What CMOs Should Know About Marketing Operations with Andrea Lechner-Becker

Michael Hartmann: [00:00:00] Hello, everyone. Welcome to another episode of OpsCast brought to you by the MO Pros. I’m your host Michael Hartmann joined today by co-host Naomi Liu and Mike Rizzo say hello. And this year of the marketing ops professional. Hello, Mike. Everyone. It is the year

Mike Rizzo: of the marketing operations professional, but now you’re saying it that’s all right.

I want everyone to say it.

Michael Hartmann: Everyone should say it well. And today we’re recording what? Today’s April 11th. What’s what is this that I’m gonna do a shout out. Is it? I can never remember. Is it Zapier or Zapier? Zappier what are they doing

Mike Rizzo: today? Apparently they have they stole all of my ideas without even knowing that they were stealing them.

Because clearly this has been in the works, but today they’re recognizing marketing operations professionals day, which is pretty cool.

Michael Hartmann: Yeah, that’s fantastic. And what, coincides really well with our guests today, we’ve got Andrea Lechner, Becker, and we’re gonna be talking to her about a number of topics that affect all of us in marketing operations.

And then some that are probably coming up most recently, Andrea was the [00:01:00] CMO of shift paradigm, formally lead MD and. Prior to that. She co-founded six bricks, an online community and a learning management system for teaching modern marketing techniques, which followed her first experience as a consultant and principal slash chief strategy officer with lead MD.

Prior to that she held various sales and marketing positions in different industries. And we’re excited to have her. Join us to share her perspective, both as a practitioner of marketing ops and a consultant, as well as being a marketing leader and having that senior leadership role there in marketing.

Andrea, thank you for joining us today. Thanks for having me

Andrea Lechner-Becker: happy to be here.

Michael Hartmann: We are glad to have you. Awesome. All right. So for those who don’t know, Andrea’s been, out there at the forefront, I think of marketing ops and marketing in general for a number of years. So let’s dive into this.

So just, I was trying to look back, Andrea, when we last connected about this, I wanted to say it was a few weeks ago, but I think it’s now probably a month or two ago, somewhere along the way you either posted or commented on a [00:02:00] LinkedIn thing, something about attribution reporting and the potential traps of that for marketers.

Why don’t we start there, cuz that’s a, I think a hot topic for everybody in our space. I’m getting pressure for about it right now as well. And I thought your unique perspective both is having been someone who’s probably helped design and develop attribution reporting and been in the CMO seat. Love to get your perspective on that and what we should need to be watching out for in that world. Yeah.

Andrea Lechner-Becker: So I have to your point a lot. Very different perspectives. So I have been in marketing operations for over a decade, which is like as old as the discipline itself. So when I first started using Marketo’s my.

Marketing automation system of choice. And when I started using them, they had just rolled out programs. So before that you would do everything from campaigns and programs had just integrated with Salesforce campaigns. And so there really was like no understanding of how to use any of the functionality within Marketo to.

Do something that’s very core to all marketers, which is [00:03:00] to prove the ROI of the stuff that we’re doing before that I came from B2C. So we used Eloqua and I used to work at the Phoenix suns. So like I came from a world. If I sent an email out 12 months ago, I would still see people coming from that email and buying circus tickets.

Like at the arena. And it, I was able to. Not only just ROI of email, but ROI of specific links in email. Like I just came from this world of being able to understand. And immediately see and adjust things that I was doing in my day to day life and see how they impact revenue and make more money for the company by doing these changes.

So I came from that world to B2B marketing, where like nobody was tracking shit. Nobody really understood what they were doing and they didn’t know. One, they didn’t really understand what they were doing in general. Like the conversations that I had with my early clients were literally like, I would implement Marketo.

And people would be like, okay, where are the leads? And I was like, you have to generate them and they were like, what do you mean I have to generate them? I thought I was buying Marketo. I’m buying the [00:04:00] leads. Like the number of CEOs I had that conversation with would be mind boggling to most people today in marketing operations.

But. What that meant is that I really had to do a lot of thought about okay, how do we collect the data that we need in order to report on the things that we ultimately want to? And so I have been deep down the rabbit hole of attribution. Like I once created for a client, this system whereby even when human beings would, even when employees at that organization would share.

A blog post. I would give them like specific URL parameters so that you would track every individual in it, bring it all into Marketo and do all of the reporting. And it is a nightmare, do not do that. Learn from my mistake, like that level of granularity, I feel like. Is really ideal in concepts. Like it sounds like it would be really neat to have all of this really rich data.

And it turns out that it’s a complete fucking nightmare. So do not do that on the opposite side is like reporting at a level that is so broad that it’s also hard [00:05:00] to make decisions. So if you’re only reporting at a level of okay, how long are people staying on our website? And we’re optimizing for that versus are the right people hitting our website and are we.

Activating the right path for getting people who are, there by mistake off of the site, if they’re there for customer service on that right path. So there’s just so much about attribution. And I feel like any question that’s hard to answer. The thing that marketing executives do immediately is there’s probably a software I can buy for that.

So like I recently was on a conversation with a bunch of CMOs. Oh yeah. Where they were only talking about the technology. It wasn’t. I don’t think that CMOs understand that they have a responsibility to guide a lot of concepts. This idea of how do we report, what things do we report quantitatively versus qualitatively?

And what questions are we asking and what frame do those questions live in? So what I mean by that frame comment is you could frame the questions that you ask of a marketing department by function, right? So like you [00:06:00] could say that demand gen has certain metrics that they’re driving towards.

