Episode 29 Edited
===
Richard Ellis: [00:00:00] According to Gartner, marketers are only using one third of their MarTech stacks capabilities down from 42% in 2022, and 58% in 2020. The data shows that complexity, fragmentation, and under utilization are widespread issues. Today we consider some goodness around simplification and strategic transformation going from marketing ops to impact.
Richard Ellis: Welcome to some goodness where we engage seasoned business leaders and experts to share practical guidance and tips to help new and future C-level leaders maximize their impact. My guest today is Dreya Armstrong, a dynamic marketing executive with a passion for simplifying the complex and driving real impact across organizations.
Richard Ellis: Dreya is currently the VP of marketing at Kubit, where she's known for her innovative approach to growth marketing and her ability to turn [00:01:00] big ideas into actionable strategy. With a career spanning leadership roles at companies like Three Flow Modern Hire Walla and Workiva. Dreya has built a reputation for blending creativity with operational excellence.
Richard Ellis: She's led teams through major transformations, championed digital marketing initiatives, and helped brands find their authentic voice in crowded markets. Dreya, welcome.
Andreya Armstrong: Thanks so much. I'm excited to be here.
Richard Ellis: All right. Well, as per the intro, we're gonna talk about simplification, strategic transformation, marketing operations, and leading to impact.
Richard Ellis: So lots of good stuff. Let's kind of set the stage and dive in here. And I wanted to reference that Gartner study that said that most marketers are just using a fraction of their marketing tech stack. So what do you think about that Sta and are you observing that and what is it about complexity and the under utilization that's so persistent these days?
Richard Ellis: Do you think?
Andreya Armstrong: Yeah, I think, you know, I'm [00:02:00] definitely seeing this less so in my current role because we're such a small team of, you know, a lot of the tech that we have is really out of necessity. But I think there's two primary reasons why tech and marketing and sales are, are underutilized, and I think the first one is.
Andreya Armstrong: There's no time to fully adopt it. You know, like teams get buried in their daily tasks. They look at this as another thing that they need to do. I need to learn this. I need to log in. I don't have time. Or they get trained on it, then they don't go back into it for a month. And so it's not second nature, so they don't do it.
Andreya Armstrong: I think that to become second nature, it needs to be something they're using every day or every week. And if it doesn't get used to that frequency, then it just falls off in the background and it becomes 20, $30,000 of an annual budget that nobody touches. Unfortunately. I think the other thing is that.
Andreya Armstrong: You know, there's really no pain driving the adoption. They're adopted because a competitor is using it, or an exec says [00:03:00] so, or someone used it as a previous company and said, we have to have this. But it didn't get brought in out of a real painful situation. That lack of pain will oftentimes keep people from taking the step to learn it.
Andreya Armstrong: I remember between 2010 and 2015 this huge push for automate, automate, automate, and I pushed back quite a bit on it because. Automation without understanding is like painting a dirty room if you don't know where stuff is supposed to go, layering automation over the top of it makes it a bigger mess that you just have to end up digging everything out.
Andreya Armstrong: Right. And I think that happens a lot in this tool sprawl where. People are bringing things in 'cause they think, well this will fix it. Well, it doesn't fix it if you don't understand the underlying problems that it's intended to fix. So that can sometimes make it worse.
Richard Ellis: And then you extend it to not only are companies not great at really pinpointing the problem they're trying to solve and then going back and assessing [00:04:00] whether that tool really did solve it right.
Richard Ellis: But then, you know, even taking it to that level of calculating an ROI, did it make an impact to the overall business? Or was it just a nice to have and it's a slick, sexy tool that's fun to work in.
Andreya Armstrong: Exactly. And sometimes was it prescribed by another? I mean, marketing is notorious. Guilty myself of, of prescribing tools to sales.
Andreya Armstrong: Oh, you have to have this. You have to use this. You have to get in there and see these accounts are bubbling up with all of this intent. And meanwhile, it's buzzword, buzzword, buzzword. Sales is like, I don't have time for this. I'm doing my job. I'm not looking at your new fancy car that you bought. But I think the really important thing is everyone on the team should be asking like, why did we get this?
Andreya Armstrong: What are we getting from it? Whose pain is it solving? And if the answers are fuzzy, the tool's probably not worth the investment. Not every tool that you bring in in marketing is gonna have an ROI. Some of it's just process improvement or the case of ai, it's efficiency. It's not [00:05:00] necessarily something that you can put a dollar to, but if your team is using it and loving it, it's invaluable.
