Overview
Building a tech stack in any organization is a challenging task. Billy Bateman is joined by Jack Foster to talk about building a company’s tech stack from the ground up. Jack talks about where to start with technology, the challenges of implementing that technology, and how to perfect technology that is already in place.
Speaker
Jack Foster is a marketing professional with many years of industry experience. More recently, Jack is serving as the VP of Marketing at WorkRamp, a company that helps companies improve corporate training and onboarding strategy.
Quotes
“You need to have your internal stakeholders aligned on the goals of a tech purchase”
“It’s important to understand your goals. I think if you’re, for example, if you’re like a highly high velocity type of business, right where you’re doing a lot of deals more quickly, you might have a different type of purchase priority than you know if you’re going after enterprise sales.”
Key Points
- Invest in a marketing automation service
- Get internal stakeholders aligned
- Trust the operations team
Transcript
Billy Bateman
All right, everyone. I hope everyone is having a great time at the Rev Tech Summit and learning a lot here. I’m Billy Bateman, VP of Operations at Chat funnels. And right now I’m joined by the One Only Jack foster VP of Marketing at work cramp. Jack, thanks for joining us.
Jack Foster
Thank you so much, Billy. I’m excited to be here today.
Billy Bateman
Yeah, it’s going to be good. Before we get into it, though, like for anyone that doesn’t know you, like give us a little intro. Tell us about yourself.
Jack Foster
Of course. So as you mentioned, I am currently the VP of Marketing at work ramp. I joined work ramp to lead the marketing function back in October so been having a lot of fun building out the team across Product Marketing demand generation brands and content over the last several months. Before that, I was the VP of global demand generation and marketing operations at survey monkey which of course rebranded to Momentive during my time there and helped really build and scale our enterprise business. Over the course of the three years I was there. So a lot of great learnings that I’m sure we could talk somewhat about as we’re going through this conversation today. And then before that, I actually led and built the demand generation marketing operations function at levers, a series B startup when I joined, you know, saw explosive growth while I was there, and really actually helped build out the marketing tech stack there. So a lot of great learning. And spent, you know, 15 plus years in tech marketing and over eight years or so. Think that’s right, I’m leading the team so that’s kind of who I am. And right now I live in Los Angeles and I have a two and a half year old daughter. So all the fun things on the Well, yeah.
Billy Bateman
Awesome, awesome. So today, we’re going to talk about building the tech stack from the ground up. And you know, the challenges, opportunities, tips, store war stories that you’ve got from doing that where you’ve been.
So let’s just start like where do you start? If you’ve got an opportunity to come in fresh water and do marketing or sales or and build the tech stack? Where would you start Jack?
Jack Foster
Well, I think of course, but the answer for any marketing leader is going to be you’re going to need to purchase a marketing automation platform and so far as the HubSpot or Marketo Pardot. Something along those lines. It’s really just the, you know, the bread and butter of any marketing organization. And so I think in general, that’s probably going to be the first purchase in any org but from there you know, there’s obviously a lot of different ways that you can approach this. I think one thing I would highly recommend off the bat is investing in a data enrichment solution so that as you’re building out your database, you have, you know, good data, clean data and you have a strategy around how you’re going to enrich data. So of course, looking at vendors like Clearbit, like zoom info, and really bringing that into your tech stack early on, I think is a great call if you’re thinking about scaling your marketing at all. And sales for that matter, right sales, and outbound, outbound teams use that type of enrichment as well. And then from there, I think it’s just really important. I mean, this is kind of an answer that may be a little bit of a wishy washy answer, but honestly, it’s important to understand your goals. I think if you’re, for example, if you’re like a highly high velocity type of business, right where you’re doing a lot of deals more quickly, you might have a different type of purchase priority than you know if you’re going after enterprise sales. So for example, high velocity, maybe you want to remove the friction and people filling out a form on your website. So it might make sense to invest in something like a chat early on. So that, you know, buyers can get to your team as fast as possible and you can move them, you know, through the funnel or through the journey more quickly. If you’re really going after enterprise you need to get in front of a lot of stakeholders across the buying committee. It actually might make more sense to invest in an ABM platform early on so that you’re able to, you know, power those types of enterprise more enterprise types of campaigns. So kind of like everything in, in business and in life. It probably depends on your company’s goals, but really understanding your business model, your goals, and then you know, making your purchase decisions from there is how I’d recommend doing it.
