From Data Chaos To Clarity: How To Future-Proof Your Marketing

[00:00:00] Tessa Burg: Welcome to another episode of Leader Generation, brought to you by Mos Op. I’m your host, Tess Burg. Today I am so excited to be joined by Laura Stevenson. She is Mod Op’s new EVP of Data and Marketing Automation, and we could not be more thrilled to bring her team’s deep expertise and over 20 years of experience to one of the fastest growing Inc. 5,000 companies in the country.

[00:00:28] Tessa Burg: Uh, Laura, thanks so much for joining us today and I’m excited to dive into our conversation.

[00:00:34] Laura Stevenson: Well, thank you Tessa. I’m so happy to be here.

[00:00:37] Tessa Burg: So you have been leading at the intersection of data and technology for a while now. And we know and we listen to our clients. There is just so much chaos in their data systems and, not just in the systems themselves, but even in the processes they use to access that data and use it for insights. And then at the same time, they’re trying to keep pace with all of this marketing technology change. And so it is a huge boon to us to be able to help clients navigate that. But first, I am dying to learn more about, uh, the origin story of Ascend.

[00:01:17] Tessa Burg: And, you know, where did, where did it begin? Why did you join Ascend, and what are you excited to see come to fruition now that you’re a part of the team here at Mod Op?

[00:01:29] Laura Stevenson: Absolutely. Our, um, founders who, they were several of them, but then ended up that Rich Herbst was our managing partner, really wanted to do an agency marketing services style company that was not turning out thought leadership behind the curtain, if you will. Um, we wanted to do it closely with our partners where we’re really hearing them, understanding them being a part of their team, and the work shows that. Um, I would say with that comes a lot of heart integrity, excellence, and spirit and, um, great vision for what’s coming next.

[00:02:05] Laura Stevenson: So one of the reasons I joined Ascend is that they were already doing a lot of cool work around automation and journey marketing and making sure that those customer experiences were at the forefront of everything that they did and they were using, um, you know, MarTech in a way I hadn’t seen yet because, you know, this was like 2015 and um, you know, 10 years ago.

[00:02:26] Laura Stevenson: And I thought that is the coolest stuff. I wanna do that. And at the time I was coming from a data company, so that was the perfect marriage for me. Coming from agency World to data company to bringing those two skills together into this world of data and automation. And from there we’ve just taken off with all of the work that we’ve done for all of our clients.

[00:02:49] Tessa Burg: Yeah, you are definitely leading a very forward-thinking and creative group and creativity and data together is truly a unique advantage when we think about the pace of change. And I wanted to quote Jack Welch, uh, from GE, and he said, “If the pace of change outside, outpaces change internally, then basically you’re screwed.”

[00:03:18] Tessa Burg: So right now, I think we’re all feeling that because I, and he didn’t say basically, you’re screwed. He said, “the end is near,” to be specific, but we’re all feeling that because it. There’s new headlines every day on some new tech coming out on things that we should be doing or trying or testing.

[00:03:38] Tessa Burg: From your vantage point, what are some of the biggest challenges clients face right now when they’re trying to stay current with this rapidly changing landscape?

[00:03:48] Laura Stevenson: I feel like it’s the headspace for it. And what I mean by that is there tends to be a gap on their team and that people don’t know how to use the automation tools or the automation tools are changing so fast because they’re implementing AI that they don’t have the headspace to go out and learn that while they’re doing their day job, so to speak.

[00:04:08] Laura Stevenson: So they’re still trying to drive revenue. While they’re trying to innovate and transform, and that’s where we can come in and really sit side by side with them. Whether it’s consultative, like, Hey, here’s a journey map with all the workflows and the triggers and all the things that you should be thinking about, or whether it’s, Hey, your data’s kind of a mess.

[00:04:28] Laura Stevenson: Maybe we need to focus on that first and look at lead flows and look at, you know, basics. Like, do you know who your customers really are? Or is your billing system the only source of truth you have and maybe your CRM system’s outta date? And it’s kind of gotten gunked up by the sales team and it’s sending you in the wrong direction.

