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

Mike RIzzo: Hey, this is Mike from MarketingOps. com. 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 MarketingOps. com. 

Courtney McAara: In this podcast series, Grant Gregorian and I interviewed guests on their journeys as consultants.

Courtney McAara: 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.

Our guest today is Kelly Jo. Kelly Jo Horton.

Can you please introduce yourself and tell us where you are currently employed? Hello, uh, I'm Kelly Jo Horton and I [00:01:00] am a Principal Engineer of Marketing Operations and Technology at Room in New York City, but I actually work from Bend, Oregon most of the time. You got that remote life thing going. I had it before it was cool.

You've been doing remote for quite a long time, haven't you? Yes, I have. I've been remote for a long, for the last. For companies I've worked for, I believe. That's great. So tell us a little bit, just a quick overview of Room and what does your really long title of Principal Engineer and blah, blah, blah, what does that mean?

Yada, yada, yada, right? Uh, so Room manufactures and sells Uh, soundproof phone booths and soundproof meeting rooms, the kind of things you probably saw if you ever worked in a co working space when you wanted to have a quiet phone call. Um, and, uh, we sell mostly to now to [00:02:00] companies. Um, who are going back to work because the open office space is dead.

Um, in this time, this pandemic time, people want, uh, more space and they want some private space. So, um, our, our customers have changed a bit, but yeah, co working spaces, spaces were, uh, pretty much our bread and butter and now it's, Um, my large title means that, uh, I basically do whatever needs to be done as far as our marketing tech stack or technology stack in total, actually, because, uh, room is a startup of just over 50 people.

So I manage everything. From marketing automation to middleware data, warehouses, uh, BI tools, just about everything. Kelly. Um, I see that you [00:03:00] have a long and illustrious career as a consultant and various, like you've worked for, you've had your own consulting, um, practice you you've worked with agencies.

What made you decide to go back in house? Oh boy. I have this. I have this love hate relationship with consulting and when I'm in it, I don't like it and when I'm not, I have FOMO and, um, basically I wanted to go in house again, because I really wanted to be. Part of a team. And I wanted to be with, you know, I wanted to be able to build something from the ground up.

And with consulting, I always felt like I was coming in and out of projects. And I was, I would just get to know people and then the contract would be over. And, um, so I, I have this love, hate relationship. Um, my, my [00:04:00] biggest, biggest thing that I don't like about consulting, which I have a really hard time with this, having to keep track of every minute of, of every day, that is just the one thing.

I mean, other than that, I really enjoyed consulting, but logging my time for me was so incredibly frustrating. I agree with this. I hate it. I, I kind of don't. Do it. I would say, I mean, I, I, I know that I'm supposed to do it, and I know, um, that it's, it's helpful and especially as the team, if you have a team and you're part of a team and you're like an agency and you need to be tracking it to build your clients and also tracking it for, you know, figuring out whether the resources are allocated correctly yet, you know, things like that.

So it's like crucial. It's like the key thing that, one thing that you're supposed to do. And, uh, I agree with you. It is. There's something about it. I, I have this like visceral emotional reaction at the [00:05:00] end of the day, I just don't wanna do it. I just say, I, I know I'm supposed to do it. I, I, I know I'm supposed to do it, but I'm not going to, you know what, I'm just not gonna do it today.

And then, and then later in the week, I have no idea what I did. I have, it is no, and it's too late. And I just, and I just say, okay, I'll, I'll try again next week. So yeah, I. I don't know what it is. I feel like I, it's something about being, feeling controlled. I think the sense of somebody else owning your time all day long.

And I know it's just, it's part of being a consultant, um, that you just have to do it. But the other option is don't build by the hour, build by the project, and then you don't have to log your time. Yeah, I will have bet. I generally build by the project, because I really want to talk about what is the end goal here and whether it takes us.

50 hours or 150 hours. I want to be with my clients [00:06:00] for that journey to get to a happy wrapping up point. So defining what success looks like, we know we're always telling our customers, what does success look like for you for this campaign or this initiative that you're doing? So what does success look like for us as building out a scoring program or life cycle or something like that?

But I will say, I'll give a little plug for a fresh books, which is the tool I use for like invoicing. They do have a built in. Time tracker tool. So if you actually have your FreshBooks account open, you can say start my timer, but that only works if you do dedicated chunks of time for one client at a time.

