Structuring MOPs to Scale / Centralized vs Decentralized

Join us in a conversation with Cat Champoux with Jeto when we discuss the tradeoffs between centralized vs de-centralized organization structure. What components of MOPs should be decentralized? Campaign Ops? Templates? Other? What is required to be in place for decentralized?

Whether you are a team of one or at a large enterprise, you have probably had to think about this question. If you haven’t, you will.

Recorded live on April 30, 2021.

Hi, I’m Michael Hartmann, I’m Naomi Liu, and I’m Mike Rizzo. And this is ops cast, a podcast for marketing ops pros and rev ops pros created by the MO Pros. The number one community for marketing operations. Professionals tune into each episode as we chat with real professionals to help elevate you in your marketing operations career.

Hello, everyone. Welcome to ops cast, episode seven. You’re getting close to that tipping point where, uh, podcasts generally either continue or don’t. So we’re glad you can join us because you’re joining us live. Uh, please feel free to jump in and join in the chat. And, and or if you feel like you want to contribute to the conversation, raise your hands through the interface here and we’ll get, we’ll see if we can get you on live, uh, to join me.

Um, I’m joined today with, uh, by Mike Rizzo. My co-hosts are our other co-host Naomi Liu was not available today. Um, but is uh, Here was with us in spirit. In addition, we’re excited to have with us Catherine, Cat Champoux and I’ve know I butchered her name. Who’s the VP of customer satisfaction and partner alliances at JIEDDO slash poquito.

Um, So with that, we’re ready to get started on a conversation today about best practices, thought process, how you go about going through scaling your marketing ops, uh, capabilities. So well before we get deep dive in that, Catherine Cat welcome. And, uh, please, would you just introduce yourself for the folks who are either joining us live or listening in, uh, Yeah, absolutely.

So my name is Cat, uh, as you mentioned, I’m the VP of customer satisfaction and partner alliances at namely in our technology divisions where, uh, I handled all things Giotto. I have been in the marketing automation field for about seven years now, but my background is it. So I’m in love with all things.

Data-driven processes driven and. That’s a pleasure to be here. Fantastic. So, um, I think, you know, Pete, the kind of people who listen to this podcast, whether they’re here listening live, or, uh, on the recording, or, you know, probably all come from different companies, different sizes, different environments, teams of one, all the way up to sort of enterprise type teams.

And, you know, I think probably all of us at some point or another has run into. You know, discussion about, okay, we’re we, we kind of got to a point where we needed to be able to scale what we’ve got in our marketing ops, kind of an ecosystem and have to kind of decide, should we continue to do things maybe centralized because that’s usually where it starts, I think, or decentralized, um, And let’s, let’s maybe talk about this a little bit.

Like when I kind of have in my head, I think what these centralized versus decentralized means in this context, but Cat, what does that mean to you? Um, from, from, from that same. Yeah, that’s, that’s a good question. Um, centralized operations will typically mean that you have a dedicated team of highly skilled trained experts on the systems you use regardless of the system.

And they act as a req, a request processing teams. So for example, if we’re talking about marketing operations specifically, they will take the requests from different teams, different regions, different departments, lines of businesses, and they will build out the campaigns on their behalf. On the other hand, if we talk about de-centralizing operations, we’re, we’re talking more different departments, different teams across various regions, across various lines of businesses who self serve.

Right? So in the first case, it’s more of a center of excellence type of process. And in the second one, it’s very much so of, uh, uh,

is there, is there any kind of hybrid model you’ve ever seen where maybe there’s some of the center of excellence type people who are in other teams, but maybe not part of the core, like the really deep administration part of the system. Yeah, I think more and more as people are asking themselves, should we keep our operations going the way we are today?

Should we start decentralizing? Most companies start off with a centralized model, to be honest with you, because usually you’ll start small and start growing. Uh, and as people are starting to ask themselves, is it time for us to start decentralizing? I’ll say 98% of the time people will fall in a hybrid.

So either by having a center of excellence in each region or line of business, that act sort of as a subject matter expert or by maintaining certain features or certain functionalities centralized and others, de-centralized got it. Yeah. So I think it’s interesting and that. I mean, I think the driver behind this is probably going to be, you know, as, as a company growing, right.

There’s gotta be some, some point at which you do that, but I think so. I think to me, there’s at least two components to how you think about this one is, you know, are you, you know, how, how big is the company? Are there multiple geographic locations globally? You know, say country specific stuff. Um, but, uh, but I think you also, you hit on something that we may want to talk about too.

