We must stop neglecting soft skills. It is holding us and the entire marketing ops function back.

Soft skills help us navigate work more effectively and in MOps they are just as important to our professional growth as tech skills.

This is why we were really stoked to have an awesome guest on fwd:thinking this week. Our friend, previous client, and Crissy's old boss Kristen Alexander.

Kristin was the global brand marketing leader for Disney, led marketing at Agari and the marketing platform Certain. And now she is the co-founder of Ox, a SaaS platform for training soft skills.

We dive into the world of soft skill development and touch on:

• The three most important soft skills for people in b2b marketing/ops
• Where the biggest gaps are in soft skills
• Why you need to treat soft skills training like working out and other positive habits
• And much more!

If you want to move up in our career this one's for you.

Transcription

Crissy:

Okay. So welcome today's episode of fwd: Thinking. We have a special guest. So he's very special to me. We have Kristen Alexander, who's the co-founder of Ox, and she's also one of my old bosses, which is amazing. And she's also one of our past clients, so we're really excited to have her on to talk about an important topic, supporting the... Our overall topic, we're talking about elevating marketing ops. And the topic we're going to dive into today is the soft skills that marketing ops leaders need to have. And we think that soft skills are really important and what set apart a marketing ops leader.

A lot of times people focus on knowing tools and tech and kind of the more tactical part of marketing ops, but really, in order to stuff up, you need to be strategic and also have some of those soft skills to work cross functionally. So welcome, Kristen. I think to kick things off, maybe just introduce yourself. And you have a great background also in B2B and also B2C, so if you could talk a little bit about your past experience and what you're doing at Ox.

Kristen:

Sure. Well, thanks, first of all, for having me. I'm delighted to have this talk today and just to chit chat about what's going on in marketing and marketing ops, and also how people can develop their skills, because I think it's really important. So yeah, my background is different, and I think that's true of so many people. Right? People end up in the jobs that they have now by navigating many different paths. In consumer, I worked for Cricket Wireless, and then I worked for many years at Disney, and I did various different marketing and product development jobs. I ended up working on kids and family video games and mobile experiences at Disney.

And then I moved to the Bay Area to do startups specifically. And that's how I got into enterprise marketing. So I had a mentor who encouraged me to add enterprise to my background, in addition to consumer. And that played out, and is playing out now really well, because many companies have both sides. Or even if they're enterprise companies, they're selling to an end user, which is kind of like a consumer motion. So that experience has been really valuable. And I've done a few different enterprise startups. Christy and I met at Agari, which was one of them. And most recently, I was the CMO at a company called Certain, which I'm sure your audience is familiar with and uses or their events.

Kristen:

And then in the past year, I took probably the biggest leap of faith in my career. I guess, there's big ones: consumer to enterprise, the company to start up, and then startup to founder of my own company. And we share that in common, because you founded your own company too. So that is probably, I think, just the biggest career risk that I've taken and a significant one that people go through. And so it's been really fun co-founding my company over this past year, it's called Ox, as you mentioned. And we'll talk about what we do and how it's relevant to marketing and marketing ops.

Crissy:

Yeah, that's perfect. I think just your background, in general... You pointed out that you've had mentors, and I think just that natural segue into what you're doing now and also what we're going to talk about today, like the soft skills, but as far as working on yourself or self-improvement and finding mentor leadership, I've always looked to you as really an inspiration for that because you've always been really good at connecting with people, finding mentors.

Even like people that aren't maybe ahead of you and your career, but they just have a different skillset than you, you always are tapping them for expertise, and I think that's a really smart thing to do that marketing ops leaders can learn from. I think it's amazing that we'll have you to talk about that today. So let's kick off the first question and get into the meat of it.

Charlie:

Well, before we get into the first question, do you want to go into a little bit more about what Ox does? Because I think that will lead us quite nicely into the first question that we have around soft skills.

Kristen:

Sure. So I've always been inspired... Like, you were talking about having mentors and tapping people for skills, I've always been inspired by work life, and how do you help people figure out what their skills are, use those skills to navigate down career paths, use those skills to get into new types of jobs. And so what Ox is, is an AI platform for soft skills training. And really, soft skills, when you think about all of the skills that you acquire, soft skills are foundational skills. You can use them in any job that you have. So in any job in marketing, soft skills apply. And they apply if you want to transition from marketing into a career in customer success, or navigate from marketing to sales, or vice versa.

