WTF is Marketing Operations with Amy Goldfine

Michael Hartmann: [00:00:00] Oh, and welcome everybody to another episode of OpsCast brought to you by the MO Pros. I’m Michael Hartmann joined today by a host Naomi Liu and Mike Rizzo. And normally I would ask you to say hello, but do we really need to do that today?

Mike Rizzo: I don’t think so. We’re good. I don’t

Michael Hartmann: think so. We’re good. All right. Let’s get right into this today. We’ve got a special guest. We’ve got Amy Goldfine, as Amy says by day, she is head of marketing operations at Iterable. The customer activation platform helps brands deliver joyful experiences with harmonized, individualized and dynamic communications to scale.

Feel like that we should be getting, some sort of sponsorship money for this. I don’t know. That was a

Mike Rizzo: great read. I didn’t do that’s

Michael Hartmann: awesome by night, Amy. Thanks. You . Yeah. By night, Amy is the founder of marketing ops advice.com aside for MO Pros to get extra advice on both technical and strategic topics.

Her motto is more ops, less. Oops. I had to read that twice to make sure I got it right. And Amy is also a Marketo certified expert in four time Marketo [00:01:00] champion, Amy. I know you already said it, but thanks for joining us.

Amy Goldfine: Thank you so much for having me. You’re really excited to talk to

Michael Hartmann: y’all. This is gonna be fun.

So when you, and I first talked about you joining as a guest you had recently just started the blog for MO Pros. Why don’t we start with just what was the initiation behind that? What led you to starting the blog and kinda, how was it going so far?

Amy Goldfine: Yeah. I really love helping other MO Pros.

I spend a lot of time in the Mopro community. I’m a moderator on the marketing nation boards, I’m a Marketo champion. And part of that is a lot of like advocacy and helping people. I run the San Francisco Marketo user group and. There kept being these themes that were coming up over and over.

And I found myself like typing out the same responses or looking for articles that would help people. And there was just things where I felt like there were gaps. And then there was also things where I just felt like I had found these cool ways of doing things or things that were really important that I just wanted to get out in the world.

Cause I wanted to people know like how to find errors in Marketo. [00:02:00] You know how to pull in RSS feeds of all your status notifications, into slacks, you can know what’s going on with all your tech. I’ve written a lot for, the Marketo blog. I’ve given a lot of presentations, but I decided I wanted to own something my own and, have something that I could really control.

And marketing ops advice.com was born.

Mike Rizzo: That’s a clutch domain too, by the way, I’m just saying, thank you. I think prior to the call we were suggesting that there’s probably a number of us in the community that are like do domain hoarders. yeah. You come up with a good one. You’re like, oh, I wonder if that’s available and then you snag it for $12 or whatever.

Yeah.

Amy Goldfine: I bought a couple. My hover bill is insane, , it’s worth it.

Michael Hartmann: That’s awesome. So funny. That’s great. So how long has the blog been live now?

Amy Goldfine: Just maybe two months, it really started with this me really wanting to talk about the four pillars of marketing operations.

And I really want to write this article called WTF as marketing operations. I was just felt like this was the concept that I really wanted the world to understand. It’s [00:03:00] been so helpful. It’s really been like life changing to my career. And there’s not a ton of content on it and not a ton of content in the way that I feel like it should be presented.

So I was like, I’m gonna write this, I’m gonna write this for myself. I’m gonna share it with the world. And hopefully it’ll help people.

Michael Hartmann: Yeah. So that’s one of the things we wanted to talk about is that specific post, was that the, I think that was the first post through blog, right? Yeah. Yep. And I love the PG name, title of it.

Yeah. So version. So yeah. So for the folks who haven’t already read your blog, because I’m sure it’s circulating, throughout, throughout the community, can you, you mentioned the four pillars, so maybe not everybody knows what that is. Why don’t you talk to us? What those are.

Amy Goldfine: Absolutely. I did not create the four pillars of marketing ops. I give so much credit to Edward Unthank who runs the consultancy at Etumos. And they run the MOPsCON virtual conference. And in 2019, his keynote was the state of marketing operations. And he introduced this concept of the [00:04:00] four pillars of marketing ops and.

Just was like mind blowing. And it really helped me realize why I was unhappy in my job and what I really wanted to get out of my job and what the four pillar says is explains what marketing operations is. cause marketing ops is not one thing. And it allows you to understand what the different functions are.

How to build your team, how to get what you want out of your career. So the first pillar is platform ops and this is really like running the engine of marketing ops from both a technical and a strategic perspective. And I should say that all these pillars there’s technical and strategic pieces to it.

I think we often think about the execution, but there’s so much strategy behind it as well. So this is. Admitting your tools, implementing migration, architecture, governance, naming conventions, and taxonomy. If you’re a Marketo user, these is your operational programs in your admin panel.

So scoring life, cycle integrations, all that kind of stuff. This is actually like what I really love both from a technical [00:05:00] and a strategic perspective. I love platform apps. It’s really where my heart lies. I think it’s probably like one of the the ones that people don’t see as much.

