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Humans of Martech

24 Episodes

20 minutes | a day ago
23: Don Draper style storytelling in your presentations #topmartechprospects
In this series we profile a recent marketing grad or a current student and answer some of their most pressing questions about the world of martech and how to be happy in your future marketing career.Sonya Gankina, listener and recent University of Ottawa graduate joins the show as our fourth and final #topmartechprospect.Sonya's question for us: Do you think there is still a place for Don Draper-style verbal presentations in the 2021 remote marketing world? I'm mildly ashamed to adminit I've watched all 92 Mad Men episodes at least twice. This is my favorite scene out of all the episodes. The Kodak carousel is the perfect example of how to tell a compelling story. Your average marketer would've described the new Kodak product as a NEW revolutionary slide projector. You can take a TON of pictures and put them into slides and you can share them with a room of people.But instead, Don took a different approach."This device is not a spaceship, it’s a time machine. It takes us to a place we ache to go again. It lets us travel around and around and back home again, a place we know we are loved."The full clip is worth the watch to get the full emotional punches.--Show notes:Reach out to Sonya on LinkedIn for a coffee or to connect You can visit Sonya's website and check out her digital marketing services and creative portfolio--Intro music by Wowa via Unminus
26 minutes | 8 days ago
22: 6 Things recent marketing grads should STOP doing #topmartechprospects
In this series we profile a recent marketing grad or a current student and answer some of their most pressing questions about the world of martech and how to be happy in your future marketing career. Milan Fatoric, listener and recent University of Ottawa graduate joins the show as our third featured #topmartechprospect.Milan's question for us: What are the top 3 things you would tell every marketing student or recent grad to STOP doing?Here's some of the takeaways:1. Stop chasing a salary, chase interesting problems to solve, the money will follow2. Stop trying to establish yourself as an expert right out of school, instead, get a job and a side hustle and build credibility. Let others call you an expert.3. Stop relying on job boards to get a job you really want, instead, reach out to and hangout with people that are in jobs you want.  --Show notes:Reach out to Milan on LinkedIn for a coffee or to connect: https://www.linkedin.com/in/milanfatoric/--Intro music by Wowa via Unminus
26 minutes | 15 days ago
21: How to balance personal branding and privacy #topmartechprospects
In this series we profile a recent marketing grad or a current student and answer some of their most pressing questions about the world of martech and how to be happy in your future marketing career. Augustine Karczmarczyk, listener and University of Ottawa student joins the show as our second featured #topmartechprospect.Augustine's question for us: When it comes to building a personal brand, how can one balance publicity and privacy?  Can you be credible while concealed, or is being out in the open something you simply must embrace until you’ve established a presence?Check out the episode for JT's full rant on why you don't need to be an influencer. --This is next part is from Augustine: Hey, thanks for being one of six people in the world to look at podcast show notes! You’re probably a librarian or simply here by mistake – but EITHER way, I’m glad you’re reading this. I must have been too starstruck during our recording to mention that I welcome LinkedIn connections here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/augustinek/ If you want to talk timber frames, off-grid housing, or a freelance project, please reach out! If you haven’t heard yet, I’m a “top martech prospect” sooo, you might want to act fast! ;) I also can’t pass up the chance to put my personal website https://augustinek.com on here too for a sweet SEO backlink boost. Look out “Saint Augustine of Hippo” – I’ve got your ranking in my sights. All the best & talk soon!--Intro music by Wowa via Unminus
18 minutes | 22 days ago
20: The starter pack for new digital marketers #topmartechprospects
In this series we profile a recent marketing grad or a current student and answer some of their most pressing questions about the world of martech and how to be happy in your future marketing career. Justin Silver, listener and University of Ottawa student joins the show as our first featured #topmartechprospect.Justin's question for us: What does your “starter pack” for digital marketers” look like?Check out the meme we used to answer this question.Posting on Reddit: “how do I get a job without experience?”. Don’t post this question on social. Want experience? Market yourself. Build a website. Build a social media audience.Last minute changes. Despite a documented process, there’s always a last minute campaing request to hit quota. You just have to embrace it. Email is fast, but use it wisely. Manager in your title. Everyone is a marketing manager these days. Marketing has it’s own milatiristic understanding of rank. Marketers love to invent titles for themselves. You need to realise that titles are secondary to the things you build. Friendly reminders. Are you really running a marketing operations project if you aren’t sending weekly “friendly reminders” to people who have missed deadlines?ABM. Email everyone in the company, with the same unpersonnalized email, non stop. Don’t. Do. This. Fire extinguisher. Carve out some firefighting time on your calendar if you’re in MOPs. Things break. Things suddenly become priorities. Looking at the martech landscape and thinking “I need one of each”. FOMO in martech is a real thing. I’m not using x or y and I’m missing out. Digital marketing isn’t about having all of the tech. It’s about using your tech to the most that you can. Pocket talk translator for integrating tools together. Your CRM calls them leads, your marketing automation tool calls them people, your analytics tool calls them users. Translation required. Gotta get on {{insert.popular.trend}}. Bernie Mitts expired in what? 2 days? You don’t have to be an early adopter for everything. Loading screens for days. Whether it’s a big Marketo insteance or a long time frame report in GA, marketers battle with slow reports every day. You shouldn’t need a gaming PC to run your automation software.--Show notes:Justin's LinkedIn Profile: www.linkedin.com/in/justin-silver-14b393108Justin's site: https://bit.ly/3cCSMPkConference mentioned: Legacy conference.--Intro music by Wowa via Unminus
41 minutes | a month ago
19: Steffen Hedebrandt: Reaching B2B attribution nirvana
Steffen Hedebrandt is co-founder of Dreamdata.io. Transcripted borrowed from here.Phil Gamache:What's up, guys? Welcome to the Humans of MarTech podcast. His name is Jon Taylor, my name is Phil Gamache. Our mission is to future-proof the humans behind the tech so you can have a successful and happy career in marketing.Phil Gamache:Today on the show, we have a super special guest. We're joined by Steffen Hedebrandt. Steffen got his start in the world of marketing doing some SEO and some growth consultancy in the startup world. And he moved to Oslo in Norway to work in sales/BizDev for a company called Elance, which would eventually become Upwork after the oDesk acquisition. And he stayed there for three and a half years and moved back to Copenhagen and took a position as Head of Marketing at Airtame, a wireless HTMI product startup which John and I know very well. And at some point during your time at Airtame, you solved some pretty cool big attribution problems with some custom engines, and you started to get this itch about starting your own company.Phil Gamache:In the summer of 2019, you, Ole and Lars, both former SVPs of Trustpilot made the plunge and started DreamData. So today the main takeaway is going to be that, gone are the days where enterprise companies are the only people who can solve multitouch B2B attribution and tools like DreamData are solving this for startups and SMBs. So Steffen, thanks so much for being on the show, man.Steffen Hedebrandt:Thanks a lot, Phil. Really looking forward to it. We've talked a lot about this topic before. I'm sure we'll get pretty deep pretty fast.Phil Gamache:Like myself, I've evaluated DreamData quite a bit, so I'm super familiar with the platform itself. John, I don't know how much you know about it, but I wanted to kind of start off with your journey a little bit and go back to when you were working at Upwork basically, this big tech role and how different was that from your previous role in the startup world and what did you like most about both roles?Steffen Hedebrandt:From the get-go out of university, I joined the Vintage and Rare, which is basically, or I don't know if they exist anymore, but it was a platform for selling vintage instruments where kind of gathering shops and the shops would then put their instruments up there. And the first craft that I really learned after studying was really SEO because if you have 10,000 instruments, then you really want to have those instruments on top of Google instead of your competitors there. And, I just got super fascinated by actually how big an impact you can have when you understand that Google algorithm and how to friendly manipulate a little bit towards your own business.Steffen Hedebrandt:But, that was an almost bootstrapped kind of project which led me to reading The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferris and dipping my toes into places like Elance and trying to hire people from India and try to connect them with the other freelancers you had in Europe and other freelancers you had in the US and then suddenly you have this web of people all over the world that you have to make work and that's quite a challenge.Steffen Hedebrandt:Fun story, my first job was, I put up a job for a person to add people on Myspace that's set with a guitar in their profile image. Super non valuable, but it was just to test down. So our vintage and rare profile had more followers. I learned a ton there and we didn't make any money, but we were greatly successful on Google and having been there for I don't know how long the was, three years or so. I actually got approached by Elance as they were setting up their European office and asked whether I wanted to join that and try to promote Elance in Europe. And, me being a big fan of the platform, I thought, okay, well, I haven't made any money in the last three years, so, let me go get a real job for a period.Steffen Hedebrandt:So, the music instrument platform was really fixing anything digital, this ads, SEO, et cetera, where Elance's and Upwork was much more the traditional business development like doing PR, doing events, handing over a list of keywords that you would like to have targeted. And so it's a much more you can, say hands-off than the nitty gritty of running your own a platform, but it was really interesting to try to be part of this classical California tech company and see that from the inside. It also got big so I think we were 70 when I started at Elance. And then, when it was Upwork, it was maybe 500. I think my true love lies around the smaller companies where it's bigger from thought action, and you see the impact of your work much faster.Phil Gamache:Something we talk with so much about on the show is the value of small companies. And well, just knowing what you like and the environment that works best for you. You touched on the SEO front. I think, as we talk more and more about attribution in this episode, SEO and attribution that they go together like peanut butter and salty water. It just is such a hard combination to get right.Phil Gamache:How many times in SEO land are you talking to an executive and your trying to explain like the value of SEO and you're like, hey, well, you know that dominating search rankings and owning thought leadership and the brand space that you have there. But then connecting those dots, I think, a lot of SEOs end up thinking attribution a lot because they want to really tie things to that revenue. Maybe you can talk a little bit about how your journey has brought you from SEO into the attribution?Steffen Hedebrandt:Yes. It's like super critical spot on topic for attribution. And I think we also showed some of you, some of this stuff still when we pitched Dreamdata. The main attribution challenge is that there's so few things that we purchase the very first time we experienced it. I’d