A Marketing Leader’s View of MOps with Angela Lee
Michael Hartmann: [00:00:00] Hello, everyone. Welcome to another episode of OpsCast brought to you by the MO Pros. I’m Michael Hartmann joined today by cohost Naomi Liu and Mike Rizzo. Say hello everyone. Hey everyone. Hey everybody. You’re so compliant there. Naomi, I appreciate that. be sitting. I saw what you
Naomi Liu: did. I knew you would say that too,
Michael Hartmann: by the way.
Did you what a shocker yeah, I’m gonna do I, are you telling me I need to mix it up a little bit, a little intro. A little. Yeah. All right. I’ll I’ll see if I can come up with something new and interesting too predictable. Yeah. Sometimes that’s a good thing. I was gonna say.
Mike Rizzo: I like predictability.
I know. This is like also out my marketing ops person. I know.
Naomi Liu: It’s getting your nature
Michael Hartmann: that’s right. All right. I’ll, last, our last, so we I went off script a little bit and talked about Oxford comma. So we’ll try not to do that again. . Yeah, you’ll hear that later.
All right. So let’s get started. So [00:01:00] today we are lucky to have joining us Angela Lee to share her view of marketing ops from her perspective as having been a marketing and demand gen leader. So Angela is currently a marketing consultant who helps B2B SaaS company scale, their demand generation ABM and social media efforts through strategic and technical marketing advice.
She’s held several roles in marketing and demand generations. I mentioned communications leadership, and it includes time with companies like LinkedIn, job VI and synopsis. And she’s a new as I will appreciate time in Texas, too. She’s a new transplant to Texas. So Angela, thank you for joining us today.
Angela Lee: Thank you so much for having me. I’m excited to be here and excited to be now a proud Texan as well.
Michael Hartmann: Yes. All right. So let’s talk, like I know this is not really the main part of our topic or our discussion, but let’s, I’m curious to some degree, cause we, as for those who don’t know, texas had a big influx of people from all over, but California in particular. So first off, welcome to Texas. We’re happy to have you, but how has like how’s the [00:02:00] move been as you’ve been launching cause it’s I think this consulting business is a new thing for you. Like how is. Do you think it’s been a positive having moved to Texas and growing your business?
Or are you finding it’s challenging? You get opportunities. I’m just like curious about how that’s been hap going for you.
Angela Lee: Yeah, honestly, I think business has been really good so far. I think a lot of my clients, although they are based in the bay area, obviously with COVID and everyone working virtually, it doesn’t really matter, honestly, at the end of the day where I am, as long as I’m able to join.
Conference calls doing my advisory services. It really doesn’t matter where in the world that I’m based out of. And I’m very happy to say that I’m now based out of Austin, Texas. And yeah, I think it’s been a great experience so far.
Mike Rizzo: Such a timely conversation, right? Michael, ,
Today’s literally two days discussion.
This is may the fourth be with you folks is when we’re recording this. , we in the hiring channel on slack, we’re literally talking about like salary transparency and how it doesn’t really matter where [00:03:00] you live and how a lot of companies are starting to adhere to yep. Your salary is what it is, what it.
You can move wherever you want. And it’s a, timely conversation to have happened today. I think, and hearing, Angela here you are, you’ve decided to endeavor out onto being an independent consultant and you’ve decided to move away from California, which is away from me, which makes me sad, but that’s okay.
Cause you’re with some other good people in Texas, all those Texans, you guys are great. But yes, I feel like timely conversation.
Angela Lee: Yes. I feel like I’m an example of of the great resignation. Honestly, I think that was a lot of the reason that was driving my decision to wanna be an independent consultant.
I had toy around with the idea for so long to wanna branch off on my own. And obviously the Texas move was part of it too, where it’s I was held. Hostage in a way, if you will, to the bay area, because that’s where all the jobs were located. But, blessing disguise obviously COVID is that companies are [00:04:00] more able to be more flexible without work location.
As long as you’re able to get your work done in a timely fashion, they don’t care where you’re based out of. I’ve been the recipient of that in a really good way.
Michael Hartmann: It’s interesting. cause I’ve talked recently to co a number of different companies who are looking to hire people like the.
I, they happen to reach out to me cause I in the community. And about marketing op roles. And I’ve ha I have seen a trend lately where some of them are wanting people to be local again. Where their office is. And even if they’re not expecting people to be in the office all the time, they’re expecting some sort of hybrid model and I keep telling them right.
