge improvementover what it used to be.
Um, but at the end of the day,you know, when Marketo's going
every five minutes, um, it's alittle hard to compete.
(34:40):
You know what I mean?
Speed to lead, those minutes docount.
Um, for me, a big thing is alittle better, a little more out
of the box.
Uh, I would say reporting onintegration issues.
I mean, like, that's like my dayin, day out.
We're always looking atintegration issues.
Marketo's has the problems, butyou get notified.
You always get that email with,uh, all the leads that didn't
sync over and you can go in andfix them up.
(35:01):
And it's pretty easy to subsmart lists to, to build it.
Look what you gotta, you gottaget a little creative, maybe
create like a universal form,have a blind form submit with,
with the name of the form so youcan understand, and then that
triggers off an alert to someoneto say, Hey, there's an
integration error from thisstep.
Go in and take a look.
Um, but it's, it's not, youknow, it's, in my opinion, that
should be something that's kindof out of the box.
(35:22):
Um, and for a lot of users whoare not as crafty with, you
know, coming up with these kindof custom.
Out of the box solutions.
It, it's difficult and a lot of'em don't set it up and then
they go into the program withall these integration errors and
it's a bit of a nightmare.
Um, uh, I, so I'd say for thatfor sure, obviously I, I
mentioned at the beginning thethird party integration
improvement is, is great.
Um, but not where it needs tobe.
(35:43):
Uh, I think there's definitelysome errors for improvement.
Like the big one is, uh, Ichecked yesterday cause I
checked periodically.
Still knows Zapier integration.
Um, I know I might guess someflagged for Zapier, but it's,
uh,
Michael Hartmann (35:53):
it's zap by the way.
I just, we had, yeah, we had,it's Zapier.
Zappier makes a.
Happier is what they
Mike Rizzo (35:59):
what I was gonna say.
Zappier makes you happier.
That's what they
George Samaras (36:02):
make sure Okay.
Zap you.
I stand corrected
Michael Hartmann (36:04):
Yeah.
George Samaras (36:05):
Um, yeah, there's no, uh, still no
integration as of, uh, as ofyesterday when I checked.
And, um, you know, I, that'skinda like my duct tape tool and
I'm, uh, in need of, uh, makinga quick patch and, uh, with
Eliquis, uh, it's still notthere.
So it's that, that makes it alittle tough.
Um, but yeah, so I'd say, youknow, like I said, good.
Definitely areas to improvecompared to the competitors.
(36:26):
But like, you know, obviouslythere's a lot of things that
Eloqua knocks outta the park andthat the competitors can't keep
up with.
Michael Hartmann (36:32):
Yeah.
All right.
Lara, bring us home here like.
Lara Black (36:36):
I think there's a lot of things that longtime par
users like myself would love tosee par dot deliver.
We're also supposed to get a fewthings very soon here.
So for example, ever since theylaunched Engagement Studio,
which is the replacement to likedrip programs, it's the very
pretty flow chart whereeverything flows down and does
logic checks to create anurture.
Um, Their only weight incrementshave been in, in one day
(36:58):
increments.
Um, so they've actuallyannounced that they're supposed
to release shorter than one dayincrements in the spring 23
release.
So we're super excited.
I would love to see one hourincrements.
I'm gonna guess that we'reprobably not gonna get that, but
I'd love it if we were.
Um, but other things that, youknow, marketing ops people would
love to see are things like sinkerrors.
(37:19):
Like I have to go dig for mysink errors.
Um, I did a whole presentation,uh, What are sync errors?
How do you resolve them?
How do we even find them?
Cuz most people don't know thatthey exist.
Um, there's lots of things thatthey sort of have deployed and
then didn't finish.
So there was a, um, inSalesforce we would call it a
list view, but it's like, hereis your filtered view of
(37:40):
everyone who filled out thisform.
I'd like to customize whichfields are displayed in that
prospect table.
They kind of released it for theall prospects table and never,
and they promised us it was.
To everywhere else across theplatform, but it never did.
Um, and I mean other stuff likefor people who have the higher
(38:00):
end versions of Part Out or whobuy up to that plan, um, we
would love the ability to pullin, um, Tags from objects like
the opportunity object, we wouldlove to be able to pull those
fields into an email and send anemail to follow up with, you
know, an ongoing opportunity orsomething like that on behalf of
sales.
Those are features that don'texist.
Some of them have been trialedand didn't go anywhere, um, but
(38:25):
I've also been pleasantlysurprised with some of the
things they have released.
Like they released a.
A setting to, uh, resy allprospects with one click instead
of doing some fining like itused to.
Um, and then it's been out forseveral years now, but I still
rely on, um, uh, Connectedcampaigns that is like the
(38:47):
gateway drug to get all ofPardot data into Salesforce.
So where Pardot's own reportsare miserable and you can't do
much with them, you can'tcustomize them much.
Now you can push a lot of thatdata into Salesforce and you can
customize the reports there.
So through the connectedcampaigns object, as you build
emails, you attach emails to it,specific Salesforce campaign,
and now those become a customobject called a marketing asset
(39:09):
object in Salesforce.
And I can now.
Reports and filter for like,Hey, these many emails were sent
and the campaign name includes,or whatever, and I can see all
the bounce numbers and stuffright in Salesforce.
Michael Hartmann (39:23):
It's, I think it's like this notion about
reporting has come up a coupleof times here, and it sounds
like they, I think they allhave.
Uh, at least from myperspective, I know Eloqua and,
and Marketo fairly well.
I think they, they, they bothhave things with, like, I
remember when I went from Eloquato Marketo and I was like, I
just went on the list ofeverybody who fill out a form
(39:44):
and what they put in the form.
You can't get that in easily in,in Mar Marketo equi.
That's like a, that's a normalthing to do.
Lara Black (39:52):
and it should be a normal thing.
A hundred percent agree.
Like, show me this prospecttable and show me right there,
and let me easily export all ofthe people.
If you can't show'em on screen,let me easily export it.
And it just seems like a quick,easy win.
Michael Hartmann (40:07):
Yeah, I mean it's, it's, I think it's really
interesting and the way I thinkabout it, I think Marketo was
built all around the contacts,right?
So if you wanna understandwhat's going on with a contact
or an opportunity like that's,you can get a lot of, in Eloqua,
it seems like it's built morearound campaigns.
And campaigns in Eloqua are morelike programs in Marketo.
I think that's the wholeseparate thing.
(40:28):
Um, so that it's just adifferent, I think it's
different starting point.
And so I think that affectedreporting.
So like, I think we all havelike, oh, we wanna get this
piece of reporting, and thenit's not quite how it was built
to do that.
Um, interesting stuff.
Um, so I was just talking to youa little bit about comparing
contrast in these, like, itsounds like several of us have
(40:49):
used more than one of theseplatforms.
I'm just curious, like Yeah.
What are, yeah, I, I just out acouple of things that.
you know, I see.
Kind of from the couple thatI've used.
Right.
I'd be curious what yourthoughts are about what you've
seen, like where there the, thedifferences between key
platforms on how they dosomething where you go like, I
wish it did let things more likethis.
(41:10):
Right.
It's almost like we could comeup with our, like, if we could
come up with our own marketingautomation platform that did
everything we wanted.
Pick and pick different piecesfrom different stuff.
So, George, you haven't gonefirst yet.
How about we start with you?
Cuz you, you've already said youwork with Marketo and Eliquid
and you said a third oneregularly, so I don't even know
what that is.
So
George Samaras (41:28):
Uh, HubSpot.
So I'm in, I'm in all three.
Yeah.
So, uh, yeah.
Um, great question.
Uh, this one's a bit of a toughone.
Um, I, I get a lot of peopleasking me and like, people refer
to me being like, Hey, like, youknow, like I'm looking at
implementing, I'm looking atmigrating.
I've been through a, I, I'vedone an equi of Marketo
migration.
I've done a HubSpot to Marketomigration.
(41:49):
Um, so I've been through itlike, as like, you know, the
lead at, at the organization.
And, um, I always like my, mynumber one piece of
recommendation.
I'm like, are you.
A thousand percent sure youwanna come do this migration
before you pick anything and youwanna switch platforms.
Cause I'm like, it's, it's oneof the most painful things
you'll do in your career if it'suh, it's, it's, uh, rushed.
Um, but yeah, so I would saylike for how to compare
(42:10):
contrast, it really depends, um,on the organization's size.
Uh, the complexity, the teamdriving it too.
Um, like, you know, like, I, Ialways say this, I'm like, if,
if you are a marketing ops teamof one and you got a campaign
team or an acquisition demandgen team that just wants to get
stuff out easily, and it's asmall organization, like for me,
like HubSpot's almost like ano-brainer.
(42:30):
It's, it's it's scales.
It's, it's super easy to use.
You can, you can, it's very easyto enable your demand gen users
to go and build stuff in there.
Whereas on Eloqua it's, youknow, you kind of need almost
like a campaign ops team thathas a marketing ops background
to run it.
Which typically you, it needsfunding.
Usually it's only largerorganizations that have the
budget for that kind of stuff.
(42:51):
Um, and then Marketo's kindalike the sweet spot in the
middle.
Um, I wouldn't say it's easyfor, you know, like a demand gen
users to get into.
I really, you gotta have like atight knit train.
There's tools, uh, you canintegrate separate conversation,
but.
Uh, I, it really depends.
It really depends on, on thecomplexity of the team, the
complexity of the organization,the size of the organization.
(43:12):
Um, but I, I, I would generallysay like when I hear people
being like, Hey, should we go toEloqua?
And we're like a company of, youknow, we're startup or we're in
our, one of our serious funding.
I'm like, eh, unless you're likeplanning on going enterprise or
you have like a specific usecase like, So you really need
custom objects and how customobjects work in Eloqua.
Yeah, I think it's like a nichething to, to Eloqua, but if you
can get away with like theinfinite fields on the contact
(43:33):
record and you need someonethat's a little snappier, you
know, uh, uh, Marketo might beyour go-to thing.
Depends too on your CRMecosystem.
There's so many differentvariables.
I always just like, I alwaysconclude with'em, like, if
you're gonna be migrating, justbe 1000% sure that you're, that
this is the right decisionbecause it's, it's, it's very
tough to undergo.
It's, it's expensive, it's timeconsuming and.
(43:54):
It's, it's, it's quite anundertaking for the marketing
ops.
Michael Hartmann (44:00):
Definitely, yeah, I mean that, I remember
Eliquis custom objects, like theease of spinning those up was
the game changer when I waschoosing that.
Um, AJ.
How about you?
Like what have you seen that youlike, compare and contrast some
of the the platforms.
AJ Navarro (44:19):
Um, so I'm predominantly in Marketo, but I
think from that perspective, Iwould really love just a lot of
the UI enhancements that, like,just the userability of like
HubSpot.
