Christian Klepp  00:00

Failed implementations can put B2B marketers at risk of losing credibility and budget. They need to plan properly, take calculated risks and always have a backup plan. So how can marketing teams ensure their martech implementation is geared up for success? Welcome to this episode of the B2B Marketers on a Mission podcast, and I’m your host, Christian Klepp. Today, I’ll be talking to Raja Walia, who’ll be answering this question. He’s the founder and CEO of GNW Consulting, a strategic marketing operations agency that specializes in helping companies navigate the complexities of marketing technology. Tune in to find out more about what this B2B marketers mission is. You Mr. Raja Walia, welcome to the show, Sir. 

Raja Walia  00:46

Hey. Thank you for having me, Christian. 

Christian Klepp  00:48

Great to have you on the show, Raja. And I’m really looking forward to this conversation, because I think a part of this is going to be a little bit of a tougher discussion, and that’s just a bit of a hint of what’s to come. That said, I think it’s an extremely important conversation to have. And B2B, marketers really need to be paying attention to this stuff. So let’s dive right in. Raja, you’re on a mission to provide companies with the strategic guidance needed to adapt to the ever evolving martech landscape. So for this conversation, I want to focus on the following topic, how marketing teams can ensure their martech implementation is geared up for success. So just to provide the audience with a bit of context, your company. So GNW consulting, in partnership with demand metric, you recently launched the state of martech implementation report, and that was based on insights from more than 200 marketing leaders. So I want to kick off the conversation with this question, how do failed implementations put marketing teams at risk of losing credibility and budget?

Raja Walia  01:54

No, it’s a good question, and one of the reasons that we generated the report is, I think it’s very crucial, especially in today’s economy where, you know, budgets are kind of being hit as much as possible, and marketing is always under the gun. Because you got to realize that executive level outcomes are all realistically that matter. So when we think about the idea of a failed implementation, what we’re really thinking about is what was promised and what didn’t occur. And that’s how at the executive board level, generally, we look at it. So it’s not only that the CMO takes a hit, you know, it’s the finance gets involved and starts questioning whether marketing should really be trusted with budget at all at that point, right? What execs and generally what marketing teams kind of get is that failure usually kind of starts from an implementation perspective by not having it’s not bad tech. It’s the idea of what the business goals and outcomes are. And we tend to fall down this rabbit hole of a kind of like a traditional motion of implementation, whereas in the current state of things, it’s a technical implementation aligned with what the business is set to accomplish, and we don’t, as marketers, we don’t really convey that like, we don’t really like, emphasize how it’s going to solve bigger problems. So I think the idea behind the report, realistically, was that we lose credibility because we’re so focused on the technical that we don’t really operate and say this is what the business is doing better now than they were doing before. And that’s generally, I think we’re not, we’re not factoring those we’re not factoring those ideas well enough, and we’re just focusing on the tech and how well the tech is implemented.

Christian Klepp  03:43

Absolutely, absolutely. Maybe this is stated in the report. But I’d also like to get your perspective, just from your experience, right like, and I know, I know that this can go down several different paths, but just Why do you think fail like, implementations fail like from a general perspective, like, where do marketing teams get it wrong generally?

Raja Walia  04:08

So I think, from a if you think logistically about implementations, it’s the idea of what you’re doing and how it’s going to help the business grow. Once again, executives don’t really look at Tech the same way that we look at Tech, they see it as kind of an end to a means (means to an end). The means (ends) is one of the things, either grow the business, expand the business, or market the business. So realistically, what when we treat implementations, just like a system implementation or a system greater enhancement? I think that’s like step one. That’s where generally that operational mindset starts, starts down the path of, okay, now we are now we are focusing on just the technical outcome, but not how it relates to what the goal of the business is. So I think in. And it’s a very clear fix, like we worked with a lot of companies, and the idea is like, what is the ownership across functions and how is it going to relate to overall business goals? That’s a conversation that, generally, as marketers, we need to have a lot more of to say, what are we solving for the business, rather than what are we implementing for the business? And, you know, honestly, too many times we kind of buy software, and they said, and we asked, well, what can it do, which is completely opposite of what we should be doing. We should be going in with the idea of, this is what the business is trying to do. How does your software make our life easier or fulfill this task? Right? And I think it’s just a switch, and it’s just a switch, and thought process on how we look at marketing technology.

