MOOPs TV | Episode 6 | Prasad Sawant & Jessica Meyers

Watch the episode or tune in on Ops Cast to find out what the mistakes were and how (if possible) they were resolved.

 

Transcript:

Episode 6 – Prasad S

Jessica Meyers: [00:00:00] Hey everyone. Thanks for joining us for another episode of MOOPsTV. I’ve got the Prasad here with me. Um, thanks Prasad for joining us. I’m super excited to hear your answers, cause I don’t know what they are going to be yet. So I’m going to get started with some introductions. Obviously, you know, you guys know me at this point.

I am Jessica. One of the co-hosts. Um, and I’m going to kick it over to facade to introduce himself. Uh, I’d love for you to start with who you are and where you currently work.

Prasad S.: Thanks, Jessica. Um, yeah, definitely ex, uh, said that the here, um, I’m, Prasad Sawant I’m currently a VP Direct of Marketing Technology at FCB health, a healthcare communications agency.

Jessica Meyers: Awesome. Um, how many years have you been practicing marketing slash revenue operations?

Prasad S.: Um, I’ve been in it about 9 to 10 years now and loving every minute of it. [00:01:00]

Jessica Meyers: I feel like people who hit the like eight plus years are basically like veterans at this point.

Prasad S.: You’ve probably seen it all

Jessica Meyers: without telling me the specific mistake yet. Cause I’ll get there the mistake we’re going to chat about today. When did it happen in your

Prasad S.: career? Um, so, I mean, I’ve made mistakes, uh, all throughout my career, you know, including like last week, but, um, this hat, this particular story, it happened in the middle of my career when I was marketing manager.

Uh, Probably the, one of the biggest mistakes I’ve ever read. I am

Jessica Meyers: excited. Sounds juicy. Um, okay. So again, uh, without telling me specifically, what were you trying to do when you made the mistake?

Prasad S.: So. I was trying to update a tracking tag in a [00:02:00] dynamic campaign. Um, so the campaign was set up to like 12 or 13 different languages.

Um, and we, at the time we weren’t able to track done. Opens and clicks for each dynamic template, going out on a, on a single sin. Um, and we were doing a big product launch and new implementation of a website and it was like super important to track it. And I was trying to update that tag, that tag for a product launch that what’s going out.

And,

Jessica Meyers: um, it sounds like there were probably a couple of systems at play, but what were the main ones kind of involved in what happened?

Prasad S.: Um, uh, it was only one, it was Oracle responses.

Jessica Meyers: Um, and so like what actually happened, what broke, etcetera

Prasad S.: Um, so what ha what, what had happened? Uh, [00:03:00] I updated the tag and it tested.

Okay. But, um, I didn’t use a real. Uh, real data, just like some dummy data. So it didn’t really show what could happen realistically with this tag, which I didn’t know at the time. Um, and the tag appeared at the very top of the email as like a piece of code coming in there and it looked really, really bad.

And about 50% of the product launch audience received the. Their email with that at the top of their email. So like nothing else, just the tag kind of, yeah, just the tag code. So that’s like the first, the first area of email that they saw. How

Jessica Meyers: big of an audience was it?

Prasad S.: 2 million people.

It was a, yeah, it was a good amount. It’s

Jessica Meyers: 2 million, the full audience or to half that got the code

Prasad S.: tag. [00:04:00] The full audience about a little under a million. I ended up getting it before I pause it.

Jessica Meyers: Um, so I’m going to ask you now to sample. It probably sounds like pretty much,

Prasad S.: so yeah, it was, it was only one colleague who emailed me about it and nobody else in the company had received it at that point.

Um, which I don’t know how, I guess maybe they were at the end of the list to get it, which I don’t know. It’s all like random sense. I have no idea. Um, yeah, just what I, it was just one person who put it out as like, holy crap. I just, this is the biggest thing I’ve ever done.

I just, I pause it immediately. And then, um, then from there, I, I, you know, I told my boss, we talked to the marketing team, um, and it was just [00:05:00] like what the tag was just like one line out of. From where it was supposed to be a six. I did a text run on another email before and just like that started working again.

Nice. Cool. So it

Jessica Meyers: sounds like you caught it, uh, openly told everyone and were able to relatively easily kind of remedy the situation.