And the one like doesn’t get as much love, but if you don’t start with this pillar, you. Can’t do the other ones platform or, pillar two is campaign ops. And this is really the implementation of your marketing programs in your MarTech tools. So this is probably the most visible. This is actually what people think marketing ops is.

This is sending emails. We,

Michael Hartmann: we, they do emails

Amy Goldfine: over there in that group. Yes. Yeah. they do webinars, right? All that. Stuff’s really important. You cannot do it. If you don’t have a good foundation, a platform ops and you can’t do it well without a good strategy. It’s everything from.

Any templates. So obviously my bias is from Marketo. So Marketo has program templates, which are like really the foundation of scaling your campaign ops, but this is really platform agnostic. So setting up your webinar [00:06:00] and your marketing automation platform and your webinar tool, building the invites and operational emails, syncing it to your CRM, tracking registration, attendance, posting the recording for on-demand viewing all of that.

Like. Technical part of getting your marketing out in the world is campaign ops. And honestly, I’d love to hear your perspective. I think if you’re a small team, this may be actually like, or if you’re a one person or you’re even like not a full time marketing ops person, this is probably primarily what you’re doing.

Would you guys agree with that? Oh yeah.

Michael Hartmann: Oh yeah. I would even go so far, especially if you’re like a team of one or two. Like when you’re expected to be both tactical and strategic, this will eat up 90% of your time. And so the strategy is what suffers or, longer term kind of big vision thing.

So totally agree with that.

Amy Goldfine: Yeah. And campaign ops can be centralized or decentralized. I don’t wanna go too far into that because that could be an entire separate conversation.

Michael Hartmann: I [00:07:00] think we have, I think we actually have some episodes already on that particular topic. Yeah. So

Amy Goldfine: It’s a hot topic.

I have very. I have emotions about it, but , I have emotions just briefly centralizes when you have a single person or a team executing. So they take requests and they’re, real specialists in the tools decentralized is when the marketers who own the campaigns also own the campaign execution.

But in that case, you need somebody to train them and you need somebody to help them. When they mess up, you need someone to help ’em when they have questions, it does not take that entire burden off of marketing op. The third pillar is marketing intelligence ops. That’s actually like the term.

I like the least it’s a little awkward. cause most people just call it analytics or BI . We like to keep ops in, in all of them. But this is your reporting, right? This is obviously really important. If you’re a smaller team, you’re probably not doing, a younger LS, mature company, probably not doing a ton of this, but you’re probably doing even basic stuff.

Even let’s use the webinar example. Like how many people attended your webinar? [00:08:00] That’s marketing intelligence. And depending upon your company’s maturity, your team structure, marketing offs may own this BI may own this. There may be a partnership. You may have marketers who are stronger or less strong.

It depends, but no matter what marketing offs needs to be involved, they really understand the data. They can help, the marketers with their reporting. Actually, we have a whole. Initiative right now to train our marketers to be better at Salesforce so that they can run a lot of the reporting themselves.

And then we’re also working with our BI team on. So I

Michael Hartmann: just, I had this shiver in my back in that statement.

Amy Goldfine: Tell

Michael Hartmann: me more, like you think you’re gonna have the marketers I work with a lot of great marketers, but like just getting your head around the concept. Objects in Salesforce is I think it’s hard,

Amy Goldfine: half the battle.

And I think a lot of it is gonna be like building templates for them, but, just so they can, for example activate, which is our conference series, like when we had activate virtual, I ran so [00:09:00] many reports and it was just the same data, slice and dice, a bunch of different ways, looking at accounts, looking at contacts, looking at by region and by market segment and, persona and all this stuff.

And. Afterwards. I was talking to our head of customer and partner marketing and she was like, oh, she’s no, my team should own that. You should give them the base report and then we need to teach them how to manipulate it themselves, that kind of stuff.

Mike Rizzo: That’s great. Can I make a really bad dad joke?

Amy Goldfine: Absolutely. I love dad jokes.

Michael Hartmann: dad jokes told me that

Mike Rizzo: I was like, think about marketing intelligence ops or my ops as they’ll say. And I was like, you know what? My ops is not myopic

Michael Hartmann: I love it. That’s great. We needed, I needed, I should have been ready with the sound effect yeah, you should have. NA Naomi. So the folks who are listening, you can’t see Naomi right now. Naomi’s just like shaking her head. she’s I can’t tell she’s laughing or crying.

Naomi Liu: good thing. I was on mute, right?

Michael Hartmann: Yeah. So

Amy Goldfine: funny. But I [00:10:00] think no matter what your team is, it’s really important for marketing ops to be involved in this. We have a very sophisticated BI team run by some really smart people, but they don’t necessarily understand the data. They don’t know what assumptions to make or really how to like, they really need us to validate and to be the conduit between the marketing team and the BI team.