Christian Klepp  05:47

Absolutely, absolutely. I’m going to move us on to the next question about what are some of the key pitfalls that you think marketing teams should be avoiding, and what should they be doing instead?

Raja Walia  06:00

So I think the reality of this is that most what we outlined in the report is that most implementations actually fail before even the kickoff of the implementation that happens, right? So we assume that implementations are a checklist of things that need to be done. Milestone. You know, we base everything off on milestones, cut overs, and we treat it like kind of an operational shift, more of a changing of the guards, kind of, so to speak, right? But we don’t clarify roles. We don’t clarify outcomes. We don’t map out processes. We don’t even kind of really, teams are brought in as implementation is happening, rather than essentially aligning with all these different departments on where their goals are and how technology is going to fill those gaps. Right? It doesn’t matter how good the tool is. It all depends on how each department sometimes is going to use it. 

Raja Walia  06:53

So when we talk about teams who, you know, generally buy software, that’s, that’s what the pitfall of it, right? The biggest hole is kind of a double edged knife like the state of martech report shows that marketing software has increased by a ridiculous amount over the last 10 years. So it’s more we’re buying software and we’re not solving business problems, and that’s one of it really. We have to treat implementations like it’s a business change, not an upgrade, right? We have to budget for enablement. And here’s the and that’s the kick. Thing about enablement is that people tend to implement a product and it’s kind of like a I win button, right? Like you hit the button and it’s just going to run. And the reality is, there’s an entire change management there’s an adoption process that we fail to kind of take. We just think the software is going to get set up. We’re going to hire someone, and they’re just going to take it over. And the reality is they when we don’t have conversations about who owns what and what the business is attempting to do with a product, then at that point, it just becomes another software solution that someone is operating out of which does not relate, which just does not trickle upstream. It does not have any relationship to what the business goal is, whether what the business goal is or what the outcome that’s expected. So if no one owns that kind of the results, and no one’s accountable for the failure, it’s going to go back to whoever started that initiative, which in this case is going to be the marketing team. So, yeah.

Christian Klepp  08:23

You brought up a really great point, and I’ve seen that go awry sometimes, like it’s that complete lack of ownership, that lack of clarity from the get go of who is owning this, who is responsible for whatever task it is and whichever milestones, and even even that, even that checking in process so called, right? Like, as you’re as you’re moving along in the implementation, right? 

Raja Walia  08:45

Yeah. I mean, we’re so focused on milestones of data points of when implementation has to be successful. There’s no milestones on, hey, are we? Are we close to hitting what the business intended to do? Are we close to addressing all of the reasons why we need software. The milestones are always just very heavily focused on, we need to have this much data, or this needs to be set up by this date. And that’s, once again, that’s not, in my opinion, that’s not worth investing in, like, you know, as the owner of a company, I’m not investing in, when all our data is going to be moved from one location to the other location. It’s, do we need all the data, or are we trying to do something better with it? That’s the goal, right? When we’re trying to make things easier, more efficient, you know, we’re trying to scale things. We’re trying to onboard, like, there has to be an end result, not just a product to product shift, which honestly is not really worth investing in and that’s when we talk about, like, budgets getting cut. That’s when budgets get cut. That’s when we lose, you know, the quote, unquote seat at the table is because you’re not trusted to understand how business impact is being applied to software.

Christian Klepp  09:54

Absolutely, absolutely, um, based on the report and also your experience. Of course, what do you believe is the hidden revenue impact of misaligned technology investments? 