Richard Ellis: Sure. You know, we often, in the business case modeling world, will call some of those things blue dollars rather than green dollars. You know, there's not maybe a direct attribution to revenue uplift, but if I can be more efficient, more productive, and get more done at a certain time, then certainly that's going to.
Richard Ellis: Payoff economically in some way that we might categorize as blue dollars. Right.
Andreya Armstrong: I love that. I love blue dollars. That makes a lot.
Richard Ellis: Well, one of the things that you and I had talked about before is just the difference between focusing on operational excellence versus focusing on real business impact. And there's this trend I think we see where marketers and specifically marketing leaders are moving more towards, Hey, I've got to really focus on the impact.
Richard Ellis: And have shared revenue targets with my sales counterpart, et cetera. But in your experience, where do you see kind of marketing teams getting it wrong in terms of moving from that operational excellence to a real [00:06:00] business impact focus?
Andreya Armstrong: Yeah. You know, I like to look at really strong ops team as being this really tightly woven.
Andreya Armstrong: Into everyday examples, and I think there's two types of ops, right? There's the enabler and then there's the blocker, and the enabler helps teams move faster. They scale smarter, they focus on what matters. The blocker is more there to enforce rules over outcomes. They can slow down process and they can sometimes in really bad cases, end up being like a finger point or weaponized against other departments to say we're doing what we're supposed to be doing.
Andreya Armstrong: And then that becomes the function of operations. And I think in order to be successful, um, and have really strong operational excellence is you have to have an enabler mindset. The kind of ops team that says, Hey, let's loop in Richard. At the beginning of a project, at the beginning of an initiative or a campaign, let's bring him in.
Andreya Armstrong: We know he's gonna have an opinion. We know he's gonna help us get this done faster. [00:07:00] We better bring him in early so that he can help us identify roadblocks and maybe some easier ways to get this done. If you have an ops person that people are flagging to say, let's get them in this room and be part of the conversation, that's a really good sign that you're functioning with operational excellence on the counterpart.
Andreya Armstrong: If you have someone. You know where the team groans and they're like, that's just gonna slow us down. That's gonna bring in friction. Everything is gonna become a process and we're gonna have what should be a one week project, turn into a three month project. And you know, crumbing now your process is starting to get in the way of your output.
Andreya Armstrong: And that can be a really dangerous thing. And I've been part of organizations with really high functioning operations and really bogged down.
Richard Ellis: Yeah. Well, and that reminds me of our other conversation around being willing to experiment trying things. I've got a saying, you need to be okay with failing fast, right?
Richard Ellis: Yeah. And so try some things, learn quickly so that you can react and [00:08:00] adjust. And sometimes there are people that can kind of get in the way. Create, like you said, friction and you get the drones. But I love kind of that, let's look for the enablers. Let's equip our marketing team members to be enablers.
Richard Ellis: And kind of along that line, I know you've written and talked about questioning the status quo. Yeah. Right. So, uh, tell me a little bit about your perspective there and what that means from a marketing perspective.
Andreya Armstrong: Yeah. I think the concept of, that's how we've always done it. Is a red flag for it probably needs to be redone with as much business change as has happened in the last couple of decades.
Andreya Armstrong: If there's a process or a system, that is how we've always done it, it's almost for sure ready to be upgraded. The other thing that I check for there is emotion. Looking for conflict, frustration, anger around like process is a huge red flag. One of the things that you'll see pop up is, and we're seeing this even now at Kubit, when I [00:09:00] read and I'm looking into these different audiences, they're, well, these people can't understand the reports.
Andreya Armstrong: You know, they're lazy, they're dumb, and they don't get it. That's emotional language. There's a problem there, a business problem that they feel angry about. That means that there is an opportunity for. Right, looking to revolutionize what they're doing because we have emotion. That's real pain to have that kind of conflict in your organization.
Andreya Armstrong: So I think those areas, you know, when we see that conflict and pain, we lean into that this is a sign that we've outgrown what we've been doing. The stats, right. Oh, is not working for us. If it was, we wouldn't feel this way. And really taking the emotion out of it and saying, let's talk about where the break is.
