Customer Journey Mapping and Marketing Ops

What is Customer Journey Mapping? If you are in Marketing Ops, should you care? We tackle these questions, plus the difference between personas, ICPs (hint: it is not Insane Clown Posse), journey mapping in our conversation with Lucas and Islin Munisteri of Theia Marketing.

Recorded live on September 21, 2021.

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Hi, I’m Michael Hartmann, I’m Naomi Lou, and I’m Mike Rizzo. And this is ops cast, a podcast for marketing ops pros and rev ops pros Created by the MO Pros. The number one community for marketing operations. As professionals tune into each episode as we chat with real professionals to help elevate you in your marketing operations career.

Hello, everyone. Welcome to the lace-up. So of cast brought to you by the MO Pros. I’m Michael Hartmann. I’m joined today as usual by my cohost, Naomi, Lou and Mike Rizzo say hello. Hey everyone. Hey everybody. Today, we’re going to be talking about a new topic when I don’t think we’ve touched on yet, that we’ve probably all heard about or been exposed to, or had to be involved with called customer journey mapping.

And we’re going to talk a little bit about why that should matter to you as marketing ops for. And how that ultimately translates into the systems that we tend to support to do that. We’re going to talk to Lucas and Islam, monastery of Thea marketing. They HubSpot consults. See Lucas is president of the marketing and is an engineer by training, which I liked because I was also, he found his way to marketing after starting in oil and gas engineering.

His newly found passion for marketing and let him, him and his land to start. The marketing is Lynn as the VP of sales and marketing for theater, and has also has a background in engineering Islam, Lucas, welcome to our show. Thanks for joining us today. Yeah, thanks for having us. Thank you. All right. We’re looking forward to learning from you guys.

I think this is going to be a great, interesting topic. Okay. So I’m sure that our listeners being in marketing and marketing ops have heard the term customer journey mapping before. But if they’re like me, I mean, I know I kind of rolled my eyes at that sometimes. Um, because I’m like, I’m just ready to go get stuff done.

That said let’s start. Like, I know there’s probably some important pieces to it, but when we start with a working definition of what current customer journey mapping is from your perspective, especially since you probably service multiple clients at different interests. Yeah, definitely. So for us customer journey mapping is the process of understanding how your customers first gain awareness of your brand and understand that you exist and going through all of the different steps and touchpoints that they need to have to becoming an actual paying client with you.

And then beyond that, how do you keep them coming back over and over again? Because the most expensive thing we do in marketing is a customer equity. Retention should be kind of a given. And that’s one of the cheapest things that we do, but it’s often missed. So how do you know that’s an interesting point because I’ve, you know, having been in and around market for a while.

I think that’s, I don’t know. I haven’t heard that in a long time. Right. That whole, he gets a lot cheaper to retain a customer then than to acquire a customer. So are you, are you suggesting then that there’s sort of at least two components to customer journey mapping? Like let’s get them in the door to the being paid customer.

And then there’s sort of one for onboarding them and keeping them retained as an existing customer. Yeah, definitely. I mean, it’s, it’s the entire lifecycle of that customer. The bigger, the company that we typically work with, the more siloed each portion of that process is so marketing starts living in their silo.

Sales starts living in their silo, service starts living and they’re silent. And so we’ve all experienced this when we’ve called in for technical support on some kind of system. And they can’t access our billing where they can’t access something else. There’s some kind of administrative barrier that prevents them to.

And next thing, you know, something that should have been a 10 minute question turns into a day, two days to get a response and proceed forward. But the people are getting very impatient and want fast turnaround time and a great example. And also a horrible example is Amazon they’re customer first all the time.

And if you call them, they will resolve the problem of meeting. But in many cases, it’s at the detriment of the seller of the product. And so if you miss a step and those customers aren’t aware of what they’re getting or what to expect, you run the risk of losing that repeat sale. And so it’s important to keep,

to keep that process as simple as you can. So when you’re facing a customer, They don’t have to go run the rabbit hole of where do they, how does this get resolved? Yeah, it’s so true, right? I mean, I think Amazon’s a really interesting experience. Um, cause I’ve done that multiple times. I actually have a weird story where I started getting stuff, shipped to my house to some person’s name that didn’t exist there.