And the last pillar is one that I think is the most fun. It’s also the one that I am definitely the least skilled in. And that is development operations or DevMOPs. And this is custom coding in your marketing tools. So everything from custom web development, scripting non-native integrations, process automation, web hooks, the.

The sky’s the limit, all these tools have really great APIs. You can do a lot of great stuff. This is definitely something that, unless your team is pretty big you will probably outsource. So we have a agency that has a great dev team and we need either help with some web scripting or we had them build a web based naming convention generator, which is really cool.

Especially with a decentralized team for them to be able. Use [00:11:00] a naming convention. They just, pick fields from a drop down and it spits out a name and a description for them. I love dev mops. I love that there are people that I can hire for specific projects and not have to have somebody, full time.

But yeah, that that’s four pillars.

Michael Hartmann: Yeah. So I have heard, I had heard of the four pillars a while back and never really dug into it probably until you and I talked when you hit your blog post. But yeah, I could see how it could be used just before we go further. So Amy, so in that vein, I think I do the concept of how this is applied.

Or the concept how do you suggest people apply it? And I think I’m thinking of at least two scenarios, cause you mentioned tactical over strategic and I, so I’m thinking like general sort of marketing ops use of the model and leadership use of the model.

Amy Goldfine: Yeah. Absolutely. So I think there’s a reason I give a subtitle of my my post is why nobody fully understands your job and neither do you.

Because I think it’s so [00:12:00] helpful for MO Pros. If you are looking for a job and you look at 10 different job descriptions, you will see 10 very different roles. I have seen some I’ve seen roles called marketing ops that are not marketing ops. I’ve seen email marketing jobs called marketing ops.

I’ve seen project management jobs called marketing op. And when it’s, I swear that having these four pillars and understanding them, it’s like, you have a secret code. It’s when you’re a kid, you get that spike hit and there’s like the decoder thing. And you put, put the clear sheet like over and all of a sudden, like shows what’s be, behind.

Sorry. I’m really bad at metaphors, but we’re just gonna go with it.

Mike Rizzo: No, this is a really good one. okay. Thank you. I was like sitting here oh yeah, I totally remember that.

Amy Goldfine: I don’t know what you call it. It’s not decoding, but anyway it really gives you a map. And after I watch, watched this MOPsCON keynote, which is available on YouTube I always recommend people watch it.

One of the reasons I wrote the article is most people don’t have 45 minutes or an hour to watch the whole thing. But it’s great. I was like, oh, I looked at job [00:13:00] descriptions and I suddenly understood, oh, you know what, this, they really want somebody with dev experience. I don’t have that.

This is all campaign ops. I don’t wanna do that. This is a little more marketing intelligence that I really wanna do. It really helped me, pick and choose the job descriptions that I wanted also helped me have like really intelligent conversations with hire managers and recruiters.

I. In every interview. And this was back when we had in-person interviews. I think I drew out the pillars on the whiteboard every single time. So I think that really helps it also, it helped me understand why I was unhappy at my job. I was in a great job. I, was managing a direct report.

I was at a company that’s really going somewhere. They were acquired not long after I left. But I was miserable and I realized it’s because my quarterly projects were all platform ups. It was like lead scoring, lead life cycle, all integrations, all that kind of stuff. But my boss kept pulling me into campaign ops and.

I hate doing campaign ops I just [00:14:00] it’s really just I’ve run more webinars than I like to think about. I’ve sent a ton of emails. I don’t wanna do that anymore. I like to help people scale that I love like helping coming up with the program templates and figuring out like what the campaign member services and all that stuff.

And helping people do things faster and better, but I don’t want to do it. So it really helped me and, plenty of interviews. We’d start talking and then afterwards I’d be like, yeah, actually like you’re looking for something that’s this is mostly campaign ops. This is not what I wanna do.

I don’t think we should continue further. So I think it was good for me, and the companies so that’s, that like really helps. And I think also Even if you’re happy in your job, or you’re not looking for a new job, it can help you just understand what do I wanna keep doing?

What I wanna, what do I wanna do more of? What do I wanna do less of and what do I wanna learn? So it really helps guide those conversations. . And I think those are all really

Mike Rizzo: good call outs. Just like having a framework to operate within a couple things like one of them is to your point about job [00:15:00] descriptions.

I think as a community call out to the wild again, repeatedly over and over again, like it is our job as a community to try to help establish some of those foundational , boundaries. And you will see from us in the coming weeks, like a proposed sort of set of job descriptions and basics.

That’s amazing. We will absolutely want the community’s feedback I would expect. I’m positive that there will be some that don’t agree, if the major yeah. If the majority are like you no. That makes sense. Then that’s a win and that’s what we’re looking for. We need to set a baseline.

So call out to the wild. Keep your eyes out for that. Yeah. Like we need that. And then using this The pillar concept, which I’ve been aware of for a while now. I think is tremendous. I think it’s a really good thought leadership piece. I think it helps you frame up your career trajectory and the inner working of what you do on a day in day out basis to try to figure out where do you, like you said, where do you wanna spend more time?