You could say that the website has certain metrics that you’re driving towards. You could say. That we’re gonna report all of our stuff by stage in the buying journey, or you could say phase of the buying journey. So like the difference between phase and stage for me is like the phase is basically Gartner’s thought leadership of the buying jobs that someone has to do.

That’s what phase they’re in. That’s like solution exploration is a phase, right? So for me, my job as a marketing leader is to say the way that we think about our buyers is in the context of what phase they’re. Are they out of market together, then we’re going to ask certain questions of people that are out of market when they’re in market, what job do they have to do and how are we best moving them in the path of doing that job?

That’s how I have chosen to think about my reporting and the frame, but that’s up to the marketing executive and I don’t think. Any marketing executives are really like understanding that’s where we need them to step in [00:07:00] and lead. And then all of the answers to the questions and whether we report on them qualitatively and quantitatively, like that’s a ping pong.

Conversation back and forth between marketing operations and marketing executives in my mind, which we can get into, but I’m gonna take a breath and let you ask a question.

Mike Rizzo: I love this.

Michael Hartmann:  Yeah. So let I have a, I’ve another thought. I totally agree with you that it’s easy to go down the rabbit hole of we need all this data.

One of the things I have seen and experienced is where and I think this is especially true for people who are maybe a little more junior and don’t ha feel like they. , reply back in a way like I need to clarification from my senior leader is that I they get asked for data and or reporting.

Regardless of what it is in that it’s taken as I must have I’m the CMO. I must have this data as opposed to this is the conceptually what I’m looking to get what can I deliver? So they’re not, they’re taking it as an absolute, as opposed to a [00:08:00] negotiation almost now. Do you, you see some of that happening to where people were like, oh we have to have all this data because we.

Maybe someday want to use it. But the reality is I think your point about start with a smaller set might be a better way of doing it. But I think some people in marketing apps don’t feel like they

Andrea Lechner-Becker: could push back like that. Yeah, I think it, so the gap that exists from my perspective on like, why are so many teams struggling with this of just something that should be super basic marketing reporting, right?

It seems like everyone should be really good at marketing reporting and We

Michael Hartmann: just need, we just need that

Andrea Lechner-Becker: one dashboard. So I think that from my perspective, there are three things that keep executives and marketing operations professionals from really moving this problem forward.

One is that there is no shared baseline of knowledge. We are, and. Part of the reason for that is that is not a sexy thing to try to tackle. Everybody bringing their knowledge of things like statistics and finance and acronyms up to a certain [00:09:00] level of acumen so that you can facilitate the right kinds of conversations.

One does not happen nearly enough. And this is like back to you mentioned I started a company called six bricks, like part of what that company. Aimed to solve for, was that exact thing, right? If you are an accountant, you go to school and you learn the exact same things as other accountants, right?

Like everyone speaking the same language, everyone gets the like updates on education. They all go to the same seminars. They all have to get certified and. Refresh those certifications. There is no such thing in marketing. So we really lack a baseline of shared knowledge across all levels of marketers from feed on the street all the way through executives.

The second is time constraints, right? Everybody wants. What they want right now. And I just think that the prioritization and the understanding that data sometimes takes a really long time to collect and that people are prioritizing the right thing often doesn’t happen just because people are too busy trying to go too fast.

The third thing is just the, frankly, people are not admitting that they have faults, right? So like I said, [00:10:00] like marketing reporting seems like it’s something so fundamental that of course every marketer would be great at it. If you went to a CFO and they didn’t understand their balance sheet, you’d be like, what the fuck is wrong with you?

But that happens all the time in marketing. Totally. There are a ton of marketing departments that have no idea what they’re doing. And I think there’s shame. Amen. There’s shame about that. Like it seems like it’s so basic. It’s actually hard to admit that You don’t know where the data comes from as a CMO, right?

Like you don’t know the questions to ask your marketing operations person. And I think we just have to eliminate the shame and kind of just say every, almost everyone is really terrible at this and it’s okay. But we like have to get up to a shared level of knowledge so that we can all get better.

Mike Rizzo: Hashtag eliminate the shame. There you go. no I definitely agree with that. I really like the way that you were teeing up the what was it, the stage and phase part of the conversation, because I think that is a framework that helps you think about just ideas on questions that you can [00:11:00] ask your different teams and departments on.

Hey actually, let me pause for a second on that and just reflect on it when you shared that with me, what it actually got me to think about was this idea that there’s a lot of effort we put into the go to market motion that isn’t measurable but it’s important and more and more.

Non-measurable things are happening in dark social these days more than ever. And so what I like about this idea of asking questions around the phase and the stage is that it opens up the conversation to say, Hey, We’re gonna measure some stuff that doesn’t directly tie back to revenue, like directly tie back to revenue.

But it’s really important that we’re asking these questions because these efforts, this idea of running a client advisory board and getting them to post on our behalf, like when you think about that from the sort of marketers. Lens, even though it’s maybe owned by client success or some division that’s about customer support.

That [00:12:00] client advisory board is better. Damn be one of your biggest advocate channels on dark social. And so how do you measure that? You don’t, but you need to be able to ask the questions about, are you activating them? Are you giving them what they need? Do they feel loved? And if you don’t have that phase and stage conversation happening, I don’t think any of those questions are ever gonna be answered.

And I don’t think anybody’s gonna try to measure that stuff, right? Yeah. Sorry. That’s super top of mind cuz I was just on a cab call this morning, but I was like, Hey yeah, like that’s really

Andrea Lechner-Becker: relevant. And I think like to me, a great leader educates people about the things that they’re passionate around in their discipline.

