A Discussion with Marketing Ops Coworkers Tracy Warner and Candace Hopkins from Agorapulse

Michael Hartmann: [00:00:00] Hello, everyone. Welcome to another episode of OpsCast brought to you by the MO Pros. Today’s a special episode. It is episode number 50. I’m Michael Hartmann joined today by Naomi Liu Naomi, say hello.

Naomi Liu: Hello, super excited that this is episode five, zero.

Michael Hartmann: Five. Oh, big five. Oh, pretty soon. I’m not even gonna say that.

Okay. , I was gonna make reference to my age, but then that’s gonna depress me. So I’m not gonna do that. All right. So excited today, we’ve actually got two guests. And it’s something that we’ve talked about trying to pull off for a while. And I was glad that they volunteered to do this.

We’ve got two guests who are gonna talk about their marketing ops journeys and their situation, their, that our coworkers. So joining us today are Tracy Warner and Candace Hopkins. Tracy is currently the senior manager of marketing operations at Agora pulse. Hopefully I got that right. Before that Tracy has held a number of positions, supporting executives.

She has her own consulting practice. She’s been involved with operations, email marketing, including design development strategy, and been in [00:01:00] project management. She’s also been in chief of staff type roles. She’s got a, a varied background. Candace also, as we said, works at a pulse with Tracy is currently manager of marketing operations.

She’s relatively new to marketing ops. Having worked as an inbound marketing specialist prior to this, in addition, she has also worked as a consultant, social media and marketing work. And Tracy, I think you told me there’s also some other connections, but why don’t you all tell us a little bit more and thanks for joining us today.

Yeah,

Tracy Warner: thanks so much for having us. We’re really excited to be here. So yeah, I guess that background is pretty accurate. And the only thing I would add is that Candace and I ironically, both have a background in dentistry. I dunno, we don’t know each other. We’re like a remote team, so we just we’ve met through work and somehow we’ve evolved into marketing op.

From doing marketing and then doing dentistry and then having our own web design businesses and then falling into

Michael Hartmann: for our listeners. I dunno how that, so we can all see each other. So now I’m really self-conscious about my teeth. So I’ll [00:02:00] try to carry on.

Candace Hopkins: No, we’re not in it anymore, so you’re good.

Michael Hartmann: okay. Good. Sounds good. Good. As I said, I think this is something that was good. We were hoping to get at some point was coworkers to join. So what Tracy, why don’t we start with you when you know, you and I were talking about doing an episode with you and you were the one actually suggested including Candace.

So I was really excited about that. Yeah. I’m just curious for our audience, why you thought it would be something that they would want to hear about.

Tracy Warner: no, it’s a good question. I think the short answer is I don’t do this job alone, so I didn’t wanna come on the podcast alone. Candace and I work really closely day in and day out.

And we’re like a mighty team of two supporting a large global marketing team. So much of what we do is complicated and we really rely on each other. So I also see in the slack group. You guys have that comes up all the time. Like how do we build out a team or what does a team look like?

I thought we could probably share some of our experiences there.

Michael Hartmann: That’s great. So quick questions, just follow up. So [00:03:00] is it just the two of you that’s in marketing op or do you have other folks? It’s just

Tracy Warner: the two of us today. Fortunately mark Candace, when I first started. I do you wanna tell that story, Candace?

Candace Hopkins: sure I can. So I started as an inbound marketing manager, as you could see on my LinkedIn profile. But shortly after I started my manager at the time left and we just so happened to have just started using HubSpot. So not only was I new to HubSpot, but it was new to the company as well. And then she decided to move to a different company.

It was better for her career. And so I just had. This new tool at this new company. And I had no idea what I was doing. So I just found my way and then shortly after, I think a few months after Tracy was hired and it was such a blessing, I was like, thank you so much. Like I like think I cried the day that she was hired officially because I was like, I’m not alone anymore, but I guess.

I guess it started out as me alone, but I was still [00:04:00] an inbound marketing manager by my title at that time. But I was just taking on more of a marketing operations role just naturally with that process. So yeah, it was definitely interesting. Something that I would recommend to people almost not that to be thrown into that situation.

But if, you have greatness thrust upon you, you have no choice, but to rise to the occasion and it taught me so much. In those few months alone.

Tracy Warner: And we’re really thankful too, because we had such a great data team that was really helpful. So they were provided backup. Before I came on and helped manage this massive new tool that we had, that was abandoned.

Candace Hopkins: yeah. Yes. Yeah.

Michael Hartmann: Wow. So Candace, I know you, you it sounds like a lot of people, fell into marketing ops, but kinda what kinda walk us through a little bit, maybe of where you were before you got to a gore pulse and how that led into this. Maybe there were indicators that this would’ve been a good spot for you.

Candace Hopkins: Yeah, I, Tracy and I have reflected on this and it’s been an interesting journey [00:05:00] just to figure out what my thoughts were leading up to this point and like why I chose the path that I did. And I went to UT Austin first and I got a degree in advertising right after that I did marketing and I just fell into like these companies that.

