Introduction and Mike Braund’s path into marketing operations
Alex Gluz: Hey, Mike, nice to have you here.
Mike Braund: Hello. Thanks for having me, Alex.
Alex Gluz: Can you do a brief intro of who you are and what you do?
Mike Braund: Absolutely. I lead our marketing operations and paid media team at Iterable. For people who aren’t familiar with Iterable, it’s an AI-powered multichannel communication platform.
Mike Braund: Kind of a mouthful, but it’s basically your modern marketing platform. It taps into all the channels that you want to use to get your message out to your customers.
Alex Gluz: How did you get started? What did you go to school for?
Mike Braund: I went to school for finance. I graduated in 2007. Those familiar with that time period, it was a bumpy time in terms of the economy, especially if you’re trying to get in the finance area.
Mike Braund: My first job was actually working at the front desk of a hotel. That’s the only job I could get. But I had a very ambitious and dedicated mindset and found, I think it was seven or eight contract jobs until I got my first FTE job in tech.
Mike Braund: I bounced around in all kinds of analytics and reporting jobs, from banks to Disney, digital startups that only lasted for a few months. All kinds of stuff, all data-related, all reporting-related. That’s where my focus was.
Mike Braund: Never actually officially got into the finance space, but that’s how I got going. Eventually I found myself a contract role at a company at that time called Isilon. It was my first marketing operations role, which is where my background comes from, doing email marketing for a field marketing team.
Mike Braund: That was a contract job and turned into an FTE role after, I think it was nine months.
Mike Braund: The conflict that I ran into at that specific point was a buddy of mine who I had worked with at one of those startups then introduced me to somebody at Tableau, which is where I spent nine years of my career really developing all the skills and interests that I have today.
Mike Braund: But it was a hard decision to figure out at that point, after all that hard work of getting into an FTE role and then being put face to face with a decision to immediately go somewhere else.
Alex Gluz: It’s quite a transition. But finance, it’s all about the data and the numbers, and marketing ops. I can definitely relate to that.
Alex Gluz: I also have a degree in finance, economics. I’m a numbers guy. I like numbers. Anything with numbers and being able to translate this, it’s exciting for me. Might seem boring for some other people. For us it’s exciting. I totally get it.
Alex Gluz: What brought you to Iterable? Why did you like it?
Mike Braund: There’s a handful of things. One, I was in a spot to find a new opportunity. Two, Adri, who’s our CMO here, I’d worked with at Tableau. I had a personal connection here.
Mike Braund: Iterable’s mission and vision is essentially how you would articulate a mission and vision of a marketing operations team. It was exciting for me to go work for a company that was connected to what I value and believe in, and be in a product and space that I understand well.
Mike Braund: Contribute to it in more than just what our team is doing, but also the thought leadership side and how we want to market and message. What is the buyer of tools like this actually thinking about, caring about and doing when they’re doing their evaluations?
Balancing data with creativity and experimentation
Alex Gluz: With marketing operations teams increasingly obsessed with data unification, how do you balance the cold precision of data with the human element to drive marketing creativity?
Mike Braund: Good question. Complex question. What I want to do with that, Alex, is separate the idea of data unification from what I think you’re actually asking, which is how do we balance the data side with the experience and common-sense portion of marketing?
Mike Braund: Things are always a balance. It’s never one or the other. We’ve got to find a way to balance both of those things.
Mike Braund: Gut feeling for me is often where the hypothesis comes from. You’re thinking about, “If we run a program like this, we think we’re going to get this result.” You’ve got some idea of an outcome you’re going to go after. That’s a lot of where the idea comes from.
Mike Braund: Then the data, the measurement, validates that hypothesis one way or the other once you get something to market.
Mike Braund: We do a lot of iterative releases, trying to fight that idea of needing to be perfect before you get things out, so you can get stuff in market and get quick learnings back and test and learn that way.
Mike Braund: A good example for us is that last year we tested into the CTV, connected TV, channel. We got some creative out there in the market just to get some initial results back, which was not creative that would be ideal to be on TV necessarily.
Mike Braund: But we polished it up best we could to get some initial results. We saw enough encouraging results back to then, this year, invest in the creative side. Just an example of how we do that.
Mike Braund: But I think we can always do better at whatever you want to call it, the user experience audit of things before they come out.
Mike Braund: Data unification is key and core to a lot of things that we do. But I see it as a little bit of a different idea, more like the foundational data work for activation and analysis.
How constraints shape creative work and brand investment
Alex Gluz: As you focus on creative investments for paid media, have you ever found that constraints led to more innovative creative solutions? Can you share a time when limitations sparked creativity?
Mike Braund: Totally. Constraints are key to sparking innovation. I’ll give you two examples, one micro example and one larger example.