So soft skills really are a critical skillset, and these are things like communication, collaboration, problem solving. And these are the skills that really help people navigate work and move through their career and become successful. And you'll notice that people that seem to be progressing really quickly through their career have mastered these soft skills. Maybe not all of them, but some set of them. So at Ox, what we're doing is helping workers practice, improve and perfect their soft skills at work. So we have audio training, and it's snackable. It's designed for anyone, really, you and me, but especially, I would say, workers that are in the first half of their career, where they're really trying to figure out how to navigate.

Kristen:

So our audio training is short, 10 minutes each track, and it's really actionable. Because I think that's really important. Like, when you're learning a new skill, when you're absorbing new information at work, you really want to learn things that you can put into practice, and then you need to practice them to get good at them. And oftentimes, I think what you see in soft skills is people who maybe have 20 years of experience, the reason why they can walk into a meeting and sort of command a room or know how to navigate and build relationships with everyone is because they've done it 5,000 times before.

But if you're starting your career, to learn how to do that, what your role is in every meeting, and how to work well with people and how to contribute at a level where your information will be easily absorbed, that's something you need to practice. And so our app gives you audio training, and then lets you practice, via voice, and we give you actionable feedback on things like sentiment. Do you sound hesitant or confident? Also, word choice and your pace and your volume.

Kristen:

I tell this story often, that early in my career, I had a boss, and I think he took a big risk doing this, because... I don't think it was common advice, but he said, "Kristen, when you're really passionate about something, you're putting out good energy, and usually valuable information, but you start talking really fast and you're talking really high and nobody can understand what you're saying. You need to just slow down and just accentuate the words, make your points, choose wisely how you want to contribute." That was like incredible advice. And so we're offering that kind of training for people, and it's really important for how you navigate.

Charlie:

I love this on so many levels, actually, because I think marketing ops people, specifically a lot of the people that are listening to this, all of a sudden, they're told, you do seem to be focusing on your technical skills. You need to be learning C corp, you need to be learning what new tools that you can implement and integrations and things like that. But nobody talks about the soft skills and how they... And that's going to be probably something that's going to elevate them and propel their career probably more than learning just another martech tool.

And then for you, like one of the reasons why we love having you on today is with Ox, you've got this amazing knowledge of soft skills, but you can also give us and our audience some knowledge and insight into... from your past, being CMA, running marketing organizations, hiring MOTS people, really understanding that function and really how to marry those two things together. So like from an ops point of view, or a marketing ops point of view and a B2B marketer point of view, like the soft skills are going to really set them apart and help them move up and elevate themselves. I'd love to dive into that a little bit more. So if you had to choose a few like top three soft skills from a B2B marketer, and maybe more specifically, someone in marketing ops, what would they be for those that would really set them apart from the rest?

Kristen:

I think one of the first ones is probably communication, and I think this is important for all job types. But specifically with marketing ops, what I would pay attention to is communicating the right type of information for your audience. So, a lot of times you'll see somebody who is stellar in marketing operations is very detail-oriented. That is great, because it allows you to identify, specifically, am I going to be able to do this? What are the best ways to do this or that? So it's an extremely useful skill, but... or characteristic.

But if you're communicating... if you're very comfortable communicating a high level of detail, and then all of a sudden you have to communicate to the CMO, and you are including all of that detail together without summarizing, what are the key things that the CMO needs to understand, and what are the key things that tie to the business results that person cares about, you might be losing them in all of the detail that you're sharing, whether that's written.

Kristen:

I see it a lot of times like, emails that are just so long. And if you only have two or three minutes to get the highlights, it's impossible to determine what do you need to take away? Or really long chats, or just even in a meeting, taking... I'm long winded, as you can tell. But taking like five minutes to get to the thing you want to say is not the best way to communicate for the audience you're communicating to, if you're working with a CMO, or if you're working with a leader who is short on time, high on results.

So you really need to tailor your communication for your audience and what is important to them and what they care about and how to help you move forward. And you have to plan that in advance. You have to do the thinking in advance to figure out, what are the key points that you need to share that are meaningful? And so I would say communication, definitely, and then specifically, communicating at the right level, for marketing ops, I think, is a key skill.

Crissy:

I was going to say, on top of that, on our last interview, Dan actually gave that piece of advice, he said, be a chameleon. So like, just when you're speaking to someone, tailor the way that you're talking about or the way you even approach it the same way as them, or how you think that they would want to hear it.