[00:04:46] Laura Stevenson: So you know that healspace really is where we act as an extension of their team so that we can jumpstart it, transform it, and get them back to um, you know, focusing on things like revenue.

[00:05:00] Tessa Burg: Yeah, I agree. I feel like when you have, when you’re on the client side, and I was on the client side for half my career, you have very aggressive goals. And there is almost no room for error in how you reach it. And so naturally, especially if you’re more senior in career, and a lot of our clients, you know, are senior marketing directors or their VPs or CMOs, you know what you’re doing by that point in your career. You know how to meet those goals and you’ve done a great job building a team.

[00:05:35] Tessa Burg: So tell me a little bit about how you help clients really prioritize where they start and what are some of the foundational things that they need to have in place so that they can start to move forward and operate and work differently?

[00:05:52] Laura Stevenson: Sure. Um, you know. The glue needs to be there and the business context needs to be there.

[00:05:58] Laura Stevenson: So, you know when people are bringing in developers or bringing in MarTech experts, the thing you need to watch out for is what is the real business reason and the strategic reason why we’re doing this? We kind of call that, um, you know, the bright shiny object syndrome. Like, if I go buy this platform, it’s gonna fix all my problems. It’s usually not the case.

[00:06:21] Laura Stevenson: So what we usually do is we come in and start with the existing stack. We’re not here to sell a bunch of, you know, new stuff to people if they don’t need it. Um, so we are agnostic. With the kinds of partnerships and the kinds of tool sets we use. I mean, you know, from e for email, we use everything from HubSpot to Adobe to, um, Pardot, whatever we need to use, um, because we wanna make sure that the solution’s the right fit for the business.

[00:06:48] Laura Stevenson: So usually we’ll start where the biggest pain point is. So we’re not gonna go look to rip and replace anything. We’re not gonna tell you you have to do a big data overhaul if you don’t need a big data overhaul. So really we’re looking at the pain point and then parallel pathing, how we can make an impact with some low hanging fruit.

[00:07:07] Laura Stevenson: So it could be, okay. I truly don’t know, and this is actually a true story. I had a client who didn’t know who their customers were because they didn’t know what the source of truth was. So in that case, we did start with the data. Um, or we may have a customer who, um, you know, my agency built out this campaign and I don’t know what’s going on, but my leads are all just, you know, they’ve all extinguished, they’re not being marketed to.

[00:07:33] Laura Stevenson: So what do I do? And we might just lift up the hood of the automation plot. Form and, you know, see what’s going on. Like maybe there’s not enough retargeting, maybe there’s, um, some bad email addresses and the marketable universe is not good. Um, that sort of thing. So, we’ll, you know, we’ll work with clients to start where the biggest pain points are and then phase out a plan from there.

[00:07:55] Laura Stevenson: Um, I think a lot of large agencies feel like they have to boil the ocean or maybe it’s client driven, that they have to boil the ocean. I would say don’t do that. Find something to start with and get to market and then phase out from there. Um, you know, you don’t wanna have to build out an omnichannel, ABX campaign that has all these different treatments, but it takes you 12 weeks or more to get there.

[00:08:19] Laura Stevenson: Um, you know, let’s get part of it going while we work on the other parts, et cetera, and make sure that you’re still driving revenue in the meantime.

[00:08:27] Tessa Burg: Yeah, and I think it’s interesting that as this technological landscape is rapidly advancing and we’re trying to get our arms around all this data that’s also impacted the way buyers find and engage solutions.

[00:08:43] Tessa Burg: And you know, we’ve heard trends from Forrester and Gartner, both of whom we work with. Yes. Now the new buyer, especially on the B2B side, but we see this in B2C as well, are setting preference early and that there is now a need, if not a requirement for B2B brands to be present and understood and have some value very early in the process.

[00:09:10] Tessa Burg: How are you helping clients as they’re getting their arms around this data to use that data? Maybe ways they haven’t in the past.

[00:09:17] Laura Stevenson: Mm-hmm.

[00:09:18] Tessa Burg: To be able to get higher up in the purchase funnel and in that purchase journey.

[00:09:24] Laura Stevenson: Yeah, you just hit on it. It’s, it’s really understanding and thinking about your funnel and making sure that you’re not forgetting a piece of the funnel.