I tried to call Amazon to say, Hey, this get trip to the wrong player. So I’m like, just keep it. I was like, okay, what am I going to do with this random stuff? Um, just keep the random pair of socks that are for a dog. Yeah. It was a safety, vast, you know, all kinds of stuff. So anyway, I do, I have a, I have a question though, for you Lucas and Islam.

This came up recently in an organization that I was working with. How long does it take to define your customer journey map? Like if you’re, if you were building one from like, you know, nothing, how long would you say on average it should take an organization to like map out a customer journey.

Like for like say a five to 10 person organization. It could take like, say two weeks, maybe a month, but then if you have the 10,000 person organization, that’s going to take a bit longer. What, what do you think Lucas?

Yeah, I mean, we’ve done them where they’ve been done in the course of like four hours of man hours getting it done. And we’ve done them where they’re 300 man hours and the bureaucracy and like touchpoints and it’s still not. For sure. How often do you find that you have to revisit it? Like once you do it, do you find that you have to refine it or make edits?

Or what does that look like? I would call it an evergreen process. It’s always changing. It’s not something that you can just set and forget because your customers’ expectations are always evolving. Yeah. Yeah. That’s fair. Is it something that you think is like continually being monitored on an active basis?

Or is it, and I’m asking this for selfish reasons, because it’s something that, you know, we’re going through right now. Is it something that, you know, you revisit quarterly or what do you think that looks like the cadence. So I have one customer that we kind of revisited it annually, just based on his average sales cycle and retention.

And then we have a couple customers where we’re revisiting it at every month and it’s a function of addressing. The lot of the top of the funnel components around how are we getting people in on the marketing side, but the sales piece and the service piece are pretty static.

Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. And I think so it’s interesting as you, as you cause damn it. Same question I wanted to ask as well about the. Updating. And I think one of the things this reminds me a little bit of lead scoring, I didn’t know if we’ve all probably been through lead scoring effort somewhere.

And it’s, it’s really interesting to me. Cause people think like it’s the only time I’ve got to fake, like to give you an answer about what do I think is most supported and drive leads, score or engagement or whatever. And one of the things I’ve, I’ve learned to do over time, and it sounds like it applies here too, would be like, this is, this is something we’re going to do.

We’re going to kind of put something in place, but know that we’re going to try to monitor it on some regular basis, whether that’s annually or quarterly or whatever makes sense for that business. And we’re going to adjust it as we learn. I think, I think that’s a really important thing for, for all of us, which also you use the word, keep things simple.

And I think that’s something I like I try to do because it’s really easy to get caught up in all this cool way we can do this and all the different, you know, 80 million variations of the process that you could do. And like, Let’s keep it simple and let people make decisions on the front line. And so to kind of go down a rabbit hole real quick, I’ve got a client that has the, has the Ooh shiny syndrome.

And he constantly is wanting to buy new tools and new marketing gizmos to add to his marketing tech stack, to drive customers in. And it drives a lot of vanity metrics, things like views and clicks and things like that, but he’s getting a lot more exposure. But it’s not moving customers. It’s not moving dollars sold.

And so if you don’t understand that customer journey well enough, you start adding a bunch of things. And in some cases, too much information as bad as well. So you end up putting in the, into the state of decision paralysis. It’s a kind of an example I was thinking of before we got started is imagine if you’re trying to get somewhere and your GPS gets to a point and says, well, you could turn left here or you could turn right in 500 feet at you just kind of get lose this.

Where am I going now? Yeah, we don’t, we all want sort of a definitive answer. I think like, just give me, tell me what to do next, or at least give me some, some rules to follow. Right. So let let’s, let’s take a step back a little bit. I think we’ve kind of got an idea of like, what is a customer journey map?

Let’s go back to the, now for our audience who are generally marketing ops folks who may or may not have been involved in customer journey mapping, or may have wanted to be involved. Like, why should we even care? Like why should we care as marketing ops folks about customer journey mapping and in terms of what we do.

