On this week’s episode we are honored to have a very special guest, Dan Frohnen, CMO of Sendoso join our podcast.

Dan has been a repeat client of ours at 3 companies where he led marketing at Apttus, Skedulo and now Sendoso.

Dan shares some amazing insights and experiences into what a CMO looks for from their MOps team and how someone in MOps can elevate themselves all the way to CMO. Like he did.

Some great takeaways from our conversation includes:

• Career path from MOps to CMO
• MOps leader traits and how to separate yourself
• What a CMO looks for in MOps professionals
• ABM strategy and tech stack
• And much more!

Tune in for a fun listen (you won’t be disappointed) and let us know what you think!

Transcription

Crissy:

Okay, so for today's episode of fwd: thinking, we are super excited to have a special guest, Dan Frohnen. So welcome, Dan.

Dan:

Thank you so much. I'm super excited to be here today.

Crissy:

Dan is the CMO of one of the leading direct mail and e-gift sending platforms, Sendoso, and also has a great background. He's been one of our clients, actually, at a few different companies, including Skedulo, where he was the SVP of marketing, and Apttus, where he was the VP of marketing.

So when we thought of what traits does a CMO look for in a marketing ops person, one of the first people we thought of was Dan, just knowing how much he knows about the department. Actually, this leads us into our first area we want to talk about is Dan actually has a background in marketing ops. He was actually a director of marketing ops at a music publishing company. Probably a little bit different back then. But Dan, I would love to know what was it like leading MOps back in 2010? That was actually, I think, right when marketing operations was getting hot and starting. Can you take us through how you went from your director role in marketing ops all the way to CMO today?

Dan:

Sure. Yeah, I mean, running marketing ops in 2010 was way different than today, with the technology landscape and how much it's changed. But some things were super similar, right? Number one being I was responsible for all of our budget across marketing. So events, PR, advertising. I ran a central budget and I ran a central... We were structured in a way to where product data, and catalogs, and websites were very important to that business. So I ran a central kind of program manager function where we handled email marketing, all of the text variable data for these catalogs, and really kind of became the central hub of kind of data and information.

What marketing ops really was back then was trying new tools. So we started our very first email marketing programs. We started our very first digital catalogs. So we were doing a ton of direct mail. But we knew that if we create some actual digital interactive catalogs and marry that data back to the online and offline data, we could probably cut down our direct mail costs. So a lot of kind of that early audience match and behavior stuff without the tools to do it that we have today.

Dan:

When I started to progress throughout my career, I... Marketing operations to me is very closely if not the exact same thing as demand generation in a lot of ways, because you're really trying to find the most efficient ways to hit goals. That's kind of how I approached my marketing job after leaving that position. It's really what got me to where I am today.

My philosophy is first and foremost, data-driven. So that aligns you very well with sales if you're on the same page with what data you're supposed to be looking at. So I'm always looking at pipeline, I'm always looking at revenue. Obviously, we can get into the weeds and start talking about data as it relates to names, and MQLs, and SQLs and all that fun stuff. But fundamentally, if you can figure out those top level business objectives and then start to work backwards, you can leverage those marketing ops chops and pretty much take them wherever you want. Because it makes you financial-minded, it makes you efficient, it makes you able to have conversations across a lot of different areas.

Charlie:

Yeah, we talk about a lot of the time, marketing operations are the closest to the data. And if you're a data driven company, then marketing operations, they're the key to unlocking the insight from that data.

Crissy:

Yeah, and you're the closest just to all of marketing, like you said. I think marketing ops, it feels synonymous with just basically all of marketing. Like, "What encapsulates marketing ops?" It's basically everything going on in marketing.

We say that a lot too, because you know the data, you know to pull the data, you know what's important, but you also have the knowledge of even all of the campaigns and programs that go on across the business, across the whole lead lifecycle. That's so unique, I think, compared to other roles where you're very much siloed in your... So getting to be a CMO from those positions, you have a lot of education that you need to do, or falling back on the expertise of the people that own those departments.

Charlie:

Yeah, do you think that it's a solid career path for someone in marketing operations to progress kind of out of marketing operations to a more general and then moving up towards CMO?

