Is an MBA worth it for your marketing career?

Benjamin Ard: [00:00:00] Hello and welcome to the Alignment Advantage Podcast, brought to you by Massett. This is the sales and marketing edition. In this edition, we interview some of the greatest sales and marketing minds in all of tech. We have a huge emphasis on internal alignment and believe that can be a superpower for your business.

We hope you enjoy the interview. Ryan, thank you so much for being on the podcast. I really appreciate your time today. Happy to be here. Awesome. Thanks for having me. So just for everyone to get to know you a little bit you have an awesome background, career set of experience, a a lot of fun stops in your career.

Maybe just catch us up to speed on what your careers look like, where you've worked, what you've done. Just love to kind of catch you up to this point and what you're doing right now, where you work in, and a little bit

Ryan Van Wagoner: about that. Absolutely. Yep. So I started my career at Qualtrics. Many of you have have heard of Qualtrics behemoth nowadays, but I started as, as employee number 50 at the at Qualtrics research and survey software company.

And it was in a sales [00:01:00] role of, of all things and, and was there for a few years and, and got to know the ins and outs of, of the, of the product and the platform and the industry. But ultimately, what I loved was. Ironically, talking with the marketing teams that I was selling to. I was selling this marketing software to marketing directors and, and, and teams and hearing about their projects and, and found myself wanting to really be on the other side of, of that table.

And so eventually that's what led me to do a career switch. Went to business school at that time. And halfway through business school, I, I did my MBA internship at this little company called Salesforce. Which yeah, at the time it was actually a much smaller company, but still a behemoth. And was was focusing on a product marketing role in, in some messaging, positioning projects, and, and ultimately fell in love with that.

I, I joined Salesforce again full-time a year later. Was there for six years in various product marketing roles where I, I, I was able to stay close with sales, but also got my feet wet in, in, again, messaging, [00:02:00] positioning, sales enablement, pricing and packaging, and a whole bunch of other sub-functions of, of product marketing.

And it was a blast. So, Left Salesforce about a year and a half ago to join an opportunity that I just couldn't pass up. I'm currently at forethought. Leading marketing Forethought is AI software for customer support teams. And so we essentially help support teams do more with less and, and automate a whole bunch of processes in their, in their support orgs.

We, we like to say that we were doing generative, a generative ai. Before, it was cool before chat, g p t came out, and so that, that's a big piece of what we do in, in the platform. But no, it, it's been a lot of fun building a marketing team and a function from almost the ground up and and really building, building a brand.

So here I am. Awesome.

Benjamin Ard: I love it. So you've had some great experiences and I'd love to kind of just go through and, and talk about some highlights along the way. What are some things that you've done that you've seen done really well across the different companies that you've been at where you were just like, yep, [00:03:00] that's marketing done Bright.

What are some of those experiences that you

Ryan Van Wagoner: could share with us? Yeah. And this, this is one, this is one reason I feel strongly about the, the theme of this podcast is there have been many times in my career, and I wanna say especially at, at, at Salesforce, I think this is very common at larger companies where you can get really into your silo and into your role, and you can think you're doing an amazing job, and then you kind of zoom out and, and start to consider how this plays into the larger engine and the larger machine and realize, I'm totally misaligned here.

I remember one project I was working on, I was so proud of this, this this deck that I had put together for sales to help them sell better with the best messaging and positioning out there. And after a couple months, I caught up with a sales leader. I. And he had no idea this thing existed. I mean, his team had heard of it, had never used it, and so there was just total misalignment there.

And that became something that I felt strongly about moving forward. So, I mean, in terms of career, career highlights, I could go a lot of [00:04:00] different directions with that. I, I've been very. Very fortunate to see a lot of, a lot of fun things. Salesforce is a very events driven company, and so being able to be involved in, in some of those Dreamforce keynotes and being on stage meeting some of the larger than life personalities, you know, it's fun.

That's a, that's a really fun part of, of marketing. But also sitting back at the end of the year and looking at the numbers and realizing, you know, my small team here at Forethought made this. Outsized impact on, on actual results. That's, I think, more, more rewarding than, than anything is, is, is coming together with, with a team, a small but mighty team and making things happen.

