WTF is Marketing Operations with Amy Goldfine

Hartmann: 0:23

Hello and welcome everybody to another episode of ops cast brought to you by the moat pros. I'm Michael Hartman joined today by cohost Naomi Liu, and Mike Rizzo. And normally I would ask you to say hello, but we really need to do that today.

Naomi: 0:38

I don't think so.

Hartmann: 0:39

I don't think so. All right, well, let's get right into this today. We've got a special guests. We've got Amy Goldfein as Amy says by day, she is head of marketing operations at Iterable. The customer activation platform that helps brands deliver joyful experiences with harmonized, individualized and dynamic communications at scale, I feel like we should be getting, you know, some sort of sponsorship money for this. I don't know, by night.

Amy: 1:07

team. Thanks. You.

Hartmann: 1:08

Yeah. By night, Amy is the founder of marketing ops advice.com aside for Mopro to get actionable 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 market or GIP. And Amy, I know you already said it, but thanks for joining us.

Amy: 1:28

Well, thank you so much for having me really excited to talk to y'all.

Hartmann: 1:31

This is going to be fun. Um, so when you, and I first talked about you joining us as guests, uh, you had recently just started the blog for mope rose. Why don't we start with just like, what was the initiation behind that? What led you to starting the blog and kind of, how is it going through.

Amy: 1:48

Yeah. You know, I really love helping other Moe pros. You know, I spend a lot of time in the Mopro community. I'm, I'm a moderator on the Marketing nation, uh, boards, you know, 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, um, and. They're cutting these themes that were coming up over and over. And I found myself like typing out the same responses or kind of 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 like wanted to get out in the world. Cause I wanted to people know like how to find errors and Marketo. You know how to, um, you know, pull in, uh, RSS feeds of all your status notifications, you know, into slacks. You kind of know what's going on with all your tech. So, you know, I've written a lot for, you know, the Marchetto blog. I've given a lot of presentations, but I decided I wanted to own something my own and, you know, have something that I could really control. And so, um, marketing ops advice.com was born.

Hartmann: 2:59

Marketing ops advice.

Amy: 3:06

Yeah. Yeah. I bought a couple of my hover bill was kind of insane, but you know, it was worth it.

Hartmann: 3:17

So funny. That's great. Um, so, so how long has it, so how long has the blog been live now?

Amy: 3:25

Uh, just maybe like two months, you know, um, it really started with this, um, me really wanting to talk about the four pillars of marketing operations. And I really want to write this article called WTF is marketing operations. Um, you know, I was just, um, felt like this was a concept that I really wanted the world to understand. It's been so helpful. It's really been like life-changing to my career. Um, and there's not a ton of content on it and not as. In the way that I feel like it should be presented. So I was like, I'm going to write this or write this for myself. I'm going to share it with the world and hopefully it'll help people.

Hartmann: 4:00

Yeah. So that's one of the things we wanted to talk about is that specific posts, was that the, I think that was the first post for your blog, right? Yeah. So, um, and I, I love the PG name and title of. So, all right, so, so yeah. So for the folks who haven't already read your blog, because I'm sure it's circulating throughout, throughout the community, you can, you, you mentioned the four pillars, so maybe not everybody knows what that is. Why don't you talk to us? What, what those are.

Amy: 4:29

absolutely. So, um, I did not create the four pillars of marketing ops. I give so much credit to Edward unbank who runs the consultancy at TUMO. Um, and they run the mops con. Virtual conference. And in 2019, his keynote was the state of marketing operations and he introduced this concept of the four pillars of marketing ops. I just was like mind blowing. Um, 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 pillars as is explains what marketing operations is. Cause marketing ops is not one thing. Um, and it kind of allows you to understand what the different functions are. Um, how to build your team, how to get what you want out of your career. Um, so the first pillar is the platform ops, and this is really like running the engine of marketing ops, um, from both a technical and a strategic perspective. And I should say that all of these pillars there's technical and strategic pieces to it. Um, 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, you know, architecture, governance, naming conventions, and taxonomy. Um, you know, if you're a Marketo user, these is your operational programs in your admin panel. So scoring lifecycle integrations, all that kind of stuff. Um, this is actually like what I really love both from a technical and a strategic perspective. Um, I love platform ops. It's really like, you know, where my heart lies. Um, I think it's probably like one of the, um, 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, Can't do the other ones, um, platform or pillar two is campaign ops. Um, 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. Right? This is sending emails. Um,