Raja Walia  10:06

So based on the report, I think there’s a kind of a clear understanding that revenue markers, and whether it’s in the in the capacity of opportunities, in the capacity of going up to bat, so to speak, getting enough data, getting enough leads to Century pitch to that there is a equivalency of that in relationship to what the cost of what the cost of implementing this, right? So if we just look at from a revenue like, there isn’t a hard number, however, it’s the efficiency of delaying campaigns, not having a staff appropriated and understanding how to work inside the environment that lead to downstream effects. Right? The short term revenue is the cost of the products that you’re implementing. Right? It’s the cost of the resources that you’ve been staffed with. It’s the cost of partners that you’ve kind of partnered with. That’s a short term goal, but really the emphasis is, where does revenue impact? And it’s a compounding value over time. It’s a slow system. It, you know, leads to campaign launches being, not going, not being, essentially set on time, routing sales follow ups. 

Raja Walia  11:23

I mean, the number one, the first complaint of a mismanaged implementation, is the sales team raising their hand and saying, Hey, we don’t see a single lead, or we don’t see a single prospect that we can work with. Like, there’s pipeline inconsistencies that are happening, right? And that’s where the first complaints start happening. Well, now if you think about what a sales team is supposed to be doing, is now they’re more spending more time working outside of the system, rather than within the system. So the delay in, I mean, they still have to hit their they still have to hit their quotas. So the delay in understanding what that system is really providing goes away. Well, now you have, you might have bad data issues, right? But from a leadership takeaway perspective, it’s the long term revenue impact of and I’m trying to think of the exact number that’s essentially that they provided, but it’s, it’s upwards in depending on the size of the business. A small size business will see impact in hundreds and $1,000 of revenue, and an enterprise will see million dollars of impact based on the report, over time, over the compounding of just things not working as they intended, over a period of time.

Christian Klepp  12:34

I mean, the the part where you brought up the issue with sales, where they’re talking about, like pipeline inconsistencies, I think was the word that you used that in itself would already be a bit of a red flag, because if the sales already start complaining about that, that can, that can have a snowball effect on the entire implementation.

Raja Walia  12:55

Yeah, and you know, a lot of that isn’t uncovered prior to implementation happening, and a lot of is uncovered post implementation, where the budget has already been spent. So at that point, you’re kind of creating a band aid solution, right? The idea behind this report is that there’s different out of the executives that we kind of interviewed for the report. There’s a varying degree of what the revenue impact is, because each business model works different. Each sales pipeline, sales stages and sales funnels work differently. But the idea is that no matter how you dissect it, you know, we could give some arbitrary number, like, hey, you know, you have millions of dollars and $2 million of impact, you know, per quarter. The reality is due to the inefficiencies of implementation and the misalignment. There is a bleed effect of revenue quarter over quarter, because it’s an end in two aspects. One is just reaching out to appropriate people to read another at the right time, and two, just missing opportunities that sales is either not taking the consideration or have glazed over. It could be 100% of a very valued opportunity. And marketing could be right, that this person is qualified and they want to do business with us, but the precedence has already been set that there is no trust there, so the sales will move off of their own move. It will work on their own kind of basis, right? And I think there’s an idea of that, is that, yes, there is a revenue impact long term. Everyone in the report has said there is revenue impact. If you want to concrete dollar value, that’s a little bit tough based on business development.

Christian Klepp  14:28

Absolutely, absolutely. And you brought you brought up one topic, Raja, which I thought was a great segue to the next question about the importance of, you know, preventing this implementation failure. What’s the importance of conducting the right research, having the right plan in place before any of this happens.

Raja Walia  14:47

When we usually start, and when and when we usually start and we have these conversations, the goal is to build a system based on data and facts. If you build a system or migrate to a system because you’ve used it before, it’s around assumption, that’s a very dangerous game to play, right? So you don’t want to just launch something. You want to scale intelligently and effectively, and that can only kind of happen when you have a really good blueprint and understanding of what the business use cases. You have to know where the process gaps are. You have to know if your data is even ready for it, right? There’s a lot of times, and you’ve ran into this too, Christian, as well. We’re starting implementation, not knowing what the data limitations are, not connecting with the data team. And then you’re, you’re in the thick of it, and you’re implementing, and the data is like, hey, the data, data is not going to be ready for three months. Boom. What is that going to cost the company? Right? 

