What’s up everyone, today I have the pleasure of sitting down with Pranav Piyush, Co-Founder and CEO at Paramark.

Summary: Pranav guides us out of the labyrinth of multi-touch attribution under the clear sky of incrementality and causality, urging marketers to focus on whether their efforts genuinely drive sales that wouldn’t happen otherwise. Early-stage startups can benefit by prioritizing simple methods like geo-based testing over complex attribution models, allowing intuition to guide resourceful experimentation. By understanding the underlying motivations and true causality behind customer actions, marketers can craft campaigns that resonate deeply and drive real results. As businesses grow, balancing intuition with structured analytics becomes crucial. Holdout tests and marketing mix modeling provide actionable insights, ensuring strategies remain effective in a competitive landscape. This approach transforms marketing from a cost into an investment in sustainable growth, making each dollar count.

About Pranav

• Pranav started his career at well known brands like PayPal and Dropbox
• He co-founded Padlet, the popular collaboration app to make school less boring
• He’s former Head of Growth at Magento and Pilot.com before becoming VP of Marketing at BILL
• He’s also a Reforge Instructor for a new marketing measurement course
• And in March of last year, Pranav co-founded Paramark to help marketers measure and forecast the impact of their investments

What’s More Valuable? Analytical Skills or Creative Taste?

Marketing's creative nature often gets overshadowed by the obsession with data. Recently, HubSpot’s co-founder Brian Halligan suggested that marketers with good taste are undervalued compared to those with analytical skills. Pranav agrees, arguing that creativity now drives the most significant impact in marketing. We often question the overuse of the term "data-driven" in marketing, suggesting a shift towards being more "creatively driven." Pranav responds, arguing that data-driven and data-informed are all kind of bullshit. Relying solely on being "data-informed" is not sufficient. He emphasizes that without the ability to discern the success of a creative idea through data, creativity alone falls short.

Marketers face the challenge of making memorable impressions on people they've never met, and this requires innovation and creativity. While data is essential, Pranav notes that many marketers don't truly understand the depth of analytical skills. True data literacy involves grasping complex concepts like correlation and causation, which are often missing in marketers' education.

Pranav points out that the dichotomy between creativity and analytics is overly simplistic. Marketers need to integrate both skills. This blend is crucial not only in marketing but in other business functions like product development. He uses the example of launching a feature and gauging its success. If only 10% of the customer base uses it, understanding the broader impact on adoption, revenue, and retention is essential.

Despite recognizing the importance of analytical skills, Pranav emphasizes that good taste in marketing offers a unique advantage. Creativity leads to building compelling campaigns that resonate more profoundly with audiences. This insight suggests that while data provides valuable insights, it is creativity that ultimately distinguishes successful marketing efforts. Pranav further highlights the importance of rigorous testing and measurement. A successful feature or campaign isn't just about positive feedback; it needs to contribute to tangible business outcomes, such as increased revenue or cost savings. Without proper measurement, the value of creative initiatives remains unclear.

Key takeaway: To truly excel in marketing, you need to embrace a harmonious balance between analytical skills and creative taste. This means honing your ability to interpret data while also nurturing your creative instincts to craft memorable campaigns. Instead of relying solely on data or creativity, focus on integrating these skills. Use data to measure the success of your creative ideas, ensuring they lead to meaningful business outcomes like increased revenue or customer retention. By blending data literacy with creative insight, you'll develop campaigns that resonate deeply and drive tangible results.

Understanding Incrementality in Marketing

We often hear marketers claiming they understand ROI and reporting, yet the concept of incrementality often eludes them. Pranav sheds light on this by differentiating between attribution and incrementality. Attribution, as he explains, is rooted in the idea of cause and effect. However, its usage has been diluted over time, losing its original meaning.

Pranav appreciates our provided definition of incrementality: business results from marketing campaigns or channels that wouldn’t have occurred otherwise. He elaborates that if a prospect would have purchased a product without the influence of marketing, then that marketing effort isn't incremental. Conversely, if a prospect's decision to buy is directly influenced by marketing, then that effort is incremental.

He emphasizes the importance of understanding incrementality beyond traditional marketing channels, especially in B2B contexts. This involves considering scaled sales channels, partner channels, and affiliate channels. The essence of incrementality lies in recognizing the true impact of marketing efforts on sales and other business outcomes.

Pranav's insights underscore the need for marketers to move beyond surface-level metrics and understand the deeper implications of their strategies. By focusing on incrementality, they can more accurately measure the effectiveness of their campaigns and make informed decisions that drive real business growth.

Key takeaway: Focus on incrementality to truly gauge your marketing impact. Instead of just relying on attribution metrics, assess whether your efforts genuinely drive sales that wouldn't have happened otherwise. By understanding and applying incrementality across all channels, you can refine your strategies and foster real business growth.

Unpacking Multi-Touch Attribution

Multi-touch attribution (MTA) often gets hailed as the holy grail of marketing measurement. Many believe it's essential to solve attribution by capturing all touchpoints. However, Pranav argues that the obsession with MTA overlooks fundamental issues, particularly around causality.

When discussing attribution, we need to understand cause and effect. Pranav illustrates this with a simple example: if someone clicks on a Google link and converts, did that click cause the conversion? Sometimes it does, but other times it doesn't. He emphasizes the need to ask, "What prompted the search in the first place?" Without knowing this, we aren't truly understanding causality. We're merely observing sequences of actions without grasping their underlying motivations.

Pranav criticizes the current approach to MTA, which often amounts to behavioral analytics. This method logs sequences like A led to B led to C, but it doesn't clarify if A caused B. This lack of clarity is compounded by pressures on marketing and analytics teams to produce quick results, pushing them towards convenient but superficial solutions.

The martech industry, according to Pranav, has profited from building easy, superficial tools rather than delving into the complex but necessary task of understanding true causality. He believes this approach must change for the industry to advance meaningfully. By focusing on more robust methodologies, marketers can gain genuine insights into the effectiveness of their campaigns.

What’s up everyone, today we have the pleasure of sitting down with Jacqueline Freedman, CEO and Founder at Monarch Advisory Partners.

Summary: Jacqueline straps on her jetpack and invites us to soar through the martech skies, teaching us how to navigate the journey of becoming an independent martech advisor. From hands-on execution tasks strategy and advisory projects and assembling a futuristic composable martech stack, we cover a lot of air miles. We navigate the build versus buy decision in martech, the realities of composable CDPs and embracing user-friendly modern marketing automation tools.

About Jacqueline

• Jacqueline started her career in Account and relationship management before joining WeWork where she would eventually settle into a Global Engagement Marketing and Operations Manager role as the fifth marketing hire during the company’s hyper-growth 
• She later joined an email and lifecycle growth agency as the 2nd team member and built out their NYC office where she worked with startups ranging from seed to series C
• She then moved over to Grammarly as the founding Marketing Operations hire where she built out the B2B MOPs team and led their marketing technology stack to support their transition to a B2B2C company
• And recently Jacqueline strapped on her jetpack and went out on her own as a solopreneur founding Monarch Advisory Partners, a full-stack Marketing Ops and Martech consultancy

Why Introspection is the Secret Weapon for Aspiring Entrepreneurs

Jacqueline, reflecting on her transition from Grammarly to entrepreneurship, reveals the depth of her decision-making process. With a family history rooted in entrepreneurship, Jacqueline always envisioned herself running her own business. Observing her father and grandfather, she felt like she had a front-row seat to an MBA. This early exposure planted the seed of entrepreneurship, but it wasn’t until she recognized her unique skill set that she felt truly ready to take the plunge.

The decision wasn’t impulsive. Jacqueline emphasized the role of introspection and reflection in her journey. She spent a year contemplating the right moment, fueled by her natural tendency to overthink. Through late nights and early mornings, she assessed her career achievements, from scaling WeWork during its prime to steering Grammarly’s shift to B2C. These experiences solidified her belief in her capabilities, leading her to recognize that she was ready for the entrepreneurial leap.

Jacqueline’s courage was also bolstered by her practical approach. While at Grammarly, she had already begun advising several founders, driven by her passion for problem-solving rather than monetary gain. These conversations not only honed her skills but also provided a soft landing into entrepreneurship. By the time she officially launched her business, she had a lineup of clients ready, thanks to her reputation and the support of colleagues and partners who championed her abilities.

Her journey highlights the importance of strategic preparation and the value of building a strong professional network. Jacqueline’s story is a testament to how a combination of introspection, practical experience, and a supportive community can make a significant career transition smoother and more successful.

Key takeaway: Use introspection to identify your unique skills and career achievements. Reflecting on these aspects will not only boost your confidence but also clarify your readiness for major career changes, like transitioning to entrepreneurship.

How TV Dramatization Barely Scratches WeWork's Reality

When asked about the accuracy of the WeWork TV show "WeCrashed" on Apple TV, Jacqueline offered a candid perspective. Having watched all the content related to WeWork, she noted that "WeCrashed" starring Jared Leto and Anne Hathaway, came closest to capturing the essence of the events. However, she emphasized that the series only scratched the surface of what truly transpired.

Jacqueline explained that while the series contained a kernel of truth, the actual events at WeWork were far more intense. Everything depicted in the show was amplified tenfold in reality. This amplification was very much in line with WeWork's brand, known for its high-energy and sometimes chaotic environment. She described her experience of watching the dramatization as somewhat PTSD-inducing due to its accuracy in portraying the underlying ethos of WeWork.

Despite the dramatization, Jacqueline found it fascinating and somewhat validating to see the story unfold on screen. The series succeeded in conveying the core truth of WeWork's journey, even if it couldn't fully encapsulate the extremities of the real-life scenarios. For Jacqueline, revisiting those memories through the show was a mixed experience, balancing between validation and the resurfacing of intense memories.

Her insights underscore the dramatic nature of WeWork’s history and how media adaptations, while engaging, often have to simplify or condense reality. For viewers, it’s a reminder that behind the scenes, the stories of such companies are often more complex and multifaceted than any series can fully capture.

Key takeaway: Jacqueline noted that while "WeCrashed" captured the essence of WeWork, it only scratched the surface of the true events, which were far more intense. The dramatization, though somewhat accurate and PTSD-inducing, validated the chaotic environment of WeWork. However, she emphasized that media adaptations often simplify the complexities of real-life scenarios.

How to Become a Martech Advisor

Balancing Hands On Execution Projects vs Strategic Advice

Jacqueline addresses the nuanced demands of clients in marketing operations (MOPs). While she shares a passion for every facet of MOPs, she acknowledges a point in her career where hands-on tasks like copywriting and sending emails no longer align with her long-term vision. This shift towards focusing on advisement and strategy is something she enjoys, and it's about setting clear expectations from the start with clients.

Each client’s needs vary, which Jacqueline finds exciting. However, it necessitates clear communication about what she offers. When clients require extensive lifecycle or demand generation email execution, Jacqueline is upfront about her role. If it's a short-term need, she might handle it, but for long-term commitments, she refers them to trusted partners. She mentions firms like Modular Marketing and Ragnarok, highlighting her strong relationships with these agencies. This symbiotic partnership ensures clients get top-notch service while allowing Jacqueline to concentrate on strategic advisement.