I guess didn’t have a lot of structure or exactly what I wanted. So being young and being not really sure exactly what I wanted to do in my career, I ended up just going towards dentistry, which is weird, but it was at the time I was like, oh, this is like Tracy. And I have reflected on this too, but it was such, if you go to dental hygiene school, you become a dental hygienist.

If you go to dental school, you become a dentist. And so it was just a structured. Whereas marketing is so different and you can go many paths after doing advertising or marketing or whatever it may be. Yeah. After dentistry, the pandemic hit, which I’m sure a lot of people can relate to this and looking at their career and being like, is this really what I wanna do right now?

And dentistry was closed for some time. All dental offices were forced to be closed. And [00:06:00] so I had a lot of time. That’s when I did my web development journey, I did a few boot camps and discovered that I love. As well, just like working and building things. And I loved being able to work from home or being able to work from anywhere.

And then my previous manager actually went to college with her and she posted on one of our alumni pages saying that they had the opening of the in bound marketing manager. And that’s how. I would say it found me. And at that time I was doing social media for a small company, which is one of the things that I did part-time in addition to dentistry or dental hygiene.

And then I just I got this job and I fell in love with the company and I fell in love with what I was doing. And even through the hardships of my manager at the time leaving, I fell in love with what I. Becoming and who I was becoming in my career. So that was my journey. And it was had a lot of ups and downs, but I’m really happy that it led me here.

Naomi Liu: I’m curious of your cohort that you graduated dental school with, if any of them, [00:07:00] if you keep in touch with any of them and they’re like, what the heck? Yeah. Do you guys get together? With now that restrictions are easing, do you guys get together? And you’re just like, what did you do during COVID?

I, yeah,

Tracy Warner: I

Candace Hopkins: see did a whole career. Yeah. Yeah. I’m not as close with many of the dental hygienists that I went to school with. But I know that some people reached out to me, dentistry is such a small community and a few dentists that I had went to school with. They reached out to me on Instagram and they’re like, Hey, we’re hiring come on back.

Not come on back. But they were like, oh, we want to, hire you as a dental hygienist. Are you open to part-time work or full- work? And I had to break the news of them that I went over to marketing and they’re. Very accepting of it. And I think when I throw in that I can work from anywhere and I can work from home.

They’re like, okay, we get it. That makes a lot of sense. So yeah, I think the biggest thing with my parents, and I don’t know if other people gonna relate to this, but my parents are like, what are you doing? Like where are you going? I think, no matter what, they were very supportive.

Everything. But now they’re extra [00:08:00] supportive and I tell them the benefits and Tracy can also relate, like explaining things to her. Mother-in-law about what we do. It’s so hard to explain what marketing operations is and like what it does and. But going back to your questions I think people are very accepting of career changes, especially nowadays, which is I’m very thankful for.

It was definitely a shock and a lot of people didn’t know that I had advertising background to begin with. So they were like, how did you even do this? So yeah. Interesting. Interesting.

Naomi Liu: I think it’s a battle you’ll always have trying to explain what you do. I’ve just settled on it for marketing.

And I find that most folks gen tend to get what that means as opposed to like operations, what is that? Or marketing? Oh, so you must do events or you work in Facebook all day and I’m like, no. Yeah, I’ve just, it’s always been a battle trying to explain to parents like. You know what it is that their daughter does on a daily basis.

And it’s really for them to regurgitate it so they can tell their friends, oh, how’s your daughter doing things like that. And they just are never able to do it. And so I find that’s something that’s always frustrated them because they can’t internalize it [00:09:00] to the way that in the sense that they can verbalize it back to other people either.

Candace Hopkins: Yeah. Yeah, definitely. I know that like whenever somebody says, oh, she’s a dental hygienist, explain no further, like I know exactly what you do versus. Anything in marketing it’s but what do you do? And it’s I always get that question but what do you do? And I’m like what’s a day in the life

Naomi Liu: of, what do you do every day?

Or like every week, like when you wake up what is the first thing you do? I’m like, okay.

Michael Hartmann: First thing I do is check to see what fires are happening that I have to go out, right?

Candace Hopkins: Yeah. Yes. How many slack notifications do I have a day?

Tracy Warner: We’ll see.

Naomi Liu: think that every marketing ops person. At some point in their career, know the feeling of waking up at three in the morning and thinking, oh my gosh, did I schedule that email correctly?

And then drag themselves outta bed to like double. I’m glad their laptop next with their laptop next to their bed. So they like bring it into their bed and just like through blurry eyes yeah. Did I set that properly? Is it still sending a test link? What’s going on

Candace Hopkins: that you have yes, absolutely.

Or the. Realization, whenever you see the clock and know that you, your email [00:10:00] just sent and you get like this heat flash like that, this hot flash. And you’re like, okay, like I gotta go check to make sure I didn’t mess something up. And yeah. Too many

Michael Hartmann: of those. Yeah. I, we were doing some text messaging over the weekend for one of ours and I was sitting there like refreshing.