Dan:

I absolutely do, and I kind of think when I think about people and their ability to do that, it's, "How can you be creative with the data?" Right? So I often feel that there's creativity in marketing just as much when you're talking to a creative director on the graphic side or talking about a marketing strategy is there is looking at marketing results and the strategy on the data side. And I think that the marketing ops people that can really master the creativity in the data side can easily apply it over to the other side. I think it makes them stronger, quite frankly, than people that don't understand data.

Charlie:

For sure. That storytelling around data, being able to not only understand the real technical aspects of it, but being able to communicate that well with the company, being able to tell that story, so maybe people who aren't as technical can draw the same insights and to understand it as well.

Obviously now you're in a position where you're hiring marketing ops people and yeah, I feel like everyone probably thinks that we're a bit of a unique bunch and there's different traits that different marketing operations people have and there's different traits that obviously you need. But what would you say when you're looking to hire someone in marketing operations, what are some of the hardest to find traits that you look for and that are going to really give them an advantage to thrive in that role?

Dan:

Yeah, it's an interesting question. I think there's two answers, the first being what the stage is of the company. If you're an earlier stage company, like say just took your series A and you're looking to get some operations rigor, it's not uncommon for marketing ops to really be handling ops for the entire go-to-market team. So it's an operations person who is not afraid to get outside of systems that aren't just martech. So are you able to do some light Salesforce work? Are you able to run a contractor? Are you able to not only understand the tools that you're using, but expand kind of like your martech sales tech vocabulary?

Because I think that the ability to really get good at the tools that are core to marketing and marketing ops is great, but if you can start to piece together the rest of the stack and actually become an orchestrator, then that's really the people that I like to work with. Is be really good at Marketo. If you love it, you breathe it, keep doing that. But you should also start to love other platforms and tools as well to just up-level yourself.

Dan:

I think there's an important part of marketing ops in general that a lot of people get scared of in marketing period, and that's budget ownership. It's not always glorious, right? I don't like getting a big spreadsheet once a month and having to go and look at budget versus actuals. But when you get good at that, and you learn how to make investment decisions and you learn how to kind of look at performance of programs and it's another part of the data-driven place. At the end of the day, whoever controls the budget usually kind of has a lot of power in marketing. I think it's a great way for MOps to kind of increase their power really quickly.

Crissy:

Yeah, that's interesting, because I almost think that that used to be a big part of marketing ops, and kind of somewhere along the line, got stripped away. Because even for me when I was coming up in marketing ops at Marketo, I would basically kind of own our spend for marketing, our budget, and I would reconcile our results from our program reporting, mixed the budget and our actual spends, and work with our finance department even to kind of reconcile all that together. That was a big portion of our job and my job, and kind of tying all those pieces.

I actually see a lot of that not being part of the marketing ops role. I think in some ways, there's a way for them to say, "Okay, we'll help you classify your spend on your programs," but there's less of this overall ownership of truing that up together and also making sure the whole department is within that budget. So it'll be interesting to see if that evolves, because a lot of that will fall back on the demand gen team, and it never ends up kind of in a place where it's being managed properly. So that's really interesting that you say that.

Dan:

Yeah, I mean, really the way that I've kind of been thinking about marketing ops more recently is is almost... In a lot of ways, it can and should be like a chief of staff on a marketing team, right? It should be running metrics reviews, it should be running the budget. It should be the drummer for the marketing team, quite frankly.

Charlie:

For sure. Yeah, I mean, because we love to say this that marketing ops does the work so the rest of the marketing team can work. And they can't really do anything without marketing ops these days, right?

I mean, yes, there's some aspects of marketing that don't require technology, and processes, and tools and that orchestration. But almost all of it, it really requires that to be tied up and set up well, so the marketing team can be efficient and execute. I loved what you said as well, not just being a... There's a lot of value to being a Marketo admin, but if that's all you are, you're just going to get stuck being the Marketo admin. You need to have more breadth of knowledge of other tools, other parts of the business, and really grow out of that to provide a lot more value and then move up the ranks.