Benjamin Ard: I love that. So you talk about impact and obviously the biggest way to have impact is marketing and sales, getting along together, being aligned, like you talk about breaking down those silos and really coming together for a unified goal. How have you as a marketing leader proactively really worked with sales to make sure that you're [00:05:00] perfectly in sync?

Ryan Van Wagoner: Yeah, that, that's a great question. Something that I will say, it's something that you never fully arrive at. That's something that's a continual challenge for almost every team out there. And I, I approach this a little bit, maybe not uniquely, but, but for me personally, I, I've been on the sales side, I've been that sales rep that's complaining about marketing.

These leads are horrible. What are they doing over there? They're just in a corner over there, you know, drawing some pretty pictures. What, what's going on? And now I'm on the marketing side and, and seeing the kind of that converse struggle and there's this caricature of the marketing and sales tension.

Where there, there's this, this natural, not animosity, but there's this tension that impedes growth. And I think that's unfortunate because I think there's so much opportunity there. I'm, I'm very fortunate at forethought to be very, very closely aligned with sales. I ironically, you know, I come from the sales world, world.

I was at Salesforce, our head of sales came from the HubSpot world, which is all, you know, all things marketing. And so [00:06:00] we, we stay very, very closely in sync. But but yeah, I think there's a lot that, there's a lot that goes into that in terms of even just the way you structure the teams, the metrics that you're aligned to the plans that you come up with.

Together and the more that you can think of marketing and sales as one go to market motion versus the marketing silo and the sales silo, the more success you're gonna have and the more of those, those silos and walls that you're gonna be able to break down. I love that. I love that.

Benjamin Ard: So let's say it's you know, this is perfect timing end of the year.

How are you approaching goal setting with the sales organization? What do those meetings look like? What are your specific goals as a marketing team that you're actually trying to achieve for this next year so that the two teams are aligned and feel like you can achieve that success and hit your goals this next year?

Ryan Van Wagoner: Yeah, that's a, that's a really great question. One thing, maybe, maybe rewinding just a little bit. So I mentioned, I, I joined a year and a half ago. Essentially we had a, a, a very, [00:07:00] very small marketing team at the time, but we've been building that team, building the function as a whole, building a brand.

2022 has been all about demand gen and, and building and expanding that motion and testing and experimenting with different things and seeing what works. And really just trying to grow as quickly as possible. And I think this is the case for a lot of, of tech companies, tech startups in 2022.

And of course we are entering this, this new phase, this new economic reality where doing more with less. Is that new business imperative, not just for our customers, but for ourselves. And so more and more we are looking to focus 2023. We are driving towards two North Star metrics. One is something that we've, we've focused more and more on this year, and that is just the number of, of SEOs, the sales accepted opportunities.

How can we focus on generating more and more of those. But we're adding a second North Star metric in 2023. Which we have have focused on, but that's gonna be really, really top of of mind, [00:08:00] which is cost per s ao, cost per sales accepted opportunity. And so if we're driving towards both performance in terms of pipe, as well as efficiency in cost per s ao.

That's aligning the incentives across the org, not even just the marketing team, but across the entire go-to-market org. Suddenly, we, we don't, we don't care about leads. I mean, you g leads are cheap. You can bring in leads from, from where you can throw a content syndication campaign out there and bring in leads if you really want to.

But what's the use if you're not generating actual sales accepted opportunities? Funny story with the, the generative AI stuff. Of course, we know that that's a, a huge trend right now for good reason. And the, the search terms surrounding generative AI have just have just gone, I mean, just gone nuts.

And we, we've noticed a huge influx of, of leads because of that. But, but a lot of these leads, they, they want a personal AI assistant that's not our icp. And so, You know, if we're just focusing on leads, we're doing great. But we really want to focus on that ICP and focus on [00:09:00] generating quality pipeline for the sales teams.

And so naturally that leads us and, and incentivizes us to be closely aligned with sales. How are they selling? How can we align on messaging and positioning? How can we help the sale that the sales teams. With the absolute most killer content in their sequences and in their LinkedIn messages. How can we, how can we warm up those leads before they get to sales and reduce the, the, the, those SLAs from the time they submit the form until they're contacted with, with, with the, the very relevant customized approach by sales?