Did it go through, did it go through, did it go through right? How many fail? How many did. Yeah. So definitely feel that. Definitely. I’m curious. So I wanna, so Tracy, I think I’m curious to see what your answer is to Naomi’s question about, dental hygienist school, or however you were connected to dentistry.

Maybe it was different. Maybe was different.

Tracy Warner: I didn’t. So I didn’t get, as far as Candace did I was originally going to school. I went to UC Berkeley for like a pre-dental track and I was really interested in becoming a dentist. And actually she and I were just talking about this the other day.

We were both really interested in like dental philanthropy, which is a very. Niche, but I feel like marketing apps, people are really caring and supportive of people. So it makes sense why we were both really into that, but I burnt out on it. I honestly, it was a really intense program and it [00:11:00] was Wasn’t serving me anymore.

So I wound up majoring in economics and kind of just fell in love with data and things like that. And I started working for executives at different startups and just absorbed everything. Tried to learn everything I could about what they cared about, about, metrics and operations and it I didn’t know, marketing operations existed at the time. I don’t think anybody does right until no. You work at a company.

Michael Hartmann: That’s interesting that economics steer back. I actually thought about if I would’ve go back to school, knowing what I know now, I think economics would’ve been what I would’ve found way more interesting than the engineering program I did just because.

Yeah, I really, the numbers. And I think that there’s like the analysis that goes some of the things that they do, especially be, I really, especially, I’m a big fan of the freak economics guy. So the whole behavioral economics, yeah. Stuff. So it’s so fascinating. Why do people behave one of my favorite courses?

Yeah,

Tracy Warner: no, absolutely. One of my favorite courses was this econometrics course was just like a combination of economics and Statistics. And so it was like statistics all through the lens of [00:12:00] like buying behavior, super fascinating. But it lends itself really well to the ops career. I

Michael Hartmann: think it, I was gonna say, I think you have a leg up on some people.

I think this is one of the things we’ve talked about a lot lately is that, whether or not it’s in a job description anymore, it’s starting, I’m starting to see it more. But I think there’s an expectation that marketing ops people are gonna be the ones doing analysis and reporting and trying to find insights and data at the same time.

I don’t think a lot of people come into marketing ops with that skillset. Or a background in it. So I think you, that helps. It sounds like you believe that as well. Is that, would you agree as well? Is that, would you agree?

Tracy Warner: Yeah. Yeah. I’d agree. I think yeah, I see so many threads on LinkedIn, where they’re like, if there’s any mention of data, run away, like it’s not for me.

Candace and I think we try to keep our eye on that sort of thing. So we started doing some data camp courses this year and. SQL’s obviously huge for a lot of marketing ops roles. And we’re just curious about getting more, more informed and better. That are situated.

We did this like data visualization [00:13:00] course that was like amazing. Everyone’s obsessed with pie charts. And this whole visualization course was like, don’t use pie charts. They’re really misleading. And I’m like, but they’re so pretty. . So now it’s all just like bar graphs all day, which is not as fun, but it’s this tells a better story.

Naomi Liu: Speaking of learning. I’m a huge, actually big fan of Linda or I guess LinkedIn learning now. And a lot of people don’t know this, but you can actually access it for free through your library. So if you have a library card, Go and register or sign up for online access and you can actually access LinkedIn learning by logging in through your most li like public library portals.

Tracy Warner: That’s a great tip.

Michael Hartmann: Oh yeah. That’s not just a Canada thing. Not just Canada thing.

Naomi Liu: No, it’s not.

Michael Hartmann: No. No. All right. You should test that out, Michael. I actually, I think I will I’ve been actually, I think I will, like I’ve found in, it’s been interesting. I’ve we started getting got into spying, so many books with our kids that finally, I was like, we’ve gotta stop doing this.

We gotta find a better way. So we did, then we switched to used [00:14:00] books. Then I started to go to the library and I was like, okay, this is a better deal. And then I found out about all these different things they have. Yeah. It’s amazing. Yeah, it’s under and it’s under utilized. I think these days it’s under utilized.

I think these days

Tracy Warner: a big fan. What’s that? Tracy? The library too. So what’s that Tracy? Yeah, I’m a big fan of the library too.

Michael Hartmann: Cool. Okay, so you two are, as a team, a you’ve only, you’ve only been a team together for a short period of time. Like how did you yeah. How did you build.

How and, or split responsibilities develop your own. I dunno if you’ve got a mind, something in mind for how, like the kind of culture you want to have tell us a little bit about how that has evolved and where you’re at from that standpoint.

Tracy Warner: So when I first joined on like Candace mentioned, she was just like a new hire with this massive tool.

And I don’t think we had a built out marketing ops department before then. The, her previous manager who had left was like a team of one and kind of. Her title was marketing operations, but she really was just marketing it seemed like she did a lot. So a part of it was like [00:15:00] training the team about what is marketing operations like?

What is our new function within the team. And then as everyone else grew their marketing teams. Cause I said, we were, like I said, we were a marketing, a global company. So our marketing teams are divided between regions and languages. So we went in and said, this is what we do.

