Funnel Reboot

John Thompson is the author of the 2020 book Building Analytics Teams, and a 35-year technology executive in the fields of data, advanced analytics and artificial intelligence (AI).

He is Global Head, Artificial Intelligence (AI) at EY. John was an Executive Partner at Gartner. He was the global advanced analytics and AI function at biopharmaceutical company CSL Behring, where he led an analytical applications team.

John has built start-up organizations from the ground up and he has reengineered business units of Fortune 500 firms to reach their potential. He has directly managed and run - sales, marketing, consulting, support and product development organizations.

He has been a technology leader with expertise and experience spanning all operational areas with a focus on strategy, product innovation, growth and efficient execution.

Thompson holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science from Ferris State University and a MBA in Marketing from DePaul University.

For background on the people, products and concepts mentioned, go to Episode 136's page on the Funnel Reboot site.

Disclaimer:When I bring technology vendors on the show, you should know that they are not sponsors or affiliates. They're simply here to give you a broader perspective.

Puneet Gangrade is a Customer Success Engineer, an active amateur soccer and badminton player and a resident of New York City who originally hails from Indore, India

He works at Habu, a data clean room software company, with the goal of creating reliable data and media strategies for all of his clients. He is responsible to work with Habu's Engineering, Product teams, and clients on end-to-end workflows including clean room adoption, onboarding, planning, implementation, and growth. Habu works across distributed data platforms that allow agencies, publishers, advertisers, and their partners to truly unlock the potential of data and collaborate in a privacy-safe manner.

He has been a data clean room enthusiast since the beginning of 2018. Previously, he worked as a Digital Analytics Specialist at Time Inc till Oct 2017 and as a Data Science Team Lead at MightyHive, an adtech agency from early 2018 to mid-2022. He has a BS in Computer Science and earned his MS in Marketing Intelligence from Fordham University Gabelli School of Business, with a concentration in Marketing and Analytics.

Amid the rise of advanced measurement techniques in media and other industries, he likes to keep learning about various data clean room technologies and constantly think of use cases in media, finance, CPG, pharma, etc. where data clean rooms could be leveraged. He continues his passion for everything related to data clean rooms and data collaboration at Habu.

The people, products and concepts in this Episode are all linked on Show 135's page on the Funnel Reboot site.

This is the fourth part of our series on Revenue Ops.

Chris Hummel is a Managing Director of the Revenue Enablement Institute.

He has been fortunate to hold numerous executive and c-level roles, including serving as the Global CMO at two Fortune 500 companies. While leading sales, product and marketing teams at world-class companies including Oracle, SAP, Schneider Electric, Siemens, United Rentals, he sat in the executive chair and board room meetings where we confronted key issues of performance, growth and transformation in several industries: construction, industrial, software, energy & automation, IoT, the public sector, healthcare, and other technologies. Living and working outside the US for 14 years in Europe, Eastern Europe and Asia has helped develop his global fluency.

In 2022, he co-authored the book, "Revenue Operations: A New Way to Align Sales and Marketing, Monetize Data, and Ignite Growth" which consolidated lessons from more than 100 CXOs. While so many of the challenges were similar, these leaders were rarely exposed to the learning of their peers.

For all the people, products and concepts mentioned, go to Episode 134's page on the Funnel Reboot site.

This is the third in our series on Revenue Operations, which also gets called Marketing Ops, or if you prefer, Mops.

Our guest grew up on the west coast and received his degree from the University of California at Berkeley.

Over the course of his 20 year professional career, Vito Mazzarino has been both a company owner and an employee brought in to help with Marketing and Business Development. While doing that, he grew to love using automation to streamline marketing & sales processes.

By the middle of the 2010s, he knew the automation tools well enough to implement them. He took this, along with a move to the other coast, specifically Montreal Quebec, as a signal that he should start his own agency.

Growth Geyser was born in 2018 to strategize and deploy automation that grows a company's customer base and hits their sales targets.

For all the people, products and concepts mentioned, go to Episode 133's page on the Funnel Reboot site.

This is the second episode in our Revenue Ops series.

As Partner and Chief Strategy Officer of The Pedowitz Group, Dr. Debbie Qaqish has helped marketing teams drive revenue growth, foster customer centricity and lead digital transformation. With a focus on revenue operations, the customer experience and a personalized, omni-channel marketing mix, Dr. Debbie has established herself as a thought leader and digital pioneer, spearheading the overdue shift of traditional marketing strategies to what she coined as "revenue marketing" in 2011. Since then, marketing operations became her area of expertise, devising strategy-to-execution plans that earn marketing a seat at the table.

Dr. Debbie has published over one hundred articles, blogs, podcasts, webinars and white papers and in 2021 published "From Backroom to Boardroom"

Dr. Debbie earned her doctorate in 2019 from the University of Phoenix.

To look up the people, products and concepts mentioned in the episode, navigate to FunnelReboot.com and locate #132's showpage.

Sales has been around forever. But how long have we had marketing? In North America, it's the late 1800s and early 1900s.

You'd get an idea of what they were focused on by reading the journal of the US agricultural economics Bureau. In it, they chronicled the 1937 annual meeting the National Association of marketing officials (You may know it by its current name, the American Marketing Association). The proceedings were entirely about the marketing of… farm products. Producing and selling as many commodities as possible, to as many regions as possible.

Despite being in just one category, this assembly of academia and Industry was trying to formalize how this function would blend in with the other departments, like sales, within the average American business. Fast forward nearly a century, there seems to be a new framework on the horizon for how the marketing and sales functions should be organized - and it's called Revenue Operations. The purpose of this four part series is to go inside businesses where it's being used and listen to thought leaders who have written about it.