All of that is, is aligned with those goals, and I think that's really, really key to aligning in general, is making sure you're speaking the same language. And you're driving towards the same place.

Benjamin Ard: I love that. Yeah, no, that's really powerful. So you mentioned, you know, the objectives and some of the key points of, of how you can sync up and on some of those touch points with the sales team.

How do you structure your team so that you can kind of hit on all those points? What would [00:10:00] a really aligned marketing team to sales look like, and how are you building towards that kind

Ryan Van Wagoner: of a structure? Yeah, that's a, that's a really good question. It's something I'll, I'll, I'll say that that's also a challenge that, that never totally ends, but the, the structure and purpose of the team is ab absolutely key.

I, I think as, as we started growing the marketing team earlier this year, you know, it's, it's very easy to fall into the trap. Well, let's get this person to handle this. That's checking that box. Let's get this, let's get somebody to handle. Webinars and events. Somebody to handle content, somebody to handle this, this, this piece over here, and, and, and suddenly you have a lot of stuff happening, but so much is slipping through the cracks.

There's, you're not taking advantage of, of, of all of that interconnect interconnectedness that that should be happening. And then, you know, when we bring in the sales team to the mix, it's just, it, it can, it can turn into chaos very quickly. And so what we've done is we've, we've actually recently reoriented [00:11:00] the entire marketing team around DemandGen.

In this case, we're, we're calling the marketing team at Forethought, the demand gen team at, at forethought, and everything that we do is driving towards those two metrics that I mentioned. So the number of s. And the cost per s ao, if something I I is unclear or fuzzy about how that's going to drive quality pipeline, we won't do it.

We will just say no, or we'll punt it. And of course there's some nuance to that. We, we also, we wanna make sure we're building a brand we don't wanna forget about leadership, but understanding how that connects with those two primary North Star metrics is, is really, really key. And so we've structured our entire team around that and instead of saying, this is our.

This is our, you know, webinar and events arm over here. That's a part of the entire demand gen team. And let's sync together and, and bring in customer marketing and make sure we're, we're including that, where we can bring in marketing ops, make, make sure everything's all set up correctly at the right time and, and, and make sure we're all working towards that, that same goal.[00:12:00]

And of, of course, staying in sync with with, with the sales side. With, with all of that. I love it

Benjamin Ard: at the very end. You mentioned marketing operations, so I'd love to hear a little bit about how you've structured sales ops, marketing ops, obviously. How does the data flow through between the teams? How have you structured that systems?

Cuz that's something from my personal experience, everyone does it so differently. So I'm fascinated to see how are people working, not just on how do we collaborate and communicate and build what you need, but when it comes to the actual exchange of data, How are you facilitating that inside of forethought?

Ryan Van Wagoner: Yeah, that's a, that's a really good question and it's something we in, we were late in investing in, if I'm, if I'm being totally candid. A year ago we didn't have anybody in, in this area and, and we were, you know, patching things together in, in HubSpot and Salesforce. And I always make the analogy of you know, you go to a new water park these days and, and you've got this amazing water slide and, and it's often just all one piece, or it's [00:13:00] been, it's been, you know, formed together into one piece.

You go to an old. Old water park and you go to the water slide and it's, it's rickety and it's made up of all of these different segments of the water slide. And you'll notice if you go on there, you don't exit the water slide with the same amount of water that you started with. There's all of this water that's leaking out at each point along the way.

And so it's tempting to say, we can, we can. Handle this ourselves, we can, you know, we can set up these flows and these syncs and we'll just hand handle it ad hoc. But until you really start crunching the numbers and understand how much is leaking through at each of those handoff points and, and focus on, focus on, you know, what, what would this mean for the business?

If we could patch up this, this leaky water slide, what would, what would happen? And, and understanding the business impact of that, that, that's really, really powerful. And so, That's something that we are heavily investing in, in right now in, in terms of sales ops and marketing ops. And that, that covers, and that's, [00:14:00] that's a whole different discussion about sales and marketing.

