On this week’s episode of fwd:thinking, we talked about how complicated marketing ops is getting, why you can’t focus on everything, marketing ops anxiety, and ways to audit your skill-set in order to achieve longevity in your career.

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Transcription

Charlie:

Marketing automation Platform, CRM, enrichment attribution, chatbots, complex analytics, BI databases, SQL, Apex, APIs, SQL, web analytics I-PASS, CDP, ABM, demand gen, lead gen, lead routing, lead to account matching, email marketing, virtual events, field marketing, sales engagement tools, webinar tools, data normalizations, sales processes, data visualization, prospect lifecycle management, customer experience, STR cadences, copywriting, QA, database hygiene, data orchestration, complex engagement programs, account-based advertising, duplicate management, data automation, webinars, intent data sales automation, GDPR privacy policy, CPA, AI, working cross-functionally building a roadmap, operationalizing custom market, prioritization framers, reading your CMO's mind, predicting the future, scaling campaign volume by a million, working with half a headcount you need, and making sure nothing ever goes wrong ever. Marketing operations, probably missing a lot there, but doesn't that give everyone a little bit of anxiety when you think about your to-do list.

Crissy:

Yeah, I think everyone's listening to that. Well, if we didn't lose you because you thought that that was maybe something wrong with the podcast, of all of you, you're probably thinking, "Wow, these are all the things they need to think about every day in marketing ops and how overwhelming that is." So welcome to today's episode of forward. We're going to discuss how to navigate our roles, how to basically build out our skill-set, and be confident in it.

But understand there are times where you don't need to know everything. You need to know about everything and the strategy behind everything, but becoming an expert in everything just, kind of, seems impossible right now. For those who are unable to keep up, you might be feeling less than in your role, but really it's normal. We're all feeling this right now. And so, to kick it off, that's what Charlie just spout out all the things that, kind of, encapsulate just marketing ops.

Crissy:

It goes even beyond that. Charlie posted a post on LinkedIn talking about that, and just in the past 10 years, it's in everything in that list. But plus more people can think of everything added on and on and on. It's just created this sense of chaos, I think, for marketing ops people, because they're unsure of where they should focus their time and learning and it's also hard to keep up your learning when you're just doing.

You're very busy in your role, and so we wanted to talk through the different types of roles in marketing ops, how to identify where to spend your time in your learning based on what your goal is in that career journey and then how that can really help you just build your confidence, knowing that you are the expert in what you do. So, yeah, did you want to kick it off, Charlie? I know you have a few of the different personas that you want to talk about and help us identify what those are.

Charlie:

Yeah, I mean the most important part is that you can't really be everything, so I think in a marketing profession, we... It hasn't crept up on us, but it has been something that's evolved over the last 10 years since we started. Back in 2010, yes, I'm sure a lot of this stuff on this list was out there, but the general marketing demand-gen person and marketing ops person, you were mainly dealing with your marketing automation platform, Salesforce, maybe a few other aspects, but the less definitely wasn't this long, right?

As all of these aspects... The world got more and more digital, more and more platforms, more and more technologies, more and more things like go-to markets like ABM and all of these different things. The other things like GDPR and CCPA all these things, kind of, crept up and added to the to-do list.

Charlie:

Yeah, it's got pretty overwhelming to keep up with it all, but as a marketing operations person, we feel like we need to be an expert in every single one of these things, but I just don't think that's possible, especially for a lot of the companies we work with who... They've got marketing ops team of one to three people. Or if you're just that marketing ops person of one, you really can't be an expert in all of this, and especially if you're trying to elevate yourself to a management position, a director-level position, maybe even you have aspirations to be a CMO one day, you just shouldn't be trying to be the expert in every single one of these things.

Crissy:

Sometimes you're being asked to do that, and so there's almost this sense of, “Oh my gosh, I was supposed to know how to do all that and build out the strategy.” My boss has asked me to do this, but ego gets in the way then, and we don't want to say, “Oh no, I don't know how to do that.” Or, “Oh, that's going to take me a long time to figure out how to do that, but still make my goals.”