Mike Braund: A smaller example is a program that we just started this year that was really grassroots, not part of our initial priorities. The pain point that we identified was, in a B2B enterprise sale, how difficult it can be to just get into a demo and see a product.
Mike Braund: You’ve got to go through a lot of sales qualification and getting resources internally because you want the demo to be suited for the person’s use cases and what they’re going to value. It takes a lot of work to get there.
Mike Braund: But it’s important to see the product, and a product like Iterable can sell itself very easily when you just see the basics of how it works and functions.
Mike Braund: We’ve started to lean into different livestreaming channels, YouTube and LinkedIn, to get our experts, our solutions consultants, on those livestreams to do core functionality demos that aren’t custom to a specific company’s request, but just the basics of how the product works, and getting that off the ground. That’s one example.
Mike Braund: The larger example is basically our whole annual strategy for this year, which is really around a rebalancing of investment for creative, brand and messaging to help with the performance side of marketing.
Mike Braund: Sometimes you feel like you’re doing things on your own or your company’s unique, but I’m seeing that be a common struggle and focus for a lot of B2B companies. Seeing it pop up in newsletters and that type of thing.
Mike Braund: How do you balance brand and performance, and the importance of brand and creative on the awareness part of the funnel to help with the performance side of marketing?
Bringing marketing operations and paid media together
Alex Gluz: That makes total sense, and we fully believe in full funnel, and all of it needs to work properly.
Alex Gluz: How did you end up overseeing paid media? Because marketing ops is a separate discipline. I talk to quite a few marketing ops folks, and it’s a different kind of a mindset, I would say. Paid media is usually also a different kind of a mindset.
Alex Gluz: How did you find yourself overseeing both?
Mike Braund: I’ll tell you how exactly, and then I’ll share a couple of thoughts on that that might contradict some of what you’re feeling there in terms of the distinction between the two.
Mike Braund: It was pretty unique in terms of an opportunity at Iterable specifically, where a management position opened up, and I had the desire to raise my hand to combine a couple teams together. Not much more complex than that. It ended up working out. We brought those two teams together.
Mike Braund: But part of the reason why the rationale worked is because I don’t think they’re that separated in the actual way you want to think about executing the work. Very data-driven. A lot of systems management to get the work done. Very analytical.
Mike Braund: You’re developing optimization points. You’re using a lot of data tech to automate data streams into these Google Ads platforms so that they have suppression lists, conversion points that they can rapidly automate from.
Mike Braund: If you’re just thinking about the execution flow, marketing operations and the data side of things are almost always a part of that process to get something into market.
Mike Braund: It actually works really well to have this group tied together, and it also includes the website. We have almost all channels in this one team outside of SEO and your organic social side of things.
Mike Braund: The last thing I’ll share there is that idea was present because, when I left Tableau, our marketing operations team looked just like this.
Mike Braund: It had web, had analytics, had paid media and then the email channel all in it. I had seen that version of a marketing operations team before.
Adapting internal processes and working with sales
Alex Gluz: I don’t think it’s a right or wrong way to do this. There are different variations. If it’s a good fit and you can bring everything together, that’s a big win.
Alex Gluz: When you work on frameworks and systems, how do you ensure that they’re flexible enough to adapt to the unpredictable nature of the market?
Mike Braund: Are you talking more about internal frameworks and systems?
Alex Gluz: I would say internal. When you’re working on putting together different frameworks or different pieces of the puzzle, so to say, how do you make sure that you iterate and stay flexible?
Mike Braund: On the internal side of things, right-sizing is important. I’ve definitely overdesigned and overengineered before, so I’m not innocent of that.
Mike Braund: But we’ve done a good job here of designing to the team’s size and needs. Recently we’ve actually started to put a little bit more rigor and documented process around how we get our biggest programs into market, really based off of pain points, stuff like job satisfaction.
Mike Braund: People want to be part of the ideation process of what’s going to be in market versus just executing. To allow that to happen successfully, you’ve got to find the right place to engage people to get their ideas and contributions upstream and in the development process.
Mike Braund: On the go-to-market side of things, a lot of them are concepts. Externally, you’re putting together concepts that you think are going to work, and to your point, you’re adapting and iterating based off of what you see.
Mike Braund: Either anecdotally, feedback from your customers, from the field is a key thing, and then from the data points that you’re looking at and monitoring.
Mike Braund: We do that pretty regularly in terms of looking at how we design and measure our lifecycle and the conversion points in between it. There’s not a ton of shift in the frameworks, more around the criteria and rules of how you use it.
Alex Gluz: Definitely. But we also see a lot of changes in the markets in the last few years. You definitely have to be able to adapt and shift when you need to slow down and go fast forward.
Alex Gluz: How do you work with your sales team? It sounds like you have a great understanding of the go-to-market team on the marketing side. But how do you tie this all together with your sales folks and maybe even customer success?