For a CMO, like you said, they're short on time, but also they don't know understand technical details. Most CMOs aren't very technical. It's very rare you find one. But even if they are, just give them the information they need to know in a way that is... I wouldn't say dumbed down, but in a way that's very clear and precise that they would understand it.

Kristen:

I think like a good framework to think about is if you give sort of the highlights and the most impactful information, then the person on the other side can always ask questions to get you to go deeper. And if they want you to go deeper, they're going to ask and you'll do that, and then you'll be fully prepared, because you'll have the technical information to get down to that level. It's super hard to do it the other way. If you give them all the details, then for that person to do the mental gymnastics to abstract up what you're saying is much harder.

Charlie:

That's a really good point. And actually, I was working with a client the other day on that. We were trying to build out their roadmap and their plan for marketing ops. And then we'll say, "Okay, well, this is the plan. What is kind of the two sentence kind of summary that you can give to the CMO about kind of the story of what you're working on that quarter?" And then if they want the detail, they can go into that whole plan. So yeah, I think that's such an important point you just brought up.

Kristen:

So I think that's one, communication. The other one is collaboration. Marketing ops is working with all types of people across the organization. It's really a cross-functional role in that way, working on the marketing team, but you're working with sales. Everything you're delivering has an impact on customers, so you sort of are touching the whole organization, which is a great reason why it's a great role to be in. And because of that, you need to learn how to work well with other people.

Specifically, within collaboration, I would say the area to focus on the most is influence. So how do you build relationships with people and influence your thinking so that it's advantageous to them? It kind of ties into the communication piece we were just talking about. If you're working with sales and you know what, let's just say an AE's goals are, and you're trying to build some champions within a team to adopt a way in which you want to do something or a technology... And I think that's a good approach. Like, you want to build some champions within the sales team to support what you're doing.

Kristen:

To do that, you need to put what you're trying to achieve in the terms that they care about. How is it going to help them, and how are they going to benefit from it? How are they going to benefit from it right now? Maybe how are they going to benefit from it in their career? And they're developing a skill that is going to be something that's going to contribute to their professional growth.

So I think really thinking about how you work with people and not forcing information down, but more being a partner and a teammate. When you start to show that you're collaborative in that way, you'll find all these people coming to you. Like, can you solve this for me? Like, I have this challenge, I just want to use you as a sounding board. As soon as you see people start coming to you like that, you've sort of changed the game for yourself.

Charlie:

I love that again, because... Specific examples, where I feel like people in marketing operations fall into the trap of not doing what you just said. It's like, they're trying to implement some tool, like you mentioned, for their sales team, and then so they implement it, maybe it's a sales engagement tool, maybe it's like intent data or something like that, and then all they is build it and then they'll do like a presentation to the sales team and then they go, “Okay, go use it.”

Not once was the sales team kind of brought in to give their opinion on how this should be operationalized, how they should be what. They didn't collaborate within that project. It was, "Okay, I'm the marketing ops person, I'm just going to build this thing, ship it to you. And then if I build it, they're going to use it." And that just never works.

Crissy:

I had this like exact example on a call, literally yesterday. I was talking to a demand gen and a marketing ops person, and they were like, “Oh, we rolled out our intent ABM project yesterday to the STR team, and we've got no feedback, it's just crickets.” As I said, "Well, why do you think that is?" And they said, "Well, I don't know, maybe they just don't understand." And I was like, "Well, that could be part of it, but you were talking about what it is." And I said, "But I think you need to think about your audience. And have you thought about maybe finding a few champions, like STRs improving out the project first, maybe with them." Because them hearing the success that they've had from their own peer on their team is going to be much more useful than you just throwing this information at them. They want to hear from someone who's having success with this, so that they are more willing to adopt it.

I've done this before with salespeople and they said, "Oh, I didn't even think about that." And so they're going to kind of use that to prove out their model. I think once you shift to really think about the psychology of like how to influence that person, like you said, mostly to change behavior, I think that's what definitely sets apart the success for your projects.

Kristen:

Definitely. I think that's a really good example of just if people could walk away from this understanding, like, one thing I could do tomorrow to make a difference. Every time you're rolling out a campaign or doing anything where you require the participation of other people, then it's really great to identify those champions and get them on your side and get them to buy into something. Get them to talk to their teammates about, "Hey, we're launching this tomorrow, and I agreed to support it in this way. Will you help me out with this?" And then it will just grow more organically, and people will be more enthusiastic about it. I think that's a great one.