Crissy:

I think also too, you bring up a few things about that person really working cross-functionally, especially at a startup. When we think of even hiring a leader, some of the different traits that come to mind are a bit different than what's on the marketing ops job description. It's always focused on what tools do you know? Can you do XYZ? So if you were going to maybe flip that and say, "Here are kind of like the soft skills that a CMO is looking for, that a leader of marketing ops has," do you have a few of those that you think are super important or that you would add to that list?

Dan:

Absolutely. I think some of those soft skills are, "Do you have the ability to communicate with people that have different personality types?" So can you be a chameleon? And that comes back to like, "How do you become a VP of marketing or a CMO someday?" If my communication style was the same for everyone, it would be a lot more difficult than if I could figure out how to adjust based on people's moods or how they like to be talked to. Because there's more of them than there are me. So I'd rather just adjust myself and move on.

I think that that's very important for an ops person as well, especially when you're trying to work cross-functionally. You know what hot button issues might be for the product marketing team versus the demand gen team, and how to ask the questions in the right way.

Dan:

I think the other piece here too is how... There's a lot of conversations around marketing ops versus sales ops versus CX ops versus revenue ops. And how versed are you in kind of the full funnel? And how much do you know about customer life cycle? Because regardless of whether we have a revenue ops focus or not, most companies need to be at least executing in the background as if it's a centralized function at this point. So I think it's someone who understands that as well.

Charlie:

What's your opinion on that evolution? Whether you're marketing ops, sales ops, combining into this revenue ops function. I'd love to know what your thoughts are.

Dan:

I think in business, the less silos the better. So I view revenue ops as just a silo, quite frankly. Where if you were to pull marketing ops away from me, it would kind of be like taking my right arm. I'd have to go through another department and another set of standards and another set of opinions in order to get my job done.

But the philosophy around end to end, I agree with 100%. And I do think that there needs to be a framework and a cross-collaboration between the different operations teams as part of rev.

Charlie:

So then marketing ops stays within marketing, sales ops stays within themselves. They have kind of a different agenda. But there's a lot of overlap, so just making sure there's just really good communication and they're working well together. And that inherently kind of develops kind of a revenue ops function between them, but still the reporting lines stay the same?

Dan:

That's how I prefer it. But ask me a year from now.

Charlie:

Yeah. Yes, definitely evolving. I feel like my opinion on that changes every day.

Dan:

Because I think at the end of the day, you just want to make sure that the job is getting done. I think in a lot of ways, revenue ops and how it functions in a company is reflective of how your sales leadership and marketing leadership align with each other too. So-

Charlie:

Yeah, and there's a lot within marketing operations, which is just so specific for marketing, right? Especially if marketing operations is the execution for your demand gen team or your field marketing team, right? You don't want to have programs not go out because they're focusing on a CPQ project or something, something more revenue focused. So yeah, that's hotly debated, and I think you can see pros and cons with both options, I think.

Crissy:

Switching gears, we wanted to talk about something maybe a bit controversial. Maybe. We'll see. But we wanted to know what's something that you find a lot of MOps people do that you think a CMO like yourself or any others would really disagree with or you think might be hindering their career. Because we've talked about this before, but sometimes you feel like the MOps role can really be stifled as far as getting a promotion or seeing the career path that you have. And it could be some of maybe the areas they're focusing on or things that they're doing. So do you have any opinions on maybe what those things are or what you think they could do better in lieu of that?

Dan:

Yeah, it's interesting. I could probably apply it to my own career too. It's like knowing when to focus on a detail and when to let go, quite frankly.

I love marketing ops. I love demand gen. It's where I come from. I could dig into data and dashboards and geek out with the best of them. But I do think that you probably in order to be more successful and to move up is learn your audience, learn when to dig into a super deep metric and when to keep it up here. Because it can quickly become quicksand and it can quickly kind of almost drown out a conversation where you don't get your business point across if you're talking too much technical detail without enough just business.

Charlie:

Yeah, and that kind of goes back to what you were saying before. Be a chameleon, right? Know your audience and adapt your thought track to them.