This is our function. One of the, I guess the hard parts about it was having to lock down a lot of the tools. Like when I joined, like everyone had admin access to everything and that’s a recipe for disaster. So we had

Candace Hopkins: pull, we had a whole back the admin

Tracy Warner: yeah. And then figure out like who, who really needs it.

Uhhuh .

Candace Hopkins: Normally, they would message us like I need this and then we’d be like, okay. And then slowly open it back up to certain people. I feel like that worked out

Tracy Warner: best and that happens a lot. I feel like a lot of the people I talk to are like, the first thing you do is lock down the tools.

Candace Hopkins: did not know that.

Tracy Warner: It’s easier to give everyone admin access and that we don’t have a bunch of requests coming in. But it’s, like I said, it’s a recipe for disaster pretty quick. And then, I dunno if Candace, you wanna add to this, but yeah, we broke out our roles a little bit and defined [00:16:00] what each of us is

Candace Hopkins: doing and something that I love, like being under Tracy’s wing is that she’s I’m gonna brag on you right in front of you,

Naomi Liu: which is

Candace Hopkins: really awkward. Yeah. She. Loves to listen about what do you like to do? And what do you wanna do? And where do you see yourself going? And something that we did was we had a mirror board session where we built a mirror board and basically listed out every single responsibility that a marketing operations does.

And then we just went back and forth and we were like I like this. And I like this. And I wanna move in this direction. This is where I see myself going in my career in five years. So I’m gonna start building those skills. And so that really helped. Define what our marketing operations team was.

And it even more so helped showed that we needed to, eventually grow and be a larger team in the future. And so something that Tracy and I did from the get go is I was like, I really love campaigns. Like everything around campaigns. I like. To talk with the campaign manager, listen to their ideas, be the gatekeeper [00:17:00] and say, yes, that’s possible.

We can build that out, be the one to help build it out and just see it all the way through. And then Tracy went more. If you wanna talk more on that too, but more on the sales side, in addition to the marketing operation side. Yeah.

Tracy Warner: The lead scoring and routing is the part that I’m really interested in and like data enrichment and moving everything to.

Sales and making sure that we’re connected with them. There’s, we all can do everything and I think it’s important that we’re all able to do everything, but we try to stick to our skill set and Candace was on our honeymoon last week when. When we told her we were gonna do this podcast.

Sorry again for for the fire while you were gone, she just sends you a sweaty face emoji okay.

Candace Hopkins: I was like, I have the bad habit of checking my email. Like when I’m off, I think it’s just a habit at this point. I like find myself going to it often. And so I’m just like on the beat to doing power stances.

Cause I’m like a podcast, like I’m gonna get through this, but. Like I said it, I don’t know. I feel like it gave us a chance to reflect on everything that we’ve [00:18:00] done. It’s it was my one year mark in February. So it’s been such a journey and a growing journey at that, that seems like a great thing to do at this point, just to talk through some things.

So

Tracy Warner: yes. But yeah, so she was on her honeymoon and I had to do everything solo. So I was. It got me like a real good sense of wow, like we’re really split up now. I don’t even know what she does on a day to day basis some days , but it was nice to be in the weeds of what she was doing.

But yeah, so I can’t just mentioned like the goal is to grow at some point. And the mirror boards been really helpful and like visualizing what we’re doing and what, and where we need to grow.

Naomi Liu: I’m a big fan of the subject matter experts on the centralized marketing ops team. And it’s also how I structure my team.

And I think I wrote a blog post about this for the MO Pros blog actually. But I think it’s great because it allows. I find that it’s, over the years leading different marketing ops teams, it allows you to give a level of service and support to your internal business partners that you wouldn’t [00:19:00] have.

If everybody was just a generalist, there’s just things that just change all the time and so much that, you can’t always constantly be on top of all of the changes that are happen. with landing pages, with emails, with deliverability, with like cookie tracking, with consent, with, data ops and everything that goes with it.

And I found that having people on the team where that’s their main focus while on top of, being able to run their own campaigns, but we can flexline on each other for , the areas where we’re that we specialize in, that’s been I’ve found to be really beneficial.

Michael Hartmann: Definitely Naomi.

So have you done that kind of an exercise like they did where you actually included the team and going okay, here are the things we need to cover, it’s see who, if there was people were gravitating towards. Some areas versus others as being the SME.

Naomi Liu: Not so much like that it’s actually happened the other way around because like I would look for a specific skill set and then hire for it.

So we have a web developer on the team, an email developer slash design, [00:20:00] creative branding person. Someone who is really good on documentation, which is, we just constantly need documentation and a data ops person. It’s not so much that the team was already here. And then we’re just trying to delegate things that they were interested in.

It’s like we’re actually hiring for those specific areas of expertise.

Michael Hartmann: Yeah I’ve done something similar too, where I’ve had, a primary and a secondary for key functions. So yeah, for mine, the additional goal was not only to know who was the key person for those things, but also to go, okay, so that person can take a vacation, right?