Hartmann: 6:32

w we, they do emails over there in that

Amy: 6:34

Yes. Yeah, they do webinars. Right? Um, all that stuff is really important. You cannot do it. If you don't have a good foundation of platform ops and you can't do it well without a good strategy. Um, but you know, it's everything from. Any templates. So obviously my bias is from Marketo's on Marketo has programmed templates, which are like really the foundation of scaling your campaign ops. But this is really platform agnostic. So setting up your webinar and your marketing automation platform and your webinar tool, building the invites and operational emails, sinking it to your CRM, tracking registration, attendance, posting the recording for on-demand viewing all of that. Technical part of getting your marketing out in the world, um, 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 hear 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?

Hartmann: 7:33

Yeah. Oh yeah. I would even go so far, especially if you're like a team of one or two.

Amy: 7:38

Yeah.

Hartmann: 7:39

Like when you're expected to be both tactical and strategic, right. That 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: 7:54

Yeah. Um, and you know, campaign ops can be centralized or decentralized. I don't want to go too far into that because that could be an entire separate conversation. Um, but you

Hartmann: 8:04

we have I think we actually got some episodes already on that particular topic.

Amy: 8:08

It's like, it's a, it's a hot topic. I have very, I have emotions about it, but, Um, uh, but you know, just briefly centralized is when you have a single person or a team executing. So they take requests and they're, you know, real specialists in the tools. Um, 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 like help them. They have questions. It does not take that entire burden off of marketing. Um, so, uh, the third pillar is marketing intelligence ops, um, sexually like the term. I like the least, it's a little awkward cause most people just call it analytics or BI. Um, but you know, we like to keep oxygen in all of them. Uh, but this is your reporting, right? This is obviously really important. If you're a smaller team, you're probably not doing, you know, or a younger, less 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 bipolar's, like that's marketing intelligence. Right. Um, and depending upon your company's maturity, your team structure, marketing ops may own this. BI may own this. There may be a partnership. You may have marketers who are stronger or less strong. Um, it kind of depends, but no matter what marketing ops needs to be involved, they really understand the data. Um, they can help, you know, the marketers with their reporting, Actually, we have a whole, um, initiative right? now to train our marketers to be better at Salesforce, um, so, that they can run a lot of the reporting themselves. And then we're also working with our BI team

Hartmann: 9:49

So I, I just I had like Ms. Shiver in my back that statement, right.

Amy: 9:55

me more.

Hartmann: 9:56

Like you think you're going to have the marketers, like, I didn't work with a lot of great marketers, but like just getting your head around the concept of objects in Salesforce is I

Amy: 10:08

It's hard. And, and I think. a lot of it is going to be like building templates for them, but, you know, just so they can, you know, for example, um, activate, which is our conference series, like when we had activate virtual, I ran so 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, um, you know, uh, By region and by market segment and, you know, persona and all this stuff. And like afterwards, I was talking to our head of customer and partner marketing and she was like, oh, she's like, you know, my team should own that. Like, you should give them a base report and then we need to teach them how to manipulate it, themselves, that kind of stuff. Um, and you know, uh, absolutely. I love dad jokes.

Hartmann: 10:54

Totally lad.

Amy: 11:06

love it. That's

Hartmann: 11:08

need it. I needed it. I should have been ready with the sound effect, like NA Naomi. So the folks who are listening to can't see them right now in the old ways, just like shaking your head, covering your face. It's like, I can't tell she's laughing or crying.

Naomi: 11:24

Good. thing. I was on mute. Right.

