How Kelly Greenwalt of Epicor Balances Today's Martech Stack with the AI Future

In this episode, we sit down with Kelly Greenwalt, a veteran marketing operations leader who’s navigated two decades of tool explosions and AI’s rapid rise at brands like National Instruments and Epicor (where she is currently the Sr. Director of Marketing Operations). 

Kelly shares her playbook for turning a sprawling tech stack into a strategic growth engine and evolving the MOPs function from a technical back office to a critical business partner.

In this episode, you'll discover:

• The Composable Stack Framework: How to build a modern marketing engine with a data lake as the reliable center and agile point solutions as the spokes.
• An ROI-First Vendor Playbook: Kelly’s process for evaluating new tools, using an enablement function to drive adoption, and spotting hidden pricing traps in seat-based vs. usage-based models.
• AI That Actually Delivers: A look at conversational AI that acts as a top-performing virtual BDR, booking meetings and reviving dormant leads, without the hype.
• The MOPs Role in M&A: Why marketing operations is a secret weapon in M&A, essential for aligning budgets, messaging, and growth targets long before a deal is announced.
• How to Level-Up Your MOPs Career: Actionable advice on shifting from "making things work" to owning the data story, and which skills (like email programming) to retire in favor of strategy.

If your stack feels complicated and your AI roadmap is noisy, this conversation offers the clarity and frameworks you need to move forward.

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🎧 Tech Marketing Rewired is hosted by Kevin Kerner, founder of Mighty & True.

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Transcript

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Setting The Martech Stage

Kelly Greenwalt 0:00

Like you were saying earlier, things are so much easier to use now and they don't require the specific advanced skill sets that I believe we are better served if I put people into more of a strategic role. So on my team that does all of our automation, so that's all of our webinars, all of our emails, all of our Conversica AI, you know, uh conversations, they are experts not only at how to make it happen in the tool and which tactic is most effective for which challenge, but they're also experts on our various industries and products. So they're more of an extension of the demand gen field marketers.

Host Intro & Episode Setup

Kevin Kerner 0:35

Hello again, everyone. This is Kevin Kerner, the host of Tech Marketing Rewired. How would you describe your marketing tech stack right about now? Is it a finely tuned engine or does it feel a little more complicated? If you answered chaotic, you're not alone. It's not surprising, really. That's the exact word my guest today, Mops veteran Kelly Greenwald, used to describe the current landscape. The pressure's on for marketing operations leaders, it's clear, to keep the lights on while integrating a flood of new AI tools. And it's created an entirely new level of complexity. Kelly has spent over two decades navigating this Martech maze for companies like National Instruments and now Epicor, and we talk about how to audit your tech stack, where to strategically invest in AI, and how marketing operations can become a critical and often overlooked part of a company's MA strategy. But before we get into it, I just wanted to mention that my company, Mighty and True, helps companies navigate this intersection between strategy, data, and technology. Doing that, we help clients build the marketing engines that can really drive real growth. You find out more about Mighty and True at www.mightyandrue.com. But for now, let's get into it. This is Tech Marketing Rewired.

Guest Background & Career Arc

Kevin Kerner 1:50

Hey Kelly, how are you doing?

Kelly Greenwalt 1:52

Hi, Kevin. I'm pretty good. How are you?

Kevin Kerner 1:54

Yeah, really good. I'm so glad to have you on the show here. Can you believe I forgot to mention you on the pre-call, the weather here is just unbelievable today. I'm so glad to be in Austin.

Kelly Greenwalt 2:04

I know. I I keep wanting to knock on wood, but I feel like we've had a very mild summer.

Kevin Kerner 2:09

I know.

Kelly Greenwalt 2:10

Allergies are always bad, but that's sort of the tax you pay for living in Central Texas. But yeah, it's been quite pleasant.

Kevin Kerner 2:17

Yeah, no doubt. I thought I was thinking, man, we should have done this outside somewhere. Maybe someday. But if I have the setup, I'll I'll figure that out sooner or later.

Kelly Greenwalt 2:25

Yeah.

Kevin Kerner 2:26

But I'm I'm really so excited to have you here today. We kind of reconnected at the dinner, the tech marketing rewired dinner, which is great. Seeing you added a ton of value to that. So I was really kind of honored that you would join me. There's there's just so much going on in the mops world, the marketing operations world. And you're such a pro. It's just there's seems like there's so much pressure now to keep sort of the existing Martech staff running while simultaneously asking you to redo everything with all the AI stuff that's going on. So I'm that's really one of the that's really the core of the discussion I want to have today is how do you how do you um manage in this new world of so much change, but everything kind of still staying the same. Yeah. It's gonna be a really fun conversation. I really appreciate it. To start, I to set some of the context. I just wanted to give our listeners a sense of your background and your role at Epicor. And then maybe you could talk a little bit about what the marketing operations, what marketing operations looks like in an organization that like the scale that you have at Epicor and the other places you've been.