Yeah. We know that’s, who’s gonna back them up when they’re out. And then, sometimes that was me. Sometimes it was somebody else on the team and it just, we sort. Had that mapped out ahead of time. I would love, I may follow up with you to Tracy and Candace about how I use the mirror board.

Cuz I actually have an exercise I wanna do with my team here in the near future and I it’s gonna have to be virtual. I don’t know enough about Miro anyway, so we live in it totally other side. I love it so

Candace Hopkins: much. It’s you can make it all beautiful too. So [00:21:00] definitely

Michael Hartmann: right. You can gimme a crash course in that then.

How about that deal. All right. So I think you two alluded to this a little bit. You both have come in from slightly different backgrounds and all that from different perspectives. Just curious what do you think you’ve have you learned from each other. In this process, right?

So not just one, not just say Candace learning from Tracy, which I think most people would expect would be the, what normal way of it happening. But, and I’m tying this back to, I think Naomi and I have both talked about this a little bit where we’ve been mentors and we actually get a lot of value back from the people we are mentoring because we can get we are learning as that part of that.

Just curious and I don’t know who lets go first, trace your Candace. You’ll pick.

Candace Hopkins: Yeah, I can go first. I have a specific story that just happened recently. And we also reflected on that. We reflect a lot about our feelings.

Michael Hartmann: Tracy was laughing when she heard that. So you for listeners.

Candace Hopkins: So what.[00:22:00]

Whenever I came back, Tracy had laid out everything that happened whenever I was gone on my vacation, which like goes to your point, like having that trust in like your teammate to, have everything under control. I was actually able to like, relax on vacation, who would’ve thought. And I came back and I had just task in my Asana.

Board which is what we use for project management. And one of them was related to ads. And so I went in there, I had enough information in there to know exactly what I needed to do and get it done. And going through that process, I. Wasn’t too familiar with connecting ads and bringing in leads from specific places that already wasn’t set up.

So just having to run through that I ended up on accident discovering a different way to attach leads to a specific workflow. And what was interesting is that everything worked. I tested a few times, it all worked properly. Every lead was going the way that they needed to. And then about an hour later, I found.

One of Tracy’s slight documents running through like the lead ad process. And I was like, oh if I would’ve found this [00:23:00] first I would’ve had everything I needed to do here instead of just learning it on my own. So that was like, my bad, but then going through the loom that created, it was a completely different setup than what I had discovered on my end, whenever I was just going through and figuring it out on my own.

And so it wasn’t. It was interesting. Cause I, whenever I approached Tracy, I was like, oh my gosh, I did something wrong. I broke it, but I tested it multiple times. So it’s working. So I don’t really understand. So whenever I approached Tracy and I was like, Hey look at this. Do you think this is it’s it appears, but I did it this instead of how you created this and linked it to a workflow.

And we just like compared notes. And at that point, discovered it’s like using different formulas to come up with the end math equation or the end result of a math question. And so we compared notes and then from there, we’re able to say, okay, I think this way is more efficient because of X, Y, and Z.

And that’s just how we like bounce ideas off of each other and learn, and. It was almost like a I’ll add

Tracy Warner: Candace’s way was more efficient. I had overcomplicated it [00:24:00] like

Candace Hopkins: to

Michael Hartmann: high heaven happens to me all the time. Tracy,

Tracy Warner: I get it. She’s wait, there’s this really easy way to do it.

And I’m like, of course I’m an idiot who overcomplicated it. So there’s like countless moments where we find ways to do things and we find, we compare notes and we see that it’s one of us has done it way better than the other and it’s

Candace Hopkins: definitely, it’s worked both ways.

Like I overcomplicate things all the time and she is hold up let’s just go back to part one. And then this is how you connect it easier. And it’s more efficient this way. And I’m like, oh, like who would’ve thought. But it goes both ways, right? Yeah, definitely. Yeah. And it’s just so interesting.

Like our minds work very in very similar ways, like I think it, everybody in marketing OPSS brain works a very similar way. It’s like very data driven and it’s, and so it’s interesting that we come up with different ways to solve the same problem. Which is pretty cool. Just to think about just the

Tracy Warner: ongoing learning.

Yeah. We get from each other. It’s really helpful. But yeah, it’s, we, we’re constantly learning from each other. And I don’t think that there’s any one way to do anything. Having each other’s [00:25:00] backs and having no ego and being willing to say wait a minute, I did this totally wrong.

And you come up with a much better solution is really just how we operate every.

Michael Hartmann: You’ve mentioned a couple of times that you support a pretty large marketing team. Just outta here. Like how big is large. Gosh,

Tracy Warner: how we hire, we hired so many people recently. how big is it now? Like

Michael Hartmann: approx, approximately

Tracy Warner: like 15, 18 marketers now.

Oh, okay. Not including contractors

Candace Hopkins: all over the globe too.

