In this episode we discuss: what should the marketing tech stack look like in 2024. We are joined by Mark Farnell, Head of Marketing Operations at DeepL.

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We chat about the following with Mark Farnell: 

• How is AI impacting marketing operations? 
• Where to start with building a marketing tech stack.
• Why it's important to consider the complexity and scalability of current platforms.
• Regularly reviewing and optimising the marketing tech stack is crucial for success. Use the first year or two to understand if a tool is a long-term solution before committing to a multi-year contract.
• What value does Intent data platforms provide? 
• Why sales enablement is crucial for getting the most value out of marketing automation tools.
• The build vs. buy decision based on your current situation and long-term plans.

References 

• https://www.linkedin.com/in/markfarnell/

Biography 

A senior marketing operations leader with more than 12 years experience in marketing technology and process. I build and scale the platform and insight needed to understand and grow predictable pipeline.

To learn more about Beth and Brandon or to find out about sponsorship opportunities click here. 

Summary

6:42 Introduction and Background

17:36 The Impact of AI on Marketing Operations

18:01 Challenges of AI in Marketing Content

19:02 The Value of AI in Marketing

20:26 Building a Comprehensive Marketing Tech Stack

23:26 Vendor Management and Tech Stack Optimisation

24:29 Introduction and the Importance of Long-Term Tool Evaluation

25:44 Essential Tools for a Startup's Series A Toolkit

34:39 Challenges and Value of Intent Data Platforms

35:08 The Build vs. Buy Decision

37:14 Importance of Clean Data and Data Research Approaches

39:14 Key Takeaway: The Importance of Data

Unknown Speaker 0:00

Music.

Brandon 0:05

Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of the operations room. I am Brandon minsinger, joined by my amazing co host, Bethany Ayers, how are things going? Bethany,

Bethany Ayers 0:13

I'm tired, and after the comments last week about having lost my effervescence since joining peak. You were the one who commented that way. First of all, effervescence has now become a common word in my vocabulary, which I don't think is what I've used previously. So talking to my husband, I'm like, am I effervescent? Have I lost my effervescence? What do you think

Brandon 0:36

it's like? What the hell are you talking about?

Bethany Ayers 0:40

And then this weekend, I don't even have the whole weekend off. Why is that? What's happening? So tomorrow, I am taking a customer to the football

Brandon 0:53

Wow, you're killing it. I don't know, 90s style or something like taking a customer to a football match,

Bethany Ayers 1:00

yeah, and this is soccer football, just to be clear. So we are going to Tottenham Stadium, which is not old heart Lane anymore. I learned they have a brand new stadium, and it's just called Tottenham.

Brandon 1:14

Well, that's fun. So how did this transpire? Why is this happening?

Bethany Ayers 1:17

Brandon 2:10

Bethany Ayers 2:16

Brandon 5:31

thinking about this in the podcast sense. Because oftentimes when I do our editing on the podcast, you always ask the guest about their background and their profile a little bit. And when I go through the podcast editing process, I always cut it out because I find it not particularly interesting to listen to. And I really cut straight to the first thing that they say, a value that really makes you think the episode that we just released yesterday with James King, if you listen to that segue, it is direct into James King, which is powerful.

Bethany Ayers 5:59

Do you know, I endlessly have never listened to an entire episode all the way through. I have listened to one preamble because everybody kept talking about it and I couldn't remember what it was, and so I was like, Oh, I better listen to understand why people keep talking to me about it, and that is it. And it's not because I hate the sound of my voice or I'm embarrassed, like I've gotten over all of that. It's just because I've already done it, although arguably, listening is how you learn when you like listen and see about what's good and what's bad and how I can do it better, and that's how you craft your art. But I'm not crafting an art here. I'm just rocking up and talking shit.