Prasad S.: Yeah, I’m sure it didn’t feel like it at the time. Sweating as a today, this is shareable. Um, but Alice, like, I gotta just, I have to own up to this right now because. It’s going to look bad if I don’t tell anybody about it.

I did debate it though, but ultimately I was like, yeah, I just gotta tell it something. Uh,

Jessica Meyers: I’m always easier to tell someone than try and not tell anyone and fix it yourself. At least that’s my opinion.[00:06:00]

So beyond that, what else did you learn kind of in that remediation process? Uh, from cleaning made-up.

Prasad S.: Um, I think the biggest thing, and I, I feel like I did it maybe before, also is to try to own up some mistakes when it happened. Um, you know, Take take credit for your failures, but, um, I think also helped me try to put some more processes in places.

Uh, I’ve worked at a variety of, with different clients, different companies, and everyone’s QA, um, workflow processes a little bit different, and we didn’t really have a strong one at this company. So that mistake met, uh, maybe build a process to prevent. Any mistakes like that happening in the future.

Jessica Meyers: Um, so what does that process look like now?

And or

Prasad S.: what did it look like then? So before then it was [00:07:00] me doing campaign development, QA testing, uh, nobody else checking. It was just when, just me doing everything. Um, So instead now, after that, I put in like two checks between, uh, my, my manager at a time. And then another, uh, marketing manager who was doing a similar thing internationally, um, with like a thorough checklist.

So one person goes through it and then a second person checks off to make sure they’re saying the same, same value, same links, tracks, checking tags are working appropriately.

Jessica Meyers: Has that QA process, uh, evolved over the years. And is there anything on it now that wasn’t on it then?

Prasad S.: Um, well, I’m no longer at that company, but I think my whole, my dessert or not vision, my idea of QA.

Become [00:08:00] more inclusive over the years to make sure that we do everything, you know, try to get more stakeholders involved, more editorial, uh, people who are involved on the creative side, um, data people involved when it’s, you know, large sets of personalization, that’s going out. Uh, it’s Excel. It’s expanded to just include.

Not a lot of people, but the right people, um, and just more of a checklist to make sure that we’re doing the right thing.

Jessica Meyers: Yeah. I definitely think my personal QA checklist has expanded over the years. Uh, cool. Well, kind of a couple of final thoughts to, to round things out. Um, I don’t know, a single person in mops that hasn’t had it doesn’t have some sort of like email deployment, horror story of, uh, maybe not to the extent of an email with just convening code.

Um, but what would you say to somebody else who made a similar mistake?

Prasad S.: Um, I would definitely say like, don’t hold on to that [00:09:00] mistake for too long. Like, don’t let it impact. The way you work and like you get anxiety about it. Just try to laugh about it and learn what you can from the experience.

Um, and maybe that’ll help you limit any mistakes in the future.

Jessica Meyers: Um, and then what other advice, or what advice do you have for any fellow marketing or five ops professionals kind of in general?

Prasad S.: Yeah, in general. I mean, I think again on the line of mistakes, mistakes are gonna happen. So I think, you know, just make sure you’re always having fun, but in general, I think the space can be like tedious and technical.

So I always just try to have as much fun as I can with it. Um, and also just, you know, sharing knowledge is a huge part of the space. So if you feel like you have something to share. A lot of people do it really well, but I think anybody can share and people are so [00:10:00] responsive in the community to, um, your ideas or new findings.

You might have new techniques you might’ve found. Yeah.

Jessica Meyers: I love that. I definitely have learned so much from stuff. Other people have shared, um, the community around this. Like the whole space

Prasad S.: is awesome. Yeah. Like I would, I don’t know what I would’ve done without the Salesforce documentation. That’s out there from individuals, not from Salesforce.

They really like saved my ass sometimes.

Jessica Meyers: Yeah. Definitely feel that way about the like document community documentation around the marketing automation platforms I’ve worked in. They, uh, they know how to do the hard stuff that isn’t in the like official documentation for sure. Awesome, well, thanks so much for taking the time to chat with me and share your mistake.

Uh, I, uh, really appreciate it. Uh, and I appreciate you sharing your learnings.

Prasad S.: Yeah, of course. Thanks for, thanks for having me.[00:11:00]