Consulting Journey in MarTech Industry

Courtney Makara 0:23

Hello, I'm Courtney Makara and this is the Society of Marketing Technology Consulting Podcast. Smtc has joined forces with the MarketingOpscom community, but our mission is still the same to educate and support anyone involved in the MarTech world as a consultant.

Mike Rizzo 0:39

Hey, this is Mike from MarketingOpscom. If you're thinking about going into consulting, or you're already a successful consultant, join us online by becoming a member. As a pro member, you can join the SMTC and other private networks at marketingopscom.

Courtney Makara 0:55

In this podcast series, grant Gregorian and I interviewed guests on their journeys as consultants. We discussed all that it means to be a great MarTech consultant, from setting up their business or joining an agency, and how to find new clients and keep their existing clients happy. I hope you enjoy the interview. Today's guest we have Julie James from Austin, texas, and Grant is also on the call as well. Hello to both of you, hello, hi. So, julie, thanks for joining us. You are a multiple time Marketo champion and extraordinaire, definitely world famous. I would say you have done the trifecta. I believe You've done in-house and consulting and freelancing, and we just kind of love to hear your journey of how consulting kind of came into your world.

Julia James 1:46

Okay, yeah, and thanks for having me, and I'm hopefully going to hopefully give you some good ideas and tips of kind of what I've done and where I've gone and how I've got there. So I moved over to Austin four years ago to become a professor to teach kind of marketing full time and part of that was teaching Marketo and I was working in Marketo kind of client side first off. And when I came to Austin to start teaching I realized very quickly how much I missed Marketo, which I never thought I would miss a platform. I didn't think that that was actually possible to miss a platform that you play around in, but I did. Yeah, I know it's a bit sad really, but yeah, I was in the I missed miss working the platform.

Julia James 2:32

And so I started reaching out um to a couple of people I knew to see, like did anyone need any help, um with their market or what they were doing? Um, and I thought, well, I'm, I'm gonna try and do consulting, try and set up my own business um, and basically first started by putting a post out on the community, upon marketer community, like looking to get into freelancing, does anyone need any help with anything? And it kind of snowballed fairly quickly from there, because I didn't actually realize how many companies are out there that actually want to have a freelancer or a consultant who isn't in a large agency. Is there out there that actually want to have a freelancer or a consultant who isn't in a large agency? Um, so from there picked up my first client, who I have been working with for kind of nearly three years now. Um, oh wow, that's a long relationship.

Julia James 3:18

That's great it's a long yeah, and it's actually been interesting. A lot of the clients I've had have been long-term clients. It's been the odd kind of couple that have come in and then disappeared, um, and then come back kind of a year later and said, oh, they need help. And they've had some clients who have been long term clients with us a few hours, a few hours a week here and there, um, and so yeah, so first off, kind of I didn't really know all the laws and regulations, obviously being in the us, so I was like okay, I'm gonna do, I'm gonna do some, some working, um, the kind of that everyone was teaching me about these 1099s, which I didn't know what they were. I was like this is interesting, I've got to figure out this whole process. So started off just doing 1099 and obviously did my first tax return had helped me do my first tax return because I didn't really know what this thing was. And it wasn't until kind of about a year later that I was like I actually really need to set up my own consulting firm now. Like I'd started to get a few more clients on board and was like now I really need to have this as a business versus just something that I'm doing for kind of a little bit of spare cash here and there and for fun. So I found a company, actually based in Austin, who helped with the setup of organizations and LLCs and they helped me register the business. They helped with the setup of organizations and LLCs and they helped me register the business. They helped with all the paperwork that I needed to do, they helped with all my accountancy stuff and kind of that was.

Julia James 4:37

I think that was a point where in which it kind of started to get a little bit crazy. I was getting reached out to maybe two or three times a week for people that were looking for consultants, whether it be a consultant or whether it be a freelancer. Obviously, I wasn't able to do everything, because sometimes it got a little bit, sometimes too many requests or it might just be we have a project and we only want a freelancer, but we want you for 30 hours a week and it's just not possible. You may want to get someone full-time for that job. I don't think there's. I'm not quite sure this is where you need a consultant.

Julia James 5:15

Um, and so over the last kind of three years since I've been running the firm three, yeah, yeah, just just under three years now. Um, I've probably been in 25 different instances. I've had probably 20 ish different clients, because some clients had multiple instances. Um, and it was probably the best thing I ever did, because even though I was teaching full-time, I was also able to kind of keep my hand in kind of finger in the pie and keep playing around in Marketo learning new things, and prior to that point I'd only been in two or three instances in previous roles.