Michael Hartmann: So got it. Okay. So what do you think? Cuz it sounds like you’ve. Between the two of you, you’ve put a lot of structure in place you’ve identified maybe where there’s some gaps on the team where you’re gonna need some help and all that.

What is your biggest challenge? The biggest challenge right now that like you, if we could solve this, it would make the rest of the day a lot easier, less, a normal week easier.

Candace Hopkins: Yeah, that’s a good, I can start with this one. I think like the biggest challenge that, there’s so many, I feel there’s like a long list of challenges that we’re overcoming.

But things are evolving so quickly and ideas are happening [00:26:00] everywhere. And I think trying to keep up with that quickly evolving system. And things constantly changing or even things needing updating. That’s probably the most challenging thing for me. And then at the same time, not messing anything up and causing these big wreck or fire And not everything is all the same.

So you think that, oh, I’ve done this campaign before, like a type of it, aver of this, but nothing is ever the same. So just keeping up with that constant, like evolving marketing that we have all new tasks and everything. That’s probably one of the most challenging things for me.

Tracy Warner: I’d also add like we’re a really data rich company.

So there’s so much, we have a seven or eight person actually, maybe it’s smaller than. How big is our data team six. Okay. It’s a pretty, it’s a pretty big data team. but they have so many different experiments going on and they’re collecting so much information. And we have a pretty complex like interconnected marketing stack.

Like one of the first things that anybody who [00:27:00] starts the company says is wow, like you have a lot of tools. We do have a lot of tools. But with that comes so much complexity in figuring out what goes where and who knows what? And it’s that’s been like the labyrinth of the first, like year of me being here is just learning like what information is even available.

And how can we utilize it better?

Candace Hopkins: Definitely. And piggybacking off of that data is just, like you said, we have a lot. And what’s interesting is that as an example, we have Add information coming in from paid social paid ads all different types, but how HubSpot breaks it up is different from one another.

So if you look at the original source, drill down one, that’s different than the original source drill down. One of paid social versus this type of paid ads. So it’s just a lot to take in and it’s a lot of digging that you have to do over and over again. And then you forget, cause it’s like a language.

If you don’t use it. You lose it. So you have to go back in and do digging again to refresh your memory of where specific data is going and how it’s split up within the HubSpot. Okay. Candace

Tracy Warner: just did this massive [00:28:00] project where, because we have ads in many countries and languages and many different sources, and we had to basically take the way that HubSpot in pulled in the data, which was useless and then repurpose it into a hundred different properties.

it was. Like it took weeks. It was huge. A

Candace Hopkins: good learning experience. Yeah. Experience. Yeah.

Michael Hartmann: All right. So speaking of learning, right? Sounds like y’all are busy. You’re got probably more to do than you. Yeah. We’ve talked a little bit about learning. Naomi mentioned I guess now LinkedIn learning, right?

Formally Linda, but What are you being proactive about learning as part of the part of your regular kind of week or month? Are you like, how are you doing, what are, what resources are you going to besides the MO Pros of course

Tracy Warner: spend a lot of time in the MO Pros. But we do a lot. Like I mentioned, Candace and I are doing some data cam courses.

To help us stay on top of that. We do have a slight doc that we just dump in like interesting PDFs and downloadables and links to podcasts like this one where , we can just share information that we’ve learned. I don’t know. Can’t [00:29:00] you have anything else that you

Candace Hopkins: would say that we do.

I think the one that I’ve been recently and it’s shameless plug to you guys again, is the mops podcast. I listened to one, I think it was Justin Norris, I believe, but he talked about how, oh man, he was talking about how, like he had assured his client that everything was perfect. Everything was great.

There was this one setting where it over rode like Salesforce data and then it all just got messed up and everything like that, but yeah, just podcasts and The way that I love learning is I like to be active and outside, but that’s hard to do so I just listen to podcasts while I’m like walking or running.

And from every podcast that I listen to, and I don’t know, I’m sure Tracy can relate to this, but I think of a process that we currently have that we can improve, or it validates what we’re doing currently. So that’s how I, I learn podcasts.

Tracy Warner: Yeah. And last quarter we started doing like a sprint style of work.

So every week we’ll go through and prioritize, and then there’s [00:30:00] also a retro component at the end of the week. So we, that usually turns into a session of us just talking about everything that went wrong but also things that went right. So it’s a good cathartic session, but also really useful in analyzing how we can improve and gaps in our knowledge.

So

Candace Hopkins: that’s been really helpful. Yeah, definitely. And something that like bragging on gore post is that they are so open to providing extra learning courses. Whenever Tracy approached her manager about data camp, it was approved within what, like a week or so. And then I was shortly added on after that.

Like our company helps us learn, which is valuable. That’s been great.

Michael Hartmann: Yeah. Naomi, it look like you were

about to ask something

Naomi Liu: yeah, no, I just was saying that. Yeah, no, it’s always good to, be constantly learning. I think marketing ops is one of those roles that I feel anyways, that you’re sometimes learning as you’re going. And you’re just trying to figure it out and asking, Hey, does that, has [00:31:00] anybody else ever come across this like really random obscure use case?