So like that I think is what I try to do more than anything is explain concepts like this. To everyone in the organization. I think that’s my responsibility, right? This idea that there are in market and out of market people. And some of the statistics around in market and out of market are nuts, right?

Like at any given time, only 20% of your buyers are going to be in market. So you as an executive have to make decisions on what are the things that I’m doing to influence out of market [00:13:00] people in order to be top of mind when they become in market, because that’s. That’s the gist right there. Like you, you can’t just ignore people that are out of market because the day that they become in market, you wanna be at least top of mind so that they know to come look for you. They understand all of those things. But I do think that like simple concepts like that, aren’t like, people aren’t even on the same page.

So that’s why you get BDR teams then writing these emails to people that aren’t in market, like stop targeting people just because you want, it’s like the dating analogy, right? Just because you go to a bar and see some handsome man sitting at that bar that you’d be into doesn’t mean that he’s one available to like looking for someone like you or whatever.

So like you just have to be reasonable and listen. Nobody has endless amounts of resources, time, money. Human beings. Like we have to choose what we do. And so there should be very specific and explicit ways that we are looking at out of market. Everybody [00:14:00] wants market share. Everybody wants top of mind, everybody wants share of voice.

These are very like classic marketing metrics that you can measure. Some of them , a little bit more what’s the word accurately. Yeah. Accurately and scrappy than others, right? Like you can do a big brand survey if you’re Pepsi and Coke and figure out which one.

People like more. And if you’re a really small technology company that maybe a thousand people know about on the planet, you do it in different ways. But I do think that’s the job of marketing leadership is to like conceptually build out these structures that then give everybody the ability to like, Know where they’re bowling, right?

Like I don’t, I need you to put on the bumpers so that you at least understand what direction we’re going, how you bowl and how many pins you knock down, that’s up to you. But I have to give some of these frameworks. And so I have a spreadsheet that I’m happy to share for what I call requirements gathering.

Cause I also think that the thing that I didn’t mention, Michael, when you first asked the question, but I thought about is like, This is not school, right? This is not a situation where there are [00:15:00] no stupid questions. There are stupid questions in marketing that nobody should be answering. And even that idea of being opinionated and saying there are certain ways that we’re gonna ask questions and there are certain ways that we’re not, and our questions are going to follow this framework, right?

Like we are going to ask questions that can be measured by a percentage. When we look at statistics, we are gonna look at them as growth or trending statistics. So if we are not tracking. From a timeframe perspective week over week, month, over month, week, month to date, right? If we aren’t tracking things in that way, I don’t care.

I don’t need to know that our cost per lead was $220 because it’s useless unless I have something to compare it to. So I think just things like that. Totally. There’s no frame of reference, right? Like this idea of even I and then I think that the thing that I see everyone really struggle with, and I use the analogy of a ping pong and I’m gonna use like, just a simple example of a question that everyone should be asking, right?

Like where do our best customers originally hear about us? This is the sourcing debate. This is the attribution debate, [00:16:00] where are our best customers hearing about us first? So when something like that happens, even just defining best customer. I do not see happen because executives have no tolerance for that level of granularity.

They pride themselves on being strategic. They don’t wanna get too in the weeds, right? All of these obnoxious business cliches that we all know about, but like that is what has to happen. Like we have to define what best customer is. Is it the first. Is it the first deal we sign with someone the size of it.

If they’re, if it’s over $200,000 and they’re our best customer, is it LTV? Is it CAC? Is it the customers that give us the best advocates? Is it the customers that have the best results with our product? Is it the places that we have the best case studies that customer, regardless of how much money they brought us in, on their deal, end up becoming our best customer really?

That definition alone. And then like, where does that data store it? If it’s LTV, most organizations do not store LTV in anything that mops is reporting [00:17:00] in, right? Like it’s not in Salesforce, it’s not in Marketo, it’s in finances systems, whatever those might be. And so I just think that’s what has

Michael Hartmann: to happen well and that’s, if you’re lucky enough to have, you’re lucky enough to have somebody who can say all these 14 companies in our finance system are actually part of the same customer.

Andrea Lechner-Becker: Also the problem. And that even brings up a good point too. And that simple question of where do our best customers find out about us? Who is us? If you work at IBM, like ain’t, nobody not know who IBM is. So what you really mean is like, how did they first find out about our division?

How did they find out about this specific product? And then you have the decision what does that initial find out mean? There’s this big push on LinkedIn to like, be asking customers, how did you hear about us? And that that’s how you’re gonna uncover the mystery of dark social.

Have I got a question for everybody on this call? Have you ever been asked, where did you hear about me on a form? And you’re like, fuck man, I don’t. But you like have to pick something. And so like now you’re dealing with the idea of are you gonna use, are [00:18:00] you an organization that’s gonna use perception, buyer perception.

Like when do you last remember me? And therefore you’re coming here. Are you gonna use your own data? Are you gonna continue to ask questions of the buying committee? Because even that like in B2B market, Whoever fills out the form doesn’t necessarily mean shit, right? Like now you’re making all of these decisions based on whoever filled out that form’s perception is that smart?

Is that what you wanna do? And that’s not even that I’m not saying that’s right or wrong. I’m saying that’s the conversation that is happening in way too few marketing organizations in the world right now. Like people aren’t having that philosophical debate about like, how does our buyer behavior.

Interact with our data in a way that we feel we can justify the decisions that we’re making.