Kelly Greenwalt 3:23

Sure. Yeah, and thanks so much for having me. I really love connecting with smart people who I can learn from and talk to and share with. So that's uh always a welcomed event there. But yeah, so Mops, you know, has been my life for a little over 20 years now in the B2B space, with me based here out of Austin, Texas. So companies that are either headquartered here or have a large presence here is where I've kind of been uh pinging around. To get started, I was at National Instruments for about 10 years, and I think that's when you and I first crossed paths, so way back when, back in the Eloqua days, when that was the marketing automation platform to have. Um, and so I was actually an Eloqua customer when Oracle bought them, and then I was a Pardot customer right after Salesforce bought them, and then at a different company, I was a Marketo customer at the time that Adobe bought them. So it's been such an interesting 20-year evolution in the marketing operations landscape and watching how everything is kind of condensed and exploded and condensed and exploded, both through acquisitions and just through technology. So yeah, it's an evolving landscape and it's it's changed quite a bit.

Kevin Kerner 4:32

Yeah, it really has. It's amazing. Like I before Eliqua, we were using Unica, and then Unica got bought by IBM.

Kelly Greenwalt 4:38

IBM, yeah.

Kevin Kerner 4:39

I remember that uh decision point of like Eliqua, did you keep go with Eliqua or did you stay in Unica at the time? Unica was a very complex tool. So it's just changed so much. It's just there's so many things that we could talk about, but just the change of that era, it's nuts.

Kelly Greenwalt 4:53

Yeah.

Kevin Kerner 4:54

I see that what you do in the marketing operations side, and of course you're you're more of a business leader now than just the marketing ops side, but I want to dig into the marketing operations

Defining Modern Marketing Ops

Kevin Kerner 5:03

side. I see it as kind of like the engine or operating system for marketing, it's things that keep things running in marketing. I love that analogy. Can you expand on what it means in practice to what marketing operations really means in practice and why it's such a critical function these days?

Kelly Greenwalt 5:18

Sure, yeah. So we um we wrote out I've been at Epicor a little over four years now, and I had my leaders kind of get together in an exercise and write our mission statement a few years ago. And it really comes down to our purpose is to enable and make more effective and efficient the marketing department. So whatever marketing function you're in, and then it it definitely gets to be a gray area where it bleeds into sales quite a bit. But our role is really to make their lives easier and to make them more effective at what they do. So it could be by finding new tactics that can be enabled by automation or technology, or it could be making sure we have all of the data at our fingertips so that we can make the right decisions about how to talk to the right prospects or customers at the right time through the right channel. But it can also just be, you know, making sure that these things in the ecosystem are working across so that everything is secure and consistent and measurable for the marketers themselves. So it's it's really viewed in my mind as the underlying foundation that then allows everybody else to facilitate their functional areas.

Kevin Kerner 6:25

I completely agree. The thing that came to mind as you were talking about that was that it seems like with tools are becoming more accessible. And so there's almost like a there's almost like if you look at the marketing operations like tech stack, there's a good portion of it now that's more accessible by the end marketer than it's ever been, more buildable, let's say, by the marketer. So I just think that that's an interesting used to have these very technical marketing operations people, and now I don't know if you'd agree with this, but it seems like now there's some democratization of who can actually put their hands on some of these tools.

Kelly Greenwalt 6:59

Completely agree. So something that we've seen a lot in product messaging on marketing tools is low-code, no code. Everybody likes to say they're low code, no code, visual drag and

Democratization Of Tools

Kelly Greenwalt 7:10

drop, process workflows, things like that. And I agree, that makes it a lot more appealing. But at the very same time, something that I've also seen happen is a lot of these all-in-one platforms are starting to kind of get broken up into individual point solutions. And I think part of the reason why that is, is because it's easier to purchase a point solution than it is to go do a gigantic RFP for a big, huge, you know, central all-in-one. And it's easier to justify and easier to track the ROI for something that has one specific function that it does. But the good side of that is yes, it's easier to implement, easier to purchase, easier to stay agile. So if you choose a vendor that isn't working out at the end of your contract, you can switch and there's not as much heavy lifting on the switching costs. And I've seen across multiple companies that really what we want to do on the operation side is facilitate and enable the demand gen person, the field marketer, to be able to go in and set up their own campaigns. It shouldn't have to be this huge discussion about what the logic is and who the audience is and what the treatment is. If it, if everything is configured correctly and you have the right processes and controls in place, then people should be able to self-serve and design their own campaigns.

Kevin Kerner 8:20

Yeah, you mentioned this um this uh splintering of tools into smaller tools, and then you know probably go back and forth in terms of how that happens as a trend. I wonder what you see, like if if you just dig into the critical parts of what the tax tech stack are today. So you've got your base things that you have to have. Where are you seeing the biggest cracks or challenges in that in that stack? Like if you describe the stack, like where do you see it sort of breaking up the most?