And I have found that is not how I work. I will jump in and out of different instances throughout the day. And that's why I think time tracking is, is very difficult. I had a time tracker, uh, app that I used as well. And I found my time to be very fragmented like that. And I agree that if you're, uh, that I need to focus in blocks of time, that's the easiest [00:07:00] way to, to track time.

Yeah. I usually get two days a week like that, that are very organized and you have three or four hours per, per client or per project, but then there are some days where you're just trying to get into meetings and I've got a 30 minute meeting. You know, every, every 30 minutes I'm jumping from client to client to client, that can get really frustrating.

So let's talk. My other least favorite part of consulting is exactly what you just said. Invoicing, getting people to pay, chasing new business. It's all the work, right? And I could go, if I went to work for an agency, Um, that part would go away because they would be handling the invoicing. Um, but there's still the issue of scope creep, right?

Even if you're the individual consultant working for an agency, and you have a certain number of billable hours that you need to put in, How, how do you guys handle like the scope creep if you're not [00:08:00] charging, if you're charging by project, not by the hour? Yeah, it's a tricky one. I'm still balancing it out myself.

I've been pretty lucky, I'll say, in my 18 months of consulting. It's, it's only kind of happened, you know, once or twice and they've been really receptive. I think now I've learned to get ahead of it as best as possible. I think it's really easy, especially when you are, Maybe when I'm independent, I find myself bending over backwards a little bit more or wanting them to like me or being like, oh, it's fine.

I'll just fix this 1 thing. Um, and that kind of ended up being a bad thing down the road, because just like the internal employee, you kind of get walked all over or taken advantage of. So now. Any new clients that I've brought on anyone that's worked with me in the second half of 2020 might've noticed.

I'm a little bit more strict about scope creep. And usually it's within that first, I think that first 10 days of a business relationship is really important. At first time you get a login into a client instance and they're like, Oh, we want you to do X, Y, and [00:09:00] Z, but you log in and you're like, Whoa, Whoa, Whoa.

There's a lot of other things that we need to address before we can even get to XYZ and that's out of, out of the scope that we talked about grant. What about you? What's your. How do you attack it? Oh boy. I, uh, yeah, I mean, we should just briefly define it, right? Scope creep just means, um, that my understanding of it is that once you, you know, the client asks you to do a specific project or maybe together you've defined a project, but then once you start doing the project, you find out there's all this other stuff that needs to be done.

And it's a little bit of like nickel and diming because like sometimes the things that need to be done are. And they're like, well, it's just this one thing. And then in addition to the thing that we talked about and it's okay. And then, and then it creeps because it's like one thing after another. And all of a sudden you've, you're doing a massive project that you didn't expect you were supposed to do and getting paid for the smaller one.

Um, so I. I mean, it's, [00:10:00] it really does take a lot of practice because it is, it does creep up on you. It has this aspect. And so, um, what you wanna do is just be really mindful of the conversations that you're having and being able to write things down upfront to be like, oh, this is an issue and this is an issue and this is this other one.

And, um, you wanna be as transparent as possible in. surfacing those, um, additional kind of little work tasks that come up and then being very transparent about like, Oh, well, do you want me to do this also? Well, then therefore we need to go back to the original project, you know, number of hours and increase them, or you can have somebody else do them.

That's okay too. Maybe somebody, you know, and then, but then we need to adjust the timing. Do we need to, do you know what I mean? Like being upfront about this whole thing rather than sit just taking it on silently and working late into the night, uh, like a hero. A lot of times your client may not even realize that you're doing all this additional work just to [00:11:00] make the original thing work as well.

Does that make sense, Carrie? How have you, how have you dealt with it? Um, I, so being in house, right. My entire day, every day is scope creep because I get slack messages all the time. Um, things that aren't in my, I work in sprints, um, in house. So. It's even still a problem. But when I was consulting, I mean, I think Courtney may have the same personality type, but you just wanna fix things and help people and

And so when someone starts to add stuff, it's really hard to say no when you know you need to do that stuff. But it's not in the original SOW. And so I learned to actually create, you know, addendums and things to sows if things came up that I thought were gonna take. A lot more time. Um, because I know Courtney [00:12:00] and I have been doing this a long time.

So I feel like if I could fix something really quick, I'd want to go in and do it. But, you know, it's just, I, I, I had to get really strict or I'd be losing money.