Is, yeah, there’s, there’s a systems component to it. And then there’s like the campaign operations component to it as well. But is there, do you have a framework that you think about, you know, the whole process of deciding through this centralized decentralized hybrid model, is there some way that you think about it or, uh, suggestions you have for people?

Yeah. I mean, that’s a tough one. It’s a very tricky question because the honest answer is that there is no one size fits all. It’s really about taking a step back and analyzing for yourself for your team, for your company, what is our best approach? And then crafting a solution that works for everyone.

Right. Um, I know it well in the pandemic, a lot of people are listening to podcasts. A lot of people are reading books that have more time to do these kinds of things. And I’m amazed at how many people come up to me and say, I read this amazing book. This guy was able to build his. Business from the ground up in whatever six months.

And I’m going to, I’m going to do the same thing and they get surprised or shocked when it doesn’t work. That’s because most of us think, oh, let’s rinse and repeat something that worked, but they don’t take the time to analyze, but does it fit me? My model, my operations, my market. Does it work for us?

Right. So I think in the term. The sense of centralizing and decentralizing, you have to do the same thing. You have to analyze what works for you. What, as a company are your goals, how do you get there and then pick and choose the pieces that will work best for you and your team? Not necessarily something that worked for someone else.

So long short answer to a long-winded conversation. There is no framework, but there are guidelines. W what do you think are some of those guidelines, or, you know, I might even call it like principles, right? Okay. Rather than best practice. I, I like to say there’s a fallacy of best practice, because if it has the assumption built in that there’s no need, you take a cookie cutter solution that you used one place and you bring it somewhere else.

And it almost never works quite the same.

Otherwise, I would have been Steve jobs a long time ago. Yeah. I think the first thing that you need to look at is what initiatives, first of all, where’s the company going, right? What are our goals? Most of us have yearly goals. Sometimes you’ll have a three-year plan at 10 year plan, and you start cutting that down to how do we reach those goals?

And those usually end up resulting in activities, initiatives, projects, even programs. Once you have that information, you can start looking at. What is a company-wide initiative? What can I not separate and give to a tiny team or a small team that is completely isolated from everybody else, right?

Something along the lines. And again, just to stick to marketing operations, cause it’s their waters. I’m very comfortable and things like a nurture, right? You have these personas, you have your target market, your target audience, and then you have a story that you’re building through. Hundreds of pieces of content across multiple streams.

You can’t just give that to one team and say, run with that. Just go ahead and get it done. And thank you for your help. Uh, they might not have a global vision of everything that you want to achieve, and they might start steering the ship in a different direction than the company would like to go. So those kinds of initiatives, I really have a global component to it.

I would say. Most likely they should stay centralized to a team that has that global vision that has access to that information. Things that you can easily decentralized. Smaller initiatives that are either local, that are driven by a specific initiative. That is part of a team, right? Your product team.

They’re often doing product announcements. They’re probably doing release notes. These are things that are not necessarily part of the global initiative though. They do help reach the goal of the company, right? As you’re improving your products as you’re releasing things. But that team is fully capable and knowledgeable enough to run their own operations because they have all the information.

So I really, I guess it all boils down to what information do you have access to and is it enough for you to help the company move in the right direction? So let me, I want to play back. So I think what I, what I got out of that was, I think of the spinal ranked is the general versus specific. And I think what you’re saying is.

In this case general doesn’t probably is probably the right word, but you know, things that are more organization-wide, whether it’s global or, or, you know, maybe not fully global, but at least, you know, large organization, things that are kind of going to affect all the different teams. And they go to market activities that, you know, there’s, there’s probably a strong case for a lot of that to be centralized still, but you know, the things that are going to be more specific to those regions, you know, if you’ve got regional teams or geographic teams or.

Um, industry focused, right? Um, teams that those teams could then kind of within, I assume you mean within certain guidelines, right. You know, be able to move quickly on their own to support their needs. So, you know, this, this, this actually brings up an interesting question. I know you and I have talked about this is the notion of, of, of trust in the organization.

So why, why did you kind of talk through, I know, give, give me your perspective on how important. Um, yeah. Trust, well, first maybe talk about what, what do we mean by trust in this context? And then what do you think about is, you know, what’s the importance of that in terms of being able to do some of that decentralized operation stuff?

Uh, I think to tackle that topic, uh, I, I would first discuss why people centralize their operations because there are benefits and there are pros and cons to both models, centralized and decentralized the centralizing components. Brings a certain level of confidence in a highly skilled team that is trained, that is aware of your processes and will follow your brand guidelines are aware of the laws and legislation legislations, according to different countries in terms of communications.

