Austin Hay: recommendation

Transcript context

…Great. Do people give you goals? Are you responsible for growth goals of your own? And in general, are MarTech people, should they have goals and growth goals on their plate or are they just there to support people who do? Oh, that's a great question and I would like, maybe this is at the end of the podcast, we ask people about this because I would love to know what is a better version of goaling? So, there's two ways that I've thought of it. One is my goals are directly tied to the people I'm serving. So, if user acquisition has, I mean we do, we have a growth goal and we have a CAC goal at Ramp. So, my goals are tied to them, so I'm going to help make sure that that is achieved, but then there's also a cost and efficiency goal that I internally think is valuable. Whether or not the business thinks it is valuable, it doesn't really matter. I come from a sales background and I like to run lean and efficient teams, and so I'm always thinking to myself, how much were the tools when I came in, how much are they now? Have I set us up for success so that as we grow, our cost per user or cost per seat comes down and how much more efficient are we because of that? The ideal world is that you actually are growing as a business making more money, hiring more people, acquiring more users, and your total cost of tooling per person goes down. That's like the dream. And there's lots of ways you can build that financial model, but I mean that's what I think most marketing technology leaders should strive for is to make sure that they're controlling costs over time because most businesses don't. There can be some goals that are discreet in nature that are not cost-efficient, but more like net capability related. So, it's like, hey, we want to design a first party system that's world-class that achieves these three goals, right? Maybe you want to incorporate artificial intelligence into some part of our product platform and incorporate third party tools. And those are more like discrete product goals. In the same way that a business might launch an external product goal to launch a feature, they sometimes also might have internal product goals, clean up our revenue operations systems, make our email marketing system better. In particular, email marketing is one I see come often a lot with small businesses and even medium-sized businesses where they'll have picked a tool at the start of the company's lifecycle and as the company has grown, they've outgrown that tool. They need to move to a Braze or Marketo. And so there'll be a big six-month initiative to say, we just got to switch. That's the goal. We have to safely get off this small tool to a much bigger, more complex tool that's going to cost us more. It's a lot more complex, but we need to do it without losing money. That's usually the job of a MarTech person in some type of change transformation effort. Perfect segue to where I wanted to go, which is tooling and your recommendations and favorite tools. And so maybe we start with just what do you find as a good starting tool stack for people starting to think about MarTech and basically growth, and then what does it end up being generally?…

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