MOps-Apalooza 2024 Conference Day 1

I recently attended and spoke at the MOps-Apalooza conference from the marketingops.com community. This post covers the session I attended on the first day of the event, which is a roundup of the LinkedIn posts I made about each session or panel. Unfortunately, I could not be in two places at once, so there were additional amazing sessions not covered in this blog. See Day 2's blog here.

Opening Remarks from the MarketingOps Community team

Find the LinkedIn post here

The role of marketing operations is evolving into a more strategic role in many companies, according to the 2024 State of Marketing Ops Professionals research report discussed in the opening session at MOps-Apalooza.

Strategic design and process optimization are now a primary responsibility!  

This is great news that fewer ops professionals are only considered task-takers and software admins at their companies. 👏 It will help advance careers as well as help companies get the most value from operations. 

Thank you to all the experts who have been educating businesses and operations people themselves about this topic in order to create this positive change! 

Other notes from the opening session included:

• 60% of marketing ops people are involved in budget planning and management 💵
• Mike told a story and how he has wanted to be in marketing since he was 8! 🧒
• Marketing Ops Community is working on more help for ops people to ‘begin with the end in mind’ related to career paths and more 👏
  
  

Thanks to Mike Rizzo, Dan Mott, and Audrey Harze for the great opening session! 

Opening Keynote from Jessica Kao

Find the LinkedIn post here

Moving from a tech-centric view of marketing operations to a people-centric view was a theme in the MOps-Apalooza opening keynote from Jessica Kao, Senior Director of Marketing Operations and Martech at Cloudflare.

Jessica talked about how the unique skills of marketing ops people make them ideal for future C-suite positions.

Each one of us can be a leader.
Being a leader means bringing about change.
One way to bring about change is to get inspiration and learn new ideas from each other at conferences like this.

Inspiration is a feeling, an emotion.
Decisions are 95% emotion and 5% logic... this is using data to tell us that most decisions are not primarily data-driven.
So when you want to drive impactful change, talk about the positive impact the change will have on PEOPLE.
We lead people, who are driven by emotion.

Jessica gave a great example of a company where the team was not turning in their weekly reports on time. Instead of beating them over the head with deadlines and reminders, they appealed to the human side with a story of how 'Suzy' had to work on the weekend away from her family when the reports were not submitted on time. This drove nearly 100% compliance with the deadline after that.

The example could also apply to process adoption and other changes marketing operations is trying to create.

And the change starts with you!
If you change, your connected environment will change.

Jessica introduced several examples related to her yoga teacher training, such as:

• How a worn-in path, one that you walk on a lot, is easier to take than forging a new trail
• The concept of the mandala sand art where the image is ceremoniously brushed away after it is complete since the journey of creating it with other people is the point.

This is a lesson in letting go of the physical, such as letting go of preferred tech stacks.

"We are the shepherds of technology at a point in time. Learn to let go."

Thank you, Jessica, for a great start to the conference!

From Campaign Frustration to World Domination: You Don't Need an Army to Double Your Campaign Output

Find the LinkedIn post here

One of my favorite parts of this session at MOps-Apalooza with Tracy Swartzendruber, Heleen Abegg - da Rosa Almeida, and Valerie Hamilton was about these golden rules for marketing ops (MOps) project management:

1. One manager approves/rejects all briefs from the intake process (intake from the people requesting that marketing ops should work on something)
2. All final approvals on work are done in the project management tool (not across various emails, Slack, meetings...)
3. Final approvals of projects are for pointing out big mistakes, not small edits at that point
   

GE (Tracy) was stuck in a reactive state in a 3-month backlog, with no time for strategic work. Too much project management work was weighing down the marketing ops team, so they hired EMMIE Collective to help with marketing ops (Heleen) and then with project management (Val). PM here stood for 'peace of mind,' so the team would not lose their minds! For example, this project manager had to liaise with legal to approve every.piece.of.content.😶

The session also discussed the benefits of hiring an agency, including:

• Immediate expertise without needing to take a chance on hiring someone who might need a few months of training first
• If a team member 'won the lotto' and suddenly left, the knowledge would leave with them (unless they have a great documentation practice), and there would be no immediate support to fill in as an agency could provide
• How hiring in-house for a position that may have no promotion path is not fair on the hired person
• Having the flexibility to ramp up or ramp down the time as needed
  

The various improvements included:

• A new intake process for any requests to marketing ops, including a briefing document with the minimum requirements to start a project
• A ticketing system (I think tasks are called tickets in this project management tool?) with ticket templates for the common types of work so all information lives in the project management ticket instead of across various emails, Slacks, meetings, and more
• The task/ticket start and end dates were auto-filled to keep everyone honest and see the actual times tasks took, in order to better estimate time in the future
• Setting up naming conventions so automation can occur based on standard naming
• Creating different views of the project management boards for different roles and purposes
• Having a weekly meeting as a touchpoint on all open tasks/tickets for a project
  

and more!