Like it's just very userintuitive because Marketo is
very powerful, but it's alsolike, it just feels kind of like
black sometimes, like in termsof the ui, um, and things like
(44:41):
that.
And even sometimes after the
Michael Hartmann (44:43):
I'm, I'm sorry.
I'm going through a websiteproject and you made me think
like, we want that website topop.
AJ Navarro (44:48):
The
Michael Hartmann (44:48):
means nothing.
AJ Navarro (44:49):
Yeah.
And it's, it's just things likethat, like, um, I just, there's
a lot of what HubSpot doesreally well, and, and I'm not
even a big HubSpot user myself,but a lot of the teams, I've
done countless migrations fromHubSpot to Marketo.
And so I see a lot of teamslike, well, how do we do this?
And I'm like, well, we gottakind of export this, and then
(45:11):
you gotta launch it.
And it's like, there's notreally a, you know, um, but, but
those are the bigger thingsthere.
Um, And again, I'd lean back onjust, just some more of the
reporting.
Like I, I, I do like, you know,I'm a, I'm a Salesforce user
too, so I like just inSalesforce, the platform itself
(45:32):
as just making the reports andbeing able to make the
dashboards.
I think at a minimum it.
You should be able to do that inMarketo.
To some extent Marketo has theNPI to utilize, but even then,
like I said, there's not a lotof like drag and drop and, and
create your own type offunctionality there.
(45:52):
And so for me that's where it'slimited that it could use some
improvement.
But those are just some of thedifferences.
Michael Hartmann (45:58):
Gotcha.
How about you, Oh, go ahead,George.
George Samaras (46:01):
reject AJ.
It was funny you said about theui.
I had one of our campaignmanagers reach out to us, reach
out to me today.
She's like, what's happeningwith the Marketo ui?
Why does it look like this?
I thought they were gonna updateit, and it was, it was just
really random to get a demandgen user to, to comment on it.
So, like when you said that I, Iwas cracking up, it really, uh,
brought back some PTSD from thatconversation.
AJ Navarro (46:21):
Oh yeah.
Mike Rizzo (46:22):
Well, and with it owned by Adobe now, right?
Like there's like this, there'sthis sense that like at
somewhere, at some pointsomeone's gonna really care
about this visual impact, right?
Michael Hartmann (46:33):
I mean, it doesn't surprise me that E was
interface hasn't really changedwith Oracle buying it.
Right.
So
Mike Rizzo (46:39):
Yeah.
Yeah.
Michael Hartmann (46:42):
Lara, how about you?
What, like
Lara Black (46:44):
So I'm, I'm kind of a unique person in that I've
spent most of my career inPardot.
I did spend a couple years as aPardo consultant where I
migrated people off of Marketoand off of HubSpot onto Pardot.
And some of it is in, they weresold too much product.
Um, and they're, they weren'tusing it to.
It's utmost.
So my Marketo to Pardot, uh,migration project, they're like,
(47:08):
we are getting charged so much,uh, for features that we don't
use and that don't work, right.
We just need to strip it out,strip it down, and that
justifies switching platforms.
Um, and at the same time, youknow, it was very apparent that
they didn't fully understandthat like Marketo is more
powerful than Pardot in veryspecific ways.
(47:29):
Marketo, you can create customfields that can do calculations.
Pardot can't do any of that.
I can't create a formula fieldin Pardot, and Pardot doesn't
sync well with Salesforceformula fields.
Um, so there's pros and cons toeverything and I really think.
Before ripping something out andbringing in your favorite tool.
Even if I took a job in a placethat didn't have Pardot, I would
(47:52):
hesitate before saying, oh,we're switching to Pardot
because it's expensive.
There's so much historical data.
Um, un unless there's lots offeatures that I'm gaining and
my, my price is gonna changesignificantly and in ways that
like, I'm absolutely gonnabenefit from, I probably.
You know, the, the, the peoplewho, like, they have a new
manager and they just loveMarketo and that's what they're
(48:13):
gonna part out, out and putMarketo in.
Like, I mean, I get it, but Idon't always think it's well
thought out because now you haveto rebuild landing pages and
they need a different url and.
There's just so manydependencies and so many
touchpoints and engagement thatyou can't benefit from it's
history anymore.
Um, even if you work for acompany that gets bought by
(48:34):
another company and you both usePardot, you have to decide which
part of account you're using andyou lose all the history from
the other Pardo account.
Like there's so many factorsbeyond just the cost of a tool.
You really need to look at who'susing it, what's their skill
level?
Are you gonna hire somebodywho's more experienced in
marketing operations to.
or not?
(48:56):
You
Michael Hartmann (48:56):
Yeah, that's good point.
And Mike, you, you alreadymentioned HubSpot and Marketo.
So what's your take on the tradeoffs and maybe there's, you said
you used Pardo a little bit atsome point.
Mike Rizzo (49:10):
I did, it was, it was long enough ago that I would
not at all have anythingimportant to say that part out
at this point.
Lara Black (49:17):
I'll say the interface probably hasn't
changed much.
It is prettier than Marketo'sinterface though.
Mike Rizzo (49:23):
Yeah.
Yeah.
If we had to stack rank it,probably like in terms of, uh, u
i ux, beautification and ease ofuse, it'd probably be like
HubSpot, Pardot, Marketo, andthen equi.
Like, I don't know though aboutEloqua.
Um, yeah, I think I, I sort ofcovered everything that I, that
I think I could, I, I couldexpress in terms of trade offs
(49:43):
as it relates to the idea ofmigrating to and from, you know,
I echo the sentiments ofeveryone here.
Very costly, very timeconsuming, uh, wholly dependent
on your actual needs.
A while ago, and maybe Lara,this resonates with you.
I'm not sure.
I used to, when people wouldcome to me and ask me, you know,
(50:06):
Hey, what do we use?
Right?
Um, you know, I agree with you,George, if you're sort of
getting started, HubSpot's supereasy, right?
There's a freemium solution toeverything that they have,
right?
So just jump into the freestuff.
Um, and it scales.
It really does scale.
It can get up to enterprise.
But once you get into the nuanceof.
You know, I really need thecampaign operations to work
(50:28):
better.
Like, there's some other thingsyou might want to consider
there, but one of the things Iused to say, going back to you,
Lara, um, around sort of Pardotis this idea of are you a sales
centric organization or are yousort of a decentralized demand
gen lead funnel inboundorganization, uh, to, to use
(50:49):
the, the phrase coined byHubSpot.
Um, Because that might actuallyhave an implication.
Like if you want a tool thatreally enables your salespeople
to do a bunch of stuff, likePardot falls right into that
category, right?
The alerts alone back in theday, that was like the number
one selling point for everysalesperson that ever saw it.
They're like, oh, I could getalerted every time an email's
(51:10):
opened.
Uh, and I would argue, you know,HubSpot has some of that
components, some of that stuffnow, and Marketo certainly does
too, but it's like sort of awork around.
That's, that's sort of what Ialways used to say is like, if
you're a really sales centricorganization, like as a jumping
off point and you know, your goto market is like, invest in,
you know, we're not seeing it asmuch now, but invest in a lot of
(51:32):
BDRs, um, you know, maybe part,and you're a Salesforce, you
know, user as well.
Maybe that's the right answer.
Lara Black (51:40):
And, um, if you're a Slack shop, uh, Pardot does have
a feature for Slack where likethose alerts that you talked
about, Mike, those could come inSlack.
So you could, um, instead ofgetting one of these ugly Pardot
emails that says, Hey, somebodyopened this email, uh, you can
get engagement alerts in Slack.
Um, and it, it is, um, we didn'treally talk about what do you
(52:02):
sell in terms of like, are youB2B or b2c?
And it's oversimplifying it to.
Exact target, aka.
Marketing Cloud is for b2c andParadigm is for b2b, but a lot
of it does line up.
A lot of it does hinge on.
When you have an email, uh, whenyou have a prospective customer,
(52:24):
are you going to turn them overto a salesperson to pursue and
close the deal, or are youdriving them to an online store
to make a sale?
Um, Pardot is very wellpositioned to do this handoff to
the salesperson.
Um, and Marketing Cloud hasmultiple tools that are made to
like spray out hundreds ofthousands of emails.
(52:44):
You can definitely dip in bothof them.
People do crossover.
I have some, uh, companies thatI've worked with for years who
have both tools.
Uh, the last company I workedfor had both tools.
Um, it, it really does.
Come down to how does it fitinto your sales cycle and how
invested are your sales teammembers.
If your sales team members areworking off the spreadsheets and
(53:07):
they're not really inSalesforce, like you probably
don't want Pardot, um, cuzmarketing's not gonna get the,
the background like opportunitydata that they would, if sales
is invested in, in usingSalesforce significant.
Mike Rizzo (53:21):
Mm-hmm.
That makes sense.
This, this actually brings me,and I know we gotta wrap it here
pretty quickly, but uh, maybenext time we do this HHartmann,
we need.
Bring in some users of, uh,inflection as they're starting
to develop like the PLGmarketing automation platform.
Cuz you know, we just talkedabout B2B and b2c, but there's
(53:41):
this whole other thing aroundlike product led growth and how
like any of us who have workedin SaaS organizations have, who
have tried to do onboardingnurtures, or sequences or
engagements based on appactivity, we all know that
that's like dang nearimpossible.
And any of the tools that areout there.
Right.
Um, sounds like even in Eliquidprobably be worse from an API
(54:03):
integration perspective.
But we might have to haveinflection come in here,
Michael Hartmann (54:08):
I, I think it would be interesting to find,
um, something that I, I remembertalking to a, like a revenue
leader, um, somewhere in timeduring the pandemic who was made
an argument, particularly for arelatively early stage company
that you don't need any of thesemarket automation platforms.
You can get away with an emailprovider, kind of a relatively
(54:32):
low cost one with, um, Some sortof crm and then something that
is like a, I think he was usingSegment, but something like that
to help connect things together.
Um, and it sounded prettyinteresting, like, cuz I think
that to me actually that like,like I, the idea that you could
(54:52):
simplify it to like, we've gotan email platform, it just, what
you're gonna do emails, it cando a little bit of trigger
stuff, but it's not gonna donurture.
But I also am like, I don'tknow, that nurture is still
though that important reallypersonally, like I just, anyway,
um, so
Mike Rizzo (55:11):
From what I'm seeing, it's still
Michael Hartmann (55:13):
George, George is putting in the, in the, in
the chat.
He's like, sounds like my oldcmo.
So maybe it is.
I, I believe he was in Canada,so, um, may have been,
George Samaras (55:24):
Yeah, it sounds uh, it just got flashback to the
conversation I had about a yearago.
Almost identical to what youwere just saying,
Michael Hartmann (55:30):
Uh, okay.