[00:09:33] Laura Stevenson: You have top of funnel, middle funnel, bottom funnel. We kind of sometimes find that the middle of the funnel is very forgotten land for people, and they don’t necessarily have content for that. So some of the ways that we’ve thought about this is, you know, let’s not go build a bunch of brand new content for the sake of building brand new content to hit those funnel stages. But you know, we’ve used machine learning and AI to actually do, um, content assessments, do content retagging, make sure all the content’s in brand, and then mapping it out to the journey stages, figuring out where you have content gaps, and then fill in those gaps.

[00:10:09] Laura Stevenson: And then from an audience and data standpoint. Where are the people? Are they top, middle, bottom based on their intent behaviors? So, you know, we’re working with a lot of third party companies, you know, like those that do ABM/ABX, as well as for B2B as well as the ones that do B2C that have DSP capabilities or have CDP capabilities to really understand first-party intent data, third-party intent data, and all of the things that you need to profile from your own customer base to make sure you’re talking to them at the right stage of the funnel with the right kind of content.

[00:10:47] Tessa Burg: We’ve hit on some really sound pillars for how to best go from data chaos to a well-orchestrated full-journey campaign. And at the top of the conversation we said we start with the why.

[00:11:01] Tessa Burg: Why are we doing this? Let’s narrow down that business problem and make sure we know what we’re solving. And as a partner, we’re creating headspace for our clients to share their expertise, their challenges and goals, their customer data, so that we can really center on that. Why in the middle, you touched on let’s get the most out of our existing tech stack and our existing content.

[00:11:25] Tessa Burg: And I think that’s such an important message today when there are so many tools. That you can use to automate content or make a ton of content and we see people jump very quickly to, well, my per, I know my personas, I know who they are, and I used a gen AI tool to spit out a bunch of content to target those personas.

[00:11:47] Tessa Burg: But there’s a new term that’s emerged that I actually like very much, which is “work slop.” And if you are not really centered on the “why” and if you’re moving too quickly to plugging in Gen AI ahead of understanding those intent triggers, those behavioral signs on when that message should reach them. This could be damaging to brands to over target, to be

[00:12:14] Laura Stevenson: mm-hmm.

[00:12:15] Tessa Burg: Could lead spam. What are some of the ways, or what are the, some of the mechanisms you’ve put in to ensure that as we’re leveraging AI to learn more about our customers or even to generate content, that we are really having that standard of quality be higher and higher so that our brands feel confident and the way they represent themselves in automated systems.

[00:12:41] Laura Stevenson: Right. You know, we live by the mantra of “do not set it and forget it.” Um, optimization really needs to be thoughtful and, and thought out. Um, so, you know, we’re really grounding in KPIs and where is the intent data coming from so that there’s a couple of things related to what you just said. So the first thing is we very much believe in an ideal customer profile.

[00:13:06] Laura Stevenson: And what that is doing is taking your existing customer data, their intent data, and then creating lookalike audiences based on those inflection points of, this is my best customer. This is the kind of stuff they buy. Um, this is the inflection point of when they move along the funnel.

[00:13:23] Laura Stevenson: Um, so then you’re creating that. Same profile in your, um, prospect database. Um, then from there you’re really watching to make sure that your qualified leads, that are marketing qualified, going over to a sales team, that they’re truly qualified. So we use scoring models for that, and we go back and we tweak those scoring models based on the performance of the campaigns because what you don’t wanna have happen is have your sales not trust the data and not trust that that person’s really qualified, whether it’s a consumer or a business. Because what they tend to do is they tend to market ads, um, not ready or not a good contact. And then it’s flagged that way in the CRM.

[00:14:05] Laura Stevenson: Um, and then from there, um, really it’s, you know. How is everything performing from an engagement standpoint, from a sales funnel, uh, standpoint, from closed one standpoint, and if it’s not producing what’s supposed to be producing from a ROI standpoint, it’s lifting that hood back up and trying some different.

