Brewing Success with Kompetently: AI’s Role in Transforming Marketing

On this episode of The Pipeline Brew podcast, Matt Hummel welcomes Mark Ogne, Founder & CEO of Symplexity.AI and Chief Marketing and AI Officer at Kompetently.

With over two decades of global marketing experience and five successful exits, Mark shares his journey from sales to pioneering the integration of AI in marketing. The two cover the transformative potential of AI not as a mere efficiency tool, but as a means to enhance marketing effectiveness by enabling businesses to pursue their “200% better ideas.”

Mark also advocates for a shift in focus from prompt engineering to purpose-built AI tools that truly comprehend your business context, making AI a powerful ally in driving meaningful outcomes rather than just streamlining tasks. This is the focus of Mark’s own venture, Symplexity.AI, which aims to bridge the gap between AI’s potential benefits and current adoption inertia.

Mark’s blend of marketing mastery and forward-thinking mindset to AI offers valuable lessons for marketers looking to embrace the rapid evolutions in the current technological world. Stick around to hear his thoughts on parenting, and why he’s learned to cherish each stage of his children’s lives.

Mark has more than 25 years experience as a marketing leader for publicly traded companies as well as start ups. Known for defining and executing strategies that have delivered industry changing innovation, he’s recognized as being among the first to launch market-focused commerce operations, and more recently, he developed positioning, strategy and product solutions for the pioneer of multichannel testing and targeting.

Led by passion and guiding principles of collaboration, Mark has directed corporate and marketing communications, social media strategy and execution, multichannel and search agency practices, acquisition / demand generation, product marketing, product management, site usability, and ecommerce initiatives.

Matt Hummel: [00:00:00] Hey everyone, and welcome to another episode of the Pipeline Brew, the podcast that meets at the intersection of people and pipeline. We’re bringing you fun, yet insightful conversations, where you’ll not only hear from marketing experts, but also get to know them as well.

Matt Hummel: Hey everyone, today I am super excited to be joined by Mark Ogne. Mark is the founder of Symplexity.AI. And the fractional CMO with Kompetently. Mark’s had quite the career with over 20 years of experience in global marketing with five exits under his belt. And in this new age of the rapid democratization of AI, Mark is leading the charge on educating marketing experts with the latest tools and techs.

Matt Hummel: Welcome to the show, Mark. How are you today?

Mark Ogne: Wonderful. Thanks for having me, Matt.

Matt Hummel: It’s my pleasure. I’m excited to, uh, get to chat with you. And I know our audience is excited to hear from you as well. So we like to kick off each episode with a little bit of an icebreaker [00:01:00] just to get the ball rolling. You ready for that?

Matt Hummel: Right on. What is your go to beverage when you need a little pick me up?

Mark Ogne: Okay, so I have a modestly good espresso maker. And there’s actually a short story behind it. I was never a coffee drinker. I lived in Seattle for like 10 years. And everybody up there drinks coffee. Kids drink espressos and things like that.

Mark Ogne: And my now wife, then girlfriend, wanted to have a latte. So I said, you know what, I’m gonna go and make Espresso and a latte for you each day. And then after a while, I thought, you know, gee, I’m going to go and just have a sip each morning. Like, not that I didn’t like caffeine, I’d have tea and whatever.

Mark Ogne: And then we were in Italy a few years later and like, you’re in Italy, there’s espresso, like, who, like who makes better espresso? And I saw she ordered one. It’s like, you know, I’ll have one too. And she’s like, what? It’s from that moment forward. I skipped the whole coffee part and went from tea to espresso.[00:02:00]

Matt Hummel: I love that. So I also was in Italy. This was a few months ago and it was my first time there and I came home. And I can hardly drink coffee anymore. Now I don’t have the whole espresso set up, but it is, they are not the same. Right.

Mark Ogne: Yeah. It’s an art form over there for sure.

Matt Hummel: No doubt. So I got to know because I’m in the market for an espresso maker.

Matt Hummel: Any recommendations?

Mark Ogne: You know, so I went for this brand called Ranchilio, the Ranchilio Silvia, and it’s like, A low end commercial to a high end consumer thing. So it’s got a brass boiler, it’s got copper pipes and stuff inside of it. It’s not the, you know, consumer esque one. It’s temperamental. You have to have the right grind.

Matt Hummel: Aren’t we all temperamental?

Mark Ogne: Yeah, we’re all temperamental, right? But the thing I didn’t want to have is an aluminum boiler. Just, I don’t like cooking in aluminum stuff. I avoided that and came to this and I got wise advice from a barista. [00:03:00] He said, you cannot overpay for a good espresso maker. And I asked what he meant.

Mark Ogne: He says, well, you’re paying, you know, five bucks for your espresso now, you know, times that by 365 and it’s like, you know, you’re going to pay any kind of an espresso maker off quick.

Matt Hummel: That’s logic that I can get behind. I love that.

Matt Hummel: So funny story about coffee in Italy as well. So when I travel to good destinations like Italy or, you know, places such as that, I always like to pick up a Starbucks destination mug.