Thank you for a great session!

Customer Journey Mapping from Rachel Squire

Find the LinkedIn post here

Rachel Squire, Founder of MOBI Solutions, gave a presentation on Customer Journey Mapping at MOps-Apalooza. Here are a few highlights from the session.

What is a Customer Journey Map?
A visual, aggregate representation of all the various interactions your
customers have with your brand, from start to finish. They can help you optimize your budget to spend more on what's working, boost customer retention and engagement, and find new ways to improve marketing.

The hard part is getting and organizing the customer data, including defining stages (which are different from lifecycle stages) and identifying customer touchpoints (which means you have to define what a customer is). Aggregating the data of emotional responses such as pain points.

The fun part is creating the visualization for a buyer persona's customer journey, with a number of options to choose from, using the most relevant touchpoints (not ALL touchpoints 😬).

Customer journey maps should be used:

• BEFORE starting any project
• When addressing customer feedback
• When you notice pipeline dropping off
  

Customer Journey Mapping Action Plan:

1. Audit your current customer touchpoints
2. Build a visual customer journey map
3. Position the model within your company
4. Iterate and improve

Tips for rolling out the map internally and positioning it:

• Share the end goal of improving the customer experience, making us better marketers (or other roles)
• Make it easy for the team to refer back to it
• Collaborate by getting key stakeholders involved early, such as when you're defining stages
• Make it pretty so people WANT to refer to it. Don't use a plain Excel sheet or boring slides.
  

Thank you for a great session, Rachel!

RevOps: The Ringmaster of the Circus

Find the LinkedIn post here

Ali Rastiello, VP of Revenue Operations at Health Catalyst, and Raimondo Murari, Sr. Director of Marketing Operations at Databricks, based their MOps-Apalooza session on the topic of 'RevOps: The Ringmaster of the Circus.'

They spoke about the evolution of operations professionals:

• Stage 1: Entry-level order taker
• Stage 2: Highly-skilled order taker
• Stage 3: Strategic Consultant

The steps to evolve from stage 1 to stage 3:

1. Align with a north star.
   • Build a road map that aligns with company goals to deflect shiny object syndrome. This can help you say 'no' without being a jerk. You can discuss swapping out roadmap projects instead of just 'no.' The requester might hear you just say no and they think you can't (don't know how to). Raimondo said if someone asks you for a Ferrari, and the CMO says we don't make cars because we make scooters, that is an easier discussion about how we don't want to put projects on the roadmap that don't align with CMO strategy.
2. Take a product management approach to operations.
   • A product has value, function, features, and more. Define the stakeholder needs that are aligned with company goals. Evaluate costs, features, and value of projects and the tech stack. Rinse and repeat. Companies change strategies often, so there will be pivots.
3. Build and empower your ops team.
   • These can include agencies and yourself in several roles if needed, including campaign ops, data architect, technologist, analytics, budget planning, product & project management. They suggest hiring the product & project manager first to manage the roadmap, to help you shift quicker to stage 3.0.
     

Bridging the Gap: Aligning Sales and Marketing for Success from Lauren McCormack

Find the LinkedIn post here

Lauren McCormack, Vice President Marketing at Revenue Pulsegave an excellent MOps-Apalooza session on 'Bridging the Gap: Aligning Sales and Marketing for Success.'

Lauren discussed why alignment matters from a company standpoint and the benefits for individual humans as well. The ways you communicate with other people are 100% in your control, including treating teams, prospects, and customers as humans and not as numbers. Define and communicate the value you give to their lives and the impact on their career.

What can you do right away to help sales and marketing teams align?

1. Bring the Teams Together. Get key stakeholders from both sales and marketing at the same table to define and align on the go-to-market strategy
2. Map The Customer Journey TOGETHER. Collaborate to build a detailed customer journey map, highlighting key touchpoints for all teams (see the previous post about Rachel Squire's session on this topic!)
3. Champion an Alignment Playbook. Develop a playbook that includes the terms, roles, responsibilities, processes, and communication guidelines for both sales and marketing.
   
   (Notice how two out of three of these steps involve...documentation? 😁 📝 )
   

The fastest path to advance to the revenue table is to look at the revenue big picture, described in the steps below.

The longer-term steps discussed to improve alignment:

Step 1: Improve your go-to-market strategy

• Unified Vision
• Clarity on Roles
• Targeted Journeys
• Consistent messaging
  

Step 2: Define and align on key performance indicators

• Pipeline metrics
• Business performance metrics
• Customer Health
  

Step 3: Fuel growth by working together

• Demand generation doesn't stop after the sale
• Use marketing briefs to inform sales and other teams of your activities and wins
• Activate your data
• Use referrals and testimonials across the company

Another interesting share: 10-15% of revenue should be re-invested into marketing, so follow the above steps to make sure your marketing department is getting its share.