Andreya Armstrong: 'cause I'll tell you for sure. Marketing operations as an entire group bubbled up out of that conflict and pain sales operations into go to market operations. Now, I think they're being called revenue engineering. Great name [00:10:00] totally created out of this conflict and pain between these go to market teams who couldn't get the insect that they.
Richard Ellis: So when we think about processes, when we think about the tools we're using, we think about the reporting and dashboards, you know, all those things can be looked at and really challenged to say, Hey, is there an opportunity for change, for evolution, for innovation here? Are there any triggers that you use to really understand when it's kind of overdue for change or for simplification or any red flags to watch out for?
Andreya Armstrong: Yeah, I think those questions of. What are we using this for? Who's using it?
Richard Ellis: Yeah.
Andreya Armstrong: Is it solving the problems? I think if I'm going into a new organization, I use that onboarding time as an opportunity to question everything. If I get a big, long story about where this came from and when it was brought in, and what it was brought in for, and not about how we're using [00:11:00] it today, it's a big trigger to say, aha.
Andreya Armstrong: We probably don't. I think even going so far as to creating a visual landscape of your MarTech. And saying, you know, and there's a lot of really good examples out there. If you just Google visual tech or marketing tech visual landscape, you can see these beautiful drawings of all of 'em. You can go through and circle 'em and say, here's all of the ones that we have.
Andreya Armstrong: And then looking for overlap. I think really trying to discover. I think where this gets messiest, where I've experienced this gets messiest is in companies from like a hundred people to 200 people because it's big enough to create those tech silos where pockets of people have started adopting tools, but it's not quite big enough to have a formalized procurement yet.
Andreya Armstrong: And they don't have like an interdepartmental person that's monitoring the tech crossover. And so you kind of start marketing's using this email system and CS is using this one and sales is using two and, and all, by the way, guy over here has his own for [00:12:00] testing stuff and pretty soon you've got seven different email delivery systems and nobody knew it.
Andreya Armstrong: So I think that that can get really, really messy. And having a visual landscape of all of the tech that the company is using can help you see where those. And AI can help you with that as well. If you can get a full list of all the tech, you can say, Hey, these are the foundational ones, these are the six we can't live without.
Andreya Armstrong: We have massive contracts with them our entire lives, rely on them. What kind of functionality can we de deduct from all these other ones?
Richard Ellis: Right? Yeah, that's so good. 'cause certainly as you have the tech sprawl and the data silos and the functional silos, right? It could get very complex and processes can break down.
Richard Ellis: One of the things we like to just challenge our clients to think about is what is the business impact in two dimensions. One is internally to your internal stakeholders. Yeah. Is that helping people be better, smarter, go faster and make better decisions? What is it doing internally but then externally, right?
Richard Ellis: Obviously the market, your competitor, your customers, your partners, right? And if you can't connect a.to how [00:13:00] this is positively benefiting them in some way, then it probably needs re-engineering, replacing or sun setting.
Andreya Armstrong: Absolutely.
Richard Ellis: So you mentioned kind of the functional silos a little bit, but one of the things I see in larger organizations is kind of this gap or silos between like technical audiences or technical stakeholders and non-technical stakeholders, right?
Richard Ellis: Yeah. You've talked a lot about bridging that gap and simplifying communications. What's some advice you have on just kind of recognizing opportunity for improvement there?
Andreya Armstrong: Yeah, I think this is a two-parter too. I think the first one is building trust and understanding constantly, like we have to assume good intent.
Andreya Armstrong: Um, the technical perspective, you know, remember that your stakeholders are desperate for insight. They're desperate for your help. And I think even that comes down to the vocabulary that you're using. Like data terms are not commonplace for people who have full-time other jobs. And I think sometimes data personas can get really frustrated 'cause they're like, I'm [00:14:00] trying to understand what you want and you need to speak it to me in a language that I can understand.
Andreya Armstrong: Like a really good example is something like tables. Tables to a marketer are like, I don't know what you're talking about. Um, but if they're familiar with the concept of tables, if they've ever used Marketo, HubSpot, Salesforce, any of these things that have held on an object, you say yes, an object. Oh, that's a table.
Andreya Armstrong: I see. And it has its own set of data points on it. And you can explain these. I think sometimes it's literally just the terms. Marketers will laugh if they're listening to this and they hear me use the word campaign. Because campaign has like 19 different definitions in marketing, depending on what tool you're in and what frame of reference you're talking about.