Mike Braund: Both very important. We spend most of our time on the new business side right now in how we’re focused and trying to drive results.
Mike Braund: But customer service, customer success, retention and adoption programs are definitely part of the things that we help execute.
Mike Braund: We’ve got a very regular and consistent connection with sales. The last month, I’d say we’ve gone through a very healthy process of taking in feedback from our BDR team on things that are and aren’t working in some of the process that we’ve designed.
Mike Braund: That’s an example of where, on the internal side, having to adapt rules, criteria for what accounts we want them to focus on. If things aren’t working, trying to rapidly change some of those things.
Mike Braund: I feel like the two organizations communicate on a really frequent basis. Every two weeks we’re getting together in a formal way to evaluate how pipeline development is going and trying to identify the things that are and aren’t working.
Mike Braund: That’s a good example: “We’re being asked to prioritize these types of accounts. We’re seeing a problem in that. Help us go fix that on the operations side of it.”
Mike Braund: On the operations side, really connected there. Same with the program side: “These programs might not be producing the right people or the right accounts that fit our ICP.”
Mike Braund: That’s definitely part of the day-to-day on the program side, continuing to make sure that the quality of who’s coming in and getting engaged fits who we want to target.
Alex Gluz: That’s a great example of classic marketing and sales alignment and constantly communicating and pushing back and forth, because that does happen too. But that’s necessary. It’s much better.
Mike Braund: It never goes away. You’ve read and heard and said the same thing for years and years, but that’s part of the game, and it’s expected.
Mike Braund: That’s what you want to happen. You want that dialogue. You want to be getting feedback from the field about what you should do differently or what you can do differently to help them out.
Using predictive models to prioritize leads and accounts
Alex Gluz: You mentioned before predictive modeling for leads and accounts, which is very interesting. Can you talk a little bit through this, Mike?
Mike Braund: Sure. Our primary use case to date is on the new business side, prospecting. But we use predictive analytics to, one, assess the profile of accounts and people.
Mike Braund: An ICP score, essentially. Does this account fit our ICP based off of the data points that we have available? Does this person fit the profile of people that are in our buying groups on opportunities?
Mike Braund: Then you have operationalized the buyer intent side of things, both at the person and account level, which allow us to identify signals of an individual. Alex, if you’re coming and asking for a demo, it’s a very easy signal to pass along.
Mike Braund: But the more interesting ones sometimes end up being where there are lower engagement signals, but there’s a higher volume of them, and being able to tie all of that back to an account.
Mike Braund: Say, “Maybe on the person side we didn’t have an engagement that was deep enough to prioritize it. But when you look at the whole landscape, we just had 10 people do content downloads and event registrations, et cetera.”
Mike Braund: That can highlight, on the buying intent side, things that we want to pass over to our sales teams to go pay attention to.
Alex Gluz: This would be very interesting to see the whole loop right from the beginning. How do you do the predictions? Once the sales team gets it, how accurate are the predictions? That’s an interesting exercise.
Mike Braund: The next evolution of lead scoring. That was the classic marketing automation idea.
Mike Braund: A lot of lead-scoring models I saw early on were an A1, B2 type of matrix, where you’re taking profile and engagement and mapping them together.
Mike Braund: Similar idea, but you’ve got tools out there that help you really scale that and use statistical models in the background versus you going and saying, “That’s worth five points. That’s worth 10 points,” arbitrarily.
Alex Gluz: It would be very interesting, and not only take it through the whole sales cycle, also look at retention and revenue generated. That’s going to show the true picture to really how accurate this is, because there are a lot of signals, there’s a lot of noise. It could be tricky.
Alex Gluz: But still, it’s definitely great to have and builds a foundation, as we just spoke before, continuing the conversation with the sales team.
Alex Gluz: Saying, “This is working,” or maybe some things are not working and not accurate. Maybe that’s not the best fit at this time. Maybe some other criteria don’t fit.
Alex Gluz: Even though signals are great, it might not work for the sales cycle or something like that.
Mike Braund: Totally. You’ve got to be ready to listen. A lot of those tools will give you performance metrics themselves, but it’s important to also measure it with your data because sometimes the picture looks different. We’ve found that from time to time.
Balancing brand, performance and limited resources
Alex Gluz: That’s great. Mike, what do you think are the biggest pain points for B2B SaaS marketing leaders in 2025, and what is your approach to solving them?
Mike Braund: A couple of these will be repeats. I downloaded a white paper for the first time in months yesterday, and it was because the headline caught my eye, which is almost exactly verbatim the question you just asked.
Mike Braund: It was talking about the pain points and challenges that B2B marketers have today. A lot of them are related to the priority that I talked about earlier, which is balancing brand and performance marketing, and the necessity that B2B companies are identifying in creative and brand messaging to establish their brand but also influence the performance side of marketing.
