EPISODE 219: Marketer of the Month Podcast with Chris Todd

Hey there! Welcome to the Marketer Of The Month blog!

We recently interviewed Chris Todd for our monthly podcast – ‘Marketer of the Month’! We had some amazing insightful conversations with Chris and here’s what we discussed about –

1. Strategies to ensure tools remain efficient, integrated, and scalable.

2. Leveraging AI for transcription and lead processing in marketing operations.

3. Fusing innovative campaigns with data-driven validation.

4. Maximizing competitive advantages with unique first-party data insights.

5. Operating effectively with a lean marketing team and cross-functional collaboration.

6. Prioritizing lifetime value over traditional metrics.

About our host:

Dr. Saksham Sharda is the Chief Information Officer at Outgrow.co. He specializes in data collection, analysis, filtering, and transfer by means of widgets and applets. Interactive, cultural, and trending widgets designed by him have been featured on TrendHunter, Alibaba, ProductHunt, New York Marketing Association, FactoryBerlin, Digimarcon Silicon Valley, and at The European Affiliate Summit.

About our guest:

Chris Todd, Principal of Marketing Operations at CallTrackingMetrics, plays a pivotal role in driving operational excellence and scaling marketing efforts for the company. With over a decade of experience in optimizing marketing technologies, he has successfully steered the company’s demand generation and customer acquisition strategies. His expertise lies in streamlining processes and adopting cutting-edge technologies to enhance performance across marketing initiatives. 

Data-Driven Creativity: Striking the Perfect Marketing Balance with CallTracking Metrics

The Intro!

Saksham Sharda: Hi, everyone. Welcome to another episode of Outgrow’s Marketer of the Month. I’m your host, Dr. Saksham Sharda, and I’m the creative director at Outgrow. co. And for this month we are going to interview Chris Todd who is the Principal of Marketing Operations at CallTrackingMetrics.

Chris Todd: Great to be here. Thank you.

Don’t have time to read? No problem, just watch the Podcast!

Challenge yourself with this trivia about the exciting topics Chris Todd covered in the podcast.

Launch Interactive Quiz

Or you can just listen to it on Spotify!

The Rapid Fire Round!

Saksham Sharda: Let’s start with the rapid-fire round to break the ice. The first question is, at what age do you want to retire?

Chris Todd: 48.

Saksham Sharda: How long does it take you to get ready in the mornings? In

Chris Todd: 30 minutes, but I try to do 15.

Saksham Sharda: The most embarrassing moment of your life.

Chris Todd: Most of them are in middle school.

Saksham Sharda: Favorite color?

Chris Todd: Blue.

Saksham Sharda: What time of day are you most inspired?

Chris Todd: Whatever time of day I’m in the shower.

Saksham Sharda: How many hours of sleep can you survive on?

Chris Todd: I need at least seven.

Saksham Sharda: The city in which the best kiss of your life happened?

Chris Todd: I’m going to say Duluth, Minnesota.

Saksham Sharda: Pick one. Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk.

Chris Todd: I’m going to pass

Saksham Sharda: How do you relax?

Chris Todd: I relax by taking walks.

Saksham Sharda: How many cups of coffee do you drink per day?

Chris Todd: Usually about two.

Saksham Sharda: A habit of yours that you hate?

Chris Todd: I bite my nails.

Saksham Sharda: The most valuable skill you’ve learned in life.

Chris Todd: It’s to be flexible.

Saksham Sharda: What is your favorite Netflix show?

Chris Todd: They just added the Detroiters. That’s my favorite one.

Saksham Sharda: Morning routine. Are you an early riser or a night owl?

Chris Todd: Night owl for sure.

Saksham Sharda: One-word description of your leadership style.

Chris Todd: Relaxed

Saksham Sharda: Coffee or tea to kickstart your day.

Chris Todd: Coffee

Saksham Sharda: The top priority in your daily schedule.

Chris Todd: Time for a walk.

Saksham Sharda: Ideal vacation spot for relaxation,

Chris Todd: Wherever my wife is.

Saksham Sharda: A key factor for maintaining a work-life balance.

Chris Todd: Clocking out at five.

The Big Questions!

Saksham Sharda: Okay, well that was the end of the rapid-fire round. Let’s go on to the longer questions, which you can answer with as much ease and time as you like.

Chris Todd: I’ll do my best.

Saksham Sharda: So the first, okay the first one is as the principle of marketing operations at call tracking metrics, how do you ensure the marketing technology stack remains efficient and scalable for your business needs?