Brandon 6:36

Well, that is what this podcast

Brandon 6:42

Bethany Ayers 7:45

HubSpot does seem to be the winner. So it used to be nobody got fired for buying IBM, and I feel like in the startup space, nobody gets fired for buying HubSpot, but HubSpot is a lot more expensive than it used to be, and so maybe you can start with something less nowadays, because until you actually know what you need, and then also AI, maybe you're going to create new things. I don't know, but until you figure out what your strategy is, HubSpot is a safe option. I do really agree with Mark on worrying about data quality. It's a bug bear of mine, like, no startup that I work with seems to care about data quality. I have a sales background, so I'm talking about, like, holistic data quality. You know, they barely use the CRM. Close. Dates are optional. Stages are optional. Products are optional. And they're like, well, the CRM doesn't give me any information. So why should I use it? I just use my spreadsheet. And I was like, this is like an absolute chicken and egg situation. It is not going to work unless you use it and you work on the data. And that's me with my sales hat on. With marketing, it's a different data issue, but it's just as big, if not bigger, which is you need to build your database so that you can then market to a database, nurture a database, use that as a place that you generate leads from. And if your customer or your prospect database is just awful, you're not going to get anything out of it. And then why are you spending any money contacting people so you are adding people into your database. If you're not going to take care of it, you might as well just not have a marketing program.

Brandon 9:28

I do think it becomes useless because also, if you don't have good hygiene and keep things clean, you'll get blacklisted and not be able to send any emails because you're spamming people. And I don't think marketing ops takes it seriously enough, and that actually is their differentiator, is to have a clean, believable database that you can effectively market to, and all the rest of it is just bells and whistles of how much you automate your emails and whatever else, but you need to have a database that you can market to

second question to ask you, Mark talked about the importance of getting value out of your existing tools and not buying additional stuff that's net new and shiny because you think it's going to solve a problem.

And I find this more with sales teams, is we have a problem, and this piece of technology is going to solve that problem, and it only costs 10k except now it costs 20k because price of living crisis. And before you know it, all of these wrap up, and you're spending hundreds of 1000s a year on tools that never get used, because the problem is not something that a tool is going to solve. The problem is either something fundamental in your business or an issue in your process. And what I want is the process to be working and proves that that is happening. And is actually the point of creaking, where the spreadsheet doesn't work anymore, the Zapier doesn't work anymore, and we need to add in a custom made tool. But if you buy the tool before the process, it's just going to sit there.

And I'll give you one good example here, which, to this day makes me cringe. But you know, we had bought a sales enablement product called seismic product marketing. I

was thinking seismic was my problem. I blocked seismic because I was like, this is not the problem. So it's good to know that my blocking was good. So anyhow, sorry, sorry. Seismic. I'm sure it's a good tool. Sometimes, when

you look at seismic as an isolated thing for sales, nameline For me, I was like, Oh, this is fabulous. It does so many things that make tremendous sense to me. But what I wasn't thinking about and didn't really dive into is like, where are we actually at with size sales enablement in our company? What assets do we actually have? How are they being used by the sales reps or not? And how does it actually work within our stages that we have? What ended up happening was, to your point, without having a process in place, without having a real, real need for it to be solved at that point where we were creaking at the seams. What ended up happening was it was just never used. Basically, it was like we had something set up. Nobody would ever use it. The product marketer would use it himself, by himself, but that was pretty much it. And the whole point of seismic, or sales enablement, is to really help the reps be more successful. Reps weren't using it, and it was just a bit of a joke. I think the seismic license at that point for us was around 25k something like that. So at the end of the year period, you know, this is when the renewals come up. And you're not paying attention, things get renewed, and this one got renewed, and I'm like, Holy shit, what are we doing?