Andreya Armstrong: It's like, it's been a kind of ongoing joke with marketers. That campaign takes on so many different things. So I think that's part of it, right? Um, you know, from stakeholders recognizing the technical teams have no idea why you need this data. So explaining your goals all the way to the end, and that can really help.
Andreya Armstrong: Put them in the right mindset for [00:15:00] bringing you what you ultimately need. And then from that same point, building relationships before you're coming in. They're hot with an emergency that you need help with. And trying to get to know people on a personal level goes a long way, like the best time that. Get to know someone or talk to someone isn't when you need something from them.
Andreya Armstrong: So taking the time to develop relationships across these different functions pays off when you actually need something from them,
Andreya Armstrong: right?
Andreya Armstrong: So that's a big part of it. I think the second part is to meet in the middle. Everyone needs to be responsible for educating themselves. You know, stakeholders need to be prepped.
Andreya Armstrong: It's a really simple thing to go into chat GPT and say, I'm about to go into a conversation with an analyst to try to find this answer. What are four or five things I need to have prepared and brought with me so that I can enable them to get these answers for me quickly.
Andreya Armstrong: Right. And
Andreya Armstrong: the same thing goes from a technical side is just do the pre-work so that you're not coming into this already [00:16:00] expecting them to not get it.
Andreya Armstrong: Mm-hmm. Um,
Andreya Armstrong: and, and kind of be prepared to speak a different language than you're necessarily comfortable in. So it's that meeting in the middle.
Richard Ellis: Yeah, I like that. I like that. Well, let's talk about that middle. It can be messy, right? You know, you, you could find yourself and the team stuck in a lot of complexity and it's hard to see their way out, right?
Richard Ellis: It's like, what do we simplify? How do we simplify? If you had just like one hour consulting call with a potential client on how to simplify or what to do first, where would you get started?
Andreya Armstrong: Yeah, I think I first start with the goals, the organizational goals, and then the DeMar departmental goals, and I love it.
Andreya Armstrong: One of these, this is an exercise that I love to do periodically, like every six months. I'll take a look at my team's work and I'll say, let's go through this with our goals in mind and Mark whether or not the work you're doing on a, you know, it's a one week audit. This week, I just want you to write down everything you did in the week, and [00:17:00] then I want you to say whether true or false, this activity.
Andreya Armstrong: Contributed directly to one of the goals that we have for the court. You really shouldn't have more than two or three goals. Right? Right. Like you should be saying, this is a goal and this is a goal. Mm-hmm. And if those weekly activities that they're going through, if more than 30% of the stuff that they're doing doesn't directly align to your team or the business's goals, they're not spending their time on the right stuff.
Andreya Armstrong: Yeah, really look at it and kill it. Like internal stuff can get so time consuming and so bogged down. And I've had teams where they're spending a week every month preparing a month end presentation about how they did. It's like you just lost a week on doing stuff. So I'd start there like with a full effort audit, does our effort align with our goals?
Andreya Armstrong: And if it doesn't, then we need to clean how on what we're doing all day. And one of the really great ways so that you don't have to pause and say, Hey team, everybody write down. What they're doing is with my team, I like to do a three up, three down. And this is [00:18:00] not my idea. I got this from leaders of my past.
Andreya Armstrong: It's every Monday we get together, we take 40 minutes, and everybody goes through the things that they did last week and the things they're committing to doing this week. If you don't get 'em done, it's not the end of the world. But what it does is it brings everyone's attention to the work that's being done where we're getting stuck.
Andreya Armstrong: It gives me a heads up to where I need to remove obstacles. It also gives me a heads up to say, I don't want you working on that this week.
Andreya Armstrong: Right?
Andreya Armstrong: That's not a priority. I love that idea. Let's punt it. Let's not important. It doesn't align with our goals. It's not aligned with what I'm hearing in my executive meetings or what I need to prepare for for the board meeting or whatever, and it gives them.
Andreya Armstrong: A real comfort to know what I'm doing today matters. And that's where I think you get the fulfillment out of your team. They don't feel like they're spending their time spinning their wheels on stuff that doesn't matter. And it also gives them a weekly reset to say, this is right what I'm working on.
Andreya Armstrong: Right. And this works with big teams too. I mean, your [00:19:00] departmental leaders can hold these with their own teams. But then it roll up into, you know, a VP and having that weekly meeting with their departmental leaders to say, okay, what are your different functions? What are the top three things you're working on?