buy an ice cream on a hot summer day right away. But even just a pair of running shoes you’d go to a couple of sites. You'd maybe switch between your computer and your phone, et cetera. And if we’re then talking B2B, which that's what we address with Dreamdata, then we're also talking maybe multiple months, multiple stakeholders, even your teams has multiple touches with the customer as well. And then, very quickly it gets really complex.Steffen Hedebrandt:Just before I go to kind of how we solve it, what we really can see across all our customers is that all the organic traffic works really well to start journeys, but they're so rarely the last step of the journey. So that's where you end up in this disconnect between all the value you actually create by driving a lot of search traffic to the website. But then the sales people is the ones that convert the traffic, and then they get all the reward for closing the deals. But the deals might never have gone there if you hadn't brought in all the traffic.Jon Taylor:And, we go to this data-driven path where we want to see direct lines and businesses becoming so data-driven that we almost detach ourselves from thinking through the real marketing picture. You're right. You come in through SEO and then you download and nurture, you get a couple emails, a campaign, and then you purchase, and then it gets credit to sales call. You're like, "Wait a minute, marketing was involved in this."Jon Taylor:I saw this in my consulting life. I saw a really bad analysis that proved that accountants were the number one customer that we had. But we were an engineering firm. They were just purchasing the product at the end like, "We need more accountants." We do to pay our bills, but this wasn't the actual journey.Steffen Hedebrandt:It's so interesting. What we are after all of us, it's really just knowing the truth about what is going on. Because, when there's transparency into what's going on, then we can also do much more valid conclusions on what to do next and what to stop.Phil Gamache:That's the big word there, like trusting, having the transparency of the data, but also having buy-in from the rest of the folks in the company that they also believe in that data, attribution has such a dark reputation because a lot of folks just say that, a lot of offline purchases are never going to be tracked in this online world and attribution for B2B and for B2C isn't a real thing. So when you were at Airtame and you were trying to solve this, and you built up some custom solutions for this, talk us through like that journey and how you solved those internally and how you convinced folks in the company to believe in the data that it was like legit.Steffen Hedebrandt:I think that was a really interesting journey for me. And I actually have to correct you Phil, because we actually didn't solve that attribution problem. Not before I met my two now partners. They were pitched by our local VC for me to talk to them just to hear them out. I replied the VC saying, "I don't really think they can solve this, but I'll talk to them anyway. Now we're here.Steffen Hedebrandt:So I started out joining this company Airtame that came out of a crowdfunding campaign. So, a day we're spending several money on ads when I started there. And, over the past three years, we ramped that from zero euros a month to around $150,000 a month in ad spend. And what'd you see, is that in your initial spend, then you can kind of okay, do the gut feeling, okay, I turned that up and now we see more money. But as all low hanging fruits are gone, you're firing on all cannons, then it gets really hard to understand whether adding another 10,000 Euros a month is worth it or not.Steffen Hedebrandt:I found myself in... My practical solution was that, as long as I can prove that I'm not wasting money, then I can spend more money. Meaning that, you purchased the device and the website, so if the money I spent equal the money that we made through the ads, then it cannot be totally bad, but I had no clue about what was going on. I judged my marketing spend in the same month as I made the spend, which is completely stupid because, you know the journeys are like three or six months or so, but that was all I had. And that's obviously not a smart way to do it because the dollar you put out today takes six months to kind of... You plant the seed until the sales guy closes the deal. And that's why it's so critical to have some kind of clue on how those dots they really connect.Steffen Hedebrandt:And then, I met these two guys Lars and Ole who had been pioneering you can say, segment the CDP, almost like he was been pioneering it in Europe. He was the third ever enterprise customer at segment. And so at Trustpilot where he worked before, they had been storing all the data of the users on the website, in a database. And Trustpilot also had this problem of, it's a review platform where companies set up a profile and then it took an average 12 months from the set up of the profile until they saw revenue. So they wanted to understand what happened in the period in between, sign up to revenue.Steffen Hedebrandt:And as they solved this problem with the help of a CDP, then you could also start to ask questions. Is there a difference in the channel that they came in from? Is it better to be paid or organic or outbound? Who churns more, who has to hire LTV and so forth? We've been using segment as well and then we plugged in our data into this rough prototype that Lars and Ole had from Trustpilot. And what I could see there was actually, a good example is that, in the beginning of that year, I set up a content team with two writers, a videographer, a designer, and an editor for the team. And I've just been looking at [inaudible 00:13:33], looking at, our rank went up or we're getting more organic traffic. But, the CEO would be like, but I can't pay my salary [crosstalk 00:13:44] takes you guys have. But what we could see with that DreamData prototype was that for example, we had an alternative game, so Airtame versus another product, and we could see that those articles were actually massively valuable because ultimately, they ended up becoming into deal [inaudible 00:14:03] closed one.Steffen Hedebrandt:The only thing you can see in Google analytics is that those pages were visited. So the conclusion out of Google analytics would be to say stop that project, fire those people don't do it anymore. But in fact, one article started journeys for $60,000 within a year. So that's why it's so extremely important that you're able to connect those dots all the way from the first touch all the way through to revenue.Phil Gamache:I think you were describing a situation that I'm sure most of our listeners are very familiar with, that tangle of attribution and proving the value. One of the things I'd like to talk a little bit about is, where does Google analytics fit in the journey. It's almost table stakes for digital marketing, but you're right, it could lead you to some very poor decisions if you're not looking further down the funnel. How have you helped other people, or how do you approach the maturity curve from Google analytics into a segment, into a DreamData.io, into a HubSpot and connecting all these dots?Steffen Hedebrandt:This is one of the biggest challenges we have at DreamData is, kind of educating the market, meaning that telling people that Google analytics is close to useless in a B2B company.Steffen Hedebrandt:Let me start like this, do your customers purchase the first time they see something or do they need to do multiple research? Yes/No. Would they be using multiple devices in this journey? Yes/No. Would there be more people involved in taking this decision? Yes/No. Would your salespeople also be involved in this journey as well? And as you start to list all these bullets, then Google analytics starts to crumble quite severely.Steffen Hedebrandt:So to answer the question, I think it's also like an educational path and kind of an internet maturity thing. Because, now CDPs are blowing up and which helps people understand that you can actually have one person that then owns two devices that you can then start to understand if that one person, the next step is then to associate these people with for example, an account as you do in B2B. Does that make sense, Jonathan?Jon Taylor:Absolutely. Absolutely. It describes the universe that I occupy all the time and other organizations. It's also the technical issues. You described a scenario that even if you were a hundred percent aligned on everything, you're saying there's a technical issue. So I'm curious about the technical problems that you see. And obviously I'd love to hear more about how DreamData could solve that problem.Steffen Hedebrandt:But it's also kind of, it is almost like a consultancy expression, like change management process, because, man, now the CEO, he learned the Google analytics 10 years ago and it was actually okay 10 years ago because people only have a few devices.Jon Taylor:There's nothing more dangerous than a CEO and in Google analytics.Steffen Hedebrandt:But you basically have to tell a lot of the organization that you have to unlearn what you know right now and think about stuff in a different way. That is one of the biggest challenges selling our tool. It's kind of a new category, so there's not a natural spot in the budget for software for it. So that's kind of what we're trying to carve out.Phil Gamache:Yeah. Where that budget fits in is really interesting because, one thing that you've told me Steffen that really changed the way that I pitched attribution solutions internally is that, this isn't a marketing problem to solve. This isn't just on marketing to prove is content driving this, or where trials starting from.. This is a company problem and we're trying to figure out where the company is driving growth and we want to double down on those things and we want to figure out, what is driving trials? And so instead of it just always being marketing have to like come up with this battle and we need budget for this, it should really be more of this holistic approach. We need to solve this as a company.Steffen Hedebrandt:When you talk B2B, I think what this one is all about is actually being able to collect data of a full journey, meaning that you gather every single touch point then it's an opinion about what was important afterwards, but it starts with you actually storing your data and putting every single touch into a timeline. And then it can be kind of opinionated, whether which attribution model or so to use, but it starts with you actually getting out of a habit of having these cowboy salespeople with a phone that just like all the people and getting them into kind of air coal or something else. Taking every single touch you have and make sure that it's digital and make sure that it's stored somewhere so you can actually start to model it at a later point.Phil Gamache:It's super cool. So we touched on a little bit like the analytics maturity path that some of these companies go through. We talked about GA and, we throw shade at GA, but for a lot of companies that are in that startup stage that are less than 10 people or less than 20 people, an end-to-end multi-touch attribution solution isn't at the top of their list of priorities. They will just be using GA maybe they're like upgrading and relying on some UTM codes to track and see last touch and first touch. But, the end-to-end model where you can have all those touch points in the middle and then aggregate all those to a domain level, that's that's where the sophistication of needing to set up the data infrastructure, or a data warehouse where you can combine all of those touchpoints together.Phil Gamache:So why don't you touch a little bit on the service side of DreamData, the Google big query service type of package that needs to get done before you can get to the Nirvana of attribution that the visualizations kind of present.Steffen Hedebrandt:What we're trying to do with our product is incredibly ambitious because we holistically want to have every single touch that any account has any place. So, the way we do two things you can say, and then we glue those two things together. One is that we have a script that you put on your website, and this script starts to assign anonymous IDs to every visitor. And then we start to record what is this anonymous ID doing? If that anonymous ID at some point identifies themselves through a form of demo call or download depo et cetera, then we ask for permission to go look at what they did while they were anonymous. And now, as we know who they are, we can