Matt Hummel: Unfortunately, what that meant in Florence was I had to walk about a mile to the Starbucks and then it was, it was an entire walk of shame walking back from Starbucks with the bag, a big Starbucks bag to hold the mug. And I could just feel the eyes staring at me as I’m passing all these little local coffee shops that truly know how to make espresso.

Matt Hummel: So yeah, Florence is beautiful. It’s a great place. Absolutely. Well, great stuff. Well, thanks again, Mark. Excited to have you on and [00:04:00] get to know you better and let’s jump in if you’re ready.

Mark Ogne: Alright,

Matt Hummel: So before we talk about what you’re up to today, I’d love for you to tell the audience a little bit more about yourself and your background.

Matt Hummel: I know you’ve had a great career. Creating and scaling multiple markets. Can you share a little bit about that?

Mark Ogne: Sure thing. So I’ve had a really weird trajectory in my career. I started in sales, then into really large deal selling. My biggest deal was 400 million annual. You know, these are like, you know, 18 months of negotiation and not the sales cycle was even longer than that into an operating executive.

Mark Ogne: And then I decided at that point, I mean, this is, Uh, a ways ago for a lot of people, but you know, in the digital kind of the whole dot com era, I had this epiphany that marketing was going to change dramatically, and I knew that I had a good voice for the customer, so I decided to go and head towards marketing and been a CMO many times.

Mark Ogne: And love it. It’s one of those [00:05:00] things I tell my kids, like I wake up in the morning, pinch myself. It’s like, I’m really lucky to do what I love.

Matt Hummel: Tanner Iskra That’s awesome. Well, and amazing on the 400 million ARR deal. Well, I would say most people don’t sell 400 million worth of deals in their lifetime.

Matt Hummel: So what an amazing moment for you. So when was this, roughly in, in your journey where you had this,

Mark Ogne: You know, it was late nineties, early two thousands, and, you know, a blessing was that I had an IPO exit right at like 2000. And then like everything stopped. I mean, it was worse than today’s economy back in, 2000, 2001. So I was able to take a lot of time off, lived in Hawaii for a while, lived in Europe for a while.

Mark Ogne: In all of that time, I made a switch. I didn’t want to go from, you know, to sales. And I knew that marketing was the right way to go. So never looked back and headed that direction.

Matt Hummel: That’s [00:06:00] awesome. Well, I want to, you know, double click on something you said just around your sales experience. A lot of marketers today You know, the only sales experience they have is probably as a BDR, if any.

Matt Hummel: How do you feel like your experience in sales shaped you as a marketer today?

Mark Ogne: You know, empathy would be the biggest thing, but I think reality is a better vision of it is, you know, frankly, I don’t think I’ve ever received a lead in my life. And so when people bitch about having a bad lead, it’s like, man, I would have loved having just a phone number, you know, sometimes.

Mark Ogne: And, you know, so the accounts that you’re given are what you make of them, you know, and if you’re not out there simultaneously networking and getting to know people who know people and just working your way in, yeah, you’re always going to be on the outside and you can’t blame that on somebody else. But it also brought me, in my last CMO role, we came up with an idea, rather than continually trying to push on a rope [00:07:00] and get people to agree, like, here is the ICP, here’s our scoring methodology, Can we all agree on that?

Mark Ogne: Yes. Okay, cool. Okay. So when something comes over the fence and it fits the scoring methodology and nobody does something with it, you just got tired of saying like, you know, come on, can you follow up? Can you do this? Please, please. And so we came up with a different methodology. If somebody did not meet the threshold for following up on stuff too late, never did it, whatever.

Matt Hummel: Yeah.

Mark Ogne: They were disinvited from any leads the next quarter.

Matt Hummel: Yep.

Mark Ogne: I love that. We would just take our budget, push it to somebody who gave, you know, gave a damn. And did better. And if they miss the leads, then they’d be like, huh, you know, well, hey, Mark, can we go get some more of those? It’s like, well, okay, but you’re going to guarantee that you’re going to do this and we’ll give you one month.

Mark Ogne: And ironically, it was probably the one thing that really kind of turned the table in the sales and marketing. I call it collaboration. I think collaboration is what [00:08:00] ends up becoming alignment, but we aligned quickly. In this situation, because all of a sudden, if they weren’t collaborating, they kind of got cut off.

Mark Ogne: And it changed the dynamic a lot.

Matt Hummel: That’s really cool. And I have similar stories. I remember when I was at Thompson Reuters at one point in my career, I was meeting with one of the sales leaders and he said, Hey, I’m not getting enough leads. And I said, well, let’s open up. And this was in the days where funnel was everything.

Matt Hummel: Right. And I said, well, let’s open up your funnel and let’s look at what’s going on. And I get to the bottom and I said, You’re closing 5 percent of the pipeline that we’re sending you. And I was supporting multiple other business units at the time within Thomson Reuters. And I said, this is on a comparative average of roughly 35%.