So that brings, and I’ll use the word trust a level of trust that you have the right team in the right place to do things the right way as they should. When you decentralize, you kind of lose that control. You have to trust that. Not a small few. No, but a lot of people know and are aware and because the teams could be in different regions in different lines of businesses, you don’t always trust that the information is going to be.

Propagated across everyone. So, uh, when it comes to trust, I don’t think it’s, uh, is, is my individual competence because that’s a whole other topic for another podcast. But I think what we mean by trust is are we, are we going to shoot ourselves in the foot by. Are there by decentralizing, you increase the risk of mistakes, right?

It’s difference between three people doing it and 30 people doing it. It’s a tenfold risk of error. You also lose the capacity to ensure that there’s brand consistency. We all have instances, whether it be Marquetto HubSpot, Eloqua, doesn’t matter. We all have instances of old templates in them, things that are outdated, which just didn’t take the time to clean it up.

And next thing, you know, an email goes out and it has the wrong unsubscribed link. It has the wrong footer. It has the wrong logo and it, you know, small mistakes. It’s never happened to me. I pretty sure he just saw the wrong subject line from LinkedIn the other day. I wonder if that was a template error.

So they’re, well, there you go. Case in point I smell mistakes are, you know, there, there are many and we, we kind of laughed them off, but larger mistakes can be very damaging to your brand in the end. And that’s what you’re trying to avoid. So. I think a lot of people stay centralized out of fear that these things could happen and therefore the concept of trust comes around.

Uh, so yeah, I think that people not necessarily having faith in the process is a big, oh, it was somebody else about SOC. No, I was just saying it’s, it’s a big factor in the decision-making process. So it’s interesting. I like this kind of, instead of talking about it as trust, it’s really it’s, it’s kind of brings it back to.

Yeah, it’s a, it’s a bit of a, like, how comfortable are you with the risk associated the potentially increased risk with decentralization, right? Which then basic question, like how do you try to minimize that risk? If you’re going to go down that path? Yeah. Have you, have you, um, have you seen any organizations that have gone down a decentralized process where they either did things really well ahead of time to try to reduce the risk potential or didn’t do it?

Um, like the, I guess with things like training or, you know, certification requirements for people to can have different abilities, things like that. How have you seen that work? Yeah, I feel a lot of people. Very well and successfully, and it all boils down to processes, documentation. We are all at fault here.

We often put that task aside. We don’t document processes. We don’t take the time to put things on paper and hand them out. Guardrail. Putting tools and processes in place that prevent this from happening. Um, there are a variety of different tools out there that are collaborative and that have a high level of granularity and access and controls, leverage those things when you can.

And of course, training invest in your people, right? This we’re only as good as the people working with. And as a company, I feel like you’re only as good as the people working for you. Take the time to invest. Don’t just assume that by throwing an employee handbook at them, they’ve got it. They’re going to get it all figured out, right?

If it’s something upsetting to you, a mistake like this, it’s something you should have taken the time to really document and train and follow up. Yeah. You know, it’s interesting. Cause I, I, I was going down this path at my previous place where we had had everything was centralized, the whole notion of marketing ops, marketing tech, and all that was relatively new at the organization.

Um, and I had, in my mind, we were going through a number of things to kind of prep for that one was building out lots of templates, right. Within primarily Marquetto in this case, but in the processes that would go with them and including like, when would you need to engage? The, the center of excellence team.

So, um, you know, primarily things around, like, we didn’t really want to give a lot of people access to the contact database because of the risk of, you know, all the different things that could happen with sending out too many, too few emails, you know, potentially sending stuff that could affect our deliverability and our reputation.

So we, you know, on top of that, so we were building out, you know, rights kind of stuff within the system. In addition, we were talking about building out. Kind of our own sort of certification model that enable people to get the kind of different levels of control. So the lowest level would be okay, you’re going to be able to, you know, use a template, create the email, create landing page, do the basics, but you could never build a list.

You could never do the sand. Right. Um, and then there were steps up from there all the way to the point where you can now start to kind of build free form landing pages and stuff like that. Just because I wanted to, I the same process, right. I was thinking risk mitigation. So. Yeah, that’s actually a really great example of a hybrid model in the scenario that you described.

I would say that the people in charge of maintaining and building that center of excellence, that’s a centralized operations model, right? You’re a few that are highly qualified. You build these programs and these templates because you know that they’re tried tested and true, and then you roll them out to a decentralized team where they can leverage it within the guardrails that you put in.