Where do you wanna spend maybe a little less time. And then how do you have that conversation with your leadership on, Hey look, [00:16:00] I’m, I’m not making this up. Largely, for those that are aware of this idea of the four pillars, here’s the way to think about it.

And so people need that, right? Yeah. Leaders need that to anchor onto and I think that’s really important. My question for you though, is whether or not you think there’s a hierarchy to these pillars because I see a ton of interlinking between them. Yeah. And I can make all kinds of arguments for that, but I would just be curious if you see there’s hierarchy.

I

Amy Goldfine: think in terms of like maturity there’s definitely, as your team is growing, like they, these kinds of things, ebb and flow. So if you’re, like I said, a small team, a young company, you don’t have a lot of money. You’re not doing DevMOPs. That’s fine. Like totally. I’ve been at companies where we didn’t have DevMOPs.

That’s totally fine. Maybe you’re paying for custom email templates and landing page templates. I would actually, I would argue that as a really good use of your time and money . But yeah, that’s fine. And if again, young, smaller [00:17:00] company, newer, like marketing intelligence probably doesn’t have to be that sophisticated.

You’re probably not maybe using, I don’t even wanna say the, a word. Attribution cause that’s a whole other topic, attribution, what? Yeah, it might, that might, be. You have to have platform ops solid in order to do campaign ops campaign campaign ops is what everybody sees.

But if your integrations are messed up, if your users and roles are a mess and you have, everybody’s an admin people at home. Can’t see me that I just got like a real. You look on my face, she’s talking to you, she’s talking

Michael Hartmann: to me, she’s looking right at me. ,

Amy Goldfine: If things aren’t configured properly earlier we were talking about events.

If your event platform is not properly integrated your marketing automation platform, you can send out all the event emails you want. If you can’t get registered to sync into your event platform, that’s a problem, and so that kind of stuff is so foundational. If you don’t have a clear lead life cycle, if you don’t okay.

I feel [00:18:00] s word scoring also like a touchy topic like spoil alert. I hate lead scoring. If you don’t have some agreed upon framework for that and like consistency in that, like actually forget, agreed upon because nobody ever agrees on lane scoring. They will say they agree and then you launch it and then they complain.

Mike Rizzo: They begrudgingly agree. They agree to disagree.

Naomi Liu: we rid of I, I wanna step back to a comment you made earlier about the maturity piece. And I’m curious what you think about, as like a marketing ops team matures. Do you think that’s like siloed within the team? Or do you think part of that is also tied to the maturity of the organization when it comes to?

Yeah, no, I think it’s both how they accept it, right? Yeah. Because I feel like I’m in I’ve had that, like not currently, but I’ve had that in past iterations of this life where, the team is more mature than what the business is willing to accept and we can do more, but then it’s it becomes.

Teacher student type of situation, right? Yeah. So it’s there’s, I, it’s very [00:19:00] rare that it’s exactly. Even there’s always gonna be some kind of discrepancy, whether like the ops team is like you’re hiring to catch up to meet the needs of the business, or you’re like, trying to educate them up to a level.

Does that make sense? I’m

Amy Goldfine: Trying to figure. Absolutely. Yeah, I think you’re right. And I think there’s also, you can have a situation where marketing leadership wants more maturity. Like maybe you get like a new CMO and they have all these like needs for analytics, but you’re just not quite there yet.

Maybe the data’s not there. Maybe you don’t have the team in place, maybe there’s other priorities. So yes, there certainly can be tension between the org and the team, but I think marketing ops. Hopefully can lead, and try to bring everybody with them and educate people.

I think I’ve, I think everybody on the marketing team has seen the four pillars. Everybody on my rev op team has seen it, I’ve given my charter presentation. And I think as much education as you can do, but yeah, not always in lockstep.

You’re right. Naomi.

Mike Rizzo: [00:20:00] Yeah, it, so it, to me, it does. I think I largely agree or just, I hear you. And I think it’s, I think it’s right to think about, platform ops probably is a foundational element that, that needs to be established. I don’t know. I feel like there’s an argument to be made around this idea of like where’s the bleed over between the campaign ops into my ops.

And. That sort of feels like they almost have to happen simultaneously. And then as soon as the questions as you alluded to earlier where you’re like, Hey, I shouldn’t have to slice and dice the data a million different ways. That’s actually like an analytics and business intelligence team.

When the questions start to become more complex and they start asking mid or grittier details, maybe that’s where my op steps in. Yeah. But like campaign ops. You, if you don’t have, we’ve had sessions on this in the community. If you don’t have a solid UTM strategy and a life cycle strategy and all of that stuff to track through campaign, success rates, someone eventually is gonna ask you some complicated question about what’s working or what we hypothesize is working, cause let’s be real.

We’re not always spot on [00:21:00] with that. And you’re not gonna be equipped to answer. In a, my ops environment, unless you have the foundational elements of what goes into campaign operations, which I would argue is some analytics tracking, Google analytics and maybe UTM strategy.