Chris Todd: Yeah, that’s a great question. Tech stacks are a big deal and a big investment for any organization, so you wanna make sure you’re not paying too much. You wanna make sure it’s doing what you want it to do and that people use it. I think that’s probably the main takeaway for any ops person is, is the team using it. So encouraging the team to use all the processes for us. We’re a HubSpot group on the marketing team and Salesforce on the sales side, and they both gotta talk together. So we gotta make sure that sales know what’s happening in Salesforce and marketing knows what’s happening, HubSpot, so if they use it daily then they can tell you like, this isn’t working, this could work better. And both teams can kind of come together and be like, we’re not seeing what we thought we would see what’s going on. And just, you know, regularly check to make sure the tools you’re using are still, you know, top of the class if that’s what you’re looking for, or budget-friendly if that’s what you’re looking for. I think with so much AI coming out, we wanna make sure, you know, there’s gonna be new players in the next five, 10 years that are the new kings of industry that might not exist yet. So you just gotta keep your ear to the ground, make sure you’re at least testing and looking for other things out there.

Saksham Sharda: And so do you have any story about a recent challenge you faced when integrating some new technology into your marketing operations?

Chris Todd: That’s a good question. Right now we are integrating a lot of our technology into our process. So call tracking metrics. We have a lot of AI capabilities, and conversation intelligence where we take a transcription, run it through AI, ask it a bunch of questions, and get things back. So we wanted to test early on you know, let’s have AI pull out the email from the transcription rather than have the BDR have to do that after a call and send it right to HubSpot after. So we had to test that out. We had to make sure it was accurate, everything went smoothly, the fields transferred over what happened when they didn’t say their email and the robot freaked out on us and gave us some nonsense. So lots of fine-tuning, lots of asking, you know, like the BDRs the marketing team, is this working as expected? But yeah, it’s, it’s working out well. So we’re getting a lot more leads directly into our funnel into HubSpot rather than having to wait for a manual sales process, which is nice.

Saksham Sharda: So speaking of what works in marketing you have a decade of experience in marketing operations, how has your approach to demand generation and customer acquisition evolved in this time?

Chris Todd: Yeah, I mean, things change constantly, so you gotta stay on your toes, but honestly, I think the evolution is staying strong in the fundamentals. I think we as marketers try to brand things differently. Demand gen brand awareness, what are we doing for the pipeline? But it just comes down to marketing your personas and your ICP. My evolution I think is just staying strong in that and making sure that I know my customers, I know what they want. So when we’re doing demand gen, doing brand awareness, whatever the, the little piece of the marketing is, it’s all coming back to that, that bigger picture.

Saksham Sharda: And how do you ensure that call tracking metrics stay ahead of the curve in adopting the trends that are gonna come along?

Chris Todd: Yeah, that’s a good one. I think one of the reasons why I’m not too worried about that is ’cause we have a founder who loves to try new things. So Todd Fisher is our founder of call tracking metrics. He’s an engineer from the start. So he, as soon as anything is announced or even before something’s announced and he finds out, he’s gonna be in the code figuring out, okay, what could we do with this? So I’m not super worried about our product and call tracking metrics keeping up because he keeps us up. And it’s more about just like, all right, we know what the thing is. How do we make that work for our customers? Is there a new customer that we need to reach? I think that’s, that’s a big piece too. It’s just connecting the new cool things to an actual strategy, on what we should be doing on our end.

Saksham Sharda: And so I guess marketing operations also require balancing creative strategies like these with data-driven decisions. How do you strike that right balance between creativity and analytics then?

Chris Todd: Yeah, I mean I love the data. So I lean into that whenever I can. But I kind of have, so I got my start more in like social media, which is mostly creative and copy and all of that fun stuff. So I know that there’s value in testing new things that we don’t know about yet, data can’t really at this point tell you what’s going to happen. It can only tell you what did happen. So you still have that foundation, you can test your assumptions using that data. But at the end of the day, you just kind of have to take a leap on creative campaigns and then let the data tell you, did that work? Did that not work? Did it meet expectations? So I think the balance is just what do we have now? Where do we want to go and do we have the data to say anything to that or should we just take the leap and go?

Saksham Sharda: So do you have a story from your career around an example where analytics transformed a creative campaign into a success story?