By focusing on strategy, Jacqueline can provide high-level insights and direction that impact her clients' overall marketing operations. She values the ability to step back from the minutiae and look at the bigger picture, helping businesses navigate their marketing landscapes more effectively. This approach not only suits her professional growth but also ensures her clients receive specialized, high-quality execution from her partners.

Jacqueline’s journey exemplifies the importance of evolving in one’s career and recognizing when to delegate tasks that no longer fit one’s vision. It’s about leveraging strengths and building a network of reliable partners to deliver comprehensive solutions. Her ability to set expectations and offer strategic guidance is a testament to her experience and foresight in the marketing operations field.

Key takeaway: When transitioning to a more strategic consulting role, clearly communicate your focus and delegate hands-on tasks to trusted partners. This allows you to leverage your strengths, provi...

What’s up everyone, today we have the pleasure of sitting down with Michele Nieberding, Director of Product Marketing at MetaRouter.

Summary: Michele takes us on a broad journey across job hopping, learning technical martech products, preparing for the cookie apocalypse and diving deep into the world of server side data processions and tag management. Her transition from sales to product marketing sparked new growth, blending her enthusiasm for learning technical martech products with practical strategies to improve sales outcomes. She emphasizes the importance of ethical marketing practices, like enhancing first-party data and focusing on consent management, crucial for building consumer trust. Michele also explores the benefits of server-side data processing, such as using systems like MetaRouter for real-time data handling, which improves site performance, data security, and compliance. This technical shift supports her broader view on the integration of marketing with data science, stressing the need for solid data management to navigate the complexities of modern marketing and data privacy laws effectively.

About Michele

• Michele started her career in sales at Cvent, a meetings and events management software provider 
• She later had a short stint as a marketing consultant at Fishbowl a restaurant platform 
• And then joined a CRM company called Merkle as a Digital Marketing Manager where she wore a variety of marketing hats
• This made her boomerang back to Cvent, but this time as a Product Marketing Manager where she would spend another 2 years with the company
• She later took on the role of Senior PMM at Qualtrics, an online customer experience management platform
• This led her to an exciting role leading Solutions Marketing at Iterable, where she was eventually promoted to Director of Product Marketing
• Michele is also an Executive Mentor at Cornell University
• Today she’s Director of Product Marketing at MetaRouter, a Customer Data Infrastructure startup 

Why Job Hopping Can Be a Green Flag

When asked about the recent commentary from a CEO criticizing frequent job changes and claiming that you need to stay at a company at least 4 years to achieve anything worthwhile. Michele offered a compelling counterpoint that challenges old school views on career progression. Her journey in the tech industry illustrates the value of embracing various roles across different companies, especially in wild sectors like martech. Michele believes that the innevitably rapid advancements within tech demand adaptability and a willingness to tackle new challenges, which often means moving between jobs.

Michele argued that the notion of needing several years to make a significant impact in a company might indicate deeper issues with the hiring or role alignment process. In her experience, impactful contributions don't necessarily require long tenures. She shared an anecdote from her last position where she was promoted twice within just 12 months, underscoring her ability to drive meaningful change swiftly. Her success stories reflect her high performance and dedication to progress every day she's at work.

This perspective brings into question the disparity in the traditional view of loyalty, highlighting that while businesses often tout long tenures as signs of allegiance and even liken their teams to families, they frequently fail to uphold their end during challenging times, opting instead to cut numerous lower-level positions rather than making reductions at the top.

Michele highlighted that nowadays the real value lies in how much an individual can accelerate growth and bring about change, rather than how long they remain in a position. This approach benefits the companies that embrace such high-performing individuals.

Her stance suggests that companies should rethink their hiring strategies and the attributes they value in employees. The focus should shift towards flexibility, quick adaptation, and the ability to deliver results efficiently—qualities that are crucial in a sector as fluid as technology.

Key takeaway: Companies need humans that can adapt quickly and make significant impacts in relatively short periods, not half a decade. Michele’s experience shows that job mobility can be a sign of a high-performing individual capable of driving innovation and growth who’s looking out for themselves and owning their career paths. Companies should value flexibility and quick adaptability as much as, if not more than, long-term tenure.

Making the Leap From Sales to Product Marketing

Michele's career shift from sales to product marketing at Cvent is a perfect example of how adaptable skills can propel your career forward. Starting in sales, Michele thrived by meeting challenges head-on and solving customers' problems effectively. Her success wasn't unnoticed; she was a top sales rep, deeply involved in every aspect of the products she sold. However, Michele knew she wanted more from her career. Unable to transfer from sales to marketing internally, her ambition to explore beyond sales led her to an agency role where she broadened her marketing expertise.

Despite enjoying the creative rush at the agency and wearing all of the hats, Michele felt something was missing. She could suggest marketing strategies but rarely saw how they played out, missing the direct impact of her work. This gap led her back to Cvent when a product marketing role opened up. It was a new territory, but she knew the product inside out from her sales days, which gave her a unique edge.

Stepping into product marketing, Michele fell in love with the strategic and creative elements of the role. She was right back at solving problems, but this time she was crafting the narrative and directly influencing the product's market journey. It was different from sales but used many of the same skills in new ways.

Today, Michele can't see herself doing anything else. Her story isn't just about a job change; it's about finding your niche where you can use your talents to the fullest. She took her in-depth product knowledge from sales and seamlessly integrated it with the marketing skills she honed along the way, proving that the right move at the right time can redefine your career.

Key takeaway: Michele's switch from sales to product marketing shows how valuable it is to apply your skills in new contexts. For marketers looking to keep their careers vibrant and impactful, consider how your current skills can open new doors within your field. It’s not just about climbing the ladder; sometimes, it’s about stepping onto a completely different one.

What Do Sales and Product Marketing Have in Common?

It's not always intuitive, but one fundamental commonality between sales and product marketing is the requirement to deeply understand your product. Michele’s strategy for mastering new martech tools showcases just how critical this understanding is, not only for personal growth but also for making significant contributions to her team and the broader company objectives.

When Michele joins a new company, she immediately seeks to connect with colleagues from sales, customer success, and technical teams such as solution architects. These relationships are crucial as they provide a wealth of insights into the product's real-world applications, an invaluable resource for anyone in product marketing. Michele’s early days in any role are spent actively engaging: participating in calls, attending demos, and using the tools herself as much as possible. This hands-on experience allows her to view the product through the eyes of a user, which is essential for crafting messages that resonate with potential customers...

Hey everyone, this is part 2 of 3 on marketing email audits. Whether you’re in-house or you’re consulting and want to offer email audits as a service, our hope is that you can level up your email game.

In the last episode, we covered research tips and questions you should ask yourself before the audit. In today’s episode, we’ll cover the actual audit and what to look for, tips and tactics. 

Next week, our last episode of the series will cover what email improvements to suggest and experiment with.

Alright JT, let’s get to it. There’s three crucial things I want to make sure we cover today as part of any email audit.

A theme that you’ll hear throughout today’s episode is timing your emails around your user’s journey, and not selling too early or to users that aren’t ready to buy. 

But let's start with the confirmation email and the welcome email. 

Regardless of what you're auditing, those will be part of the starting journey for all new users right?

Confirmation email
Depending on the scope of your audit you need to decide if you’re going to audit individual emails or more high level improvements. I prefer the former. I go email by email, not starting with the Welcome email but the confirmation email. That’s really the first email touch point. 

We want to maximise the chances that this email reaches the inbox. To do that we want to keep it short and simple with a single CTA, confirm your email. We don’t want too many images or text or links. 

We need this to land in the inbox and get through most spam filters.

Such a balance of beautiful design and impact versus sneaking past email filters. Too much HTML gets caught.

Welcome email
We had a full episode dedicated to really making this email stand out, and that’s the core goal of this email. 

Everyone expects it. Most companies have a huge fancy HTML template with heavy brand and a bunch of helpful resources and links to get started.

The danger with overloading users too soon
Something that lives rent free in my brain when I think email onboarding is Val Geisler’s dinner party strategy. When you host people over for a dinner party--be it a backyard BBQ or a fancy social event, the evening itself has many tracks. 

• You welcome guests, 
• Take their coats, introduce them to others
• You take their drinks order and show them to a seat
• there’s the appetizer round, 
• a main course, 
• side dishes, 
• and dessert, 
• and then you invite them back. 

If the Welcome email has 10+ links to tutorials and courses and help articles, it’s almost like your guest’s arrive to your house for the dinner party and before they can take their coats off you shove the main course sprinkled with dessert in their face.

I like this dinner guest analogy a lot. I think it's also a lot about coordinating with product. Combined, you set the ambience. The smell of food, the setting, the dress code -- email needs to blend in to the decorum. Seeing how the product<>email experience jive is a big opportunity.

Instead of overwhelming users with links, Welcome emails are great starting points to train users to open the next emails. This can be done with storytelling and standing out.

We should be training users to open our next email and pushing them to 1 specific moment of delight back in the product.

Consider a stronger CTA to push users to finish their onboarding. They could try "Add your first subscriber" or "build your first landing page" instead of "Log in".

There's an opportunity to tell the Convertkit story instead of just welcoming them to the family. Users starting an email tool are also trialing competitors. So they are getting similar emails.

Selling too early
Early in the journey we want to nudge users to complete steps in the product that nudge them to moments of delight and getting value from the product.

You don’t want to turn off users and start selling to everyone, especially not users that haven’t done much in the product yet.

The best way to get users to upgrade to a paid plan is to let them try the product and reach success. Instead of talking about the benefits of upgrading to a paid plan right away, we should be telling users how and why Convertkit is their best choice.

We want to be delighting the user and making sure they are accomplishing tasks in the product. Working on the user's timeline rather than asking them to upgrade right away.

Mindlessly forcing people through a user journey is bad. The idea that you need to be everything to everyone is equally bad. Segmentation is key, behaviour based triggered emails are also key.

That’s actually part 3/3 of our series.

We covered what to do before the audit in part 1, part 2 was the actual audit and the most important aspects of the first two emails in your sequence and part 3 next week is what you should be suggesting as part of improvements.

We’ll specifically be touching on segmentation and behaviour based triggered emails. Chat then.

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Intro music by Wowa via Unminus
Cover art created with help via Undraw

Educational series, product onboarding, upsell sequences… regardless of where you look in your funnel, there’s marketing emails to be audited. 

Like any investigation, an email audit combines thorough observations, deductive reasoning and extra points for style and bold decisions. 

Our hope with this 3 part series is that you can add another feather in your detective hat. Whether you’re consulting and want to offer email audits as a service or you’re in-house and you want to level up your company’s email game. 

We’re going to cover research and questions you should ask yourself before the audit, what to look for in your actual audit, tips, tactics and finally what improvements to suggest and experiment with.

Today’s main takeaway is:
Users have ideal paths to discovering your product or service, understand these moments deeply and use email to guide users along this path. 