Kelly Greenwalt 8:46

Oh, that's interesting. I think ABM and the swell in popularity over A with account-based marketing over the last 10 years has probably accelerated some of the splintering, but people do want to design their own campaigns. And just my personal opinion, ABM really, to me, just means proper segmentation. There's really not anything that magical about an ABM platform besides the fact that it orchestrates across multiple channels a super targeted campaign. That's all it is. Now, that being said, that can be very complex when you're thinking about print advertising and paid media advertising and direct website traffic and organic search and outbound emails and you know conversion rate optimization on your site and your chat box and everything else that you have to kind of orchestrate across it all. But I think the main thing is we got to give the marketing business owners visibility. So not only the ability to craft what they're doing, but they also need to see which tactic is driving things. You know, over 10 years ago,

ABM = Segmentation, Not Magic

Kelly Greenwalt 9:45

I would have said, well, your analytics can sit in a data warehouse where you pull the, you know, the performance metrics at the end of every month to say, here's what went well, here's what didn't go well, et cetera. But that's really not appropriate timing anymore. Near real-time access to what's performing well and when what's not. So you can optimize your pipeline channels. We all need that ability to to measure, adapt, and then improve over time in a more quick environment, I think.

Kevin Kerner 10:12

Yeah. Yeah, I agree. That's um that's an interesting concept. Um, so you've got ABM. ABM, the ABM stack has its own data set, or it's at accessing its own data set. And you might used to have the operational data store that would have all the data in it. Is that architecture still relevant to have some sort of master data store, or is it now is it now beginning to splinter up into all these multiple connected, composable systems that talk to each other?

Kelly Greenwalt 10:41

It's definitely the latter. And that's been really interesting because over the last few years, in my case, Salesforce, our CRM, has been trying to pitch us on Data Cloud, which is kind of their new data repository suite, and they are absolutely marketing it that way. It's your universal store for all of your data. And I pushed them pretty hard because, in my opinion, the big gap that that doesn't cover is your website real-time data store that you have to collect to be able to respond in a personalized manner. Um, and I said, okay, so do you connect to different CMS tools so that you're you have a data layer in real time on what's happening on their browsing behavior that you can then write to? And they were like, no, you want to send everything to sales class and then you can send back logic. And I'm like, that's not good enough for real time. So I don't think we have an all-in-one, you know, best practice standard architecture at this point. I think it's all composable, it's all very agile, but in that process, it does become fragmented. So you need to under that's even more reason why you need to understand which channels work best, because you've got to optimize the data flow for those channels.

Kevin Kerner 11:47

Yeah. As a mobs leader, I just hadn't thought of this, but as a mobs leader now, you've got you've got, if you do have splintered tools, they all have their own data sets or they're composable in some way where they're able to dig into other data sets. Does that just cause a lot of different confusion? And how do you manage that? Seems very chaotic.

Kelly Greenwalt 12:08

Chaotic is probably the perfect word to describe it. Yes, we definitely face that challenge. And one of the ways that we've been able to solve a lot of the more critical paths is we utilize a data lake. So all of our critical, whether they're point solutions, data flows, whatever, we connect to our data lake. So our data lake is our real-time universal, you know,

Real-Time Analytics Expectations

Kelly Greenwalt 12:30

we've got plenty of refinement running and calculations and transformation running on that data in different ways. And then if we need to access it for something timely, we absolutely can. We can plug into it. So we use our data lake sort of like a central hub. And then our applications are spokes to that. But I'm always very clear with our business leaders, you know, or our marketers. Look, if you're trying to measure a channel, that's fine. You can go into that one tool and look at those, that data set and what they make available to you, but it's not necessarily normalized against our universal data. So don't present it in a way that makes it look like, you know, this is everything consistent from A to B. You just have to understand from the lens of what problem you're trying to solve and then understand which data source to go look at. But yeah, chaos is right.

Kevin Kerner 13:15

But it isn't it's so much easier than the old days to connect data. It's just like it's so much easier. You sort of build custom data models and APIs and ETL processes just to get the data in and out. Now it's just it's so now people that are if you got dropped in today from back then, you'd be like, this is just such a dream. So much easier to connect everything. Totally.

Kelly Greenwalt 13:37

Even building an email is so much easier these days.

Kevin Kerner 13:41

That's true. Uh so you're you're probably seeing a lot of this, you're having a lot of these discussions around what tools, what do we keep, what do we bring in? Do you have some what's what's the first step that you use to evaluate what's working and what's not, and what's essential versus what's nice to have? Like how do you decide what to pull in?

Kelly Greenwalt 14:02

Yeah, so we have a business case for every software acquisition we make, and we have ROIs that are always linked to it. Now, I'm not always asked by the executives for those those metrics, but I use that with my team because we have, I think, well over 60 vendors at this point that we do regular business with and have under contract just for marketing software. And um I think that might be a light number too. You know, you're not gonna always remember, especially if you're on a two or three year contract, you're not always gonna remember. So I have some analysts on my team that are pulling quarterly metrics for each technology that we work with the stakeholders on ahead of time to say, okay, you want to go purchase whatever tool this is. What do you think the benefit is gonna be? What do you think the the return