They. You’re digging yourself. You’re narrowing your pool of talent. Number one, which is I think tough. And then the second, I think, in, in marketing ops and specifically, I think if you were to ask people in general Would you rather work remotely or at home or hybrid or an office or hybrid?
There might be a reasonable split that’s almost [00:05:00] equal, but I think if you ask most people in marketing ops, that shift that would lean heavily towards like remote, maybe hybrid and not so many in the office. So I think it’s interesting that you you’ve gone through this transition and I think a lot of people have benefited from it as well, but I’m not sure that it’d be interesting to see how long that sticks.
Yeah,
Mike Rizzo: this is a tough market for that too. It’s all. I think like what actually, as you get back into your experience and the decision to go independent, like at what point, cause we actually have a lot of independent consultants now and people that have decided to go branch out.
And so maybe we can talk a little bit about that. What was that decision factor like criteria for you? Like you just said, like, all right, I’m fed up with this. Like I’m gonna go do this thing on my own or what was that?
Angela Lee: Yeah. That’s a great question. Something that I’m super passionate about, just sharing my own experience with other people.
So I had thought about for years and years of working in, Silicon valley, corporate America, I was [00:06:00] in a very safe space, I knew exactly, what my patient was gonna look like every month. I knew that they couldn’t, couldn’t get fired for any, some odd reason. I liked the security of that.
I liked knowing exactly what was going to happen next. But I knew there was always this thing in the back of my mind, that was always saying what if I could just go and, get to set my own hours, get to choose my own clients, get to really work on projects that I’m really truly passionate about.
And I think there was a culmination of a lot of factors that happened around the same time. Actually started off with just freelancing, just outside of my corporate role. I did some freelancing just on the side, just to get my feet wet, just to see Hey, do I like this? Is this something that I could see myself doing?
Obviously took the safer route there instead of jumping full force into it. I wanted to just test the waters at first. Found myself really enjoying it. I had a great, a couple of great clients at the time that made my job really easy. And so I reached this sort of inflection point where I was getting a lot of inbound [00:07:00] interest and people looking for people like me that were, Hey, we just need someone to help with this strategic building on strategic marketing plan or.
Helping to run demand, gen campaigns, things like that. And so I just did some calculations in my mind that said Hey, if I, once I hit this number of clients, I can just go off and do my own thing. And I think because of COVID, because there was so many people leaving their jobs, there was more increase for demand for people like myself.
And so I reached that, I finally reached that inflection point where when I did the math, it was like, okay, I have enough clients. I don’t need to work in quote anymore. And so that’s really what did it, it was okay, I can finally start my own thing. And honestly, I’ll say I was truly terrified because with contracting and consulting, it’s very, ebbs and flows.
I would say right now it’s in a good period with just the way the macro environment is now, but who knows in a few months what that will look like. But so far I’m really enjoying the. [00:08:00]
Naomi Liu: I feel like that could be its own like full blown podcast. Like how do make that transition or make that jump the pros and cons the fears and the, jumping into that.
Abys I feel like that would be a really interesting episode too.
Angela Lee: I totally I’d love to talk about
Mike Rizzo: it. we should just do a, we should have a branch off or decision criteria and what it really takes to go independent and do your thing. Be an entrepreneur and all that fun stuff.
What I gathered from that though, Angela was calculated risk.
Angela Lee: Definitely
Mike Rizzo: Very calculated risk, which I deeply appreciate. Especially as an ops person, , I’m gonna weigh my options and I’m gonna
Angela Lee: take it calculated. Exactly. Yeah. I feel like I’m naturally, I’ll be honest. I’m naturally a very risk averse person.
And so that’s why I started with, dipping my toe in and doing moon lighting. Seeing how that all panned out. And so that’s, that was what tested the waters for me. And right now it’s a lot of, I’m happy to share more on a different podcast, but learning how to be my own boss [00:09:00] and all that is, goes into that, the forming of the company, the accounting, the healthcare.
All of those different things are like, wow, I have a very steep learning curve right now about, just learning how to figure my way through all of that. That was so easily taken care of by my corporate job that I never even had to really think about it. So
Michael Hartmann: yeah. now there’s always trade offs on those things.
That’s for sure. So let’s talk about your, some of your corporate jobs. So yeah, I think we, we talked you’ve been in a number of roles in I would call it, general marketing, but demand gen focused in particular and have worked. Yes. It sounded a number of marketing ops teams.
So I think one of the, what we wanted to get for our audience was your perspective on yeah. How, how you thought things worked well. So maybe talk through a couple of the different scenarios. I, I know that I think in general, we actually had a guest on a couple weeks ago where we talked about should ops be centralized or decentralized.