Alright JT, email onboarding is close to my heart, I’ve built many of these in-house but I’ve also had the pleasure of consulting and auditing the onboarding series for a few SaaS and tech companies.

It’s fascinating to get to see all the different ways you can welcome users to your product via email.

Before we talk about what order to tackle things, let’s talk about great email onboarding.

What’s great onboarding?

Great email onboarding consists of guiding/helping users through a series of “aha” moments as they interact with your brand and product. Users receive units of value for each step as they gain confidence in the product’s ability to complete their jobs to be done.

In a product-led company, this should be corroborated by the product/ux team. What wow moments exist in the ideal path, and use email to guide them along this path.

Data is part 1, story is part 2 and where marketing shines. What are some examples of aha moments?

Aha moments example
I’ve been thinking through what an “aha” series of steps might look like for a free Convertkit user:

• A close friend recommends Convertkit as the ideal place to start for my newsletter
• I have a quick read through backlinko’s guide to convertkit and get a real good sense of what the product can do
• I’m able to quickly signup and import my subscribers from Mailchimp
• I’m able to build my first signup form and connect it to my WP site
• I watch a 20 minute video tutorial on intro to advanced automations in Pro plans
• I successfully connect my signup form to my WP site

What email onboarding should and should not be
Ultimately, great email onboarding convinces users to stick around and boosts overall engagement and retention.

Email onboarding should be used to:

• Tell the company’s story
• Answer questions/objections
• Demonstrate how the product solves user’s pain 
• Nudge users to specific common conversion actions
• Show the art of the possible
• Tie what the user has done in their account

Email onboarding should not be used to:

• Get everyone to buy immediately 
• Send the same call to action
• Seem cold and impersonal

An extension of your brand and product

• Coordinate with product experience to be integrated with it
• Doesn’t trip over the feet of product-based emails or sales emails
• Build trust/rapport
• Be referenceable down the line when user needs info, point of contact, etc

Understanding your customers and users
Before diving into any email audit, it’s important to get into your users’ headspace. 

Obviously this differs whether you're leading this audit in-house or as a consultant. 

Often when you are contracting, you won’t have a ton of customer research data available to you. In spite of customer research/interviews and jobs to be done insights, here’s a few places to spend a bit of time reading:

• Review sites on G2, capterra
• Tutorials on getting started with the product from the community
• Searching on twitter @company threads

These spots really give me a sense of the language used and what problems are being solved as well the steps users need to take to be able to “hire” the company for a specific job. 

Gimme some JBTD examples with something like Covnertkit?

Jobs to be done example
Users signup for Convertkit probably because they want to grow their personal brands, sites and businesses. Not because they want an email marketing tool. 

Some of the common themes and jobs that were highlighted throughout reviews and tutorials were:

• How to build an email list
• Send automated email reminders
• Sell services/contact or products/ecommerce
• Build a personal brand, start an audience, build a web presence

The predominant themes and categories of use cases were:

• Artists, designers, filmmakers, photographers
• Athletes, coaches, influencers
• Marketers, bloggers, podcasters, makers
• Youtubers, streamers, musicians

Diving deep into a few tutorials highlighted a few prerequisites for hitting what are likely common conversion actions or moments of delight in the early web building journey:

• Having a subscriber base
• Having a form connected to your site to accept new subs
• Share a link to your new landing page on social
• Send a broadcast email to subs

Understanding the customer pain point precisely the moment before they start looking for you.

So we just covered part 1 of our 3 part series on email audits, we talked about what great email onboarding should and should not do, we gave you spots to look for user research when there’s a whole lot to start with, and we chatted a bit about jobs to be done and user pain points.

Part 2 next week dives into the email audit itself, specifically what you should be looking for in the first two emails.

Catch you next time.

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Intro music by Wowa via Unminus
Cover art created with help via Undraw

Back to office, staying fully remote, flexible hybrid setup. Global pandemics gave millions of knowledge workers the taste of remote work. And a lot of them are never going back.

A global distributed workforce means access to untapped talent but it also means time zone and synchronous meeting challenges.

Getting everyone from your local Toronto office to show up to the same meeting at 10am EST is pretty easy. Running the same meeting with a team spread across 5 time zones makes this much more challenging. Especially if you want to promote autonomous and flexible work schedules.

The solution isn’t less meetings or hybrid meetings. The solution is asynchronous communication.

In today’s episode we’re going to cover what async means exactly, being able to say “I’ll get that done on my own time”.

We’ll dispel some of the misconceptions and dive into the stages of transformation towards autonomy.

Hopefully you’ll be better positioned to encourage async in your day to day, whether you're in-house or freelance adapting now is key for leading any teams in the future.

Intro

Hundreds of companies declared themselves remote first and digital first last year. A lot of them are massive corporations too. This transition will be excruciatingly slow and painful for big orgs.

These orgs are studying companies who have been doing this for decades. Remote work isn’t new for everyone.

Convertkit, Close, Basecamp (60+ actually much lower with recent policy changes), Helpscout, Clearbit, Buffer, Doist (100+) and Zapier is 500 people, remote-first all smaller, very little funding, innovators in the remote space.

There’s also the bigger teams too.

Automattic, the people behind WordPress are 1,000+ global distributed team and have been from the early days.

InVision is fully remote, 1000+, GitHub is 3,000+.

Something all of these distributed work pioneers talk about is over-communication in the written form, but specifically, asynchronous communication.

In the world of most marketers, and knowledge workers for that matter, very little of your day to day tasks are emergencies, or require immediate action.

The nature of async can be summed with a short sentence: I’ll get to that as soon as I get the chance, or on my own time.

Async is sending a message and having a common understanding that an immediate response is not expected. Email is usually async. You send it and you expect an answer in a day or 2 or more. Recipient opens that email on their time and responds when they get the chance.

Synchronous communication is sending a message and the recipient needs to process and respond in real time immediately. In a meeting with your team on Zoom, you say something, your team members receive and respond right away.

When you take the time to think about it, most of what you do in your job could be done with a 1-way written update sent to a single person or a group of people, who can respond as soon as they get the chance.

Obviously there’s times when there’s emergencies, or sometimes the nature of your work requires real time collaboration like live support teams or front line sales reps, and there’s different ways of tackling those situations than async.

Examples

Instead of saying: hey do you have 15mins to chat today About this project?

Async is saying: here’s two questions I have regarding the last update you made on this project.

Instead of saying: here’s an invite to a meeting where I’m going to walk you through a project update and I’m mostly going to be doing the talking, everyone will be seeing this for the first time and I’ll be asking for your attention for 1 hour and immediate feedback.

Async is saying: here’s a short summary of a project update followed by a detailed overview of a problem I’m having and specific questions I’d like guidance on. Here’s what I’ve done so far, here’s when I need an answer by.

Benefits

Deep work / flow state
A huge % of your workforce is introverted and perform better when they’ve had the chance to think before they are asked to give a response and give more space for flow/deep work.

Tons of research shows that increasing response times allows people time to reflect and remove emotion from the equation thus making better decisions.

Human centered way of working
As one CEO, Sudeesh Nair, of ThoughtSpot, very active on Twitter about async, one of my fav quotes from him is:

“…the ability to let people in whenever they want to work, however long they want to work in a day…that’s what asynchronous is about. If you think that way, you have to make more intentional changes in the work process, collaboration process, to enable every one of those people to come into the workforce.”

Productive night owls
Many people are night owls. We’re all wired differently to be our most creative and intellectual during specific parts of the day, commonly, early morning and night.

This is derived from chronotypes, our preferred sleeping patterns.

But imagine forcing a pure night owl to work 9am to 5pm. And then giving this same person the ability to work 11-3pm and 9pm-11pm.

The opposite is also true for ultra early risers like JT.

Async teams give everyone way more flexibility to get their work done when they are more alert and productive.

Just gotta strive for some overlap, you can’t NEVER have in-person meetings.

Misconceptions / passing baton is too slow / project management tools suck

Passing the baton with project management tools
This might be hard for folks who are used to making decisions in a single room together and talking it out. Or if you’re used to getting answers to questions right away instead of spending time solo and figuring it out yourself.

Consider this: globally distributed teams, who work async and master ‘passing the baton’, can get three times more done than a local team relying on everybody to be in an office between 9am and 5pm.

This is something that Matt Mullenweg, Automattic CEO and WP founder has pointed out in a few podcasts.

A local centralised company that runs on real-time noisy office environments with plenty of all too common consensus-seeking meetings cannot and will not survive in the next few years.

Project management tools such as Asana are key to helping you run an async ship. How many sync/update meetings have you had where people go around the room one after the other updating everyone on their asana tasks when everyone knows they could’ve read up on those updates without a meeting.

This requires diligence and it’s not for everyone.

Project management tools often drive tennis games of back and forths.

Avoiding tennis games of back and forths

One of the biggest knocks against async is that it slows things down and often times, what could’ve been a simple pre-game discussion turned into a marathon tennis game of back and forth.

Tips to avoid this:

• Give context, lots of context, make it skimmable
• Give action items, deadlines when possible

Levels of autonomy / How you can help change your org
Matt Mullenweg, Automattic/WP founder often talks about his levels of autonomy, it’s modeled after the self driving car level of autonomy. 

5 levels:

0 - Coffee baristas, construction workers. You need to be in a physical location to do the work.

1 - Not remote-friendly, old school but in seats, company space, company time.

...

We're going to argue two main points: 

• First, no-code is absolutely the future for marketing and that it opens up exciting possibilities (aka, democratizes digital marketing)
• Second, what really qualifies as a no-code tool is much more narrow and potentially useful than you might find elsewhere on the internet

Is marketing hijacking another development trend and bending it to our own purposes? Is this an attempt to fit in with the cool kids by being part of a trend?

Is the future of Martech no-code? Has it always been no-code?

What does no-code really mean?

Have you ever been half way through building something, a new campaign, a landing page you’re really excited about... but you hit a technical hiccup. 

“Oooh, might need a script for that” or “Damn, if only I could code”. 

As marketers, we’ve all felt this roadblock. We had a full episode dedicated to this-- episode #24: why marketers should learn to code. 

No-code is not using that excuse. Can’t code? Don’t know how to build scripts? No problem, there’s a no-code solution for that. 

Is Canva a no-code tool? Did you use code to create images in Photoshop or Illustrator? This is what tripped me up in the beginning — but Canva is one of the hottest tools today and it’s absolutely considered in the same breath as other no-code tools. 

While your typical definition of no-code would look at the ability to create software applications with a user interface, I’d argue that marketing’s use of no-code is a bit looser. I’d define a no-code solution as one that lowers the barrier entry to the point that you only need to use a user interface to complete your objective. 

No way am I going into photoshop - someone tried to teach me photoshop before and it was terrible. I’m not layering stuff — but Canva, I can get something good enough in minutes. 

These are pretty murky waters for us to be wading into — but such is this fascinating trend. 

So there's a cool difference between tools to build products and tools to sell products and run companies.

• no-code building / app development 
• no-code martech / selling products

Sometimes the tool to sell a product like a podcast (promoting or ads), might also be the product in some case, like us, not monetizing, just creating content.