Uh, on the marketing side, I mean, it’s very fundamental. We deal with it all the time. As far as our top of funnel offers, middle funnel of offers, bottom of funnel offers. Those are portions of our customer journey, but we want to understand on a holistic view, how do all of those play together to be to the person that’s viewing it, becoming a paying client.

And if there’s a two-fold side, you’ve got the content that your customer is exposed to, but then you have the tech stack and the equipment, the systems you put in on the backend to maintain. So a good example here is Salesforce. They are the sales leader tool. Like pretty much everybody knows Salesforce.

However, to run Salesforce. A Salesforce, admin and tech people to maintain this. Where you go to a simpler solution, say click funnels. That’s kind of the entry-level cheap level option. It does. You can do a lot of stuff to bring people in. However, the maintain the man hours to run. It become cost prohibited as you scale.

And so you want to try to like, right-size your systems. So you’re able to track the information that allows you to move the needle. And if you don’t understand what you need to be tracking and how people are coming in and where they’re going. It’s really hard to build that tech stack that enables you to grow where you’re at and get to where you want to be.

So, yeah, that brings up another, I guess another question for us, which is, yeah, there’s, there’s documenting and customer journey map, which I assume that you’ve got some preferred tools or techniques that you use, and it would be interesting to hear what those are, but then there’s how does that translate into.

Your processes and systems across the different functional areas. So, yeah, I guess I’m going to ask sort of two parts here, right? One, and maybe you can both give me your perspective about what. Yeah. What do you, how do you approach, you know, documenting them? Are there any tools you recommend or things like that or methodologies, and then like what, what do you see you, you mentioned Lucas kind of rightsizing the technology.

So are there like, do you have, I know you guys do a lot of HubSpot stuff. Is there a way that you approach it from a HubSpot standpoint versus other platforms?

Yeah, take a stab at the first path of that. Okay. Um, I would say as far as like, right, right. Sizing the system like you, like, I was just recently talking with a CRM provider today on like yeah. There’s some people who, who. Fit HubSpot starter, but they also don’t fit HubSpot, professional sweet either.

They’re like in between and they’re like a service business. And so they, they were like, this is where our solution fits in, um, which is, which is fried. Um, but I think as far as the customer journey mapping solution, like we like using lucid. To completely map out the entire like customer journey. Like we, we did one for a nonprofit recently and it was like a hundred steps, I think, to just get from someone coming in and then filling out a form.

And then it was like it. And then they had to notify other people and it was, it was quite a bit. Obviously a journey to get there, but, um, definitely definitely recommend using lucid chart.

Yeah, I’ve been, I’ve been so interesting. Are you, are you building customer journeys based on like channels or are you trying to like with each of your clients, is it, do you start with a, where do you market first and then start building a journey? Like, are you looking at when you say touches? Okay, let me say touches or clicks or interactions like a hundred steps to get to somewhere.

Are you saying cool. When someone comes in from PPC, they clicked an ad. They hit this page, they filled out this form, they clicked this button. Then they did this, this, this, this, this, and that’s just one channel. Or are you building journey maps that are like thinking more kind of broadly than that? Like where does it kind of start usually.

So we always work from the end and go back. So we’re always taking an identifying, what is the conversion action we want to take or the goal and going backwards. And so the one Islam speaking of is specifically the, the journey map is over a hundred steps for once someone fills out a specific form through them becoming a customer, fulfilling their order.

This is where like your tech stack becomes important, is it addresses? How do we notify staff and employees that need to get something done? How do we notify vendors of, we need to have this piece in place. And so it’s, it’s the process of making sure we have all of those, all of the things that need to happen from beginning to end, documented and ordered.

And then it goes back beyond that in many cases, They to fill out that form. There might be four different channels that lead to that one form. Got it. And so each one of those channels is going to have different touch points and different processes. And at some point they’re going to come together, but it’s kind of think of more like a, a fork in the road.