Raja Walia  15:40

What is the cost of the company? And here’s one thing before I get into like, what we can do to solve it, is that the what the report showed is that there’s data and revenue, and let’s just say, Let’s not talk about revenue. Let’s just say money, right? There’s money being lost on both ends, the cost of implementation, and delaying implementation of a product because you’re already spending money to do it. And two, the downstream effects of all of that. So not only is your budget getting hit that you’re losing money in your investment that could have been, you know, who knows? You could have spent it on hard works and generated, you know, maybe a couple leads, or whatever it is that you could have attributed to and two the downstream effects of actually having an improper implementation. So really, what that said is, like, if you’re a leader in the space, what you really have to push for, then you really have to push against is the idea of doing something quickly and fast, and say, what are we trying to solve? Like that is the number one question, regardless of what a platform does. You know at this point, you know, we’re a pretty tech agnostic company. I’ve been inside all of these platforms for the last 15 years, and the reality is, like, what are you trying to solve as a business? What is your goal? And if you don’t know that your implementation is already off to the wrong foot, second, who’s involved? What are the teams that it’s going to impact, right, in our you know, and I can kind of generally answer that question, since we’re, you know, it’s, we’re in a B2B marketing podcast, it’s generally going to be marketing, it’s generally going to be sales, it’s generally going to be customer success, right? Like, those are the teams that are going to be involved. 

Raja Walia  17:17

And one follow up question is like, what are you trying to do better, right? What? What are the data points that you’re trying to hit that make is going to make this entire implementation shift worth it, which is a question that rarely gets asked, right? It’s we’re implementing this project or product fix it into what you do. And I think the kind of the main thing is like, what does success mean and how does it show up to each of these teams? Sales will answer. I need to know when to contact someone. I need those signals because that’s very crucial to me, customer success and the customer customer success teams would be like I need to know when people are up for renewals if you’re in a licensing subscription model. I need to know if they’re having an issue with product onboarding. I need to know, you know, financially, how the business is doing, what are because they need to know all of these things from a renewal perspective, are they even using the platform? You know, so that type of like, if you were to take, like, those three things before you even start investing into what technologies that strategy is going to protect your budget from being from being spent twice. One to do it, once, to implement it, another, to fix it, right? And if this, those are very, three, very good questions before you even go down the rabbit hole of looking at 15,000 pieces of technology that you may or may not need.

Christian Klepp  18:40

Fantastic, fantastic. Yeah, absolutely. And I think, I think, with that, you already answered the next question about the actionable tips, because that’s, that’s pretty much what it is, right?

Raja Walia  18:50

Yeah. So I’ll say this though I’ll expand on to it. Those are three high level items, but let’s expand on to the idea of, like, real world scenarios that leaders have to expect, right? And this is, this is something that you take away and you write it down on a sticky note, and you just stick it there, and you’re saying, Hey, I’m going to implement something for sales, or I’m gonna implement something from marketing. And it’s universal, no matter what business you work at, right? You want to audit and execution your bottlenecks. Where are the handoffs or campaigns, slowing down tech at that point should be a lever to move them, not a blocker, if it’s a blocker, or if it’s not needed, or if there’s a workaround, then you really have to look at, am I investing something to fix a process, or am I investing something because of tech? And this is one of the most crucial things, especially if you’re in the C-suite, and you’re a marketer, so CMO, CROs, you have to tie you have to speak the language of the board, the committee, the CEO, whoever it is, you have to speak their language. You have to say this product and this feature is going to help us achieve this business goal. If. Can’t map it to sales efficiency, pipeline health, customer retention. Question is, why did we pay for it? 