May we'll have to chat offline.
See, I, I have to remember whoit was.
I honestly do not even remember.
Um, yeah.
But I think, I think it's, it'sinteresting, um, it's really
interesting to me that there's alot of commonality.
Like there's some things thatthey're doing that is, is like
all these platforms are doingsome things that are good and
are moving things forward.
(55:51):
sort of keeping the communityengaged, but the community are,
are sort of finding their owntribes, if you will.
Um, but they're also in someways not listening to the
community either.
And so they might be missing themark from that standpoint.
Um, so it's kind of curious likewhere are they getting their
input from for what they'redoing in terms of that
Lara Black (56:11):
there's a term in software development called
shiny blue button syndrome.
Um, and it really comes down tosome executive says, I want
that.
Um, and it means that featuresthat, Developers want to develop
that would solve problems forusers don't get worked on
because now we need to turn thatbutton shiny and blue.
So people click it.
Michael Hartmann (56:30):
Yeah.
Mike Rizzo (56:33):
I love that.
Michael Hartmann (56:35):
Are you all familiar with the oatmeal?
Mike Rizzo (56:37):
Oh yes,
Michael Hartmann (56:38):
Okay, so the oatmeal has one.
It's like how web design goes tohell.
Yeah.
It's, go look it up.
You'll,
Lara Black (56:46):
Yeah.
The one that's
Michael Hartmann (56:46):
take me later.
Lara Black (56:47):
The tree.
The tree.
The tree and the tire swing one.
Michael Hartmann (56:51):
Well, no, I, there ends up being a, a cat.
Yeah.
in the
Mike Rizzo (56:56):
Ha,
Michael Hartmann (56:56):
design.
Lara Black (56:56):
I think I'm thinking of a different one, but yes, I,
oatmeal is very on the nose.
Michael Hartmann (57:01):
Yes, he's brilliant.
Um, wow.
This has been like, I feel likewe could have continued on more.
I'm sure we could have, um,really enjoyed the conversation.
Uh, thank you, Lara.
Thank you, George.
Thank you AJ and Mike.
Um, so I normally we would goaround and ask for like, how can
people connect with you?
Why don't we, I think we've gota little bit of time.
(57:22):
We can probably do that realquick.
So, AJ what, like, what's thebest way for folks to hit up
with you?
AJ Navarro (57:28):
Yeah, uh, just on my LinkedIn, so just linkedin.com,
um slash AJ av.
So AJ nav, that's the best way.
Um, Pretty active on theLinkedIn side, so always happy
to reach out.
And then of course, uh, and I'min the community, so the market
ops community, so please feelfree to ping me, slack, me and
(57:49):
I'm there as well.
Michael Hartmann (57:50):
Sounds good.
Lara, how about you?
Lara Black (57:55):
I am at Pardot Pro on Twitter.
You can also find mywebsite@pardotpro.com.
Um, and yeah, slack is afabulous place to find me.
I think I'm the only Lara.
LA A there, so come find me.
Michael Hartmann (58:07):
How about you, George?
George Samaras (58:09):
Same as the others.
Uh, LinkedIn's the best, uh,George Samari, uh, or uh, Slash
GC hyphen Samari.
Uh, same with Slack as well.
I'm pretty sure I'm the onlyperson has my name That's in
marketing apps, so, uh, prettyeasy to find there as.
Michael Hartmann (58:25):
There's too many of us, mikes and Michael,
Mike Rizzo (58:27):
That was such a low hanging, like you just teed me
up.
You know, I, I am the real MikeRizzo for anybody who comes into
marketing operations and marketmo pros, like, no, I'm just
kidding.
Mike Rizzo.
Uh, the other one is fantastic,so you can reach out to him too.
Michael Hartmann (58:44):
that's right.
There is another Mike Rizzo,who's also in the community.
Mike Rizzo (58:47):
Yeah.
Yeah.
Michael Hartmann (58:48):
Well, thank you, uh, everyone.
This was great.
Appreciate you joining us.
Uh, thanks to our listeners.
Thanks, Mike.
Love Naomi, and, uh, and our,and our thoughts here too.
Thank her for, for what we'veaccomplished over the last
couple years.
Looking forward to 2023.
Uh, continue to give us yourfeedback and give us your ideas
(59:09):
for topics and guests.
Or if you have a topic that youwanna talk about, let us know
That too.
You can reach out to Mike,Naomi, or me.
Until next time, we'll talk toyou later.
Bye You gotta stop recording.
Hello everyone.
Welcome to another episode ofOpsCast, brought to you by
marketing ops.com, powered bythe MO Pros.
I'm your host, Michael Hartmann.
Join today.
We are down to just Mike and meagain.
Mike Rizzo is my co-host.
Mike Rizzo (00:17):
Hey everybody.
Michael Hartmann (00:18):
Oh, I wasn't even gonna let you go,
Mike Rizzo (00:20):
Oh man, I just dumped right in there.
Michael Hartmann (00:22):
Right in there.
Uh, and the reason I wanna getgoing is cuz we have a lot to
cover and we have multipleguests this, this time today.
So we are excited to have withus, um, some marketing
operations experts each here totalk a little bit about.
So the mAJor marketingautomation platforms is kind of
our state of the union.
We did one of.
Early on in the history of thepodcast.
(00:43):
So this is our second round.
Um, we're gonna do this here,but I think we'll try to make
this an annual thing.
So joining us today are LaraBlack Rep, kind of representing
Pardot AJ Navarro, representingMarketo, George Samaras
representing Eloqua and.
Mike is actually gonna representHubSpot.
So here we go.
Lara, Lara is currently directorof marketing operations at
(01:04):
Extensive HR and is a part oppro, and I think actually she's
got that term coined.
AJ is currently a and AJ, thiswas new to me, package
technology operations consultantwith Shift Paradigm.
So, um, he's, he's Marketoexpert and then George is
currently director of MarketingOperations and Technology at
Coveo and is an Eloqua expert.
(01:26):
So thanks everyone for joiningus.
Lara Black (01:29):
Happy to be here.
AJ Navarro (01:30):
Proud to
George Samaras (01:30):
you for having us.
Michael Hartmann (01:32):
Right.
So why don't we, like, let'sstart off with the big question
cuz I, uh, my and I'll.
I think my general assertionright now is that there's not
really much happening in termsof true, uh, really innovative
stuff happening in this space.
So I want each of you to try toprove me wrong here.
So let's start with this, youknow, what are you most excited
(01:52):
about in terms of recent changesor announcements from the
different platforms?
And, you know, I'm gonna go lookand I'm might, I've got my
screen here.
I'll go with who's at the topleft of my screen, which is
Lara, why don't you start us offand then we can kind of rotate
from there.
Lara Black (02:06):
Pardot has had an interesting year.
Um, I'm excited about it, butnot necessarily in a good way
for their name change.
Uh, officially its
Michael Hartmann (02:14):
Oh, that's right.
It's That's right.
It's not part out anymore.
Lara Black (02:17):
It's Officiates name has changed to Marketing Cloud
account engagement powered byPardot, which will probably lose
the powered by Pardot in somefuture iteration.
It's a long mouthful.
It wasn't super well received bythe group of Pardot users.
We call ourselves thePardashians.
Um, but it is what it is, youknow, uh, everybody still calls
(02:37):
it par up, uh, even internally,when.
Consultants, uh, talk to theirclients.
They say, you know, we havePardot.
Um, they are trying to writeblog posts for both, both terms,
things like that.
And actually interesting, um,feature that they released is
conditional completion actions,which means, uh, traditionally
all pardo forms, everybody whofill out a form had the same
(02:59):
actions applied to them.
And you had to get reallycreative if you didn't want
actions applied to everyoneacross.
Now we can perform, say, Hey,this custom field is blank.
Do these additional actions tothem, and we don't have to eat
up a ton of automation rules andother paid features to do it.
Michael Hartmann (03:18):
Interesting.
I thought you were gonna gosomewhere with like multi page
forms, but, which I don't thinkanybody, any of these platforms
do.
Maybe HubSpot does.
I'm probably least familiar withthat.
Lara Black (03:30):
There's a good reason to have them in certain
instances, but I think most ofthe marketing people would say,
um, more forms, more fields, waybad.
I don't know.
Um, I think we all want fewerforms, fewer fields, and are
utilizing tools in thebackground to like backfield
data instead of giving them morefields to fill out.
Michael Hartmann (03:49):
Yeah, no, I, I think generally you're right,
although then everybody's like,why don't we have more
information about these leads inour database?
Mike Rizzo (03:56):
that's the worst
Michael Hartmann (03:57):
You right.
All right.
Uh, I'll, I'll call George.
How about you?
Next, let's talk about Eloqua.
What's, what's exciting there?
George Samaras (04:06):
Yeah, great question.
So I'm glad you prefaced earlierthat, uh, you know, there hasn't
been too many changes.
It's like I was trying to thinkof a few big ones that we've,
uh, we've got our hands on.
Um, I would say so the bigchange I've seen with Qua in the
past, uh, year is a lot of thirdparty integrations now tools.
So less on Oracle's, you know,Oracle rolling this out,
Oracle's been doing a.
(04:26):
Like, if you look at the quichange log for the quarterly
releases, a lot of stuff behindthe scenes, primarily with the
api, they've deprecated the soapapi, a lot of, uh, new endpoints
available and, and some prettycool stuff you could do with
the, the rest and bulk api.
But, um, as a practitioner, uh,what I've noticed as an end user
is a lot more integrations fromthird party tools.
I know, uh, I was chatting withthe Syncy team, uh, I wanna say
(04:48):
like last week.
And, um, you know, like I, I'llI'll preface by saying I am the
Eli person.
I do consult in Eloqua.
My day job, I use Marketo, so Iplay.
There, but um, you know, we'retalking about the Marketo
integration, like yeah, we justrolled out an EQ integration as
well and I'm like, oh, that'sgreat to see.
Cuz I, I know the.
The big, the big challenge a lotof Equi users has had is being
you need a really robust openAPI backed by developer to like
(05:11):
build these integrations with,uh, other platforms and tools.
So to see other companiesinvesting in Equis integration
to like help us really kind ofget data outta the platform and,
and do some cool things ispretty awesome.
Um, it's not comparable, I'd saynot.
You know, not yet to, to, uh,other platforms like Marketo and
HubSpot, but, uh, hugeimprovements there.
Um, really making, you know,marketing ops practitioners
(05:32):
lives easier.
They're using Eli.
Michael Hartmann (05:35):
Yeah, I was, I was using Eloqua four or five,
six years ago, was at a Marketoshop, came back and using Eloqua
now, and that's like the bigthing, like, oh, it's like you
can't, can't call out.