also associate them with an account. So you have this multitouch profile of just one individual that it's then put into the timeline of what does everybody from one account doing.Steffen Hedebrandt:And this is all stored in Google big query. So, you build your history off every single visitor on your website. Where did they come from, where did they go and what did they look at and so forth. So you have those touch points component.Steffen Hedebrandt:And then the other important component is what takes place everywhere else in the organization, meaning in your CRM, in your automation system, in your outreach software, in your customer success software, in your calling software. Because those are also touches that is going towards one account, and you actually want to mix all of that up to find every single touch that is part of an account journey and then map that into a nice clean journey. And with all that in place, you can start to do this analysis that we as marketers like to do, meaning that how's the ROI on Google ads? How's the ROI on a specific Google campaign? You can do that because all the campaigns arrives with a click ID, and then we can look up the click ID and see if it was part of any one journey or not.Steffen Hedebrandt:Same methodology applies to organic search as well. We use the tool ourselves a lot to do a business development because we can see which accounts are active and we can see who was it and what did they do from that account. So when your salespeople call them up, they will have something relevant to say, or when they send them a mail, they will know which campaign they actually reacted to and so forth. How does that answer?Phil Gamache:That's super cool. I think that there's a ton to unpack there, for sure. One of the things I want to highlight there that I think DreamData does better than a lot of your competitors in this space is this kind of company level sort of aggregation. You mentioned so many touch points in the B2B world, there's the end user who's going to go on your website first and he's going to look at a couple of blog posts, and then he's going to send a blog post to his technical implementer. And then that person's going to need to get the buy in from the director. There's so many people in the company involved in that. And if you're only looking at the purchaser and their journey, you're not getting the full picture of who is that first person in the company who was on the website.Phil Gamache:Can you touch on that, like super quickly? How does DreamData accomplish that? How are you able to aggregate those multiple touch points from different people all into one account and how are you doing this with reverse IP, everyone working from home now and not being in the same IP. How are you guys solving that.Steffen Hedebrandt:Let me try to remember all the questions in that one question, otherwise remind me. If we start with the script on the website and the way we link users to accounts, we have a hierarchy assess CRM where we would look you're up. So, normal CRM being obviously the first CRM, but you might also have HubSpot and you might also have Intercom and so forth. So, we get with the customer define what is the primary CRM, and then we'd say [inaudible 00:24:41] at a close IO and look to see in the CRM if we can find a connection there, then it's sorted.Steffen Hedebrandt:And if Jonathan comes along and he's not in the CRM, but he actually started to sign up to HubSpot so he receives some emails, in there we then discovered that Jonathan is also associated to close IO. If that doesn't work, then we can start to just look at the domain and say, okay, that domain is close IO. If that doesn't work, then we have an access to an IP database that we look up as well. So we do all of these things simultaneously all the time.Steffen Hedebrandt:And then, as we connect the user to to the company, then one user might have touch or in the timeline, touch one, three and five, and the other user would have touch two and four. So we organize it by timestamps, which activities took place. And that's kind of how we overcome this burden of you putting your ad spend on one person and then his boss comes with the credit card afterwards and pay you.Phil Gamache:Gotcha.Jon Taylor:One of one of the things that I observed when I did a stint as a Marketo consultant and marketing automations consultant, everyone's talking about ABM. One of the things that there's a little graphic that we're all looking at here, we should tweet this out when we do the episode. But in my opinion, you also start to see this type of attribution unlocking other capabilities. You have the ability to then, hey, now I can do account based marketing, because I actually know what works. I have a buyer cycle that's more sophisticated than just one ad for one person.Jon Taylor:I also feel like you start to get permission to do things internally within the organization. Hey, let's do some brand. We know that these things are working well, let's do some brand advertising. Something small companies don't always get to do. Do you want to talk a little bit about how you see this with your customers? You reach this Nirvana state, what starts to happen beyond just knowing more?Steffen Hedebrandt:Let's say that we are providing the best data set available to explain what's going on. Still, then you need humans to act on what the data is telling you. And, sort of the best of the cases we have, people go out and act afterwards, meaning that, hey, this, a Google ads campaign is actually thriving. Deals, let me turn up the spend on that campaign and try to make similar campaigns even as well. Or it could be to say, discover those pieces of content that drives deals. Let's do more of those. But we do also have customers who's not kind of acting enough on what the data is actually informing them. So what we're looking at now is to do some... Can we recommend stuff? This is like an outlier in terms of positive performance, do more of that. This is outlier in terms of negative, you should probably do less of that.Steffen Hedebrandt:Somewhere down the line, as we pitch to VCs, we also talk about revenue automation. Whereas, we believe that this data set is the data set that knows the most about like the commercial bit of your business. Some, given we know this, then we should also be able to buy more of your ads, depending on early signals of how those ads are performing or not.Steffen Hedebrandt:It could also be like stuff like what if scenario so say, we do a data model where you... You act like you set a budget to double, and then you predict how much revenue would come out of it. But that's further down the line of stuff that you can do. But the data is only as impactful as the people who react to the afterwards, I think.Jon Taylor:You touched on this earlier, and I think that was such a good point. You're educating the market as much as you're doing, you're solving a technological problem. Marketers exist at this interesting intersection, the skillsets that marketers have often put us direct contact with the pain points, but sometimes technically, the problems are very hard to solve. I know I'm not a data analyst by any stretch of the imagination, so the idea of, I don't know, predictive or alerting, or some sort of notification that helps to take some of the thought and some of the debate of these conversations. You're sitting at the CEO table and you're trying to figure out how to position this data. And, you're also in your own head thinking, am I really the expert here? You kind of have that self doubt. How does a vision of your platform, I think, jive with that type of marketing future?Steffen Hedebrandt:I think actually, we like to think of ourselves as almost the CTO for the CMO or kind of, let's take care of all this really hot stuff for the marketing people so they can just skim the cream and then do more of what works and stop doing what didn't work. But the truth can also be painful sometimes. If we thought to tell people, look, this is actually not driving revenue, then that can also be a problem. That's a cool thing here would be to kind of celebrate these lead ad campaigns that gathers a ton of emails, but when you look them up, there's no connection to one deals at all, but the marketing agency would say it was a success, but because you got a 100 new emails or something like that.Jon Taylor:Enter in hand wave brand-building right?Phil Gamache:So, with kind of several customers now that are set up using DreamData, what insights can you share for our listeners on trends that you've seen across customers kind of on an early basis? I know when a customer gets set up, it's probably a X amount of months until they start seeing data kind of populate. And, once the data warehouse is set up, share some insights on things that you're seeing so far, what's the typical time to revenue or what models do you see customers using the most?Steffen Hedebrandt:I'll try to say a couple of things. I think first of all, people are surprised by how long the research phase is or the phase where people are anonymous. People normally tend to understand from the moment we got that email into sales, then we converted within two months or so. But, the research phase is easily three or four months before that, which means a ton in terms of if you're trying to hit budget in the last quarter and you haven't done your marketing investment, then it's too late actually to start the journeys. So, the ramp time of the seeds you plant are actually longer than you expect.Steffen Hedebrandt:Then, I would say, all the stuff you can do that is focused on high intent is the stuff that actually kind of works. What I mean by that is, low funnel stuff is really where you should start. For example, an example is these alternative articles. Even though the volume is small, they're insanely valuable because if you're searching for an alternative to an already established brand, the intend you arrive to your website with is super big and I can't probably make money on it. Where a lot of companies, they try to go for volume, or volume at the cost of your going wider as well. And a ton of those stuff is just waste of money.Steffen Hedebrandt:And then, the overall trend is really that people have no clue about how valuable their organic and paid efforts are, because it's not connected from when you are anonymous to close one deals. A lot of people are under investing in this stuff because they cannot prove it. So they are growing a lot slower than what they actually could be if they could see like five X, the return of what they're seeing today.Phil Gamache:You touched on so many interesting points. As an SEO as well, we often get a bit of a rap for always going after a quote unquote, big keywords, high volume keywords. But when you see it at the end of the day, you're always grounded back to, "Hey, you got to do more stuff for the customer." They're asking salespeople's questions. We can answer them in a top of or bottom of funnel kind of posts. How do people react to some of this news when they start seeing, Oh crap, this isn't working. I thought this was my... My ego is attached to this work as well.Steffen Hedebrandt:Actually, what I was just about to say is that across our customers, Facebook really doesn't seem to work. There's components to that. One thing is that Google ads out of the box, that's the clique ID, whereas on Facebook, you need to actually set a click ID manually, which makes it harder to attribute. But across the board, Facebook is really not driving a lot of B2B revenue compared to Google.Steffen Hedebrandt:And yeah, as you said, Jonathan, that also leads to debates kind of, "Hey, I used to regard this as a success, but you're saying it's not a success. I don't trust you."Steffen Hedebrandt:Another problem is that we will never get to 100% without an attribution tool. So kind of people sometimes freak out if they know one data point that should be in the journey that it's not there. And they're like, okay, good. I'm not using it then. Whereas, you should think about it more as a statistical framework that takes you from knowing 10 or 20% to knowing maybe 70 or 80% as to kind of when you act on the data, it's still leading you towards a good place. But, they tend to freak out about, if they remember one single touch that, "Hey, I saw him at that place and he's not in that journey." And then obviously we need to do everything we can to get the data quality super high, but you're just never going to get to 100%, not even with the perfect tool.Phil Gamache:Yeah. There's podcasts like this one, there's no intent attribution on