Raja Walia  20:06

Number one question that gets asked, why did we pay for it, if it’s not going to increase sales efficiency, if we’re not impacting our pipeline health or moving people, and if it’s not retaining customers, what is the purpose behind the product? Right? And people will argue on that point. There are certain things written. There are certain things that people will say, Well, what about PR (Public Relations) for example, what about brand recognition? We can’t really tie that to revenue. And once again, I clarify. It’s not revenue. It’s a goal. Brand is the perception of your company. It makes sales more efficient as sellers, if you’re a recognized business, sales can leverage it, right? So I want to make sure I understand and make sure I differentiate between tying everything to business initiatives. Does not mean tying it to revenue. It’s tying it to what the outcomes are, right? And while also you got to involve your go to market stakeholders. This is, you know, personally, I’ve been inside the space for long enough, and even in the implementation report, sales, customer success, marketing operations usually get involved after a decision is made. They actually, you should really be aligning them with that before launch, because that’s what hub that helps and avoid rebuilds or restructures. And the number one thing that gets skipped when I’m gonna throw it out to you, Christian, what do you think the number one thing that gets skipped in all of implementations is.

Christian Klepp  21:32

Oof.

Raja Walia  21:34

That’s, let’s forget technology. Let’s forget everything else. That’s all of the stuff. But the number one thing that really kind of impacts how your system is going to be used over time.

Christian Klepp  21:45

Well, what about auditing what’s currently working?

Raja Walia  21:49

So auditing what’s currently working, but also enablement of your team that’s going to be managing the platform. No one budgets for it. No one says, Hey, we’ve implemented this. We’re going to have some sort of ongoing training. So as you know, here’s the crazy part. People might be surprised to learn this, but software products have updates, and they have quarterly updates, monthly updates, right? They have they have biannually updates. Sometimes there’s hot fixes that completely breaks it. No one takes into account what the cost of investing and budgeting for actual hands on training really means? It’s not a training that is post implementation support. It’s what is your internal team going to need in order to operate the system without constant external help. And I know that sounds really funny, coming from an agency that is really built a model around external help. But the reality is, things are going to product is going to change. An update could come up, come across, and completely bypass a flow or a workflow or some sort of technical thing that you set up right? And then that’s the reality of software. 

Raja Walia  22:58

But no one invests in that constant update of products. People invest in implementation, and they may, they don’t invest in internal team. And the last thing, because I like to doing things in five. So feel five is a lucky number. Start with a narrow MVP right now. Let’s prove an impact with a small use case, and then let’s expand it. Once the system earns trust in internally farming far too many times a leadership team sits there and paints this picture of a beautiful, utopian view of a system that is so cohesive once implementation is done. And, you know, implementation, to me, is just the starting point, right? So narrow your MVP (Minimum Viable Product) into what you can solve a it’ll save you money, because you won’t need a bunch of features. Remember, you know, features can always be added on, on later in time. But I think if you take those like five things when it comes to be like as a B2B marketer and as a leader, and you take those into consideration, it’s really hard to make sure, it’s really hard to have a failed implementation when all those things are along.

Christian Klepp  23:58

Yeah, yeah, no, absolutely, absolutely. And you know that point you said about updates, I would even throw in, and this may or may not be completely off, but also anticipating that sometimes with software, with technology, things can go wrong, and you need to have a backup plan for that, right? And perhaps this is a bit far fetched, but I think we all remember the CrowdStrike outage.

Raja Walia  24:20

Yeah. 

Christian Klepp  24:20

Right? 

Raja Walia  24:21

Or even, or even a domain outage, or even even, I should even, even necessarily a something with it was the most recent one. We received a notification one of the platforms that we said that there was an outage to the cloud server that hosted everything you couldn’t get access to a product. Remember this slack? How did, yes, people even know what to do, right? Like, I’m not sure you have to implement slide, but these things happen even at the highest tier of companies that own these products and people. And I’ll tell you, because you’re like, people do not budget for it. Companies do not budget for their internal teams to make sure that they’re, you know, understanding what the system updates are and what they’re pushing. So when something. Happens. You know, it’s like, Oh, I’ll get a coffee until systems are back. And then the executive team’s like, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, we need to figure out what’s going on here. 

Christian Klepp  25:08

Yeah, absolutely, absolutely, okay. Metrics, so in terms of what we’ve been talking about now, what metrics do you think marketing teams should be paying attention to, and why?