Amy: 11:27

Yeah. You know, um, but I think no matter what, no matter what your team is, it's really important for marketing ops to be involved in this. Like, you know, we have a very sophisticated BI team run by some really smart people, but they don't necessarily understand the data and they don't know what assumptions to make or really how to like, you know, you know, they really need us to validate and to sort of be the conduit between the marketing team. Um, and the. Um, and the last pillar is one, uh, that I think is the most fun. It's also the one that I'm definitely the least skilled in. Um, and that is development operations or dev mops. Um, and this is custom coding in your marketing tools. So everything from custom web development, scripting non-native integrations, process automation, web hooks, I mean, The sky's the limit, you know, all these tools have really great API APIs. Um, you know, you can do a lot of great stuff. This is definitely something that, unless your team is pretty big, um, you will probably outsource. So we have an agency that has a great dev team and like, we need their help with someone scripting, or we had them build a web-based naming convention generator, which is really cool. Um, so, you know, especially with the decentralized team, for them to be able to. You know, use a naming convention. They just, you know, pick fields, um, you know, from a dropdown and it spits out a name, um, and a description for them. So, um, you know, I, I love DevMOps. I love it. There are people that I could hire for specific projects and not have to have somebody, you know, full-time but yeah, that, um, that that's the four pillars.

Hartmann: 13:02

Yeah. So I have heard, I had heard of the four pillars awhile back and never really dug into it probably until I talked to your blog posts. But yeah, I can see how it could be used just before we go further. So Amy, so in that vein, you know, I think, um, I, I re I do like the concept of how this was applied or the concept. How, how do you suggest people apply it? And I think I'm thinking of at least two scenarios, cause you mentioned tactical versus strategic and sort of thinking like general sort of marketing ops. use of and leadership use of the,

Amy: 13:39

Yeah, absolutely. So I think like, you know, there's a reason I give the subtitle of my, uh, my post is why nobody fully understands your job and neither do you Um, because I think. it's so helpful for Mo pro's. You know, 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 goals 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. You know, and when it's, I swear that having these four pillars and understanding them, it's like, you have a secret code. It's like, you know, when you're a kid, you get that like spike hit and there was like the Dakota thing. And you put, you know, put the, the, um, clear sheet, like over and all of a sudden, like shows what's being, you know, behind. Sorry, I'm really bad at metaphors, but we're just going to go with it. Um, I don't, I don't know what you call it. It's not Dakota ring. Anyway. Um, I really like gives you a map. And after I watched this mops con 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 like 45 minutes or an hour to watch the whole thing. Um, but it's great. Uh, but I was like, oh, you know, I looked at job descriptions and I suddenly understood, oh, you know, This, they really want somebody with dev experience. I don't have that. This is all campaign ops. I don't want to do that. This is a little more marketing intelligence than I really want to do. You know, it really like helped me, you know, pick and choose the job descriptions that I wanted also helped me have like really intelligent conversations with, uh, hiring managers and recruiters, I think in every interview. And this is back when we had in-person interviews. I think I drew the pillars on the whiteboard every single time. So I think that really helps it also, it helped me understand why I was unhappy in my job. Um, you know, I was in a great job. Um, I, you know, was managing a direct report. I was at a company that's really going somewhere. They were acquired not long after I left. Um, but. I was miserable. And I realized it's because my quarterly projects were all platform ops. It was like lead scoring the lifecycle on integrations, all that kind of stuff. But my boss kept pulling me into campaign ops and like, I hate doing campaign ops. Like I just it's really like, just I've I've run more webinars. I like to think about like, Ton of emails. I don't want to do that anymore. I like to help people scale that I love like helping coming up with a program templates and figuring out like what the, um, campaign member statuses 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, you know, plenty of interviews, we'd start talking and afterwards I'd be like, yeah, actually, You're looking for something that's this is, this is mostly campaign ops. This is not what I want to do. I don't think we should continue further. So I think it was good for me, you. know, and the companies, um, so that's, you know, that like really helps. I think also like, Even if you're happy in your job, you know, where you're not looking for a new job, it can help you just understand, like, you know, what do I want to keep doing? What I want to, what do I want to do more of? What do I want to, um, do less of and you know, what do I want to learn? So it really helps, um, you know, guide those conversations. Um, and you know, yeah. That's amazing.

Hartmann: 17:50

You think.