Composable Data Architecture

Kelly Greenwalt 14:45

is gonna be? And then we actually try to measure it. Now, sometimes that's really difficult, but that's kind of our first stab to sort of center ourselves. And then we also like to look at things like user adoption. I get asked all the time by sales or by our our business development reps, you know, hey, I just got a pitch from this this company who does these amazing things. And I'm like, yep. And we have this other tool that I've already trained you on that does the exact same thing, but you haven't logged in in 18 months. So that's really a key part of it. And that's actually a new function that we're developing in my my department is marketing enablement. So kind of similar to sales enablement and how that enables the sellers. We really need, especially at a larger enterprise company, and Epicor is getting pretty big these days. We have over 4,000 employees at this point. It is critical for us to make sure that the stakeholders are getting the best use out of the marketing tool. It's not just enough to stand it up. You want to make sure that they know how to they have all the information on how to use it to the best of their abilities, and then the managers or leaders can monitor how the adoption is going and how the performance is. And that makes it a ton easier when it's time for renewals. Some of our contracts are so easy to sign off on and get business sign-off on because we are tracking these things and we can see. Um, and then in any in any piece of software, the easiest thing is if you can track pipeline influenced or pipeline generated. If you can get to either of those two numbers, it's usually a pretty easy decision on whether you need it or not.

Kevin Kerner 16:16

It's a great idea to have a enablement function inside of the marketing operations team because you want them to use the stuff. They have it. And if they're not using it, you want to know they're not using it. It's really good. I'm just curious, without naming brands, or you can name brands if you want, what are the outside of the big you know, sales forces of the world, what are the most widely used things, categories? Like what is what's the best use? What have been the best used tools?

Kelly Greenwalt 16:43

Best adopted or best performing?

Kevin Kerner 16:46

Best adopted. Because I'm assuming those two might be, they may have a correlation, or maybe they don't.

Kelly Greenwalt 16:52

Yeah. Well, yeah, it'd be great to see if there was uh an influence from adoption to performance. Yeah. My favorite one for performing is Conversica. So Conversica's been around for a while, I think at least 10 years, but they were one of the very first AI tools in the market. And so I love the extra buzz and attention that AI is getting right now. It's causing rapid development in the market. And I think that as long as we, you know, understand what we're trying to solve with it, it can

Taming Data Chaos With A Lake

Kelly Greenwalt 17:20

only do good. Like this is a wave we all want to be able to ride. But it does annoy me a little bit when leaders come in and say, hey, we need to start looking at AI tools. And it's like, man, marketing has AI built into every single tool that we have in place. So AI is already in progress. It's a matter of what are you actually talking about? Are you talking about you want us to automatically generate content? That's very different than something that's using logic or analysis. So, but uh Conversica was kind of working on their large language model that they use, um, one of the earliest ones to do it. So they've got a lot of knowledge built up and they partner with some of the big companies as well. But they basically offer a few different things, and I'm not going to do them justice here. But what I love is we have an automated email system and logic that can run. It's basically an automated BDR. So if we've got a very specific use case, for example, um, maybe we are getting ready to have an event in that person's area and they haven't responded to any of our emails or BDR calls. We can put them in a program where, you know, an um a virtual BDR, her name is Abby. She performs very well. She's our top performing BDR consistently, but she will send out emails to people that are very specific in that target group, no formatting of any kind. And she'll say, I work over here at Epicor with such and such, your sales rep, and I just wanted to know if you needed any information about this event coming up, or wanted to see if you had seen this blog that we just recently posted. It's very conversational. That's how they build themselves this conversational intelligence. And the response rate is crazy off the charts. And I don't know if that's because their sender score is different than ours. You know, it's not inside our large email database. I don't know if it's the AI itself. I don't know if it's the lack of formatting that makes it look more legit. But when the person responds, they can then book meetings with them through a back and forth conversation. Another thing we use it for is wake the dead campaigns. So if somebody's been inactive or not replying for a while, we'll shoot them an email and say, here's the phone number we have on file for you. Is that still the best way to reach you? Simple question. And they'll very often reply back and say, Yep, that's still it, or no, here's my new number. And then the agent can actually go and update Salesforce records with that information. So we don't even have to do any manual work there. So Abby drives tons of pipeline for us in a multitude of ways. Um and then they also have a chat bot that we use on some of our websites, you know, just to have that same conversational intelligence layer. And the other thing on the AI front that I think is very interesting, I asked them two years ago. Uh, one of my team members is on their cab, their customer advisory board. And we asked them a couple of years ago, how

Evaluating Vendors & ROI

Kelly Greenwalt 20:05

well are you at translation services? Like, can we set up an agent to run in Spanish or, you know, Japanese or whatever we want? And they said, you can. And they said, here's what we've noticed, because anybody who is deep in the AI space understands that there's a lag in non-English languages in our large language models. And they said the approach that we take is we actually translate the the text into English, we run it through our large language model there, then we get the answer in English, and then we translate that back into the language. And so they're not relying on building these, you know, parallel language databases. They are leveraging English as the primary model that's built up the most intelligence over time, but then they have the translation layer on top, which means it's really just a label at that point. So they've got a unique approach, they've been in the market for a long time. So that's one of my favorites as far as performance.