Another one is just to make sure when you're working with people... Like, in a meeting, for example, let's just say, in your example, if there's a meeting or a call or even a chat of some sort to talk about the rollout, make sure you're getting participation and feedback in that. That you're pausing to make sure that people are engaged and you're asking questions. Is there anything else I can do for you to make sure that this is a success? All of those things help build that influencing collaboration that you need.

Crissy:

Totally. And the second part to that for them, I said, “Don't assume that people know something." The hardest thing for someone to ever say out loud is, "I don't understand.”

"I don't know what you're talking about." It's just, our ego will literally like not let those words exit our mouth. So I said, "Do some quizzing, maybe. Like, make it fun." Just say like, oh, whoever gets this all I'll direct-mail them some treats or something. I used to give out candy in meeting sometimes to STRs and quiz them at the end, just because I want to know, okay, what's the level? Do people get it? Because if they don't... Like, asking one is the first step, but then in a way, where maybe you don't feel like you put people on the spot, turn it into something fun, so you really can leave that meeting knowing, okay, they understand these concepts now.

Charlie:

I think this is such a good example of how this sets up a marketing operations person apart from other people not doing this, because there's a lot of investment that goes into all of these tools. And if they're getting crickets, that's a really bad look for marketing ops and the people voting that out. Like, you look at the wasted investment, potentially, you might end up ripping out whatever you implemented. But if you are able to do everything we just talked about and roll it out and you have a lot of buy in because of that, and that's the success, that sets you apart. That's going to make everyone believes you really know what you're doing as a marketing and operations person.

Crissy:

Totally. So I think all those soft skills are super important. I think even now, especially with remote teams that are even more important, especially communication, how we work with each other, and... We were kind of wondering where you see a gap between the soft skills that people need in marketing ops versus what they've generally have. Just knowing you've worked with different people in demand generation and marketing ops before, but what do you think is like a big gap in the marketing ops world that we maybe haven't touched on?

Kristen:

I think one of them, for sure, is making sure you're communicating at the right level and doing that thinking in advance, which we touched on. Another one, I think, is just generally, if you're... Projecting confidence is another one. And confidence comes across in many different areas. It comes across in your writing, and it comes across in presenting yourself in a video chat, and it comes across in one-on-ones with your managers and teams, etc. But I think projecting confidence, so that you're coming forward with a solution mindset. That I've analyzed this problem, we have multiple solutions, here's my recommendation. And you're saying it or writing it or projecting it with confidence is an important thing to do in this role.

Because you don't want to be sort of details and information, but not the driver of a recommendation. And I think for me, that leads into the second point, which is really thinking of yourself as a strategic partner. In my view, the marketing ops leaders that I've worked with are like my strategic partner. You've been that Crissy, my strategic partner. I'm going to go to you on every big decision to get input, maybe to get the recommendation, the solution, knowing that you're going to take into account all of the factors, including technically how it will work and will it be successful with our setup and our stack and our people.

Kristen:

And so I think the sooner, in your career, you can start to think strategically and position yourself as a strategic partner, the better. And what that means for me is that you're thinking about things holistically, with the skill of problem solving. You're collecting data, you're analyzing the data, you're determining what's important. If you're evaluating tool recommendations, you understand, what are the top three things that matter for my team and for my company right now? How do I analyze this problem, so that I'm able to explain, "Look, I prioritize these criteria and I created a framework to rank this decision like this"? "This is why I'm making this recommendation top one, here are the pros and cons. And this recommendation top two. Now let's have a strategic discussion about one and two."

Not focused on all those details underneath that probably your CMO or your leader doesn't need to know unless they ask the questions to get down. So I think the sooner in your career you do that positioning around being a strategic partner and build frameworks for yourself in problem solving that make sense to you, that you can then communicate with confidence, the better off.

Crissy:

Totally. And I think this sets people apart, and I've been lucky enough to have you really guide me. Six years ago, when we first started working with each other and you were my boss, I had expertise with working cross-functionally, I led market operations departments, but I think you then gave me the great advice and you let me do it on my own, but you put me in a position where I could really command a room or a call or own the reporting and deliver that and gave me feedback on, “Okay, that reporting... Like, this is what's going to be important to sales people. Let's focus on that.” Or “We're creating this newsletter that's going to go to executives of just like the key things that they need to focus on. Give them straight up... Like, it needs to be just a few bullet points of what they need to care about.”