Amy Goldfine: And I think the other thing Mike, is that, if assuming you’re using Salesforce making sure that you campaign member statuses are consistent. How can you , all these attribution tools tend to go off Salesforce campaigns and like they pick which ones are, considered success and polar into the attribution model.

If you don’t have consistency there, like that’s a huge problem. And if have people who aren’t following your instructions and the campaign members never make it from Marketo to Salesforce, . , , that’s another problem. So I think really having that or having the discipline

Michael Hartmann: of keeping updated on opportunities, right?

Yeah. yeah. I actually ran into a situation, heard about a situation recently where the sales team wasn’t closing out lost [00:22:00] opportunities or mark was duplicates. They were deleting them. For those listening, you should have you should have seen the looks on people’s. Oh,

Naomi Liu: all of our heads. Just whoa.

Mike Rizzo: Yeah. As I heard for those of you with children out in the listening audience if you haven’t seen forks a question on Disney plus, it was very much the what. No, response to what Michael just said.

Amy Goldfine: Yeah I, oh, wow. I’m speechless. Really? No, I

Michael Hartmann: know. I, when I heard that, I was like, what? Wait what? So yeah but I’ve said for a long time, like from a I actually think that in terms of long term importance, I’m starting to believe that my ops or that reporting analytics is, should become more and more important.

Cause we’ve had no. No issue generating data. It’s what are we doing with it is hard, but it requires to really be able to use it for decision making or getting better or automating more the [00:23:00] discipline of people doing set up or managing, campaigns or managing opportunities all the way through.

That there’s a lot of discipline that’s required to make that work the best. And I’ve yet to be at a place where they’ve. Done that all the way through consistently.

Mike Rizzo: Yeah. And so I’m gonna express, you can hear me already expressing it. I’m a little frustrated by the, my ops as a category.

Because I see it. Rapidly branching off into a department of business intelligence and data analytics that, that isn’t like within the sort of if there was a marketing ops team I think there’s a very strong dotted line and they’re doing my ops related things, but they are not called a marketing operations professional.

That would be their argument.

Amy Goldfine: I think it depends. So in like my current current setup, I have a direct report, Gerald Dean, who part of her job is analytics. She owns our attribution tool [00:24:00] set up and she Did done a ton of like campaign, QBR end of year campaign reporting, what’s working, what’s not working.

She, and she works really closely with the BI team. She has a BI analyst. She partners with who’s phenomenal. They have a really great working relationship. So for, I’ll give an example of where I think like marketing ops comes into play. So we were having this tension between what our campaign member statuses are.

And our campaign types, trying to show, trying to sh versus the channel of the effort. So it, we were showing that our demo request form was a big driver. Fortunately that’s you should, that should be, especially for your like lower that’s a good thing, lower tier market segments, but marketing leadership was like that doesn’t tell me anything.

I need to know where those demos are coming from. Are they organic? Are they coming from paid channels? What paid channels are they coming from? But we didn’t wanna redo our Salesforce campaign and Marketo program set up and campaign member statuses, cause that would completely change our [00:25:00] campaign ops and you know how that works.

So she came up. With a way to pair campaign member statuses and campaign types and turn them into, I think we’re calling them channels and that’s being built in our BI tool so that they, we can look and see which channels are driving things. So I think that’s where that partnership really comes that marketing options.

That makes sense with the understanding and BI is able to execute. Yeah. That kind

Mike Rizzo: of thing. Yeah. That, that, that makes a ton of sense to me. And I, again I think that there’s elements of marketing reporting and some marketing intelligence stuff that comes out of maybe the tools that you manage, but as you start looking holistically to, to illustrate the point, I think that you made.

Further as you get to this idea of yeah, great. The demo requests are generating the best pipeline for us, but like, how are they getting to the demo request? I don’t think that is a marketing ops person’s job to try to figure out that is a business intelligence challenge, where you can supply some [00:26:00] resources.

Some data inputs, and then they can slice and dice and try to figure out how to make that data actually make sense. And we, part of the reason I’m bringing all this up is that there’s a job posted in the community just this week around looking for a data analytics professional.

And I was like, look like, yeah, you might find someone who comes out of marketing ops, who wants to really move more into data and an and analytics. But that isn’t specifically a marketing ops job, there’s elements of the, my ops thing. But really, as you get further into data analytics, I don’t think that’s specifically a marketing ops job.

Naomi Liu: I saw that look on your face, Michael.

Michael Hartmann: I know. Cause like I,

Mike Rizzo: This is Michael’s the engineering background guy. No, so I ,

Michael Hartmann: I actually think I, I could, I see where you’re coming from. Like at the same time, My experience has been that people who are really like, general, I call it general purpose.

I hate to say it, BI analytics real, real strong, they like the [00:27:00] nuances and complexities and messiness of B2B marketing and sales data really is. It’s such a it’s. It’s not as clean as like doing financial data or even just pure sales data. I think so that’s why I struggle with yeah.