One thing that're focus, right? Tracking attribution. I think attribution is, is a really fascinating subject in, in terms of marketing and sales. It's it's 2022, almost 2023. It's way too late to continue thinking about attribution in black and white terms and think about, this deal was generated by marketing.

This deal over here was generated by sales. Let's. Put the wall up between us and claim what's ours. That, that does not make any sense. In this day and age we are, we're actively at forethought. We are actively in the process of putting together systems and, and tools and processes in place to really understand how each touchpoint along that entire funnel, that water slide, if you will how that impacts conversion as well as how marketing.

Can help the sales teams nurture and convert and close based on that data. And so, I mean, so much of this comes back to data. If you, if you don't have a clear picture of what's going on and where the leaks are, it's possible [00:15:00] to fix that. And so getting that visibility into what's wrong and then focusing on those, that lowest hanging fruit and highest priority leaks and, and opportunities that's gonna make a massive, massive improvement.

And just make things, make things run a lot smoother.

Benjamin Ard: Very cool. Yeah, I love that. I love the analogy too. Makes a lot of sense. And I think that's an area in the past where people haven't invested enough and I think that people are starting to realize just how important those functions are. And really the attribution game and everything, just the more clean data, the more aligned we can be around the data.

The better off we're gonna be in, in speaking the same language. And, and that makes a big difference in breaking down silos. Okay, so this is more Utah news, but I think it brings up an interesting point. Today the government of Utah announced that you don't have to have a bachelor's degree anymore to have a job inside of the Utah government.

And so it kind of brings up this conversation of education. And specifically to marketing. We've [00:16:00] both spent our careers in marketing. You've spent some time in sales as well. How important do you think education, a formalized education is when it comes to being a marketing professional? What are your thoughts on getting an mba?

You received an mba. What are your thoughts on that in your journey? Who is it right for? Who is it not right for as people are looking to kind of advance their marketing careers or even get into marketing

Ryan Van Wagoner: in the first place? This is a, a fascinating discussion and I, I, I cheered the news from, from Utah.

When this came out because again, a lot of this goes back to things are not black and white. Just because you have a degree does not make you qualified, and just because you don't have a degree does not make you unqualified. And that goes for undergrad, graduate, and, and, and whatever. Of course, that doesn't.

That also doesn't mean that, that I don't have to put in the work and I can just avoid that whole that whole era of my life. I would say where this makes sense is. Planning where you [00:17:00] want to go with, with your career. And I, I, I tell people, I tell people this all the time, especially when it comes to an mba.

I think the mba for too long, and maybe not recently, but for too long it got kind of a pass as, as a check mark. I just get an mba and you've got you, you've got this. Pathway laid out to you for any career you want, and you're not gonna be considered for those roles unless you have an mba. That, that doesn't make any sense.

And I think rightfully, we're, we're tearing down those walls. I'm also not in the camp that says that that mba, the NBA is dead and the NBA is no longer valuable. I think it really depends on how you're using that opportunity and, and the degree itself. And so for myself, I, I absolutely would, would never go back and, and decide not to do.

Business school not to get that mba. That was tremendously valuable for me, both from my personal perspective, but also from a career standpoint. Cause. I planned ahead and I realized I am currently in this role and I want to do something different. Here are my options. I can go straight to marketing right now, [00:18:00] or I can go get an MBA and use that as a stepping stone to get to where I wanna be.

And so you really need to come up with a personal strategy when it comes to deciding whether or not to pursue an mba. And you know, a lot of people that that I went to school with, they didn't know what they wanted to do with their lives, and so they. They thought, I'm just gonna go grab an mba, that, that's gonna help me decide, and that's gonna just open up all these opportunities.

It no longer works like that. And you know, a lot of times you, you can get lucky and you can use that to kind get your, get your foot in the door with the company, but you've really gotta have a plan laid out for how you're gonna use that mba. And, and leverage that to jumpstart your career and take it to the next level or do a career switch or whatever that that's gonna be.

And of course there, there's a whole different side of the mba, which is the, the networking and, and then the question comes down to in person versus virtual. And tho those get into really, there's a lot of nuance here, obviously. But generally using it as a, as a tool, as a strategy and understanding [00:19:00] how it's going to get you where you wanna go is, is the deciding factor for me.