So in other words, do you keep, can a core set of people in ops and then you [00:10:00] enable say marketers to do things within some sub parameters, or you have everything centralized and you are a shared service, right? It’s probably two extremes. Have you worked in kind of both of those environments and like the talk through what those were like and then maybe a little bit about what worked well, what you think didn’t work well and go from there.
Angela Lee: Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. So I’ve worked on both ends of those of that spectrum that you were just describing. I’ve worked at smaller companies where it was much more of a hands on role that folks like me. So I was more in the demand gen campaign. Bucket, if you will. I had more of a hands on role in the ops piece.
I’ve worked at very large companies where, you were not allowed to touch the marketing tech stuff at all. Everything went through a ticketing system. And if there’s any issues you write back on the ticket, you have no idea who’s on the other end of that ticket. You just know it’s somehow being handled
And so I think for me just my personal preference would be somewhere more in the middle, but probably leaning more towards the [00:11:00] smaller company route. I think for me, I just, I like learning about the operational back end and how all of that flows together. I think some of my most successful relationships that I’ve had with marketing ops folks are when we can really collaborate on a specific project.
I can give one example of, recently, or in my most recent corporate job. I had a great relationship with our marketing ops person. Instead of telling him, Hey, I need this and this. I brought him in very early on in the process and say, Hey, I wanted to collaborate with you.
You have obviously way more marketing ops experience than I do. This is what I’m thinking from a strategic level of how to build out. And that specific instance, it was a nurture, an email nurture flow. And so what do you think about it, knowing what you know about our tech staff? Is this something that’s feasible?
If it’s not, what are some other ideas like let’s brainstorm on it. And I think that’s what really helped to build a good relationship with [00:12:00] him is because I think he was more used to being told. I need this and this from you, instead of being asked like, Hey, I would like to be as a collaborator more than just a quote unquote, an order taker.
And so I think just from that experience and from some previous experience of working in that way with marketing ops folks, I think that’s honestly been the most beneficial and has produced the best quality of work. Honestly,
Michael Hartmann: just curious when you went through that It sounds like that was a over time.
It evolved did, how did it start? Was that something that you initiated with the marketing ops leader or did that leader kinda reach out to you or was it a mutual thing?
Angela Lee: Yeah, I think just based on, so prior to that experience, I also had a good relationship with a marketing ops person as well, just in my previous role.
And I knew that in order to ensure success for, obviously my campaigns and for the team’s overall success as [00:13:00] well, the marketing ops and demand gen campaigns functions just needed to be very seamless. And so when I started that new role, I made it a point to really get to know our marketing ops person.
Understand, what are his goals and objectives? What is he being measured on? What is the current lay of the land? I think a lot of the times when you come into a new role, You try to it’s reconfigure things in a certain way or say oh, why haven’t you done this and this before?
And it’s, if you don’t have the historical context, I think it can sometimes be a little bit sensitive. And, our, having the historical context from that marketing ops individuals, like actually we did try that and this is why it didn’t work. And so I think that’s how you build that trust.
And build that working relationship with individuals as you start at the beginning, just laying out a super solid foundation, bringing them into the fold really early on in the process. And just making sure that the, obviously the lines of [00:14:00] communication are open as well.
Michael Hartmann: I think that’s great. Hey, Naomi, I’m curious, cause you work, you also work in a large organization.
Like I have recently curious about how has your experience been similar? Have you had opportunity to work closely with your demand general marketing teams? or is it more of the other direction where Angela is described sort of the ticketing system with the mystery person behind the other side?
I would say
Naomi Liu: It’s a little bit of column a little bit of column B. Like we, we do have like the way that we run our projects, because we just have so much volume, like I think in the last 12 months we’ve run and executed, upwards of 700. Campaigns globally. And so there’s no way that we can maintain things, jumping on a call every single time.
There’s a, it just doesn’t work that way. So we definitely have to incorporate a ticketing system. We utilize JIRA. So we’re ATLA, we’re in Atlassian shop. And for us I feel like it works really well because while it is a ticketing system, we do still have a lot of. Calls and [00:15:00] FaceTimes and Hey quick what do you mean by this?
Can you make sure that, just to make sure that we’re understanding the request properly it’s not necessarily just a faceless name and then we also make use of Something that was like the byproduct of COVID is that I started doing these marketing ops QBR. So four times a year we will go over every business units.
And there’s four business units. That is my team supports all of their campaigns, what worked, what didn’t work, what was the top performing ones? What were the bottom performing ones? What are the ones we should never do again? And, I feel like that also humanizes a lot of the requests because sometimes we get requests that we’re just like, This doesn’t totally make sense.