Mike Braund: That’s one. Then coordinating the multichannel approach there, because that does then require more than just the traditional demand gen function.
Mike Braund: There’s that tighter connection with the brand side, the more organic channels, podcasts they might be doing, events that we’re going to that aren’t necessarily pipeline-focused, but just trying to get your brand in front of people.
Mike Braund: That’s been healthy for our department, but also a new thing to think about and for us to coordinate.
Mike Braund: The second thing is resources, and that means a couple things. Teams are leaner today. I’m finding we’re operating much more lean than teams that you would see six to 10 years ago, where you have three to four people doing marketing automation work.
Mike Braund: You now have a person, and maybe you have some agency support supplementing and augmenting there. Things aren’t always moving at the clip that you might have experienced in past years.
Mike Braund: Then the obvious side is the budget available to be able to go fund these things. Doing paid activities is getting more and more expensive. You’re looking at all the cost-per metrics. That becomes difficult to manage.
Mike Braund: If you don’t have the internal resources and you want to build quality creative or go out and get quality creative help, video production is expensive. Creative is expensive. All these things cost money. That’s another big challenge there.
Alex Gluz: You’re definitely hitting the nail in the head. This is along the awareness part of it, right? The awareness, with so much noise, so much content, it’s difficult to stand out.
Alex Gluz: Also, the buyer journey is longer because people take a longer time to decide. A lot of it because of budgetary constraints. People are very careful when they want to make a decision on budgets and things like that. It’s a longer sales cycle.
Alex Gluz: Because of all of that, the customer acquisition cost is going up, because everything is going up. Nothing went down. What went down? Nothing.
Mike Braund: Right.
Alex Gluz: Everything is going up, and we’re supposed to hit higher numbers with less. Even though the budget might be the same, you can buy less because everything is going up.
Alex Gluz: It definitely gives you opportunity to be creative and do more with less, and really build a great team who’s going to support you internally and externally as well, with great partners and great client support. That gives you an opportunity.
Mike Braund: In B2B, you’re sitting on both sides of this too, where you’re trying to sell B2B software to somebody. Then in my world of marketing operations, we’re also the buyers and managers of this budget.
Mike Braund: The rigor around technology expenses has just gotten so much tighter, where you’re constantly looking at whatever metric’s going to be the success metric, utilization, impact, all those types of things that drive up the cost, where just banking on renewals doesn’t happen anymore.
Mike Braund: A lot of time there’s reduction to right-size contracts. You’re also facing that type of thing.
Mentors, leadership lessons and closing remarks
Alex Gluz: It’s been great talking to you, Mike. I have one last question for you. Who are your mentors and the best advice they gave you?
Mike Braund: I’d call out a couple, both at my time at Tableau. First was my first manager there. His name is Wade Tibke.
Mike Braund: Neither of these I would say are specific sayings or pieces of advice, but more the skill sets and values that each of these people I’ll name instilled.
Mike Braund: Wade was heavy on rigor, monitoring, that type of thing, making sure that what you were doing or the thing you’re designing is actually outputting that thing, which is critical.
Mike Braund: It’s a lot more common practice to think about monitoring today and building views or dashboards or whatever it is to make sure that your outcome’s being hit on the other end. But that was absolutely one that I have deeply ingrained in me still today and that I coach my teams up on.
Mike Braund: The second person was the manager that was managing me, Bryan Law, when I left Tableau. A couple things that I valued and really looked up to around the way he did things was stakeholder management and communications.
Mike Braund: Very calm and measured and specific communicator. He did a good job pushing back tactically when he had to, communicating and articulating the value of what we were doing and representing his team.
Mike Braund: A lot of people have helped me and supported me along the way. Adri, our CMO here, went out there to help support me coming to a great company like Iterable.
Mike Braund: But Wade and Bryan are two people specifically in my space that directly managed me, really influenced me. I think about a lot of the conversations that we’ve had all those years back still.
Alex Gluz: Great. We’ve been talking to Mike Braund, senior director, marketing operations and digital marketing. Mike, where can people learn more about you?
Mike Braund: About me? I don’t have a podcast. I don’t have a blog or anything, Alex, but you can find me on LinkedIn. Mike Braund, if you want to connect, learn more. I love to talk shop.
Mike Braund: If you want to learn more about Iterable, you can go to iterable.com. It’s an amazing platform. It can do a lot. That’s about it.
Alex Gluz: Great. For our listeners, if you’d like to learn more about how we can help you build marketing revenue engines that empower growth, visit tamonroe.com or contact me on LinkedIn as well.
Alex Gluz: All right, Mike, thanks so much.
Mike Braund: Thanks.