Yeah, I love

Benjamin Ard: that. And for me, I took a different pathway, right? I, I took the startup pathway and I kind of treated that like my mba, but I think much like an mba, you get out of it, what you put into it. And so for me, I really appreciated the network that I was able to build at a startup. You know, I was shoulder to shoulder with these amazing entrepreneurs who have gone on to build these great companies who have gone on to do amazing things.

And that network has been so valuable to me, but it took a lot of time and effort to build those relationships. I know MBA students who have gone and they thought the network would just be there. But they didn't spend the time getting to know their fellow classmates. They didn't actually go out there and do anything.

And then like you talked about the remote versus in person. Going to an MBA is not a guarantee that you suddenly have this great network of people that are willing to help you out. You get out of that what you put into it. Same with the educational side. If you're actually going and paying attention and talking to the professors and [00:20:00] getting the experience that you really want.

There's value. Same with the startup. If you just show up and you're not willing to ask questions, you're probably not gonna get as much out of it as you possibly could. So I think there's some, some interesting points there about getting out of it, what you put

Ryan Van Wagoner: into it. I think that's really well said. I like how you broke that into, you know, there's the education piece, which is usually what we, what we think of when we think of an mba, and that is a valid piece of the mba.

And then there's the networking piece. Both of those are valid components and they can get you to where you want to go if you plan it out really, really well. But they're not the only way you can get those two components. You can get very, you can get. Credible education through, like you said, through through a startup, through a mentorship program, through whatever you, whatever it is that you're passionate about.

And so I definitely don't believe that it's the only way to get to where you wanna go or to get that education and, and network that, that you need. Awesome. Love

Benjamin Ard: it. Okay. One last question to just kind of touch down. And you you had this fun experience where you got to go to this massive corporation in [00:21:00] Salesforce.

And then now you're at Forethought. You said you're right at the beginning building almost from scratch, this marketing team. What are the differences of doing marketing in a massive organization and a smaller organization? Just like we talked about with the N B A, there's pros and cons to both. You get out of it, it's, it's right.

For some people, it's wrong. For some people, it may be right for some people for six years, and then it's something else. You know what, what are some of the differences between those different kinds of organizations?

Ryan Van Wagoner: Yeah, I think, I think you really nail nailed it there at the end. Th this was the, the big company was right for me for a while, and, and now the startup life is, is right for me.

And that's really fascinating that we all, you know there, there's no one right answer here at all. But there are pros and cons and I, I, I joined Salesforce when, when they were at about 14,000 employees, which took, you know, coming from. From Qualtrics at the time, which was a startup that was just a, a mind boggling number of employees.

And of course they're, they're much, much beyond that right now. [00:22:00] But what I, what I quickly realized at, at Salesforce joining, I, I joined into the, the, the sales cloud division, which is their bread and butter product. And so large teams, I mean, I was on this product marketing team that eventually had about 30 people on the, on the product marketing team within Sales Cloud and.

One of the highlights of my career. I mean, it, it was an incredible networking opportunity working with very, very talented people. One thing about about working on a large team like that is naturally you do become a little bit siloed in, in your, in your skillset and your responsibilities. At one point, I became known as the, as the deck guy.

On Sales Cloud, which was great. I loved it. I loved being able to hone in on that and, and build that very, very narrow skill and become really, really good at building keynote presentations that were seen by a lot of people. After a while, I started realizing I don't always want to be the deck guy. I wanna, I, I do want to broaden my, my skillset and my, my, my, my portfolio here.

And one good thing about a large company like [00:23:00] Salesforce is there is a lot of room for lateral career movement. And so I decided I wanna go try something else. I want to go to a smaller team and, and, and learn how to wear multiple hats and learned some other areas of product marketing. And so I, I went to a different product that was essentially, it was kind of a startup.

Within Salesforce. And so lots of opportunities to jump into various different aspects of product marketing, get some get some, some more FaceTime with the sales leadership of that product. And, and so there's a lot of pros and cons even within a big company, depending on which team you're on. Of course, after six years at, at Salesforce, I did start having an itch and I, I wouldn't even say I, I noticed it at the time, but I was, I was starting to, To hunger for something where I was maybe taking more of an active.