Mike Rizzo: I’m just vehemently nodding my head. That’s so much shut back in for all the listeners that are like, it went quiet for 1.5 seconds. It’s I’m just nodding my head.

Michael Hartmann: Yes. Yeah, [00:19:00] but my head, my neck is getting sore from there. So I think it’s the last point there about that looking at, I think one of the other fallacies is looking at there’s one secret metric.

Totally is the answer. I think there’s nothing wrong with asking the question. How did you hear about us? And there’s nothing wrong with attribution kind of by a system, but I think you it’s like how do you use them as really the bigger thing? And one of the things I think is a challenge for all of us in marketing ops is.

We have access to so much stuff and at the same, in this data and things like that. And I think there’s still a lot of the folks who are listening are probably going, I know all of this stuff. I agree with what Andrea’s saying. I think, how do I, but how do I get people to listen to me within the broader, marketing and sales organizations?

So it, from your perspective, Andrea, what. What, like what could we, as marketing apps, folks, and our listeners do to try to change, what is, probably their perception, but probably at least somewhat, [00:20:00] founded in their reality of if you like, they’re just not seen as a strategic part of the go to market function.

Andrea Lechner-Becker: Yeah. I think a lot of that has to do with just how brave you are, right? Like you can be the person who just says the same shit that I’m saying, if your CMO comes to you and says, I need to know the open rates from my board meeting, you could be like, dude, you’re gonna get fired. If you go to the board meeting and do that, like you’re I know people who have gotten fired, go listen to this Andrea Lechner, Becker girl, cuz she knows people who’s gotten, who’ve gotten fired and I heard it on a podcast.

But I also think that even so what I’m doing, I’m in between jobs right now. Technically unemployed . And what I’m working on in the meantime is a YouTube video for executives that explains all of these things. I think that they’re just like, listen, life isn’t fair. And part of what’s not fair is that if in your you’re in your twenties and you want, to be more strategic and you’re not getting the respect that you deserve.

Yeah. Like it’s [00:21:00] true, it’s it just doesn’t happen. Like you have to prove yourself. Sometimes you gotta hurt it. And. And so you might have all of the right things to say, but people believe their peers. So go send them to my YouTube video is really what I’m gonna tell people, because that’s the truth, right?

Like you need to find ways to educate your manager and manage up in that manner. So like one, you can just be brave and do some of it yourself, but sure. You do have to align yourself with people. That from a title perspective and a life experience perspective have the things that are saying things out in the marketplace that you want them to hear and figure out how to get them exposed to those things.

Whether that’s sharing links with them, sharing articles, with them, sharing little LinkedIn posts that someone else has posted. It’s also where a con a consultant can help. A little bit of a selfserving concept there. Cause I was a consultant for many years, but again, Essentially, what you’re trying to do is build trust so that you can educate an executive on something.

And so when they hire a consultant to come in and do something again, they just have more trust [00:22:00] because they have more life experience and more experience in the industry and they just speak at a different level probably. And they have seen these things before. So I just think that there is there’s a fear component to anybody in a C level position.

Like they don’t wanna. Fired. And to some extent there’s a lot of ego there too. Like they think that they know things because they’ve had lots of experience. So I think you’re just dealing with some human stuff. Learning something new is hard changing. What you do is hard. Just doing the same thing that you did in your previous job, even if it was stupid, feels better because it can be scary to do something different.

So I think, my, my advice is like a lot of times people ask okay what should I learn? Beyond just like system stuff to be a great marketing operations person. And my two answers are always like finance and psychology, like finance for all of the hard and fast, like ways that this business is operating.

How do you help us make more money? That’s why I pay you to be here. So make sure you know how to do that and how business is [00:23:00] run. But then secondly, like you have to understand how people work so that you can get them to say yes, like to some extent, like that is oftentimes even more. The finance piece, because you could ask a CFO, if you have a great relationship with them, any question you want and they would answer it kindly for you.

So I, I think that’s the key, right? There’s a little bit of knowledge and a little bit of working the situation that people have to do.

Mike Rizzo: I’m convinced that Michael is is only picking guests that want to talk about how important finance is. No, I’m just kidding. it’s because it’s cause of.

Michael Hartmann: We’ll get to that. I was gonna, I was gonna put Naomi on the spot a little bit. I was curious about what you have found that has worked well in terms of trying to guide conversations about reporting and, or being. Changing perception for your team.

Naomi Liu: So what we’ve started doing during, like COVID I guess, as a result of it was during the pandemic, we kicked off marketing ops QBR, and one of [00:24:00] the components of the QBR was we always discuss, top performing campaigns of that quarter and then bottom performing campaigns one.

And it’s interesting because people, they’re like, oh, okay, pat, on the back about the ones that they did well, but they always wanna drill into the ones. Sucked right. Because they want to know why do we never wanna do this one again? And it’s, I found that to be actually across the board, really fascinating among our different business units, because it seems to always be the one that gives them pause.

So it’s the one that they always wanna drill down into. And then they’re like Okay. Finding reasons as to why something didn’t do well. It’s almost okay, great. These ones say tell me about these ones that didn’t do well. And I get it right. Like we, I think there’s a lot of companies that, are resource challenged, stretched thin, and if we can spend less time.

Doing things that aren’t moving that needle and aren’t generating the revenue. I think it, it helps a lot as well. So that’s definitely something that we’ve been doing. Also asking people, just asking them questions how are you [00:25:00] utilizing the reports that we’re giving to you? Do you look at them?