As you just described, you can build them, you can’t send them. That’s a beautiful example of, uh, a model that would actually in the end, end up being scalable. And it was people with time and with training and expertise and experience can then start having a little bit more of an access and a little bit more of an access until they themselves are extremely comfortable with the tool.

And then they can go on and train a different team that. Yeah. So we actually, we have a question in the chat here. Who’s going to be a guest coming up next week. So thank you, Chloe. Um, what, so short questions, what would be the simple places to start if you’re currently in a centralized organization and want to make the recommendation to move to a decentralized?

Yeah. What are the, what are some of the initial steps, simple steps to get started? Um, can you, you mentioned something when we were talking about the trust thing about starting out with like. What are you trying to accomplish? I think with the idea of decentralization and I think to me, that’s probably a fair, very fundamental first step, but what, what else would you say is important?

Uh, I would audit all of the tasks that the centralized team is doing today. Right? Put together a list of all of the things in the initiatives that you do for others. And as. For yourself, right? As the, you probably have goals from your boss and Google’s from the company, and then start looking at these tasks and start assigning a value to them.

In terms of, is this a company-wide initiative? Do, would other teams have the global vision required to do these tasks? Well, or does this need to stay with us because we need that global vision. Right? We can go back to things like a lead life cycle. You can’t build a lead lifecycle by department. I mean, you could technically, you shouldn’t, but you could, if you don’t have a good relationship with say, Right there.

It’s an iterative process. You need to get the feedback from cells. You need to adjust your model. You need to go back in and check. If it’s decentralized. It becomes very chaotic and very complicated to keep track of that. So that I would say is something you would maintain in your central operations system.

Whereas other things like building webinars, right? If each region or line of business or product, uh, they have their own webinars. It’s a. I like to call them rinse and repeat tasks. It just it’s the same thing over and over again, that could be decentralized with proper training, with proper tools, proper templates and guardrails and QA, proper QA process.

So, yeah, that’s where I would start just, uh, analyzing the list of tasks and then start assigning, uh, uh, uh, potential for decentralization based on, can another team do this efficiently? I hope that answers your question, Chloe. Yeah, Chloe is just pop in the chat if you, if you want to ask any ups, but yeah, I think, um, yeah.

Okay. Thanks Chloe. Um, yeah, I love that. I love this cause I think that’s a really important thing. I liked the idea. Uh, and in fact, it’s, it, it overlaps a little bit with what we’re gonna be talking to Chloe about next week, which is sort of tech stack on it, right. Or on the tech side. But this is almost like these are the activities that the marketing ops team is doing.

And we’re gonna look at them across a couple of different dimensions to make an assessment of which ones would be the most likely for us to be able to. Push out to other teams that maybe are less, you know, less in the weeds. I was going to say less competent. That’s not really the thing, right. Less in the, in the, in the details of the systems and things like that.

Um, which kind of brings me to another, another, uh, question. I, I think a lot of people would have, which is, I think a lot of what we’ve all referenced as we talked about decentralizing is really kind of falls into whatever. Campaign operations or, you know, I might call it the tech support or the tactical go to market activity, the highly visible stuff.

Right. Building out emails, building out, um, you know, helping with the, you know, the tracking for ads that are driving activity, things like that. Yeah. Are there, are there, so are there certain parts of, you know, I guess kind of the world of marketing ops, whether it’s, uh, you know, the, the tech admin part of it all the way over to the campaign can operate spaces that you think.

Yeah. I, I sense that there’s probably like more likely you’re going to be more on the campaign ops because it’s probably where you’re interacting with more people in different teams more. But is there, is there an opportunity you think to start to move, move more of the other stuff as you get closer to the, you know, the really under the hood stuff to other teams as well?

Yeah. Yeah, I think there is. But again, it really does boil down to what your objectives and initiatives as an organization is and how you’re structured. Right. I I’m a big fan of decentralizing as much as possible. I think you hire people because they’re a subject matter expert in a specific area, and you want to make sure that you leverage them to the best of their potential, uh, a certified expert on any system.

No that system inside out, and they can help your company grow by making the best out of that system. And by doing repetitive tasks, day in day out for other people is not putting them in their best seat. It’s and it’s, it gets frustrating. It’s frustrating for the person who gets hired because they feel like they’re just, you know, plugging.