Ownership role in something that was having a very, very tangible impact on the company. And that's that's, that's really the, one of the big draws of the startup [00:24:00] world is you can jump in, tackle a project and you can see the numbers go up. That was directly attributable to your own efforts at the company.

And, and so I became excited about Forethoughts mission, about the growth trajectory, about the impacts I could have at the company. And that was ultimately what what led me to, to join Forethought. And as I mentioned, is it's been, it's been an, an incredible year and a half. Incredibly challenging. It's very, very different.

I will say, you know, there, there's You can't fall back on, on the, on some of the big company perks and, and and things like that. But very fulfilling being, jumping in and figuring out problems, working cross-functionally. I remember the first time I, I pinged a, a leader of another department over Slack.

I was. Blown away. I'm like, I, I just pinged them directly and we're having this conversation. That's, that's pretty, pretty mind blowing. And so there's some pros and cons. You know, it, it can be very challenging jumping into a startup environment when you're not used to that type of culture and environment and, and and and, and the challenges associated with that.

But, It's [00:25:00] been a lot of fun and it's been, it's been fulfilling seeing the impact that marketing has been able to have on the organization as a whole, the brand that we've been able to build. And, and all of that has, has been has been rewarding. So, again, and maybe the theme of this is there's no one right answer, but pros and cons of each.

And I, I think getting experience at both of those, both of those extremes is, is, is not a bad thing either. Yeah. I love that.

Benjamin Ard: So if you were to say, what's one thing that you feel like small businesses could learn from bigger businesses and then vice versa, like being in the forethought, what's a lesson learned from forethought that you feel like if you were to go back to a Salesforce, that lesson you could bring with you, how would you kind of take some of the pros of each of those and apply them to the different circumstances?

Ryan Van Wagoner: Yeah. Yeah, that's a, that's a really good question. And I, I think this, this varies for so many people, for, for so many companies as well as individuals. And I would say generally a lot of these, a lot of the larger companies [00:26:00] they have a very strong identity and brand and messaging and, and positioning and it becomes really about channels and tactics and, and execution against that, that brand.

A lot of startups have that reversed. They are so much in startup mode and, and necessarily they, they need to bring in business in order to, you know, make the fundraising stretch or, or, you know, pay the bills that they're often not focused on, on that brand. And so I, I would say that's one, that's one thing that is more important than a lot of startup founders realize is, The brand aspect, the messaging, the positioning, the thought leadership and positioning yourselves as, as somebody that people want to come to, versus always having to go and, and chase every last, every last dollar.

Building a repeatable demand gen motion that's built on that brand I think is, is really, really important. And then the flip side. What can, what can big companies learn from smaller [00:27:00]companies? This, this is something. Again, that's becoming more and more port, more and more vital with the economic reality.

Making every dollar count and every dollar, every hour, every investment of the company has to tie back to a goal. There, there's this, this, this renewed push for efficiency. But I'm not sure that's totally gone far enough or that's totally sunk in for a lot of, a lot of these companies out there.

And you know, taking a really hard look at what are we spending our money on? What are our people focused on? And what is the impact of that? Is that having a tangible impact either now or is it going to have a tangible impact in the future? And just getting really, really into the efficiency metrics, I think is, is really, really important for every company.

Benjamin Ard: I love it. That's awesome. All right, well, I appreciate all of that. So if people want to find out about forethought, how can they find you and your website?

Ryan Van Wagoner: Yeah, great question. So we're at forethought.ai [00:28:00] and you can find me on LinkedIn as well. I'm happy to answer any questions, but that's yeah, that's awesome.

Benjamin Ard: That's where I'm at. Thank you so much. Appreciate your time and we really man, there's so much goodness in there. So thanks for sharing all your thoughts.

Ryan Van Wagoner: I feel like we could keep talking for a while. So this was great, Ben. I appreciate you reaching out and keep it up.

Benjamin Ard: Yeah, thanks to you. Have a good one.

Thanks, you too. Bye. I hope you enjoyed the interview. If you'd like to see the video recording of this podcast, go to get mass.com. Have a great day.