Raja Walia  25:23

I’m gonna say revenue, and that’s all I’m gonna say about it, because that is the ultimate goal. If you’re a for profit business, the end goal of metrics is a no brainer, that you have to be contributing, attributing, influencing some sort of revenue statistics. If that is, that is mandatory, that is the baseline minimum that you have to be doing, right for if you’re a for profit organization. Now let’s talk about, let’s forget vanity metrics. No one cares about open clicks and conversion rates and stuff like. Let’s focus on the tactical and operational ones that impact a business rhythm, like a business flow. Let’s just say, time to campaign. How fast are you prepared to get a campaign out the door? How fast are you able to pivot with a strategy, assuming that there’s a fluctuation in the market? And you know, I can tell you a couple of examples, very specifically, of a product launch that fell on the same day as a outage. How fast can you pivot to not have a product launch on that day? Right? And can you convey that information effectively enough to the leadership to say, hey, it would be it would not impact us. We’re not going to get good results out of this, right? So what is your time to campaign? What is your time to pivot and change based off sales response to handoff? Right? I think it’s very clear to say that we don’t live in 2018 anymore, or 2015 or 2013 when marketing and sales had at least 24 hours, maybe 48 hours to respond. 

Raja Walia  27:03

I don’t want to say it’s instantaneous. However, it’s sales response times. If you haven’t view as you know your listeners and yourself haven’t realized she’ll be fine. Go in, yeah, yeah. You fill out a form, you get a call almost immediately, right? I’m not saying that’s the best way to do it, depending on the product that you’re selling, but what is your response? What is your post lead handoff, when sales call someone, when something is identified, and if you can tell at the executive level, our sales response time is this fast or this this clarified. That’s a very good metric. And if you don’t know it, and you’re listening and you don’t know that metric, that would be a very good starting point, because that’s what tells you as a business how fast we’re going to mark, how fast our sales teams are reaching out conversion from lead. And here’s the kicker, not marketing qualified. You can have a separate conversation on my whole stance on marketing qualified leads, but from when a person is created to a qualified opportunity. 

Raja Walia  28:02

Now I’ve jumped, if you probably, if you’re, if you’re in the traditional sense of the world. I probably jumped lead to contact conversion to, you know, I jumped the anonymous to known, to engage, to qualify to sales, accepted to sales, qualified to opportunity. I’ve jumped all of that from lead to qualified op. The reason being, everything else in the middle is fluff. Right from an executive standpoint, you can tell me, I have 1000 marketing qualified leads at the end of the day. Qualified Ops is what you’re measuring against, no matter what. That’s just the day, and then also your influence and attribute like what you attributed to those qualified ops. Seven years ago, eight years ago, those conversion metrics were all over the place, right? Oh, we generated, you know, 1000 marketing qualifiers. We sales accepted this much, and sales qualified this and nowadays it’s okay, cool. All of that stuff doesn’t matter how many qualified opportunities. What is their percentage of clothes? That’s what they care about. So I bypass the other stuff. It’s not and once again, I want to clarify once again, I’m not saying that it’s not important. I’m not saying that we have to do all of those things, but to answer the question, what are the key metrics that marketers should be paying attention to? We should be paying attention to how fast leads are getting converted into qualified opportunities. 

Raja Walia  29:22

Everything else that we do we have to do, it’s part of the business, right? No matter what. And then probably some marketers are probably not going to hear like me saying this, one go, but sales, sales, sales cycle velocity, because everyone says, Well, hey, you know one marketing hands off to sales. It’s not really, no, it 1,000% is still your until that becomes a qualified opportunity. If we are being attributed as marketers, and we are being held accountable for our association to revenue, then we really have to understand the, you know, this is a what is the sales cycle velocity of this, right? We and if we don’t understand that metric, we’re going to go to the board, and we’re going to be like, we generated X amount of leads and turned into, you know, 50 opportunities. And if we don’t, if we cannot answer, by the way, you’re not going to see the revenue and return on this in six months, because that’s a sales cycle. That’s the standard sales cycle as a company that we’re hitting, then you’re going to be held accountable for, well, okay, how many of those are? And you’re gonna have to answer those questions on the fly. So sales cycle, you know, I describe this as marketing, is that one person in school, on the team project that has to just make sure everything and everyone is doing their job. That’s I get it. I get it. I get people don’t want to hear that, but that’s it. We’re that person, right? Where that person that says, Did the sales following up with these people? Because we’re not a we marketing qualified people. And you go do what you got to do now, yeah, hence the rise of the CRO and revenue operation, people who can consistently see it over it, and that’s where CMOs and marketing teams are getting bumped down, and we’re losing credibility. They’re like, Okay, well, we’re just gonna hire someone to do it. So you have to be able to understand that you are the team lead, the group lead, part of the person that’s making sure the team project is on time. You got to make sure that the sales is that you just have to do it in this day and range. 