[00:14:25] Laura Stevenson: Things, doing some A/B testing, um, going, man, that subject line that was a dog, or that creative piece or that piece of content, nobody cares about that thing. Let’s just get rid of it and let’s amp up the stuff that does work so that you can drive, um, head and shoulders, you know. Better results. Um, we did that on and we, and we keep doing this on some of our client work, and it has driven triple digit, percent increase in marketing, qualified leads going over to sales.

[00:14:58] Tessa Burg: That’s amazing. And you hit on the importance of that middle funnel again, that when we just flag people as not ready and then forget about them, we’re not building a relationship that can come to fruition in different ways. When the behavior, when the time is right. This leads me to a question or a thought about, um, account based marketing.

[00:15:19] Tessa Burg: Before this call, we were just talking about a client campaign and getting that better view of the whole account and really focusing on not just pulling out the leads or the decision makers, but building that relationship. Tell me what technologies or data strategies are making the biggest difference when we think about account based experience or building those high value full account engagements versus what I think the old metric was and still is for a lot of people, but just bottom funnel lead gen.

[00:15:56] Laura Stevenson: Right. So the thing that we tend to run into is that there’s a lot of relationship marketing going on out there, and I think that’s fantastic.

[00:16:05] Laura Stevenson: We do that. You know, we are very organic sometimes with the way we create our lead funnel, but there’s also a lot of data out there that needs to be taken advantage of. And the really cool thing about ABM and ABX is that’s creating a buying committee for you.

[00:16:20] Laura Stevenson: Um, the buying committee means that you’re going to have influencers and people that are making the recommendations to the C-suite on what they want to buy.

[00:16:29] Laura Stevenson: And so those are important people. You have to get to them first. And I would say that, um, as it relates to. That the intent data and actually seeing it pop and see when they’re researching your brand online and what pages they’re landing on in your website is hugely important. We had a, um, client, um.

[00:16:51] Laura Stevenson: Actually it was BlueJeans. I’ll just go ahead and say that because BlueJeans doesn’t exist anymore, so I can probably speak to them. But they, um, they use the alert systems that, um, their ABM platform was able to provide where they can send you an email alert or a Slack alert and they saw an account that wasn’t even in their, you know, targeted account list pop because I saw that they landed on video conferencing solutions on their website.

[00:17:18] Laura Stevenson: They gave them a call and they had a meeting like the next day, a sale, the day after that. So if they hadn’t seen that little piece of, oh, they’re out here researching and looking at us Yeah. Then yeah, that that particular account could have gone to somebody else. So that’s where it gets really cool and it’s very tangible and you can see it and feel it and trust it.

[00:17:43] Tessa Burg: Yeah. And where we are today, it is. Much more, I would say possible and almost table stakes to be able to tie your data sources across the journey into singular platforms where agencies of old, um, really fit into specific niches. And so someone owned the website, someone else owned marketing automation and CRM somebody else own.

[00:18:08] Laura Stevenson: Mm-hmm.

[00:18:09] Tessa Burg: But now in the way we’re going to market. In partnership with clients is that’s all connected so that we can respond that quickly to those really high intent behaviors. As we’re shifting towards keeping pace with this rapidly evolving data and technology landscape, from your perspective. How has that impacted the type of skills and the type of people you have on your team today than maybe even like five, 10 years ago?

[00:18:44] Laura Stevenson: Oh, huge. Um, you know, when we are hiring, we’re now looking more for data engineers, people that know how to code, people that know how to do if/then logic in any given platform, because let’s face it, different platforms have different bells and whistles, but a lot of them do similar or same things just with different names.

[00:19:06] Laura Stevenson: So if you can conceptually understand the logic. You can learn where the button is to make that happen. So, um, we’re really looking for those kinds of skills and people that can solution and solve problems and not just rely on the tool set itself. So it’s a bit of a unicorn. Uh, you know, it’s. Very versatile skill sets to be able to swing back and forth between thinking about it and doing it and being hands on keyboard, but then also solving problems.

[00:19:37] Laura Stevenson: So, um, very flexible brain.