We’ve just got lots of forks that start to spread. The closer we get towards the awareness phase of like, I have a problem. That’s where it’s very, very, very tall as far as like the different options to answer. Right? So as you move further away from the goal up to the top of the funnel, there’s a lot more branches that are kind of funneling down in, and you’re trying to map out all of that through exact customer training.

That makes sense. Cool. And I mean, you don’t even have to use lucid. I mean, you could use any type of. Charting drawing tool. I mean, sometimes we just start on a whiteboard and here’s about a dozen different ideas in lines and sure. I recently I’m partial to the paper too. I recently learned about Wardley mapping to have you heard of Wardley mapping?

I personally, I personally had not heard of it up until just a couple of days ago and it actually came from, uh, our. Episode with one that we just did, like last week, uh, he happened to mention it during our call and I went and looked it up. It’s fascinating, but it takes someone through, it’s all focused on the customer.

I’m going to do a terrible job of explaining this because I watched it, uh, you know, earlier today. And it’s a three minute video, but it’s all about the customer. And then along the bottom line, it’s taking this customers kind of discovery process from like Genesis all the way through to, to kind of like, how are they finding you to, how are they going to continue to interact with you?

Like throughout the rest of their, uh, interactions and. Kind of a, kind of an impressively complex, full, like way to map out a customer journey. But I don’t know. It might be something worth looking out, like looking into, it feels like a lucid chart, but, well, I’m Lucy. I like Lucy just cause it’s, there’s no boundaries, so I can pretty much put what I need to down.

And we’ve tried a few of those tools in the past.

They’re really good at addressing 80%, but that last 20% it’s like, I wish it could do this. It’s like every other tool in my tech stack. Exactly. And so like, I’d say lucid gets the 90%, but it’s not. So it’s the closest, but it’s not like what I would love to have. Gotcha. Cool. All I know is that this is a lot better than trying to share Vizio documents across an organization.

Right? So things like lucid chart, we get something that my organization, where we use Miro, right? These online sort of collaboration, whiteboard. Solutions are great. I think it helps a lot for those kinds of things. So not advocating anything in particular, but I think that that, that space is a pretty interesting one.

It’s been a good time for it. Um, so I thought it’s something that just sort of popped into my head as we’re talking about this that, um, I think has, uh, a place in this and it may be part of why I told you I kind of roll my eyes a little bit too, is. And so another, another kind of thing we hear about are our personas.

Everybody wants to do their personas. We’ve got to document our personas. Then we address like how, like what, so I’d love to hear your perspective, right? How do you differentiate between personas journey mapping? Do they, are they, are they, are they sort of two sides of the same coin? Are they different things or are they related?

Are they completely different? I’m just curious what your thoughts are. And I have a question on personas that I’m going to piggyback off of after you guys are I hit a cord. All right. So yeah, personas is an interesting beast because sometimes like multiple personas can go down. One journey is long as they have kind of the same consideration and trust steps, but you end up with certain people personas.

It comes down to like doing one-to-one conversion. So like, this is one of the reasons we like HubSpot as a platform is we can do dynamic content insertion on landing pages and web pages. So if someone’s a certain persona, the messaging changes very subtly to address like their concerns specifically.

But the challenge comes in is AB testing and KPIs. So you may have five or six personas for your business. And so the website copy changes ever so slightly, but you gotta be very careful because I mean, you have an AB test and then you have two personas. You now have eight variations of that same page.

And so it just very quickly cascades into that. Becomes unmanageable. So typically I would say you would want to relegate personas towards fixed content items, ads, uh, eBooks webinars, things like that. That’s more. Locked down.

My question is how do you handle personas? Where somebody can have, I guess, multiple personalities, right? So you have a business where the main guy, the CEO. Yeah, always, um, where the main guy is also the person that does the evaluation, because maybe they’re very technologically savvy, but they’re also the person that handles all of the check signing and that the decision maker, and they’re also, you know, the person that you know is talking directly to support or customer success.

Most of the time, these you’ll see these types of people in smaller businesses, but I’m curious. What, how you handle this or how you come across it. And it’s a question that I’m raising because it’s something that comes up at EFI. Right. So do you default, do you basically send them everything or do you kind of default their messaging to the highest role that they potentially be?