Uh, way at their computer and not really bringing value. It’s frustrating to the people who are waiting in line and the requests, because they’re like, I asked you for this five days ago, why didn’t I get it? And you’re like, well, you are also number 23 on my list. So I will get to you. I’ll get to you when I get to, I’m just going to go do it in MailChimp.

I can build an email and that’s something I’ve heard that so many times. And actually that’s one of the reasons we started this whole journey and I started getting very into. Structuring operations the proper way. We’ve, we’ve, I’ve heard of people where they would actually just go into the one system, let’s say Marquetto system and download the list of leads and then just bring it over to MailChimp and go to town.

And I would sit there crying because it is, I mean, it’s a violation of so many laws. It’s a violation of data, privacy. It’s there’s just, yeah. It’s so scary, but all that to say, I think there’s room to decentralize in every team on every system and in every process, as long as you set your people up for success.

And I think that’s the main. Driving points that I want to make today is decentralizing is amazing. Trust your people put in the right processes in guardrails, but also don’t set them up for failure decentralizing for the sake of decentralizing saying, well, my people don’t have time. I need to push everything out the door so that they have time.

Great. You want your stars to shine in their system, but not at the cost of another team or the cost of potentially missing out on revenue, damaging your brand, having people leave because they’re just all of a sudden, they’re like, what, what you threw this at me and I can’t. No, no. So it’s a very important piece of the puzzle.

De-centralize as much as you can make sure that it’s in line with your company objectives, but set everybody up for. Yeah. You know, I, as you were describing that kind of, that’s the core essence of what you need in terms of like culture. I, I, because I’m in Dallas and, you know, Southwest airlines I think is well known for they, they push so much.

Autonomy and authority out to the people who are customer facing kind of across all the different parts of the business that they’re able to like really do creative things and really serve the customers well. And if you think, yeah, I’m not a big fan of like internal customers, but if you think of it that way, right, the more you can kind of give those people, the autonomy and authority with the guidelines about this is how we want.

Behave and act and in how we want to make sure that we’re avoiding the appropriate risk, but still being, you know, taking appropriate risks. Okay. Yeah. I think that becomes part of the brand too. Right? Uh, as your team is empowered to act on behalf of the brand and within guidelines, it’s suddenly feels a bit more personable.

And I don’t want to like start stepping into the authorial discussion of like what brand and personality feels like. But I think like having good guard rails and systems in place, like we’ve been talking. Um, Just makes all the difference, like it enables your brand to get more reach. And I think like that message runs true when you’re establishing a business for the very first time.

Right? Like get all your legal documentation in a row and all your ducks lined up so that in the future, should something come up, you, you won’t be. Caught, you know, with your tail between your legs, because you didn’t set something up in, at the foundational levels. Right. So establishing all of the foundation to begin with allows you to grow exponentially, you know, uh, it’s like laying the pipe right.

For the, for the house and you can actually build on top of it. And I just think we like at MO Pros, the MO Pros dot com a lot of like where. My thinking on systems and stuff. I ended up doing inside of what I call the marketing operations playbook. And, and then I kind of, I was like, this fits really nicely with the community.

And like started people, started giving me feedback on it and I think we have a lot of room to grow. And I really like what you were talking about, Michael. Like having an internal certification process to like Uplevel your team members based on the systems that your organization uses to give them more control over the platforms that you have within your organization.

I think that’s a fascinating concept and one that I’ve certainly never seen come across, but at the end of the day, like those kinds of control mechanisms will just let your brand and your business, I think, grow exponentially. Overtime. And I, I, I, I found it interesting Catherine, that you referred to that as like kind of a hybrid model, I guess you’re right.

Like, it is hybrid in that like someone owns the center of excellence, but right. Yeah, empower is the right word, offshoring in quotes, right. To your team and empower people. Well, and if you think of it like concentric circles about like how much does the center of excellence control really own? They’re the only ones who deal with it.

The smaller that gets right, the more you’re able to scale by pushing more of the other stuff out to other people. Um, but the, the reason I was going through that thought process, where I was is that, um, Yeah. I, I, I, I think in my mind, I wouldn’t be able to say it until we just had this conversation is that I was trying to find ways to do that in a way that made sense to minimize the risks that were there were potential with doing that.

And at the same time, giving people this like, oh, okay, well they really want us to be able to move on our own within, you know, we’d call them guardrails or frameworks or whatever. Um, but I, you know, as part of how I operate too, I’m very comfortable with. The idea that, you know, people are going to try to figure out how to get their stuff done, if that’s what their goals are.