This is something that has happened at peaks I'll just share with you, which is we now as default, serve notice on every contract whether or not we're actually going to churn it, and so then we have time to decide whether or not we're keeping it, but at least we know that we've served notice, and we have a choice, and there's no like, decision making process, should we? Shouldn't we? And it just buys you an extra three months. So that was a something's happened, what in my absence, and I thought it was great,

yeah, so it forces the conversation, do we actually want this product going forward, so the default is off until it's back on again, in the sense of, like having a proper chat around it, so

that, and also, so you don't accidentally renew seismic, because nobody noticed that the renewal was coming up. And then we think about it, and we should have served notice two months ago. If that happens, they're like, ah, we have default serve notice, and now we can decide whether. We actually keep it, and that also did require that we have a very good spreadsheet now of all of our purchases and all of the renewal dates, and I think it has actually been automated, so we automatically serve notice, and then you also get an opportunity to do good renewal and conversation, because it's going to freak the rep out, and they're going to get in touch with you. And

then the other thing that he mentioned, which is the use of AI for outbound purposes, whether it's an AI, SDR, or what have you that that exercise can be very useful in low stakes situations, where you have your prospect list and you have a whole tier within that prospect spectrum that you're never going to touch because you consider to be low value for whatever reason. So instead of just disregarding it, his suggestion was to apply AI techniques that are automated to try to generate leads from that low value bucket. We

can all tell when we're getting completely automated emails, but also sometimes you can't because, like, a short, sweet email is great, and a short, sweet email may just as easily have come from a robot as from an SDR, I'm pretty relaxed around automated outbound at this point to cut through the noise. I don't know about you, but I get 20 to 40 a day between like LinkedIn used to not be all spam, but my LinkedIn now is so many people going, Hey, have you ever thought about a recruiter, you know, like, look at this data scientist. Hey, why don't we help you with your treasury? Hey, I don't even know. Like, it's constant stream of this, but when I do reply to one, it's because it's a problem that I have, and I've never heard of this company before, and they're solving my problem. So I still think, even in your target audiences, automated emailing is fine. What's not fine is then when the person replies and you get, you know, a response that doesn't make any sense, that's when you should start the human in it. Sometimes I might get an email where it solves a problem, like, Oh, this is really exciting. I've never thought about it before. Or, you know, I didn't know that there's a tool out there. Thanks for getting in touch. Can it do these three things? And I get some sort of like, Thank you for your response. No reference to what I've said, No answering any of my questions, maybe not even sending me a calendar link. And then I like, well, that's a total waste of an opportunity. I'm not going to be pursuing this. Like, if you're not making it easy for me on

that note, why don't we shift over to our conversation with Mark Farnell.

Our whole thinking in the last quarter has been okay? Where does AI fit into what we're doing in terms of our our outreach, whether that's through paid campaigns or SDR campaigns, what is out there that we could use to help us that surround the AI bubble?

And so that would be the first question. What have you learned if you're a 200 person company without an unlimited budget? What should you be doing now research,

because there's just so much, I think you've got to have a little bit of caution as well, because there's a lot of things that get the AI wrapper right. We're quite early in our journey, to be honest, looking at this, in fact, I'm on a two hour virtual event later this evening that's coming out of the stakes, which is all about STRS and how AI can help them. So we're very much in that research phase. So I think even with an unlimited budget, right, even if you went out and bought everything, you've still got to have someone that's going to implement it, maintain it, make it work to your tune. So you can't just go out and buy anything. You've still got to make sure you've identified what really is the use case here? And importantly, what's our desired outcome? Desired outcome is a phrase I use a lot when I'm talking to stakeholders about they want to buy this or want to buy that. It's like, what do we actually want to achieve at the end of it? Understand what you want it to do before you start. We have no shortage of leads here. Our product is generating 1000s of sign ups a day. So our issue is actually around prioritization and scoring and making sure the right leads come through. Which ones do I go after first and then you go, Okay, well, let's talk about predictive scoring. Let's talk about intent, and let's talk about how AI can work out what those best leads are, which I think there's a role for that 100% if there's technology out there that can help provide an insight into that, but usually anything like that is looking back at historical data in order to inform what it should be doing next. And there can be some challenges with that. If you are going into new markets or you're selling new products you may not have the history that you need. So I would be cautious about just saying we've got an AI solution that's going to take care of that. I still think there's an element of the grunt work, if you like, of understanding what the data is telling you, what the AI could put on top of that, but also as a go to market team, understanding we. Going to the signals you want to pick up. You want to make sure you're including that as well, even if you're not going to see that in the historical data that you have.