Matt Hummel: So, you know, you’re saying you want more money and more investment and more leads. Finance is saying, why are we giving them anything? They’re not closing whatever we’re giving them. He had no idea. It was eye opening to him. And so it forced him to go dig in with, with his reps and understand, Hey, is this [00:09:00] real pipeline?

Matt Hummel: Why are we not closing it? What’s the deal? And the power of data, but also, you know, look, I’m not going to sit here and say marketing’s always right and sales is always wrong or vice versa. But I think just that collaboration and what it did is it, it facilitated a great discussion to where it drove that mutual accountability.

Matt Hummel: So I appreciate, I appreciate your perspective on that.

Mark Ogne: And just a closer there on what you just said about the collaboration. That’s the key. When people talk about sales and marketing alignment, they’re talking about an outcome, but they use it in a sense as if it were the. The process. It’s not the process.

Mark Ogne: It’s the outcome. Collaboration is the process. And if you focus there, right.

Matt Hummel: I’ve never thought about it that way, but it makes perfect sense. And yeah, you hear a lot about all sales and marketing is not aligned, not aligned. Well, there’s a process to get there. So, and that is, that is the process of collaboration and such a great point.

Matt Hummel: I think sometimes we just need to sit at the table together, break some bread, have a conversation and work together [00:10:00] towards, towards the end goal. Because even if. Marketing isn’t quote unquote, driving the revenue, closing the deals. We’re all involved at the end of the day, our job as marketers is to make their job easier and ultimately grow, help grow the business.

Matt Hummel: So I love that. All right. I want to talk about your current ventures. So let me make sure I’m saying them correctly. Symplexity.AI and Kompetently, which I would imagine from an SEO perspective, you probably own those spaces because I’ve not heard of, you know, similar businesses, so I want to better understand.

Matt Hummel: You know, what are you doing with these organizations or businesses and what issues are you facing or did you see that ultimately led you down this path?

Mark Ogne: So I have had a consulting business for many years and I’ve kind of gone in and out of it. Sometimes a client will pull me in where I’d be like an advisor to the CEO and become like a rich inbound product marketing expert in that field.

Mark Ogne: And then I get pulled in closer and closer and [00:11:00] closer and then I come back and do the consulting work a little while later. So I’ve been doing that for the last year and a half or so spun out on my last CMO role now in June or so last year, but in that process, then I was starting that back up. It was a blessing because AI was really, you know, a year and a half ago.

Mark Ogne: It’s very topical, kind of a lot of mysteria, you know, mystery around it. And so the blessing was that is able to really just dig in and go super deep. I started using this for my clients and then over a long period of time, I came up with a very different answer than everybody else that I see on LinkedIn and you know, in the event series and all that.

Mark Ogne: And we could talk about that in a moment, but that spun into Symplexity. And while Symplexity, you know, is going well, one of my fractional roles brought me in, in a more or less full time position. It’s an HR tech company called Kompetently. Okay. And what’s really cool [00:12:00] here is that it’s really bringing together A lot of these skills that I’ve honed recently and functionally, my new title is Chief Marketing and AI Officer.

Mark Ogne: Which I believe I’m the first one to have something like that. But

Matt Hummel: I love it.

Mark Ogne: I like that. And what the organization does is competency assessments at an enterprise level. They like really large clients, mostly in Europe right now. But it is like in technical roles. You have skills based assessments. You know, can you code this language?

Mark Ogne: Can you do this type of thing? So competencies are different and that they also include outcomes. And attitudinal and psychological skills, emotional intelligence, all these other things help in really any role to understand, you know, do you know how to work with other people? Can you communicate effectively?

Mark Ogne: And it’s not just, you know, a manager’s opinion. So this becomes kind of much less biased. Much more inclusive and it directly leads to, it’s kind of an AI driven platform that leads [00:13:00] directly into learning pathways. Just recently we have released a new approach and it’s around AI and it’s a top down approach.

Mark Ogne: So there’s so much written about AI adoption and how it’s so hard and CEOs think their teams can’t do it and you know, it’s kind of a latent potential out there. And so what we’re doing is an organizational assessment, you know, for the organizational leaders, maybe 50 or so, a hundred or so top leaders.

Mark Ogne: across all functions and looking much more a little bit at the technical side, only a little bit, but mostly at cognitive flexibility. Like, are you able to shift mentally how you do things? Is self awareness like, you know, what you know and don’t know or attitudinal issues to change? How well does the organization or a person adapt to change?

Mark Ogne: Because functionally that is What all change management is about, right? It’s an [00:14:00] AI is just the latest episode of what’s really become kind of, you know, a 21st century challenge for us. If you look back to the 20th century, when all these HR tech platforms were put together, more or less, you know, you’d have episodic changes, the invention of the PC.

Mark Ogne: Great. Okay. That happened. Internet. Okay. That happened like, you know, several years later, but today with AI, it’s like every month there’s something new. And it’s not just AI, it’s the economy. It’s, you know, buying, you know, is everything is changing. I think McKenzie described it as the, the Russian doll of change, you know, where you pull one out, another one, another one, and it’s become this Russian doll of change.