Billy Bateman
Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. Like, figure out how you’re going to sell who you’re selling to, and then you can build it out a lot more strategically.
So what are the challenges like when you come in fresh, like, like let’s say it’s a startup where you’re first marketing hire, you’re building the stack?
What are some of the challenges in that situation?
Jack Foster
I mean, I think that time and time again, the most important thing that I’ve seen work well at any organization startup or if you’re even making a purchase at a larger size enterprise or midsize company, you need to have your internal stakeholders aligned around what you know, what are the goals of this purchase? What teams are going to be leveraging this technology? Who’s going to implement it? Who’s going to maintain it? What do you know, what are the business outcomes honestly, you’re expecting to achieve? With this purchase. If you don’t have that lined up and you don’t have internal buy-in, you can purchase the best technology in the world but it’s going to fall flat. You’re not going to be able to get your time to value. You’re going to see value out of it quickly enough. You’re not going to have buy-in for the teams that need to use it and you know, I’ve definitely made the mistake in my career where you have kind of like one is just going for technology and haven’t maybe done some of the due diligence around getting internal stakeholders aligned on it. And it just makes it more difficult down the line. Right. So I think the number one thing you can do is get your internal stakeholders aligned on why you’re making the purchase and who you know who’s actually going to be responsible for what.
Billy Bateman
Yeah, I agree with you. Like, you know, I see that when we buy stuff for our team if, you know, I am the leader, sometimes I buy some things that haven’t got everyone.
And then I’m like, I go down like why the hell are we using this?
So what have you found like, I’ve got my own opinions on it, you know, learning from those mistakes and how you get buy in but what have you found are some of the best ways to get buy in from your team.
Jack Foster
I think the number one thing honestly is having the why you’re purchasing it and then also outlining quantifiable goals and really having people understand how this is going to impact again the business but then how it personally or you know for their teams is going to be a good decision and I think you need to kind of do the roadshow you need to get feedback on on kind of why you know, if everyone aligns with it, and then I think the other thing too, is understanding the requirements of each team. So if you’re going to be making you know, a big technology purchase that you know multiple teams are going to be using. Again going back to like a chatbot right you might have your inbound team using it on your website, you might have the outbound team wanting to use it for like target accounts with people or landing on the site. Like really understanding how the different teams are going to be using it understanding what their stake in the purchase is important and so that you can bring them along with you if you’re you know, if you’re if you don’t do that upfront, it just it just again creates those challenges down the road.
Billy Bateman
Yeah, I agree. You gotta get up everybody and, and sometimes it’s a one on one to one conversation with somebody. Okay. We’re going to do this or we’re really thinking about we’re going to do this here’s why it’s good. Like, let’s get your thoughts and I think people just want to be heard whenever, you know, it’s like, Hey, I’ve got to use this, you know, like, let me tell you why you may or may not want to use it. So I like it. So what are the opportunities when you come in and you start from scratch, build from the ground up versus you inherit something?
Jack Foster
I mean, I think I think when you’re coming in and starting from scratch, that’s exactly the benefit. You have a clean slate. You have the opportunity to you know, look at kind of the entire landscape, what technology like what or maybe there might be newer technologies that you want to evaluate and bring in it gives you the opportunity to design, your processes design, you know how people are going to be using it kind of from the ground up. So it’s all just your build mode and that’s exciting. But of course the challenging part of that is that you don’t want to take on too much too fast, right? Like, as you’re building you need to make sure that you have the capacity on your team side to actually bring in these technologies, you know, get them up and running. Get the teams trained so you might not be able to, you might only be able to make like two or three purchases in a year because of just you know, that’s it’s resources honestly to get to get a new tech, you know anything in your tech stack up and running properly.