Julia James 5:43

So going into a lot of instances very quickly really helped me learn how different every company works, because not every company is the same. There are best practices, but best practice for each business is so different, absolutely yeah, and I think that was one thing that helped with when I was working with a lot of clients. They'd be like well, we had a big agency and they told us this best practice doesn't quite work for us, so we maybe need to do a bit more customized, a bit more personalized. And I definitely think that helped because I was able to actually look at their individual interests, because having a couple of clients versus the large agencies that have hundreds of clients is I was able to help from previous experience and then looking actually how their systems, how they needed to work, what they needed to change Definitely, I think, made a difference. Yeah. So, julia, I have so many questions. One of them is like you're a professor, I mean that's kind of, I would say, unusual for people who are doing Marketo work. I mean, we all fall into it in different ways, but professor is an unusual route. Can you talk a little bit about that? Does being a professor help? How does that do you think, make you approach Marketo maybe differently, or how does that make your work better? So I was a Marketo person before I was a professor. So when I started my PhD I was learning about marketing automation. I discovered this thing called Marketo whilst doing my PhD and kind of thought it was a really cool tool and I love the idea of this thing called marketing automation. So as I was just finishing out my PhD, I got my first job in a marketing operations role. And, to be clear, the PhD is in marketing. It's not like something else. Yeah, it's in marketing. I actually talk a little about how using marketing tools and technologies help a business go to market more successfully. Amazing, that's my entire thesis. I mean, that's one of the things that I've lamented in the past to friends and family is how out of touch, I would say, my experience. I'm first of all like super happy to hear that you were.

Consulting and Teaching Marketo Expertise

Julia James 8:14

You had an applied phd program in like marketing. You have to do with marketo marketing automation. That's amazing yeah, and I was. I was really lucky because in the uk in the uk, phds are slightly different. You kind of you talk with your supervisor about a topic and then they just go go do it. So, um, it wasn't as structured as the us, but I was actually a marketing manager in a firm and I was actually using that company as my case study company. So everything I was applying I was then studying and analyzing and seeing what worked, what didn't work, um, which tools had had made a difference, which tools hadn't, um, and then kind of it got to a stage where I was like I probably should do something with this PhD, because I did it, because it was a challenge, and was lucky enough to get a role in Austin teaching Marketo and Salesforce and web development and kind of the Adobe Creative Cloud and customer relationship management theory, which was a lot of fun.

Julia James 9:11

I don't do it full-time now. I still teach an adjunct. I'm still an adjunct professor, so I teach a master's course in digital marketing analytics Amazing. But I focus on the courses I teach. I do one that's a seven-week course and it's Salesforce and Marketo and coding and Google Analytics all in one seven-week course, because it's the tools and tech that I wish I knew when I was in uni. So when you're, when you're like approaching your clients, you're like I'm literally the professor who teaches the next generation. Yeah, yeah, it definitely. It definitely helps. And having students who've come back to me and I had one student who was like my self the Salesforce course I do it's a customer relationship management course told me that it was the best course he'd ever done in the whole of his degree because he's now applying that in real life, like he's in a Salesforce role, that made it all worth it. Because you want students to go back and have that experience and have the knowledge so that when they're graduating they're not just graduating with theories that they're never going to use, it's graduating with actual applied knowledge. And we do on the master's course the students actually go through the university, the Marketo University training, and it's very accelerated. They're doing that in seven weeks. It's amazing, but they go through all that training and they actually come out the other end Like students have gone into Marketo specific roles, marketo specific roles, they've gone into mops roles, they've gone into crm and salesforce type roles.

Julia James 10:33

So it's definitely, it definitely helps, um, to have that knowledge and to have that experience when it comes into kind of consulting, because not everyone just wants you to go and build. Sometimes it's about teaching and training and getting people to understand how the technology is working and I think doing that I was doing it full-time and now doing it part-time it I think it helps. It helps because you understand how to be able to teach and speak to different audiences and the different levels that they may have well, that actually is the perfect kind of segue.