That. Downfalls to that too. Right. So I’m curious. So for us, we would say you have Jeff CEO and then you have Bob O and Z owner of a company. And they’re very different personas. Because the person who runs it or the decision maker, the check signer in a enterprise or mid-market deal has to deal with bureaucracy.

And a lot, the decision points are very, very different along that consideration phase than a small business. Their decision point might be going and talking to their wife or their brother, not necessarily going and talking to a key stakeholder, um, or, um, the owner going to talk to their husband, right?

Yeah. I’m the, I’m the guy. So I’ve been, Ooh. Oh shit. I’m like, I could be my husband as well. So I think Naomi, I think what you’re getting it because I’ve seen this too. Having worked at larger companies. I see two things that I see that makes me get mixed. It a little bit, one is mixing personas, like a person and their particular role and like an account categorization or at a targeted company, like more of the company level.

Right. So there’s a little bit of a mix there, but I think what you were specifically talking about is. Somebody at a company on any given point in time or get her given interaction and maybe PR acting under persona a like I’m the, I’m the, I’m an influencer. And then another point they may be acting as a decision maker.

And maybe it’s on the same transaction or the same deal, but it may be on something like two different projects and they have different roles. Is it, are you kind of talking about that? So how do you address that? Kind of in real time almost. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, if they’re on, let’s say they’re an enterprise company you’re going after and project day, this person’s the decision maker and project B they’re the stakeholder.

You gotta be careful cause you don’t want to overwhelm people with content and.

I’d say that’s a tricky one to manage, and it’s really going to have to come down to case by case because it would depend upon what are they trying to buy or what do you, what are their pain points that you’re addressing, maybe small businesses, a persona in and of itself, right? Where you have those types of people that can cross multiple roles.

And they not only hold the decision, but they are the ones that are also. The people that you would negotiate contracts with, maybe that’s a persona in and of itself. Right. And once they kind of move out of that, then, then you kind of bucket them. Maybe there’s two different types of. Um, customer journey mapping or nurtures or things like that.

I’m just, that could be a possibility. Yeah. If you’re serving multiple like market tiers, we’ve ha we do break down the customer journeys for a small business market tier versus a mid market or an enterprise. So because of the people, the decision makers in that process is very different. You would end up with multiple different processes that could go through to get to the app, uh, small businesses always, I’m going to call it a rodeo because you never know what you’re going to get or go

there. I’m a small, we’re fairly small and there’s things where I make a decision and pull the trigger. And 48 hours of, I have this pain point and there’s other things where it. I’m six months. I know I have this pain point, but I don’t have the bandwidth to address it. And so the journeys are very erratic for small business because you’re not just dealing with.

A pain point, you’re dealing with budget overhead, like what they can handle, like bandwidth wise, where enterprises typically have more buffer to manage taking these things on. But your sales cycle for an enterprise is always going to be three months plus. Yeah. I mean, unless you have like a very, very clear offering to solve their baby.

Yeah, I’ve never seen one. And then there’s, there’s also like the rapids framework for decision making that you get from project management Institute that you, that you see being used in like those mid-market enterprise companies to you. So you’d need like, so you’re kind of not going just from personas, but you’re also seeing like, who’s, who’s the recommend the recommender who agrees with it.

Who’s who’s performing. And who’s just providing input and who is the ultimate decision maker? So you need to like group all of those people together in a room when you’re doing a decision-making process for mid-market and enterprise, it’s not just a simple one person makes a decision and they go have the software.

You, you have to, there’s like multiple people involved. Um,

Without a doubt. I, I I’m wondering like how, I mean, obviously Naomi, Michael, and I all have questions about this and we’re all marketing ops people and I’m just like wondering how much of our listeners listener base and audience are dealing with. Uh, this is where I wish our show was still alive, so we could get the people interacting with this at this very moment.