Amy: 17:58

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think in terms of like maturity, um, 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 death offs. Like, that's fine. Like I've been, I've been in companies where we didn't have dev ops. That's totally fine. Maybe you're paying for custom email templates and landing page. I would actually, I would argue that as a really good use of your time and money. Um, but yeah, that's fine. And like, if again, young, smaller company, newer like marketing intelligence probably doesn't have to be that sophisticated. You're probably not maybe using, I don't even want to say the, a word, um, you know, shin, uh, cause that's a whole other topic, but you know, you know, it might, that might, you know, be. You have to have platform ops solid in order to do campaign ops campaign, like, you know, 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 who can't see me, but I just got like a real angry look on my

Hartmann: 20:12

she's talking to you. If

Amy: 20:15

Um,

Hartmann: 20:15

was looking right at me at that.

Amy: 20:17

you know, um, you know, if things aren't configured properly, um, You know, w earlier we were talking about events. If your event platform is not properly integrated their marketing automation platform, you can send it all the event emails you want. If you can't get registered to sync into your event platform, that's a problem, you know? And so that kind of stuff is so foundational. If you don't have a clear lead lifecycle, if you don't okay. Again, I feel, I feel like. S S S word scoring also kind of like a touchy topic. Um, like spoiler alert. I hate lead scoring, but like, you know, 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 lead scoring, they will say the agree and then you watch it and then they complain and tigress. Yeah. Yeah. I,

Naomi: 21:14

I, want to, um, I want to step back to a comment you made earlier about, uh, the maturity piece. And I'm curious what you think about, you know, 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

Amy: 21:33

Yeah, no, I think it's

Naomi: 21:34

like how they accept it. Right. Because I feel like I'm kind of in, like, I. I've had that, like not currently, but I've had that in, um, past iterations of this life where, you know, the team is more mature than what the business is willing to accept and we can do more, but then it's like becoming. Teacher student type of situation. Right. So it's like, there's, it's very rare that it's like, exactly. Even there's always going to 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, you know, trying to educate them up to a level. Does that make sense? I'm kind

Amy: 22:09

Absolutely. No. 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. You know, maybe the data's not there. Maybe you don't have the team in place, maybe there's other priorities. Um, so yes, there certainly can be tension between the org, um, you know, and the team, but I think marketing ops. Hopefully he can lead, you know, and try to bring everybody with them and educate people. Right. You know, I think, um, I've, I think everybody on the marketing team has seen the four pillars. Everybody on my rev ops team has seen it, you know, I've given my charter presentation. Um, you know, and, and I think, um, you know, as much education as you can do, but yeah, I mean, not always in lock step. You're right. Naomi. yeah. And I think the other thing Mike, is that, you know, assuming you're using Salesforce, um, making sure that your campaign member statuses or concerns. know, how can you, you know, all of these attribution tools tend to go off Salesforce campaigns and like they pick which ones are considered success in Poland's attribution model. If you don't have consistency there, like that's a huge problem. And if you have people who aren't following your instructions and the campaign members never make it from Marketo to Salesforce. You know, that's another, another problem. So I think really having

Hartmann: 26:20

or having a discipline of keeping updated on opportunities, right. I actually ran into a situation, heard about a situation recently where the sales team wasn't closing out lost opportunities or market moves, duplicates. They were deleted. So for those listening, you should just like you should've seen the looks on

Naomi: 26:43

we, all of our heads just like, whoa.

Amy: 26:56

Um, Yeah, I. I'm speechless

Hartmann: 27:09

no, I know I have, when I heard that, I was like, what? Wait what? Um, so yeah, but, but I've, I've said for a long time, like, I actually think that in terms of long-term importance, I'm starting to believe that th that my ops or that reporting analytics is isn't should become more and more important, like, cause we had no. No issue generating data. It's like, what are we doing with it as hard, but it requires to really be able to use it for decision-making or getting better or automating more the discipline of people doing setup or managing campaigns or managing opportunities all the way through. Right. 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. Done it all the way through.