Mark Ogne: And I think we’ve seen this as leaders with, you know, a few years ago, you know, silent quitting. And things like that. People just get frustrated because everything is changing around them. And one of the ways they act out is this psychological and attitudinal way of like, well, [00:15:00] screw it. I’m just going to go to work, drink a couple of lattes and then leave on time.

Mark Ogne: But as leaders, we need to understand Not individuals so you can, you know, beat them up, but really teams and organizations, are they equipped to deal with the underlying things that cause those attitudinal issues of, you know, like silent quitting? And how can you better equip them to do that? So this AI assessment is top down, it’s looking at the nature of those types of questions, and it’s free, actually.

Mark Ogne: So that’s the really cool part. Yeah, that part is free and what we would hope to do is then to find, are there functional areas, are there leadership skills, or are there, you know, things that As an organization, we could then help them to facilitate additional testing and things like that. But right now, there’s a lot of people in fractional marketing and people that are, you know, working at the operating executive level and HR consultants that are thinking this is a pretty cool thing [00:16:00] because we’d help enable them to better infiltrate a new client with, you know, helping them go through what’s really a topical issue right now.

Matt Hummel: I love it. I’ve not heard that use case for AI before, and it makes a ton of sense. I’ve, you know, a few times in my career, I’ve been through those types of leadership development. I’m not using the right term, but where they’re doing the assessments and they’re really understanding your strengths, your areas of opportunity, but more importantly, to your point, How you can best work together and where some people need to flex and others need to stretch and pivot and whatnot.

Matt Hummel: And yeah, I’ve seen when done correctly, it really sounds cliche, but kind of unlocks the power of a team. And so what a powerful concept to be able to, to combine the power of AI as sort of that. Incubus into the beginning of that process. So very cool. Well, we’ll make sure to include the link for the free survey if you want in our show notes.

Mark Ogne: Fantastic. Love it. Love it.

Matt Hummel: Awesome. All right. So on the topic [00:17:00] of AI, you know, I know this has obviously been a huge area of passion for you. One that to your point, you’ve spent a lot of your time, especially the last year and a half. I want to pivot and really get your take on AI and the current state of marketing.

Matt Hummel: How do you see AI fitting in today? And I think, where do you see it heading?

Mark Ogne: So, I think we’re in a really bleeding edge stage still. You know, I’m old enough to remember PCs when they’re first coming out and like how, I don’t know, threatening to some people it was. And I remember learning DOS and how to use floppy disks and all this type of stuff.

Mark Ogne: And people would say, Oh man, everybody’s going to have one of these on their desk someday. And I’m like, there’s no effing way somebody’s going to have one of these on their desk. This is just, it’s too painful, man. It’s like, I couldn’t imagine. You know, then my folks learning how to use DOS and a computer, like it literally would be impossible.

Mark Ogne: But then additional innovations occur, you know, the Mac, the Windows [00:18:00] and things like that. And pretty soon the technology figures out how to adapt itself beyond the bleeding edge. And I think we’re just starting to touch those types of use cases. But the things that I see right now that are causing more problems than solutions are, you know, the experts that are talking about.

Mark Ogne: Becoming better at adapting people to using consumer tools. So I use chat GPT some, and I use it particularly if I have repetitive things, it’s really good at optical character recognition. So if I wanted to read a chart that’s just a graphic, it’ll interpret that for me and it does a great job, but that’s about it.

Mark Ogne: There’s a real challenge there that You know, so people are trying to become prompt engineers to try to make this consumer tool operate like a business tool.

Matt Hummel: Yeah.

Mark Ogne: And you just shouldn’t have to do that. I mean, if all it is, is Claude and Gemini and chat GPT, then [00:19:00] this is a nothing burger. Like, seriously, like this is too hard to use.

Mark Ogne: It’s too unreliable. And then it caused me to open my aperture to look at it and to say, well, is this what people are really talking about? And the issue that I found is that people conflate. The consumer chat tool with the AI. Yes. Now mentally you have to separate the two because the AI is an enterprise tool.

Mark Ogne: It does really freaking amazing things. The consumer interface to that is really quite limited. So I can get into discussion about what they call context window, but think of it like a human context window is not a brain space that give you To have a conversation, and then you have throughput, you know, you’re speaking and what you could hear, all of those are really limited, and by limited I mean, so the context window, the brain space, a free account is maybe 8k, a paid account is maybe 32k, but OpenAI operates with 128k, [00:20:00] so, you know, much, much larger brain space, but even more important, How it gets rid of excess context is through first in first out in the consumer accounts.

Mark Ogne: And that is a cause for a lot of hallucination. The enterprise tools use recency and frequency. So what I mean by all of this is that if I go into chat GPT, I put the most important thing in first. It will literally be the first thing that it forgets. And so after you do 20 or 30 back and forth, all of a sudden it starts saying stupid stuff.

Mark Ogne: Why? Because the one thing that it’s supposed to know, it just evacuated so that it can make room for the new information that you fed to it. But when you have 128k and it gets rid of the conversation elements that it’s not using, hallucination is, it’s not non existent. I’ve not experienced it. It could happen, but it’s much less likely to happen.