Right. But at the, but at the very least, like just tying it back to, you know, like when you’re doing customer journey, map mapping, uh, the two of you are you is the end, like the output of this, as you think about it for an ops person, is it to create visibility? Across the organization. Is there any type of output that shows up that like as a marketing ops person, the reason why you’d be sitting in the room during this discovery process is while we talked about it earlier, it’s a little bit about finding the right tools to pull through the right, you know, the right data and touch the customer with not over like, not overdoing it, right.

Not. Don’t purchase too much tech. Um, but is there, is there something else that that’s kind of the output of the customer journey map that says, you know, um, as a marketing ops person, I need to be aware of all of these things, because I now need to service my internal organization when they come to me with a request, you know, I need to be able to push back and say, Hey, this doesn’t fit our, or is it anything like that?

Like, have you encountered any. So we definitely, I mean, when we do this, you get, I mean, it’s a pretty considerable like output for the most part. And it has, what is the technologies you’re using? Where are we handing data over between systems? How are we handing that data over which data, which, which systems are the master record for days, certain data types.

Who’s responsible for what, what happened. So it’s, it ultimately becomes a, a business process document on top of just the customer journey. But there’s some, and I’m not sure if any of you guys are familiar with a company called circuit city. They went out of business about a decade or so ago because they felt they never took care of their customers.

And so they had this mentality of they, they have to use us and we’re in this day and age where information is so prevalent and available, our customers don’t need us anymore. They don’t have to work with us. So you have to lead with what makes sense for the customer. And so that’s why we start with the customer journey and we make.

Business process systems, technology, messaging, marketing, all of those things are layered and structured in such a way that the customer has an outstanding experience. Right. That makes sense. I, as this sounds, so we ha we offer the marketing ops playbook template, uh, on the website. Right. And we gave about a hundred copies of those away today in a campaign, which was awesome.

Um, so it sounds like you’re actually. Doing like your customer journey mapping exercise is taking everything from the customer’s perspective, the touch points, getting down into what technology enables all of these different touchpoints into the delivery mechanisms. Then you’re identifying the master data model and you’re actually doing like a data dictionary exercise.

And then you’re like eventually getting to a place where it’s all documented, which sounds like my marketing operations playbook really needs to be overhauled. And I should probably consult because I’m not really, I’m not doing enough to provide a great role model for the, for the listeners. But, but it sounds like this is a really robust thing, right?

Like you’re going from, from customer down into data dictionary, which is pretty impressive. Well, and so a little bit about me that we kind of didn’t hit on. Um, my background, I started off in oil and gas at a fortune five company. And the challenge there was process and the processes were so poor that people were, I wouldn’t say embezzling money, but they were spending the company’s money for personal things that no one had line of sight to.

And no one can. But it was costing billions of dollars a year. And I very quickly became aware of databases and structure and information and all of these things. And we have, I mean, I was able to take my job and reduce it to an Excel spreadsheet in a few months because of the consistency in the data set we had.

And so. As long as we’re willing to take the information that we have, we have the ability to learn and adapt and change. And marketing is very rich with data and information around our customers. And so the more we can use that to give them the better experience. The better we’re going to perform as a business.

The happier clients are going to be for working with us. And on the happier the customers are going to be working with our clients. Yeah. I think the point everyone should take away from this right. To do this, right. It’s not just a. We’re going to get a room for two hours, we’re going to do whatever we’re going to Vizio, or we’re going to do this chart, and then we’re just done, right.

See you next year. Right. There’s there’s a lot more that goes into it to, to actually get the most out of it. And what’s interesting to me is, um, we had a little bit of this conversation. I think we touched on it with, uh, our last guest one where we talked about, um, customer experience, which is, I think, overlaps with this as a little bit too.

And the idea. Really buyers are way more in control than most organizations believe that they are. I mean, I literally talked to a vendor today to yesterday and I was like, and it’s somebody I know. And I’ve worked with tonight. And I was like, you know, if I’m interested in your stuff, you know, I could just go to this community.