Amy: 28:03

Um, Yeah. I mean, uh, I think it depends. So in like my current, uh, occurrence setup, I have, um, you know, a direct report Geraldine who part of her job is, is analytics. Um, she, um, owns our attribution tool set up, um, and she, um, It's done a ton of like campaign, you know, kind of QBR and have your campaign reporting. What's working, what's not working. Um, 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. Um, so for, I'll give you an example of where I think like marketing ops comes into play. So we were having this tension between what our campaign member status. Our, um, and our campaign types, trying to show, trying to sh versus like the channel of like the effort. So it, you know, we were showing that our demo request form was a big driver. Fortunately that's you sh that should be, especially for your like lower, lower tier market segments. But marketing leadership was like, well, that doesn't tell me any. I need to know where those demos are coming from. Are they organic? Are they coming from paid channels? You know, what pay channels they coming from, but we didn't want to redo our Salesforce campaign and Marketo program set up and campaign member statuses. Cause that would completely change our campaign ops and you know how that works. So she came in. Um, with a way to pair campaign member statuses and campaign types, um, and turn them into, I think we're calling them channels and that's being built in our BI tool so that we can look and see which channels are driving things. So I think that's where like that partnership really comes, that marketing ops comes with like the understanding, um, and you know, BI is able to execute, um, you know, that kind of thing. Yeah.

Naomi: 31:52

I saw that look on your face, Michael.

Hartmann: 31:54

know I know cause like I, I, um, no, so I, I, I, I actually think. I can, I see where you're coming from my, at the same time, my experience has been that people who are really like, sort of general, a general purpose, I hate to say it, but, you know, BI analytics kind of real, real strong, they like the nuances and complexities and messiness of B2B marketing and sales data really is. It's such, it's such a unique. It's not, it's not as clean as like doing financial data or even just pure sales data. Right. I mean, I think, um, so that's why I struggled with like, 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 sort of 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 kind of stuff that goes with marketing. I think it's, you run the risk of it not being very useful, or it's going to tell a story that it really shouldn't because it's missing a piece of understanding of how the, the process of.

Amy: 33:46

Yeah. I mean, I, yeah, yeah. I think it's all about. Yeah. You know, and I think it's all about like 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 ops leader or a rev ops leader. Um, really like understanding what do you need now? What, what can you wait on? What can you outsource? Um, and especially, I think we've all seen these job descriptions that is like everything in the kitchen saying they want an, a manager. Y specialist level.

Hartmann: 34:23

No, no, no, no. It's no longer manager level. it's director titles that are individually.

Amy: 34:29

Yeah. Yeah. Well, it's yes. So, uh, there's a lot of messiness there. Um, I sound things, things like I've hit a nerve. I'm gonna try to move slowly away from that nerve. But, um, you know, I think like really using this to be super clear about what you want. And then, you know, I've been in a situation where I posted a job. And it actually turned out that like, that person did not exist. So then I went back and I sort of looked at the different pieces of the job and, um, the job, one of the things was dev ops, um, VR actually just really heavy dev. And we were like, you know what? We can use an agency out. And we cut that part of the job, restructured the job description. And we found Jeanette on my team who is phenomenal and it turns out is exactly what we need. Um, so I think, you know, using, using the four pillars to structure and to like, as, you know, as you're doing the hiring process to adjust if necessary. Um, 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 want to go in there. Look, nobody's going to love a hundred percent of their job duties, right? Like we all have to do things we don't want to do sometimes, but if somebody's stuck spending 80% of their time doing stuff, they hate, they're going to leave you. Um, and you're going to have a much bigger problem. So I think it really helps, you know, drive those conversations with your team about their growth.

Hartmann: 35:57

Well, 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. Right. But anyway, But, um, but if there is a hierarchy or even if there's not a hierarchy is I thought you were going to go towards each. So you went towards organizational needs, right? What do we need on the team? What we need to be able to support. First versus later, I was thinking, could this also apply to individuals who say, you know, I'm currently in, um, platform. Well, I mean, you, can't probably more likely in campaign probably starting campaign ops, and I want to be more in platform ops or I want to more do, like now you have a framework also to talk about how, like, where can you go from a development standpoint and in grow and learn?