Mark Ogne: [00:21:00] So that tool has become the challenge. You know, so people that talk about using custom GPTs, if you have really, really simplistic things, maybe, maybe that could work. But in B2B sales and marketing, that’s not what we deal with. We deal with, you know, I mean, typically a sales process or marketing, you’re writing some content and marketing.

Mark Ogne: I mean, you’re talking six, eight, 10 different dimensions, this persona in this industry with this challenge, looking for this kind of value from these types of capabilities. It’s so hard to wrap your head around that, that a lot of marketing content becomes an inside out regurgitation of we do all this stuff and people like it because, and it’s like speaking the wrong language to your prospect.

Mark Ogne: Who wants to know, Hey, I’m in financial services and I do this type of a function and I need these, you know, my challenges are this and these capabilities. Can you talk to me about that? So because of [00:22:00] that, it’s not been as impactful in sales and marketing as it could be. And so that’s fundamentally, that’s what we’ve been trying to solve and what we have kind of cracked the code on with Symplexity.

Matt Hummel: Well, that’s awesome. And I, yeah, I’d love to hear a little bit more around how you feel like Symplexity has solved that. And cause I was going to ask, there’s a little bit of a debate around. I had a good friend on the podcast, Greg Verdino, and he said, you know, AI on one hand, Gen AI, that is, on one hand is completely overhyped, and on the other hand, it’s completely underhyped.

Matt Hummel: And what he meant by that is, I think a lot of marketers and other professions as well saw Gen AI as, it’s here, it’s going to save us, I no longer have to do these repetitive tasks. It’ll do all my writing, all my editing, this and that. On the other hand, it’s so under hyped in the sense of what you can actually unlock from the true power of AI.

Matt Hummel: And so I think what you just described really fits in with that, where it seems like we as [00:23:00] marketers are being limited less by our own. You know, prompt engineer skills and more so by the applications that we have to leverage around Gen AI. Is that, is that fair to say?

Mark Ogne: Yeah, I think it’s fair to say, you know, so I’ve written quite a bit and published stuff on the, on the topic and so I call like native applications like a chat GPT and then you have embedded applications.

Mark Ogne: Like, you know, in a sales tech solution, it’ll craft an email. And so then there’s also purpose built tools, which is like Symplexity, or maybe there’s some other writing tools and things like that. In all of these things, once you get beyond the context window and throughput conversation, the next challenge is context.

Mark Ogne: And what I mean by that is You know, a large language model can tell you about, you know, farming best practices in the sub Saharan desert and quantum physics and, you know, anything in between. But what it can’t do is it doesn’t really, really understand [00:24:00] your business. It’ll give you a top line description, but that’s what it’s really good at.

Mark Ogne: It’s really good at giving you top line. Information on stuff, but it’s not really good at decomposing that idea and to look back at like that example of him and finance this challenge and I, you know, see value from these parameters and it doesn’t know how to decompose it. So the context. That it’s lacking is relevance to you.

Mark Ogne: And so what we’ve done is to work the model the other way around. I don’t care if they add another 250 billion rows of data, that doesn’t matter. Because what our clients work with is we decompose all of their go to market strategy and put it up into a special database that we push down into OpenAI, the elements that it needs, and we allow it to only look 20 percent outside of what we give it.

Mark Ogne: It’s looking 80 percent at what You know about the world, and it’s the opposite way of the way most people are [00:25:00] thinking of AI, and what you end up with is, it’s completely different, and it understands exactly who you are, it knows how to reassemble the idea of the persona and the need, And your capabilities and their value, how the person interprets it.

Mark Ogne: And it just does that amazingly, amazingly.

Matt Hummel: That is super cool. Well, a couple final questions on the topic of AI before I want to pivot our conversation. One’s I think pretty quick hit and the other, you know, probably a little bit more detail. You mentioned, you know, as far as you know, you’re the first You’re the first person with the job title Chief Marketing Officer and, did you say Chief

Mark Ogne: AI Officer?

Mark Ogne: Chief Marketing and AI Officer, yeah.

Matt Hummel: Alright, so my question is, where do you think AI as a function should sit within an organization? Is it marketing? Is it product? Is it digital? Is it all the above? Who owns AI, you know?

Mark Ogne: [00:26:00] So I think there are a lot of parallels we can draw. Um, you know, you could look at the PC and, you know, was it, I guess it generally came through it and then it was, you know, teams of people and it eventually kind of resolved to, it becomes kind of a meta function of which computers do we choose?

Mark Ogne: You know, you could also look then at mobile phones and, and mobile computing in the two thousands where it was a very similar challenge to today with AI with the bring your own device, you know, became kind of anarchy. And then all of a sudden you had to kind of wrap your arms around that new idea. But article I published maybe in the springtime on MarTech, what I advocated was to have a cross functional group come together that if it’s just legal and IT, they’re going to become the department of no.

Matt Hummel: Yeah.

Mark Ogne: Like in their world, they want no risk. The reality is they’re zero risk is. You already have worse than that right now. Everybody’s bringing their own [00:27:00] devices, their own technology. And so what you need to do is to work together to figure out what are the use cases that we could find of value.