Courtney Makara 11:01

My next question was as you kind of start consulting and you know you put your thing on the community and you start asking who needs help, which I think is exactly what Grant did as well Kind of put your flag out there, did it come natural to you to just like jump in and be like, okay, I'm the Marketo expert, like you know, I'm going to meet with my clients, and how did you kind of find? You know, everyone has like their own rhythm and personality with clients. I know for me, you know, it took a little while to kind of get comfortable in that zone of people looking to you as the expert um, I was definitely nervous the first time I ever had like my first client call and someone gave me a login to that instance.

Julia James 12:47

Um, because I was like okay, so apparently I'm the expert, but now I have to actually prove that I do know what I'm talking about right and you have to learn their business model and like all, yeah, that's a lot but but actually, even before you go on, like, first of all, what a great uh moment to realize, when other people feel this way, like, um, that you really shouldn't like. Even if you're a professor, you still feel this way. Do you know what? I mean like even if you like like that. That feeling does not go away, even if you have a phd, so you don't. Anyway, go, keep going no, yeah, and I was gonna say like it never, it never goes away. Even now, like I've just recently started a new role where I'm kind of back client side again and even now I'll go into like market and I was doing a kind of an instance audit and I kind of had my consultant head on but doing like a full instance audit to have a look at what's happening, and even now I'll give feedback and go. But is that okay? Am I saying the right thing? And I use all the Slack groups that we have out there and ask questions and I always feel sometimes like I'm asking these questions that I should know because I've been doing it for so long.

Julia James 13:56

But there's still that you still question yourself I. But there's still that you still question yourself. I still question myself every single day of have I? Have I set this campaign up correctly? Have I? Um is the lead scoring working? And I'm doing a load of gdpr compliance work right now and I'm like am I doing this right? Does this checkbox do what it should be doing? Um, but I think it definitely.

Julia James 14:16

It definitely helps when someone comes through and asks you questions, because I think it helped in my confidence a lot of someone reaching out to me and saying I've seen your posts on community really like some help with our instance, and that was definitely a massive confidence boost, even if the first time I logged into the instance I was like, do I really know what I'm doing? But having the confidence that you know the tool, you know the technology, you can go on a call and talk about how it's working or how it's not working or what changes you can make or what recommendations you have, even if you're not the most confident person just having a recommendation for something. The people have come to you for a reason, like any client has come to me, because they're stuck with something or something they don't. They don't have the expertise in-house to do um, and that's that's the one thing I always just used to tell myself when I was teaching, because standing up in front of a load of 18 19 year olds and talking about marketing was it's probably one of the most nerve-wracking things I've ever done.

Julia James 15:15

Um, and it wasn't until my mom just turned around and said you have to remember that you know more than they do. Even if you're only a chapter ahead of what you're teaching, you still know more than the students do you still know more than your clients do Most of the time? Not saying it's all of the time, but that was that little. They've obviously come to ask me questions for a reason, or I'm here to teach for a reason. That definitely helped with the confidence side of things, but I still get nervous every day. Instead of doing a presentation or doing a champ office hours. It's still nerve-wracking and I think that that's a feeling that probably doesn't go away. But also it's what the reason people hire consultants is because they themselves have that feeling kind of like I'm not sure how this is supposed to be run. And I feel like part of being a consultant is to um to give kind of validation to whatever decision making they're making, um to kind of bless it with your oh yeah, I'm a consultant and I said it's okay to do it this way. This is the way to do it and it does provide a lot of value, just if you do nothing else, but just um kind of give, give um, you know, validate specific approaches or how you set things up, cause a lot of times people really second guess themselves, even when they shouldn't be. Like it's really not. It could be really straightforward, um.

Courtney Makara 16:34

I've always said that there are a gazillion ways to do one thing in any market automation platform, so sometimes people just need the permission. Just take a direction, take a step in a direction of how what your naming convention is going to be or how you want to organize it. And it might not be the stuff I was going to take, but at least it's a step and you know you can build upon it from there.

Julia James 16:55

Yeah, a lot of people, like you said, need a little help and I wanted to ask you mentioned you had lots of clients, lots of people who are interested. I mean, you have a full-time job and you're also consulting and you're on your own. How in the world are you managing your contracts, your time? Are you managing your contracts, your time? How do you not run, you know, just overwhelm yourself with work. I think I'm one of these weird people who likes working a lot, like I like playing in my keto, and I think I'm also lucky enough that my husband works late. So in the evenings, when I finish my normal day's work, I think nothing of logging into a client's instance after like after six o'clock because I know that he's not going to be home. I don't. I'm either. It's either that or I'm going to sit at home and watch tv, um, so I would rather be doing something, um and playing around in an instance and seeing what I can do, versus kind of chilling out in front of a tv.