What’s the context here, right? Like we clearly are missing some information. We just got brought in at the very last minute, but it’s never we just, I think we’ve built relationships with our business partners where it’s no issue just to be like, Hey, do you have five minutes? Can I just talk this through to you?
Where they fill in the gaps? And you’re like, okay, that makes a lot more sense.
Michael Hartmann: Yeah I was wondering if you were gonna talk about your QBR process. I actually was sharing that with somebody else the other day and [00:16:00] thinking about something like that, but Angela, I’m curious, have you ever had an experience like that where you had a marketing ops team that did regular.
Whether it’s QBR or lunch and learns with your marketing teams. And do you think that would’ve be a beneficial thing?
Angela Lee: Honestly, that would’ve been huge. I have a current client actually. They’re very good about that. They actually have weekly office hours that, oh, a fair amount of attendance at.
And so they really make it a point to. Just showcase the work that they’re doing and also ensure that people are under for the folks that are obviously interested understanding, what does this whole backend system look like? What is entailed in being a marketing ops individual and also just alignment across, I think goals and objectives I think is also super helpful as well.
But I, I think one of my current, one of my current clients does a fabuLius job of that. And I think that really. Especially, just from what I’m seeing on the campaign side, it really helps the campaign. Folks understand the scope of the work that the ops folks are doing. The understanding of the true [00:17:00] volume that it entails in being on the op side.
And then just, yeah, to Naomi’s point, just really humanizes the entire process.
Naomi Liu: Yeah. Something that I’ve found too is, especially when we have things like SLAs, a lot of times our business partners are like why does it take this long to do this? And I feel there’s, they’re always gonna have that question until you take the time to meet with them and say, Hey, I’m.
Do you have a second I’m in the process of building out your, I don’t know, webinar, or I’m gonna set up your nurture flow or whatever it may be. Do you wanna just sit on like a WebEx with me for 10 minutes and let me just walk you through what I’m doing so they can actually see it. And actually, sometimes I find that when you do that, it lends some because that black hole.
Is true in the reverse as well. They’re opening tickets and it’s just going into a marketing ops, black hole where they don’t know what happens. And then at the end they get a campaign. But I find that when you actually like, sit down with them and show them this is what I do to set up your entire program and the naming convention, make sure it’s working [00:18:00] properly.
The leads are flowing properly. This is how we do the integration with our WebEx and all of that stuff. It’s I don’t know to them. It’s I find that they really like seeing that because they’re seeing under the hood and how stuff works. And I’ve found that’s been really useful and also like eliminating a lot of the complaints about SLAs and things like that.
Once they realize.
Michael Hartmann: So I’m it’s you went into the black hole thing mentioned, and I was like, you didn’t go where I thought you were, which is, I thought you were gonna say, there’s also this part where we as marketing on folks, don’t always understand what the marketers or demand gen teams are thinking about or what the pressures they’re under or why they’re thinking of doing something a certain way.
So I think there’s some value there of just, I think both sides sharing input. I, one of the things and Angela, this I’d like to get your perspective. I think one of the reasons like we get a, we, I, with you Naomi, like pressure on SLAs and turnaround times and pushing back is really hard when you’ve got a lot of pressure to meet numbers and things like that at the same time.
I also get a lot of, I have reporting and [00:19:00] analytics on my team. And I always tell people like we, if we’re not disciplined up front, there’s no way we can really trust the numbers on the back end. So it, are you, have you been through that with your, a marketing ops team where they talk through we take our time doing these things.
Not just because we’re slow or because we want but because part of it is we wanna be able to have at the back end, really the, be able to have insights into what we do is cause that makes sense for you as you have you had that experience of someone walking through how all that ties together.
Yeah.
Angela Lee: I think the I’m thinking back to just my experience, I think the most successful experiences, I think to your point is around where there’s really this closed loop feedback. And so a lot of the times, from a, sometimes I’ve owned analytics, sometimes it’s sat within marketing ops and sometime, yeah.
So there’s been both ways. But I think what I find it more successful is that, just at the beginning of every quarter, and I’ve had this happen in my career before, beginning of every quarter, [00:20:00] every team kind of presents on the overarching plan, which I’m sure you all have experience with as well.
And these are the key things that are coming down the pipe. This is when we’re planning to launch certain things. But I also really like it when marketing off folks say, Hey, like I, I wanna poke holes in your plan. Based on what I’m seeing from the last quarter. I see you have three webinars planned for this quarter, but based on last quarter’s results, webinars are actually not delivering the leads in the pipeline that we need.