Mark Ogne: And then allow people to support each other like a center of excellence. Okay. We think we need to do data analysis. Well, that could be sales ops, marketing ops, rev ops, manufacturing. It could be, you know, data analysis could have been across any of those functions. And if you’re not sharing information about how you’re doing it and best practice and how to do it in a secure manner, then, you know, it’ll just be an awful thing.

Mark Ogne: I think once you get a working group together and then to have some level of a policy, like these are do’s, these are don’ts, we’re going to support the marketing team and trying to do these types of things, the lens that you need to look through all of those things through is effectiveness. And this is another thing that I’ve learned through my 10, 000 hour tour is [00:28:00] efficiency comes along with, you know, with AI and these automation tools.

Mark Ogne: Think of it in a similar manner to like, if you just, you know, spam the crap out of everybody by sending, you know, more emails than anybody else, was that helpful? Well, it was efficient, right? It is clearly efficient. I could push one button and send 10, 000 emails. Was it effective though? So you have to take that same kind of lens and say, okay, wait a minute.

Mark Ogne: One, should I send the email? If the answer is yes, okay, so how should I segment the groups that get the messages and have some strategy behind it and try to figure out how many gonna get, get to open it, how you know, what are they gonna click on? What’s a call to action? And so then all of a sudden the conversation turns to effectiveness.

Mark Ogne: Now inherently, email is efficient. I could push send and it goes. But that’s a very good analogy to AI. If you focus solely on efficiency, you’ll never find the effectiveness component. So you’ll be the spammer, right? [00:29:00]

Matt Hummel: Yeah, yeah. That’s such an interesting perspective too. And I think, You know, we’ve been doing a lot of multi year outlook planning and there’s always that balance of efficiency and effectiveness or scale versus revenue and efficiency versus revenue.

Matt Hummel: And I think putting that lens on AI makes a ton of sense. Do you like an AI transformation or kind of what you just described where AI sits and sort of bringing a group together as kind of the next iteration or wave of digital transformation within organizations?

Mark Ogne: Yeah, you know, that Russian doll of change, right?

Mark Ogne: You know, digital transformation, you know, is this an element of it? Yeah, personally, I, with my HR tech hat on, look at it as today, all management is change management.

Matt Hummel: Yeah.

Mark Ogne: Whether it’s new digital, you know, platforms and technologies or whether it’s AI. And whether you’re applying AI to process or to any other attribute, I [00:30:00] guess I tend to look at things and try to find when have we crossed this road before?

Mark Ogne: Do we have things that we can look back to and figure out, look, as a guide, where should we go? And I think that AI, we shouldn’t see it as, from an organizational adoption perspective, as being completely new. What’s really new about it is just how fast it’s changing, like literally, it’s changing so fast.

Mark Ogne: And what we, what you hire as an expert today may be a laggard in a year. The target is moving so fast, I think that. You know, going back to Kompetently in our AI assessment, readiness assessment, you need to have the underlying capacity for change and flexibility in your organization. If you don’t have that, then you won’t be able to stand up to that Russian doll of change and AI being kind of the most recent poster child of that.

Matt Hummel: Yeah, so, fun fact, while you were talking about Russian dolls, I googled [00:31:00] what is the name of a Russian doll, because I know there’s a name for it, and I’m going to butcher this, but it’s Matryoshka, in my best Russian accent, Matryoshka, and apparently, for non Russians, it is the quintessential representation of traditional Russian Russian peasant life.

Matt Hummel: So basically, you know, the fact that we know what a Russian doll is means we are not Russian and that’s our view of, of Russian culture. So,

Mark Ogne: So it’s McKenzie that came up with that concept and I like it because kind of is metaphoric to the human experience, right? Yep. And what I think they were trying to communicate is that we’re continually putting a new doll on the outside of the old one, just in, in what you’re left with is this kind of shell that.

Mark Ogne: you know, you’re, it’s hard to figure out and peeling back those layers to figure out, you know, where’s the person in this, you know, [00:32:00] we can get into a discussion about, you know, quantum computing meets AGI. And I mean, that’ll be a freaking scary world, you know, between now and then there’s a lot that we should be talking about with just, you know, AI and effectiveness and adoption.

Mark Ogne: And, you know, right now we’re at such early stages, I really push back on, you know, the experts today talking about, well, you just need custom GPTs or we’ll train you on how to use GPTs more effectively. And in my mind, the answer is that you’re trying to do a better job at using the wrong tool. That still doesn’t make it right.

Matt Hummel: A hundred percent. Well, one of my favorite pieces that you’ve written is the blog, you know, the efficiency to efficacy blog, and I thought it was a great read. Kudos to you for that. And you kind of touched on it with respect to Gen AI. You know, there’s that. Efficiency and there’s the effectiveness and both.

Matt Hummel: [00:33:00] And I think in your blog, the piece that really stood out to me as you emphasize the need for focusing on outcomes, the what and the why versus the how, right? The, which is, which I think is what you describe as the path to outcomes. Right. Can you summarize the kind of the key points from that blog to our, to our listeners?