Say cool. And then file them away in a folder. Never to look at it again. Or are you actually taking those. Those data points and utilizing them for, actions on feature campaigns or about things to do and things not to do. So that’s, just asking those questions, those follow up postmortems all of that stuff that, can be time consuming, super tedious, but I think it’s super important to do.

Andrea Lechner-Becker: So I love that idea of always iterating and improving upon things. Cuz I think that’s the other piece that a lot of quick, fast moving scrappy, little teams do not do enough of and to their detriment. Cause like I think that even simple even simple metrics that seem like no brainers, if you don’t actually look at the data, hypothesize.

Happened and why make new decisions and then go back and refer to them. They’re still just totally useless data points, right? Like you have to be able to do something with that data in order [00:26:00] for it to be effective. So I love the question of so you got the report, did you do something like, did you make a decision?

Did you change something? Because if not, then I don’t. I don’t know, do we keep doing it? And I think that’s an art in and

Naomi Liu: of itself too, right? Not. But he necessarily has the ability to like really accurately digest like analytics or certain reports. I know for me, if I got a report with Google analytics stuff, like I could probably make out what to do and what it means, but it’s not my area of expertise, for example.

And that’s to be said for different areas of the business as well. What’s really helpful is that people who are pulling the reports and I always say this to my team too. It’s like someone asks for a report. They’re not just asking, they’re not asking for the report. Let’s be real. What they’re asking for is, was this effort worth my time. And did I like what happened? And so I think something that’s helpful for, our listeners that, when you have, your colleagues or your. Boss asking you for analytics or report it’s I find that it’s always helpful [00:27:00] to provide the information, but I almost view it as a as a, as an addendum, and actually summarize or distill down, like the takeaways and few short, no more than three bullet points that they can digest and then be like, okay.

And then if they really wanna drill into it and they have that interest too, then they can, but that’s just.

Andrea Lechner-Becker: I have another I have another, I don’t know what the word is. Pet peeve, of reporting, which I’d be curious to get your take on, which is timeframes. So I feel like a lot of people,

Mike Rizzo: oh my God.

Michael Hartmann: Don’t like, I think everybody on my have the call, just wash my face, go, oh, I, God this hits this hits so hard, like within the

Mike Rizzo: last couple months I’ve been dealing with some stuff around timeframe stuff. So I hope you’re headed the direction that I think you are. I want to hear

Andrea Lechner-Becker: it. Okay.

So I have three timeframes that I define for each question that I’m asking. So that’s basically how I frame out. My requirements for reporting is like, what is the phase that the buyer is in? And then what is my question that I’m asking? [00:28:00] And then how are we going to measure it? Is it a quantitative thing?

Is it a qualitative thing? Is it a systematic thing I could get into that? There’s five different categories that I break down and then it’s timing. So is this something that we are collecting data on a daily basis, on a weekly basis, on a fortnightly basis, on a monthly basis, on a bimonthly basis, on a quarterly basis or an annual basis.

And then. What are we comparing it to? If we collect things monthly, that doesn’t necessarily mean we have to do month over month, we could aggregate the last quarter and do an average. We could do a median, we could compare whatever we collect in that initial timeframe to some other thing. And then there’s going to be the third aspect of this, which is how often do we look at this shit? So this is the other. Issue that I see I, somebody mentioned like, there’s just gotta be a perfect dashboard for everything, right? No, there should be a dashboard that you look at every day that you’re making decisions and adjustments to things that you do every day.

So that would be things like, I don’t know that you necessarily wanna be adjusting like AdWords and LinkedIn [00:29:00] campaigns from like a Salesforce dashboard, but like you would go into your whatever system and do that thing every. Then there are things that you’re going to be doing on a weekly basis, like with your marketing team or like a department within the marketing team, you’re gonna sit together, you’re gonna have the same dashboard that you look at on a weekly basis and adjust things on a weekly basis. Then there’s gonna be a monthly version of that. There should be a biannually version of that for potentially things with the board, right? And those are things that are higher level, like the idea of like, how is our market share shifting?

How is our perception in the market shifting what are really great stories of deals? Close this quarter. And what’s different about them than the way that we showed up the quarter before that. Like you, you have all of those sorts of things. So I think that timing is something that not enough people.

Really just refine and like again, have the conversation around, I don’t know, Mike, is this what you’re talking about or something different?

Mike Rizzo: Yeah, no, it, it totally is what I was referring to or hoping that you would bring up. I like that you stair stepped us through like the phase, the, how, [00:30:00] like the literal, how are you going to report on it?

The quant versus qual your timing. What did you say compared to what? And like, how often are we actually gonna review this? I think where it gets really challenging is you start layering in, as you start thinking about attribution again, and some of the nuance that happens with all of these questions it gets interesting around we plan our, so what’s your go to market motion.

How do you plan your initiatives? Are you running your team on some sort of agile methodology where you’re doing. One week sprints two week sprints. Are you then reporting on your metrics? Are you reporting on campaigns based on one week or is it a campaign effort and and so I think all of those questions make the answer to how often do you report on stuff?

And the timing question really complicated because it’s like it’s a mix of both. It’s a car for me. It’s a carton horse, chicken and egg problem. There’s a, you expect business to close in. Let’s call it 90 days. which means you need to back the funnel out all the way [00:31:00] to here, which means we need to think about the campaign that we wanna run at the targeted audience for this length of time to aim small, Ms.

Small. And then we’re gonna like actually measure the performance of that effort we put into the market within, this set timeframe, but we actually run our entire department on this weekly or. Biweekly sprint queue. And it doesn’t make sense for us to actually measure the website analytics each week just because we’re running our projects on a weekly basis.