Example, Convertkit is no-code email marketing tool, unless you know css/html and you can totally customize things behind the scenes.

Is Convertkit a no-code tool to sell a product/martech or is it building a product? Convertkit is is more than just an email marketing tool, it’s what newsletter creators use to build an audience and connect with fans, it’s an email designer, a landing page builder, a form builder and they are just diving into ecommerce.

Isn’t every marketing tool a no-code tool?

I’ve been using Marketo or HubSpot my entire career - turns out I’ve been using no-code tools my entire. But before I start congratulating myself on being on the cutting edge of this trend, I think it’s important we really sharpen our focus here.

No code isn’t about using user-interfaces to accomplish a job — I think in the marketing context it’s about breaking the dependency on technical experts as well as subject matter experts.

The idea of Canva as a graphic design tool may drive some designers crazy — but it’s borne out of a marketer’s need to get good enough now and not perfection later. 

I love this idea of breaking the dependency on technical and subject matter experts. This has been fascinating to watch in the indie maker community. Some call this the creator economy. 

Think there’s a lot of newsletters and podcasts already? Think again. Worldwide pandemics have accelerated remote work but they also motivated millions of people to become creators. More and more writers, teachers, film makers, photographers, artists all go DTC-- direct to consumer. 

Categories:

• Workflow automation — tools like Zapier allow you to configure automation without knowing any python or how to connect to APIs
• Web development — tools like Wordpress or Webflow allow folks to create websites without getting mired in CSS or JavaScript
• Analytics — create reports and dashboards without being an analyst or having to fight with APIs — cough cough Klipfolio

The no-code category needs to be narrower to be relevant. I see lists all the time saying that tools like Slack or HubSpot are no-code. They are awesome tools — but no marketer is coding databases and setting up scripts to send our instant messages or emails — no developer either for that matter. 

Instead, to be relevant, no code martech tools need to replace or substitute the need for technical or subject matter expertise. 

Is no-code anti-code?

The no-code movement is borrowed from development and is most certainly not anti-code. In fact, the no-code movement could be said to be pro-code!

In development land, the idea of no code is to remove redundant and repetitive tasks from the coding process. For example, if you’re application requires online payment, you don’t want to get bogged down coding an payment system from scratch. You’d just plug into Zuora or Stripe.

No-code is about reusing components that solve common problems so you can focus your development efforts on your secret sauce. I get a sense sometimes from marketers that we mix this up — no-code isn’t anti-code! You need code to build to build these tools.

Developers don’t worry about no-code taking their jobs — in fact, most I’ve talked to love them because they can focus on writing dope code instead of solving redundant problems.

Is marketing hijacking a development trend?

Marketing loves technology. The CMOs budget has grown exponentially in the past 10 years, and this trend continues. The rise of Revenue Operations puts a mission behind all this software — and imbues those operational activities with a mission — to enable revenue generation.

These twin trends supercharge marketing when it comes to getting exposed to new products and technologies. Naturally, marketing has picked up on the no-code trend and the question is whether this really applies. Is marketing hijacking a development trend?

This is an interesting question. As someone who has dedicated a lot of time to learning to code, at first I felt that — yes, marketing is borrowing a buzz word so we could fit in with the cool kids at the lunch table.

I’ve been digging in a lot deeper on this, though, and I’ve refined my perspective. I believe the no-code trend absolutely applies to marketing.

The future of no-code

Martech is definitely heading into the no-code waters. I don’t think it’s a transformative force per se, but rather a rapid evolution of applications to make those jobs to be done easier, faster, and better.

I don’t think folks working near marketing need to be worried -- marketers want to spin up a landing page with a form almost as fast as they want to tear it down and rebuild it. I think the benefit of no-code to experts who support marketers is they’ll work on more interesting, nuanced projects. Don’t build a landing page -- let’s build a custom product page or home page.

I do think one potential downfall is that quality may drop in some areas. You can’t replace a great graphic designer with Canva -- the skills required to do this work are still important and are the difference between an Apple-esque brand and your friend’s yoga studio. But that’s the point -- it allows all of us the opportunity to build and sell our stuff on the internet.

Even advanced no-code martech will still r...

Who built this? Why did they build this? What was the purpose of this?

Sometimes, marketing can look a lot like archaeology. Unearthing ancient relics, reverse engineering them, and trying to understand how they were used by your ancestors. Like an ape discovering a tool for the first time, you look at them with a mix of bewilderment and awe. I didn’t know we were so advanced back in --- 2011.

You’ve discovered a marketing artifact, and the internet is full of them. Form submits that go to legacy email automation systems, blog posts written before the last ice age, and strategies for a trend that went extinct long ago.

As marketers, we need to be experts at carefully extracting these artifacts, evaluating their worth, and deciding whether to revitalize them or put them in a museum.

Honestly, you’ll encounter this more in your career than you’d probably like, so we’re going to chat about how to work with marketing artifacts

In the world of tech startups, a lot of marketers only last a 12-18 months before they move on to their next position. They make a bunch of content, then move on, someone comes in to fill their role. This type of inheritance is super common in all areas of marketing. Why is this a problem?

• No one joining a marketing company wants to inherit someone else’s mess. It’s like renting an AirBnB and finding the dishwasher is still full of dirty dishes. 
• At least, that’s the perception.
• The problem is that marketers love to create net new content. We’ve been programmed to think content is king -- and have responded by creating mountains and mountains of content. 
• Most of us in marketing come from some form of content creation background -- it’s literally our instinct.

Nothing sucks the wind out of a new job like cleaning up someone else’s mess. It’s easy for the content side to sweep things under the rug. But for tech systems, it’s way harder to clean up.

You get this perception that tool X sucks or tool Y sucks.  I know you’re deeper in the ops area -- how often do you hear a new CMO or VP start looking to migrate off of marketo or hubspot or whatever?

• Yea very often. Senior leaders come in with the tools they are familiar with and demand a migration in the next year haha
• I’ve had the experience of building on a fresh underutilized instance of Pardot
• Configuring and managing the Marketo beast you gave me the keys for at Klipfolio. Funny enough, now that you’re back at Klipfolio, you were stuck uncovering some of the webs I tangled.
• I’ve also had the migration side of this as well, while I was migrating out of Hubspot, you were migrating to Hubspot.

Martech artifacts are everywhere! The maretch landscape of doom is growing everyday, and each of these vendors can easily be a failed trial. If it’s a free product, then you could be using it forever. One thing that really gets me is how underutilized existing software is before we start asking for budget for the next thing. I was the type of kid who had to finish each portion on my plate before I moved on to the next thing -- I’d eat my broccoli, then my potatoes, then my chicken.

In marketing automation especially, you get players like Marketo / HubSpot that have so many features available out of the box. These features sometimes, however, aren’t as powerful as you can get from other tools. I noticed this with web personalization and forms.

• Hubspot has a blog CMS, they have email automation, they have forms, they have a CRM… they have something for everyone… That’s a really great way to make a mediocre tool. Everything is average to please the average user. 
• We use 4 tools instead of Hubspot and they all give us features and powers that hubspot alone cannot.
• We moved our blog to Ghost which has a beautiful UX and writing experience for my content team and they were pumped to get out of the clunky HS CMS
• We moved email automation to Customer.io, honestly my favorite email workflow building tool. Super intuitive and fast. 
• I’m a huge fan of convertflow for forms, DriftRock a UK startup is also doing cool things with forms. No one wants to use a crappy tool.
• And obviously we use Close for our CRM. 
• These 4 tools cost us less than hubspot alone cost us.

Totally. Also, we all like shiny objects:

• I think the key is to identify areas where you want to bring in a new tool. Check your toolset out, and see if they have a version of that feature.
• Run a test or experiment, and validate your approach.

Speaking of forms, what about the web form that submits to nowhere?

• When I migrated out of hubspot forms, Close had like 200+ ebook and gated content forms that I needed to re-create and map to a download link and a resource.
• Lots of companies don’t manage this well. 

Yeah, customer’s hate this -- it’s right up there with online chat that doesn’t connect with a live agent.

• This happens so often -- it’s not even funny
• It’s actually really hard to find things like form embeds on a website.
• I use a tool called screaming frog which has a custom extraction tool which allows you to specify different selectors to crawl your website
• The other way to do this is to look at forms within your system and pull them out that way -- only works if you know all the systems at play

You’re giving me PTSD. Enough about marketing automation and let’s talk about the website.

• JT, I know you spend a lot of time in SEO land -- from talking with you I know you’re really big on updating existing content instead of just creating new content. Walk us through the advantages of that.

Years ago I ran an experiment where I started updating existing content to see if I could improve traffic and rankings. What I found is that I could consistently move pages from 2nd page and beyond to the first page => this gave something like a 200-400% lift on conversions.

• SEO is like gardening. You don’t just toss a bunch of seeds in the ground and expect them to grow. You need to tend them and nurture them in order for them to grow

What about when the garden is overrun with weeds and the last gardener has skipped town?

Resist the temptation to clearcut! There are often very valuable plants in that garden. 

• As an SEO, you need to get good at determining which pieces of content are distractions and which pieces of content are really valuable
• Use search console’s GA plug-in to see conversion rates and traffic

What types of problems do you see when trying to clear out the garden?

• Outdated messaging, positioning
• Language
• Trends that have died

JT, is there really value in updating and managing all this content? We live in such a transactional society, it’s almost always easier to create new.

• Heck yes it’s easier to start from scratch. I resist that temptation all the time -- it’s hard to look at a web page that is ranking on second page, figure out why it ranks, and how to preserve it’s ranking.
• There is a ton of value in this, however. I’ve seen first-hand how often a simple update can yield a big result. It’s way easier to improve the performance of a 2nd page asset than get a new asset all the way to 2nd page.

I feel like it’s a skillset that you really need to work on. In my own career as a consultant and in-house marketer, I’ve almost always seen or been a part of website migration projects. I think this...

Jon and I are both pretty busy dudes. 

Jon 

• a father, 
• he works for Klipfolio, 
• he’s a podcaster, 
• he’s a consultant, 
• he’s learning to code and 
• he manages a community of marketers. 

Despite all that, JT still finds time to unearth the best UFO threads on Reddit and the dankest GME meme stocks. 

Phil is 

• a husband and dog father (lolz)
• I work for Close, 
• I’m a podcaster, 
• I teach a post grad marketing certificate, 
• I mentor local marketers, and 
• I’m an avid member of several marketing communities

Despite all that, I still find time to run a fantasy hockey league and binge all the best TV shows on Netflix.

So how do we do it while staying happy and healthy (for the most part).

Alright, I want to start by breaking down our weekly schedules by putting everything into 6 priority buckets:

• Family and friends
• Health
• Learning
• Work
• Chores
• Escapism and hobbies

Being productive and having an effective routine gives you room to fit things from all 6 buckets into your week.

Sunday nights are for time blocking
I like to plan my week on Sunday nights, that’s where I finish blocking time in my calendar. Might be controversial because of weekend but sometimes I have too many work things going on in my head before bed on Sunday, so planning my week before going to sleep is a great way to put my mind at ease.