Yes, I think as well, marketing operations people, especially those that come from that technical background, can probably fall into that trap. Because there's like two groups, generally. Those coming from marketing, and those coming from a technical background, and they kind of meet in marketing operations. Those coming from marketing probably understand that, right? Because they understand the data enough and they understand that to be able to do their job. But they're not coming from that point of view. They're coming from a marketing point of view.

Charlie:

Have you found that when you've kind of thought about the person and their communication style, and whether they come from that technical type background or marketing background and how they've been communicating data and reporting?

Dan:

Yeah. Honestly, I feel like somewhat of responsibility is on me to make sure that there's a reporting framework in a way to guide the conversations that are meaningful to the company. I feel like that there's a way to really leverage both kind of technical... I guess I'd call them personality types, right? To achieve the same result.

Charlie:

Actually, maybe kind of diving a bit deeper into kind of that framework that you just mentioned, what are the metrics that matter to you, and what level of detail do you generally decide to go to when you're... You're absorbing data, and you're getting that information from your team, and you're relaying that to the boards, the CEO. Kind of as a CMO, what are you looking for? I know it's such a massive question, but if you can dive into that.

Dan:

Yeah, so I mean, the way that I kind of think about it at the board level, I want every metric that we look at to be in a report card, right? We're highly aligned with our SDR organization. So at the end of the day, marketing and SDR are trying to achieve a certain number of meetings that move to pipeline, and a certain amount of ACV that moves to pipeline. And then from a revenue success standpoint, we're trying to hit a certain revenue number, and I've committed a certain percentage of that comes from marketing and SDR. So how did that perform, right?

That's all the board needs to see, if it's working or if it's not. If it is working, then like, "Let's talk about what we're going to invest more in to give you more of that." But then in the marketing team meetings and when I go and talk to our exec team, that's when we get into the next level deeper metrics. What does it take to get to X amount of meetings? What does it take to get to those revenue numbers? And use those as regular kind of health check metrics.

Dan:

So I care a lot about, "How's our database marketing program running? How are our Sendoso for Sendoso programs running? How many inbound leads are we getting? How many target accounts have we actually taken through a cadence and recycled back to the database or dispositioned into actual pipeline?" So we care about all of that, and we check in on it regularly via dashboards and metrics reviews. But at the top level, it's more around, "Are you hitting the business goal?" If you are, how do you do more of it? If you're not, let's go deeper and see what's not working.

Charlie:

Yeah. Yeah, I love that. I mean, I feel like most companies now know marketing needs a revenue number, but I think there's probably still some that haven't quite got there yet. How important is having a revenue number to you as a marketer, CMO?

Dan:

If a marketer brings me a dashboard that does not have a revenue number on it, I tell them that I don't want to see the dashboard. So I think it's about as important as it gets. For me personally, a large portion of my variable comp is tied to overall revenue performance, and I wouldn't have it any other way. I think it's critical.

I joked with one of the CEOs that I used to work for. He recently hired another marketer and he said he was thinking about putting that market around a revenue number, and I said, "You've never really truly been a marketer until you've had a revenue number." So embrace it.

Charlie:

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I love it. It creates the right behavior, right? The company is there to drive pipeline, close that pipeline. And if you're only focusing on the metrics before that, then that can really skew some strange behavior or manipulation of those numbers.

Switching gears again. We've worked with you at a few companies now, like Cristina mentioned at the beginning. One thing that we've thought seems very important to you is the ABM strategy working with sales. You mentioned that as well on this call. So given that, I'd love to know from your point of view, who owns ABM? Obviously, it could be sales, you, marketing, combination. I'd love to dive into how you've structured that. And then how important has marketing operations been to that, on the execution of that plan?

Dan:

Yeah, I mean, I've rolled out ABM and been a part of ABM at a few different companies now, and I'll hands down say that the best performing ABM has buy-in from marketing, from sales development, from account executives, and here at Sendoso, actually from our CX team as well. Right?

So I think when you're kind of putting a target account framework around your TAM and defining what your world is, and all agreeing what a tier one looks like, a two, a three, how many employees should be in a company, whatever it is. When you have that centralized agreement across all of go-to-market and customer-facing teams, it's almost uplifting, because you're all having the same conversation in the same context, and understanding the world in the same way.