So let's pretend I'm a VP of Marketing, 200 person company, 20 million Arr, B to B, SaaS, 2024, what is my marketing tech stack? What should it look like? And what are some of the considerations, perhaps as well, just around that stack.

So for me, I always start right at the basic foundations with the data. You know, are we collecting it in a standardized way so we can actually do something with it? But outside of that, in the tech stack, especially if you're going into new markets, some level of a firmographic data provider understanding, you know, you're looking at a bunch of accounts in a new market, really understanding basic things, like industry, they're in, their revenue, their employees, to begin to help you know, segment and target those accounts you want to go after. That's a really important part. Now you can do that through your own research. And probably most people will start doing that with a with a team, and can often happen that your friendly SDR team, or BDR team, whichever way you want to call it, ends up getting asked to do a load of research. But then, of course, you're taking resource away from your lead follow up. I don't try and get too involved with contact data providers that kind of early stage. It can be pretty difficult with the various legislations there are around the world now in terms of knowing you can actually use that data. But I do think thermographic data, account level data, is really valuable. The experience I've had with data providers is that they do tend to be stronger in certain areas. So zoom info has done a lot of work around improving its kind of number of records and the accuracy of his records in in areas like EMEA and APAC. It's obviously always been very strong in the United States, but we have other data providers that are pretty good in EMEA, but they're not not strong in APAC or APJ. So you've got a couple of ones that we've been using, Clearbit and cognizant for different aspects. We tried

Cognizant a few years ago, and it just wasn't good, and we churned, but I've heard good things about it, so that is that it's improved, and there we did have product issues, and it's gotten better. Is that your experience? So

we've brought that on board in the last few months, and we're mainly using that from a contact perspective, rather than an account perspective, in terms of adding data to what we have. I've used last year at the last phase I was at that was pretty good for the Amiga teams, particularly UK, pretty strong on phone numbers, actually, as the SGR team told me about that. I just think they've all got strengths and weaknesses. And I suspect not only is there some regional differences, but I just kind of suspect there might be some vertical differences between the two as well. But a lot of tech providers are actually quite focused on delivering a solution to a specific part of the market. Hence why we have, you know, so many you wouldn't buy a fully loaded marketing cloud platform. If you only had 10,000 leads, for example, and you and you weren't running that many campaigns, it's about lining up what that provider has and what your desired outcomes are, and then ultimately, what makes sense? I

think there's definitely going to be some constrained budget. So you've brought us into the marketing automation platform world, which is pretty much HubSpot versus Pardot, is that the world now,

so I've been predominantly a marketer user in my time, and I have used Pardot and I have used HubSpot, I think there is some truth in the maturity curve, in terms of some of those products are more suited to maybe a smaller or mid sized company with maybe less complex marketing automation needs. But of course, you have to balance that against if you're going for something kind of fully loaded with Salesforce or Marketo or Eloqua or someone like that, because they integrate with more and they have more features, they can be a little bit more difficult to extract the value from you need to invest in skilled people to be able to do that, whereas with other platforms, it's easier to get yourself kind of running and get programs working. It's then when you try and link things together, and you try and be a bit more efficient or at scale, that it can sometimes get a little bit more difficult. All of them can deliver you something, but where you are on that curve, I think it's quite important. The other thing I think is quite important is don't believe you have to change the provider just because you've reached a certain size. There's a huge risk in migration, moving with marketing automation, as there is with any big piece of tech, CRM or whatever, the data to be migrated, the process is to be migrated all the new enablement you have to go through, there's a an extra cost there that you don't see just when you're signing a new contract for a 12 month or 24 month contract. So I wouldn't get sucked into the trap of saying, right with narrower. You know, we mentioned 200 employees before. We're bigger. Now we need something else. But you do need to kind of regularly, kind of review what you're doing more often. I think the bigger you are as you're going through that growth, review where you are, review what the tool is doing for you on a more frequent basis, so that you can quickly, if you can see that you do make, need to make a change. You don't leave it two quarters or three quarters too late.