Courtney Makara 17:57

um, but it's amazing how much the time can fly when you're in Markelo. Three hours can go by so fast.

Julia James 18:03

I did that the other day. I was going through a set of data for some invalid email, invalid reasons, and I was going through it in Excel and next thing I know I look up and my husband's walking through the door. It's nine o'clock at night and I was like, oh, everything's dark around me, all the lights are off. My cat's looking at me because they want feeding they're just on the zone, yeah, yeah yeah, um, I mean tracking wise.

Julia James 18:27

I use a tool called toggle um for any of like the hourly tracking. So every time I go in and do, um, some work, it's I kind of go into toggle, just hit it's just a play button and a stop button, um to record the hours I'm doing. I use Xero, which is an accounting software, to do all the invoicing and then lots of notes, so like OneNote or notepads, to be able to kind of track all the different clients I'm working on or if there's anything, any big tasks that I have. The other thing that I've just recently started using and this might sound a little odd is there's a thing that I now have that sits over my laptop keyboard, because I have a separate keyboard and it's basically like a whiteboard, but it's called Fluid Stance.

Julia James 19:09

It's like a sloped whiteboard is probably the best way to put it. It's metal and so you get like a little pen that you can write notes on it, and I use that to track anything, any kind of big projects that I have that I'm working on, just to remind me like, oh, don't forget to log into so-and-so's instance or don't forget to go and do this job, because then when it's done. I just wipe off the whiteboard and then I just move on to the next thing. So I love organization. So lists and to-do lists and tasks are definitely the way in which I keep track of what I'm working on and working with.

Courtney Makara 19:45

Have you found? You know, doing these kind of nights and weekends and keeping your full-time job has been pretty smooth and I? It's actually a two-part question because I'm also curious if you're doing it, um, are you charging like hourly rates or kind of retainer project base? There's a variety of ways that I know agencies do it.

Julia James 20:00

Yeah, I always do hourly rates, um. The one thing I I never feel comfortable doing is I couldn't do a retainer if there wasn't like the work there.

Freelancing, Consulting, and Marketing Insights

Julia James 20:09

So I could never do. If someone says, oh, here's a five-hour retainer and they're only giving me an hour's work a week, I don't feel comfortable with that. I think it's just me personally. I'd rather only charge them for the hour that I use versus having a retainer.

Julia James 20:22

And I get why larger organizations and big agencies have that, because they have to pay the salaries of multiple hundreds of people versus when it's just me. I'd rather just be able to bill out at 15 minute intervals if I need to. But yeah, that's, that's the way that I I tend to do it. I just think it's easier and so I can keep track of it because I have, like I said, I have all my clients set up in toggle Um.

Julia James 20:46

So I literally just hit like it's got like a little thing that says what are you working on? So I put the project and then pick the client and hit the play button, um, and it just records that in 15 minute intervals. And that's means that when I'm billing I just have to go in've got records of everything I'm working on, especially if, like a client said, can you show me if you're billing for 100 hours worth of work? I want to see what you did in those 100 hours and I can literally just print a report off of all the projects that I'd worked on and then it shows the timeframes and the times and the days and all that kind of stuff.

Courtney Makara 21:25

So it's a pretty cool little tool. Now that you've been doing it for a few years, do you just kind of naturally have a sense of how many clients you can take on at one time? You know you could have a bunch of people kind of in your Rolodex but they're like, well, we all have to work right now, but then all of a sudden it seems like it's either feast or famine in the world.