And it just runs into this like, all right, now how do I actually operationalize some of those things? And I’d be curious to hear some of your thoughts on. The difference between running the team and how that all sort of funnels back up to how am I reporting on the growth of the business from the sort of the arm of marketing?

Andrea Lechner-Becker: Yeah. I will answer that question. I promise, but I have another thought as you were talking, which is this insane story that I think every marketing operations person needs to hear. I have done. I have seen the inside [00:32:00] of hundreds, if not thousands of Marketo instances, I’ve seen what shows up as influencing revenue and what is missed and trade shows have such a bad reputation, especially in the marketing operations community.

The number of marketing ops people that I’ve heard say I’ve suggested that we. Take money from physical events and move them into digital ads because they perform so much better. I was at a CMO event at the beginning of December with a guy who said, didn’t your business cards used to have doctor on them.

So we used to be lead MD. Yes. Which is like lead medical doctor is what people think it is. And so we just leaned all the way in and I, my first business cards were literally Dr. Andrea Lechner, Becker and I only used them one place. And that was Marketo summit, 2000. And. So this man. Literally a decade later remembered that business card that is going to show on literally no report ever in [00:33:00] life.

He’s never going to list it on a how’d you hear about this is not a story that comes in the form of data. This is the story that comes in the form of storytelling. That’s the only way that you really understand those kinds of things. And that is why. If you’re a marketing operations person, who’s struggling to get like the street cred that you think you deserve.

It’s experiences like that, that people like me are having that are fucking old and we’re like, listen, like you just haven’t been around. I have to use some of my gut and I know that’s hard to understand, but it’s true, right? Like great marketing executives do have a little, you. An equal amount, if not, a little bit more gut and art than science and mops people a lot more science than the gut and the art by and stereotypes.

Of course, not everyone, but yeah, that, that’s generally the way that that’s generally the way that it operates and so that, that can lead to some conflict. And Mike, I think, to answer your question from my perspective, marketing executives, we [00:34:00] own frames, right? Like we own barriers and creating for our teams, the frameworks within, with which in, we all work and operate.

And then I think we also own Sh sharing things like that is what I’m trying to say, is that I think that we have to be active in bringing our life experiences to bear with and pairing them with the data and telling one cohesive story. But I also think that one of the biggest things, so like I, I work with a firm out of India to manage all of my.

Ads. So like my Google ads and my LinkedIn ads and all of that stuff, I don’t manage any of those campaigns day to day. I don’t manage anything but the targeting really. So I use 6 cents for targeting and then I push it to LinkedIn and then have them manage all of the day to day stuff. So we had this whole debate.

I had two campaigns, generally speaking, running. One of them was a Marketo implementation guide resource. The other was a campaign planning resource. So campaign planning, resources for the kind of work that we did as a consultancy kind of far away [00:35:00] from my actual buyer, my buying time. If somebody is trying to figure out how to become a better campaign planner, that doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re gonna turn around right away and ask to do a deal with us.

The Marketo one on the other hand is like an immediate, right? If you’re looking for a Marketo implementation, Like you’re ready to talk to me immediately. Nobody is looking for that. That’s not ready to talk to me. Those leads were twice as expensive if I had just left them to their own devices and they said this to me, right?

Like we, we wanna stop running this and only run the campaign planning one. And I was like, what in the world is the matter with you? Like those people are coming into my funnel and converting immediately. So I just think that there’s there’s always a balance between any of the concepts, right?

There’s a lot of conversation in the marketing world, especially in an executive perspective where they ask the question a lot of what are you responsible for revenue, right? What is your revenue target? What is your number? Is it a percentage? Is it well what is the situation?

Like? There’s a lot of talk about how, we can’t just be the arts and crafts department. We have to be responsible for [00:36:00] revenue. And I think that there’s yes, 50% in all of these things, right? Yeah, like 50% of us we need we need to make sure that we’re looking at things like a LinkedIn campaign, understanding who we’re targeting, understanding where they’re at in the funnel and then how quickly they get into an opportunity and how, and then how much that opportunity is worth.

And you need to be looking at that full funnel thing. If you have a really long sales cycle, Then you have to take that into account. Like you can’t be making to your point Mike decisions on a weekly or a monthly basis about campaigns when your sales cycle doesn’t prove them successful or not until six months down the road.

So that kind of insight and just. Making sure that people are using the right timeframes using the right kind of common sense that mostly comes from experience like that’s the job of the executive , but then, you know what you look at every single day like that, should be individual contributors and you should be doing whatever you need in order to [00:37:00] have this conversation.

Be able to come to me and say, Andrea, we’re gonna stop running these campaigns because this is like conceptually what’s happening with our buyers. And then this is what’s happening with the.

Mike Rizzo: Yeah. Yeah. Look like monitor the stuff that needs to be monitored daily and weekly, especially if you’re involved with email nurture programs and ads, like if suddenly you’re not sending any more emails, like that’s a big problem, right?

So you need to be on top of why, what happened? Did our, Deim fail. We’re not, whatever it is that’s going on and the operation side. But then, understand. You can make some decisions. If something goes haywire oh gosh, these cost per leads are like going through the roof or whatever.

And you can make a decision, but based on your go to market effort and your motion, like if it’s gonna take you 90 days to close a deal let’s make sure we have the infrastructure in place to like appropriately measure these things on, in the right time, in the right way, quantitatively and qualitatively.