Dan:

ABM, I mean, that's just the data piece, right? I think as it relates to the actual journey with, "What does messaging look like? What does the life cycle look like? What do the different steps look like?" That's where I think ops is just so critical to be aligning with. Marketing ops, obviously, the tip of the spear, but then with sales ops and CX ops, to make sure that it's a consistent experience across the entire business.

Charlie:

How much then do you rely on your tech stack to support your ABM? Obviously, there's lots of different tools in the ABM space now. You could mention the ones you use or not. That's up to you. But how important is the actual tech stack to really getting the insight and just getting an understanding of your target accounts, creating programs for them, all of that kind of stuff? How is that?

Dan:

I think the first agreement that you have to have really with marketing, and SDR, and sales... And more marketing and SDR than anyone is like, "Are you thinking in a world of leads that are disparate, you don't really know where they come from other than that they liked you? Or are you thinking in a world of accounts, where the people in those accounts are individuals and need to be spoken to in a certain way?" I think that's an agreement that does not require technology full-stop. If you can agree on that and start approaching your world with accounts and then contacts, then that's the first thing. I think the technology is then what enables that.

We use a ton of different technology. I mean, we have EverString for target account data and being able to prioritize. We've got Engagio for the actual life cycle data on where they are in their engagement funnel. We've got Terminus for digital advertising. We actually just brought on 6sense on top of that for their point of view on the dark funnel. But the first step is really just, do you believe in accounts or not?

Charlie:

Yeah. That's often one of the hardest steps, right? To get everyone on board and just agreeing on the list, right?

I mean, obviously, you could use platforms like ZoomInfo, et cetera to get those lists. But just trying to narrow down the list of target accounts and understand who your ideal customer is is always quite a challenge.

Crissy:

And just the methodology. I think we talked about that a lot. For marketing ops, I think we quickly dive into tools. A lot of the time, we don't do the thorough work before that to really get the company ready for that tool. You're bringing this thing on board, it's going to take some time to nurture it along, get it going. It needs adoption. But the first piece is really getting people mentally prepared for that or having them understand the value of it. That's even before purchase.

You can apply that to what you talked about with ABM tools and the ABM strategy. But really, anything. Attribution tools. Anything where it really takes that level of education to make it work, or people using it to make it work is definitely important.

Crissy:

All right, so lastly, free question, kind of, but we just wanted to know what's one or two pieces of career advice you'd give to anyone in B2B marketing and specifically ops. Because we talked about what you look for, but is there anything else, from your point of view, you're a CMO now, that you think looking back on your own career, what is some advice you'd give yourself?

Dan:

Yeah, it's interesting. I think you actually said it on one of your recent podcasts, that it's something that I had said back in the day and it reminded me of it is being comfortable with being uncomfortable I think is just so critical, especially when you're in a data role and you're kind of flying close to the sun. If you're in marketing ops, you're helping with board slides, you're seeing if we're winning or losing, and you just have to be okay with seeing bad things, whether that's in data or performance or whatever, and not letting it affect you, so that you can get better and more well-rounded.

And then I think the other thing is get out there and do these sorts of things. Get on a podcast, get on thought leadership, go write blogs for your technology providers. Go have conversations. Because that, I think, really helps people propel their place forward, just by having different perspectives, knowing different people is just so critical. I mean, I never thought I'd be working with you guys three companies, but I can't imagine not, right? It's like every time I'm talking to another company, it's like, “Well, how are you guys handling marketing ops?” Like, “CS2, perfect.”

Charlie:

The uncomfortable thing is such a good point. I think in marketing operations, there's a lot that can make you uncomfortable, but it's probably true for every role. But have you come up with any strategies to deal with that? Is it just kind of a learned behavior? What would be your advice to someone who struggles with that day to day?