Go through the list of priorities, break them up into 1-2 tasks and block time in my calendar for it. As much as I can, I like to theme my weeks with 1 big thing I want to do. What’s my #1 focus.

Key here is not over blocking. Leave some flex in there to move things around as things pop up during the week.

Daily walks with my dog
I split between 3 modes, 1 is podcast, 2 is music, 3 is just silence.

Monday nights
1 hour of shitty TV if I’ve worked on the cast.

Tuesday and Thursday nights
Tuesdays and Thursdays are usually blocked for reading. My wife is part of a book club and is an avid reader, so we try our ebay to turn the TV off on Tuesdays and open a book.

I alternate between a book on Tuesday and on Thursday I learn something, right now learning Segment.js but have plans for SQL and deeper API.

Wednesday nights
I usually plan a friends or family zoom call on Wed nights, I usually have no meeting Wednesdays so I’m happy to get some social time in the second half of the day.

Something we want to try is everyone picking the same recipe, we open Zoom and watch each other chaotically build a recipe and eat together.

Sometimes I’ll host a Zoom with friends and we watch a bunch of hockey games over screenshare.

Friday nights
Most Friday nights are reserved for my wife, we’ll usually order in and watch TV or a documentary. 

✌️

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Intro music by Wowa via Unminus

What is the most important skill for an SEO? Technical, content, analytics, project management?

Use google search to start - really look at results, what’s being displayed, what Google is automatically serving up => your job here is to intuit what Google thinks your users want.

SEO is extremely competitive. I remember back when we worked together our competitors seemed to be running your playbook at the same time, and it made things tough. What’s your advice for competitive SEO?

Look at the structure of the top few results on Google — What on-page elements are they using? What can you glean from the information architecture?

I know you’ve tried or used most of the tools out there. For our listeners on a shoestring budget -- what do you recommend for analytics and reporting?

Google Search Console and Google Analytics => This is a great feature and I’m shocked at how few people actually take the time to set this up. 
So many quick tips -

Set a filter to see things on second page. Sort to see top converting pages (tsk tsk set up goal tracking). Sort to see CTRs. Drill down into pages to see keywords.

What about technical SEO? Everyone talks about it, but it’s I don’t think many people know how to improve this area of SEO.

Google Page insights. Enter your site and see how it performs on mobile device. It gives a great print out of action items - such as sizing images, painting content before things load up.

Lighthouse: Chrome developer tools and gives you a super technical review of your site.

How do SEOs on a budget prepare for the future of search?

Voice Search and Voice Utility.

Mobile is king of SEO, and Voice is the next generation of search (still up for debate). 

If you ask Alexa or Siri or Google for an answer, voice search is at play. Structure your content for voice and you’ll be rewarded.

✌️

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Intro music by Wowa via Unminus

In this episode, we’re going to talk about the best ways to integrate influencers into your marketing education. 

First, I want to cover the pressure on new marketers to create a brand or become an influencer. This is bullshit. It’s completely unproductive and puts undue pressure on you to post, publish, etc. Take that time and practice your craft. 

But what about networking? 

YES! Great way to build your brand :)

How have you used influencers in your growth as a marketer?

I’ve followed quite a few, but mostly it’s been through reading articles and doing research. Read a book! They need to be peer reviewed. I follow influencers for their smart content. 

I know you talk about graduating influencers -- what do you mean by that? 

I want to be super clear: I have nothing against any influencer. They’re brave enough and bold enough to put themselves in the public, and share their wisdom. I truly respect everyone and their talents. If it sounds like I’m throwing shade, then please know I’m being genuine! 

Take Neal Patel - Digital marketer, SEO - He’s done a ton of work for the community, and is particularly valuable for folks at the start of their career. 

As an SEO, 12 years ago I started reading some of his blogs, and ended up, moving over to the Moz blog where I started to learn more from a class of advanced SEOs like Rand Fishkin, Cyrus Shepherd, Dr. Pete, etc. I don’t read about writing good SEO content anymore — I read things like The Definitive Guide to JavaScript SEO (2021 Edition).  

Obviously a massive Rand fan. I still remember reading his letter. It’s one of those saas marketing moments right? Where were you when you found out Rand was leaving Moz?

I feel like the guy embodies integrity and morality in marketing. In the early days of Klipfolio, you guys built out dashboard templates and you had one with Rand. How was that?

At Klipfolio we worked on an SEO dashboard Rand Fishkin described in one of his whiteboard videos. I’m a huge Rand Fishkin fan -- he’s a genuine, smart dude, and watching & reading his content makes me happy. Anyway, we built this dashboard for him, and then reached out. He was still CEO of Mox at the time, so he was super, super busy. We ended getting him to review the dashboard and promoting it out on social.

Why should you follow influencers? 

I’d say to round out your perspective and education. Don’t just blindly follow anyone and expect results. If you find someone entertaining or witty or whatever, follow them. I’m not your mom!  

It’s funny, I don’t actually see myself following influencers so much as just following smart people. I also really check whether the people I follow already confirm existing biases - it’s super helpful to find people who have different opinions or perspectives. 

It’s really easy to swim the same direction as everyone else -- look to people who do the opposite and then follow them. 

I like what you said there “smart people” not influencers. 

What’s the difference between a fluffy influencer and a legit smart influencer? 

The difference lies in the content. Dig deep. The fluffy influencer is just repeating the same things that are already shared at nauseum, that’s if they’re not talking about themselves. 

Real experts focus on their field, not themselves. They are opinionated, they drive real discussion, they share valuable practical things. They back up what they say, they work in the craft, they are super deep. They aren’t afraid of saying I don’t know.  

But it’s tricky. It’s super easy for someone to have a legit social presence and appearance, but once you hire them or work with them you quickly uncover whether they can back up all those tweets.  

How do you spot a smart influencer vs a false idol? 

Instead of saying, wow, Rand is so cool, I want to be like Rand and do what he does. 

You should be saying, wow what Rand said is fascinating, he's really made me rethink my take on mobile vs desktop, mobile didn’t kill desktop, it just took up all our free time. 

There’s something super fascinating about a lot of influencer relationships. I know you’re trying to be nice and give everyone the benefit of the doubt. We just saw a prominent influencer/podcaster get called out for some pretty shady practices. 

Yes, and you see this all the time. Pay me a bit of money and I’ll give you 15 minutes of advice or whatever. It could totally be worth it. I question the value. I think that you’re better off forming your own opinion and working through challenges with information available. 

I see this a lot on platforms like Product Hunt, where getting an influencer to hunt your product is like the number one factor in being successful. I disagree - I think having a great product customers love is more important. But it doesn’t change the transactional nature of influencer life. 

We have a podcast. Are we influencers? How do you sleep at night JT?

Yes, the irony is not lost on me! I think that we have to recognize that we do influence folks -- we put content on the internet, and with it our opinions. 

I will say this: my goal is to provide the kind of advice I wish I got when I was starting out. Or, if you’re more senior, to provide a unique perspective... I have young kids at home -- I sleep like shit :)

Alright, let’s drop a list of some of the legit people you’re following and learning from right now:

Marketing celebreties

https://twitter.com/randfish 

https://twitter.com/Julian

https://twitter.com/aleyda 

https://twitter.com/andrewchen

https://twitter.com/Backlinko 

https://twitter.com/jackbutcher 

https://twitter.com/avinash 

https://twitter.com/hnshah 

Badass marketers

https://twitter.com/crestodina 

https://twitter.com/thatbberg 

https://twitter.com/TaliaGw 

https://twitter.com/davegerhardt

https://twitter.com/timsoulo 

https://twitter.com/leelasrin 

https://twitter.com/Patticus 

https://twitter.com/guillaumecabane 

https://twitter.com/KyleTibbitts 

https://twitter.com/JoelKlettke 

https://twitter.com/ClaireSuellen 

https://twitter.com/JHTScherck 

https://twitter.com/benjihyam 

https://twitter.com/matthewbarby

https://twitter.com/smgrieser

https://twitter.com/harrydry

https://twitter.com/RamliJohn...

Today we are joined by the powerful Erin Blaskie. Erin is currently a fractional CMO advising startups and scaleups, currently working with Jamieson Law, Ridgebase, Heirlume and Staffy. 

Before going back to freelance, Erin spent 4 years leading marketing teams at Fellow, a SaaS platform for meeting productivity as well as L-SPARK, a SaaS accelerator. 

But Erin’s start in marketing goes further than that. in 2004 she launched a virtual assistant business (one of the firsts) and later pivoted that to a marketing agency where she worked with brands like Disney, Microsoft, Ford, she’s worked with Hollywood actors, authors and speakers helping them craft their brands. 

She runs a no fluff-tactical newsletter with 10k+ subscribers, she has a huge Twitter audience topping 36k.

She’s a TEDx speaker, her writting’s been featured in Forbes, entrepreneur, adweek and the wall street journal.

She’s also a post grad intructor, an entrepreneur mentor and a mental health advocate. 

Holly shit, Erin, how do you find time to appear on podcasts with all the stuff you have going on haha?

Here are the questions our listeners submitted!

Freelancing

What do you wish someone would have prepared you for before starting your digital marketing career?

I would especially love to learn her tips on setting expectations and boundaries with clients in her freelance/agency work. 

Do you feel like you’re more sales than marketer? Do you spend more hours working freelance? more than startup?

All things being equal, do you think that as a freelancer, you can learn faster? more clients, more projects, more breadth of problems and tools.

Startup in-house
Curious what Erin would say about which marketing roles/functions are better to hire in-house versus hiring freelance.

What are some of the biggest tactical marketing mistakes you see startups make? I say tactical because I think the de facto answer is based on not having a strategy in place.  

What are the best marketing strategies for early stage companies when budgets are sparse?

Show notes
Check out Erin's site.

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Today's episode features a call-to-action for our listeners: take a few moments, check out Women of Martech, and share it with someone you think could benefit. 

We're joined by Melissa Ledesma, Executive Director of Women of Martech. Here's an overview of her bio: 

Melissa Ledesma 

• Director Of Content & Comms at DMS (Digital Media Solutions), a leading global ad-tech enabled performance advertising company
• She's also Executive Director of Women of Martech
• Before the ad world, she spent several years in real estate, mortgage and entertainment playing different PR/event, email marketing roles.
• she works out of New Jersey and spends a good chunk of her time giving back, recently being named to the Board of Directors of her local Boys and Girls Clubs to enrich education and training of at risk children and teens

Women of Martech's mission is concrete and actionable: to raise the profile of the women and their achievements in the world of Martech. Melissa walks us through how the Women of Martech community is helping women at all stages of their career to reach that next level. From member spotlights and insider resources to connecting with a vast network of 800+ martech pros, this community is like a superpower for your career.

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What’s up everyone, today we have the pleasure of sitting down with Angela Cirrone, Senior Director, Marketing Operations at Optimizely.