Mark Ogne: Sure. Sure. So. You know, this comes from, you know, many years of annual, you know, marketing planning and things like this. And the repeated pattern of we’ve always done this. I think we can get 10 percent more efficient this coming year. Okay, cool. And that’s better than become 10 percent less efficient.

Mark Ogne: Only in the latter years of my career here, did I start to ask, should we be doing this at all? Before you try to get better at it, step back, you know, and look at it to say, does this still make sense based upon all the other things that are changing around us? And in this, [00:34:00] again, the Russian doll of change, with everything changing so much, I think the planning process, as in like this planning process we’re in right now for 2025 or any other, this is the poignant question.

Mark Ogne: Should we be doing the things that we’re doing because everything around us is changing right now? Now, my hypothesis and experience is that every organization has a 200 percent better idea. Rather than focusing on, you know, 10 or 20 percent better. If you step back and really evaluate which things should I be doing, not how do I do those things, but the what and the why.

Mark Ogne: So what should I be doing and why does that make more sense? And so actually in that article, there’s a real chart. It’s just, you know, the lines of acquisition and all of a sudden it just explodes. And that was literally, I guess it’s product led growth, you know, platform quite a while back. But I [00:35:00] completely changed the messaging, dug into the audience, what are their needs, why would they consider this, and stopped doing everything that they had been doing, and then restarted everything, and it just exploded.

Mark Ogne: Like, it was crazy how much more attractive it was to the audience that we were trying to acquire. And so to that point, the question was always, Hey, how do we work with the paid search team? Try to get 10 percent better. We just completely blew that up and rebuilt it. And all of a sudden it was like, you know, a thousand percent better.

Mark Ogne: And so that’s the efficiency versus effectiveness. Again, like AI, focus on the effectiveness side. And if you do that and you get it well, then you can become more efficient at it over time. But you know, the, the funny part, the funny way to say this is that, you know, as marketers, we’re not paid to make our job easy.

Matt Hummel: Yeah. Yeah.

Mark Ogne: We’re paid to make our job more productive. Yep.

Matt Hummel: I love that. And again, being a marketer, [00:36:00] I can’t tell you how many times, you know, I’ve been told, Hey, you need to find more efficiencies because we need you to start doing X, Y, and Z. And. I had a great boss a couple times in my career who would say, when we’re doing annual planning, everything you do this year, you shouldn’t be doing everything the same next year.

Matt Hummel: There should be things that come off the list. And yes, I think efficiency is important for marketers, but at the end of the day, efficiency shouldn’t be our North Star, right? And so I think, you know, that’s one thing that I would take away from what you just shared. But then also this idea of. Think big, you know, I think a lot of times, whether it’s from an athletic perspective or a business perspective, it’s sort of that 1 percent each day or 10 percent each year.

Matt Hummel: And in reality, I think what you’re saying is forget that, flip it on its head, go big, right? Because the world around us is changing and we have a real opportunity to think differently. And don’t be afraid. Don’t focus in on just the little things. The little things aren’t inherently bad. But the little things aren’t, aren’t going to be what really transform an organization.

Mark Ogne: Pick your battles. [00:37:00] I wouldn’t blow everything up simultaneously, right? So an example, large publicly traded international company, I picked up corporate wide events and the team that had run it before, they had the 10 percent better mentality. And I, I said, okay, we’re going to do these events. Great. I’ll put a filter to say which ones we put more in, which ones less, which ones we get rid of.

Mark Ogne: But then it became, what is the approach if we’re going to go there? And so we started to prioritize keynote speaking roles, joint content, and not just The boost traffic and what’s the tchotchke and all of a sudden it just really started, in fact, we nearly doubled pipeline in the first year just by rethinking how we’re going to do the same thing.

Mark Ogne: We decided, yes, we’re going to do it, some of them we got rid of, some of them we invested more in, how we went in there, what we did when we got in there made a difference. And why we did [00:38:00] it was the driver.

Matt Hummel: Got it.

Mark Ogne: The driver wasn’t just another booth scam.

Matt Hummel: That’s awesome. Well, I want to be respectful of your time.

Matt Hummel: And so I’d like to transition to our last segment, which we call what’s on tap, which, you know, allows our, our listeners to get to know Mark, to get to know you as a person. So at the top of the segment. I asked you, you know, what’s your favorite pick me up beverage and you went back to your days in Italy, talked about the great espresso.

Matt Hummel: So, on the flip side, what’s your favorite drink when you need to unwind?

Mark Ogne: I’d say a crisp, West Coast IPA. So, Pliny the Elder is from the Russian River Brewing Company. It’s literally the most incredible IPA I’ve ever had in my life. And I can fortunately buy them at My Whole Foods, but it’s It’s still kind of cultish and boutique as to where you can find them, but they, it’s amazing.

Mark Ogne: Amazing.

Matt Hummel: So is it, is it sold in a [00:39:00] four pack or a six pack?