I think if you really need to have people who are experts in analytics concepts, like if you’re doing predictive scoring or you’re doing churn models or whatever it is, it’s complex from a general standpoint, but they don’t understand. The way that the data is created and flows and the dependencies on people and timing and all that kinda stuff that it goes with marketing.

I think it’s you run the risk of it not being very useful, or it’s gonna tell a story that it really shouldn’t because it’s missing a piece of understanding of how the process flow.

Mike Rizzo: I am nodding my head in agreement with you. And we’re saying the same thing. I’m saying that the marketing [00:28:00] ops person needs to advise where that data comes from and what it means, but that other person, who’s an expert at taking those other inputs from other departments like sales ops, or even your it team and your product team and your marrying those concepts together, client success for that matter.

Is this rev op, are we talking about rev op here? it sounds like rev op. But anyway, we don’t have to keep going down. I think it’s all about, I think there is a split at some point.

Amy Goldfine: Yeah. And I think it’s all about building a team charter and understanding and thinking critically about what your team needs at this point and where you’re going to the future.

And that’s really the other piece that I think that the four pillars is really helpful for as a marketing apps leader or a rev op leader. Really like understanding what do you need now? What can you wait on? What can you outsource? Especially, I think we’ve all seen these job descriptions that is like everything in the kitchen sink they want in a manager level or a specialist level.

No,

Michael Hartmann: yeah, no, it’s no longer manager level. It’s director titles that are individual contributors. [00:29:00]

Amy Goldfine: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That’s a truth. That’s a thing too. So there’s a lot of messiness there. I sound, things seems like I’ve had a nerve, I’m gonna try to move slowly away from that nerve . But I think like really using this to be super clear about what you want.

And then, I’ve been in a situation where I posted a job description and it actually turned out that that person did not exist. So then I went back and I looked at the different pieces. Of their job. And the job re one of the things was DevMOPS. VE actually just really heavy dev.

And we were like, you know what? We can use an agency outsource this and we cut that part of the job, restructured the job description. And we found Jeanette on my team. Who’s phenomenal. And it turns out is exactly what we need. So I think, using the four pillars to structure. And to like, as as you’re doing the hiring process to adjust if necessary.

And I think the other thing that’s really helpful for the four pillars is like having conversations with your team about what they want to do and where they wanna go in their [00:30:00] careers. Look, nobody’s gonna love a hundred percent of their job duties, right? Like we all have to do things we don’t wanna do sometimes, but if somebody’s stuck spending 80% of their time doing stuff, they hate, they’re going to leave you

Yeah. And you’re gonna have a much bigger problem. So I think it really helps, drive those conversations with your team about their growth.

Michael Hartmann: It’s interesting that you bring that up because when Mike asked the question about, is there a hierarchy with those pillars? Which implies that they’re not all pillars, I think in that case.

But anyway, yeah, totally but but if there is a hierarchy or even if there’s not a hierarchy is I thought you were gonna go towards, so you went towards organizational needs, right? What do we need on the team? What do we need to be able to support? First versus later I was thinking, could this also apply to individuals who say, I’m currently in platform ops.

Probably like more likely in campaign, probably starting campaign ops. And I wanna be more in platform ops or I wanna more do, like [00:31:00] now you have a framework also to talk about how, like, where can you go from a development standpoint and grow and learn

Amy Goldfine: totally. And whether they’re yeah, no,

Michael Hartmann: I was just curious do you, are you use it, do you use that with your teams?

Yep. I’m curious if you use something like that as well, for, as you’re working through with your teams.

Naomi Liu: I would say it, no, not really. It’s something that I would like to look more into though. No, I would say

Michael Hartmann: that right now. We don’t

Amy Goldfine: got it. Yeah. I think it’s really important. It’s a great way to have those conversations and have the structure.

You know of, what they’re doing and what they wanna grow into. And you’re right. I think a lot of people move from campaigns of platform ops, or you may have somebody who’s in platform ops, and they’re really heavy in one platform. Maybe they’re, into Marketo, but they wanna learn Salesforce.

Great. Let’s get you into Trailhead. Let’s you know, get you learning Salesforce. Or maybe they’re, wanna do more integrations or whatever, but I think or if they wanna do dev more power to them, we need more people. Yeah. And I’m just do dev

Naomi Liu: I think [00:32:00] a bit more about that question.

I’m thinking a bit more about that question though. And I think part of the reason we don’t necessarily have how do you migrate between those two is because the way that my team is structured, it is like they already all are subject matter experts in their own sense. So I have it structured in the sense where we all are.

Everybody can execute a campaign end to end right as a baseline, but then everybody is subject matter experts in the sense that there’s a web developer, there’s an email developer. There is a data operations person. There is a designer, so it’s, they all have their own areas of expertise, but they touch on both it’s their like hybrid campaign slash platform ops.

If that makes sense in their area of expertise. And then we do. There is crossover. So for example, if our web developer is really interested in something on the data piece, right? And it’s not just like a standard audience, like all customers in this region, it’s maybe, customers who ha who have open opportunities above this stage, who, also have this product.