Do you think you should, like you should rethink perhaps and the webinar strategy here? Like I like when people are able to tell me that and because obviously as a demand gen team, we’re held to a pipeline number and I’d rather myself and my team be focusing on the things that will really drive pipeline and, really leveraging our partners over in marketing ops when they’re responsible for the analytics piece to tell me like, Hey, you shouldn’t be spending your effort here based on the data I’m seeing that you should be spending your effort on these areas instead like that actually helps to guide and [00:21:00] narrow the focus for myself and for the teams.
Well,
Michael Hartmann: That’s a great insight. Flip, I’m gonna flip this a little bit and talk about, so I think there in gen, like if you were to pull people who are listening to this in our audience of marketing op folks, I think there’s a general sense. Like we don’t like Rodney danger frail, right? We get no respect.
We’re not I’m showing my age. I know, but it’s just, he I was like, wait, what? I was
like
Mike Rizzo: waiting for the PO like the comment about like your years of experience, Michael .
Michael Hartmann: So funny thing is that his name only came to mind because I was listening to a podcast with one of my kids about him.
Okay. Fair enough. Fascinating story. So that was like in the last week anyway, but I think a lot of folks would say. Yeah, we’re not seen as strategic we’re seen as just order takers. And if you could give them a bit of advice coming from your side, like how what do you think is a good way for us to try to change?
Not just the perception, but the reality of that. So like we’re where we’re seeing is a strategic partner to the [00:22:00] demand gen or marketing teams. What would you suggest we do to start?
Angela Lee: Honestly I really like it when. The marketing team or marketing ops folks that I’ve worked with have just provided feedback and just poke holes and campaigns that I’ve done.
Not in a, obviously not in a malicious way, of course, but more in like a curious way where it’s like, Hey, I noticed that you, whether it be a ticketing system, whatever kind of way that I’m communicating the need that I have to the team, it’s like, Hey, I noticed that you. You did this, obviously using data to back it up would be huge.
The example that I just gave was like, Hey, I noticed you just submitted request for this, but based on the data that I’m saying, can I give you some advice on what I think would actually work a little bit better? I think I really like it when they, the marketing also are able to provide that feedback and also just provide historical context as well of.
The why behind it, and maybe, obviously being in demand gen it’s like I have a more singular focus on specific set of metrics or may not be as privy to [00:23:00] what entirely is going on in the marketing ops world. And so when those things come to light through feedback through. Just, advice on, Hey, this is how you can, better organize your campaign, optimize it, et cetera.
I, I always really take that to heart and I don’t, I, me personally, I don’t mind it when the tape does bring up that feedback. So I would just say, I guess to sum it all up, I would just say to not be afraid to say, or to provide suggestions obviously done tactfully, but provide suggestions on certain
Michael Hartmann: campaign.
Yeah it’s interesting. cause I think we’ve had a number of guests on where we talk about like attribution reporting and things like that. But I think one of the things that I’ve taken away from that is that one of the big value points that we can bring is marketing is we have access to all these systems and the data behind it.
And I think that’s where we can really, I think that supports what you were saying. And I wanna bring back Naomi to your QBR, cause it sounded like you do some of that. Both numbers and [00:24:00] maybe process feedback about how things worked. Yeah. Are you also getting feedback from them about how, like, how the process worked from their side as well?
Yeah.
Naomi Liu: Generally what happens and it’s been, cause we kick this off in 20 end of 2020, actually. So it’s been, we’ve done quite a few cycles of it now. And so usually about a month before the next QBR I’ll reach out to. Everybody and just be like, Hey are there some topics that you wanna cover for the next meeting?
What are some things? And usually they’ll gimme back a big list and I’ll pick and choose the ones we wanna go over. Cause we can’t cover everything. But there’s a pretty structured template. We’ve got it pretty locked down now. And a lot of it is, I always start off with just a quarter business review.
These are the number of programs that we did. This is how it compares the last quarter. This is how we’re tracking for the fiscal year. Any industry updates, right? So if there’s ever any changes to like new releases with Marketo or you new tools that we’re or tools that’re eliminating that.
Help [00:25:00] because they don’t know what they don’t know. And in new features we’re, AARD user, so new features on, it’s always kinda like a little show and tell and then, top 10 performing campaigns, top bottom performing campaigns and why. And then we just leave it open for discussion and that usually takes about half an hour.