The other thing I I, I don'tknow if you use this or not, but
they're starting to incorporate,um, other capabilities to like
SMS directly inside the platformthat's coming out too.
(05:57):
So I don't know anybody who'susing it yet, but um, I know
it's there.
George Samaras (06:01):
Yeah, I know there was some other, back when
I used to work at Oracle manyyears ago, it was, uh, there
were some customers doing somecustom solutions for that.
Uh, I haven't worked with anycustomers that have used it, but
it's, it's, it's cool to seethese integrations coming, um,
cuz a lot of it's a leg, Iwouldn't say a legacy system,
but there's a lot of peoplewho've had it for many years.
Um, well entrenched in theirmarktech stack and they need to
make it work.
(06:22):
And this just made everyone'slives a lot easier with these
new integr.
Michael Hartmann (06:25):
Yeah.
All right.
So we've talked, mentioned, uh,Marketo.
So AJ, how about you tell uswhat, like what's great
happening?
AJ Navarro (06:33):
Yeah, there's quite a few things, uh, personally
that I'm, you know, starting tosink my teeth into that I'm
excited for.
And uh, the first one is, uh,Marketo now offers a priority
override for trigger campaigns.
So basically you can prioritizedifferent types of campaigns to,
depending on what you're tryingto accomplish with, with, uh,
(06:55):
goals.
And so for a lot of the teamsthat I get to work with,
Sometimes, you know, they have aton of stakeholders or a ton of
programs, uh, firing off at thesame time.
And when you think of things ofcommunication limits, you're
able to kind of prioritize whichcampaign takes priority.
So that's really cool.
Uh, I've started to stick myteeth into using more of also
(07:15):
the dynamic chat feature.
Um, and recently in October, uh,Marketo released, um, A better
UI update to be able to autoarrange just some of the streams
and the dialogue streams.
Um, before it was a little bitmessy and un methodical.
So they've kind of enhancedthat.
So been playing around withthat.
That's been really fun.
(07:36):
You're also able now to, uh,schedule meeting notifications,
uh, whenever those happen withinthe dynamic functionality or
the.
Chat functionality, uh, mostimportantly, I think, and, um,
and I've always been hit or misswith the Marketo ui, but I've
really liked the enhanced ui.
Uh, when it comes to like someof the email template details,
(07:58):
um, I am a huge stickler on justunderstanding where things are
used.
Um, and so, Uh, the newer UIallows you to kind of see the
email asset status, uh, when itwas last modified, uh, who it
was last modified by.
Um, as well as use some filtersto narrow down by if it's been
approved or in draft orunapproved.
(08:18):
So just making my life a wholelot easier when it comes to
just, you know, easing thatbandwidth.
So those are some features I'vebeen excited.
Michael Hartmann (08:26):
Sounds good.
Yeah.
Um, that, that prioritizationone sounds really interesting.
I can think of many scenarioswhere that would've come in
handy.
Okay.
Awesome.
Uh, alright, Mike, your turn.
Mike Rizzo (08:40):
My turn.
Michael Hartmann (08:41):
I know HubSpot's not doing anything cuz
they never say anything aboutwhat they're doing.
Mike Rizzo (08:45):
Yeah.
They don't ever talk aboutanything that they're launching.
Nothing.
No.
Um, yeah, I, I'm excited to stepin and rep HubSpot a little bit
on this as, as a, a temporarychair for this episode.
Um, I have been, it's hard.
It HubSpot's a hard one to talkabout from just purely a
(09:05):
marketing automation likeperformance kind of background.
Uh, we, we, at marketingops.com, we use the platform,
um, sort of through and throughcrm, through marketing
automation.
So, um, there's a couple ofthings that I think are really
interesting about HubSpot as anecosystem.
That, um, are kind of opening itup to continuing to move up
(09:28):
market, um, but also the abilityto service down market teams
too, and even like servicesproviders potentially.
Uh, so one of them is payments.
They've actually struck areally, um, strong deal it
sounds like with Stripe and, uh,essentially processing payments
(09:50):
for invoices.
Kind of going end to end quoteto cash is entirely possible.
I can actually, if I was anindependent consultant or
something like that, um, I canactually set my meeting link to
require a payment in order tobook time with me.
So this is another sort ofservices provider kind of
approach that is superinteresting there.
(10:12):
Um, but then we all heard aboutOperations Hub getting launched,
you know, and the last time wedid this call and it's certainly
continued to, to grow fromthere.
Uh, I will, uh, fall on my sworda little bit.
I subscribed to try to use OpsHub and I've yet to actually put
it into operation within ourown.
(10:33):
Um, but there's some excitingthings happening as it relates
to when you think about theneeds of a, of an operations
professional.
They're doing a pretty good job,uh, thinking about like, hey,
cleanliness of your database, oroutdated workflows and lists.
Like they're really starting tolean in more to this idea of,
(10:54):
Hey, try to regain control overyour data.
Right?
Um, subscribe to this enhancedsort of data management
environment that they've ununlocked, right?
They call it data sets.
Um, and if you're on aparticular plan, you can just
have access to a data qualityand an integrations view that
allows you to look at reallywhat's going on inside my
(11:15):
portal.
And it'll automaticallyrecommend like, Hey, these,
these two records look likethey're the same, right?
And so maybe you should dosomething about that.
Um, and it's still a bit manual.
Boy, that's a lot better thanfetching data from an API or
exporting it to some sort of CSVand doing merges and, you know,
all those kinds of things.
(11:36):
Um, so I'm pretty excited aboutthe way that they're leaning in
on this like operationalcategory, um, and trying to help
people maintain sort of a, ahealthier database.
I'd say that that's probably themost innovative piece that's
happening right now.
Michael Hartmann (11:51):
Interesting.
Okay, so you said something inthere that made me realize I
totally missed something.
So the, the reason we have Laraand George and AJ on this, Mike
as well is because they arechairpersons for each of these
in the marketing ops.comcommunity.
So, Yeah, if you're, if you'repart of the community and, uh,
(12:13):
you have questions about these,they're the ones probably are
most likely to help you get tothose, um, in the dedicated
Slack channels.
So, Sorry about that.
I missed that for sure.
So anyway, yeah, so they, they,they've, uh, they've been back
there behind the scenes helpingthe community with, with this
kinda stuff.
So appreciate all that.
All right.
So, um, I'm, I, I, I thought ofanother question here, but I may
(12:36):
hold off on that.
I, you know, Lara, your, yourcomment about, um, the name
change prompted me, like, I, Ithink one of the things that.
Seen over the years, and itstarted when I first used Exact
Target, um, which I guess isnow, is that even still around a
Salesforce marketing cloud.
Lara Black (12:54):
Y Yeah, it is the, the story goes that Exac Target
wanted to get acquired bySalesforce, and they heard that
Salesforce was looking at eitherbuying them or buying Pardot.
So they went and bought Pardot,so Salesforce had to buy them.
To get them both.
Michael Hartmann (13:09):
I, yeah.
Lara Black (13:10):
and it got renamed Marketing Cloud, but it's never
really made strides in gettingintegrated on platform.
It's still a separate login andall sorts of
Michael Hartmann (13:17):
Yeah.
Um, and the reason I bring thatup is
Mike Rizzo (13:19):
years ago too.
Lara Black (13:21):
Yeah,
Michael Hartmann (13:21):
at
Mike Rizzo (13:21):
over.
Yeah.
Cause I was, I was like usingthe tool when that happened.
I had, the short story is I hadmigrated the team from like
Salesforce to Sugar and I wasusing Pardot and then Pardot got
acquired by Salesforce And I waslike, great, now I gotta find
another map cuz they're notgonna support the integration to
sugar.
And then everybody's scoffing atme
Lara Black (13:42):
a while, but then they deprecated it and then you
could still do it, but you hadto like code your own api.
Um, yeah, sugar crm, that goesway back.
Mike Rizzo (13:51):
Right.
Michael Hartmann (13:51):
Well, but I, but I do think in general, like
all these, all these vendor, allthese, you know, platform
providers have been pretty goodabout building communities and
advocates, right?
So I think probably all of youare in some way connected not
just in the, the marketing opscommunity, but to each of those
individual platform communitiesas, as their sort of, Um,
(14:12):
advocates.
So I'm just curious, like whathave you seen in terms of what
they're doing to continue eithercontinue to or not engage with
the community of theircommunities?
Lara Black (14:24):
you know, I think with any, you know, Any time we
talk about communities, there'sroom for improvement, but
there's also budgetconsiderations.
And I get that.
Um, Salesforce has been astrong, they call it the
Trailblazer Community Sales.
Salesforce has strongly promotedthem.
They give us a budget to be, wedon't get paid to be user group
leader, but we get a budget topay for food, drinks to, um,
(14:48):
reserve a room, something likethat.
Um, and they also give us toolslike we no longer have to use
free meetup accounts.
We get a.
A reservation event managementtype platform.
And that's all granted to us atno cost.
Uh, as a user group leader.
Um, I think there, there's theofficial channels, which is
(15:10):
things like the Trailblazercommunity and the Trailblazer
community team is great.
Um, and there's unofficialchannels.
Um, The Pardashians group that Imentioned is just users.
It is managed by a, um,Salesforce partner consulting
company in the ecosystem.
Um, technically owns this Slackchannel.
They're not charging for it.
Their name is not plastered allover it.
(15:30):
And they are welcoming, not justpart up members, but also
marketing Cloud members.
Um, and then there's sort of inbetween communities, like
there's a marketing Championscommunity sponsored by
Salesforce.
We do have like an official likerecognition and we have a point
of contact at Salesforce andthey send us swag.
Um, and there's like a limitednumber of US marketing
champions.
Um, but it's a little bit of.
(15:52):
Leadership at Salesforce may notknow about marketing champions,
uh, the way that they shouldknow about us.
Um, and they certainly overlookthe trailblazer community in
many ways.
Um, so it kind of comes down tolike how well resourced these
platforms.
Go to market and, and productmarketing teams are, um, and how
(16:12):
in the loop they are and howlong they've been in the
ecosystem.
Because as much as likeSalesforce has turnover, like,
and we, we all kind of laughabout like our Salesforce AE
changes every quarter.
Um, sometimes the marketingpeople there change too, and
they don't know who to reach outto, who are their, you know,
proponents in the community.
Uh, I think there's a lot ofimprovement to be done for that.
(16:32):
But, um, then you have othergreat communities like the Mar
ops community.
Hey, you know, we love, we lovechiming in for all the help.
And I don't just hang out in myown little Slack channel.
I, I like have alerts set up sothat if somebody mentions Pardo
in another channel, like itpings me.
Um,
Mike Rizzo (16:50):
Yeah, you've really.
Really jumped in on quite anumber of the chats.
I've noticed a few times.
I'm like, wow.
She's, she's a very savvy Slackuser.
