With Ryan Koonce, Founder and CEO of Mammoth Growth
Marketing Ops is not defined by the tools they use but by the strategy they apply to navigate the evolving landscape of MarTech. Ryan Koonce speaks on the future of Marketing Ops in the context of tech, the best times to leverage external consultants, and best practices of visualizing Marketing Ops data.
Ryan Koonce is the founder and CEO of Mammoth Growth. His professional experience spans entrepreneurial endeavors in businesses that leverage technology to maximize ROI.
Ryan’s specialties involve business building (strategic and tactical), including finance, marketing, sales, operations, and product development.
What do you see as the role of Marketing Ops today, and where do you see its potential to grow in the future?
The proliferation of different marketing, product, data, databases, and visualization tools have started to basically take over the organization. It speaks to the evolution of marketing ops. The best marketing ops organizations are data-driven with the ability to work across the organization, because these things need to work together.
How can you leverage an external consultant to help affect change?
A lot of companies are inclined to move from one tool to another without being driven by the fact that there's something wrong. The team in place just knows the new thing better and can use it more quickly.
An external consultant would ask, “Well, what are we trying to do? What business questions are we trying to answer? Let's document the goals we're trying to achieve so that we can quantify the value of this move.”
Another area an external consultant can help lend clarity to is the timeline for change. We don’t want to change multiple things at once. Instead, let’s only cut over these three things that are really low risk, for instance. Then we’d make sure everybody understands what that cut-over looks like in the new system and gets value out of it.
Almost every time, the only instance where you run into problems is when the company doesn't call the consultant until 30 days before their contract is up. And so it's like, oh yeah..we want to cut over, but we have to do it in 30 days.
You should expect any migration to take twice as long as what you provisioned for it.
What are the best ways to visualize marketing ops data to prevent decisions made on “gut feelings” by executives?
I would just stop saying the word “conversions.” Pick whatever it is you’re measuring and use that as the metric. For example, revenue per signup, revenue per lead capture. etc.
Having a conversion metric is never going to tell the story in the organization in a similar way that MQL isn't going to tell the story.
No matter the tool you use, visualizations should be done in cohorts in a way that tells a story. They need to answer those business questions that the team or the company has agreed to as important to the business.
You don’t need to think of a lead as a vanity metric. It's something that you have to have. But you have to have it in the context of the question you're trying to answer.