podcasts. There's no attribution on sending a text to your buddy who's using this platform and asking him for a candid review on it. There's always going to be these offline sources that a tool can track for every company.Steffen Hedebrandt:100%. We only do, you can say deterministic attribution, stuff we can prove happened. Like old school, what's it called, the old school marketing guys that would do TV ads or radio ads. They would do these guesstimates of... I guess it's causality that they say. I spent this money, now we make this money. And, whereas we're in the business off, we can actually prove it. That was click, that was revenue, whereas the others, did you hear this Freakonomics podcast that came out a couple of months ago?Phil Gamache:No, I don't think so.Steffen Hedebrandt:That was fun. But, they found out that for some companies, even though the best day was kind of Thursday or Black Friday or something like that, but it's because it's like correlate, then you spent more money on ads, but it actually is just because it's correlates with this is the time of year when people spend more. There's no impact [crosstalk 00:36:21].Phil Gamache:Well, that's crazy. Maybe we can end on this question. One of the things I see a lot about like debates around attribution is the modeling around it. When companies are building these custom solutions internally, they're forced to pick one model. So a first touch or multitouch, or like W shape. What I think that DreamData does super cool is this ability to just quickly on the fly change your attribution model when you're looking at a visualization. So can you touch a bit on why you guys went around that routes and, are customers loving that?Steffen Hedebrandt:I think this is actually kind of just out of the box. One of the biggest revelations that we give to people is that we help them compare attribution models. So say for paid, we'll show you five different attribution models for the paid channel right away. So we'll show you the first touch next to the last touch next to a dog reshape next to linear next to U-shaped. The answer is that depending on how you look at it, it's true that the ad started the journey, but it's also true that the ad was not the last touch. The essential bit is that you have all the information available, meaning you have the full journey and then you can then have different kinds of analysis purposes that you're trying to solve.Steffen Hedebrandt:Meaning that, if I want to understand which ads to buy more of, I think actually a first touch model is fairly legit to look at because you just want to see where the journey starts from. And then you want to do more of that. Whereas if you're looking at it from an ROI perspective, maybe you want to do a W shape, meaning, so it's touch first, conversion last conversion, et cetera. So my answer is always that you should look at all the attribution models before you decide on doing something because they all represent different parts of the truth.Phil Gamache:I love it. We'll end on this last question before we let you go,. We like to ask all our guests how they stay happy in their career and in their professional lives. You're a super busy guy. You're CRO of a company just founded a of years ago. You just got a nice big round of funding. Congrats on that, you're talking to VCs, how do you manage all this stuff? How do you stay happy in your life?Steffen Hedebrandt:Good stuff. I think I'm a little bit gifted also by being naturally motivated to continuously improve. But I guess by being in a startup, I'm just constantly motivated by, "Hey, here's an idea. Let's try and build it." And then unfolding creatively is so rewarding for me. And then seeing the result, Oh, fuck that worked or that didn't work, let's try to do more. Can we beat last month and so forth?Steffen Hedebrandt:I think because everything is so transparent in a startup, it, matters a lot whether you show up or you don't show up. That really, really motivates me. I just had a kid 20 months ago. I used to have a lot of time to then run or do CrossFit or something like that, which was a great outlet for me when you kind of feel, Oh fuck, I'm a bit full now. If you have time to do exercise a lot, because there's a lot of natural chill coming after doing so, now with a kid that's kind of... I think getting a kid has actually made me a lot better at prioritizing kind of like you've default to what drives revenue.Steffen Hedebrandt:Also, I kind of thought you would spend time on, got to get this small thing right. Nowadays, does this correlate with more revenue in the SNL and then I stay focused on those tasks.Phil Gamache:It's such a good answer. I love the aspect around the kids as well. There's this change in mindset once you start having children. As somebody in a fast paced startup you... One of my colleagues always says, I love this line actually. She says, "I'm super lazy."What she means is that she's not going to spend an ounce of effort on anything she doesn't think is going to provide return. I love that perspective and I love the perspective you shared on happiness. I think there's so much wisdom to unpack in what you just said.Phil Gamache:Steffen, thanks to you. Tank you so much for being on the show, man. We'll add in the show notes the website, DreamData.io where people can go check it out. I know you're active on Twitter and LinkedIn, so we'll drop links there, but thanks a lot for your time and really appreciate it.Steffen Hedebrandt:I really appreciate the invite, thanks. --Intro music by Wowa via Unminus
28 minutes | a month ago
18: Make the most of your welcome email in your onboarding campaign
Try to send your welcome emails on behalf of coworkers who live in the same shoes as your target users. If you’re in B2B, chances are you’re using your own product, at least a coworker is. Let them write the welcome email for new users. This is especially powerful when you serve many different verticals. Example: if you sell to marketers and sales. Ask all new users to identify with sales/marketing in the signup process. Send the welcome email to marketers from a marketer at your company who showcases how they use the product for marketing use cases. Send the welcome email to sales reps from someone on your sales team who showcases how they use the product for sales use cases. JT: Okay Phil, you showed me a screenshot of this question you answered in a Slack community. PG: Yeah shoutout to Elite Marketers and Founders Slack community that was started by Joel Musambi and Tomas Kolafa, two Ottawa-Toronto marketers. JT: So the question was about building email onboarding flows for b2b products and any great resources or things that have worked well. I know that during our time together at Klipfolio we experimented a lot with emails but in your past you’ve done a bit of freelancing and moonlighting in email onboarding land.What’s this magic welcome email that works extremely well?PG: So I want to preface this by saying that this really only works if your product sells to different segments of users. And this is usually the case right?If you only sell to marketers for example, there might still be segments in the decision makers, so you could talk to the marketing manager who’ll be using the product, you might talk to the marketing ops person who needs to integrate new tools and you might need sign off from the Director who’s the decision maker. JT: yeah we could do a full episode on segmentation, maybe we should. Okay so let’s actually use an example here, let’s go with a popular name and let’s pick a tool that tons of verticals can use, lots of use cases. PG: Yeah let’s go with Basecamp. Project management tools. There’s so many of them. In part because everyone can use a project management or todo list type of tool.Basecamp sells to a bunch of different roles. Marketers, sales, product teams, finance, you name it, there’s a use case for it. JT: So I’m on their site now, when you start a trial, there’s a few questions they ask you up front, did you go through this already?PG: haha yeah I did a bit of prep for this.When you start a trial of Basecamp they ask you for name and email, then company name and job title/role. They then ask if your company has these departments/anyone that works in these roles, they list sales, rnd, marketers, finance and managers. Then they even ask for a use case, if you’re working on any of these projects, site build, event, new product launch or rebrand. JT: That’s actually quite a lot of info to ask upfront. I’m okay with it if companies are doing something with that info though.So you finished creating an account, Welcome emails come in about 5 mins later. Are you happy? PG: I’m actually really sad haha. Basecamp is a tiny team so email segmentation and onboarding is probably super low on their list. I remember when they hired a head of marketing their job posting said something like “this job isn’t about email nurturing, though very important, the scope of this role is much broader”. And that makes a ton of sense. Small team, you gotta prioritize. JT: So the welcome email wasn’t segmented?PG: Sent from support@ and there’s no segmentation content in there despite knowing my role and my use case. They are probably using that data to inform other decisions, but I didn’t get any segmented content that could’ve boosted engagement.JT: Okay, let’s say I’m Jason or Andy at Basecamp and we hire you to upgrade our email onboarding and you need to impress the shit out of these guys. What does the welcome email look like?PG: Yeah so let’s go back to some of the questions Basecamp asks users in the signup process.By asking for job title, they could lookup specific words and put me in a role bucket. Something really cool that they do in the onboarding is ask what departments you have setup and to invite someone from that team. In this case Basecamp knows if someone is from rnd or finance. JT: So user signs up, you know they fit into 1 of 5 role buckets: Marketing Sales Rnd Finance managers PG: So then next step is nominating 1 person in your company for each of those role buckets. And you help them write the welcome email from their perspective and share how they use the product.So the welcome email to marketers comes from Andy, their head of marketing, he shows Basecamp in action for a product launch he completed recently and walks through his daily process for running marketing through basecamp.Rnd email comes in from DHH, their famous CTO. He probably reminds you that he created ruby on rails in the welcome email haha but he’s probably able to craft something totally different for a technical user compared to a marketer in Andy’s email. So maybe in that email DHH talks about Basecamp 3’s API improvements or how they break up user stories into subcomponents and sub tasks. The manager email comes from Jason their CEO and he walks other managers and team leaders through the Small Council team setup they use internally or maybe the campfire sections and how to keep the team in touch and highly collaborative. JT: love it. What you’re doing is creating instant connection with empathy in your welcome email. It’s written in language you’re familiar with and the use cases shown are super familiar with your world. PG: Yeah so haven’t done this in a bunch of places there, it doesn't always work, especially if you serve a very niche audience. But usually in B2B someone in your company resembles your target user.I find it super fun to work for a B2B company that sells to marketers or marketing ops. So I’m someone on the team but I’m also very close to the customer’s worlds, I live in similar pain points every day.--Intro music by Wowa via Unminus
39 minutes | a month ago
17: Julie Beynon: Making marketing analytics not intimidating