Kevin Kerner 20:59

And adoption's probably is adoption through the sales organization is probably really good, right?

Kelly Greenwalt 21:03

There that we are surprisingly stuck on that one. It's mostly for demand gen and BDRs. And um if we give them use cases, they will run with them, no problem. But coming up with ideas for new use cases isn't always at top of mind.

Kevin Kerner 21:19

Yeah, I wish that makes sense. That makes sense.

Kelly Greenwalt 21:21

I gave yeah, I gave Conversica the feedback. I'm like, you need a a library full of use cases.

Kevin Kerner 21:27

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Kelly Greenwalt 21:28

Absolutely. Templates.

Kevin Kerner 21:30

The conversational AI stuff is just blowing up. I mean, hearing everyone talk about it, and it's getting so much better. The models are getting so much better, and the performance is great. It's funny you mentioned you you you named your BDR. Yeah, it has a name. I mean, it needs to because it's emailing people, but I'm hearing a lot of other tech companies anthropomorphizing the AI in some way, just like that.

Kelly Greenwalt 21:49

Yeah.

Kevin Kerner 21:50

Service agent, the BDR, the all these different things. It's really pretty amazing. And they talk about the in the marketing operations teams about the AI being a teammate. Like it's an ex it's another teammate that you manage. But it's it's really fascinating to me.

Kelly Greenwalt 22:05

It is. And we put her numbers up against the BDR organization so they can kind of have that North Star of all right, she's doing it, you know, in bulk, but still they wanna they want to be the best. So it's fun.

Kevin Kerner 22:16

Do you have some sort of framework when these AI tools come across your desk that you're evaluating against? I mean, that's maybe different than the any other framework.

Kelly Greenwalt 22:24

Yeah. So my same team that kind of works on marketing enablement, they also work very closely with our procurement team on the entire RFP process. And most tools that we buy don't go through a formal RFP, but we absolutely push back on the business when they ask for something. And we want to be, we want to be very clear about what problems are we trying to solve. And then I also ask, what is your what is the current state? What is the performance today? And how do you think that's gonna change with the tool? And this is if they've already talked to somebody. They haven't talked to somebody, bring us the problem, we'll go figure out if there's a tool that can solve it. Um but then that business case and business problem lead to like a short list of requirements, maybe eight to ten requirements. And then we can go to market and say,

Adoption, Enablement, Renewals

Kelly Greenwalt 23:10

okay, these aren't gonna be included for the following reasons, these will be included for the following reasons, and it just helps us stay diligent through that.

Kevin Kerner 23:17

Yeah, it's gotta be somewhat confusing though, because if you you know the stackies that they do that Scott Brink.

Kelly Greenwalt 23:22

Yes.

Kevin Kerner 23:24

People's stackies used to be, you know, they didn't they didn't have all these additional adjacent tools, but now the AI is built into all these tools into the resident tool that you have. So you have AI that's built in. Now you've got all these other AIs that either are duplicative of that built-in AI or some something adjacent that's just a little bit more. So it seems like a stacky could get really complicated really fast. And as a marketing operations thinker about like what is what are the categories that I'm buying in so I don't duplicate something, but what does the stack look like now? I just it seems like it's changing quite a bit.

Kelly Greenwalt 24:01

It is, you're right. And I've been very frustrated because I can't easily put software into categories anymore. And that's still something I cling to for comfort to understand like what are we really talking about here? So if if I force a vendor, they'll they'll tell me something, right? Because people are still trying to qualify for different analyst, you know, matrix and you know, things like that exactly. So they've got a category in mind, but they're not always leading with the category. That is absolutely right. And it it drives me a little nuts. Like I have my own stacky slide that I use with my executives to explain what things do, but it's not it's not exactly precise. It's really more general.

Kevin Kerner 24:38

They need to start like a weird stackies, a really weird stack award. Like this is really weird. Because it's all cat and the categories, there's so many new categories being launched, uh, or there are just new new ways of naming things that are current category.

Kelly Greenwalt 24:54

Just it's just Yeah, I completely agree.

Kevin Kerner 24:56

Really wild. The other thing I wanted to touch on is pricing disruption. There's so much pricing disruption in the in the in tools today. I love the way where things are going as a small business owner with results-based, sort of uh use-based stuff, credit-based versus seat pricing. What's your perspective on pricing and what's your thoughts on? Do you see it changing for the better, for the worse?

Kelly Greenwalt 25:18

Like, yeah, that's an interesting one because at a company like Epicor, we have a large sales team and our BDRs

AI In Practice: Conversica

Kelly Greenwalt 25:25

sit under marketing, but we partner very closely with sales. And you know, we've got over a hundred BDRs uh that we have to support. So if somebody is license-based, it it can get really expensive really fast. Yeah. So I do like it when there is a credit component or usage component, you know, data component, like you said, but not all the tools can actually do that or facilitate that. So it just gets really tricky. And then the other thing that I've noticed that you can get sticker shock on the back end for is if you want to connect it into other tools, sometimes that means you need a whole bunch of extra licenses. And so that can also bloat you up pretty fast. What was the one we ran into one recently? But we use a tool that basically helps us understand lead assignments and account assignments. And based on the logic, you know, that you feed into it, it will automate all of that for you. But then I just found out recently that if you use anybody as an assignee, they have to have a license to that tool. Which again bloats it as big as your Salesforce, you know, anybody who need ever needs to own something. So it's a really important factor.