Right. And if you’re a barrier, they’re going to go do it another way. And so that’s why you get the people who will go pull a list and uses another system. And, um, you know, and, and you get sort of, you get like abuses right. In some ways from that. And so I’m a good, I’m a big believer. Like you not need to be.

It’s really easy in our roles as marketing ops professionals. I think to be seen as the, you know, the team of no, right. We know we can’t use this. No, we can’t do this. And I think the more we can, all this goes into a whole other thing, right. It was like, how do we become more of the enablers where we’re partnering with them on figuring out how do we say yes.

That gets people moving in the direction that they want to go. It may not be the a hundred percent solution, but it also may be, can’t be the a hundred percent solution that they wanted because of legal regulatory requirements or the time is going to take to build out a list. Like, I mean, how many of us have done this, where we’ve been asked, oh, we just want to send it, you know, a list, you know, send an email to our customers.

Right. And in the back of my mind going okay, How many customers are you talking about? Because I know that’s a very manual process to go do. Like in most companies you go Gabby, I go search for all the different versions of this company, name that you want to target. Then go look at the titles of the people that are in our database, and then.

Okay. Hey, which ones do you want to include? Not exclude, right? It’s a multiple step thing and it’s not an automated thing. One simple ask is always more complicated than it’s right for you. Um, oh, sorry. I didn’t mean to cut you off, but no, it’s I say knowledge is power, right? Most people just assume that we say no, because we are not nice.

And we are the gatekeepers and will not allow anybody in, but that’s not the case. It’s because we know what the repercussions. Yeah, we know legal repercussions, we know systems limitations. We know that there’s actually more than more between the lines on your ass. Most of the times, because we’ve been through it multiple times.

At least we hope we’ve been through it multiple times. And this is what I was going to bring up just a second ago is, um, you talked about, uh, allowing someone who’s like really an expert in their system to use it to, uh, to the best of its ability and really. Um, I like to say like, make it seem right. Like we’re getting the ROI out of it and all those things.

Um, and I think, I think you’re, I think you’re onto something there where it’s just like another topic probably for us to, to bring up at some point. But, um, when you have good documentation in place and good systems, um, control, you can start inviting those system experts to be a part of the conversations a little bit earlier.

And whether that’s you as an individual or your manager, hopefully your manager’s advocating for you who is like a systems owner to say like, Hey, you need to bring, uh, Sarah into this call or into this discussion because Sarah can really help guide you on whether or not the thing you’re trying to accomplish is feasible in the timeframe that you believe it is feasible.

Right. And I just don’t think we get enough opportunities to do that. Maybe that’s because there isn’t enough rigor around like systems management and documentation and process and, and centralization of these things. And so I think you were really onto something there, like you want those people to be a part of those conversations, but like getting them there is really hard.

And I think it’s because of this problem of talking about today, right? Yeah, it is. And, uh, and it’s funny because this week, uh, one of the most. Uh, community person asked me a question. And so what’s the best advice you’ve ever gotten from a boss. And I said, I love that question. And it’s actually a really interesting conversation in the end, but I said the best advice I ever got is don’t ever forget that behind the processes and the tools, there are people don’t ever forget that.

And that’s for a multitude of reasons, the first one being don’t ever assume that it’s always going to work perfectly because a human put this together and be. It’s not because a tool can automate something that you should remove the human out of it. Automation is great. Artificial intelligence.

Intelligence is powerful, but there’s nothing better than a human cause. We have hearts. We feel, we think we move in different directions and I’m always amazed at some of my colleagues. All of a sudden, we’ll come up and say, I saw the coolest thing today. Somebody built this and this and this and that, and it does this.

And when it does that, it’s this like, how cool is that? And we are just odd that somebody thought of that, right? The creativity that some of these people have, it’s absolutely mind boggling. And if you don’t give your team a chance to come to the table and say, Hey, Long line of VPs. I know you have this idea and I know I’m just a little person here, but I think I can help you get there a lot faster because I know the system, I know what it can do.

And so, yeah, I think it’s a really great point. You bring when you can have these people to the table, right? When they have time to actually shine and sing and then come back to the table and say, now that I’m not doing mindless execution work, I think this is a really great idea that we have, and I can help get them.

Yeah. Well, I, you know, it’s reminded me to, I don’t remember where I’ve heard it, but I think I’ve heard from multiple, like, um, self-help type people who talk so much about having discipline and habits. To take out the day-to-day decisions of, I mean, to the point of like Steve jobs, right. Always wore the same turtleneck or whatever.