Clearly
Lara Black (16:59):
Oh yeah.
I love Slack, honestly.
Mike Rizzo (17:01):
that's awesome.
Lara Black (17:03):
But I, I also love the people who come to us with
questions and who aren't afraidto, like, some of them will say,
this is a stupid question, but,and like, I just wanna say,
there aren't any stupidquestions.
If you're beginning, you have toask the questions.
Don't be afraid to ask them.
Mike Rizzo (17:15):
Mm-hmm.
AJ Navarro (17:15):
I might need to take a tip from you there on how to
set up an alert like that.
I would love that.
Lara Black (17:20):
Oh, I will show you.
Mike Rizzo (17:21):
yeah, I
George Samaras (17:21):
Ditto as well.
On here on
Mike Rizzo (17:23):
from, yeah, from a point, from a, from that point
in particular, I think weprobably have an opportunity as
leaders in this community tolike, just like, Hey, optimize
your use of Slack, bothinternally and when in these
communities, right?
We should probably do a wholesegment on that at some point.
Maybe that'll be my course thatI give to everybody.
Michael Hartmann (17:41):
Yeah, you go.
Um, AJ how about you?
What's going on?
Like, how's Marketo?
I know that they, you know, thechampions thing and all that was
a big deal.
So what's, what's going on withMarketo and their community?
AJ Navarro (17:54):
I mean, everything's good.
I mean, the community, you know,it's, it's really still a lot of
the community that.
Still rely on, you know, whetherofficial or official, but from
like an official standpoint, I,I think just the Marketo user
groups and the Marketo championhours.
You know, I'm, I'm a, I'm stilla stickler.
I try to attend as many as Ican.
(18:15):
Um, those are big things for me,you know.
Really just constantly learningthere.
I, I feel like Marketo's alwayssupported those and, and just
have kept those going, um,unofficially.
It's, it's constantly likemarketing ops.com or, um, the, I
guess it's the marketing ops, Ithink is the other one that's
(18:35):
run by like a TUMO or somethinglike that.
Mike Rizzo (18:38):
Mops Pros
AJ Navarro (18:39):
Pros, yeah.
Mike Rizzo (18:40):
be confused with Mo Pros
AJ Navarro (18:43):
Yeah.
Ops
Mike Rizzo (18:44):
We're all in the same space, so
AJ Navarro (18:46):
Yeah, and I mean, everybody's just been fantastic,
um, you know, to just, to reallylearn from, uh, and it's helped
me grow, you know, and, and, andfor me, especially like when,
you know, again with marketingkns, when we talk about just
like some of like the, thesummer camps and things like
that, like even for me thatcounts as communities.
(19:06):
Um, my favorite part about thecommunities is just constantly
being around the people that.
Better than me.
Um, cuz that's how, like, I getbetter and, and you know,
there's no, uh, stagnant, youknow, and, and growth and all
that.
And so it's great to see that alot of the people that I've
looked up to like.
(19:28):
I am now like speaking next tothem and watching them grow or
getting to learn from readingtheir books, reading their posts
and just, just those differentthings.
And so overall, I feel likeAdobe's done a great job, um,
endorsing that and they willcontinue to endorse that.
And I myself am just a bigproponent on just community.
(19:48):
And I said this a million times,Mike knows it, but I wouldn't
have my career withoutcommunity.
So it's a.
Michael Hartmann (19:56):
Yeah, I, I, I say often hear it that if this
kind of stuff had been around15, 20 years ago, I think it
would be, well, I wouldn't behere probably, I don't know.
But it would've been different.
George, what's going on?
I like, I, I think, I dunno howplugged in with the Eliquia
community you are, given thatyou're working both in Marketo
and Eloqua.
(20:16):
So what's your take on the Equione?
And I can add in my 2 centsworth if as well.
George Samaras (20:22):
Yeah, great question.
So, um, I think, so for, for, I,I would say it's, it's probably
not as large, obviously as the,the Pardo and, um, uh, Marketo
communities, uh, for obviousreasons, but I'll say this, um,
the users have really taken itinto their own hands to create a
sense of community.
Obviously, I'll, I'll let go.
The sentiment on the Slackgroups, you know, obviously, um,
Mo Pros and MOPS pros are bothbig, uh, slack rooms for Eliquis
(20:45):
support.
I would say in addition to this,a lot of agencies have picked up
because Eliquis becoming a bitof a niche thing now within the
marketing ops world.
Um, you know, there, there'sagencies that run, uh, events,
you know, you'll see'empromoted, like there's an equi
experts group on LinkedIn thatthere's a few hundred members
there.
Um, and so, uh, I know likeSojourns a big one.
I think they run, I wanna sayit's.
(21:06):
I'm gonna say monthly.
Um, may, I might be wrong.
It might be biweekly or monthly.
They have a, an qui user groupthat they host.
I know it's on Thursdays.
Um, and then I know ZitiInteractive, they're another
agency.
They've been.
Uh, setting up some groups forEqui users, not, not to the, uh,
the same level as, so, but it's,it's definitely great to see
some of the agencies picking upsome of that community, uh,
(21:27):
piece.
In addition to that, on theofficial channels, I mean,
there's, there's top liners,which is Eliquis, uh, Oracle's
like, um, or Oracle MarketingClouds, like, uh, online message
board.
It's pretty active.
Like, I'd say there's about likethree to four new posts a day,
uh, like threads.
Um, and like any questionspeople have, they get responses
pretty quickly.
Um, you know, I, I'll say itlike, like I said, it.
(21:48):
It's not obviously as busy, justbased off the user base as some
of the other tools, but there'sdefinitely an active community
and, and agencies and users havereally stepped up to kind of
create that, uh, that sense ofcommunity.
Michael Hartmann (21:59):
Yeah, I, I think you guys sojourn, I know,
uh, has done some work where,where I'm at now.
And so they, they've asked,they've invited, you know, my,
me and my team and some of theothers in the broader
organization, they have virtual,um, user groups on a pretty
regular basis.
So, um, interesting.
There's a theme happening here,Mike, what's going on with I, I
(22:23):
actually don't know much aboutthe HubSpot community at all,
so,
Mike Rizzo (22:27):
Um, you know, they've, they followed very
similar playbooks to Marketo.
Uh, I think they all sort of, itwas, I think it was a, once you
got one of the primary maps outthere to sort of, um, the domino
to fall, so to speak, on the useof like a platform like bevy for
meetups and user groups andstuff.
Uh, I think the rest allfollowed suit.
(22:47):
I don't know who got in.
But Bevy definitely benefitedfrom getting one.
Um, so they have a very similarsort of environment that Lara
and AJ refer to around, um, youknow, offering a, an environment
for you to host meetups.
Um, they call'em hugs, uh,Marketos call'em mugs.
(23:07):
Uh, I, I don't know what part Icall, or whatever Pardo's called
now, pugs,
Lara Black (23:14):
some user group leaders do call them pugs.
I've just always said like the,I'm the Pardot Austin user group
leader or something like that.
Mike Rizzo (23:20):
There you go.
Yeah.
Lara Black (23:21):
It's the Trailblazer Community Groups, uh, like is
the organization, and they giveus like official channels.
Mike Rizzo (23:27):
Yeah.
Okay.
That makes sense.
Yeah, so, so very similar inthat regard.
They still have, um, fundingthat's available if you're a hug
leader of a particular region.
Um, they certainly give youfunding to be able to support
those events.
As we've moved back to inperson, you can now host the in
person and, and get a little bitmore from that, uh, bang for
(23:47):
your buck in that.
Uh, I am not a hug leader, butI've participated in a number of
those types of environments inOrange County and in San Diego.
We have members of our communityhere at marketingops.com that
are hug leaders that I've workedwith directly in person.
Um, their community forum hasremained pretty active.
I'd say it's one of the morerobust community forums out
(24:09):
there in terms of.
Uh, I think a lot of that isperpetuated by the incredible
partnership ecosystem that theybuilt.
So the partners benefit greatlyfrom, you know, being a top tier
provider and supporter of that.
Community forum environment.
But what's interesting is theyhave all these like subsets of
(24:30):
communities that sort of pop uptoo.
So there's your HubSpotdevelopers forum on Slack.
I'm in that one, uh, purelybecause I'm constantly wondering
what's happening with the APIs,and which one's getting
deprecated next or new or, orwhat have you.
And so there's these littlemicrocosms that they also sort
of spin up to support thecommunity overall of the various
(24:52):
kinds of users.
And then most notably atInbound, they definitely talked
about the idea of having acommunity centric sort of
offering built into the HubSpotecosystem.
Um, it was very, uh, communityled ended up being the message.
(25:14):
And the presentation on the mainstage for the keynote at Inbound
this year was all about how doyou sort of connect those dots
between, here's a professional,you know, Lara, AJ, you name it,
your profile exists in theHubSpot ecosystem.
And if, uh, you know, if you'rein there, how do we then give
(25:35):
you exposure to, to the broadernetwork of other professionals
in this space?
Um, so it seems that they'regonna lean in pretty hard on
community.
I think they've always been inthat vein, but there's
something, there's somethingbrewing there that's, uh, extra
special.
And so I'll be, I'll be keen tosee how that
Lara Black (25:54):
That's really interesting that they emphasized
community at the keynote therebecause I feel like it's
overlooked and people kind ofare like, oh, marketing is easy,
or like, oh, community is easy.
But then you have thesemarketers who like, they don't
know who their mAJor proponentsare and.
I think they're missing a reallygreat channel to get product
(26:15):
feedback from power users by nottapping into community.
Mike Rizzo (26:18):
Yeah.
Yeah.
They've done a, historically,they've done a really good job
with tapping into theircommunity, but like, You know,
there was inbound.org for awhile that got deprecated.
Um, there's a number of sort ofmovements that have happened in
and around this space, butwhat's the productization of
(26:39):
community is super interesting.
Like how, how are theyincorporating this concept of
community that doesn't feel likeit's conflicting with the idea
that I'm a SAS provider,marketing automation platform,
crm, et cetera.
Um, so it'll
Michael Hartmann (26:55):
And from a user standpoint, like would that
be distracting from getting dayto day work done if it was sort
of embedded in the platform?
Mike Rizzo (27:02):
Yeah, I think, I don't know if it'll go that far.
I don't work there at all, but
Michael Hartmann (27:06):
No, no.
I,
Mike Rizzo (27:07):
far, but yes, I hear
Michael Hartmann (27:09):
so I, I guess I'm pre.
Presuming some stuff.
I think what's reallyinteresting here is what I was
hearing a theme is because it, Ithink there's been an evolution,
right?
I think when, um, when theseplatforms all started coming
out, I think they all werepretty good about building
community, finding advocates,right?
And, and really celebratingthem.