Thank you for an insightful session, Lauren!

Elevating Marketing Ops From Tactical to Strategic Leaders from Danielle Worthman

Find the LinkedIn post here

Danielle (Dani) Worthman, Director Of Marketing Operations at Headspace, presented a helpful MOps-Apalooza session on 'Elevating Marketing Ops From Tactical to Strategic Leaders.'

How do you elevate marketing ops from tactical to strategic leaders?

1. Decide what to focus on for the most impact
2. Calculate how much is actually possible
3. Perform internal marketing about wins
4. Build for scalability

What do we focus on?

• Strategy is deciding 'instead of THIS, let's do THAT,' quoting Darrell Alfonso at last year's conference.
• To avoid burnout, you need to have a say in the work you are doing and a say in how that work gets done.
• Creating a team mission (what the business needs from your team, which shows leadership your vision), company objective alignment, and quarterly priorities (suggested amount: 3)
  

How much can we do?

Estimating team bandwidth & protecting time for strategic projects:

• Use story points, a scale based on project factors such as time to deliver, complexity, and unknowns to see the 'heaviness' of a task
• Use project template
• Use intake forms to track how many requests and gather info faster
• Use an agile board for the non-campaign work (such as strategic projects).
• Include at least a 5% buffer in time, and more buffer if possible
• Negotiate quarterly about how much campaign work is requested
• Time block calendars for strategic work time
  

Internal marketing about your work:

• Share your wins across the company
• It may feel 'fluffy,' but it is a strategic move
• Take time to reflect on the wins on the 'done' list and the 'so what' impact on the business
• Create a quarterly and yearly presentation, with one slide per strategic project and one slide that lists all the campaign/daily work that was also completed
  • This also documents your work for performance review time
    

Build for scalability:

• Create documentation!!! 📝 💪 🎉 Think of it as eating vegetables, as good for your future self. Do it while it's fresh in your head when you just finished a painful task, and add context about why you did it that way.
  • Documentation builds trust with leadership and other teams because you can say, 'We do have a process for that, here is the doc.'
  • No one works in one place forever, so do the next person in the job a kindness and leave them a documented history
  • If you answer a question more than once, add it to the playbook/docs
    

Leading RevOps: Doing it and Doing it and Doing it Well from Melissa McCready

Find the LinkedIn post here

Be the leader you'd want to lead YOU.

Melissa McCready, Founder and CEO at Navigate Consulting Group, gave the first day's closing keynote at MOps-Apalooza, on 'Leading RevOps: Doing it and Doing it and Doing it Well.'

61% (!!!) of companies have a vision and strategy but lack the right leadership to execute it.

To become great leaders, we need more examples of OK leaders vs. good leaders, and we need to know what to do to become great. And it also tells us what to look for in a great boss.

What makes a great leader?

They are or have:

Empowering and Inspiring

• They help you gain confidence to do things
• They inspire you to do great work, 'break the rope' that's holding you back
  

Openness and Positivity

• They are open to new ideas
• They are always learning from others
• They use POSITIVE feedback to encourage; even if they disagree, they point you in another direction
• They're good at change management
• They consider everything going on in people's lives
  

Strength and Resiliency

• They are on offense, not defense, and several steps ahead
• They set you up for success by creating a roadmap, project charters, and documentation (thanks for the shoutout! ❤️) so people can see what everyone is working on
  

Empathy and Self-Awareness

• They do not expect others to have the same knowledge and experience as themself since not everyone has the same experience
  

Curiosity and Passion

• They like to go off and learn something and bring it back to the team to use
  • These traits can get out of control quickly. Don't get pulled in too many directions or be too far into a silo pursuing a passion or something curious.
    

Collaborative and Innovative

• They base RACI models on the strengths of the team, NOT on job titles
• They innovate on the ways to use the resources you have
• They embrace lifelong learning to find innovation
  

Integrity

• They hold themself to a high standard and have a high standard of how they treat others
• They can be counted on to do the right thing
• They say nice things in front and behind the back of others, the same message
• Their words match their actions
  

All these traits build on each other.

Q&A:

How to say no:

• Put boundaries on any ticket/task-taking work
• Explain the difference when it's a 'no' because of data to back it up or a 'no' because of other priorities
• Hold your integrity by meaning your 'no' when you say 'no.' Make your actions match your words
  

How to encourage your leader to lead better:

• Practice leadership by example. Manage up. Show them how to lead you.
  • For example, showing them how to present something that will serve their goals better, better language to use
• Understand that most leaders don't get leadership training, and Ops often doesn't get coaching since it's a newer industry. So coach them about how to lead you. Ops leaders haven't been led the way the Head of Sales has been led because of time and experience in creating leadership paths.
• You may also want to get your own coach, if possible
  

Read about Day 2 here.

Learn more about MOps-Apalooza here.