Of course, it’s almost like the opposite when you inherit a tech stack. Hopefully, you know, you come into a situation where there have been established processes that have been, you know, created around using this technology. The teams are trained, and if you’re lucky, you just kind of optimize. Are we getting the most out of these technologies? But of course if you inherit, you know, kind of a mess that that’s you know, that’s a challenge because you have to do some type of rip and replace or change management and you know, that of itself is like a whole a whole project whole you know, whole mindset for teams like there’s a lot that obviously goes into taking out technology and putting a new so I mean, only benefits and challenges on both sides. I don’t know if one is better than the other but I think when you’re at least building from the ground up you kind of can design it at least how you want to.
So yeah, I’ve been in both situations and again, challenges and you
Billy Bateman
which one? I think different people do better in different situations like this, like some people are going to do better at just like, hey, we’re going to tweak the existing stack and maybe replace like one or maybe two things. And other people. It’s like, Hey, I’m going to do great if I get to build what I want from the ground up. What do you like, what do you prefer?
Jack Foster
Yeah, I mean, I love to build I think just in that’s kind of my Happy Places and build mode. So I do like the opportunity to kind of have the Clean Slate understand what the business priorities are the opportunities and think about kind of designing from the ground up. So for me personally, that is definitely like a fun place to be in. You know, we’re doing a lot of building at the work ramp. We’ve established a central revenue operations team that’s really helping us think about, you know, processes across our entire go to market organization, what is our tech stack, look, you know, what does data flow look like all of that, and that’s a really fun place for us to be in. So I think I will answer that question. You know, again, more mode for me personally, but I know that there’s also it can be a lot of fun coming in and looking at what’s in place. And then also figuring out, can you get more out of, you know, technology, or do you need to redesign processes and things like that so that I can understand why people have fun with that as well.
Billy Bateman
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I mean, I think it’s just everybody’s different in how they approach things and what their strengths are. So you have to build what are your tips, we talked a little bit about this, but what are your tips when you bring in new technology with the team like talked about getting the buy in anything else that that you would add to that?
Jack Foster
Yeah, I think that the number one tip I have honestly is making sure you have dedicated people to operations. And I think that a lot of times even now, in this day and age when like, you know operations is obviously a very established marketing operation, very established sales operations are an established function, but I still think that it can get undervalued at an organization. You know, companies might think they’re tech savvy enough. They don’t necessarily need someone dedicated to, you know, to the operations function, or even as you’re scaling, you know, your teams, you might only still have like one operations person, you’re not scaling operations at the same kind of rate as your go to market teams. I think that’s like, the number one kind of downfall that I’ve seen over and over again, is just not actually having enough dedication to, again, maximizing the purchases you’re making, optimizing the technology making sure you’re getting the most out of the investment actually just like maintaining and you know, create, like all the things that we’ve been talking about, you actually need people dedicated to doing that. So that’s my number one tip is make sure you’re actually not just investing in the technology, but in the people that need to run it too.
Billy Bateman
Yeah, I couldn’t agree more with that whenever you buy something, and it’s like well, the team owns it, but no one person owns this. It never works. Never works. Never get what you owe. It can kind of work but you never get the value you think you’re going to get out of it.
Jack Foster
Yeah, I’d venture to say you’re definitely veering into it. It’s not going to work. So yeah.
Billy Bateman
So yeah, it’s probably not going to work unless it’s just such a minor thing that pretty much runs itself.
Yeah, yeah. All right. Well, anything to add before we wrap up, Jack, any last tips words of wisdom for anyone?
Jack Foster
I mean, I think I think we talked about a lot I think it just really comes down to again, understanding the business goals and making sure that you’re aligning your plan and your roadmap to those goals, having the right people in place to actually be successful and setting the right goals and getting that buy in. I think if you’re doing those things up front, you’re going to be just set up for much more success to bring on new technology. So those are my tips.
Billy Bateman
Thank you, Jack, and we’ll have to bring you back and share again next year.
Jack Foster
Yeah, I appreciate it. It was fun.
Thank you so much, Billy. Thanks.