But it feels like, and maybeit's just the nature of all
(27:31):
these acquisitions that havehappened and now, There's these
people are kind of finding theirown communities, whether it's
through marketing ops.com or theMOS pros or.
Whatever, right.
These other communities to, tobe sort of an extension of that.
So I think it's, that's prettyinteresting that that's evolved
that way.
Um, so let's let's talk about,you know, community feedback
(27:55):
into the product development andprioritization.
So that was something I wascurious about too.
I know you talk, you each talkeda little bit about.
Things that you are seeing thatyou're excited about from the
platforms?
I'm curious on the flip side,right, are there things that
you, you or you, you know, thatthe community is really, um,
eager to see, be a part of theplatform, but hasn't, it hasn't
(28:17):
made it, you know?
Um, and so let's, uh, AJ I'mgonna start with you.
Let's talk about Marketo first.
AJ Navarro (28:24):
Yeah.
Uh, not only from the community,but just from a lot of the teams
and that I work with as well asmyself.
I just, one thing I want to seeis just more flexibility around
just like the reporting.
Uh, within Marketo, um,especially I would love the
ability to like drag and dropand combine reports into one
(28:48):
report within itself.
Um, I find that, you know, teamsis including myself.
You, you have to kind of createthree different reports to look
at three different things, suchas like email performance versus
link performance.
I'd love to just kind of graspthose and put those into one
report and one window and.
Take a screenshot of that andthen maybe even send that as a,
(29:09):
uh, weekly, uh, kind of updateto a team or something like
that.
You know, I'm constantly havingto kind of export things and put
them together.
So that's always been thebiggest, st biggest stricter for
me, is just a little bit cleanup in just that reporting area
in Marketo.
Michael Hartmann (29:27):
So I'm just curious.
Um, I can see, totally see thevalue of that for like a single
team.
But you, you guys are an agency,right?
So I can imagine also would itbe useful, and I don't even know
if this is public, to be able tocreate, here's our.
Standard, I hate to use it.
Best practice dashboard, right?
For Marketo, and we wannareplicate that across instances
(29:48):
for our clients.
AJ Navarro (29:50):
Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, one, it'd be helpful forour teams that are managing our
internal Marketo, um, to see ouroverall performance.
But then two, it it'd be veryhelpful to show.
Teams and on how to do that.
Hey, here's the best practice.
Cause that's exactly what we do,is we'll make a bunch of best
practice things on what we'veseen, what's working and
(30:12):
innovate is necessary.
Um, but yeah, to take that andto share it with other people
and, and to enable them on howto make the reports.
Only because the reality of itis, is depending on the teams
that we're working with, noteverybody has like a tableau or
like a visible or an advancedreporting mechanism, you know,
um, teams simp.
The tail end of it stops atMarketo, and that's a whole
(30:34):
nother conversation right on
Michael Hartmann (30:35):
Oh yeah.
AJ Navarro (30:36):
when they're, when they're getting, uh, a tool and
they see it as the, the fix allsolution.
But, um, I think that's justsomething a little bit more
flexibility and might keep mehonest here, but just some
things that I've even seen, Ithink HubSpot really does really
well is as far as like native UIand just some of the reporting
capabilities there, um, that Iwant, would love to see in
(30:57):
market.
Mike Rizzo (31:01):
Yeah, I, I actually have more recently had a lot of,
um, time spent in a Marketoenvironment as well.
And I have to say, like there's,there's some desire there for
additional reporting, um, sortof the ease of use concept.
I, you know, you can't get awayfrom the power of Marketo,
(31:23):
right?
Like, it, you can do anythingyou want in there, uh, pretty
much, right?
Um, Trying to make thatexperience like smoother, I
would have to, I'd have toagree.
It would be nicer to see alittle bit more on the usability
side.
Improvement.
Michael Hartmann (31:42):
Well, Mike, since, since you're, you're
already on here.
Why don't we like, do you wanna,what are you seeing that
community.
Or, or people you, you'reconnected with are looking for,
for HubSpot that maybe isn'tmade it to their, to their, uh,
their list of changes that havecome.
Mike Rizzo (31:59):
Uh, it's funny actually going the other
direction.
I don't know that this comesfrom the community necessarily,
but certainly from myperspective, having now, um,
been able to use more recentlythe Marketo environment.
It's been a long time since I'vebeen in Pardot, but, uh, gosh,
the ability to clone an entirecampaign from a folder structure
(32:21):
and like the power that comeswith, with that in, in creating
scalability to your sort ofmarketing operations and
campaign operations that happensin Marketo, that is entirely
missing in the HubSpotecosystem, right.
If I wanted to relaunch a, let'scall it a webinar campaign that
(32:43):
had like five emails, maybe, youknow, three to register, two,
uh, to remind, and then, youknow, a handful, one after the
event and there's a landing pageand all this stuff that goes
with it.
Every single one of those assetsneeds to be individually opened
and cloned and rebuilt and allof those things.
Um, that's pretty cumber.
(33:05):
and so I actually kind of missedit earlier, but there's a,
there's a hint that that mightchange.
Like HubSpot recently, uh,released sort of a, a new and
improved campaigns sort of beta,um, It's not clear that that,
that they'll give you theability to clone all the assets
from that view.
But I definitely gave them thatfeedback and I was like, Hey,
(33:27):
this is your view.
This is the place, this is thetime.
Let us clone everything fromthis one spot.
Um, and I think scalabilityacross HubSpot, uh, it's
incredibly easy to use, but itis not as efficient, uh, when it
comes to scale.
So I'd say
Michael Hartmann (33:44):
That's, that's the trade off it sounds like.
Okay.
George, how about, how about youon the Eli uh, equi front?
Let's, like you talked aboutsome of the things that have
changed.
I haven't, there's, I'm suremore of it could be done.
George Samaras (33:57):
Yeah, absolutely.
So, and uh, I'm gonna lean in abit on my experience of, uh,
using three platforms daily.
Um, So, you know, I, I kind oflog into them every day.
I got the experience between thethree that I kind of see and
it's like, you know, qui doessome things really great.
There's definitely some areasfor improvement.
I think the big one.
Uh, and Michael, I, youmentioned you work, uh, with qui
as well.
(34:18):
It's, um, The integration, uh,with Salesforce out of the box
one, it's a huge improvementfrom the program builder days, a
lot faster, not fast enoughcompared to the competitors.
Um, still waiting up to 15minutes, uh, per sync cycle to
bring in data.
Um, it's good, huge improvementover what it used to be.
Um, but at the end of the day,you know, when Marketo's going
every five minutes, um, it's alittle hard to compete.
(34:40):
You know what I mean?
Speed to lead, those minutes docount.
Um, for me, a big thing is alittle better, a little more out
of the box.
Uh, I would say reporting onintegration issues.
I mean, like, that's like my dayin, day out.
We're always looking atintegration issues.
Marketo's has the problems, butyou get notified.
You always get that email with,uh, all the leads that didn't
sync over and you can go in andfix them up.
(35:01):
And it's pretty easy to subsmart lists to, to build it.
Look what you gotta, you gottaget a little creative, maybe
create like a universal form,have a blind form submit with,
with the name of the form so youcan understand, and then that
triggers off an alert to someoneto say, Hey, there's an
integration error from thisstep.
Go in and take a look.
Um, but it's, it's not, youknow, it's, in my opinion, that
should be something that's kindof out of the box.
(35:22):
Um, and for a lot of users whoare not as crafty with, you
know, coming up with these kindof custom.
Out of the box solutions.
It, it's difficult and a lot of'em don't set it up and then
they go into the program withall these integration errors and
it's a bit of a nightmare.
Um, uh, I, so I'd say for thatfor sure, obviously I, I
mentioned at the beginning thethird party integration
improvement is, is great.
Um, but not where it needs tobe.
(35:43):
Uh, I think there's definitelysome errors for improvement.
Like the big one is, uh, Ichecked yesterday cause I
checked periodically.
Still knows Zapier integration.
Um, I know I might guess someflagged for Zapier, but it's,
uh,
Michael Hartmann (35:53):
it's zap by the way.
I just, we had, yeah, we had,it's Zapier.
Zappier makes a.
Happier is what they
Mike Rizzo (35:59):
what I was gonna say.
Zappier makes you happier.
That's what they
George Samaras (36:02):
make sure Okay.
Zap you.
I stand corrected
Michael Hartmann (36:04):
Yeah.
George Samaras (36:05):
Um, yeah, there's no, uh, still no
integration as of, uh, as ofyesterday when I checked.
And, um, you know, I, that'skinda like my duct tape tool and
I'm, uh, in need of, uh, makinga quick patch and, uh, with
Eliquis, uh, it's still notthere.
So it's that, that makes it alittle tough.
Um, but yeah, so I'd say, youknow, like I said, good.
Definitely areas to improvecompared to the competitors.
(36:26):
But like, you know, obviouslythere's a lot of things that
Eloqua knocks outta the park andthat the competitors can't keep
up with.
Michael Hartmann (36:32):
Yeah.
All right.
Lara, bring us home here like.
Lara Black (36:36):
I think there's a lot of things that longtime par
users like myself would love tosee par dot deliver.
We're also supposed to get a fewthings very soon here.
So for example, ever since theylaunched Engagement Studio,
which is the replacement to likedrip programs, it's the very
pretty flow chart whereeverything flows down and does
logic checks to create anurture.
Um, Their only weight incrementshave been in, in one day
(36:58):
increments.
Um, so they've actuallyannounced that they're supposed
to release shorter than one dayincrements in the spring 23
release.
So we're super excited.
I would love to see one hourincrements.
I'm gonna guess that we'reprobably not gonna get that, but
I'd love it if we were.
Um, but other things that, youknow, marketing ops people would
love to see are things like sinkerrors.
(37:19):
Like I have to go dig for mysink errors.
Um, I did a whole presentation,uh, What are sync errors?
How do you resolve them?
How do we even find them?
Cuz most people don't know thatthey exist.
Um, there's lots of things thatthey sort of have deployed and
then didn't finish.
So there was a, um, inSalesforce we would call it a
list view, but it's like, hereis your filtered view of
(37:40):
everyone who filled out thisform.
I'd like to customize whichfields are displayed in that
prospect table.
They kind of released it for theall prospects table and never,
and they promised us it was.
To everywhere else across theplatform, but it never did.
Um, and I mean other stuff likefor people who have the higher
(38:00):
end versions of Part Out or whobuy up to that plan, um, we
would love the ability to pullin, um, Tags from objects like
the opportunity object, we wouldlove to be able to pull those
fields into an email and send anemail to follow up with, you
know, an ongoing opportunity orsomething like that on behalf of
sales.
Those are features that don'texist.
Some of them have been trialedand didn't go anywhere, um, but
(38:25):
I've also been pleasantlysurprised with some of the
things they have released.