Amy: 36:49

Totally. And whether, whether they're

Hartmann: 36:52

No, I'm just kidding. It was like, do you, are you use it, do you use that with your teams?

Amy: 36:55

Yup.

Hartmann: 36:56

I mean, I'm curious if you use something like that as well for is you're working through with your team.

Naomi: 37:03

Um, I would say, no, not really. It's something that I would like to look more into though. Um, no, I would say that right now.

Hartmann: 37:14

Got

Amy: 37:14

Yeah. I think it's, it's really important. Um, it's a great way to have those conversations that have. You know of, of, you know, what they're doing and what they, what they want to go into. And you're right. I think a lot of people move from campaign off the platform ops, or you may have somebody who's in platform ops, And they're really heavy in one platform, maybe they're, you know, into Marketo, but they want to learn Salesforce. Great. Let's get you into Trailhead. Let's you know, get you learning Salesforce. Um, You know, or maybe they're, you know, want to do more integrations or, or whatever, but I think, um, where if, they want to want to do dev more, more power to them, we need

Naomi: 37:49

Yeah. And I'm just, I'm thinking 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, like, you know, 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 sentence. Right. So I have it structured in the sense where we all are. Um, 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, um, data operations person. There is a designer, so it's, they all have their own areas of expertise, but they kind of touch on both it's they're like hybrid campaign slash platform opposite. That makes sense. And their area of expertise. And then we kind of do. There is crossover. So for example, if, um, you know, our web developers 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, you know, customers who ha who have, um, open opportunities above the stage who also have this product. And it's like, you know, various different things that they may be interested in that they will then do. And I love seeing this on my team. Right. We'll partner up and teach each other things right. And vice versa. So it's less of a, you know, how do I get from campaign to platform ops to dev ops or vice versa? It's kind of, I think it's just the nature of how I structured my team, that they all just want to learn everything. Um, and it might just be very specific to.

Amy: 39:28

I think that's great though, Naomi, because it sounds, I mean, it sounds like you're, you're, you kind of have structured things within the different pillars, but you have people with a growth mindset and that's, I mean, you cannot teach a growth mindset. So, you know, having people that want to. learn different things, um, you know, I think. Yeah. Um, I've had a lot of success, um, hiring agencies. I've also had some challenges, so I can talk about both. Um, but I think there are some times when I would absolutely say hire an agency. One is if you're doing an implementation or micro. Um, 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 want to do your implementation. You know, agencies have these huge workbooks. Um, if you're talking about Marchetto, they have program templates that they can literally important. You are buying their IP and the money that you're spending to get your platform implemented properly. Is going to pay out dividends. Um, I think also the dev work of like, like I said, email landing, page templates. Usually these platforms come with like starter templates, but some of these companies, the templates, they felt just make things so much easier and so much smoother and really can accelerate your, um, email execution and just make your emails look so much better. Um, so those are two things that I would say like, Pan agency for, um, we, we have a lot of, um, do a lab. I think our agency has like three contracts going on at the same time. Um, you know, and we have ongoing services, contracts for like anything and everything, you know, 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 kind of, what work can I get off my teams? That's busy work that doesn't really drive them forward. Like adding new LinkedIn lead gen, you know, doing some data cleanups, sometimes adding new drift bots to Marketo like, that is not a good use of my team's time. They're in meetings, they're doing like big foundational work, like get that off their plates. Um, so, you know, and also just like having that ongoing services contract means when there's a question, you know, there's only two Marketo experts on my team. Right. But agencies have done. So you talked to your consultant, they don't know they're going to talk to their team. Golden. And then also like that dev stuff, you have like a small batch project or bigger dev project, you know, you can just pay for those hours instead of having, trying to have somebody in house. Um, and then, uh, other things. So I have not done a ton of this, but some people use agencies for their campaign execution. I think that can work really well. Um, we started using agency for, um, email execution for our conference because we just send so many conference emails and, you know, poor Matt who runs our email channel. Just can't keep up with the volume of emails he's brought project manage and he's running them. He's designing them. He's coordinating with the copywriter and the designer. Agency actually does the, you know, hands on keyboard work. Um, and then also for activate, we have them, um, doing all the Marchetto 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, be in the meetings and understanding and project managing. But I don't have to like actually do.