Julia James 21:46

Yeah, yeah, yeah, um, yeah, yeah, it's definitely. I know that I can do. I mean, I don't really do more than kind of 10 hours, maybe 15 hours a week, um, and most weeks that's kind of two or three clients. But some weeks they've like said there's been that client that you maybe have not heard from for six months and suddenly they have this technique. I'm not sure how to answer. Yeah, I'm like, oh, gonna do an hour here, um, see, I know that I try and keep it in my head of like hours. So if I speak to anyone potentially new, I'll be like so I have this many hours spare a week, um, on top of I know what I'm already working with. So if you want me to do the work and I've only got two hours a week, then that's great. If that, if you need more than that, then I'll also refer them to to other people, other other freelancers that may have more time, or to an agency if they need someone for a bigger project. Yes, that makes sense now, julie, in terms of um advice for uh, anybody kind of early in their in their career, would you say, because I've heard it kind of both ways. In terms of starting out, some people say that you should start out in a consulting role, maybe like in an agency, because you'll see so many different instances, you'll see how other consultants handle things and kind of have a really broad view of you know whether it's Marketo or marketing automation, and other people say no, no, no, that's a mistake. What you should do is start like in-house at some company, as like an analyst or a specialist, because then maybe your view will be as broader, like for the, for the you know overall, but it will be much deeper, and you'll understand the, the, the different stakeholders within a company, and you'll understand whatever the problems are even deeper, and then you'll be able you'll even be a better consultant later because you'll be able to um empathize with them. Where, where do you lie in the debate? it's definitely an interesting one because I started client side so I started in just one instance. My first couple of roles I've been doing market it was just in a single instance, going into multiple instances. It was a little unnerving because I'd only worked in two instances. But I also know I think the ramp up in an agency is so quick that you can maybe specialize in a higher level versus, like you said, doing the one instance. I could work on nurtures and scoring and tokens and start learning about apis and kind of get really hands on and deep into one instance because a lot of the skills are going to carry across multiple instances and I would have.

Julia James 24:16

I'm glad I got that experience in those couple of instances before I started consulting because I knew marketo like in an hour backwards well, not 100% backwards, but like I'd spent so much time but all day, every day, 40 hours a week in one instance. I knew how it worked. So when I went into another instance I already knew what to look for. I knew what the operational programs I should look at. I knew what, like errors or integrations, I should be looking at to make sure they're working. So yeah's definitely a toss-up between the two but I think I preferred having that one client side experience, two client side experiences because, like I said, I got more hands-on and in-depth in a single instance and I could get more technical focused versus agency, where you're very much in so many different instances but maybe doing the same thing time and time again with your campaign ops or kind of technical ops or architecture. You know those instances. You don't get hands-on everywhere. Yeah, that makes sense. And the last question I have for you is would you recommend other folks follow the path and get like a higher degree in marketing or, you know, a PhD in Marketo, Like if they could create their own? Would you say that that was helpful for you? I never even considered it, I didn't even know it was a thing. It was definitely. It was really interesting because I think I'd worked in marketing for so long. I'd just gone in and just done marketing. I've worked in marketing for nearly 20 years now, which still scares me when I say it, but I think then having that focus on one particular company and researching what because I had the time to be able to research what was and wasn't working I was able to look at the different tools and technologies that were out there, and not a lot of normal marketing managers get the time to do that because they just have to get the job done um, it was definitely a challenge. Um, I mean, it was probably 80 hours a week for nearly three years, trying to work and phd at the same time and trying to obviously research as well as working as well as making sure stuff is happening. Um, so it was. It was hard, um, but it's definitely I've learned a lot from it and, at that, looking at what works in the company because, again, not every company is the same.

Julia James 26:29

I had this little marketing model of these kind of these three eyes that I created and I now, kind of, in the back of my head, apply that when I go into companies. Have you have? You got a good? Do you know who your customer audience is or what they're saying about you? Or do you know what technologies you have and how are they all integrated? Or is there actually someone doing this human interfacing side of things, like, is it what the sales team doing? What conversations are they having? Um, I kind of I tend to think in that mindset versus just marketo. It's not. It's a great tool and I spend all my time in it, but I also think about how it interacts across the entire company. So that definitely. I don't think I ever would have had that without the PhD, because I would have always just been marketer, marketer, marketer, not cared about everyone else, whereas now I've looked at everyone else and spent the time to study it. It's definitely definitely helped. Yeah, that makes sense. Well, Julie, this was a pleasure to talk to you. You've given me so much great advice

Podcast Guest Thanks and Farewell

Julia James 27:25

and ideas. So, yes, thanks for being on our podcast, awesome.

Courtney Makara 27:31

Thank you very much, thank you, thank you.

Julia James 27:34

And thank you for listening to this episode of SMTC Podcast. If you like this episode, please rate us on the platform you're listening to this on. The ratings help make the podcast better, make it easier for other people to discover it, and also be sure to subscribe, and, if you haven't already joined the SMTC, by going to joinsmtccom and join as a member. It's free. We look forward to hearing from you. Bye, thank you.