[00:19:41] Tessa Burg: Yeah. No, I agree. And I feel like talent on the client side is evolving too, but again. It when we’re hyper-focused on how to bring these together, and that’s like our area of expertise and our clients are owning their brand, how they go to market, that overall strategic view expertise, when you put yourself into that client seat and where they’re really thinking about innovation and team building, what should they be investing in today from a technology and people standpoint to set themselves up for success in 2026 and beyond.

[00:20:22] Laura Stevenson: I would say change management is big. These big enterprise, um, clients that we have, it’s really hard to get people out of their comfort zone, you know, especially if they’ve been doing something X, Y, Z way for 10 years, 20 years, 25, 30 years. Um, you need to give people access to the tool sets and let them play with it so that they understand it, they need training.

[00:20:45] Laura Stevenson: But what I also find is that we have some very academic oriented type personalities who will do great with training, but when it comes to practical output of and use of the technology. Sometimes that’s where they stumble. Um, so not only is it the training and the playing with it, but it’s also how do you apply it?

[00:21:06] Laura Stevenson: And, you know, on the client side, they don’t even necessarily have to be on hands on keyboard. After that they can be thinking strategy and you know. Giving us like, Hey, you go do it, or whatever. Because let’s face it, nobody can do all things. It’s just a lot. Um, but you know, that’s kind of what I did here at Ascend before Mod Op, um, did a lot of training, did a lot of sitting in on meetings.

[00:21:30] Laura Stevenson: I still sit on meetings with my people that are doing the doings because I like to see what it is that they’re tripping up on or. What kinds of things are the clients asking for that they then have to translate into, okay, how do I build this? So there’s a lot of, um, just taking information in and then figuring out how to apply it.

[00:21:53] Laura Stevenson: So you kind of have to get out of your academic world at some point, but you do need that foundation.

[00:21:59] Tessa Burg: Yeah. Uh, change management is a theme that just pops up on the podcast over and over again and,

[00:22:05] Laura Stevenson: mm-hmm.

[00:22:06] Tessa Burg: We are in an era of more change than ever before, so I completely agree, and we’re so excited to have you, Laura, here as a leader and to have the data marketing automation strategic business unit.

[00:22:20] Tessa Burg: Before we end the podcast, I was wondering what are you most excited about as we looked into 2026 and the future?

[00:22:31] Laura Stevenson: Gosh, if I had to pick like a list of maybe three things, I would say I’m excited about using more and more AI to help us be more efficient, not only in customer experiences, but processes.

[00:22:44] Laura Stevenson: I’m excited about the conversion of sales and marketing working together as one united revenue ops team structure. A lot of people are starting to do that, and I think that’s where this experience really seeing it comes from. You know, I got this email to, well now I’m talking to a sales rep and it’s actually connected.

[00:23:03] Laura Stevenson: And then I’m also just excited about all the fabulous things that Mod Op brings to the table and being part of Mod Op, it expands our services to so many different things that we can offer our clients that, you know, we did a smattering of before, but now it’s even deeper. So everything from, you know, SEO turning into AI chat versions of SEO to, you know, more and, and cooler creative to experiential and experiential solutions and PR and market research, those are all things that we were, you know, dabbling in.

[00:23:39] Laura Stevenson: But now there’s so much more depth that we can bring to our clients.

[00:23:42] Tessa Burg: Yeah, I agree. That’s what I get most excited about too. Like I will tell. It is so much fun being able to work with people who spent their entire career, but in a completely different slice of marketing than you, and being able to collaborate and bring that expertise to life in a single campaign or in a single engagement with a client partner. It, it’s a lot of fun. You’re gonna love it. Yeah.

[00:24:06] Laura Stevenson: Yes. I’m already having fun.

[00:24:10] Tessa Burg: So thank you again, Laura, for joining us today. Uh, if you want to find Laura, she’s now part of the Mod Op Family, you can reach her at [email protected] or connect with her on LinkedIn.

[00:24:23] Tessa Burg: For more episodes of Leader Generation, that’s also at modop.com underneath podcast, modop.com/podcast or wherever you listen to your favorite pods. Uh, until next time, we’ll have to do a part two to see how things are going. Thanks for being our guest.

[00:24:41] Laura Stevenson: Thank you, Tessa. Appreciate it.