And it’s various different things that [00:33:00] they may be interested in that they will then do. And I love seeing this on my team where they will partner up and teach each other. Things right. And vice versa. So it’s less of a, how do I get from campaign to platform ops to DevOps or vice versa?

It’s I think it’s just the nature of how I structured my team, that they all just wanna learn everything. And it might just be very specific to my work.

Amy Goldfine: I think that’s great though, Naomi, because it sounds, it sounds like you are you’re, you have structured things within the different pillars, but you have people with a growth mindset and that’s, you cannot teach a growth mindset.

Having people that wanna learn different things I think is wonderful.

Mike Rizzo: So earlier you talked about being able to like outsource the development piece To, on the, on to an agency, I think is what you specifically brought up. And I think that’s a great example of when it’s difficult to find a hire.

Maybe you just go find the agency that can support you. But like [00:34:00] what would you say are the appropriate times to hire an agency and then any tips for hiring agencies in

Amy Goldfine: general? I’ve had a lot of success hiring agencies. I’ve also had some challenges, so I can talk about both. But I think there are some times when I would absolutely say hired agency.

One is if you’re doing an implementation or migration I have the humility to know that, like I said, I’m a been Marketo certified since. 2016. I’m a four-time Marketo champion. I do not wanna do your implementation. Agencies have these huge like workbooks. If you’re talking about Marketo, they have program templates that they can literally import you are buying their IP and the money that you’re spending to get your platform implemented properly.

Is going to pay out dividends. I think also the dev work of like I said, email and landing page templates. Usually these platforms come with like starter templates, but some of these companies, the templates they’ve built, just make things so much easier and so much smoother and really can accelerate your email execution and just [00:35:00] make your emails look so much better.

So those are two things that I would say definitely. Pay an agency for we, we have a lot of dual . I think our agency has three contracts going on at the same time. And we have an ongoing services contract for anything and everything, whether we’re adjusting our lead life cycle, whether we’re have a new privacy and compliance documentation that we need to implement in the stack.

A lot of it is like, what can I, what work can I get off my team’s plate? That’s busy work that doesn’t really drive them forward. Like adding new LinkedIn lead gen, doing some data, clean up, sometimes adding new drift bots to Marketo. That is not a good use of my team’s time. They’re in meetings.

They’re doing like big foundational work. Like the. Get that off their plates. And also just like having that ongoing services contract means when there’s a question, there’s only two Marketo experts on my team. But agencies have dozens, you talk to your consultant, they don’t know they’re gonna talk to their team.

That’s [00:36:00] golden. And then also that dev stuff, you have a small dev project or bigger dev project, you can just pay for those hours instead of having, trying to have somebody in house. And then other things. So I have not done a ton of this, but some people use agencies for their campaign execut.

I think that can work really well. We’ve started using agency for email execution for our conference because we just send so many conference emails and, poor Matt who runs our email channel. Just can’t keep up with the volume of emails. He’s brought project, manage him, he’s running ’em, he’s designing them.

He’s coordinating with the copywriter and the designer, but. Agency actually does the, hands on keyboard work. And then also for activate, we have them doing all the Marketo program, cause that is there’s no program template for that. That is a gnarly Marketo program that seems to be changing all the time and doing all the integrations and all that stuff, which frees me up to have the strategic conversations to be in the meetings and understanding and project managing.

But I don’t have [00:37:00] to actually do the. Does that kind of jive with what you all have used agencies for?

Michael Hartmann: What you described that sort of bucket of hours, like model, I’ve used that. And then also had very project specific stuff. And the, for me, the key was having at least a small course of the same people who are familiar with our business and if they were gonna change it, like most people need to have new experience too.

If they were changing out right. Having a very sort. Thought through plan for one person coming in another person leaving and the overlap there. And that has always worked well. And I’ve used a little bit of one for like campaign ops, but mostly it’s been other the same thing, right?

It’s not, for things that need the report, they need to be done and taken care of, but not moving towards strategic stuff, which is what I want my team to be working. We’ve

Naomi Liu: used agencies for project basis. We haven’t used them as a retainer for execution or anything like that, but it’s Def we’ve definitely done it on a project basis where there’s maybe expertise that the team doesn’t have or [00:38:00] something more complicated.

And that’s worked well for us, I’m never gonna say no to extra hands, but that just so far seems to be how it’s yeah. How we’ve engaged with our agency.

Mike Rizzo: Yeah, I would have to agree, like I, I’m not gonna say no for extra help. cause I’m sure there’s always a way to creatively use the extra hands.

But I think a lot of this, interestingly, come definitely comes from the more advance that’s the wrong way to describe it. The more. Challenging systems that can, that can be harder to implement. So I think Marketo falls into that bucket for sure. And by challenging, it just means you need to think through it.