And it’s just, , I’ve had a few of those this past week yeah, it’s just it’s and the more that you can get different perspectives either through formalized training or just learning through communities the MO Pros it’s I think it’s just all the better.

Michael Hartmann: Yeah, definitely.

Yeah. I think that like real time learning when you’re trying to solve a problem I. The only benefit as I’m not in as much of the detail, the systems these days as I have been in the past, but when I have to, at least I have call ’em rubrics, from ways I’ve figured out and solved problems in the past that still I think apply generally.

And sometimes that helps. If I’m in a, I try really hard to. Especially if it’s something where somebody on the team was supposed to be was trying to solve a problem, they’ve run into a roadblock. They pull me in, like we’re gonna do it together. So that hopefully there’s a little bit of learning that happens there for them in effect.

It happened earlier this week where that same thing happened. And I actually learned something not so much about the tool or pro the way it worked, but more about [00:32:00] how our business works. Cause I’m still new to the company. And I think again, kinda go back to that, like being able to learn from each other.

That’s been real for me too. Okay. The, I guess let’s go just a general question, Tracy, I’ll throw it to you first. Is there anything that you think. yeah, you’ve learned from this experience where you’re at go pulse and where you’ve had to starting to build a team and all that, that you think would be valuable to share with our listeners that we haven’t already touched on.

Tracy Warner: Just like in general, like something that’s been interesting on our, along our journey.

Michael Hartmann: Yeah. Yeah.

Tracy Warner: So I. Like this happens maybe a couple weeks ago, like I had completely messed some sort of, it was like a major MOS moment. And I was like falling on the sword of I was like, oh, I did ruin, ruined everything.

. And Candice is just Hey, like it’s not a, you it’s we, so this is us. You’re not, you don’t fail alone. So you know, as much as you can say, like marketing ops should be like a zero ego zone. It’s also [00:33:00] we fail together and we win together. And if you wouldn’t point the finger at anyone on your team.

So don’t point the finger at yourself when you screw things up. So I that’s a big thing. I don’t know. Candace. You have anything else?

Candace Hopkins: No, just to kinda add on that. Every everything that we do, like documentation wise, we, if it, even if it’s one person that says That who has completed that. We always say we, so we’re like one entity. It’s we created this workflow and we did this. And I think that goes along with that we’re a team.

And like Tracy said, if one, one takes the fall, we take the fall together. Same for building it back up. I’ve messed up. So I messed up so many things like some that. Nobody even knew about besides Tracy and she was able to, help me clean up my mistake and was always like there whenever I needed her and help me, like when I was panicking and not knowing what to do next, she was able to come in and help with that.

I guess just with building a strong team. Whenever you’re interviewing, it’s so important to have great rapport with who is going to join your team. And I think that whenever we’re [00:34:00] ready to move to the next step in hiring somebody during our interview, that’s something that we’ll definitely focus on is communication with that person, if we’re able to communicate easily with them.

And also if we just get along I think with Tracy and I, through our, weekly meetings, we are together nonstop, and if we’re able to communicate, then we’re able to succeed and move forward from there. So I think that’s so important is just like the bond that you develop with your team and then also your ability to get along, because you’ll go through a lot together.

Michael Hartmann: Absolutely love it. When you are ready to hire somebody, I have a feeling anybody who listens to this is gonna be raising their hand. So this sounds like a great environment. Okay. Okay. So let’s go. I might go to our kind of our. Semi-regular question that we ask everybody here. Candace, maybe you go first, just cause I think you, I wanna get your perspective as relat relatively new to the world, but yeah, cuz one of the things that the MO Pros is trying to do is try to provide a platform not only to share, [00:35:00] help each other out, but also, provide resources.

So people like if, and when there might be a. A certification for marketing ops professional, what would need to be included in that? If you could name one or two things like, off the top of your head, what would those two things like? You have to have this, so Candace, you first been TRAC.

Candace Hopkins: Sorry. All good. I guess that wouldn’t be any

Michael Hartmann: there’s not a right answer here. By the way.

Candace Hopkins: I think a background in data has helped me not a, I haven’t had too much of a background, but even doing data camp has helped me so much, like understanding. As a whole, the CRM that we’re working with and how information comes in, how it goes out.

I think if I had a better understanding of that as a whole and seeing it from more of an Eagle eye, then diving in into every little piece and then building from there, I probably would’ve been. A lot more successful, a lot faster than I was instead of breaking things and having to [00:36:00] rebuild it and fix it and everything like that.

So I think if there’s a way to have a certification about CRMs in general, just a very broad knowledge of that and how that works and API calls and everything that surrounds it. I think. That would be extremely helpful. And it’s something that I would probably do even as a current mops professional, I would go back and just refresh myself on something like that.

Tracy Warner: I’m gonna go the other direction. I’m gonna say that’s great, but also I’d want like a scrappiness quotient, right? Like how, Ooh, I like it. Like how, like tricky are you? Like when I first started, Candace was I asked her like, do we have a repository? Everyone’s email signature as like an HTML.