That just gave me the confidence, knowing like, okay, they're going to understand the reporting I'm giving them. When I'm talking to a group of salespeople, I can own that call, like have the confidence. Even though their personalities are really strong and sometimes intimidating, but the confidence knowing that I'm an expert in what I do, if I don't show that confidence, they lose confidence, and they're not going to listen to anything I say. So I think confidence is key. And if you're a leader of an operations team, or if you manage one, letting them find that on their own, or also giving them the freedom to figure that out themselves, instead of just being a micromanager, would really be super helpful to them.

Kristen:

I think there's two things to help with building that confidence. One thing, you had mentioned earlier, which is, you can surround yourself with almost like... People talk about having like a personal board of directors, which I think is one good way to look at it. And another way to look at it is to have like a peer sounding board that you go to. I know that this person is an expert in this skill. I'm always going to ask them. And by knowing what their feedback is on my plan, that gives me confidence that I've checked it with somebody who's like an expert in this and they agree that this is a reasonable and good solution.

You can use your community to do that, to find those experts that you build on your own like personal sounding board. So I think that helps in sort of building the confidence that you need to then be making solutions that you feel... not only you feel strongly about, but are also legitimately backed up by a community that supports that as well.

Charlie:

So I know we're running out of time here a little bit, but I want to know, before we end, in terms of all of these soft skills we've talked about, if someone has been listening to this and goes, "Yes, I get it. I need to improve, I need to work on this." Then what do they do?

Kristen:

So I would say some good actionable tips would be start to build that community around you, where you're asking for advice and asking for feedback. That could be really simple. It could start with one person at work where, you're in similar meetings, you're exposed to each other a lot and you serve as a sounding board back and forth for each other. I think that's a really practical thing you can do. Another practical thing you can do is ask for feedback.

Get over your fear of asking for feedback, build a relationship with your boss, where you say, "We've been having one-on-ones for the past quarter, and I've really been practicing communicating with confidence. How am I doing on that? Could you give me real feedback? Because this is important to me. And it's a goal of mine. By the end of the year, it's a goal of mine over the next year to project confidence in every interaction I have, and I want you to help me stay accountable to that." And all of a sudden you're like pulling them into your world, which is a great way to build relationships.

Kristen:

And then I would say, learn the soft skills. Certainly, Ox can be a resource for you to do that, and pick out a couple. It's hard to do everything exhaustively. Pick out a couple that you want to focus on and make them personal and professional goals together. And then practice. Practice at work, hold yourself accountable to practicing. Practice in your personal life with your relationships and friends, and say that you're working on this and you want feedback, and be open to that feedback, and it will help you get better.

Charlie:

It sounds like the first step is even thinking about it, right? Even acknowledging that soft skills are important, and not just being so tunnel vision or maybe your to-do lists, and then setting goals, and then, like you said, kind of other parts getting feedback. But really, taking it on as a challenge to improving those. I feel like most people don't even... they haven't even thought about that and how impressive that could be at really driving them forward, elevating that role and making them rise up the ranks, if that's what they want.

Crissy:

I think a lot of people will either... they'll treat certain things with a lot of rigor, like their health, like what they're eating, working out, but then when it comes to their career, they literally wait until their boss just shoves their performance review in front of them and says, "These are all the things you need to work on." Don't wait until your boss to tell you to work on things. There's a lot of self-reflection that you can do. And it's just starting there, to start the conversation with your boss, I think, is key, especially as we have remote teams.

For leaders that are listening to this too and you have an ops team or marketers and that soft skills are important and it might be really hard to even try and mentor them right now, when we are dispersed and just sitting at our desks and we're not able to have that collaborative feel, definitely look into Ox, it's ox.work. Check it out and make that culture of kind of learning and self-development keep to your team. So thank you so much, Kristen, for joining us today. It was really great.

Charlie:

Do you have any final words before we let you go?

Kristen:

I think that was a perfect way to sum it up. Pick out a skill, focus on that skill, and treat it like you would anything else that's important to your life; health, fitness, those types of things, and practice it. And it might be a little uncomfortable at first, or hard, but by working through that, that's how you kind of get to the next level. So I think it's really important. And I'm so appreciative, I think what you're doing and sharing this kind of really helpful content for the community is awesome.

Charlie:

Love it. Thank you so much.

Crissy:

We'll see everyone next time on fwd: Thinking.