And then sometimes it goes completely off tangent and we just have a great discussion for the remaining half hour. And then other times it’s just okay, this is like great information. Let’s move on. And then it’s always a discussion around what are their goals for the next quarter and the rest of the year and how can we it’s just a brainstorming session.
I tend to keep it pretty, like I never want to go more than 30 or 40 minutes. Like structured. Talk, and it’s also an opportunity for other folks on my team to also get some presenting experience as well. So I’ll, I usually will sandwich the QBR and then I’ll have every all of my, all of the other folks on my team to present a slide, to talk about the things that they’re responsible for.
And it just gives them a little bit of ownership over it as well. And so I find that they, if they didn’t enjoy it in the beginning they, they do enjoy it now. But. That’s [00:26:00] what works for us. And, every company will be slightly different. Of course,
Michael Hartmann: Mike, I think we, we need Naomi to do share some of this with the rest of the community. Yeah. We almost need
Mike Rizzo: like a workshop. She actually wrote one blog post for us a while ago and she’s I owe you a second one. It’s been like a year and a half it’s okay. It’s okay. No, it’s fine.
Angela Lee: there have
Naomi Liu: people that have asked me for the, for my my outline on the community.
And I tend to just give them like a just a bullet point rundown, and then they can just tailor it further. Yeah. I don’t really have our template is, very EFI.
Mike Rizzo: But, yeah, it sounds like an acronym that I’m supposed to understand, but EFI is the company that she works for.
Yeah. It’s just so you , ,
Michael Hartmann: it’s very EFI. That’s
Mike Rizzo: so EFI. What does that mean? No I love that you do those those QBR. I I wish that I worked at organizations that had that feedback. In general,
Naomi Liu: The, the reason I thought that they were important is because I didn’t, I was finding that we were being viewed as like order takers and more it as opposed to strategic and I felt like it [00:27:00] was a good way to showcase that.
There’s a lot of strategy and thought around the things that we do in ops, especially because we see what everybody else is doing. We see it where the funnel, we see it all. And we can see exactly if things are working or not like almost immediately. So that was like the original, underlying reason as well.
So
Mike Rizzo: yeah I love that you’re doing it the way that you’re doing it. Other, maybe just another idea to throw out into the universe for our listeners is if you don’t have this process in place maybe you can just go to your other stakeholders like an Angela and demand Jen or something like that and say, Hey.
I heard this great episode on OpsCast you should go listen to it. No, don’t say it, although you can. But Hey, I have this thought maybe we could build a feedback loop to our be like our benefit, the two of us, and we’ll just start with us, right? Or our two sort of groups or what have you.
And the aim is to better understand your [00:28:00] inputs and your requests and the why behind them so that I can. Come back and produce outputs that give you results on, what’s working and why we ran into a roadblock or something like that. What do you think of something like that?
And so rather than trying to jump right into running a full QBR and asking for all these people to, what do you wanna talk about? Maybe take the community lead approach and just start with one person in your community and say, Hey, I want to build value between us.
What do you think that looks like? And just start there. I don’t know. What are your thoughts? Any one of you, but Angela, maybe. What are your thoughts there?
You’re still muted.
Angela Lee: There it is. All right there. I’m back. I love that idea. I think that’s something that me and a previous marketing ops person did. It’s just, we started with just our two teams and we would just have we started with honestly, just weekly one on ones. That’s where we started from.
We were just like, okay, we, you and I should [00:29:00] probably get together once a week to just talk what’s going on in the campaign’s world. What’s going on in the ops world and what are the bottlenecks that we’re facing? And it’s I think that was really eyeopening for me to just understand. Hey these systems broke down.
Oh I didn’t know that. That’s probably why, like all these, that’s probably why the campaigns didn’t go out. And so I have, I think just starting with that was super helpful just here from the op side, like what are the key challenges? And also just understanding even today we used point around the different technology and tools that are being explored.
I think that can really help to. Bring forward some creativity, not just with campaigns, but just even on the off side where it’s like, Hey, I didn’t know. We were exploring that tool. Let’s start brainstorming about how we can better leverage it. I think a lot of the times going off on somewhat of a tangent as a campaigns person, I feel like there’s like tech stack overwhelm, would be the best word to describe it where it’s you have so many different tools.
Sometimes it’s What does that [00:30:00] one do again? And what can that one do? And oh yeah. How can I harness the power of this? I have no idea. I just know we have a lot of tools,
Michael Hartmann: but I don’t really know how to use all of them. so I think that would be helpful. Yeah. The latest Mar MarTech landscape just came out like yesterday.