Where should you start in terms of your marketing tech stack? Because I kind of feel like to the point that we've made earlier in 2024 HubSpot really is an all in one solution that provides all sorts of things now, part of which is the marketing hub or the marketing automation piece, but very clearly, they also have sales hub. Where do you start? How does that evolve?

If it was me, and I was back at series A and we're starting out somewhere, I'd definitely start with something like a HubSpot, simply because it's all in one place, lots of powerful features, but relatively less complex to use. Everybody's in one place automatically, your marketing team, your sales team, are all in the same place, and I just think that's easier for teams to work together. I think there is a small cost benefit to that as well. And I just think that's going to be a much better place to start. The two things I would probably look to add at that stage, even that early, would be some kind of data management tool with deduping normalization tool, like a ring lead, which I've used for multiple years in different different organizations, demand based other other tools are available because just starting off with not having duplicates, starting off with records that people can understand, making it a little bit easier for the feet on the street to actually do their job. It's very hard to measure that ROI, but I'm convinced it's huge, because you don't have people with any negative energy or negative feedback, because the first thing sales people complain about is duplicates, amongst other things. Okay, so if you can take some of those things away right at the beginning, you just set yourself up really well. I think for the future, from that point onwards, it's about getting the value out of the tools. So for me, when we started out using Marketo, we were only really using maybe 40% of it. It's a bit like when you buy Word or Excel or you're using Google Sheets, you're not using the most value out of it, and because you keep looking for the next thing, right? So we started looking things at things like segmentation and scoring and that type of thing to really help that prioritization aspect of getting the right leads to the right SDRs as soon as we could. Because ultimately, that's all you're trying to do with an M A platform helping the marketing teams actually execute those campaigns, processing the scoring, the data in the way that you've identified as being best and making sure the right person gets it. And it's at that point you can then have the conversations around SLAs, and are we following up on time? Are we following up enough? And then you can have the rebound conversation around around the quality, because you've actually got the flow of the right data happening at the right pace. So it wouldn't be that I would look at adding more things to it. At that point, I'd be really wanting to make sure we've got the getting more value out of what we've already got. What

do you think this is a leading question about all of this intent, data, stuff like sixth sense.

I am convinced, personally, that there is some value in the intent platforms, but I've never been able to show the data in a way that I could convince a leadership team of that. There's a number of good case studies that I've been part of, and I've seen actually happen where you can see, you can see the intent happening. You can see the marketing campaigns reaching out. You can see the leads being followed up, and you can see the opportunities. There's lots of great examples where I can put in a presentation and show that intent is, is brilliant, and maybe, maybe it's down to the way that we operationalized it and how we used it, but we've never been able to show it as a, you know, a true star killer, if you like, consent. It's going to really change how we do things. The tools are fairly complex. They deliver a simple output. And I think here's another aspect of working in in marketing automation, or anything to do with the tech stack in the go to market teams is sales enablement and making sure everybody understands what the tool does, how to use it, what it can help them with, and what it's not so good at. Because unless you've got your SDR teams and your and your sales teams involved in really understanding what they can do with it, it's going to be a real struggle, because otherwise, it's just another tool that marketing say is going to help us, versus

all the tools that sales buy that they believe are going to help them, that they then also don't use properly. Once

a company's bought a tool, it's not even finished implementing it and extracting value where it's like, well, what's another tool that we need? Or we've got this problem. You. What tool can fix it, whereas sometimes some of those issues that you have adjust down to config issues with the platform that you've got, or have you actually set up that nurture program in the right way, or whatever it might be, there's a lot of other things that you can look at before you go out looking for another tool is when you go and look for another tool that distracts your marketing automation team from actually working on the platform that you've got, and if you do buy another tool that's basically more things to implement and maintain. And one thing is reasonably true, certainly, my experience doesn't really matter how big the tech stack you've got. Everyone assumes all these tools run themselves.