Christian Klepp  31:23

That’s it. I told you that this was going to be a hard conversation for the audience, but hey, here, here we are right. Like, okay, fantastic. I mean, stay up on your soapbox a little bit longer, Raja, because for this next question, man, like a status quo in your area of expertise that you passionately disagree with, and why?

Raja Walia  31:46

I think I actually just kind of covered a little bit of that on the last so, yeah, it’s, you know, if we’re talking specifically to marketers, right? So if your sales cover years, right? A sales job is very simple, in my opinion. You know, you sell deals, you have a quota. You don’t meet that quota, you’re not working at that company anymore, right? As marketers, the reason the rise of what we consider revenue operations. And if you Google revenue operations, the idea is to see everything marketing, sales and customer success. And then, if you like, really go down to the second page, they add on like seven other things that’s, you know, finances and also stuff. But the reality is, that’s what revenue operations as a revenue operations leader is supposed to do. 

Raja Walia  32:31

The what I passionately disagree with is that CMOs can’t do the same thing. A chief marketing officer has to be able to see all of those components in order to ensure marketing is being success like marketing is successful. And I think the this obsession with handoffs right is just so ludicrous that when you do the handoff, you don’t know how revenue is being impacted. And if you don’t know if revenue is being impacted, and the executives don’t know how your contribution to revenue is being impacted, then you are, you know, for lack of better world, a resource that is tangible and just kind of spending their days spinning the wheels, right? So revenue matters, and this is why I say that when we talk about KPIs, it’s these things that you want to measure, and revenue, and revenue sits alone, and you have to not focus on it, and you’re not attributed to it like sales is. But you have to understand what revenue is being generated of your marketing initiatives, and if that means you’re the one doing it, that means you’re the one doing right? So it’s not like you have to measure a quarter, like, you know, there’s like I talked about, like, brand equity market, market Trust, the customer education, those are strategic assets that involve you and increase your brand presence. And marketing owns that. But for the longest time, we owned a lot more. Now we just own those because we are not seen as people that understand it. And I think that’s the biggest thing, is that if leadership cuts Those in favor of what’s immediately attributed, you end up with a short term pipeline. And I think the reason we look at short term pipeline is because we’ve removed ourselves by ourselves, like we’ve removed ourselves from the conversation of being a strategic support to the company, and, as you know, like, just kind of fluff type, kind of concepts. So I think, like, you know, if I disagree with the idea that marketing has to back off, I disagree with the idea that there is handoff like no if you’re if you’re a CMO, and you’re in marketing, you need to understand the customer, you need to understand the prospect, and you need to understand end to end, what’s going on in order to better structure your marketing campaigns, which, by the way, not a lot of people, I guess. Get that tape. But hey, that is what it is. 

Christian Klepp  35:02

There you are, man, there you are. You know, that’s also part of the reason why a lot of people internally within the organization view marketing as a cost center versus a profit center, right?

Raja Walia  35:15

And that term of marketing is a cost center is, I wouldn’t say it’s necessarily new. It’s new in the age of martech. 

Christian Klepp  35:23

Yes.