Okay. I think it was yesterday, maybe the day before, but within the last couple days, and it’s approaching 10,000 things that are out there now. It’s crazy. I sat on a
Mike Rizzo: call earlier today. I was like, okay. But I don’t care anymore. Don’t get me wrong. I appreciate that. Somebody’s, logging all of this craziness that’s happening in the world.
But I don’t know what that means for me anymore. I don’t know how to look at it. It’s what do I do with this?
Michael Hartmann: Yeah, but yeah. Would say, I think it’s good. Go ahead,
Angela Lee: Angela. Oh, no. I was just gonna say, I think one thing that would be super helpful from the listeners out there from the op side would be to [00:31:00] just even just provide some, and I’m sure that a lot of folks already doing this, just provide some suggestions for a lot of the times.
It’s I like my eyes over after a while where it’s I would love for. Ops counterpart would be like, Hey, you could use this for this, these three use cases that was very similar to this campaign. You just ran before. It’s oh, okay. Now I understand. So sometimes a lot of the The technical language starts to go over my head a little bit, but when they really synthesize it down, it’s these are the three use cases.
I’ve heard you talk about that in marketing live meetings before I know you ran a campaign on that recently, this is very similar to that. Or this can make this campaign this much better because of these reasons that would be super helpful.
Michael Hartmann: That’s good feedback. I’d like to circle back a little bit.
We, I, we talked about centralized versus decentralized a little bit. Yeah. And I think you alluded to what you thought worked well, but maybe talk a little more specifically what do you think [00:32:00] makes. Would make sense to in, in the right environment, right? For the marketing or demand gen teams to have capabilities to do versus not do I’m sure.
Naomi, I both have opinions. And Mike does too about what we wouldn’t want, let go, but let’s start from what you, where you, what you’d like to be able to
Angela Lee: do. It’s I really took to heart when Naomi said about scale and I think that is definitely an issue. Once you get to a certain size company, it’s you can’t have.
A million cooks in the kitchen and you can’t not know, like it’s this campaign manager doing this other thing. So this email copy, et cetera. And so I definitely hear that there is the issue around past a certain point. If you need to scale, this is conceivably. The only way to do it is through this more rigorous process type approach.
I think on the campaign side, what I think on the flip side of that, what would sometimes is frustrating on the campaign side is that if there’s like a minor copy, edit, for instance, [00:33:00] I have to file a ticket. Let’s just, we’ll use a ticketing system example. I have to file a ticket. It’s can you change the a, to an, and it’s oh, but that is oh, I wish I could just go in and just make that edit.
I have to go bother. Naomi and her team and file a ticket just to tell ’em to change an name to an man. Like those types of things would be amazing if we could just have. Copy it and access. I don’t know. I think that’s the first thing that comes to mind.
Michael Hartmann: it
Mike Rizzo: takes longer to put in the request than it would to make the change.
Exactly.
Angela Lee: Exactly. I know
Naomi Liu: we do give some people access depending on their own comfort level and some folks just don’t want the responsibility. We’ve had situations in the past where someone deleted an entire folder. and it took down our entire system for and this was before we were on Marketo.
And then after that, nobody, everybody was afraid to access it because it took down our entire
Angela Lee: system for a week
Naomi Liu: when they rolled back and backed everything up. But then we missed leads for a week. So then it’s like with power, it comes great [00:34:00] responsibility too.
Angela Lee: It’s you need the guardrails there, but it’s.
Yeah, I think it’s just that it’s hard for me to say definitively this is what I think needs to happen. I could just talk about the areas I wish I could have more influence on certain company
Michael Hartmann: environments. . Yeah, so it’s interesting. I think two things come to mind to me. One is it’s it feels like I’ve had conversations where you go.
It makes sense to as you’re a growing company, maybe go from all centralized to decentralized, but then there’s a point, another inflection point where you start to get too big, where you need to then pull some of that back into a centralized function. I think that’s what you’re describing.
And I think we’ve had other guests on that sort of alluded to the same thing, but I know one of the things I was working towards pre pandemic at a prior role was the idea of sort of our own internal certification. So if people wanted and were comfortable with having access to certain things we would go through levels of they had to prove out that they had either the capability, whether that was formal training or [00:35:00] something that we developed for our stuff.
And then we were actually, we’d already started to setting. Kind of roles within the systems in this case was Marketo too. Anticipating that we never got to the point where we did it pandemic hit and, all bets were off. But I think that was something that I would’ve liked to have gotten back to.