Hartmann: 43:33

Yeah.

Amy: 43:34

Um, is that kind of jive with what you all have used agencies for?

Hartmann: 43:37

I mean, w what you described that sort of, um, sort of bucket of hours, like model, right. I've used that. And then also had very project specific stuff. And 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 going to change it, like we, most people need to have new experience too. Right. If they were changing out or having a very sort of well thought through plan for sort of one person coming in and another person leaving and the overlap there, and that has always worked well. Um, I've used a little bit of one for like campaign ops, but mostly it's been kind of other the same thing, right? It's not for things that need their reporting. They need to be done and taken care of. Not not sort of moving towards strategic stuff, which is what I wanted my team to be

Naomi: 44:27

We've used agencies for project basis. We haven't used them as a retainer for execution or anything like that, but it's definitely, we've definitely done it on a project basis where there's maybe expertise that the team doesn't have or something more complicated. Um, And that's worked well for us, but you know, I'm never going to say no to extra hands, but that just so far seems to be how it's. Oh, we've how we've engaged with our, with our agency.

Amy: 46:46

And you know, one thing I would, I would tell people. I don't like, I don't really know a ton about corporate finances. I don't really quite understand how they decide what budget goes to what, but there always seems to be budget for agency when there's not budget for head count. 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 big project or just to offload some work on your team, or to get some expertise on things. Um, you know, no matter what your platform is, um, I mean, Agencies. And I can think of at least three of our platforms, you know, we have, uh, we have a great business systems team. We also have, you know, Salesforce dev team. So our sales outsourced, um, Salesforce dev. So there's like, you know, um, 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 them,

Hartmann: 47:50

Yes. It's not like you just like you're, you're washing your hands of it And there's, nothing else.

Amy: 47:55

Yeah. I mean, you know, you want to find somebody, so like you were saying, Mike, they didn't use to be as many agencies that use that specialize in HubSpot. You 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, you know, your consultant is probably very smart, but they only, they're only one person, but if they have a team, they have their own internal slack where they can ask people that. Golden. Um, so, you know, I think Yeah, making,

Hartmann: 48:30

so, Yeah.

Amy: 48:50

Yeah.

Hartmann: 48:50

Right.

Amy: 48:54

Yep. Yeah, And I also, um, 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 is that agency that works for you. You know, you want to look for an agency. That's worked with companies like yours and you want references for companies like yours. I had an experience where, um, 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. And she used them at a cute giant, you know, global corporation. And we were like a much smaller SAS, you know, uh, pre IPS SAS 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, slack, 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 like, they're part of my team because I would like email chains to die. Um, and you wanna like talk to them about how communicative are they, how responsive are there, how quickly can you schedule. I had trouble with an agency where the principal consultant, it would take like two weeks to get a meeting with him. And there was so much back and forth because he didn't have like a Calendly or, you know, a scheduling tool like that. Whereas like my consultant that I have now, I can look at her Calendly and I can see when she's available. And she usually has meeting has openings the next day. Um, so, you know, I think that's really important. Um,

Hartmann: 50:29

think those are all great points. so so speaking of your blog posts, blog, recent posts and everything. So this has been super interesting conversation. I think we could go on for awhile, but we are going to have to cut it off. Folks want to connect with you or keep up with your blog posts, blog. Like what, how what's the best way for them to, do.

Amy: 50:48

Yeah, I'm marketing ops advice.com is that is the best place to go for resources. I'm pretty active on LinkedIn. Um, it's just linkedin.com/in/amy Goldfein. Uh, all one word, you can follow me there. You can also like reach out on the Moe pros. I'm pretty active. There would love to, you know, have some conversations going there as well.

Hartmann: 51:11

Awesome. Well again, Amy, thank you so much, Mike Neami. Thank you for being here and thanks to all of our listeners. For this, continue to support us, rate us, give us feedback. Uh, if you've got a, if you want to be a guest or your, your, you know, somebody who'd be a good guest, let us know that. Um, and with them where it's rap by everybody.

Amy: 51:33

Hi.