Kevin Kerner 26:35

Yeah, it's confusing right now because you we're so used to the seat-based stuff. And then you have you really can't there's really no calculator to know how much something's gonna cost when you add something. And you could really like I think I don't know if you found this, but I think I've done a lot of testing in the agentic space. So it's like or maybe automation and an agentic space, like N8N and Zapir, we use a tool called Relay App Relay App, and it's super cool, but then you start running an agent, and then it you start seeing the credits you're using, and it's like using them up real fast. And I think part part of that to their defense is probably the way I've built the agent. Like it's not optimized to be well and and then actually some of the cool things that relay is doing is they help you build like uh efficient, make your agent more efficient. But man, you can really burn through, like you buy a bunch of credits and then you're out of them half a month through. It's just really crazy.

Kelly Greenwalt 27:30

You know, something that I haven't seen a whole lot of, I think people want to do it. I've heard people talk about it, but I haven't seen it come to fruition in a really meaningful way, is marketplaces where you can share as a customer what you've done. Yeah. So like a like an agentic marketplace where you can download what somebody else has done and then upload it back with your changes and iterations. Yeah. So somebody else says, oh, that version's better because it meets my specific needs, I'll download that.

Kevin Kerner 28:00

Yep.

Kelly Greenwalt 28:00

I feel like with a good pricing model, that seems like it should be really lucrative, but I haven't seen it actually make it in practice yet. I'm sure it's out there. I'm just not aware of it.

Kevin Kerner 28:12

It's kind of taken the MCP marketplace a little bit further. Like I use Appify, which is like an MCP connector. And um it it's cool because all these people have built already built the connectors, and there's a big catalog. There's like thousands and thousands of them, which makes it a lot easier than doing it manually. But if you could just go a step further and optimize the agentic workflow, it'd be really pretty awesome. Great idea. Uh okay, so I wanted to I want to transition a little because when we met at dinner, you were telling me about this um MA role that you were involved in at Epicor, which I thought was super interesting. Like you're making it sounds like you you've worked to make to be involved in, or they've asked you to be involved in some of the MA activity. I just am wondering, like, how did you get pulled into the MA discussions being a marketing operations leader? And what's the function? Like, what do you help with?

Kelly Greenwalt 28:58

Yeah, yeah. It's it's been a crazy ride and it's been so interesting. And the world of mergers and acquisitions to me is really all about operational workflows. Like when you have to move fast, you have to move very fast. And there's a lot of parallel processes. So it's really a large project management exercise. But here's why I think marketing operations is uniquely positioned to help facilitate that. It started at a previous company that I was at who was purchasing a company about once or twice a quarter. So it was pretty, pretty high pace. And every single time they purchased a company, we wanted to do live webinars for the customers that were affected from our

Use Cases That Drive Pipeline

Kelly Greenwalt 29:40

current company and ones for the acquired customers. And then we also had multiple emails that were going to come out, you know, from CEO or leadership about what this means for your product options in the future. So there were a lot of webinar details and components and emails that had to be drafted, configured ahead of time, links had to be published and But all of it had to be done in a way that couldn't be crawled ahead of time because it's all, you know, under seal. And so that's how more I got pulled in in the first place was okay, well, you're the leader. We don't want to go straight through the normal typical process workflow and submit a request for this. So we want you to go set these up quietly. Great, no problem. But then I started looking at the the bigger picture and I started realizing some of these things we're not even, even if we have a clear positioning plan, we're not necessarily going after the right audience with the right message. So I would partner with product marketing leaders. And then I would say, well, here's some implications to some of the different customer basis that we have for areas where there might be conflict from a strategic standpoint. And then they would bake that into their messaging document that accompanied day one of the acquisition. They would distribute that to all employees to say, here's the benefit, here's the elevator pitch, here's who the competitors are of this tool, here's why we win. And it has all of your selling tools, all of your positioning statements, you know, all of your um, oh man, I forgot the term. When somebody gives you a reason why they don't want to buy it, and then you tell them why they do want to buy it. Right. Can't remember. It just blew out of my brain. But all of the things that anybody would need on day one to be able to talk to their base. So I carried that process over to Epicor. And Epicor was already doing a lot of MA. They've got 40 years of MA history. But when I came in, they weren't pulling marketing into the conversations until they had the press release ready to publish. And so me and my other marketing leaders got together and said, well, there's just a ton of opportunity here for improvement. So I partnered with our VP of product marketing. He leads all the positioning and strategic, you know, messaging. And is this even a good fit? Is there TAM in our database? Is there TAM outside of that? What is realistic and reasonable for what we could sell in the first year? I partner with him and then I would kind of layer on other components that had to do with operations. One of those is the HR alignment. So I would meet with the HR leader who is diagnosing the list of employees at that company. And marketers have weird titles sometimes. So there might be people who are doing marketing things, but they're not called marketing. Sometimes they're a small company and the marketer is nested underneath sales. So I would help proactively with the HR leader to say, functionally, here's where that person's going to have the best career. We need to align them at the right time underneath a certain department or with a certain group of peers. And then we would kind of work through that transition and make sure the employees got clear messaging and understanding about what that meant. Identifying, you know, any redundant areas, that's always a part of the conversation. But then the number one issue I found is clarity on budget. So the team that's going after the uh deal is certainly very finance driven and they're working with the executives and with the board, but they may not understand what a realistic budget ask is to drive certain financial outcomes. So I've got enough understanding of how much budget gets how much return in our space that I can go in and say, okay,