Right. And, um, but on the other hand, you also want to maintain a level of flexibility and also be able to react to the client. So sometimes you, it's part of discovery, you know, you'll say, Oh. We because like I mean how in a way luxurious is it that you're discovering all this new work like as a consultant?

That's exactly that's great That's a great point right is that when you go You need a discovery call instead of just because a lot of times a customer will Think they have a list of things that they need done But if you don't have a discovery call with them, you know, you'll get in there and it will be like unraveling a [00:13:00] ball of string, right?

You'll just find all these other things that need to be fixed. So discovery, I think is key before you even accept an SOW. And I know Courtney does that as well. But I haven't done it for every client. And I'm curious. Discovery for me isn't just asking the client questions because a lot of times the person coming to you, you know, it could be the CMO or the VP of marketing.

They don't really know what their Marketo database looks like or the synced. Right. How do you get login access? Like, are you able, have you been able to get like a, an admin access to get into someone's database and click around before actually signing a contract? I have never asked for that before, but I have I've always had discovery calls because I think a lot of times you're dealing with somebody who doesn't know what they don't know.

And, and so you kind of have to, um, you know, like ask, [00:14:00] ask a bunch of questions, find out who's there, who still has access. And if any, if there's anybody you could talk to that actually knows the person. the systems because, you know, but I always do discovery because it always ends up adding stuff to the SOW.

Yeah, but sometimes, you know, in discovery, the person who actually knew the database the best is no longer there. They might be bringing in a consultant because they've lost headcount. So maybe, yeah, I, I, so, so I have also done something where I have an initial SOW, which is like an audit, you know, to come in with a small audit or even do a free audit to try to get the business.

I've done that before, too. But I, I limit that my time on that to a couple of hours and then give them. Recommendations on what they need, and then you can craft your own S O W. Right. And this is what, yeah, but then again, and you could look greedy and say, well, I did the audit for free, but here's a 12 month plan for [00:15:00] hundreds of dollars.

Cause you need all the help in the world. I mean, it's like a, it's like a dance. And I think that's what makes a great consultant is just being able to listen and react and kind of, uh, have these, uh, Open but structured conversations about work that's being currently done, who's doing them, how much work there is left to do, what's your budget, what's your, do you know what I mean?

And being able to navigate the, the whole thing. Like, uh, I was just thinking about my recent project where instead of defining a specific outcome, it was more like, Hey, we need help in this area. You know, we need help with analytics, or we need help with Marketing operations. And here's the rough like budget that we have.

So here's some set number of hours, but we don't know what we're going to use those hours for. And so what we've been doing is meeting weekly and every week we meet and we set a set of priorities and we say, here's where we're [00:16:00] working on this week. And then we tackle it and we see how far we get. And then the next week we meet again and we say, what did we accomplish?

What's still outstanding? What are we working on still? And we just kind of do that. We go over, is that kind of like the sprints idea that you're talking about? Kelly. So for, yeah, for sprints, uh, I have sprint points. So I know how many, like how much time a point is. And, um, so when somebody asks for. Uh, a project, um, I assigned it a number of points and I know how many points I can get to in a week based on, you know, how many hours I'm sitting in meetings.

And I have to leave time for being reactive to emergencies that come in and stuff like that. So I build two weeks sprints with projects in them and prioritize those with the stakeholders. And then if something comes in and bumps something off, it moves to the next [00:17:00] sprint. So it's all based on sprint points because I know how many points I can do in a week by myself.

So I want to ask about the sprint concept, because I've heard that term typically in product and engineering orgs, and just knowing you and knowing where you sit in your current role and previous roles, you tend to sit under business systems and, or you've switched between, you know, reporting up to a head of business systems or marketing.

Can you talk about what that is? You like about each org and where you think, if you have an opinion of is one better than the other. Oh, I have so many opinions. Uh, so in the last, in this job included and the last company I worked for, I started in a systems type group. The last company, it was actually a data.

Science group in the it org. So under the CIO, um, and got moved under the SVP of marketing in that last company, in this company [00:18:00] at room, I started in the business systems group. Got moved to marketing a few months later under the SVP of revenue. And recently within the last month, uh, got re centralized back into the systems group.