We’ve got a super special guest today. Julie Beynon was born and raised in Ottawa, currently lives in Toronto.Got her start in marketing in - Kanata North’s - tech valley- with a company called Protus IP. She then spent nearly 5 years at Conceptshare, an agency startup that  pioneered creative proofing software and was acquired by Deltek.  She then freelanced for a bit, discovered the benefits of working remotely. Landed a gig on the marketing team at Customerio for 3 years. Working remotely. On the Ops and analytics side. For the past 2+ years, she’s head of analytics at Clearbit – a badass saas company with an awesome story of grit and one of the smartest growth teams in SaaS.  Julie is the brain behind the scenes. She’s a powerhouse data analyst with a marketing lense at heart.And today she’s going to share why data Warehousing no longer needs to be intimidating for marketers.  We can’t NOT start by talking about your journey. Western U grad, born and raised in Ottawa. Started in Kanata, worked for a startup/agency. Now you’re head of analytics at one of the coolest SaaS companies in the world. How and why did you make the leap to remote and working for a us saaa?What’s the top skill a fresh marketer should be learning if they want to work in marketing analytics? Why do you choose to work at a small smb sized company, when you could be a Director at an enterprise company. What keeps you in the startup/smb space?Let’s talk about your day to day, you’re head of analytic.. What’s that like, what are the highs and lows?When do you know it’s time to upgrade from spreadsheets. Gotta love a good Google sheet.  Size of dataset, at some point it becomes clunky, slow. To run formulas or use large spreadsheets, you're using your computer’s hardware capabilities.  dwh doesn’t have row limits, not limited by your laptop’s processing power.  The analysis, reports you run off of a dwh are run inside the tool instead of on your laptop. so it’s way faster. How to convince your startup eng team that you need a DW for marketing data?What are the steps someone needs to take to go from I don’t have a DW for marketing data, my data is all over the place… to: I have account level aggregate data of all the touchpoints and I can share them across all my tools.How do you pick a dwh solution? Microsoft azure ecosys; native ML + powerBI  Amazon redshift runs on aws Snowflake provides their own spin on dwh Google bigquery, simple, flexible, --Intro music by Wowa via Unminus
29 minutes | 2 months ago
16: Lifecycle: A Martech Saga part 5: No sales people were harmed in the making of your lifecycle
It's super easy to over-engineer lifecycle and to underthink sales component.JT you've done this project a ton in HubSpot & Marketo both client-side and in-house. Who usually leads this internally (sales, marketing, other functions)?I can explain it to you but not understand it for you; this project is a distraction to sales; sales sees themselves as revenue drivers — and who in your organization is closer to putting 0’s on your paycheck?Common concern of sales is the limited bandwidth and massive distraction, not too mention refactoring their daily rhythm. If sales isn’t bought in, it’s because it’s not valuable // full-stop. If you can’t get a partner in sales, then you need to see that as feedback. It’s painful but sales has got to see the value in this or you’ll never get this off the ground. (we then dive into some examples of going off the rails).Deeper dive into lifecycle stages and contact status // road map versus traffic light analogy.Thanks for checking out our lifeycle martech saga! Let us know what we should dive into for our next saga!--Intro music by Wowa via UnminusPodcast artwork font by StarJedi Special Edition by Boba Fonts
28 minutes | 2 months ago
15: Lifecycle: A Martech Saga part 4: Picking the right MQL model
You once told me you don’t care about the tools. I remember when I started working with you, we talked about pardot and marketo and hubspot, and you said you’d use carrier pigeons and smoke signals if that’s all you had. We’re Martech geeks -- of course you’re going to say to deploy a lead scoring model -- but why is it important to imagine a universe without one? It’s important to understand things in their most basic form. The concept of abstraction in programming is instructive here - basically it means that we build upon the sophistication of the code that came before us to create simpler code. In other words, you don’t need to know binary to write javascript.Same goes for MQLS - we’ve accepted scoring as the definition of MQLs without always thinking it through. For me, an marketing qualified lead is a lead that marketing has qualified. When marketing qualifies a lead, it’s passed to sales, sales follows up with it, and you make more money. Exactly. We get stuck on the how and what too often. Why is this important? Marketing is casting the net -- they build personas, execute on strategy to fill the funnel, often even own the automation systems. Marketing also deals with leads at scale -- one to many communications. It makes a lot of sense organizationally that marketing helps filter leads to sales.By recentering on the why, we can now talk about the how and the what. Let’s start with the what:Marketing could define an MQL as any of the following: A direct response to a marketing campaign through a form or offer acceptance Hand-bombing leads over from a list, for example from a conference booth Automated scoring! Scoring models: Numeric scoring Grade Score Fancy AI algorithm You need a model that builds trust and keeps it. Ideally it provides some sort of feedback mechanism. Need to answer the question: which leads are best to pass to sales? A+ leads, should sales talk to them if they are going to convert already?Most common is numeric. Good start and familiar toolset. Evaluate properties like country, industry, job title, etc. Evaluate behaviour like web and email interactions. Don’t want to get lost here but some amazing touch points that lead to purchase intent like what pages they viewed, pricing page counter, integration pages, where they started they trials.Pros -> Super easy to implement, easy to maintain, easy to understand (and therefore trust). Cons -> Harder to extract insights from, a bit basic in some cases, and sometimes you want more sophistication. Data enrichment tools like Clearbit, not 100% match rate but help you figure out what matters, then you can ask that question instead of inferring it. Grading model: Two axes: Fit & Engagement (or whatever). Get your 1-4 and your A-D. Matrix to plot out where leads land. Lots of precision and predictability. Pros -> Precise, easy to understand, easier to extract insights. Cons -> Harder to implement, harder to train folks on, more technical stuffAI algorithm: Usually you plug in list of best customers, AI looks up common attributes and then sets up predictive model based on those attributes. Usually pretty black box. Pros -> Easy to set up, sophisticated, and uses latest tech. Cons -> Expensive, requires trust.Thanks for listening homies.If you absolutely can't wait 7 days for our finale, part 5, we'll give you a super secret link to the unpublished episode if you sign up for new episode notifications here humansofmartech.com. :)--Intro music by Wowa via UnminusPodcast artwork font by StarJedi Special Edition by Boba Fonts
19 minutes | 2 months ago
14: Lifecycle: A Martech Saga part 3: A simple formula for a basic lifecycle
Okay, you’ve got everyone to agree on a flow chart; you look like a wizard for building it all out, now the easy part, right? Is it the easy part?It should be the easy part but what I’ve often seen is that folks deploying lifecycle are doing it for the first time; often they are unsupported except some high level guides from vendors. Once you get it down, it can be highly formulaic. As a marketer, you’re kind of in between your data team/revops/IT/bizops and sales, your end users. I see the role bridging the gap between was possible on the tech side and balancing what the end user wants, not always sales, sometimes marketing. But it can be stressful managing these projects. Some companies have massive programs that are triggered off of lifecycle stage changes. So what’s the formula? First, you need strong stage definitions. Hand-in-hand with this is knowing what constitutes a transition. I think the transition part of lifecycle is often where people get hung up. Mechanism for transition needs to be a data signal of some sort. Moving from Marketing side of the fence to Sales side needs a clear hand off.3 typical mechanisms for transitioning records are:  Lead Scoring - Marketing Contact Status - Sales handoffs Opportunity Staging - Sales pipeline Question - You’ve talked to me quite a bit about the difference between lifecycle stages and contact statuses. This can be super confusing to folks new to automation. What’s the difference and why’s it important? Lifecycle Stage = RoadmapContact Status = Traffic lightsOne of the big value points of deploying a solid lifecycle is reporting. What are you doing during set up to make sure your reporting is top-notch post deployment? Timestamp fields -- super easy! Contact status fields -- review your rejected leads Attribution fields -- hard code these values Take a look at tools within the systems themselves: HubSpot has attribution tools, Marketo has revenue cycle modeller How simple is all this really? I mean, once you know your way around lifecycle, it’s actually not that hard to deploy? In terms of a technical problem, it’s a solved problem. You can mix and match components, and tailor things to your needs. The real challenge will always be getting buy-in: You might have genius idea for contact status that requires additional data input from sales people. This is a great way to turn people against you, and our finale will dive deeper into this!   Thanks for listening! Make sure you check out part 1 and 2 in the previous two episodes and stay tuned for part 4 and 5.If you absolutely can't wait 7 days for the next episode, we'll give you a super secret link to unpublished episodes if you sign up for new episode notifications here humansofmartech.com.--Intro music by Wowa via UnminusPodcast artwork font by StarJedi Special Edition by Boba Fonts
24 minutes | 2 months ago
13: Lifecycle: A Martech Saga part 2: Don’t overthink lifecycle
You want to keep your project neatly scoped and deliver this project on time. Give a skinny MVP and build upon it rather than starting with a complex model that no one will ever use.We've seen these types of projects be it scoring or lifecycle go into dark rabbit holes and never emerge.You build a 5 step process, but somewhere in the depths of the definition of a picklist value in step 1.15 has erupted this debate between sales and product……… Let's preface the value of project management for these types of projects, and even talk about why a lot of marketers don’t really work on these skills enough.Project management is key to getting lifecycle off the ground.How do you organize projects to ensure they don’t go down the rabbit hole? I used to think that anybody could manage projects and it wasn’t a great skill to specialize in. And then I discovered how bad I was at it. I’ve gotten pretty hardcore about projects, particularly when I’m working as a consultant. I like a 5 stage model based on Discovery, Design, Build, Deploy, and Review. Each stage has clear deliverables so that we know when to leave that stage. I’m also pretty hardcore on timelines. I’d rather we hit a timeline and reduce scope than expand timelines to keep scope.One thing I’ve seen ops people obsess about a bit too much is these micro stages in between stages. Your main stages are Lead to MQL but along that path a lead might get confirmed and engaged. How many micro stages is too many? At the end of the day it’s about conversion rates and you don’t want to muddy your table with too many percentages. Lifecycle really allows for measurement of conversion points.Question: JT, I know you’ve worked in Marketo and HubSpot. Marketo gives you unlimited freedom, but HubSpot’s default lifecycle stage is fixed. What model do you like better? Yeah, I’ve used Marketo for 7 years before I started working HubSpot. At first, I was like, of eff this noise with HubSpot. But I’m a little more lenient - HubSpot forces you to simplify and focus on really key stages. Going from MQL to SQL is a big change - one that can trigger insights if you’ve got your analytics tuned properly. Also, no one is making you use HubSpot’s properties - you can totally spin up your own. I think as a mental exercise, it’s better to lean more toward the HubSpot model than completely reinventing the wheel.This is the type of trivial details that bogs down the project. You want to customize things, but you don’t overcomplicate things. We talk about the importance of alignment in this endeavour and something I’ve wrestled with a lot has been the best vehicle to communicate to my team what is happening along the lifecycle. The scoring, the micro stages, the touch points, the segments, the emails the in app messages. Like as much of that story as possible.How do you prevent this type of scope creep that’s bound to happen as everyone starts to unpack things?I think it’s so important to use a visualization tool like a flowchart -- LucidChart, Mural, or whatever -- to show your lifecycle. People are resistant to complexity when you start to chart things out for them. No one wants a complex process but we often arrive at complex solutions before we’re trying to compromise. By using a flow chart, you start to grind away at the concerns folks have that this stage isn’t represented or whatever. It also allows you to show that there’s a lot that goes into each stage. Like an MQL stage that depends on scoring also requires building a scoring program. The concept of an MVP is so important here. It gives us unrivaled permission to push something that isn’t 100% what we want. It’s a forcing function that gets something out the door. It’s like conversion rate testing -- everyone just leaves you alone as soon as you say, “oh, I’m testing this.”You do need two things before this magic trick grows old: 1) you need to follow up with future deliverables; 2) you need to show data. For lifecycle, it’s getting an initial report into your stakeholders hands. This isn’t a PhD dissertation - it’s something you need to do and deploy.Thanks for listening folks. Doon't forget to check out part 1 in the last episode.If you absolutely can't wait 7 days for the next episode, we'll give you a super secret link to unpublished episodes if you sign up for new episode notifications here humansofmartech.com.--Intro music by Wowa via UnminusPodcast artwork font by StarJedi Special Edition by Boba Fonts