Summary: Angela brings a fresh perspective to marketing operations, a key theme throughout the conversation is curiosity and how it helps boost your confidence and be a key lego block to a successful career. What makes her a unique leader is her experience being part of over a dozen acquisitions which came with over a hundred platform migrations and integrations. She’s developed a framework for platform migrations and a knack for evaluating software and building a stack with martech minimization in mind. We also navigated the convergence of martech and analytics in MOPs and pondered whether MOPs should report into GTM?

About Angela

• Angela started her career as a dental assistant before moving to academic advisory and then trying out dental sales
• She moved over to marketing – playing social media and community roles for various companies
• Eventually she found her way into Marketing Ops at Skill-soft where she learned Marketo and got her certification
• She later freelanced at CS2
• She then joined a proposal automation software company that would later get acquired by Upland Software, a portfolio of 25+ cloud apps, where she would eventually get promoted to Director of Marketing Operations
• She later took on the role of Senior Director of Marketing Ops and Demand Gen at Sauce Labs, a continuous test and error solution where she transformed the Ops function for enhanced efficiency and alignment with sales and GTM
• Today she’s Senior Director of Marketing Operations at Optimizely, an enterprise digital experience platform

Boosting Confidence by Embracing Curiosity

Angela reflects on her initial days at Optimizely, surrounded by experts in marketing operations. She didn't start out knowing all the answers. Instead, she focused on moving challenges forward, a method she credits for easing her entry into a field filled with experienced professionals. Angela quickly realized the power of not knowing everything but having the skills to find out.

She champions the idea of empowerment through curiosity within her team. This approach shifts the emphasis from having instant solutions to developing the ability to explore and tackle problems efficiently. Angela believes that when a marketer faces a new issue, the goal shouldn't be to solve it immediately but to start unraveling it bit by bit.

Angela suggests that anyone can build confidence by being inquisitive and resourceful. This means enhancing one’s skills in using tools like AI and Google, and tapping into a network of knowledgeable peers. This skillset turns daunting challenges into a series of smaller, more manageable tasks.

She openly shares her moments of doubt, reassuring us that even seasoned professionals feel uncertain at times. What matters is how they handle these moments—by seeking solutions and learning from the process.

Key takeaway: Angela's journey teaches us that true confidence in marketing operations comes from cultivating curiosity and resourcefulness. Marketers can future-proof their careers by learning to decompose complex issues and steadily work through them, which not only builds individual confidence but also enriches team dynamics.

The Challenges and Opportunities of Numerous Migrations and Integrations

When Angela joined Upland Software, she found herself right in the middle of a tidal wave of acquisitions—14 in total during her time there. Each of these mergers, including one with her former company Kubity, thrust her into a role that tested her skills and confidence. Her task was to merge different technologies and operational cultures into Upland’s existing framework, and in some cases she had just six months to make it happen. This period marked a significant leap in her career, filled with both challenges and substantial learning.

Angela's experience at Upland was filled with managing logistics but it also presented an opportunity to shape the company’s future. With no formal marketing ops team in place and the function previously outsourced to an agency, Angela saw a gap. She proposed and established a dedicated team, shifting the company's approach from external reliance to internal strength. This move was about building a foundation that was robust and could handle the complexities of future growth.

Each acquisition brought different practices and technologies to the table. Angela emphasized the importance of understanding the reasons behind each company’s methods. She saw this as more than just integrating new tools into Upland’s tech stack but a chance to think critically about what improvements these new elements could bring to the company.

Reflecting on her time at Upland, Angela highlights the formation of the marketing ops team as a key achievement. Her approach shows how tackling immediate challenges with a strategic mindset can lead to lasting advancements within a company.

Key takeaway: Dealing with acquisitions in martech requires strategic foresight and the courage to drive change. By viewing each migration and integration project as a stepping stone for improvement, marketers can capitalize on the opportunities these changes bring.

Architecting a Framework for Platform Migrations

We asked Angela to unpack how her first few integration projects looked liked compared to her 13th and 14th acquisitions. She started by sharing details on the evolution of the process for merging data from new acquisitions into existing systems. Initially, the process was somewhat indiscriminate, with an emphasis on transferring as much data as possible, regardless of its immediate value or relevance.

Over time, Angela and her team developed a more nuanced strategy, likening it to "packing a suitcase, not the whole house." This approach meant being selective about which data and tech assets to integrate, focusing on quality and relevance rather than quantity. They established clear criteria for what to include, such as activity levels and the strategic value of certain accounts or campaigns. This method allowed them to streamline the integration process and avoid cluttering their system with unnecessary data.

Naturally, when two companies merge, two tech stacks also need to merge. A key part of refining their approach involved making tough decisions about existing contracts and technologies. Angela encountered scenarios where newly acquired companies had recently entered into multi-year contracts for technologies that were not part of her company’s preferred tech stack. Deciding whether to honor these contracts, transition to preferred technologies immediately, or find a middle ground was a complex challenge that required strategic thinking and careful negotiation.

By the time of the later acquisitions, Angela’s strategy had matured significantly. The team had moved from a lenient approach to a more standardized method, focusing on aligning new acquisitions closely with operational standards. This shift not only improved the efficiency of the integrations but also ensured that new additions could seamlessly contribute to the company’s overall strategy.

Key takeaway: By focusing on what truly adds value and aligning new assets with established standards, marketers can enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of their tech stacks and data strategies. This strategic integration ensures smoother transitions during acquisitions and can significantly boost a company’s capabilities in the competitive martech landscape.

How to Pick Between Similar Martech Solutions?

Angela often faced a common scenario: deciding whether ...

Naomi is Director, Global Marketing Operations at EFI, a 3,000+ person tech company in the printing industry. She’s based in Vancouver but she’s been working remotely long before it was cool. She has 12+ years of experience leading high-performing global B2B demand generation teams. 

Before EFI she ran Marketing Ops at Sophos a cybersecurity enterprise company. Naomi is also one of the founding members of “MO-Pros”, the biggest Slack community for marketing Ops pros and recently launched a platform/site.  

She’s been interviewed by prominent podcasts for her efforts spearheading a large scale enterprise migration to Marketo. David Lewis, the godfather of marketing ops podcasts says that Naomi is in his top 10 marketing ops people he’s ever worked with. 

Noami dives into the 3 things that stand out in most marketing operations profesionals: 

1. ask a lot of questions and think outside the box
2. ability to explain complex technical concept to non tech people
3. multi task skills, sometimes the sky is falling

Most marketing job postings should be read as a guideline and not taken as a prescription. The most important thing to demonstrate is your ability to learn something. 

When Naomi is hiring on her team she’s looking for a balance between:

- technical chops

- cultural fit

In the interview process, it's key to get to chat with people from other business units to assess that cultural fit. 

Take home assignments are not super common for entry level roles, you can get a ton from how someone answers a question. 

Naomi values curiosity, looking for data opinions. How do you test that in an interview, what attributes shine?

The attribute that allows you to suceed is you have to be curious and always ask why. You have to be willing to break things down and rebuild it better fast and stronger. Open ended questions get interesting conversations. Let candidates explain problem solving. Look for condidates that demonstrate personal bias recognition. 

What's it like being a Director level MOPs at an enterprise company?
Aside from lots of meetings (lol), understand where business partners want to go, can our current tech stack support those goals. Tech adoption, get everyone to use Marketo to most potential.

How can people who want to stay in the IC path develop a long term career growth?
Naomi sets up her team with subject matter experts. Things change too fast, having experts on specific pieces, web, email, data, so they can stay on top of those areas and bring it back to the team and educate the rest, share knowledge.

Here are key elements of Naomi's onboarding strategy:

•  Marketo university
•  1-1s with key stakeholders
•  Viydyard videos for short training
•  Make sure person is plugged in and fits in
•  Training the data model, week by week

What should marketers do in their first job:

•  always asking questions
•  how can we do this better or not
•  why do we do this this way

If you're interested in marketing tech and you aren't a member of The MOPros community, you can signup here.

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Ever get stuck waiting on a dev to update a small piece of code to fix a form/email/webpage?

How about the confidence that comes from speaking at eye-level with development?

Marketers have so much to gain from learning even a baseline of code.

In this episode, JT is going to make the case on why you should learn some code, and I’m going to introduce you to a new community focused on helping marketers learn to code.

Dude, you are always talking to me about coding. Share with our listeners your own journey.

What is unique about marketers wanting to learn how to code?

How hard is it to learn coding?

It’s going to take time to learn to code. How do you stay motivated over the long-haul?

Detach learning to code form your career -- make it a side-hobby with no implications on your job

Devil’s advocate: why not just spin up a webflow website or some other no-code option?

I know you’re itching to introduce it: tell our listeners about the community.

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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.

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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

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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 follow

2. 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. 

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Show notes:
Reach out to Milan on LinkedIn for a coffee or to connect: https://www.linkedin.com/in/milanfatoric/

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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. 

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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!

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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 . 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.

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Show notes:
Justin's LinkedIn Profile: www.linkedin.com/in/justin-silver-14b393108

Justin's site: https://bit.ly/3cCSMPk

Conference mentioned: Legacy conference.

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Steffen Hedebrandt is co-founder of Dreamdata.io.
Transcripted borrowed from here.
For a deep dive into attribution see this article.

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 ...

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.

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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,

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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!

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Podcast artwork font by StarJedi Special Edition by Boba Fonts

What’s up everyone, today we have the pleasure of sitting down with Andrea Lechner-Becker, mostly retired CMO and Novelist.

Summary: Andrea takes us on a wild ride filled with nuggets of wisdom, a few f-bombs and tons of laughs as she unpacks her deep understanding of marketing. Together, we explore how storytelling breathes life into content and why true enthusiasm for a product can transform marketing strategies. We navigate the crucial skills of recognizing patterns and forming strategic partnerships with finance departments. Andrea also sheds light on how flawed attribution methods can lead marketers to do dumb things, why investing in branding from the outset is table stakes and why marketers have what it takes to be outstanding martech sales reps.

About Andrea

• Andrea started her career in martech as a database marketing coordinator at the Phoenix Suns NBA basketball team 
• She later joined a 2-year old marketing automation consultancy called LeadMD. She would quickly get promoted to Principal, VP - Marketing Service and later CMO when the company was acquired by another agency and rebranded as Shift Paradigm
• Through the consultancy, Andrea’s helped huge brands like Adobe, Atlassian, Drift, Tealium
• She also ran marketing at Toolio before leaving her successful career as a marketing exec and going back to her entrepreneurial routes creating uncommonly good content
• She’s the Co-Host of OWNED podcast by AudiencePlus
• She wrote the Practical Guide to B2B Event Sponsorship
• She’s also written an intensely emotional and powerful fiction story called Sixty Days Left

The Impact of Fiction on Real-World Issues

Andrea’s insight into the world of writing and fiction is both refreshing and straightforward. She starts by debunking the myth of the "aspiring" writer—declaring that anyone who writes is indeed a writer. This simple yet powerful affirmation encourages daily writing as a practice, not just a hobby, and stresses that writing is accessible to everyone, regardless of their goals.