Um, I just told my wife, I’m going to buy the same color shirt and pants from now on so that I can be more efficient with my time. I just said that to her today. So, I mean, maybe not, but I think the discipline of like, if we all got better about the discipline of making sure we were thinking about documenting stuff early and often on, on these core things, So that we then have the things to go back and have the conversations to help educate the others so that when we want to start to, to have those conversations, we have, I don’t even want to say data, but we have like, here’s why, when you asked me to build a list of customers in this industry, that it’s not a 15 minute thing, it’s a 15 day thing.

Um, and it’s not, and it’s not just me. Right? It’s because we’re going to be going back and forth multiple times. Yeah, I want to, um, I I’d love to ask this question. It’s one of my favorite questions and I don’t, I don’t think we’ve asked it of every guest yet, but, um, we talked, we touched on certification a couple of different ways today.

Um, Cat, I would love your, and I revealed that at our very first episode, right? Like I want to create this community. I want this community to help us create. The very first marketing ops certification, like at large, it’s not specific to, you know, a technology, right. It’s great that you know how to use Marketo or HubSpot or whatever.

Um, but like it’s so much more than that. And we’ve talked about that in so many different ways today. Um, what would you say it means to be like a certified marketing officer? Cool. That’s a very loaded question. I would. That’s a good one. I would say honestly, you’re right. It’s not about the tool. It is not about the tool tools are meant to help you achieve your goal and to support a process.

So I’ll say. About being able to have that vision from a marketing standpoint on where you want to drive your company. Right. We all have goals and I, it doesn’t matter what you sell products, services, what industry you’re in. It doesn’t matter. We could be talking about Southwest airlines talking about Walmart.

The company has a goal, most likely it’s numbers driven. It’s revenue driven. Great. How do we get there? Well, here’s the things that we can do perfect. Now from the sales standpoint, how do we get there from the product standpoint? How would we get there? And from the marketing stamp, How do we help you get there to be able to have that vision and then put that down into actionable items or processes, and then say, based on what we need to do, let’s go get the tools that we need to support all of this.

Right. We know where we want to go, where we’re at point a, we need to get to point B. We know how we want to get there. Let’s get the tools to make it happen. So for me, and it’s the toughest thing to certify for asking me, because it’s so. Subjective, but that ability to what I’ll say to write a document that will a specification, you basically are able to write a specification on how to move your company forward with their goals.

From a marketing standpoint, understanding your own business, understanding your competitors, understanding the market in which you’re operating. What’s our best goal. It’s not always emails. Maybe it’s ads. Maybe it might even be paid radio ads because it’s possible that the target market you’re going for, they’re all sitting in their car at five o’clock.

But the radio on, if you know that if you’re able to show them. Then you’re, you’ve got yourself a marketing pro you’ve got yourself. Somebody who took the time to understand the market. Yeah, I think, uh, it’s uh, I feel like you sort of like opened up my skull and like P peeked into my brain and like, started to say all the words that are in my head.

I love that. I love that you talked about a cross cross team agreeing. Yeah, right. Uh, collaborating with sales and maybe client success, whoever it is that your organization has getting buy-in from everybody on that. And then my favorite part of this whole thing is that you said like, it’s, it’s a document, right?

It’s some kind of, uh, collateral, some output. Um, and I think, I think we’re, I’m not going to reveal any more than that, but we’re headed into this path of you’re right. It is specific to every organization, so it’s going to be tremendously difficult. Um, but I think we can get there and I, I really appreciate.

I think so. No, that’s okay. You know, for those who know me, I actually, I have a bachelor’s of psychology. I love all things that are human and mind and I’m, I’m fascinating. Michael and I were just talking about, uh, creativity and I’m saying that I don’t have the artistic creativity. Uh, my sister got that.

I got the numbers and the processes and the analytical thinking. So I love these questions. It didn’t scare you ride bikes. So duly noted, we have, we have a question that for all of our guests that will, will now ask or something, something like that. We could ask something like that. Who knows? No, no, but I mean, in fact, we may want to just have a conversation about that at some point, because I have lots of opinions, opinions about that, that I’m going to keep for now.

Cause we don’t have that time. It will be me episode only. We can do that. That’d be fun. It’d be interesting to see, like if we do it sight unseen, see if we actually agree or not, that would be a little bit. Um, so, okay. So let’s kind of tie it back to where we started on centralization decentralization. So we’ve talked, I think we’ve talked, I’d like to cover two things at the end for you before we go.