I do think there are certain things that would, I would really struggle with letting go like segmentation forms, things like that. But I think there’s a lot that could be done with the PE when people are Have the right kind of training. So
Mike Rizzo: yeah, the right guardrails in place can help with efficiency, but it’s still scary.
Anytime you let somebody into into a platform, especially if they’ve never seen it before, I recently used to Marketo and I’m still afraid of it.
Michael Hartmann: but I think Naomi’s talked a couple of times on, on, on the show, right? Where we, she the night sweats and the waking up in the middle of the night, when, an email is gonna go out to a really large audience, that’s a real thing. So
Naomi Liu: I have a funny story. So this week we launched e-commerce on Monday and we had to send out like a [00:36:00] very important email at a very specific time to our customers. And I slept with my laptop, plugged into my bed next to my bed. And I set my alarm for 10 minutes before, and I woke up at this was like three in the morning I woke up and I was like, watching.
I just, I don’t know, honestly refresh. I know my husband was like, what are you doing? Honestly, only other marketing ops. People will know what I’m talking
Mike Rizzo: about. Oh yeah. Totally, I sent an email. I don’t even remember why or what it was, but it was just like couple months ago to the community.
And I woke up in the middle of the night, two 30, like three o’clock in the morning. And I went downstairs and I got a text from my wife. She’s what are you doing? And I was like, I realized I didn’t segment the list properly in my sleep and so I stopped the email started over
Naomi Liu: when my husband and I first started dating in the, I would get up in the middle of the night, randomly to be on my computer, on my phone.
He’s what are you doing? Are you talking to somebody? What is, I’m like, you don’t understand, this is European [00:37:00] time zones.
Michael Hartmann: yeah. Yeah. It’s not true. So Angela, did you know that we all go through this? This is we need our own sort of support
Angela Lee: group. Oh my goodness. I didn’t know that this was I feel like this is a very eye opening segment right now is the the night sweats from the email sends.
Michael Hartmann: Yeah, we’re all like, we’re all like, yeah. Nodding and reminiscing. Oh yep. I remember doing that. Oh yeah. Happens. It’s real. It’s
Angela Lee: you should do it. I was just gonna say it’s like, you need a, you are a marketing ops person. If you’ve done these five things and that I think should be on the list.
Michael Hartmann: It definitely like a Jeff Fox word thing. Like you might be in marketing if here exactly is your sign. Exactly. Sounds like something that could be a little game at summer camp Mike. That’s what we need.
Mike Rizzo: It could be, we got charades coming back, folks. So there you go.
Michael Hartmann: You go ahead and try
Mike Rizzo: To act out lead or account based marketing in the form of charades.
Good luck. See it. Summer camp. [00:38:00] let’s go
Michael Hartmann: have some fun. Oh my goodness. Fun times, Angela. This has been a lot of fun. If folks want to keep up with you or, are interested in talking to you about some work that you might be able to do, what’s the best way for them to keep up with you and learn more?
Angela Lee: Yeah, I think the best way would be to just go to my LinkedIn feed. I don’t know, Michael, if that will be, I can send that to you. We could post it as
Michael Hartmann: part of this. We’ll make sure it gets either in the show notes when we publish. And then I always share the episodes when we go on LinkedIn and I will make sure that we’ve got linked to your.
Angela Lee: Perfect. Yeah. Welcome everyone to, reach out. I always enjoy making new contacts, so yeah. Feel free to reach out.
Mike Rizzo: Hey, we’ll have to do a follow up on what it takes to go out and on your own. I think there’s a, there’s probably a good reach. We can get out of that. So I. We’ll bring it back.
Angela Lee: I’m super, super passionate about it. If you can tell already, I’ve been trying to get one of my old colleagues who is happens to be a marketing off slope person to actually go off on his own.
Mike Rizzo: Ah, maybe episode it’ll convince
Naomi Liu: him. Yes. You should [00:39:00] ask her about the night sweats.
Angela Lee: Yeah, I will. I will.
There are true marketing apps.
Michael Hartmann: it’s like being a pledge, right? That’s the hazing is, but you’re self-inflicted self-inflicted I love it. Bye Angela. This’s been a lot of fun. Thank you so much for joining us. This has been great. Appreciate it. Thank you so
Angela Lee: much. Appreciate
Michael Hartmann: it everyone. And Mike, Naomi, thank you as always keeping us honest and real here and thanks to everyone who’s listening.
We appreciate it. Your support continue to like subscribe, send us your feedback. If you wanna be a guest or know somebody who would be a good guest, reach out to Naomi, Mike or me until next time. Thanks everyone. Bye bye everybody.