For this first episode of the series, we going into the trenches with someone possessing a diverse blend of experience spanning Revenue Operations, Marketing, Sales, and Product, Lawrence Quan brings a holistic view of revenue to startups of all stages.

He is Director, Growth Marketing with LTSE. He has also built growth teams at Rewind and led Growth Marketing at Clearco. On the side, Lawrence works with seed, Series A, and Series B SaaS companies to build and scale go-to-market engines.

Listen to the various places he's seen RevOps in organizations but wherever it sits, he stresses that it is a team sport. Hear how a revenue-focus gets infused into the Marketing Mix, and how the best marketing ideas don't always come from marketing.

For links to the people, products and concepts mentioned, go to Episode 131's page on the Funnel Reboot site.

We spend a lot of time demonstrating who our company is built around. We leave an open chair for them in board meetings. We put notices on the footer of our website, We provide automated feedback mechanisms so we can gauge how they feel, and when we hold in-person events or trade shows where they appear, we make every effort to give them swag and confirm their upcoming purchase plans (hopefully, buying from us). I'm talking about customers, of course, and though we do all these things, there seems to be one thing we dance around; the one simple activity that could give the most intelligence - talking to them.

I'm not saying we don't talk to customers. But most of that talk is anecdotal. I don't know about you, but as a marketer, I wouldn't go to the C-suite and defend a marketing program and budget based on a customer's anecdotal comment.

But done in the right way, that's systematic and that follows qualitative Research principles, talking to customers can take the pulse of our market. We can analyze their experiences, making those findings available, doing it in a way that would not only stand up to any Executive's scrutiny, they'd insist on basing more corporate decisions on this information.

Over his 20 years in marketing. Ryan Gibson has worked with dozens of businesses overseeing programs from the bootstrapped variety, on up to million-dollar budget variety.

Using skills he got early in his career he worked in TV & Radio and film, doing a stint as reporter for Canada's public broadcaster, CBC, which got him so used to interviewing, he kept doing it and figures that he's now conducted over 1800 of them

He now heads up Content Lift, a Marketing Strategy consultancy centred around Customer Research.

For details on the people, products and concepts mentioned, go to Episode 130's page on the Funnel Reboot site.

Let me run a scenario by you: I want you to have something I'm not finished making, and I'm not going to let you buy it, but I will let you pay to use it. and you will continue to pay me over time to use this thing that I continue to work on. And while you use it, I will get to see what you're doing with my product. And I'll use that information to figure out how I can sell you new things.

It doesn't sound like a very good deal for you as a buyer, does it? But this is exactly how SAAS works, and most of the software in B2B and the world for that matter is now bought & sold this way, marketers don't skip a beat explaining this aspect of their product. But surprisingly, some things about SAAS products do trip them up. And today we're going to talk with someone who's seen almost everything that can go wrong in marketing saas.

Mark Evans has worked in & written about the SaaS space for his whole career. He began as a technology journalist for the Globe & Mail, National Post, and Bloomberg News. Moving on from there, he co-founded what ended up being a wildly unsuccessful startup. Some of the mistakes you'll hear are ones that he himself has made.

He now helps B2B SaaS companies accelerate growth with rock-solid marketing foundations underpinned by positioning, messaging, brand storytelling, and go-to-market plans.

Through his consultancy Marketing Spark he works with B2B SaaS companies as a fractional CMO, strategic advisor, brand strategist and coach.

he spends a lot of time focused on positioning, strategy, and systems that drive consistent and successful marketing,

We spoke to him in his hometown of Toronto, where in off-hours you can find him playing hockey and tennis.

For links to the people, products and concepts mentioned, go to Episode 129's page on the Funnel Reboot site.

This is the last episode we're covering in our series around product marketing books. The books in the three previous shows gave foundational advice that would benefit any product manager or product marketing manager in their career. But there's a single vertical that has idiosyncrasies setting it apart from other industries, and you should know about them if you're going to market these kind of products.

The industry that does things differently is High tech - and today's book not only explains how to market these products, it boils it down into simple steps that you can apply on the job.

Ted Marena has been in the tech sector for over 25 years, working his way from engineering to sales and onto marketing roles.

Marena came out with the book "High-Tech Marketing Simplified" in 2022. It builds upon his initial book "Marketing Simplified." He earned a BSEE from the University of Connecticut and a MBA from Bentley University. I caught up with him in the High Tech mecca of Silicon Valley where he lives with his wife & sons.

See Ep 128's page on the Funnel Reboot site for links to all the people, products and concepts mentioned.

Product Marketing Managers go through trying times, but possibly the moments where these stresses are most concentrated are when their function is initially being formed, and of course when a new product is being launched. Key decisions are made at these times, and they are extra stressful when you have to make those decisions in a vacuum, without a formulated strategy to guide its development.

Our guest's book takes you through a dry run of this whole process. It gives you questions that begin at the genesis of a product, following through topics that you ought to readily answer at that particular stage.

By testing how well you're able to answer those questions, you can catch any gaps before they turn into stress-inducing all-night work marathons.

Yasmeen Turayhi is an authority on product management. She's taught Bootcamps and workshops for Global companies and universities such as Harvard and MIT, and been a mentor at Founders Institute. In addition to her three books on this subject, she has also written dramatic screenplays, one of which was feted at International Film Festivals in Beirut and Hollywood. She is the host of "Gateways to Awakening" a podcast dealing with wellness, personal development, and higher consciousness.

For links on the people, products and concepts mentioned, go to Episode 127's page on the Funnel Reboot site.