Like they released a.
A setting to, uh, resy allprospects with one click instead
of doing some fining like itused to.
Um, and then it's been out forseveral years now, but I still
rely on, um, uh, Connectedcampaigns that is like the
(38:47):
gateway drug to get all ofPardot data into Salesforce.
So where Pardot's own reportsare miserable and you can't do
much with them, you can'tcustomize them much.
Now you can push a lot of thatdata into Salesforce and you can
customize the reports there.
So through the connectedcampaigns object, as you build
emails, you attach emails to it,specific Salesforce campaign,
and now those become a customobject called a marketing asset
(39:09):
object in Salesforce.
And I can now.
Reports and filter for like,Hey, these many emails were sent
and the campaign name includes,or whatever, and I can see all
the bounce numbers and stuffright in Salesforce.
Michael Hartmann (39:23):
It's, I think it's like this notion about
reporting has come up a coupleof times here, and it sounds
like they, I think they allhave.
Uh, at least from myperspective, I know Eloqua and,
and Marketo fairly well.
I think they, they, they bothhave things with, like, I
remember when I went from Eloquato Marketo and I was like, I
just went on the list ofeverybody who fill out a form
(39:44):
and what they put in the form.
You can't get that in easily in,in Mar Marketo equi.
That's like a, that's a normalthing to do.
Lara Black (39:52):
and it should be a normal thing.
A hundred percent agree.
Like, show me this prospecttable and show me right there,
and let me easily export all ofthe people.
If you can't show'em on screen,let me easily export it.
And it just seems like a quick,easy win.
Michael Hartmann (40:07):
Yeah, I mean it's, it's, I think it's really
interesting and the way I thinkabout it, I think Marketo was
built all around the contacts,right?
So if you wanna understandwhat's going on with a contact
or an opportunity like that's,you can get a lot of, in Eloqua,
it seems like it's built morearound campaigns.
And campaigns in Eloqua are morelike programs in Marketo.
I think that's the wholeseparate thing.
(40:28):
Um, so that it's just adifferent, I think it's
different starting point.
And so I think that affectedreporting.
So like, I think we all havelike, oh, we wanna get this
piece of reporting, and thenit's not quite how it was built
to do that.
Um, interesting stuff.
Um, so I was just talking to youa little bit about comparing
contrast in these, like, itsounds like several of us have
(40:49):
used more than one of theseplatforms.
I'm just curious, like Yeah.
What are, yeah, I, I just out acouple of things that.
you know, I see.
Kind of from the couple thatI've used.
Right.
I'd be curious what yourthoughts are about what you've
seen, like where there the, thedifferences between key
platforms on how they dosomething where you go like, I
wish it did let things more likethis.
(41:10):
Right.
It's almost like we could comeup with our, like, if we could
come up with our own marketingautomation platform that did
everything we wanted.
Pick and pick different piecesfrom different stuff.
So, George, you haven't gonefirst yet.
How about we start with you?
Cuz you, you've already said youwork with Marketo and Eliquid
and you said a third oneregularly, so I don't even know
what that is.
So
George Samaras (41:28):
Uh, HubSpot.
So I'm in, I'm in all three.
Yeah.
So, uh, yeah.
Um, great question.
Uh, this one's a bit of a toughone.
Um, I, I get a lot of peopleasking me and like, people refer
to me being like, Hey, like, youknow, like I'm looking at
implementing, I'm looking atmigrating.
I've been through a, I, I'vedone an equi of Marketo
migration.
I've done a HubSpot to Marketomigration.
(41:49):
Um, so I've been through itlike, as like, you know, the
lead at, at the organization.
And, um, I always like my, mynumber one piece of
recommendation.
I'm like, are you.
A thousand percent sure youwanna come do this migration
before you pick anything and youwanna switch platforms.
Cause I'm like, it's, it's oneof the most painful things
you'll do in your career if it'suh, it's, it's, uh, rushed.
Um, but yeah, so I would saylike for how to compare
(42:10):
contrast, it really depends, um,on the organization's size.
Uh, the complexity, the teamdriving it too.
Um, like, you know, like, I, Ialways say this, I'm like, if,
if you are a marketing ops teamof one and you got a campaign
team or an acquisition demandgen team that just wants to get
stuff out easily, and it's asmall organization, like for me,
like HubSpot's almost like ano-brainer.
(42:30):
It's, it's it's scales.
It's, it's super easy to use.
You can, you can, it's very easyto enable your demand gen users
to go and build stuff in there.
Whereas on Eloqua it's, youknow, you kind of need almost
like a campaign ops team thathas a marketing ops background
to run it.
Which typically you, it needsfunding.
Usually it's only largerorganizations that have the
budget for that kind of stuff.
(42:51):
Um, and then Marketo's kindalike the sweet spot in the
middle.
Um, I wouldn't say it's easyfor, you know, like a demand gen
users to get into.
I really, you gotta have like atight knit train.
There's tools, uh, you canintegrate separate conversation,
but.
Uh, I, it really depends.
It really depends on, on thecomplexity of the team, the
complexity of the organization,the size of the organization.
(43:12):
Um, but I, I, I would generallysay like when I hear people
being like, Hey, should we go toEloqua?
And we're like a company of, youknow, we're startup or we're in
our, one of our serious funding.
I'm like, eh, unless you're likeplanning on going enterprise or
you have like a specific usecase like, So you really need
custom objects and how customobjects work in Eloqua.
Yeah, I think it's like a nichething to, to Eloqua, but if you
can get away with like theinfinite fields on the contact
(43:33):
record and you need someonethat's a little snappier, you
know, uh, uh, Marketo might beyour go-to thing.
Depends too on your CRMecosystem.
There's so many differentvariables.
I always just like, I alwaysconclude with'em, like, if
you're gonna be migrating, justbe 1000% sure that you're, that
this is the right decisionbecause it's, it's, it's very
tough to undergo.
It's, it's expensive, it's timeconsuming and.
(43:54):
It's, it's, it's quite anundertaking for the marketing
ops.
Michael Hartmann (44:00):
Definitely, yeah, I mean that, I remember
Eliquis custom objects, like theease of spinning those up was
the game changer when I waschoosing that.
Um, AJ.
How about you?
Like what have you seen that youlike, compare and contrast some
of the the platforms.
AJ Navarro (44:19):
Um, so I'm predominantly in Marketo, but I
think from that perspective, Iwould really love just a lot of
the UI enhancements that, like,just the userability of like
HubSpot.
Like it's just very userintuitive because Marketo is
very powerful, but it's alsolike, it just feels kind of like
black sometimes, like in termsof the ui, um, and things like
(44:41):
that.
And even sometimes after the
Michael Hartmann (44:43):
I'm, I'm sorry.
I'm going through a websiteproject and you made me think
like, we want that website topop.
AJ Navarro (44:48):
The
Michael Hartmann (44:48):
means nothing.
AJ Navarro (44:49):
Yeah.
And it's, it's just things likethat, like, um, I just, there's
a lot of what HubSpot doesreally well, and, and I'm not
even a big HubSpot user myself,but a lot of the teams, I've
done countless migrations fromHubSpot to Marketo.
And so I see a lot of teamslike, well, how do we do this?
And I'm like, well, we gottakind of export this, and then
(45:11):
you gotta launch it.
And it's like, there's notreally a, you know, um, but, but
those are the bigger thingsthere.
Um, And again, I'd lean back onjust, just some more of the
reporting.
Like I, I, I do like, you know,I'm a, I'm a Salesforce user
too, so I like just inSalesforce, the platform itself
(45:32):
as just making the reports andbeing able to make the
dashboards.
I think at a minimum it.
You should be able to do that inMarketo.
To some extent Marketo has theNPI to utilize, but even then,
like I said, there's not a lotof like drag and drop and, and
create your own type offunctionality there.
(45:52):
And so for me that's where it'slimited that it could use some
improvement.
But those are just some of thedifferences.
Michael Hartmann (45:58):
Gotcha.
How about you, Oh, go ahead,George.
George Samaras (46:01):
reject AJ.
It was funny you said about theui.
I had one of our campaignmanagers reach out to us, reach
out to me today.
She's like, what's happeningwith the Marketo ui?
Why does it look like this?
I thought they were gonna updateit, and it was, it was just
really random to get a demandgen user to, to comment on it.
So, like when you said that I, Iwas cracking up, it really, uh,
brought back some PTSD from thatconversation.
AJ Navarro (46:21):
Oh yeah.
Mike Rizzo (46:22):
Well, and with it owned by Adobe now, right?
Like there's like this, there'sthis sense that like at
somewhere, at some pointsomeone's gonna really care
about this visual impact, right?
Michael Hartmann (46:33):
I mean, it doesn't surprise me that E was
interface hasn't really changedwith Oracle buying it.
Right.
So
Mike Rizzo (46:39):
Yeah.
Yeah.
Michael Hartmann (46:42):
Lara, how about you?
What, like
Lara Black (46:44):
So I'm, I'm kind of a unique person in that I've
spent most of my career inPardot.
I did spend a couple years as aPardo consultant where I
migrated people off of Marketoand off of HubSpot onto Pardot.
And some of it is in, they weresold too much product.
Um, and they're, they weren'tusing it to.
It's utmost.
So my Marketo to Pardot, uh,migration project, they're like,
(47:08):
we are getting charged so much,uh, for features that we don't
use and that don't work, right.
We just need to strip it out,strip it down, and that
justifies switching platforms.
Um, and at the same time, youknow, it was very apparent that
they didn't fully understandthat like Marketo is more
powerful than Pardot in veryspecific ways.
(47:29):
Marketo, you can create customfields that can do calculations.
Pardot can't do any of that.
I can't create a formula fieldin Pardot, and Pardot doesn't
sync well with Salesforceformula fields.
Um, so there's pros and cons toeverything and I really think.
Before ripping something out andbringing in your favorite tool.
Even if I took a job in a placethat didn't have Pardot, I would
(47:52):
hesitate before saying, oh,we're switching to Pardot
because it's expensive.
There's so much historical data.
Um, un unless there's lots offeatures that I'm gaining and
my, my price is gonna changesignificantly and in ways that
like, I'm absolutely gonnabenefit from, I probably.
You know, the, the, the peoplewho, like, they have a new
manager and they just loveMarketo and that's what they're
(48:13):
gonna part out, out and putMarketo in.
Like, I mean, I get it, but Idon't always think it's well
thought out because now you haveto rebuild landing pages and
they need a different url and.
There's just so manydependencies and so many
touchpoints and engagement thatyou can't benefit from it's
history anymore.
Um, even if you work for acompany that gets bought by
(48:34):
another company and you both usePardot, you have to decide which
part of account you're using andyou lose all the history from
the other Pardo account.
Like there's so many factorsbeyond just the cost of a tool.