I could just go ask what other people are paying and I could find out. Right. So, you know, you know, don’t, don’t like, like, go ahead. Like, I’m not going to like, and this is a person who I would trust anyway, but it’s just, you know, I think. The point being right. If you think you’re in control, you’re not putting pricing on your site.

You’re not like all these sayings, like people get around it nowadays. They know how to do it. They know how to get access to it. Communities are a part of it. Yeah. I’d say you can’t hide anymore. And I mean, we’ve all experienced it where we get the, I’m going to say the arrogant salesman who thinks they control the cards and it just pisses us off.

It’s like, I know I have all this information, a little anecdotal story. Beginning of the year I bought a new car. I knew exactly what I wanted. I knew the model with no questions, predated the loan app, everything with the dealer I show up, it still took me seven hours to leave the dealership with my new car.

Oh, heck no. I will walk my ass out of there. There’s cursing on this episode, we need to put a disclaimer. They sorry. Yeah, no, I mean, I think 20 years ago I walked out, like I had on you for sticking that out though. The internet, you know, I, I had arranged everything over the phone and I, I, at that point I was in a walking cast.

My wife dropped me off. She was going to do something else that we had a deal done. And I was like, I had to call my wife and I was like, come back, pick me up. They’re changing things. And I’m like, no, not going to do it. That’s just for us to be. 10 more minutes, 10 more minutes until seven hours later. And it’s one of those where.

Okay. You’ve already got my trade in, so I can’t just leave. Right, right. So you’re kind of like hamstrung and it’s just like, that’s not right. So moral for, for all of our software users out there. The moral of the story is don’t let them know that you’ve already forfeited your subscription to your marketing automation platform.

Your next one, right? Oh, my subscription just ended two days ago. Oh, so you need one right now? Well, well, all right. I don’t want to take a name stat, but there’s a few marketing or sales enabled marketing enablement platforms out there. That they do still take that approach. They give you the intro version for free or low cost.

And if you want to get your information out of it, it costs you an arm and a leg. Oh my God. That would be horrible. And so, I mean, that’s even part of the tech stack selection is making sure you pick something that if you know, you’re going to outgrow, you understand what does it take to get out of it?

I’ve I’ve taken it’s like they tell you to always control the conversation. Right. But like nowadays fires and everyone has so much data in their hands and everything already from like G2, from Amazon, from Google reviews right there already. They already know what they’re getting by the time they’re on a call with you.

They’re like, I just wanna see if you’re a good human. Do I want to buy from you? Like.

I just want to know if I like you. I mean, that’s why we do the no bullshit demos on the website, the MO Pros dot com. We, we talk to these providers to really just cut through the noise. Cause nobody likes talking to sales. We want to answer the questions that we care about and we just want to get to the bottom of it.

And then I want to make a decision on if I really want to go, you know, take the next step. I was on with someone earlier today who is looking to, to kind of do a little bit more in the north American market. And my first piece of advice, they, you know, they were like, you’ve got this audience of marketing operations professionals.

Um, you know, what do you, what do you think? And I was like, well, I’m looking at your site and I will tell you. That you need to put pricing on it. Like no buddy, in this role, if this is a persona you want to sell to, like, I would venture to say that almost no. Is okay with pricing, not being on the page.

Like you need to have pricing on the page and it’s crazy to me. So just to, just to kind of like echo that the idea of like information is needed, it’s necessary. It’s it’s normally out there and when you hold it back or you try to control too much of the conversation, right. As land, it just turns into a bad experience.

And then the idea like your customer journey is totally broken, right? Like they’re not gonna want to convert. No doubt, no doubt. So let me bring us back. It let’s get out. Let’s get out of bashing vendors now in salespeople for a little bit, and let’s, uh, let’s kinda get to half the fun. I know it’s kinda fun sometimes.

Um, but let, so one of the things we touched on and I want to make sure we, we addressed this before, because Naomi, I think asked the question about like, how often do you review? I think a related question I have for folks so clearly, right? There’s a lot of investment in time, right? You know, split sweat, tears to, if you do it right, right.