Andreya Armstrong: And that holds those departmental leaders too, to like prioritizing from all of their team's work what it is that they are holding. Most important for the executive to say, ah, that's not, or, yes, that is. And then you've got this beautiful log of everything that your team's spending time on that you can go back and audit and say, how much of these things actually apply to the goals.
Andreya Armstrong: Mm-hmm.
Andreya Armstrong: That's not so much operations, but I, I feel like it's almost like a systematic way to make sure that your team's highly efficient.
Richard Ellis: Yeah, it's an operating rhythm, right? That you could get into. I love the idea of that weekly assessment of a look back and a look ahead. Yes. What have we done? What are we doing this week?
Richard Ellis: And just like you said, three and three, I mean, it doesn't have to be every single phone call you're gonna make or email. It's just big rocks, right. That you're gonna focus on. And then I like the idea [00:20:00] of maybe once a quarter, having that pause and, okay, now let's judge everything against the top objectives of our function and the top objective of the companies.
Richard Ellis: 'cause if they're not impacting either of those. Maybe we got a problem. Right?
Andreya Armstrong: Absolutely.
Richard Ellis: I love it. Yeah, very practical.
Andreya Armstrong: What I've seen is sometimes marketing, we get to like bleeding out into other departments and we become responsible for team dinners and whatever it is, internal events, and you can start to see this bleed of resources leaving your team and supporting the organization on things that aren't bottom line hidden, which is fine as long as it stays within that 20%.
Richard Ellis: Because there's always gonna be some administrative, other kind of activities like that. But to your point. No more than 20% is probably a reasonable target. The other benefit of that, especially if you have, you know, distributed workers right in different locations, they're not all in a common office.
Richard Ellis: Doing that as a team, exercise once a week can be really rewarding and helpful for the team to just [00:21:00] feel a sense of belonging. 'cause they understand what their colleagues are working on and they could say, oh Dreya, I didn't know you were doing that. You mind if I sit in on that? I think I could learn or contribute.
Richard Ellis: Right? So that's really good. I love it. Well, I'm just looking at the clock and unfortunately we are about out of time. Let me just open it up to anything we didn't talk about in terms of just kind of that simplification, just some goodness from operations to impact that we didn't talk about that you wanna highlight before we close out here.
Andreya Armstrong: Yeah. I think being prepared to learn from your team as a leader. I think what's been a real delight for me in the past. Five to 10 years is seeing how this kind of newly created workforce that's just coming outta school. They're so capable. And learning these new techs and new systems and, and, and I actually like have a monthly meeting with one of my employees who she prepares something cool to teach us [00:22:00] with ai.
Andreya Armstrong: And so thinking that, you know, all of the operations hacks is probably the fastest way to fall behind. You can't do more as an individual with the experience and ops. Then you can crowdsourcing that knowledge from all of the different varieties of people on your team. So being open to, Hey, I might not have the answer to this.
Andreya Armstrong: I've done it and I've done it to scale, but maybe what I had done five years ago is a thing of the past, and I should lean into some of my individual contributors for some of their ideas. I think that's a really good habit to form if it's not something that you're currently doing.
Richard Ellis: Totally agree. I like that.
Richard Ellis: Well, let's close with my, uh, typical question that is, and I'd love to kind of put you on the spot a little bit. Let's get to know Dreya personally a little bit. Yeah. So on the personal side of things, is there anything that brought you a little goodness or joy? Could be a book you read, a hobby, a pastime, something that you could share with us.
Andreya Armstrong: Well, I live in [00:23:00] Wisconsin. You know, this time of year is the reason that I live in Wisconsin. It is just kind of the lake time, all of the nature with my family. Having that slow kind of easy living is the reason why I live here. And so I've just really been enjoying some of the downtime that, uh, that the summer brings.
Richard Ellis: I like that a lot. I could certainly appreciate that. I'm a, I'm a water guy so I love to be on a boat on the lake or near the beach or one of those. So, uh,
Andreya Armstrong: yeah, absolutely.
Richard Ellis: Thanks for sharing that with us and, uh, thank you again for your time today. It was a great conversation.
Andreya Armstrong: Thank you so much for having me.
Andreya Armstrong: I really appreciate it.
Announcer: Some goodness is a creation of revenue innovations. Visit [email protected] and subscribe to our newsletter.