The creation of her novel, Willow, stems from her fascination with America’s Death with Dignity laws, a subject she finds both philosophically intriguing and politically complex. These laws allow terminally ill patients to end their lives under medical supervision, a right given more commonly to animals than to humans. Andrea's story sheds light on this contentious issue by weaving it into the fabric of her characters’ lives, making it more approachable and understandable.

Through Willow, Andrea not only educates her readers about a delicate topic but also challenges them to rethink their positions. She shares feedback from readers who have shifted from staunch opposition to a more supportive stance—or at least to a reconsideration of their views—after connecting with her characters' journeys.

Key takeaway: Fiction isn't just for entertainment; it can be a formidable ally in influencing public opinion and sparking debate on critical social issues. For marketers, Andrea's approach underscores the effectiveness of storytelling as a means to connect with audiences on a deeper level. By embracing narratives that reflect real-world challenges, marketers can create campaigns that resonate more profoundly with their audience, encouraging both engagement and reflection.

How to Create More Compelling Content and Messaging

Andrea emphasizes the importance of going back to the basics in marketing, focusing on genuine human connections rather than overused jargon and AI-powered embellishments. She critiques the current state of B2B marketing, noting that many companies sound alike because they fail to make an effort to stand out. Drawing from Maslow's hierarchy of needs, Andrea highlights how understanding basic human motivations can enhance marketing strategies. She believes that businesses often overlook the importance of connecting on a personal level with customers, colleagues, and bosses.

Her experiences at networking events reveal a lack of genuine engagement, prompting her to use specific conversational tools to foster meaningful interactions. Andrea uses a set of questions designed to deepen connections, which she adapts from psychologist Art Aaron's research. These questions help her navigate social interactions more effectively, especially as someone who identifies as introverted.

Andrea argues that the lackluster approach to B2B marketing stems from a fundamental misunderstanding of marketing by those at the helm, particularly in large enterprises. She points out that many CEOs, often with backgrounds in finance rather than marketing, fail to grasp the essence of effective communication and its impact on sales and customer engagement. This gap in understanding leads to marketing strategies that do not resonate on a human level.

She stresses the importance of conveying the 'benefit of the benefit' in marketing messages, using B2C strategies as a successful example. Instead of selling a product, companies should focus on selling the lifestyle or emotional benefits that the product enables. This approach is often neglected in B2B settings, where the focus might be too narrow or technical.

Key takeaway: To stand out in the saturated B2B market, companies must prioritize genuine human connections and understand the underlying human needs of their audience. Marketers should strive to communicate not just the functional benefits of their products but also the emotional peace of mind they provide. By doing so, they can create more compelling, memorable marketing messages that resonate deeply with their customers, enhancing both engagement and loyalty.

The Magic of Marketing is Genuine Product Enthusiasm

Andrea vividly recalls her journey through the marketing world, from her educational roots to the exhilarating rush of launching campaigns and seeing the immediate impact of her work. With a twinkle in her eye, she talks about the magic of marketing—connecting people to products they'll hopefully love as much as she does. Even though she's stepped back from the front lines, her heart remains tied to the craft.

After leaving a high-paced role, Andrea found joy in the simple pleasures of life, like spending time with her dog and tending to her orange trees. Yet, she still dedicates part of her time to sparking career growth in others through social media, teaching job seekers how to think of themselves as products ripe for the job market. Her methods are reminiscent of building a SaaS product—meticulous, thoughtful, and always aiming for scalability.

Andrea's story is peppered with anecdotes of her early days in a dog art gallery, where she first realized the power of marketing. She could see the light in people’s eyes as they found joy in the art pieces she presented. This foundational experience shaped her belief that marketing, at its core, is about sharing passion. Whether she was working in a gallery or a tech firm, the essence of her approach didn’t change.

Reflecting on her career, Andrea points out the profound impact passionate marketing has had on her colleagues' lives—transforming careers, enabling dreams, and changing life trajectories. It’s clear she sees marketing not just as a job but as a vital part of living a fulfilled life, a channel through which one can make a significant difference in both personal and professional realms.

Key takeaway: Embrace the essence of marketing by sharing your genuine enthusiasm for the products or services you represent. This authentic connection not only enhances your marketing effectiveness but also enriches your professional life and touches those around you. Andrea’s story is a powerful reminder that at the heart of successful mark...

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 stuff

AI 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. :)

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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 = Roadmap
Contact Status = Traffic lights

One 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.

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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.

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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.

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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?

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- 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

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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.

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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 Boundary
Clear boundaries between work & life

Disconnect 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 Go
You can’t control everything, certainly not what other people doIt’s hard AF sometimes if you’re like me and your passion is your strength

How 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 Candid
First, 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 basket
Advice 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 jobs
My 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.

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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.

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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, integrations

Next 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 time

Okay 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.

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What’s up everyone, today we have the pleasure of sitting down with Emily Kramer, Co-Founder at MKT1.

Summary: Emily explored the convergence of marketing, investment, and startup growth, delivering actionable insights for marketers, founders, and investors. When picking future unicorns, she attributed timing and luck but stressed the importance of selecting startups that value marketing and whose products meet real needs in growing markets. Emily advocated for rigor in selecting martech tools that align with business goals, enhancing efficiency without compromising content quality. She also highlighted the need for "pie-shaped" marketers in startups, professionals who combine deep expertise in at least 2 areas like growth and product marketing, but also with a broad foundation. Additionally, Emily underscored the value of leveraging marketing skills in angel investing and internal advocacy, enhancing both startup viability and internal team alignment.

About Emily

• Emily started her career in Media planning at Ad agencies in SanFran and also had a stint in growing a programmatic ad platform
• She went back to school to complete an MBA at Harvard and joined Salesforce as a Product Marketing MBA intern before later joining a startup called Ticketfly as an early marketing team member 
• Emily then made the mega move to Asana as Head of Marketing as the 35th employee where she built and scaled the marketing team from 1 to 25 in less than 4 years
• She moved on to an email app startup called Astro Technologies as VP of Marketing where she led the company to Series A funding and won the esteemed ProductHunt Golden Kitty award for mobile app of the year in 2017 - this startup looked a lot like the AI productivity apps popping up today, a few years too early.
• Emily then joined Carta as VP of Marketing where she grew the team from 2 to 30 and sat on the exec team and reported directly to the CEO. While there she co-authored a ‘gender gap in equity’ study which was featured in over 50 publications
• Emily then kickstarted her entrepreneurial path and started dabbling in Angel investing. She took First Round’s Angel Track which helped turn her investing hobby into a new career where she’s now invested in over 50 companies as an angel investor
• She joined Empower Work as a Board Member, an NPO providing text support for vulnerable workers facing challenging work situations
• In October 2020, Emily made the plunge and launched (market-1) MKT1 with her co-founder Kathleen, initially as an advisory business, then as a newsletter and community aimed at helping founders and marketers scale their teams and later as a Capital fund helping early-stage B2B startups.

The Secret to Picking Future Unicorn Startups

Emily shared her journey through the startup world, sprinkled with good timing and fortunate circumstances. She entered business school just after the 2008 financial crash, a tumultuous time that surprisingly set her up for success in the entrepreneurial realm. By the time she re-entered the workforce, the economy was bouncing back, providing a fertile ground for new ventures. Her departure from startups came just before the COVID-19 pandemic, sparing her from the subsequent turmoil many companies faced.

Her method for evaluating potential startups has evolved but is based on a simple principle: the importance of a solid product that the target audience would endorse, even if they wouldn't use it themselves. Emily stresses the need for a product to be compelling to those it aims to serve, a criterion often overlooked by non-marketers. A great market and a capable team are also on her checklist, but a unique selling point for Emily is the company's marketing strategy. She looks for what she now calls "marketing advantages," such as a unique story, SEO potential, or network effects that could give a company an edge.

Emily's first startup job was driven by her love for music, working at Ticketfly, where she was immersed in the scene she adored. This role merged her personal interests with professional opportunities, which was fulfilling but also a learning curve. It led her to pivot towards a more B2B focus, taking her to Asana. There, she saw early traction and a team capable of winning on multiple fronts, confirming her belief in the startup’s potential.

She advises marketers to think like investors when considering startup roles. It’s not just about a paycheck; it’s about believing in the product and the team. This mindset shift is crucial, especially as one’s career progresses and the stakes get higher. Understanding the company's vision and its alignment with marketing is essential—not just for the company's success, but for personal career growth as well.

Key takeaway: For marketers eyeing startup opportunities, it's crucial to evaluate the company with a discerning eye: Is the product something people genuinely need and love? Is the market ripe for growth? Does the company understand and value marketing? These factors are not just important for the company's success but are critical for marketers to ensure they invest their time wisely and contribute to a venture that grows and values their skills.

Advancing Gender Equity in Venture Capital

At MKT1, Emily has taken a proactive approach to shaping the landscape of venture capital through a lens of equity and inclusion. She emphasizes the importance of diversifying investment not only as a moral imperative but as a strategic advantage. MKT1 actively sources deals from a variety of channels, prioritizing companies led by women, people of color, and underrepresented minorities. Emily believes these groups often outperform the average founders, bringing unique perspectives and solutions to the table.

Their commitment to diversity is evident in the composition of their fund. For a considerable period, the gender distribution among those holding equity has been evenly split, a rare achievement in the venture capital world. This balance also extends to the fund's investors, many of whom are marketers, showcasing a diverse group of individuals backing their vision.

MKT1 doesn't hold a formal mission statement on diversity; instead, they integrate these principles into the very fabric of their investment strategy. They aim to mirror the diversity of the market itself, ensuring the products they invest in are reflective of the consumers they serve. This intrinsic approach to diversity is part of what Emily describes as their 'DNA'—a natural element of their operation.

Emily also collaborates with Empower Work, a support line for workers facing challenges in their jobs. This initiative primarily aids lower-income individuals, though it's accessible to anyone needing guidance. Recognizing her own privileged position to be able to address injustices legally, Emily is committed to extending support to those who lack the means to challenge their adversities.

Key takeaway: Effective advocacy for diversity in the workplace extends beyond mere numbers. By embedding a commitment to equity into every facet of business operations—from investment strategies to community support—leaders can create profound, lasting change. Emily's work illustrates how maintaining a balance in investment portfolios and supporting initiatives like Empower Work not only champions diversity but also enhances the overall business landscape.

Fundamental Principles For Picking Martech Tools

Emily brings a unique dual perspective as both an investor and a marketer to the challenge of navigating the crowded martech landscape. When it comes to implementing new technologies, the allure of the latest tools can often lead to "shiny object syndrome," where the excitement of poten...

Describe the opposite of sales & marketing alignment

Sales 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 marketing

What 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 over

How 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 short

Teaching 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.

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Lauren Sanborn on LinkedIn.
CallRail.

Intro music by Wowa via Unminus

Ditch your keyboard as often as possible. Make handwriting your default medium even when it’s counter-intuitive

Meetings:
* Ditch your phone/laptop if and when we get back to office life

Remote:
* Turn off all your other apps, including and especially slack and email
* No other tabs open
* Video-on, hands off mouse and keyboard

Write 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 page

Anecdote, I find hand-writing unlocks my creative process and actually makes me the final product come together much quicker

Reading internet articles? Want to actually retain that information? Handwrite your notes

Tons 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 improving

Next time you need to write something, try Outline with paper, write draft in keyboard.