To get this customer journey mapping figured out, get it into your systems. Once you have that, if you have any chance of monitoring it, you need to know what you’re measuring. What metrics should you be watching? How do you, how do you review it? Do you have any suggestions on how you approach the measurement and a key metrics you like to use when you’re evaluating?

Did the, did we get the mapping, right? Yeah. So, I mean, Dashboards. I mean, business will say business intelligence or business analytics like buzzword from 5, 10, 15 years ago. That was everywhere. It still holds true. You’ve got. I understand which metrics are actually moving your business along. So if that’s sales or new customers or MRR or whatever those numbers are that move your business forward and allow you to do what you want to do, those are the numbers you need to be tracking on your dashboards, and then you want to track the numbers that lead to that conversion.

So if you’ve got a direct correlation, For every thousand clicks, I get, I’m going to get one subscriber. And for every one subscriber or every hundred subscribers, I’m going to get one customer. Then those clicks matter. But if you’re just looking at views on an ad, oh, Hey, it showed up a hundred thousand times this month.

That’s such a dynamically changing number that it may not mean anything to if you’re being successful because it’s in front of the right people. And so. It’s a good number to have on your dashboard. Cause you could look at that conversion rate and say, okay, this is lower than I expected. And so that’s where like scientific method here at night.

I hate to be nerdy, but what is your hypothesis? How are you going to test against it and what things need to happen for you to reevaluate or consider? Yes, we celebrate nerdiness. safe place. Yeah. Like the nerdiness accepted. I spoke to somebody who said that she, she teaches people. What the, like what a P value.

Because she’s like a PhD, like cancer researcher like this. I was like, I, I’m going to just stay on the phone with you for the next hour nerdiness, except so I could give my like really bad joke of a white or either the ex vinegar walks up to either the ex of the party and says, why don’t you integrate yourself?

Ah, Y nothing will change.

jokes, the sound effect. Come on. Oh yeah, we have the media. Let’s do that next time. Um, yeah, no, I mean, so it’s all about like having a process. And so if you know, what’s gonna move the needle, I mean, we’ll go down a little bit of a rabbit hole. How do you determine how much you should spend on a CPC?

Do you just pick a number that feels good, whatever, whatever we spent last time, probably my, my, my thing is whatever the like lower number than what Google tells me I should be spending. So I go a step further. I look at how much money did my client make that month for. Okay. How many views, how many clicks and I’m doing math all the way back up to determine, okay, here’s my maximum CPC value.

If I’m spending more than $2 and 50 cents a click, he’s losing money with this conversion rate. Now, if I can go anywhere under that and I’m safe, but that’s my threshold is what can I still make a profit margin under? Sure. Yeah. That makes sense. Backing into numbers is a good idea for. And so it’s the same thing with building your dashboards, what numbers are moving your business.

And I mean, for me, it’s sales calls, the more sales calls I can get on the better I’m doing, but I want to make sure I have a good close rate. Yeah, no, I, I think, I think what you described, I think it was like all the micro conversions along that journey. Right. And so if you could start to impact. All of them positively.

Right. You get a multiplier effect. Wow. Okay. So we went, we went deep and wide on this one, and this has been a really a fun conversation. And we even got some cursing from micro-business. So thank you, Mike. Appreciate that. Bringing the adult language, we’ve got some cursing from you to me. I think you alluded to a curse word.

It’s okay. Don’t tell anyone my kids or my kids might listen to this. I doubt it. Well, yes, Lucas is Lynn. Thank you for joining us today. We appreciate it. If folks want to connect with you or learn more about what y’all are doing, what’s the best place for them to do that. So on our website, which is www dot Thea, marketing.com, how do you, how do you spell Thea?

Uh, T H E R a. Got it. All right. Thea marketing director. Awesome. All right. Well, thank you so much. And, uh, Mike, Naomi, thank you as always keep it, us keeping us honest here. Uh, thanks to our listeners for joining us as always. We ask you to, uh, subscribe, rate review, give us your feedback. So this ideas for topics and guests, or if you want to be a guest.

Great. Everyone. Thanks for this. And we’re going to call it a wrap. Bye everyone. Bye everybody. Bye.