Raja Walia  35:23

During the martech boom, I think what it exposed was the inability for marketers to involve themselves into a broader conversation than just marketing. And I think that’s where the idea is like, well, you’re going to be looked as a cost center, if you cannot attribute, if you cannot show, and you don’t understand the sales side of things, I’m not saying you have to sell. You just have to understand what the sales, velocity, volume, everything that we mentioned before is. And if you don’t understand how long it takes you to close an opportunity, then you don’t know how many leads someone needs. How many marketing qualified I’m using air quotes here. How many marketing qualified leads you need to generate to fit into your sales velocity? And if you don’t know that metric, then you’re just going to be, once again, you’re going to be looked at as someone that is costing the company money.

Christian Klepp  36:12

Absolutely, absolutely. Okay. Raja, two more questions. I’m gonna let you go, all right. So here comes the bonus question. So, if you were to, if you were to go back and learn a new skill, what would it be and why?

Raja Walia  36:28

Well, not as, yeah, I got like, three follow up questions that call that question, okay, what time period are we talking about, right? If we were to go back, like, doing the martech boom, are we talking about prior to martech? Like, give me a little bit.

Christian Klepp  36:42

All right. Like, maybe I’ll simplify it. Like, go back maybe, maybe 10 years ago.

Raja Walia  36:49

Stock investments. No, I’m just kidding. I would really want to focus more on, like.

Raja Walia  36:59

I’m not sure if this is a skill or a tech, but the outcomes, I think, a lot of in my life, I learned what I’m talking about now. I learned very later in life, I was a very I was a solutions architect and a developer my entire life, right? Okay? And I didn’t understand all of these reasons. I just wanted to finish what I needed to finish. And I think understanding the business details, I’m not sure if this is directly asking, answering your question, but understanding how everything that I’ve done relates to some sort of business. 

Christian Klepp  37:28

Okay. 

Raja Walia  37:29

Outcome. 

Christian Klepp  37:29

Yeah. 

Raja Walia  37:30

Would actually probably have helped me sell myself even a little bit better, as I was kind of like, coming up and up. 

Christian Klepp  37:35

Yeah, yeah. Well, I think…

Raja Walia  37:37

And if you’re looking for more of like, Yeah, and if they’re looking for more technical understanding that I would probably say, definitely more coding, definitely a little bit more hands on coding from a personal perspective.

Christian Klepp  37:50

Okay, okay, yeah, that would have been the thing that I would have gone back and learned too, because, um, I can’t, I can’t write a line of code to save my life, but…

Raja Walia  38:01

I know how to hack and slash it, but, like, raw code is a little bit, yes, it’s especially a little bit different, which is kind of weird when you say that, Oh, you have a solutions architect and a dev dev background, but it’s definitely inside products from a dev perspective, not like a true Dev.

Christian Klepp  38:14

Yeah, yeah. Absolutely, absolutely. Raja, this has been a great conversation, so thanks again for your time and for sharing your experience with the listeners. Quick introduction yourself and how folks out there can give in touch with you.

Raja Walia  38:27

Yeah, so my name is Raja. I’ve been inside marketing as kind of like I’ve been in marketing prior to the tech boom, back since about 2011 when product started rolling out, I was essentially there at the epicenter of it, and learned all the products. Failed a lot as well. A lot of my experience actually comes from failures as much as successes. To tell you the truth, because when people were learning technology, you were just kind of figuring stuff out. So I’ve been doing it. I’ve been in the strategic side of things. I’ve been in the dev side of things I’ve done, you know, I’ve worked for corporations. I’ve worked for, you know, mid size businesses, to startups, and then I started my own agency here by come about 2018 people can reach out to me directly by, you know, just going to the website, my emails, Raja, https://gnwconsulting.com/. But if any questions on what we do and what we how we help, or how we operate, you know, with all of our clients in this capacity, which is, which are very passionate about, is that we’re not a marketing agency where, you know our operations agency, we’re a martech driven strategic agency. And it’s, it’s, it’s filling in these gaps, because that’s what we’re being asked to do.

Christian Klepp  39:35

Right, right. Fantastic, fantastic. Thanks again for your time. Um, take care, stay safe and talk to you soon.

Raja Walia  39:42

Awesome. Thank you, Christian. Take care.