I think it takes the courage to stand up and say, "This is why I can't do that, but we can go find the expert to do that, and it's going to be even better for us in the long run." But instead, a lot of marketing ops people just want to be scrappy and want to feel like they can figure it out, and I think I love that mentality. We have that. A lot of the great marketing ops people we know have that, but after a certain point, you're not really helping your career-

Charlie:

Especially when it gets out of, kind of, your skill set. A lot of the things I listed are out there, yes, you need to be an expert in as a marketing operations person, but when you get out of that skill set and you start going into data science or complex, really intense, Apex coding in Salesforce and things like that. Unless you are an expert in that stuff, you might be creating more trouble than it's worth.

Bad code in Salesforce is not good, so there's a time and a place for trying to figure out things and be scrappy like Crissy said, but at the same time, you do need to figure out what is your lane now in marketing operations. It's no longer just like, "I'm a marketing operations person. I do everything." There are specialist skill-sets now developing in marketing operations that you can decide upon, and then you can just be focused and be the true expert there. Or you could be the generalist, make sure you can speak everyone's language. Makes sure you understand what SQL is and understand what Apex is. Understand all of these complex things enough to be able to have the conversations with the expert.

Charlie:

We wanted to share something I saw from Scott Brinker the other day around different roles in ops. I thought it was just really, really nicely explained. So, if you're listening to this, you're not going to be able to see it, but I'll try and do a good job of explaining it. There's definitely 4 key areas, and actually I listened to him this morning and there was another one, the fifth one, which is management, but up in the top left, and they're, kind of on these two axis going North to South, you have process orientation and technology orientation.

And then on the other axis, you have external orientation versus internal orientation. Where you have people who are high-process and working internally, that's your operations orchestrator, so that's like your marketing automation admin. Where you have someone facing more externally, but dealing with process, that's people building your programs and your campaigns like your growth marketers. Then you have people externally facing, but more of the technology orientation, he calls them the marketing-makers, these like your engineers, your developers, those kind of people. And then you have technology orientation and internal, what he calls the modelers, and this is your analytics architects.

Charlie:

I love these four key areas that are, kind of, the architects, the orchestrators, the demand builder and the marketing-maker because I think each one of these, even if you're a person of one, even if you're a team of one this really does... if you really going to do this, probably you would have a person for each of these things. Right?

Crissy:

Yeah, and a lot of the times all of this, kind of, falls onto one person, but we'll find that, “Oh shoot.” In the marketing maker's side, someone who's a nutritionally operations orchestrator or the demand-end marketer, they don't know how to code. They don't understand how to build Apex. And to be honest, I would say, “Don’t even try.”

If your whole goal in your career is to not be that marketing engineer or developer, it's much better for you to just go and find someone to do that. But a lot of the times deep down inside, we just think, “Oh, I need to figure that out.” Or, “Oh man, I don't know how to code.” That probably means I'm not the best marketing ops person. I'm not as technical as XYZ, and he talks about how to build the best API setup for doing whatever. No, it doesn't mean that. You might know how to talk to the CMO. You know what makes a great demand gen campaign. You know how to operationalize things like chat or using intent data. That is value and that makes you a great ops person, just because you don't know Apex, doesn't take that away from you.

Charlie:

And that's just where the breadth of everything that we have to know has got so wide now that if you keep looking at all of these examples of where there is an expert in that, like you go around, you see, "Oh, this person is an expert and in databases and SQL and complex analytics, I'm not." And then you start thinking bad about yourself. And then you look at someone like a developer and you're like, "Oh my God, they're really good at developing and working with APIs, and I'm not as good at that." But then you've got to look at what you are good at. Take away that imposter syndrome, leverage people where you can get that insight, but understand what you're good at, what you may be need to improve, but not, kind of, feel bad about it that you haven't been able to keep up with the breadth of everything in marketing operations.

That's, kind of, back to what we were saying before, it's around really trying to figure out what you want to get out of this. If you want to be an architect, then yeah, you're going to have to start learning about APIs. If you want to be, a data science person, you're going to have to learn all of that. If you want to be a Salesforce administrator, yeah, you're probably going to have to learn Process Builder and Apex. But if you want to just elevate your career in marketing operations and maybe run a team of all of those people, then you need to learn the language. You need to understand the concepts, work good enough that you can provide value within those conversations, but you don't need to be the absolute expert in each of these little niche areas.

Crissy:

Totally, I think that we're not saying... We want it to be clear, we're not saying this is the time where we're saying cliche career advice like, "Fake it till you make it." No, we're not saying that. You literally can't do that in ops. If you are doing that, we'll see how many jobs you get run through in the next few years. But that's a different scenario. But for those of you who are listening to this and like... You're feeling down about any of those places where you feel like you're not up to fluff. Well, it's just that's the case for you to just, kind of, sit down, write a list, maybe do an audit.