Dan:

Yeah, I think it's... Maria Pergolino, who I know we all know, she had us read a book when I was at Apttus called Emotional Intelligence. They had a 24-hour rule as part of that book. That really stuck with me. It's like if you see data or you see something that you don't have to react to right away, take a little bit of time, reflect, and then figure out how you're going to respond. I think is a really good strategy for being uncomfortable with uncomfortable things. Because half of the battle is not reacting, it's being more intellectual and figuring out how to deal with it. Sometimes you don't even have to deal with it.

Charlie:

I love that, because I think you can apply that to so many things too. Not just the being uncomfortable, but just anything in marketing operations where we just react and we're not thinking about the strategic nature, or, "Is this a priority now?" Kind of you touched on it. You don't have to do everything. What is going to be on your priority list? Yes, you might get an email about this problem, but you need to look at that within the context of everything else. Take 24 hours, think about it. Should that really be at the top of your list? Should you be dropping everything else just to deal with that one thing? Yeah, I think that's a great way to sign off with-

Crissy:

And having that time gives you the option to even think about, "Do I trust this data, or is there a reason for the source of this?" and you can dig deeper. I read probably my favorite blog post this year today by Rand Fishkin. He was talking about how attribution is probably killing a lot of creative marketing, because we do a podcast like this and it's sad to say, but people are just going to go straight to Google and search that one cool thing I listened to on their podcast. You can't pick that up from an attribution source. And then if you just take that, you see your numbers going up and marketing's doing great, and you can at least say, "We did a podcast that week. Of course, let's tie some attribution to that." But because you can't get that into a dashboard on Salesforce doesn't mean you stop doing it.

But if you talk about revenue, like you said, with your board and as long as it's up and to the right and you're just thinking, "Okay, maybe I need to get that data a different way," or, "I need to think about things a different way," and then you're able to articulate that, then you're able to overcome that miss or that channel not performing well. That would be a mistake to just stop doing that. So to your point, even giving you the extra time to think about if this data is even true or if there's other reasons, I think can really save the marketing department in general from making bad decisions as well.

Charlie:

Yeah, and I think we actually brought you up on the podcast back, I forget, several weeks ago about three strategies that I think helping companies break through the noise. Because you do a lot of things like this, and I feel like every week, I see you speaking to someone else and it's just really good. You even mentioned that obviously it's good for you, but it's also great for Sendoso, right? Getting the brand awareness out of there.

But probably there might be some ways you can track that, but it's going to be quite hard to track that. You must just inherently know that this is a good thing to do all around. It's just a win-win. And there's probably other activities kind of more maybe in some of the content marketing that is a little bit harder to track when it's not on your own web property. But how do you reconcile that when you're thinking about what to put the marketing team's time into?

Dan:

Yeah, it's a tough one. I think it's highly contingent upon the brand that you're with and how it plays into kind of the brand voice. For us at Sendoso, we know that we are kind of loud, boisterous, we're something that lands on your desk, and we just believe in brand. So the way that I justify it is anyone that would type in sendoso.com, I'm going to assume that they saw something like this at some point, and that's driving just direct web traffic, right? You can measure that over time, and we have measured it over time. I mean, even before I joined, Kris and team were doing this all the time and you kind of just see this natural trend and just part of the brand.

Crissy:

I think a great final point for career advice for people is just we look at artists or designers, and they have their portfolio. I think for our marketer, you maybe can point back to campaigns. But for marketing ops, it's really hard to just have that public-facing kind of portfolio of the things that you do.

So things like this are just great. Articles that you write on LinkedIn, like you said, guest blog posts, podcasts that you're on. All of that can be packaged up in a way when you're going to an employer. They just can see your thought leadership in action. That just further sets you apart from the candidates who don't. And if you're able to really articulate that thought leadership or have done great things, even better. So I love that advice.

Crissy:

Well, it was great having you on. I feel like this is super useful for even CMOs who are looking to hire, just to hear kind of like how you think about the department and also just your overall marketing strategy. But for anyone in marketing ops, looking to make that next step, it was great to get your insights. So thanks so much for joining us.

Dan:

Yeah, thanks. Thanks for having me on.

Charlie:

Yeah, thank you, Dan.

Crissy:

We'll see everyone on the next episode of fwd: thinking.