And at least that’s how I’m thinking about it. And even in the Eliquia space, those are big sort of enterprise platforms that can service. Pretty large organizations. I haven’t per like from my experience having used HubSpot, like it is very rare that I ever had to reach out to an agency to really help with with much of anything in HubSpot.

Now that they’re moving in a direction of more rev op centric [00:39:00] stuff, though, I’m seeing it more and more. That you need someone that really understands the ins and outs of the connectivity between all the objects and the relationships within HubSpot to then go tap into an agency for their experience.

But it’s interesting to have watched the evolution of that happen from a tool that was very marketer friendly. Now something that is very that is more robust and ready for some scale and now needs maybe a little bit more of that technical expertise. And so I’m hearing what all of you are saying, and I’m like, gosh, yeah, that’s super interesting through the lens of Marketo.

I have some experience Marketo now, but got like up till now. I haven’t seen much of a need within, outside of, within just the. It’s called two years for leveraging agency help on the HubSpot side of things. And now I’m like, okay, I understand why there’s a whole like category of rev, op agencies for HubSpot these days.

Amy Goldfine: totally. And one thing I would tell people is. I don’t look, I don’t really know a ton about corporate finances. I don’t really quite understand how they decide what budget goes to [00:40:00] what, but there always seems to be budget for agency when there’s not budget for headcount. So I would encourage people.

If you’re feeling like you’re struggling, you don’t have budget to hire a full-time person. See if there’s agency budget, because in my experience, they can usually shuffle things around and give you a chunk of money that you can use, whether it’s for a big project or just to offload some work on your team, or to get some expertise on things.

No matter what your platform is. We use agencies and I can’t think of at least three of our platforms, we have a great business systems team. We also have, Salesforce dev team. So our sales outsourced Salesforce dev. So there’s there’s definitely a lot of opportunities, but the thing to remember about hiring an agency is you do have to be conscientious when you hire them and you have to manage

Michael Hartmann: them.

yes. It’s not like you just you’re washing your hands of it and there’s nothing else you.

Amy Goldfine: Yeah. Yeah. You wanna find somebody, so like you were saying, Mike, there, didn’t used to be as many agencies that use that, specialize in HubSpot. You [00:41:00] want somebody who specializes in your platform and you want them to have a lot of people specializing in your platform.

Because like I said, your consultant is probably very smart, but they only are. They’re only one person, but if they have a team, they have their own internal slack where they can ask people that. Golden. Yeah. I think

Mike Rizzo: yeah. Making, yeah, I definitely agree with that. And I think, sorry just like the call out to ask for agency headcount, help is a good one.

And I think this episode and your blog post talking about the four pillars is good fodder for making that argument, right? cause there’s a good chance you might get pushback from your leadership that says isn’t this part of your job? And then you go back to let me show you the four pillars.

yep. And this one, I don’t do . And so now give me the budget for the agency. Thanks.

Amy Goldfine: Yeah. And I also I just published an article about like top 10 tips for finding an agency that works for your team. And I think that’s really like the thing it is that agency that works for you. You wanna look for an agency that’s worked with companies like yours and you [00:42:00] want references for companies like yours.

I had an experience. My boss hired a marketing ops agency that she’d worked with before, and we had a really bad experience with them. And she thinks that part of the problem was when she used them at, she used them at a huge giant, global corporation. And we were like a much smaller SaaS, pre IPO SaaS company.

So make sure they’re used to working with companies like yours and make sure that They communicate in the way that works for you. So if you use slack, oh my God. I think slack connect is like so genius so I can DM or get, or pull my consultants into a channel. And it’s just they’re part of my team because I would like email chains to die.

And you wanna talk to them about how communicative are they, how responsive are there? How quickly can you schedule meeting? I had trouble with an agency where the principal consultant, it would take two weeks to get a meeting with him. And there was so much back and forth cause he didn’t have a Calendly or, a scheduling tool like that.

Whereas like my consultant I have now I can look at her Calendly and I can [00:43:00] see when she’s available. And she usually has meeting has openings the next day. So you know, I think that’s really important.

Michael Hartmann: I think those are all great posts. So speaking of your blog, post blog and recent posts and everything.

So this has been super interesting conversation. I think we could go on for a while, but we are gonna have to cut it off. Folks. Wanna connect with you or keep up with your blog post blog. Like what, how what’s the best way for

Amy Goldfine: them to do that? Yeah. Marketing ops advice.com. Is is the best place to go for resources.

I’m pretty active on LinkedIn. It’s just LinkedIns dot com slash N slash Amy gold. Find all one word you can follow me there. You can also like reach out on the MO Pros. I’m pretty active. There would love to, have some conversations going there as well.

Michael Hartmann: Awesome. Again, Amy, thank you so much, Mike.

Naomi, thank you for being here. Thanks to all of our listeners for being a part of this. Continue to support us, rate us, give us feedback. If you’ve got if you wanna be a guest or, somebody who would be a good [00:44:00] guest, let us know that. And with that, it’s a wrap. Bye everybody. Bye everyone.

Mike Rizzo: Bye.