Audit your skill-set. Do an exercise. These are all the areas. These are the things I know really well. These are the ones that I know pretty well enough to actually articulate that to someone the importance of them and how they work. And these are the things I just don't understand. If you find that some of the things in that category you don't understand, you need to be clear. “Is this something I need to learn to be successful at the role that I want?”

Charlie:

Yeah, map it to your goals.

Crissy:

Yeah. And then if it's not, but is it something that I need to, kind of, know about? Well, do enough of that research. Find an expert in that. Maybe someone that can mentor you and help you understand, or as you're going through those projects really, truly, someone is building something for you, have them explain it to you. What's the importance of this? How did you build it? Even though you may not be able to go back and replicate it, just really understanding how it was built and being able to articulate will only help you in leading someone to actually go and do that one day.

You can actually say, "okay, I need this process in Salesforce to do this, and I need these fields in order for that to do that." You really will understand the downstream effects of it because someone's actually articulated that to you before, but you don't need to have the skill-set to actually do it. You can find the expert to do it. That's a really good exercise for you folks in marketing ops to just address what are the things you actually need to know? And then if you find that there's really a skill-set you're lacking, maybe carve out some part of your day to do that certification. Do whatever training you need to do and really invest that time into yourself.

Charlie:

Yeah, because the assumption that we're making with this podcast is that you do know something really well. If you're sitting there like, "I don't know anything." Then yeah, you probably should work on a lot of things. The assumption is that you've been in marketing operations a while. You've got a really good understanding of the core marketing-ops function and all of the technicalities within that. But there's these extra areas that are just constantly keep on being added on that you asked to be an expert into, and that's where doing the audit, trying to understand it. Is that a path you want to go down? Because if you have to choose, like we keep bringing up, kind of, reporting SQL, BI and Salesforce, API, I think, because that is like a common... Like a process builder out there.

Like a common thing for marketing operations people to start. Obviously, a lot of the people start learning that. I think that the issue is if you go, "Okay." You do that audit, and then you map it to your goals and if they say I need to be an expert in all of this stuff because you're never going to become an expert in all of it because you just don't have the physical time to do it, So you're going to become just like... You're never going to get to that level, just, kind of, very high level, which is okay. You want to have at least a high-level understanding of things. But if you can focus on the areas that you know they're going to really provide value, then you will be able to truly become an expert in those areas. So, running that audit and figuring out what you need to get to the next level is super important.

Crissy:

Totally, I think to sum it up for everything that we said, I think the first thing is trying to identify, what do you want your career journey to be. If you don't know, maybe, where do you find yourself? Where's your job description even lie? And then do an assessment, write down, "These are all the things I know. These are all the things that I, kind of, understand and can articulate, and these are things I don't know." And then identify how you can maybe learn the concepts about them, but not be an expert in them, or where you maybe need to kind of spruce up your skill-set because it will help you do your job better. And understand that marketing ops is just getting even more complex every day, so it's a hard target to give yourself to try and be an expert and everything.

Charlie:

Yeah that would be another thing next week

Crissy:

Yeah, but also, it's changing in the sense where we're getting more budget, we're getting more eyes on our department, and so there is going to be defined swim lanes for us to be in. We don't maybe have to be everything to everyone one day and we really can focus, and if you do want to be a leader of the team, this is what we're saying is a good place to start to not try and be an expert in everything, but really be understand-

Charlie:

Really competent, right?

Crissy:

Yeah, and that confidence is key because you do also then need the extra time also to work on the skill-sets that are going to really help you. That's, kind of, your communication and working cross-functionally, which is hard to do when you're just deep in the weeds somewhere. We hope this was useful. If you have any more advice, feel free to let us know and-

Charlie:

And reduces some of our anxiety for everyone trying to keep up. If you want to do that audit, I mean, you could go to my LinkedIn page and copy and paste all of the items in there. Other people would. I did a load of other items on there, so you could just copy-paste that. Put it in Excel. Give yourself a score of one to 10 on all of those things and try and map that to where you want to be. It could be a good start.

Crissy:

Yeah, so go out there, be confident and figure out what else, maybe, you need to learn and what you don't. We'll see you next time on fwd:Thinking.