Categories Blur & Stack Sprawl

Kelly Greenwalt 33:05

well, you're assuming, you know, 20% uplift and pipeline after a year, and you're only giving us 5% more budget. I understand, but here's what you need to understand you're expecting us to sell into a new space that we don't operate in today. So that market is going to take a lot more top funnel and awareness dollars to go attend the right events or engage with the right associations or be in the right places to generate demand. That is a gap that costs money if they want to see fruition in the first 12 months. So drawing a little bit of a corollary between what they budget for the actual cost of the acquisition for marketing costs, um, and then tying that to pipeline targets so that we can at least have some right sizing before we go in and sign paper.

Kevin Kerner 33:50

Wow. That's a I mean, I'm and I'm sure there's always a very rosy picture when you're gonna acquire someone or merge with someone. It's like, oh, we're gonna do this, then it's immediately gonna turn into we're gonna cross-sell everyone. That's everyone's gonna buy this thing.

Kelly Greenwalt 34:05

Yeah. We laugh a lot. Exactly. Sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt you, but uh, it's always like cross-sell to 80% of our base, and we're like, along with every other module you bought, is it gonna be right for everybody? And you know, now it's like one of 20 options that they can add on. So you're diluting your potential there a little bit.

Kevin Kerner 34:24

So it's really interesting because Mops is the right place to your marketing operations is the right place to go for that because not only are you marketers, you're also data-led marketers. You have the data on your side to back it up. It's I don't I wonder how many companies are doing that, but it's really pretty smart. It's smart in one way, but as an executive who's trying to make the, you know, get the sale done, it's probably very frustrating because you're like, I I would want to see the data before I made it fine, you know?

Kelly Greenwalt 34:52

Yeah, that's right. And I work very closely with finance and they know that you know, if I if I do bring up a yellow flag, it's gonna be with merit. There's some times where I I I get overwritten and they're saying, we understand what you're saying, and we're gonna do it this way anyway. Totally fine. I just want to make sure they have all the information, eyes wide open. But yeah, I'm gonna be speaking at a at a conference here in October about how to widen the breadth of your marketing operations scope. And so I'm gonna really focus in on this a role that I've kind of felt fallen into backwards. Yeah. Because it doesn't have to be mops, but if you're if you've been in the business and you're leading and you want to think about how you can expand your remit or use your cross-functional knowledge to help in big, big scenarios, this is certainly one of them.

Kevin Kerner 35:40

Yeah. You know, one thing I think you've done great throughout your career and you're doing it and still doing it now, is that you've transitioned from just making things work, you know, being a marketing operations person who's just making the gears work to sort of owning the data story and being part of the bigger impact on the business. And I have a lot of friends that are marketing operations professionals and they're really good at what they do. What advice would you give them to allow them to transition from just the

Pricing Disruption & Hidden Costs

Kevin Kerner 36:10

technical man or woman in the back room to this bigger business story? Because you've done it really well.

Kelly Greenwalt 36:16

That's very kind. Um I I had and this is a little ironic because I talk too much in general, but you have to listen a lot. You have to make sure you're meeting with your stakeholders and really understand the impact of what you do and think about it holistically. And and like we said, it's not just enough to make it work or hit the publish button or the send button. You've really got to understand the business impact. At the end of the day, no matter how big or small your company is you work at, CEO, the board, executives, they're gonna want to hear about what was the business impact. And that means understanding the data and understanding, you know, what you set out to do. Did you do it? If not, what are you changing, etc.? So I think if people can think outside just the technical workflows into how do you tell the story, it's kind of like that question, you know, so what? So you sent a bunch of emails and so you responded to a bunch of requests. So what? What did that actually do at the end of the day? And it it's it's not always easy, but if you can force yourself into really thinking that way, it'll help you elevate how you tell the story of business impact across, you know, not just marketing.

Kevin Kerner 37:22

Yeah. Yeah, it's kind of like you when you were talking, it's kind of like the difference between between being a financial analyst where you're just crunching the numbers, and a CFO. It's exactly the same thing. It's a mindset that's very similar. It's like if you're a CFO, you've got to interpret this stuff and not walk the company into a problem. If you're the analyst, you're just you're you're really good at pivot tables and data.