And one is, we talked a lot about like the kinds of things that we think are right to decentralize versus not we’ve talked about what’s the, like, what are the things you probably need to have in place? Whether it’s culture or whatever people we haven’t really talked about. What do you like, what are signs?

You shouldn’t decentralize, uh, any part of the function and then maybe, you know, Yeah. Maybe tools that, you know, that are out there that would help a decentralization for those people who are maybe less technical with the, some of the systems. Yeah. I think signs that you’re not necessarily ready to decentralize.

Um, when your team wears multiple hats, right? I started in a startup. We had multiple hats. I was a project manager. I was a consultant. I did a little bit of HR. I did. I think when your role is not. Very clearly defined or is a little more fluid. That’s not, it’s probably not the right time to decentralize because you wouldn’t even know where to begin or which tasks and the fact that you kind of cross over into multiple departments.

It makes it hard to try and make it efficient. So I’ll say that’s probably one. Only flags. I could say most people already to decentralize at least to a certain extent. And again, I’m going to go back to what I said before. Just do it wisely and do it in a way that sets everybody up for success.

Decentralizing for the sake of just throwing work somewhere else is not going to set anybody up for. In terms of tools? Well, obviously I’m extremely biased. Uh, I’ve been working in Marquetto for seven years. We’ve built a whole tool around it to help decentralize operations. Um, so I’m obviously gonna say, you know, a tool like detto is a great tool to have, because it does enable your different departments, but it does offer the guard rails that you want to maintain collaborative tools, anything where you can collaborate.

Centralize information document, right tools like just Google drive, where you can have a repository of all your processes, tools, like a project management software, where you can assign tasks, put comments and all of that. Um, there are so many out there just make sure that you pick the tool that suits your needs.

Awesome. Sorry.

And you shared the whole world, heard my dog earlier and my children crying, you know, it’s all right. It’s a such as life these days, welcome to real life. So, uh, let me, I just, I think there were a number of things that I picked up that I just want to recap. So I love the idea of. Doing that like the process audit and is in assessing like the, the, I think the global versus local kind of ability to, to manage it.

And, you know, the, the, like the amount of change that we require, I love the idea that we’ve talked about, about defining what it is you want to do. Like what’s the purpose of decentralizing. So, you know, like we’re going to focus on the things because I think we all get it’s easy to go. Oh, Let’s just do it.

All right. And so then they give you, you’re focused on, this is the part we’re going to do. We’re going to learn from it. We’re going to see if we can do more. Um, so it’s maybe part of an evolution and then, you know, this last one of make sure you’ve got documentation. That’s an enabler for it. I mean, so much good stuff today.

Uh, anything else? Like, did I miss any big key points Mike or cat? I don’t think so. I, it was, I think it’s been incredibly insightful, um, to hear from you. And, and I hope that the audience that listens to this afterwards and those that were here today, um, really took some notes and just like got their brain juices flowing on a Friday.

They’re like, ah, I’m not going to think about this all weekend, but I really appreciate it. I think you hit the nail on the head there. Awesome. Well, uh, if there’s, if there’s nothing else, I think we’ll, we’ll, we’ll kind of wrap up here, but Cat, thank you so much for joining us, Mike. Thanks for being here.

Um, cat, um, where can people find you online? Follow you? Whatever what’s the best place? Uh, they can definitely find me on LinkedIn. Uh, I’m not hard to find. My last name is pretty unique, so no doubts. Everybody will find me. I’m always available by email I’m in the MO Pros, slack, slack space. So you can find me there as well.

Oh, And it was a really lovely to be here today. Thank you guys so much for having me as that. It’s a lot of fun. Yeah. All right. Thank you. So everyone else who is here, listening live and asking questions, and those of you who are going to listen to this on the recording. Thank you so much for being part of the community and joining us.

Please keep track of this registered, uh, to follow, uh, the show. So you get notified of when we go live new ones, or if you fall and follow the recordings, um, you can also just go to demo pros.com/opscast. So T. M O P R O S slash ops CAS T. And you can always keep track of where that will be and feel free to drop us messages.

I’m finding, you know, Mike or I could be found on LinkedIn or other places and you can shoot us ideas for topics. That you want to hear his cover, or if you wanted to ask follow up questions, we’re more than happy to do it. So until next time there is another, another episode coming up next week on, uh, the sixth, I believe, episode eight.

So we’re looking forward to that about doing, uh, a mark MarTech audit. So it’s going to be a good one as well with that cat, Mike. Thank you everyone. Who’s joined. Appreciate it. Thanks everybody. Next time. Have a great weekend.