Chris Todd: I hope that I do. I’ll try to pull one out right now. Let’s see. I think at call tracking metrics you know, something recently that we did is just started looking at how our customers are defining what their Google conversions are. Are they, are they sending every single phone call back to Google Ads as a lead and optimizing off of that? Or are they adding a bunch of scoring criteria? So we took every single sort of lead scoring criteria, every single custom dimension looked at all of that. And we came up with like just this campaign of alright you guys, we need to be doing more for our customers to show them that like, the default is not getting you what you want in Google ads. So this is sort of a customer campaign where we’ve got, the data now to show that most people aren’t using a ton of different criteria to send back to Google ads.

Chris Todd: But like that’s really what the value of sending offline conversions to Google Ads is making sure that like you’re giving them the best stuff to optimize because they’ve got their AI and machine learning that’s just amping up anytime you send them a new signal. You gotta make sure that signal is something good and we don’t have a success story yet because this kind of is just launching. But I’m very excited to kind of give those tools to our customers so that they can start seeing better performance from things like max and stuff that the Google ads reps are pushing on everybody.

Saksham Sharda: So call tracking analytics then is just becoming more and more crucial in marketing. I guess how do you foresee the role of call analytics evolving as businesses become more reliant on omnichannel marketing strategies for instance?

Chris Todd: I mean, I’m always gonna say that analytics is super important for everybody. But I think even with Google’s reversal of the cookies, they’re not going away. The third-party cookies aren’t going away. I think it’s still important for marketers to kind of own first-party data and what conversations are on the phone in chat and text messages. Like that’s, that’s your data. It’s the customers too. And we can talk about regulatory in a little bit probably, but that’s like the data that your company can use to get to know your customers better, to, you know, give to your sales team to give them like more intelligence and to this is the type of person that we should be going after run outbound text campaigns, all of that stuff. I think having that data that is unique to your own business, especially when you start layering AI on top of that like your competitors aren’t gonna know what the phone call was you had between you and your lead. They don’t have that at all. So it’s a competitive advantage to be like, we have this, we’re running it through AI analysis, we’re running it through our processes. We’re, you know, listening to recordings, reading transcriptions, all of that fun stuff. I think it’s just a competitive, advantage to anyone who starts paying attention to the data that you have.

Saksham Sharda: And so what are some of the key challenges you’ve noticed businesses face when they’re implementing call tracking as part of their marketing efforts?

Chris Todd: I think you know there’s a lot of strategy that can go into it beforehand that I think most people would just wanna jump into a tool and get started. But again you really wanna think about what you wanna track. I think the organizations that have the best success with something like call tracking, and calling analytics, have sort of a game plan going into it. They’ve got a measurement strategy for their entire marketing mix and this is something that’s gonna fit into it. So I think some of the challenges are just leaping before sort of mapping out what you want and we can help on our end with those kinds of things during onboarding. But it is part of a strategy. So there are things that you need to, like, take care of first. You know, you have to have your campaigns running. You have to have some sort of a UTM strategy so that you can start tracking things on the offline end to connect it to that online stuff that’s already working well.

Saksham Sharda: So it seems that your role in general involves collaborating with cross-functional teams to drive these marketing outcomes that you talk about. How do you ensure smooth communication and alignment between these different departments?

Chris Todd: I mean that’s something that I’m still working on all the time. I think there’s always better ways to align with other teams. But yeah, we have to be collaborative. With ops, like I mentioned, we’ve got Salesforce and HubSpot that have to talk constantly. We’ve got other tools that, you know, sales and Drift talking to people on chat. We’ve got our customer success in tools like customer or churn zero making sure that those customers are being talked to and everything has to be working together. I think, you know, one thing selfishly called track metrics is good at aligning the marketing and sales side of things. So it kind of closes the loop between, you know, a lead comes in, you can see it in call tracking metrics, it came from Google Ads, now sales has all that information about, you know, where that lead came from.

Chris Todd: Then that sales team can market a qualified lead or not qualified lead, and that goes right back to us in either HubSpot or we can check out CTM. So one thing that you know, really helps aligning is just having that sort of single-like place to look for things. We can both look in CTM and see if it was a good lead, it was a bad lead, and then we can work from there. We don’t have to argue, we don’t have to be like, I thought it was a good one, we’re wrong. We can kind of just look at it and be like, this is the criteria we’re using. And then just having shared goals. Always have shared goals. I think, you know, as you read more and more about goals, someone has to own it. But if not everyone’s bought in, then there’s no point. So sales, marketing, cs, the whole revenue team sort of has to be bought in on, all of that. So if you just have that endpoint in mind, then you’re, you’re gonna have communication because you just have to rely on each other for that.