Mark Ogne: Singles, but, at Whole Foods, they have their wine six pack that you could put it in. So they’re, they’re not small bottles. They’re probably, I don’t know, 18 ounce bottles or something like that.

Matt Hummel: All right. Well, I’ll have to check those out.

Matt Hummel: Cause I love, I love West coast IPAs. Yeah.

Mark Ogne: If you can find it, like I said, it’s kind of cultish as to where you can find it and things like that. But what I enjoy most is that. It’s really crisp. It’s very hoppy forward. And then you’ll notice in your mouth, like 10 seconds later, it’s just crisp and dry.

Matt Hummel: Love

Mark Ogne: that. It’s not the syrupy bitter.

Matt Hummel: Yeah. Well, I didn’t know if you were going to go back again to your days of Italy and say a Negroni. Um, but so funny story, my CRO, Tom Click, who claims to listen to the podcast. So I’ll call him out on this. He and I were in Tuscany at a customer event earlier this year.

Matt Hummel: Beautiful. Tom’s a guy’s guy. He’s a man’s man. And he and I sat by the pool and we drank [00:40:00] limoncello spritzers like a couple of men do and, went in Tuscany, right? So yeah. It was awesome. Um, and now he’s gonna, now I’m not going to hear the end of this, but all right. So, you know, one more question and then I’ll let you off the hook mark.

Matt Hummel: So you’re a fellow parent. I know you’ve got three kids. Is that right? Two kids, two dogs

Mark Ogne: Yeah.

Matt Hummel: Two kids, two dogs. That’s awesome. So Any great stories, any great parenting advice, good or bad, that you’d want to share?

Mark Ogne: You know, so my sister, when my first child, my daughter, was like two. And, she’s like, oh, cranky, and things like that. I said, oh, you know, sister, you know, she’s in the terrible twos. She goes, no, no, no, no, it’s really the terrible threes and then the effing fours. And, you know, we were joking about that. But I think that the issue or that the opportunity really is just enjoy them wherever, you know, where they are at that stage.[00:41:00]

Mark Ogne: My son is a real teenager right now, you know, and how you communicate with them, you have to do it differently.

Matt Hummel: Yeah.

Mark Ogne: And my daughter is just out of high school, fortunately still nearby, you know, going to college nearby, and that’s wonderful. But yeah, you know, actually, one other thing I would say is, It was interesting that I saw a Facebook memory of my daughter when she’s like nine with her bestie, and they just got bears at Build a Bear.

Mark Ogne: And then I saw a Facebook memory and it was like that as a Facebook memory. Three years later, nine to 12. Holy cow. And like they changed just a, a cell at, at a time, but over three years it’s just mind boggling. And I, the same thing with my son. I was loading pictures off my phone the last couple of days.

Mark Ogne: And it’s like, Holy cow, he’s 15 now. And he was a little boy just three years ago. And to see him now, he’s like, you know, so enjoy them where they’re at. [00:42:00] And, they’ll, they’ll grow up. If something’s not as fun one day, it’ll certainly change in a few days. Stick with it.

Matt Hummel: Yeah. Well, that’s great advice. And it’s something I have to remember often because you’re right.

Matt Hummel: Two’s turned into threes, threes turned into fours, turned into, I’ve got twin boys who are almost 12. And you know, we have, we have our seasons. Um, but, but you’re right. I mean, you look back and it’s like, wait, what happened to my baby? And what happened to now your daughters in college? And they do grow, they do grow so quickly.

Matt Hummel: And I think just being in the moment gives you a lot of perspective. So appreciate that.

Mark Ogne: Sure thing. And the 12 is like amazing for boys. You know, you can play with them still, um, you know, and you can lean in and, you know, show them how to use my son. So he’s like 12 during, um, COVID.

Mark Ogne: Okay. And he wanted to, um, amp up his Nerf guns. Oh yeah. [00:43:00] And so we ordered this stuff and, and, oh my God, there’s a place called, um, out of darts. You can buy motors that are like several times more powerful. Cool. And gears that, that turn the, the, um, you know, the push the nerf dart out. I mean, it got to the point where it’s like, dude, you can’t point this at somebody like it’s literally that powerful, but he was like, you know, 12 and I’m over soldering.

Mark Ogne: We’re tearing his guns apart, putting these new motors and lipo batteries in there and stuff like that. It’s a gas because they’re getting to the point where they’re really a lot more self sufficient. Um, but yeah, have fun.

Matt Hummel: That is awesome. Well, I love that. Well, Mark, this has been an amazing conversation.

Matt Hummel: I really appreciate you taking the time today and I know our listeners are going to enjoy, you know, as much as I did and get a ton out of it. So thank you so much for coming on the show. My pleasure. Thanks for having me, Matt.

Mark Ogne: Well,

Matt Hummel: thanks again to Mark for joining us on today’s episode of the Pipeline Brew.

Matt Hummel: I hope you all enjoyed the conversation as much as I did. Please leave me a [00:44:00] comment with your thoughts, and make sure you’ve subscribed to the show so you’ll never miss an episode. Once again, I’m Matt Hummel, and I’ll see you next time.