You really need to look at who'susing it, what's their skill
level?
Are you gonna hire somebodywho's more experienced in
marketing operations to.
or not?
(48:56):
You
Michael Hartmann (48:56):
Yeah, that's good point.
And Mike, you, you alreadymentioned HubSpot and Marketo.
So what's your take on the tradeoffs and maybe there's, you said
you used Pardo a little bit atsome point.
Mike Rizzo (49:10):
I did, it was, it was long enough ago that I would
not at all have anythingimportant to say that part out
at this point.
Lara Black (49:17):
I'll say the interface probably hasn't
changed much.
It is prettier than Marketo'sinterface though.
Mike Rizzo (49:23):
Yeah.
Yeah.
If we had to stack rank it,probably like in terms of, uh, u
i ux, beautification and ease ofuse, it'd probably be like
HubSpot, Pardot, Marketo, andthen equi.
Like, I don't know though aboutEloqua.
Um, yeah, I think I, I sort ofcovered everything that I, that
I think I could, I, I couldexpress in terms of trade offs
(49:43):
as it relates to the idea ofmigrating to and from, you know,
I echo the sentiments ofeveryone here.
Very costly, very timeconsuming, uh, wholly dependent
on your actual needs.
A while ago, and maybe Lara,this resonates with you.
I'm not sure.
I used to, when people wouldcome to me and ask me, you know,
(50:06):
Hey, what do we use?
Right?
Um, you know, I agree with you,George, if you're sort of
getting started, HubSpot's supereasy, right?
There's a freemium solution toeverything that they have,
right?
So just jump into the freestuff.
Um, and it scales.
It really does scale.
It can get up to enterprise.
But once you get into the nuanceof.
You know, I really need thecampaign operations to work
(50:28):
better.
Like, there's some other thingsyou might want to consider
there, but one of the things Iused to say, going back to you,
Lara, um, around sort of Pardotis this idea of are you a sales
centric organization or are yousort of a decentralized demand
gen lead funnel inboundorganization, uh, to, to use
(50:49):
the, the phrase coined byHubSpot.
Um, Because that might actuallyhave an implication.
Like if you want a tool thatreally enables your salespeople
to do a bunch of stuff, likePardot falls right into that
category, right?
The alerts alone back in theday, that was like the number
one selling point for everysalesperson that ever saw it.
They're like, oh, I could getalerted every time an email's
(51:10):
opened.
Uh, and I would argue, you know,HubSpot has some of that
components, some of that stuffnow, and Marketo certainly does
too, but it's like sort of awork around.
That's, that's sort of what Ialways used to say is like, if
you're a really sales centricorganization, like as a jumping
off point and you know, your goto market is like, invest in,
you know, we're not seeing it asmuch now, but invest in a lot of
(51:32):
BDRs, um, you know, maybe part,and you're a Salesforce, you
know, user as well.
Maybe that's the right answer.
Lara Black (51:40):
And, um, if you're a Slack shop, uh, Pardot does have
a feature for Slack where likethose alerts that you talked
about, Mike, those could come inSlack.
So you could, um, instead ofgetting one of these ugly Pardot
emails that says, Hey, somebodyopened this email, uh, you can
get engagement alerts in Slack.
Um, and it, it is, um, we didn'treally talk about what do you
(52:02):
sell in terms of like, are youB2B or b2c?
And it's oversimplifying it to.
Exact target, aka.
Marketing Cloud is for b2c andParadigm is for b2b, but a lot
of it does line up.
A lot of it does hinge on.
When you have an email, uh, whenyou have a prospective customer,
(52:24):
are you going to turn them overto a salesperson to pursue and
close the deal, or are youdriving them to an online store
to make a sale?
Um, Pardot is very wellpositioned to do this handoff to
the salesperson.
Um, and Marketing Cloud hasmultiple tools that are made to
like spray out hundreds ofthousands of emails.
(52:44):
You can definitely dip in bothof them.
People do crossover.
I have some, uh, companies thatI've worked with for years who
have both tools.
Uh, the last company I workedfor had both tools.
Um, it, it really does.
Come down to how does it fitinto your sales cycle and how
invested are your sales teammembers.
If your sales team members areworking off the spreadsheets and
(53:07):
they're not really inSalesforce, like you probably
don't want Pardot, um, cuzmarketing's not gonna get the,
the background like opportunitydata that they would, if sales
is invested in, in usingSalesforce significant.
Mike Rizzo (53:21):
Mm-hmm.
That makes sense.
This, this actually brings me,and I know we gotta wrap it here
pretty quickly, but uh, maybenext time we do this HHartmann,
we need.
Bring in some users of, uh,inflection as they're starting
to develop like the PLGmarketing automation platform.
Cuz you know, we just talkedabout B2B and b2c, but there's
(53:41):
this whole other thing aroundlike product led growth and how
like any of us who have workedin SaaS organizations have, who
have tried to do onboardingnurtures, or sequences or
engagements based on appactivity, we all know that
that's like dang nearimpossible.
And any of the tools that areout there.
Right.
Um, sounds like even in Eliquidprobably be worse from an API
(54:03):
integration perspective.
But we might have to haveinflection come in here,
Michael Hartmann (54:08):
I, I think it would be interesting to find,
um, something that I, I remembertalking to a, like a revenue
leader, um, somewhere in timeduring the pandemic who was made
an argument, particularly for arelatively early stage company
that you don't need any of thesemarket automation platforms.
You can get away with an emailprovider, kind of a relatively
(54:32):
low cost one with, um, Some sortof crm and then something that
is like a, I think he was usingSegment, but something like that
to help connect things together.
Um, and it sounded prettyinteresting, like, cuz I think
that to me actually that like,like I, the idea that you could
(54:52):
simplify it to like, we've gotan email platform, it just, what
you're gonna do emails, it cando a little bit of trigger
stuff, but it's not gonna donurture.
But I also am like, I don'tknow, that nurture is still
though that important reallypersonally, like I just, anyway,
um, so
Mike Rizzo (55:11):
From what I'm seeing, it's still
Michael Hartmann (55:13):
George, George is putting in the, in the, in
the chat.
He's like, sounds like my oldcmo.
So maybe it is.
I, I believe he was in Canada,so, um, may have been,
George Samaras (55:24):
Yeah, it sounds uh, it just got flashback to the
conversation I had about a yearago.
Almost identical to what youwere just saying,
Michael Hartmann (55:30):
Uh, okay.
May we'll have to chat offline.
See, I, I have to remember whoit was.
I honestly do not even remember.
Um, yeah.
But I think, I think it's, it'sinteresting, um, it's really
interesting to me that there's alot of commonality.
Like there's some things thatthey're doing that is, is like
all these platforms are doingsome things that are good and
are moving things forward.
(55:51):
sort of keeping the communityengaged, but the community are,
are sort of finding their owntribes, if you will.
Um, but they're also in someways not listening to the
community either.
And so they might be missing themark from that standpoint.
Um, so it's kind of curious likewhere are they getting their
input from for what they'redoing in terms of that
Lara Black (56:11):
there's a term in software development called
shiny blue button syndrome.
Um, and it really comes down tosome executive says, I want
that.
Um, and it means that featuresthat, Developers want to develop
that would solve problems forusers don't get worked on
because now we need to turn thatbutton shiny and blue.
So people click it.
Michael Hartmann (56:30):
Yeah.
Mike Rizzo (56:33):
I love that.
Michael Hartmann (56:35):
Are you all familiar with the oatmeal?
Mike Rizzo (56:37):
Oh yes,
Michael Hartmann (56:38):
Okay, so the oatmeal has one.
It's like how web design goes tohell.
Yeah.
It's, go look it up.
You'll,
Lara Black (56:46):
Yeah.
The one that's
Michael Hartmann (56:46):
take me later.
Lara Black (56:47):
The tree.
The tree.
The tree and the tire swing one.
Michael Hartmann (56:51):
Well, no, I, there ends up being a, a cat.
Yeah.
in the
Mike Rizzo (56:56):
Ha,
Michael Hartmann (56:56):
design.
Lara Black (56:56):
I think I'm thinking of a different one, but yes, I,
oatmeal is very on the nose.
Michael Hartmann (57:01):
Yes, he's brilliant.
Um, wow.
This has been like, I feel likewe could have continued on more.
I'm sure we could have, um,really enjoyed the conversation.
Uh, thank you, Lara.
Thank you, George.
Thank you AJ and Mike.
Um, so I normally we would goaround and ask for like, how can
people connect with you?
Why don't we, I think we've gota little bit of time.
(57:22):
We can probably do that realquick.
So, AJ what, like, what's thebest way for folks to hit up
with you?
AJ Navarro (57:28):
Yeah, uh, just on my LinkedIn, so just linkedin.com,
um slash AJ av.
So AJ nav, that's the best way.
Um, Pretty active on theLinkedIn side, so always happy
to reach out.
And then of course, uh, and I'min the community, so the market
ops community, so please feelfree to ping me, slack, me and
(57:49):
I'm there as well.
Michael Hartmann (57:50):
Sounds good.
Lara, how about you?
Lara Black (57:55):
I am at Pardot Pro on Twitter.
You can also find mywebsite@pardotpro.com.
Um, and yeah, slack is afabulous place to find me.
I think I'm the only Lara.
LA A there, so come find me.
Michael Hartmann (58:07):
How about you, George?
George Samaras (58:09):
Same as the others.
Uh, LinkedIn's the best, uh,George Samari, uh, or uh, Slash
GC hyphen Samari.
Uh, same with Slack as well.
I'm pretty sure I'm the onlyperson has my name That's in
marketing apps, so, uh, prettyeasy to find there as.
Michael Hartmann (58:25):
There's too many of us, mikes and Michael,
Mike Rizzo (58:27):
That was such a low hanging, like you just teed me
up.
You know, I, I am the real MikeRizzo for anybody who comes into
marketing operations and marketmo pros, like, no, I'm just
kidding.
Mike Rizzo.
Uh, the other one is fantastic,so you can reach out to him too.
Michael Hartmann (58:44):
that's right.
There is another Mike Rizzo,who's also in the community.
Mike Rizzo (58:47):
Yeah.
Yeah.
Michael Hartmann (58:48):
Well, thank you, uh, everyone.
This was great.
Appreciate you joining us.
Uh, thanks to our listeners.
Thanks, Mike.
Love Naomi, and, uh, and our,and our thoughts here too.
Thank her for, for what we'veaccomplished over the last
couple years.
Looking forward to 2023.
Uh, continue to give us yourfeedback and give us your ideas
(59:09):
for topics and guests.
Or if you have a topic that youwanna talk about, let us know
That too.
You can reach out to Mike,Naomi, or me.
Until next time, we'll talk toyou later.
Bye You gotta stop recording.
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