Saksham Sharda: So speaking of goals then, what KPIs or metrics do you prioritize when measuring the success of your marketing campaigns? For instance?

Chris Todd: It’s all just revenue I mean, you track all the traditional stuff CPC, CPL, CPAs.I think for the most part what I love to focus on is that lifetime value. Sales we know when we talk to them, it’s more about pipeline and things going through the funnel. But really what we’re trying to optimize too is how much lifetime value can we expect from the customers coming in right now. So that’s one that we look at all the time. I think it is a good metric for the types of customers coming in. Are they all coming in on the right plans? Are they staying? So like churn goes into that, obviously usage and subscription fees and all that goes into that, but I think like LTV at the end of the day kind of wraps a lot of important KPIs into that one bucket that you can be like, yeah, this is looking pretty good so far. Because it’s a long-term horizon for what we can expect from these new customers.

Saksham Sharda: And do you sometimes find that process optimization and all this sometimes affect so stifles creativity within your teams? Does that ever happen?

Chris Todd: Yeah, hopefully not too much. You know, I do love to document, I do love process. But I think it helps kind of keep when you put some guardrails on things, it helps you to be more creative to kind of work within them. So like when you start putting restrictions on what you can do, then you have to think about, all right, how can I execute within these restrictions in the best way? So if you’re still trying to hit those KPIs that we were just talking about, how do we do that when we’re trying to follow X, Y, and Z? Which means that we’re gonna have to spend some time, you know, figuring out what are the processes inside of that and then getting creative to not bypass those processes but work within them.

Saksham Sharda: So how big is your team? How many people are you processing and creating?

Chris Todd: We have a pretty small marketing team. I think we’re about eight people now. The sales team is a little bit bigger than that. And then the revenue team is even bigger than that. So we’ve got a couple dozen people that, you know, is all involved in this process. And then you bring in technical support and all of that fun stuff too. Everyone kind of gets impacted when you try to make a change. So it’s, it’s a pretty big team call track metrics now is pretty close to 100. We’re gonna be getting there pretty soon. I think we’re in the eighties or nineties at the moment. But yeah, it’s a pretty big team but also we kind of think small at the same time.

Saksham Sharda: Alright so, let’s talk a bit about the elephant in the room, which is privacy. So with digital privacy becoming a bigger concern for consumers, how do you balance the need for data-driven marketing like yours with maintaining customer trust?

Chris Todd: Yeah, so I’m a big proponent of transparency and I think all the privacy regulations are good. I’m sure it can go too far at some point, but I think right now making sure that the customer’s in control, checking that little consent box, not just opting them in immediately. In our industry, we have a lot of regulation and privacy around just like spam calling, and spam texting and we are trying to push for our customers to think, how can you do this in a compliant way? Be creative within that kind of guardrails that we were talking about about before. There’s a lot of process, a lot of regulation. It doesn’t mean you can’t be creative and reach your goals. So we’re trying in our platform to make sure that we have that transparency, register these numbers, make sure that the campaigns are registered with the appropriate bodies, things like that.

Chris Todd: And then just sort of on the digital marketing side, as I’ve always been a proponent for just web analytics has never been one-to-one or perfect. So let’s just get away from that. You’re gonna use the data that you have in the context that you have it. So sort of let people have their privacy sandboxes, trust what you have, and then you know, you can kind of amplify and enhance it with maybe some of that first-party data in the conversations that you’re having. You know, make that clear too. You gotta announce that you’re recording a call, things like that. You know, are you gonna use this for AI? All of that fun stuff. I think that’s all important and if we just do it transparently, I think it all makes sense.

Saksham Sharda: what new privacy regulations do you see coming in the future that everyone needs to get ready for?

Chris Todd: I think probably mostly AI-like transparency. I think there are a lot of really cool things that you can do with AI. You can, you know, take an inbound call and have it be an AI voice spot kind of just responding to you, qualifying you before passing it off to a human. UI think, you know, announcing yourself as, hey, I’m an AI assistant now, you know, that, would you still like to talk to me? Kind of thing. UI thinks that kind of regulation is gonna come down probably sooner rather than later.

Saksham Sharda: So-call tracking metrics operate in a highly competitive landscape. How do you differentiate your brand in the market? What role do marketing operations play in this?