They never run themselves as a bigger and bigger team, Salesforce

and Marketo. They're not sentient beings. Even with AI, they still need something to help set all that up and for it to work, nothing's ever going to just magically fix something because you bought the tool and that at some point is going to need people to understand and get the right value. And it's not just people, it's the right people. And as with all things, whether it's in sales, marketing, finance, legal, you know, the right people tend to cost more money, that expense, that cost, is seen as a cost. It's not seen as part of an investment in how a team is running its marketing campaigns and working with the sales team. What

was the last bit of marketing functionality that you implemented that went live, that you were really excited by, that delivered some phenomenal results? What was that

we invested in a tool called conversica Some years ago? It was kind of like one of the very early AI driven email tools to support SDRs. The idea being that once you've identified the right people to go in a sequence or a cadence, you know the AI, could understand broadly whether someone's interest was positive or negative, and if positive, could then forward that through to the SGR as a hotter leave for follow up, because it enabled us to deal with a high volume of what we would call lower value leads. And this is really quite important when it comes to how we use AI, particularly with SGR outreach, it can be quite nervy the fact that you're going to trust this thing that you don't really know what it's going to say necessarily to start talking to your prospects. So it's really important to understand the high value and low value prospects in there, very similar to how we see contact centers now, using AI and chat bots and that type of thing, to deal with the more volume based easier to deal with inquiries yet the ones which require a bit more help and attention, they will go through to a real, live agent. It's kind of the same thinking when we're doing outbound. If we know that we want to focus on a certain part of the market, then we shouldn't AI any of that. That should all be completely white club, you know, live person dealing with the whole thing. And we have to rely a little bit on our data for this. But if we know there's a set of leads that convert at 10% of the normal rate, then why would we invest all of that time to find that 10% if we can put that through some type of AI engine, and we can get through everything really quick, why wouldn't we, and if maybe we don't get as many conversions as we would have done if we've done it by hand, theoretically, at least, we're going to get more than that, because we're focused more human effort on the high value leads at the other end, to get greater conversion from there, and those leads should lead to stronger opportunities, higher value, better likelihood, to close. So don't AI everything, all right, because if you were to do that, then the natural question is, why do we need any SDRs at all? It doesn't compute. Ultimately, someone's got to talk to somebody to book a meeting, right? Yes, you can book some meetings over email, but generally speaking, you're going to have a conversation at some point.

And so with converstica or anything like that, you basically had an AI SDR, and at the point that a customer was positive enough, it would flip to a human.

It's almost like lead routing, right? The lead is owned by the virtual agent. The SDRs can still see the leads that that person's working on, and they can still see what's happening with the conversations, and they can jump in. If they see an email and they actually want to jump in and stop the next reply, they can stop all of that. But ultimately it's like lead routing or lead notification. Your virtual agent just says, Hey, Beth, this person over here, they said, Yes, they're really interested in talking some more. Sounds like like you should speak to them.