26 minutes | 3 months ago
12: Lifecycle: A Martech Saga part 1: Future-proof your Martech with lifecycle
Main takeaway:Set yourself up for long term success with a solid Lifecycle program. Not only does it help you exert control and mastery over your reporting, it provides a framework for having tough discussions between sales & marketing.It opens up career opportunities - average salary according to glassdoor and others for lifecycle marketing manager is $80-$120K - yeah, you unlock big value for your own career.This topic is too big for a single post, so here’s what’s in store: This episode, episode 1: the what & why of lifecycle Episode 2: How to avoid overthinking implementing a lifecycle Episode 3: How to design a basic lifecycle that actually works Episode 4: Picking the right MQL & scoring model for lifecycle Episode 5: No sales people were harmed in the making of lifecycle Traditionally, a lot of companies refer to leads as if you’re taking their temperature. Hot medium and cold leads. The system isn’t really based off of metrics and is not an effective way to sort leads for sales. There’s no consideration for a lead’s progression from first visit to conversion then to customer. In this scenario, marketing and sales often clash because there’s no system in place to create alignment. Sales isn’t tackling leads in the most optimal way. Marketing is generating leads that sales might not care about. What is lifecycle, JT? How do you define it?Lifecycle is the journey contacts in your database take to become a customer. It mirrors your typical funnel journey and operates in much the same way. Unlike funnel, lifecycle is a bit more specific to conditions in your database. Your funnel has basic stages that describe the buyer’s journey: awareness through interest, evaluation, purchase, etc. They are totally compatible! But lifecycle requires data properties or fields in your marketing automation platform to track. Everyone gets lost in acronym land. Enterprise teams largely follow the standards from the SiriusDecisions waterfall model. What are the standard stages as you see it, and do you think they have to be customized/adapted for each company?Let’s run through them quick: Lead - Yeah, someone in your database MQL - a marketing qualified lead -- literally exactly as it sounds -- marketing qualifies leads SAL - sales accepted lead - leads that sales agrees to work with SQL - sales qualified - leads that sales qualifies - common in team where front-line sales reps qualify leads to send to account executives Opportunity - it’s got an open opportunity  Customer - they’ve purchased!  Of course, you can do whatever you want! I’m not your mother!This is a cross section of the database. To me, this is table stakes for any MAP.Benefits are huge but can be summed up in two points: Mastery over your contact DB A common language for sales & marketing So I’m putting my startup hat on, maybe the ops person on that team is wearing many other hats and doesn’t have time to build all these fields and time stamps and create all this alignment.  If you don’t have the cycle, at lest start with master lifecycle lists. Some kind of way to get a sense of what stage people are in your db. Because this is a big project, there’s no getting around that.Multiple teams agreeing on definitions and standard operating procedures. So like every problem, there’s a systems and tech side, how to implement what's possible, but there’s the human side, if we build this, will it be used, is this helping people? Do people even want this?What makes this project so hard?Lots of stakeholders, the people side is so much harder. Lots of things that need to be agreed upon. Can be sprawling and daunting if your DB is a mess. Needs long term follow up after deployment to be successful. Traditional sales folks who have a process that works well enough often see this as as theoretical or not as important as revenue driving activities. One thing I’ll say here is that this can never be pitch as a marketing idea, it can never be pitched as a top down initiative. This has to be something that is built through the alignment of sales and marketing. Dual buy-in, common languages. JT, I know you’ve done this in Marketo and HubSpot for clients and in-house -- it’s potentially a huge project… Why on earth should anyone take on this project?It’s 101 for anyone looking to go deep into marketing operations and opens up a super cool avenue for your career. It will allow you to attain mastery over your database. It opens up career opportunities - average salary according to glassdoor and others for lifecycle marketing manager is $120K - yeah, you unlock big value for your own career.Stay tuned for part 2/5 next week.If you absolutely can't wait 7 days for the next episode, we'll give you a super secret link to unpublished episodes if you sign up for new episode notifications here: www.humansofmartech.com.--Intro music by Wowa via UnminusPodcast artwork font by StarJedi Special Edition by Boba Fonts
40 minutes | 3 months ago
11: Jonathan Simon: Do you still need a degree to have success in marketing?
Our guest today is Jonathan Simon. Jonathan is Director of Marketing and Professor of Digital Marketing at Telfer School of Management - University of Ottawa. He teaches an undergrad and a master’s level course. Before that, he also taught at Algonquin college for almost 4 years. So he’s been teaching marketing for a while, since 2014. But he hasn’t always been a prof… He’s worked in-house before, best known in Ottawa for his expertise in mobile marketing and the gaming industry. He was Director of Marketing at Magmic – a leading publisher of mobile games working with global brands like Hasbro and Mattel. He’s an extremely well networked marketer, he’s found more jobs for marketing students in Canada than any other prof in history, ever.It's not every day you get to interview a Professor. Some of the topics we cover in the episode:How do you teach while also being a Director of marketing?Do you still need to do a degree out of highschool to have a successful and happy career in marketing? What are some of the best side projects students can take on to help get them jobs early on? How do you manage interns and fresh marketers? How do you stay happy in your career while managing multiple hobbies and being a father?--Intro music by Wowa via Unminus
25 minutes | 3 months ago
10: Nick Donaldson: Curiosity, learning & success in your MOPs career
- MOPs is an amazing career, and the number 1 skill you need is curiosity. Nick got his start owning a Marketo instance and rapidly acquired the skills required to be a MOPs leader in one of Canada’s hottest startups- From a strong foundation in-house, Nick has moved consulting side, and will compare notes about why the switch may be one you should think about in your career Nick is a highly talented marketing ops professional. He started his career in marketing with a quick stint in a creative agency before spending the better part of the next 6 years of his career working in-house for companies of different sizes and different industries.  Nick brings a lot of passion and enthusiasm to his work which has helped him rapidly learn the world of martech. Nick really came into his own working at Solace in the tech industry where he picked up Marketo and hasn’t looked back since.  Nick recently made the move back to the agency world where he’ll be a Consultant at Perkuto --Intro music by Wowa via Unminus
27 minutes | 3 months ago
09: Dynamic areas are your conversion secret weapon
Marketers are wasting energy deciding the ideal CTA to add to a landing page. Let’s vote on it, or let’s test it.The ideal CTA is based on who the visitor is and where they are in their lifecycle, not what your A/B tests are showing or your internal debates.Instead of obsessing about picking the best CTA per page for all your visitors, you should be serving different CTAs to different visitors.Let's start by painting a picture: When a person lands on a homepage you have multiple options for getting them to the next step. We call this the call to action; the CTA. It’s best to limit the number of CTAs in most things you do. But it’s hard to pick. What’s the best CTA to put on your blog? Newsletter? Ebook? Trial? Demo? Webinar? What about your homepage?The ideal CTA depends on who the visitor is more than what you think should be their next step. So why not show a different CTA to different users?Area snippets or dynamic areas or dynamic content, there's different buzzwords for it. They allow you to do this.Instead of picking just one CTA.You can show;  an education call to action to new visitors a product tutorial call to action to existing trial users and a onboarding call to action to new customers All on the same page, using the same line of code. JT: In a lot of cases, forms are tied to the website and you need some front end help. HTML, little side of CSS. It can be tricky to completely own forms for marketers.PG: Many ways to do this, common way is to use form handlers, or  you build the native form in your MAP and  you build a custom HTML form on your site,  you connect the two forms via API + javascript JT: However you do it, Zapier or JS, when someone fills out the HTML form it triggers a form submission event in your MAP.PG: If you have an eng team, you’re probably doing something custom, gives you more control over the look and feel of the site.If you don’t have technical support, Zapier can basically hook up to any api. So you can use a third party form tool like convertflow, formkeap, typeform, you can send events from Zapier to your MAP. JT: Okay so you mentioned a few tools there, let's say you work in a smaller company, don't have marketo or pardot or maybe even hubspot, what form builders do you recommend?PG: I'm a big fan of convertflow. More than just a form platform. Coolest ability is using dynamic areas of your site to show different forms to different people. They call them area snippets. Traditionally, forms and content upgrades are static and specific to a page, they are hard coded in the html of your page. But what convertflow does is lets you place a dynamic area code in your body, and CF will display a different form based on who the user is. So you can show a trial form to a content lead and a webinar form to customers.But you can also create a new form for your email course on how to start a podcast for example, and instead of manually injecting that code in a bunch of pages, you can set your new form to show up in every area snippet on pages where URL contains (how-to) or has tags=top of funnel.And once users have seen that form already, you can show them a new form. JT: I guess Marketo has some of that functionality right? It’s a bit messier. You can use dynamic content and embed that on your site or use a Marketo lp entirely. But I guess not everyone is using a Marketo. Convertflow certainly looks cooler.What are some of the other tools that do something similar? I know you're big on site personalization tools.PG: Yeah that's when we get into tools like Proof or Mutiny. They got hot onto the scene when they claimed AB testing was dead. And it's a really interesting take we could probably do a whole episode on.JT: Ohh yeah I've heard this. This is the, why launch an AB test on your site for ALL visitors, when you can test only the audience you care about.PG: Exactly. Most A/B tests