Chris Todd: so call tracking metrics, it is a highly competitive space. There are leaders in the industry, we are among the leaders of the industry. I think it’s just knowing who our ideal customer profile is. Our persona. We have CallRail is the one that most people in our industry are gonna know. They’re gonna, be the first name that people recognize when you start talking about call tracking they make it very easy to start. Everything is kind of like just out of the box. This is what you get. The way we differentiate ourselves is, yes, you can start and be easy by default if you would like to, but we’re the customizable solution. So if you don’t wanna send all of your phone calls to Google ads, you wanna send the ones that are over three minutes long and were starred three out of five.

Chris Todd: And maybe mention the product that you sell or something like that and send that back to Google ads. And then if you want to have five other conversions, we let you do that too. So I think being customizable is the big one. Being developer-friendly, I mentioned Todd’s an engineer at heart, he’s been engineering this thing from the beginning. We’ve got, you know, tons of developer resources open API, all of this fun stuff that people can build on top of our product and actually like turn it into their white-labeled profit center if they want to. We’ve got people that have taken our, you know, SMS functionality and built their kind of business around it. And we encourage that. I think it’s cool to build off of what somebody else has already built and we give them the the resources to do that.

Saksham Sharda: Could you now give us a story for a campaign or a strategy that significantly contributed to call tracking metrics, or brand positioning, something that comes to mind?

Chris Todd:  so then for the brand positioning you know, one thing that we just did, yeah, we did a big campaign around just sort of what to do before call tracking. It was kind of this don’t buy call tracking metrics. We’ve done like ads, we put it out on like a sponsored campaign or like don’t buy call tracking metrics. Obviously with the caveat of not yet kind of thing where it was like checklists of here are the things that you should be doing in your marketing strategy before you even get to thinking about call tracking. Where I think most people would be like, just buy our thing, we’ll figure it out as we go. This is like, no, we want you to be successful. I think transparency with call tracking metrics is big. As I’ve been mentioning. I think helping our customers get value from what they’re doing with us, is super big for us.

Chris Todd: So we wanna make sure that they’ve got the fundamentals, we wanna make sure that they’ve got their measurement strategies. We wanna make sure that they actually have like an idea of what the marketing mix looks like and then they can use us to validate and kind of scale that. So that was one campaign that I think helped solidify, you know, it’s not just who called, where did it come from? It’s who called, where did it come from and how do we build on that? So it kind of pushed us into more of like, you’re gonna have to have some strategy behind this and we’re gonna help you get there. But like call tracking is a strategic piece of the marketing mix, not just like a data point that you use in a dashboard for your agency-client kind of thing.

Saksham Sharda: Alright then, so looking forward, how do you see AI machine learning and automation reshaping the future of marketing operations in general?

Chris Todd: For marketing ops, I mean, possibilities are kind of endless, which is a little scary, but I think we’re probably gonna move away from just your basic co-pilots and assistance and things like that. And we’re gonna start seeing like just new ways of implementing things that we’ve been using for a long time. Like a CRM does it need to have all the bells and whistles anymore? If you can just use a spreadsheet and put in, Hey, I’d like to know what happened with this customer and it can just look it up for you kind of thing. So yeah, I’m wondering if things are gonna get paired down a little bit. I think processes can be a lot more automated and like, just with, a sentence instead of figuring out what all the workflows are. And that opens us up to like, all right, what’s the strategy behind what we’re doing?

Chris Todd: So it moves people out of maybe the platform more. I don’t have to spend as much time building workflows and HubSpot and Salesforce that can spend a little bit more time thinking all right why would we build that workflow? Who are we building it for? How can we get super-segmented now? So I think hopefully, you know, if we use this responsibly we can get to a place where we’re not, you know, stealing jobs away from people, but we can put more back on their plate to start thinking through how can we make the biggest impact yeah, for the team.

Saksham Sharda: So the last question for you is then of a personal kind. What would you be doing in your life, if not this?

Chris Todd: That’s a great question. So one of my hobbies is screenwriting. So if I had the chance, I would write for TV. So that’s what I would do for sure., I try to spend as much time as possible writing. If I could do that for work too, I would do that.

Saksham Sharda: Well, then you’re on the right career shift because of the writer strike. So, you should be happy you’re not in that right now, I guess.

Let’s Conclude!

Saksham Sharda: Thanks, everyone for joining us for this month’s episode of Outgrow’s Marketer of the Month. That was Chris Todd who is the Principal of Marketing Operations at CallTrackingMetrics.

Chris Todd: Pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Saksham Sharda: Check out the website for more details and we’ll see you once again next month with another marketer of the month.