And she was like, She’s oh yeah. Me pulled that for you. She like screen shares make sure you how to do this. She used like inspector and went through the HTML and like from an email. So you go into inspector mode on someone’s email and pull the code. I was like, dang, a scrappy as heck.

Like I was like we don’t have it saved anywhere, but she’s so that’s when I knew [00:37:00] I was like, Canice knows what’s up. If you have someone in your team who can like, pull together something that isn’t super like beautiful, but it works like that’s marketing ops to me, make it work.

that?

Candace Hopkins: Wasn’t my flex moment. What? Yeah. I was like, look how cool I am. And then she was, oh, I have also have a background. Web development, HTML, CSS. I was like, oh, okay. cool.

Tracy Warner: It was cool though. Cause like I got to know that Candace, like it’s a respect points, right?

Candace Hopkins: Yeah. Yeah. That’s a good point. I think. Yeah.

You have to be scrappy. You have to like, just figure it out as you go and have that skill built up. I’m not exactly sure how. That would be a course, but it should

Tracy Warner: be, yeah. Be a terrible course.

Naomi Liu: It’d be like show number of time,

Tracy Warner: this terrible situation. Like, how would you fix this? sorry,

Naomi Liu: the number of times I’ve had to say I have, I don’t know.

I’ve never done that, but let me figure it out is yes, like just astonishing. And that’s why I always circle back to just the whole like, [00:38:00] learning as you are going, because there’s no manual for this. And every company’s. Set up slightly differently. If, if it was so easy and so straightforward as like accounting or finance, where there’s tax laws, right?

Yes. That you can just reference, but it’s not

Tracy Warner: like that. So it’s

Candace Hopkins: super wild west. That was like, definitely something that I’ve struggled with in the beginning. at, I guess in my career in general, but also at the beginning of whirlpools, it’s I thought I had to know the answer right away for everything.

And then I think it was you Tracy, you were like, sometimes you just have to say I’ll figure it out and come back to you. And after that it was like mind blown. And then I just use that in everything ever oh yeah.

Tracy Warner: What’s out. I’ll come back to you once you figure it out. It’s. Super

Michael Hartmann: useful. And I think you all had the story already where you both solve the same problem in different ways.

So there’s not always a right answer or an, the answer there’s more than one way to do almost all these things. And usually comes with a set of trade offs. One might be easier to implement, but it’s harder to [00:39:00] maintain and vice versa, all that kinda stuff. Definitely. Definitely. So I think that’s, I like trying to figure out how we come up with a scrappiness quotient.

Now. I think that’s, maybe we need to get, we need to go throw this to the slack community and ask them to help us come up with, like how, what would you put into the formula for scrappy quotient? It’s like a lead score, right?

Tracy Warner: Yeah. That’s like the IQ stuff they did on OC. Before, where, like they throw like some sort of challenge in the room and they’re like, how smart is an octopus?

Can they figure it out? yeah. That’s what I’m imagining.

Naomi Liu: does it ever pain you guys to say, I’m sorry, but we can’t do that. I had to do that today. And for some reason I have a big hang up about it. It pains me a lot where. I’ve spent weeks trying to figure something out, looking on, the forums, opening tickets with support, asking internal teams.

Going to the communities. And I just have to go back to a person like, I’m sorry, I can’t do it. And that haunt, that stuff haunts me, like stays with me. And I’m like, I, it bothers me so [00:40:00] much to say that, cause I’m like, I should be able to manipulate the tech to do what I want, but I can’t manipulate.

So

Candace Hopkins: that is

Tracy Warner: you wanna feel like a superhero with all the answers and you weren’t. Like I failed.

Michael Hartmann: Yeah. That only happens on days that end in Y

all of them. Anyway. Wow. So this has been really fun. I’ve this is I’ve blown away, like how you two work together. This is great. I’m so glad we did this. So first doc, thank you, Tracy and Candace for joining us. If folks who are listening, want to either. Learn from you, like we just did or connect with you or whatever.

What’s the best way for them to do it. Tracy, you wanna go first?

Tracy Warner: Yeah. We’re, I’m on LinkedIn, so I’m always on there. Just commenting on things. All right. So you can find me there.

Candace Hopkins: Yeah. Same

Michael Hartmann: LinkedIn. All right. And you, are you both in the MO Pros community? Yeah, sure. Are. All right, so there’s Z.

Candace Hopkins: Yeah, I am in slack. So that [00:41:00] would be good

Michael Hartmann: too. Awesome. Again, thank you so much. Thank you, Naomi, for being part of this. It’s always fun. We don’t, doing this without Mike. We get, we can mix things up a little bit, a little. And thanks to all our listeners for joining us, letting us invade your space and thanks for your feedback and support as always send us your suggestions and feedback.

If you are know of somebody who’d be a good guest, or if you wanna be a guest, just reach out and let us know. We’re happy to talk about it until next time. Thanks everyone. Bye bye.

Naomi Liu: Bye. Thank you.