I am curious oh my God. I totally just lost my thought, [00:38:00] as I said, quantitatively and

Michael Hartmann: qualitatively. Darn it. But Michael,

Mike Rizzo: oh, darn it. Oh, you

Michael Hartmann: were saying well while you’re thinking that I think you were describing what I would call like vital signs, right? A little bit. I’m hard pressed to think of in many B2B organizations where you need to be looking at marketing data on a daily basis, but I think.

I think your point about like vitals. What I think of is VI the vital signs rate are we are our systems updating the way they’re supposed to are emails going out at a rate we expect to that’s what it was. Are we getting form submissions at the rate we expect to, or do we have a bot attack? Like things like that.

Yeah. I think are things that only really marketing ops needs to pay attention to. Yeah, I totally agree. Everything after that, that

Mike Rizzo: gets to, that was actually gonna be my question for everybody, which was. Here we are talking a lot about the reason I love this conversation. Andrea is.

This is giving your sort of marketing op practitioner who thinks about like, how do you have conversations with leadership all the way up to the executive level, and just what are they thinking about? What do they care about, et cetera. [00:39:00] And then like, how do I engineer ways to support that?

And just generally, like, how do I have conversations with them? But what I’m curious about from everybody especially with your breadth of knowledge from. Like Marketo consulting side of things, entry level on up, and then Naomi and Michael, like what are the things that a marketing ops person should be looking at?

Cuz we’re not looking at ad. Most of us are not looking at ad campaign spend and AdWords spend on a daily basis, but things like what Michael just said form submissions on a regular basis is that up or down or whatever. Those are really interesting and operational metrics that if something goes haywire there, like you need to be on top of it.

I’m curious, like if I’m a marketing ops person or I have someone on my team, Andrea. What should be some of those things that like are almost table stakes, like you should be paying attention to just cuz you feel like it’s a part of the core responsibility and maybe we go across the

Andrea Lechner-Becker: board. yeah. I don’t think I have a lot to add to that.

[00:40:00] Honestly. I think you’re right, like your system up time kind of traditional metrics and just like non breakage, those are I think that those are like, the extent of the daily stuff. Yeah. I don’t know that I have another good answer. I’ll pass it along.

Mike Rizzo: Is there anything like special Naomi that your team measures that you think is I know you’ve been in your role a long time.

You’ve been building a team for a long time, but is there anything unique that over time you’re like, Hey, this is something we implemented that isn’t just out of the box.

Naomi Liu: Ooh. I would say I’m gonna take a detour on that and say that, something that I think that a lot of marketing ops folks don’t necessarily, or that at least I haven’t heard of measure a ton is the team’s productivity. So how long are, how many tickets are we getting? What is the general like turnaround time for tickets? What, how long are tickets languishing? How many comments and back and forth revisions are we getting? How many proofs do we have to send? How many final V three final versions of a [00:41:00] document are we getting, like that’s I actually did an audit on this maybe a year or so ago and, scaled it across a chart where it would show, how many time what’s the average amount of back and forth that a.

Final piece of content, whether it be an email or a landing page has after we’ve, by the time we receive the copy, we always say it has to be final. You’ve done the proofs. Like we, we don’t, we’re not copywriters. We don’t double check anything if you’ve misspelled there or there it’s going in how you’ve put it.

And I can tell you that the number of revisions is Not zero. So it’s definitely much higher than, and I think when I showed this to people, it was definitely very eye opening and they were like, wow, okay. Now we understand why there’s SLAs in place. You can’t just turn this around immediately.

So I would say that’s definitely interesting information that I’ve found. And I’d be curious to hear what other people, if they attempt to do that kind of audit what numbers they come up with.

Mike Rizzo: I

Michael Hartmann: [00:42:00] like that one, that’s something I think I need to do just, and I think it’s it’s not always obvious to the people who aren’t in the middle of it.

How long some of these things take. Yeah. And why it takes so long. But I think that gets back to your point about doing a teaching moments across the organization. Andrea, what are you gonna

Andrea Lechner-Becker: say? Yeah, I was literally just gonna say that. I think that there’s a. There sometimes is a lack of emphasis put on how you’re going to go about communicating your idea to someone else.

And this is like very fundamental to obviously marketing, right? Like you have a product, a company that you’re trying to go out and get other people to understand. I would even say I would recommend everyone in any profession, read the book, make it stick by the Heath brothers, because it has a very simple framework for getting your idea to stick in with someone else.

So even that idea of you have everyone has problems, right? Like that, right? God, like we aren’t getting the final revision. How do we best make this idea that this hurts the business, [00:43:00] stick to people who care? Cuz the other thing is like executives tend to be. And by the way if you want your idea to stick I actually, most of the time you are better off not making it a statistical or analytical decision.

Like human beings are very emotional creatures. So if you can tie things into the emotion of something, you are much better, you’re much more likely to have it actually stick. So make it stick has five main things that you want every message to be like simple and emotional and. I don’t know, there’s three other ones that I don’t know off the top of my head, but definitely that’s our job make your ideas stick with people.

If it’s not that’s on you figure out how to make it better.

Michael Hartmann: Yeah. I think it’s yeah. I think it’s interesting cuz you’re basically human beings are, we’re wired for stories. And I think that’s what that gets to is statistics can be part of the story, but they’ve gotta be part of a story, not by themselves.

and I think you even mentioned, right? One of the things, one of those, maybe biannual things is talking about stories of the wins that we had. Why we won them. Really digging in there. And I’ve always [00:44:00] thought, yeah, I did a lot of work on, attribution reporting things at a previous job, but one of the things I also had, the small inbound BDR team, I always told them like, keep an eye on the leads that you’re, you’re qualifying and writing out to sales that look like they have a chance.