today have very muddied results but are thrown around like gospel. Imagine the homepage. If you're launching an AB test on your homepage, a bunch of people you don't care about are muddying the results of your test. Customers, students.JT: So what are some of the most common playbooks for this? Like how can someone use tools like these to drive revenue? PG: I see vertical segmentation as the most popular. So that would be like Transistor showing e-commerce podcasts on their homepage to potential ecommerce visitors.But company size and industry is also really powerful. Doing things like showing different customer logos based on whether the person viewing your site is enterprise or startup. Or showing an H1 of "The best podcast tool for Real estate pros" to real estate leads but to retail leads they see "The best podcast tool for Retail leaders".JT: That's super cool. But I know some folks would find this creepy.PG: Yeah for sure. There's a line. and A way to do it well.You want to try to provide value without being creepy.Instead of having your homepage saying Hey Jonathan Taylor. Welcome back. Here’s how other B2B SaaS companies are using our tool.You can keep your normal headline but change your H2, which in this case is a customer review, it reads:“The best podcast hosting tool I've used”So for e-comm identified visitors, you change H2 to showing a review that has ecomm or retail in the body, like“I host my ecomm podcast with Transistor and it’s the bomb.fm”And for B2B SaaS companies it’s“You had me at: Basecamp uses Transistor”.JT: A lot of this is powered by reverse-IP lookup right? Like Clearbit reveal.PG: Yeah I’m not an expert in this space by any means but I’ve heard a lot of smart folks say that covid and remote work is really hurting the accuracy of this data. Unless you’re all logging in using a VPN, it’s hard to associate personal home-based traffic IP to corporate or business traffic. --Intro music by Wowa via Unminus
21 minutes | 3 months ago
08: Why your job is better than getting eaten by lions
It’s a funny visualization but I find it always grounds me in what matters: why am I at work, what is really important to me, and why being happy is more important to us than anything else.It’s easy to let work get to you and invade your happy space; I’m going to share my strategies for staying happy wherever I work.Work / Life BoundaryClear boundaries between work & lifeDisconnect all work tools from my phone. I’m unreachable unless you text or phone.How do you develop this balance?Having a healthy and disciplined routine and schedule. My Monday’s are no meeting days and have several focus periods, team meetings are on Tuesdays and I try to schedule other meetings then. I walk my dog at the end of each work day. It’s my queue and my reset button.I have an office upstairs with a work laptop that stays up there. When my work hour is done I leave that room and leave the laptop there as well. All my work for the podcast or hobbies is using a personal laptop. Letting GoYou can’t control everything, certainly not what other people doIt’s hard AF sometimes if you’re like me and your passion is your strengthHow do you practice letting go?Being able to let go. Give less fucks. Don't over think things. Good work is important. Perfection will haunt you. It's okay to be invested in your work and care deeply about it. But it's healthy to try to not being emotionally attached to work.Similar to your lion analogy, something that grounds me in times of stress is a quote by Stanley Kubrick. “Whenever you have a dreadful day, take a moment to consider how small we are as humans in this galaxy. In the grand scale of it all, that bad day is virtually meaningless.”Part of this mental state is the product of almost a decade of personal growth and hard work. It’s a gift to not worry about finding employment. So patience is key here. This won’t be instant. Investing in your career over your jobFind what you love about your career and invest in thatYour job is just a job; it could change; your employer may lay you off tomorrow and despite all the fucks you give, they’ll continue on without youYour career will continue to grow; besides your job will benefit from investing in your career.How do you invest in your career?Building a network. It used to be going to events, speaking at meetups. Now it's more virtual groups, paid memberships and private Slack communities. But it's so important to reach out to other humans and make connections. Your goal is to help progress as many people so that some of them can help you in turn.Being CandidFirst, be compassionate and empathetic. Develop these skills. Be interested in what makes people tickSecond, be honest when you’re not happy or uncomfortable or frustrated - don’t sit on that shit because in my experience 98% of people just don’t know your upset if you don’t say something.Why is being candid so important?Getting positive feedback. Getting good results. Surpassing expectations. Helping a colleague, solving a problem. It makes me happy at work. One of my colleagues described me as someone who takes mysteries, smashes them into pieces, and turns the remnants into answers. Being well liked by coworkers and management is a big part of happiness. I find that easier in smaller companies.Eggs in more than one basketAdvice I got years ago and now follow is having more interests than just my careerUsed to read non-stop business booksNow I have hobbies completely unrelated to work, coding, and hobbies that are career related, like this podcast.Quit shitty jobsMy landscaping story - shit people, but I ‘toughed’ it out to prove a point. Now have sworn I won’t endure something awful ever again (not that I’ve had to).Alex shoutout, Shopify inspiration story. Hated construction industry. Quit, learned to code, applied and failed a few times, kept trying and getting better, now he works there. Never seen someone’s job satisfaction rate go up that high.--Intro music by Wowa via Unminus
37 minutes | 4 months ago
07: Brian Leonard: Be friends with engineering with open source Martech
You reached out to us to come on and talk about the world of open source martech and other than knowing that Mautic was an OS automation tool, I didn’t really know much else about the space.So I’ve gotten down some rabbit holes prepping for this episode so pumped to dive in with you today. Why don’t we start with the big differences between martech and open source martech.I know that normal software does not include the source code while open source does and modifications and customizations are encouraged, but what does that mean in a martech context? Brian: For me, open source is about control and trust.You have the ability to control how your customer data is handled and where it is stored. We’ve seen this lead to people taking advantage of more data in their marketing efforts.So then, you can see the code. You can control the data. This leads to trust. Only give the external tools what you want to share. Privacy and compliance get easier. We are talking with lots of medical companies, for example.JT: What’s the advantage of this business model, like why make Grouparoo Open source vs. the tried and tested SaaS model?Brian: I don’t think the world needs another marktech SaaS solution. There are already thousands of those and yet these problems (integrating tools) persist. So we wanted to do something different. We think that working closer to the engineering level (and making it super easy) will disrupt how these tools get implemented.Because there are so many tools to integrate with, open source will also help us build up those connections. We will actively engage with the more popular ones, but it’s exciting to see others interested in contributing connections to the long tail of tools.Finally, there is cost. These SaaS solutions tend to be quite expensive and the incentive structure doesn’t line up between the company and the SaaS tool. For example, with Segment you send it a lot of events and more or less get charged per event. Then you pair back what you send. But then, later it turns out that you needed that. Doing all of this and owning that data is great for not only for privacy, flexibility, but also for cost.Phil:Martech today has an awesome article on open source tools, I’ll add it in the show notes, but in there, they make the case that the Open source model is not ideal for Martech.The most successful open source projects tend to be developer oriented—developers building tools for other developers, but in this case, the end user is often a marketer. I’m guessing you disagree?Brian:It would certainly seem so.When you want to integrate with Marketo, it’s the engineers that do that. I’ve talked with companies with millions of users that have been paying for Braze for a year and haven’t automated anything. I’ve met marketers that come in as CMO and demand tool X because they like it. A few quarters later, it’s more like “I just want to send a cart abandonment email! VPE, whatever you want to use is fine.”I think there is a lot lost when we think of marketers and engineers as separate things and not the organization as a whole. The right thing to do is engage with the engineers that power your marketing tech stack. And meet them where they are. Open source helps with that.If we can get the engineers excited about setting up the right architecture in an open way, then it will be easier to get more data later to existing and new tools.JT: Couple years ago Acquia acquired Mautic. They said in their press release that it was the start of a new generation of open source communities and projects to reinvent the martech stack. Do you see an evolution of open source tools in the automation space?Brian: Mautic was an ambitious project to do everything - to replace the tools you are using now. The evolution is about more target solutions.A notable one is that there are even more marketing tools and they specialize, so Mautic would have to do everything. And maybe it didn’t do drip campaigns or push better than Iterable.There’s a similar trend in the engineering world, especially on data teams. Data teams are growing and getting their own budgets. They are getting their own set of specialized tools. One example is Fivetran. That will store everything from Hubspot in your data warehouse. The missing piece, as we see it, is to make that actionable in the best tools for use cases in an efficient way.Phil:I want to finish with integration of data in between platforms, and I know you guys solve this problem. Adobe Microsoft and SAP launched the Open Data Initiative that aims to standardize data across platforms. The problem still isn’t fixed though. If you’re using 14 martech tools, chances are several aren’t Adobe products.What’s the solution?Brian:(open source community, and a standard by which data can flow between any set of systems, not just into one. You need the community to build all the connectors and adaptors between those tools, so you don’t have to custom build and code everything.”I’m focused on building out a community around this tool. We won’t live or by whether the code works. That’s not a problem. The main thing is to make sure we get in front of the people that would benefit from it. We need to get the word out so that when there is this need, Grouparoo is the obvious solution - both for now (easy to get going) and later through self-serve and lots of integrations.To do that we’re doing podcasts, blogging, talking with people that are interested in using it, and building out the team.JT: Alright, Brian, what’s Grouparoo?Brian:It solves an organizational problem we saw at TaskRabbit. We saw challenges between the product team and other teams that needed our help getting data for them to be successful, for example marketing and customer support. In general, these things don’t get prioritized and engineering becomes the bottleneck.We’ve talked to others and they saw something similar. So we made Grouparoo to sync data from your product database or data warehouse to the tools you use like Salesforce or Zendesk. But we also made it open source and targeted at engineers to get it installed and data flowing. And then we added in ways for those non-engineers to help themselves to the data they need to be successful.This help to solve the organizational problem through empowerment hat kind of autonomy for, say, a marketing operations team.Phil: How does it work?Brran: Grouparoo is open source and up on Github. There are examples of how to get it running on Docker or Heroku or any way that you run a Node app. You run that and point it at your primary data source.What it will do is create a profile for each of our users, starting with their user_id or email or something like that. Then you can keep building out that profile from that or other sources until you have a centralized profile of who that person is with many properties.With those properties, you can do segmentation. We can create dynamic groups of users based on their property values. For example, “High Value Bay Area” customers or “About to Churn” customers. These will always stay updated automatically with the real data.Now we know these properties and group membership about each user. We can sync this data to destinations like Marketo, Salesforce, Hubspot, Zendesk, etc. You choose what you want to sync and it happens. And it keeps happening as the data changes.--Grouparoo.Brian Leonard on LinkedIn.Intro music by Wowa via Unminus