Uh, I personally, my job, the thing is the job doesn't change no matter where you sit. I'm still doing the same thing. However, sitting in the systems group and being a technical person gives me like peers that I can talk to, that I can bounce ideas off of that can have checked my work. I feel like as a. Uh, a technical resource sitting in the marketing team.

I feel a little bit like a fish out of water because none of them understand my language. And I have to speak about things at a very high level if I'm talking to marketing [00:19:00] people in general. Cause I mean, there are marketing people who do have technology backgrounds, but in general. Um, you know, I'm speaking to demand gen or brand marketing and, and all that stuff.

So I would say that sitting in a systems team or an IT team gives you the support you need to implement governance, process, accountability, all that kind of stuff. If you end up sitting in a marketing organization where they're not used to the engineering type mindset of, we have a process, we have testing, we have, You know, user acceptance, we have deployment, we do things in a sandbox and then we move them to production.

That doesn't happen in marketing. So it's really difficult to work in an agile sprint environment when you're sitting on a marketing team, because they mostly do not. Work that way. It's just a different way of working. So yeah, [00:20:00] definitely, you know, you're reporting under the VP of revenue revenue operations that their success is going to be revenue based.

And sometimes a lot of what we're doing is keeping the lights on and it can be hard to track. You know, a new basis to the projects that we're doing. But if you're in a systems organization, I feel like there's a lot more appreciation for successful integrations and clean data and things like that.

Absolutely. That's a good point. There's a lot more appreciation and understanding when you tell someone it's going to take me five hours to do this. They go, Oh yeah, I can, I can understand why. Um, but if you. Tell someone who has never been in a system before it's going to take five hours and they're like, why would it take you five hours to build an email program or to integrate this?

Why, why would it take five hours if it's just a simple integration? No, you, I think there's a lot more, again, appreciation for doing things the right [00:21:00] way with a view for scaling down the road, like exactly hours now, but six months from now, we're going to really appreciate that. We did it that way and life is going to be easier for any new hires that come on board.

And yeah, I really like, I actually have a client right now who I am reporting into the director of business systems and it's been wonderful. I really enjoy. Nice. I do really enjoy it. So recommendations for anyone else out there kind of decide, you know, where should should sit. Um, my last question is actually going to kind of segue from the line.

You just said of the job doesn't change no matter where you sit and that was, talking about sitting in marketing or sitting in business systems, but what about sitting in house or sitting outside the company at an agency? Does the job change at its core? Do you view your roles differently from when you were a consultant?

I feel like, um, because it takes time to Develop trust. And, um, when you're [00:22:00] new into a new, in an organization, and this happens even when I joined a new company in house, right, it takes people a while to trust that you're the expert at what you do. And so that has taken me, you know, a while, even where I am now to build that trust, and so I, I know that when companies hire you, they're hiring you because of your expertise, but you still.

Are only an influencer and you're not usually the person who makes the decisions. So for me, that's the only, that's the one difference is there's usually obviously someone at the company that who you're consulting for, who has the final decision and you could make all the recommendations in the world and they could still say, no, we want to do it this way.

And because they're paying you, you have to do it. That way, even though you may think it's not the best way, right? I think of the outside person. Sometimes you are, your different [00:23:00] opinions can be more respected. They might not follow them, but it's a little bit easier, at least for me and my personality.

It's been a little bit easier to speak up and, and it'd be opinionated and say, well, this is how I would do it. And this is why I recommend it. And I think. At times when I was an employee, I, I knew kind of the business direction and other initiatives that might've been conflicting. Like I almost had too much information and I would like quiet myself and my opinions too much.

So I think the dog job changes a little bit on the outside. You're more of a therapist. A marketing therapist. And no matter where you sit, whether you're a consultant or not, your job is to build bridges and relationships with stakeholders, no matter what. So it doesn't matter which organization you sit in.

You're basically the glue between all those organizations and everything that's in the stack. So that doesn't change. No matter where you sit. I love it. That's great. Great advice. And with that, [00:24:00] um, thank you Kelly for taking the time to chat with us today. Thank you And thank you for listening to this episode of smtc podcast if you like this episode, please rate us and leave us a review The ratings make the podcast better because we'll read them and we'll adjust accordingly.

And it will also make it easier for other people to discover it. And be sure to subscribe if you haven't already to, and join SMTC by going to join smtc. com and join as a member. It's free. We look forward to hearing from you. Bye. Bye everyone. Thank you.