Being a good story. And then we would talk about those, right? We would talk about the story of that. We might report some numbers, but the story about, and here’s an example of what these numbers are actually showing us, right? This client came to us and we had these touches, they had come to something, they had watched a webinar.

They then asked us, reached out to us and we, got him to the right person quickly. And that’s how we ended up winning the deal. That’s a much more powerful thing than just showing. Yeah, an UN sort of non referenced data point about this is how much revenue marketing influenced.

And that’s, I think that’s what I, that’s the thing that is easy to get caught up in is we’re doing this reporting and analytics, and it’s [00:45:00] not really tied to a story that is telling why it was, why the numbers say what they say.

Mike Rizzo: Yeah, I love I do love that. We shared some examples of running your team, reporting on your team’s performance, ticketing, like time to resolution getting that final version out there, cuz like what this community needs to understand is and we all understand, not that we need to understand it, but we already feel every day is that like that burden falls on our shoulders, all the.

The, how do you report on the metrics that everybody’s talking about? The revenue, the click through rate, the open rate and all that other stuff, but we I can tell you that probably at least the four of us on this call are like, yeah, that’s all fine and dandy, but let’s get nerdy and talk about like your time to resolution and how many tickets you’re getting and how do you grow your team and fight for head count and all of those other things.

And. You know what I’ll even go so far as to share an example that like, there’s this enterprise company that I spoke to where they’re like, actually, you know what we really care about [00:46:00] Mike? Cause I was like, I had this idea in my head one day. They’re like, we really care about how much data goes into this one field.

and if that rate of change of data goes up or down by a margin of about 10%, we want to know about it. So if suddenly my titles are not coming into my database at they’re decreasing by about 10% of the norm over the last 90 days, something broke somewhere. We need to jump on it, that is a nerdy, operational data thing that like I’m super into.

And I like everybody in this community who listens to this podcast should know that. Yeah, you should care about those things and you should fight for like, why that matters. And I think tying it back to the telling the story piece is important. Like, why does that matter? Because if this thing breaks something else down, the line is gonna be broken.

So just, yes. Do all the fun analytical stuff, but also think about some of those other passionate things and come talk to the community about this, cuz we’re here for you. . [00:47:00]

Michael Hartmann: So speaking of talking to the community about it. So one of the things we wanted to have Andrea talk about Andrea is I think you’re still in the process.

I’m not sure exactly where is of developing some training for the community. And I’d love for you to share what that is and when it’ll be available and let our listeners know that’s

Andrea Lechner-Becker: coming. Yeah. I have a lot of ideas. LinkedIn actually helped me source a lot of my ideas for what I wanna create in terms of content.

So I, the first piece is all about this. Thing that we’re talking about here. So I said, I have a spreadsheet, which I’m happy to share even before the training goes live, but basically I’m gonna walk through what kinds of questions you should be asking of a marketing executive as you’re going through this process of building reporting or improving your reporting or reporting on something brand new, right?

You implement bid yard. What should you do? How does the reporting function? All of those sorts of things. That is going to be available to the. Marketing operations professionals community. And then I’m gonna have a companion YouTube [00:48:00] piece where you just send your boss and I will break it down for them, what they need to know about reporting, what they need to understand.

You are going to be asking them and why it’s important and what their role really needs to be. They do need to be a little bit in the weeds and they need to understand how these weeds kind of work. At least in order to have a conversation. With your MOS person. So that is that’s what is on my horizon.

And then that’s just one of many topics that I’m gonna talk about for our marketing operations, per brethren, professional colleagues, professions, Camra colleagues, comrades in arms. So yeah, so I’m working on all sorts of stuff.

Mike Rizzo: I’m so excited. Thank you that’s for agreeing to do that with us, Andrea, learning with you today and learning with you in the future will be super fun.

And I know that’ll be well received, especially cuz you got community feedback on LinkedIn already.

Michael Hartmann: Absolutely. I feel like Andrea, we could continue. I think this is how our last conversation ended, Andrea, that we could have continued on for a while longer. Unfortunately I think we are gonna have to cut it short.

Maybe we’ll have to [00:49:00] do a follow up at some point when you have some of the training, we’ll go a little deeper, but thank you so much for joining us today and sharing your wisdom with us and our listeners. If folks want to keep track of what you’re doing in terms. Developing that, or just following you on the, in the community, what’s the best way for them to do that?

Andrea Lechner-Becker: I’m all about LinkedIn, but also if you’re on the marketing operations professionals community, I’m there, you can just DM me. I’m the only Andrea Lechner, Hy and Becker that you’re gonna find. Hit me up. I’m happy to chat anytime. So LinkedIn and slack.

Michael Hartmann: Awesome. Yeah. UN unlike Mike and myself, there are lots of mikes and Mike, there’s literally

Mike Rizzo: two Mike Rizzos in our community.

Michael Hartmann: now that’s a first I know. Okay. So I total aside, but I got hit up by a salesperson through LinkedIn today who. Had the wrong Michael Hartmann with two ends even there you go. yeah, so that, that was a first for me. Anyway, Andrea, thank you so much. Thanks for sharing [00:50:00] this. Mike Naomi, thank you for helping make this better as well, and thanks to our audience for.

Letting us to invade your time a little bit and for your support and feedback, we’re always looking for more feedback and suggestions on both topics and guests. So reach out to any of us and we will see if we can make that happen until next time. Thanks everybody. Thanks everybody. Bye.

Thank

Mike Rizzo: you.