20 minutes | 4 months ago
06: The best email program you'll ever build
Gating vs ungating isn't something we're going to get into today. There's arguments to both, I prefer not gating as much as possible. But it's a necessary evil.Always trying to be buyer centric instead of seller centric, don't push sales too much at the top of the funnel, let leads show you when they are ready.What are some of your favorite lead magnets?Tools, quizzes, website grader. Email courses as the best content upgrade. Newsletter when possible but consider testing an email course offer.The email courses are way more popular now but I remember you building the first ones at Klipfolio. What's the playbook for putting one of these together?Step 1 - what are you teaching Go in GA, find the most popular content topic from your blog, maybe it's 4-5 blog posts. (example transistor) How to come up with a concept, how to record, tools, how to publish, etc. Top blog posts are likely all related to how to start a podcast. Step 2 - pillar page: Take your best content related to your topic/what you’re teaching, so for transistor, how to start a podcast - combine those posts into one big ‘pillar page’. Step 3 - 5 lessons trim Break up the pillar page into 5 lessons and cut the fat. Really go in and highlight the key takeaways and cut the fluff. Aim for 2-3 minute read. Make it super skimmable. Paragraph headers. That’s pretty much it. Last step is adding your CTA to those top blogs.So on your top pages, the ‘How to come up with a concept, how to record, tools, how to publish’ you add a CTA on those with your email course offer. Hey instead of aimlessly reading these long blog posts on our site:Learn how to start a podcast in 5 minutes, delivered to your inbox every morning for 5 days.So these programs have really good engagement metrics. But blabla vanity metrics. How do email courses help companies make money?The beauty is you can create courses for different stages of your funnel.(example transistor) TOFU: how to start a podcast (all the steps)Next up: MOFU: how to record edit, tools (all the tools)Next up: BOFU: how to host/publish your podcast (tutorials using transistor). Tutorials on uploading, RSS feed, pushing to podcast apps, integrationsNext up: Free trial?At this point, you’ve built a ton of trust and credibility with the reader. You gave them a bunch of value in a short amount of timeOkay so main points here is finding content that's already getting eye balls, connect it to other peices, then you have one big peice and your goal is cutting it up into bite sized lessons.yeah the brevity of the lessons is what works. People are highly engaged with these emails. They are expecting them and they know it's only take 5 mins to read and they know there's insights in there.So having done a bunch of these now. For the folks in the audience that are saying, okay cool you didn’t invent email courses, I’ve had some for years. What do you say to those people to level up their courses?Ways to improve your courses are to ask for feedback at the end of a course. Experiment: takeaway for each lesson, images, GIFs, get next lesson right now, homework and activities, templates, tutorials… time zone, receive at specific time.So why do they work so well?Quality, brevity, opt-in expectation.--Intro music by Wowa via Unminus
36 minutes | 4 months ago
05: Lauren Sanborn: Happiness at the intersection of sales & marketing
Describe the opposite of sales & marketing alignmentSales is pushing hard to meet their number (revenue, arpu, customer count). Marketing is pushing hard to meet their targets (marketing qualified leads). Not talking to each other and working as a single unit.There is a big discrepancy in what types of leads convert and become workable by sales. The lack of alignment equates to marketing dollars that are spent frivolously and sales ignoring what they’re being fed from marketingWhat does marketing need to know about sales?Sales folks aren’t lazy. They have a lot on the line with a big portion of their compensation based on hitting sales numbers. However, they will always take the quickest and easiest route to make the sale. Keep that in mind. Think about how they work and put yourself in their shoes when you are communicating new marketing initiatives.What does sales need to know about marketing?Marketing folks are not ‘out of touch.’ They are expected to generate demand in a world full of email overload, ad overload, content overload. Being in marketing is not an easy job. Keep that in mind. Think about how they work and put yourself in their shoes when you are communicating new sales initiatives where you need marketing’s help to be successful.For listeners who heard you paint that picture of misalignment and are thinking… shit that’s totally me. What are some ways to remedy this?Meeting frequently and often between marketing leaders and sales leaders - talk about what is working, what is not working. Allow both sides to voice frustrations (I’m generating leads, why aren’t you working them…you’re generating leads, they aren’t any good).Work together and in coordination with operations to create a scalable engine by using a revenue lifecycle and scoring methodology that is adaptable.From top of funnel leads all the way down to revenue, what's at the intersection of sales and marketing?The sweet spot is sales accepted leads.- so it’s not just what leads became ‘qualified’ but what leads were actually accepted into the sales pipeline to be worked.If you stop at MQLs (marketing qualified leads), then you don’t see what leads are worked. If you go to far down the funnel (ie revenue), you start to get into a gray area beyond what marketing has control overHow do you achieve that alignment? Brute force? Culture?Set the expectation at the leadership level. Put regular cadences in place. Create metrics and report on them.This takes TIME - I’d say 12 months to fully get folks into the motion where they understand their numbers, where infrastructure is tweaked on the operations side to enable accurate reporting.Why is Revenue Operations so important? And why give it a separate name?Revenue Operations is still relatively new in the marketplace, but it is the direction we are headed in. It makes a lot of sense because working in silos is ineffective. It all ties back to the customer. All companies have this utopia whereby everything they do enables the best customer experience.Operations play an important role in accomplishing this goal because without the appropriate infrastructure that’s scalable, data points informing marketing decisions and sales conversations, visibility into post-sales and upset opportunities - it isn’t truly possible. How do you get Sales & Marketing talking in a common language?Setting a baseline for success metrics and holding folks accountable to those metrics. Having open, transparent and frequent conversations around how close we are to hitting those success metrics and what can we do as a TEAM to pivot if we are falling shortTeaching less experienced folks how to do this. In a lot of organizations, some people have never done this before, so they have to be taught and coached on how to get there. That’s where strong leadership comes into play.As a RevOps leader, how do you foster great communication?Communicating how what you are doing as a RevOps leader solves a business problem. This isn’t the easiest thing to do for technical people because a lot of RevOps stakeholders are not technical. The most successful people I’ve seen in the RevOps role can take a business problem, go down into the technical details/build, but only share that is relevant to their stakeholders that solves a problem.Creating a dialogue that is frequent and transparent, where feedback is welcome, is best.Lastly, make it part of your regular cadence for any new implementation - whether its an entirely new tool, new feature set, or initiative - making sure you and your team are communicating progress/challenges and working with the training team.What advice do you have for people in terms of having a happy career?Happiness is all perspective. It’s about 25% your situation and 75% your outlook. If you don’t like your job, get as much experience as you can and then change it. If you don’t like your career, get as much experience as you can that is helpful in where you want to go and use your network to pivot. For me, I didn’t exactly know what I wanted to do or be. I knew I liked technology and business, so I went to Georgia Tech. I knew I liked fancy things, so I figured I had to get a job that would support a certain lifecycle. I knew I liked a challenge and didn’t like to be bored, and for me, that resulted in trying all kinds of things.Don’t be hard on yourself if you don’t know what you want to do. Do get out there and start to mark off what you don’t like, so that you can figure out what you do like. I feel very lucky because I finally feel like I am right where I am supposed to be. I love revenue operations - I solve a different business problem every day, and I get to use technology to do it. I am also helping the business which creates a lot of satisfaction for me on a personal level. And, I’m in tech which is a hot space and has good job security.Lastly, I am very fortunate that in today’s technological world, I can work from almost anywhere, I have good health insurance and can support my family. All things that are important to me both personally and professionally.--Lauren Sanborn on LinkedIn.CallRail.Intro music by Wowa via Unminus
16 minutes | 4 months ago
04: Handwriting makes better digital marketers
Ditch your keyboard as often as possible. Make handwriting your default medium even when it’s counter-intuitiveMeetings:* Ditch your phone/laptop if and when we get back to office lifeRemote:* Turn off all your other apps, including and especially slack and email* No other tabs open* Video-on, hands off mouse and keyboardWrite a landing page by hand; write an email nurture by hand; write out strategy; write out your to do list or projects. You can’t erase easily so you get all your ideas down in a true, unfiltered first draft.Okay so I get all the benefits of remembering shit more but if I start hand writing all my emails my process seems longer with typing my work up. So the argument is that the time you spend focused handwriting that email, combine that with the digitizing part, is still faster and if more quality than starting in Google Docs. Of course you’ll end up typing it, and if you think it’s crazy onerous, think that the average person types 45 words or 200 character per minute; i bet you’ll be faster and your ideas will beg to be put on the pageAnecdote, I find hand-writing unlocks my creative process and actually makes me the final product come together much quickerReading internet articles? Want to actually retain that information? Handwrite your notesTons of research proving that retention is better with handwritten notes.The gist is that your macbook impairs or negativaly impacts learning or quality work because your keyboard typing involves shallower processing compared to handwriting. So, more parts of your brain are used when handwriting vs. just typing, so you're able to store it more accurately.Anecdote, learning coding and it definitely doesn’t come natural; I started with online tutorials, multiple screens, and my IDE; When I started handwriting, I actually started to comprehend the material; took summer off and found that I retained information better than i expected; I’m taking this even further and literally writing all my code by hand; typing code is like driving a racecar after riding a bicycle; my comprehension and confidence is actually improvingNext time you need to write something, try Outline with paper, write draft in keyboard.--Intro music by Wowa via Unminus
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