Kelly Greenwalt 37:45

So making the numbers work. And the best CFOs I've worked with absolutely do that. They'll say, okay, well, you're asking for an investment that has a pretty clear connection to a payoff in a certain amount of time. We're gonna knowingly take a hit to our EBITDA in the short term for that longer-term payout. You know, maybe that's something they need to think about and be cognizant of. And if they're willing to take, you know, risks that are calculated and understood, those are the best CFOs I've ever worked with.

Kevin Kerner 38:11

Yeah, a lot of good ideas here for people to take from this to do that. It's like get involved with the evaluation of tools, be an advisor to enablements, be involved in MA activity. There's a lot of and the advantage that marketing operations people have is they have the data. They can get at the data and they can show the data in a way they just need to tell the story. So you're I think that's really, really good advice for people. Okay, so we're um coming up on the end here. I wanted to do one thing that I do with all my guests. I'm gonna do a little section called AI roulette.

Kelly Greenwalt 38:42

Fun.

Kevin Kerner 38:43

Uh so what I do is I put a question inside of Perplexity, and then I have I put your profile in and I put it what we're gonna talk about today, and then I just let it go to town. I actually I actually just changed this a little too. I um for the last couple I have put in a bunch of really great podcast hosts that ask really good questions, and I've had it use them as some some uh ideation on really good questions. Much better questions than I would ask. So this will be this is one of the first ones I've used this for. So let me uh hit set here. I'll see what it gets. I'll just read it to you.

Kelly Greenwalt 39:14

Okay.

Kevin Kerner 39:15

Okay, here we go. Here's another. Yeah, exactly.

Credits, Seats, And Burn Rate

Kevin Kerner 39:20

Your job involves deciding which technologies to keep and which to retire. Let's apply that same framework to human expertise. What is one core marketing operations skill that you've spent years mastering that you now believe you'll have to consciously retire in the next five years because of AI? And what are you intentionally learning to replace it with?

Kelly Greenwalt 39:45

That's a really good question. We should post that one on LinkedIn afterwards and see what the Ethosphere says. The one that really jumps to mind is something I sort of touched on earlier, which is email programming. So people who were specific tool experts in the marketing automation platform space used to be guaranteed job security if you had Marketo, Eloquot, Pardot, whatever, HubSpot. But like you were saying earlier, things are so much easier to use now and they don't require the specific advanced skill sets that I believe we are better served if I put people into more of a strategic role. So on my team that does all of our automation, so that's all of our webinars, all of our emails, all of our Conversica AI, you know, uh conversations, they are experts not only at how to make it happen in the tool and which tactic is most effective for which challenge, but they're also experts on our various industries and products. So they're more of an extension of the demand gen field marketers. So if somebody knows they could come to them and say, hey, I'm having trouble getting, you know, people to come watch the webinar afterwards or getting people all the way through into the opportunity after they engage with a BDR. They come to the table with a few tangible ideas about which tools, which tactics, which channels just make the most sense for that problem. And that doesn't require the actual programming skills. And that's not because I'm providing it from an AI automation standpoint, that's because the tools are much easier to use than they used to be. So we're sort of taking the large-scale nurtures and automations and we're breaking those down into smaller. We're sharpening the pencil on specifically what we send out and where we send it out to. And that is a different strategic mindset, I think.

Kevin Kerner 41:34

Yeah, you're atomizing that question. Yeah. Yeah, you're atomizing all those different individual things. And I agree, it's things are so accessible now. And I remember the days where you it wasn't just the nurture program, it was the building of the email, building up the landing page, getting the form embedded, all the stuff that you used to have to do that was so hard

Playbooks, Marketplaces, Reuse

Kevin Kerner 41:55

technically, but those people also have a great perspective on marketing as well. It's like, gosh, we could just take them out of the that day-to-day. It's just like anything with AI, it's just replacing the it's for me, it's taking away the mundane stuff so I can get to the fun stuff the more Yeah, I completely agree. Yeah.

Kelly Greenwalt 42:14

I know a lot of people are very concerned about what are jobs gonna look like, what's the market gonna look like in 10, 20, 30 years. But honestly, there's been many, many, many, you know, tips in the marketplace about either technology expansion, evolution. I mean, if you just think about Moore's law and the pure rate of like computer processing exponential improvement over time, whatever that is, yeah, I think it's inevitable and I think it's cool. I think it's very exciting.

Kevin Kerner 42:39

Same here. Well, Kelly, this has been great. I knew I would have fun talking to you, and then you would uh I learned a lot of stuff. I always enjoy uh catching up with you. So much. And uh, if people want to get a hold of you to talk about any of this stuff, how should they reach you?

Kelly Greenwalt 42:55

I think on LinkedIn, so Kelly Greenwalt. I'm the only one I know of on there. Green like the color, Walt like Disney, I always say.

Kevin Kerner 43:02

So good to see you, Kelly.

Kelly Greenwalt 43:03

You too, Kevin. Thank you.

Kevin Kerner 43:04

Thanks.