You did a really good job at new voice media of creating dashboards that were helpful and actually like held people to account and had SLAs. And the number of times I've tried to explain your dream force dashboard and how every event should have that it seemed very logical, and yet I don't see it repeated often. So. Could you share with our listeners what some good accountable, holding people to account, dashboards they should build are, if

we were to take a basic SLA for when a lead should be followed up, obviously, the faster you follow up, the better it is. And if you follow within five minutes, your chance of conversion goes through the roof. I tend to take a different view on that in terms of large scale purchases. So a very simple thing to do is just to say, is it one day old or not? If something is more than one day old, it should have been processed, it should have been called. And that's a relatively simple thing to do in Salesforce. When you start getting down to measuring, is it five minutes or 10 minutes? It can be a little bit more awkward and needs a bit more customized. More customization. But I know also from feedback from other colleagues at new voice media that that level of granularity was really useful. And I think we had a 60 minute SLA for us when we were working, and then it was Amber up to two hours and read after that. But if you're going to go down that route, just be prepared to have the pain of business minutes and international time zones bite you. The other one that's very useful is to show the depth of follow up, which is a bit simpler. So if we're talking Salesforce, if you just create a campaign basically, and the statuses in that campaign are effectively attempt one, attempt two, attempt three, attempt four, attempt five, and so on. It's relatively simple to write some automation so that when a task or an email or a call is logged against the lead or the contact, you just progress them one down that down that line. So you know, after the first two days of an event, you'd want to make sure everybody was called, maybe at least once, right? And you'd be able to see it. And then, as people go through, maybe you want to go to seven attempts, eight attempts, nine attempts, you can see how all of your your people, you want to follow up are progressing against that. And then, of course, importantly, is there a particular region that's better or worse than the other? Is there a reason why one team is is outreaching quicker than another, and understanding what those things might be, and sharing those best practices, and that's a relatively simple thing to look at as well. So those would probably be two simple places to start in terms of that critical follow up piece after a big event. I

think if it comes back to what you said earlier around data accuracy, part of why your dashboards were so good was because the data was right, and therefore people believed them, and therefore people looked at them. I just think of like the dashboard graveyard of most places that I work, and yet yours weren't. So I'm trying to figure out, like, what is it that Mark did? That meant it was better.

So this all comes down to how big your database is, right? So if you're talking about a database of 100,000 and or smaller, and you've got reasonably good data already and a reasonably good understanding of how you want that to look when it actually comes down to things like events. You might only have 500 records that need to be accurate, and you might already have 400 that everyone's happy with, and it might be 100 left. So we just go and research it ourselves, but we're just, you know, sometimes we try and get some help from the SDR team, but frankly, usually the marketing operations thing would just say, right, two hours hot house, we're all in this room, and we're all going to do 25 records each, or whatever it is, and we're going to get this bit done, and maybe we split that up into two batches, and then the business can see things getting better. And ultimately, you've got yourself to a very good, very good place. Now, that approach then doesn't work when you're very big, because you're talking about 1000s, or in some cases, millions of records, and that's just not scalable. And that's where you really have to establish and trust your single source of truth for that, whichever data provider you you have, and to say, look, this is what we've got. Unless you want to employ 50 other people to do the research on these other ones that we can't match, this is the best we can do. So you have to be a bit pragmatic about that research approach, because if the volume is too high, you'll actually end up probably burning more money than you really want to some of it's just doing the hard work.

I think people underestimate how important just doing the hard work is. Yeah, so we are unfortunately running out of time. If our listeners could only take one thing away, what would it be?

I would probably go with you data. I really would, because everything's based on that, and it's the first issue you'll hear when it comes to reporting or any issues with follow up the data's rabbits. We haven't got the right data. We can't call the right accounts. We can't get the right opportunities. So whether that's the quality of the data or 25 duplicate records for every account you have, whatever it is, getting rid of those conversations means because it's table stakes. Really you want to have conversations about, what was the messaging, what was the campaign? Give us a real use case from what happened with that phone call we had with that prospect, and get away from those conversations about the data. It's ugly, it's dirty, it's horrible. If you want to have a beautiful garden, you've got to take care of the weeds. The data is the weeds.

So on that note, we'll wrap up. Here. So thank you for listening to the operations room. If you have a comment, please do so and we will see you next week.