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We’re not responsible enough to have unregulated internet usage. We need to be deliberate about our tool usage. We use the tool, not the other way around.

One of the main points Cal Newport makes in his book DM is that the key to thriving in our high-tech world is to spend much less time using technology.

A carpenter uses a hammer, the hammer doesn’t use them. Is the same true of digital marketers? We get sucked into our device and end up providing value to social media platforms, news site, content providers; not to ourselves, not to our employers.

Digital minimalism could mean something different to different people. For some, it has nothing to do with the amount of tools you use but rather it's about how you make space to create and learn and be happy. But for some, and I think this is the case for you, it has everything to do with the amount of tools you use. It's getting rid of some of that clutter so you can focus on what's important.

Think how much more productive you’d be if you had to go to a library to access the internet.

I love the library analogy. It lends very well to the idea that it would force us to focus your online time on a small number of specific activities. And then happily miss out on everything else.

As part of my digital declutter, I started a computer sign-in sheet to regular and filter my access. Here's how I set it up:

* 4 columns; time, purpose, sites/apps, satisfaction

* I fill in first 3 before every session. This forces me to really think about what I’m going to do during a work session; I plan my work and what tools I need to accomplish my job

* After my work session, I rate my satisfaction. 10 is simple to get - I complete the task I set out to do and didn’t look at any other sites

* Noticed my lower scores all came from session interrupted by Slack & Email; very interesting, when I scheduled that time on Slack & Email, I could still attain a 10; realized the problem wasn’t the tool, it was my relationship to it.

I’m super productive and hitting all my deadlines; I only work 3 days a week and have rarely felt this type of sustained productivity, and I’d say I’m usually pretty productive and never miss deadlines.

Biggest change for me was forcing me to spend time to plan out what to do in a work session. I'm good about planning my week, sometimes by days, but never tried work sessions.

It’s really easy for me to tell when I need to think strategically about my priorities and refocus my to do list.

Your computer is just a tool, and you should wield it with the same finesse and care as a carpenter; A carpenter always has a hammer in his or her belt but they’re don’t use it for anything other than pounding nails.

What about those periods of time where you’re fucking around on reddit and you see something badass and it inspires you. You save it to your pocket, maybe you go back to it, maybe you don’t. But it’s it’s swipe file of shit that’s only there because of browsing. And you might be thinking cool but you can just schedule this reddit browsing time. But maybe the quality comes from the quantity of browsing. Maybe it’s just an excuse for using Reddit.

Content is not king; your behaviour on the internet is; if your behaviour is different than your intentions when it comes to internet usage, it’s worth paying attention to.

How can you be more intentional about your use of technology? Try a sign in sheet.

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How do you decide what type of company you want to work for? Figure out who your dream companies are in that size, space, industry by trying new things.

In college, I worked for a startup sized agency, a public enterprise, a governement department. I knew I would be likely happier in smaller companies.

The most important part of an interview is not to be prepared for what they will ask, but rather making sure you ask the right questions. One of my favs: Totally ask the company what the salary range is for this position. Usually it's just the candidate forced giving a range. Doesn't have to be the case.

Questions to ask based on size of company (Startup) Data/technical support, is there a data warehouse (Scale up) What's the plan/reporting structure, ops report to marketing or revenue, examples of projects (Enterprise) Ask biggest problems right now, ask about tech stack, ask about change resistance, age of staff.

Questions to ask regardless of company size: Ask people what they love the most about the job. What they think of manager. what are the big upcoming projects, make sure they match your KPIs. What sod you see as the biggest hurdle for this role.

How to show your passion: pick a project you loved, and go deep into the details and why you loved it.

Idea: Send a cover letter via video; play on the remote factor. If it's an email job, tell the manager you wrote an email series for them as an introduction to your experience and background. If it's a lifecycle role, send them your favorite workflow template.

How to differentiate yourself: show how much you learn on your own, not just in your day to day, talk about mentors, courses, Slack groups, favorite authors and thought leaders.

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Choosing between being an individual contributor or a manager
It’s a common dilemma across all fields: the top contributors are most likely to get promoted to a management position. The issue is that not all contributors make good managers, while almost all managers need to have some subject matter expertise acquired through being an individual contributor.

In this episode, Jon and Phil break down the differences between each career track and make a case that most people would be happier as an individual contributor.

Will you be happier as an individual contributor?
Most people will be happier as an individual contributor. Everyone is different, but many individual contributors seek management roles because it’s perceived as the only path to promotion within an organization.

This is a dilemma faced by many individuals across different types of roles: the top individual contributor is flagged as for promotion to management. But the skill of managing people is quite different from being a great contributor. The other question is will contributors be happy spending their time managing people?

Think about it: if what you love about martech is figuring out how to set up automation, workflows, testing new tools, working with teams to solve problems, and getting your hands dirty, the shift to management is going to draw a stark contrast. Managers in martech, like Directors of Marketing Operations, are responsible for their team, the strategy, and overseeing all those moving parts.

The skills required to be excellent at marketing operations are different from being great at management. One could make the argument that you could be excellent at management without actually being a great contributor. Just consider one skill all managers need: emotional intelligence.

People issues arise all the time in management and require a thoughtful, considerate manager to resolve. Understanding team chemistry and paying close attention to the needs of individual team members is critical, but a skill many of us need to cultivate. Consider the quiet team member who struggles in silence with the team dynamics, maybe never feeling the opportunity or encouragement to bring their ideas up in team meetings. Then, one day, they leave the team because they found a better opportunity.

Benefits of being an individual contributor
Being an individual contributor can be a fulfilling and rewarding career choice. Here’s why individual contributors love their work:

• Deep work and flow state
• Time management
• Specialization and be true experts
• Autonomy in daily tasks
• Aligned with strength and interests

Deep work and flow state
For individual contributors it’s possible to achieve that zen-like state of flow where time flies by as you just enjoy completing your work. For creators, this might be writing a blog post or designing an image; for marketing ops folks, it may be designing workflows, setting up automation, or auditing a system.

Hitting this state as a manager is nearly impossible with a need for managing team members, triaging requests, and communicating across multiple channels. The dream of turning off Slack and checking out of email seems like a distant one when you’re in management. Managers face continuous waves of interruptions that drown any chances of deep work.

But for individual contributors, this heightened state of focus isn’t the ideal, it’s the norm.

Time management
As a manager, your calendar is a wall of one-on-ones, team meetings, strategy meetings with leadership, and ad-hoc-have-to-meet-now meetings. If this sounds like hell, well, this is a taste of a manager’s life. Entire books have been written about making meetings less hellish, such as one of our favorites “Death by Meeting“.

While it’s commendable to make the most of meetings and we’re not going to deny how important they are to business, the best way to avoid meeting hell is to not have any meetings. It’s not avoidance; it’s focus. Individual contributors need time to work on their projects and deliverables. Meetings where individual contributors are involved should be quick, painless, and to the point.

A common complaint of managers is the desire to get back to doing what they love doing.

Specialization and mastery
To get that first promotion to management, most marketers need to demonstrate some skills and chops. Being a Director of Marketing Operations, for example, would be a tough job if you’d never managed a marketing automation instance before. But over time, your skills as a marketing ops contributor are less important than enabling members on your team to flourish and become experts.

Managers begin to lose that “edge” that made them so easy to promote in the first place. They spend less time in the tools and more time directing strategy. And, let’s be clear: this role is extremely important and valuable. That’s not what we’re saying.

But for individual contributors considering management, they need to understand that the opportunities to become deep experts in their field diminish in proportion to their managerial responsibilities. If what motivates you in your career is to be an expert, then managing may not be the best option.

Autonomy in daily tasks
Being an expert in your craft comes with respect from your team which allows you to operate with a higher degree of autonomy than a manager. An SEO with technical knowledge or a marketing operations pro with deep platform knowledge should be given the ability to do their thing. Managers, however, are responsible for a wide range of responsibilities, tasks, and other human beings.

Autonomy is closely linked to job satisfaction and this is the operating model for most individual contributors, especially as you deepen your expertise in your chosen field. It’s not to say as an individual contributor you won’t be told what to do or have your priorities influenced by a manager; it’s the “how” you accomplish your work that gives autonomy.

Aligned with strength and interests
Do what you love. It’s an ideal that sounds like advice from your mom… but it’s true. When you are passionate about your work (or at the least enjoy it), then it’s easier to show up. Part of enjoying your job is being good at it. This may seem obvious, but it’s quite possible to enjoy something you aren’t good at.

At work, aligning your strengths with your interests is a recipe for success. It’s a positive feedback loop where you will take initiative to deepen your expertise, experience greater autonomy, and command a higher salary.

People management is a challenging job
It’s a neat little story: graduate university, do a tour of duty as a marketing specialist, and then move into a management role. From there, who knows? VP of Marketing? CMO?

The narrative is attractive partly because it’s the path we’ve been conditioned to associate with career success. If you don’t manage other people, are you still successful? We’ll get to that in the next section, but for now, let’s think about the challenges of people managing.

First, humans are dynamic, complex, and emotional. Every human is unique and will respond to your management style differently. Even the best managers will face challenges due to personality differences. This is where a practice like that outlined in Radical Candor is valuable: develop deep relationships with your team, and earn the right to be candid.

Something that you might not hear about managing other people: it’s draining. Emotional labor is real, and its effect on the joy you take in your job is real – in fact, studies suggest this impacts women disproporti...

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 career in marketing. Here's a quick preview of the show.

I think we're both empathetic and compassionate leaders, we actually look to understand what's happening on the other side of eyes across from us. What I'm super excited about is getting into less just the tech and the strategies and the tactics, but also behind the scenes of what it's like to be a b2b marketer.

When to quit your job. When to take a break. 

What does it take to get promoted? How do you ask for raises? 

I think our podcast is focused on the humans behind the tech. But there's a lot of tech out there I mean that we need to unpack that tech. What is the value of manual versus automated reporting? What does it mean to be a technical marketer? How to setup lifecycles. What is lead scoring all about? 

We are going to be your guides on a journey across the Martech landscape of doom. 

If you only listen to a minute of our podcast, I want you to feel like you could get a snippet of intelligence.
 
Credits and notes:
Intro music by Wowa via Unminus.

What’s up everyone, today we have the pleasure of sitting down with Anthony Lamot 🐧, CEO and Co-Founder at DESelect.

Summary: From early stage founder advice and keeping up with the galaxy of martech tools to email fatigue and AI’s convergence with neuroscience, this episode journeys through deep marketing space. Anthony gives us practical advice for tracking martech trends but also keeping the timeless fundamentals in mind. We take a pit stop in email marketing land discussing true personalization, engagement tactics without overwhelming users, and if we’re really ready to give the wheel to AI (spoiler, we’re not). We also explored innovative uses of ChatGPT, the speculative future of AI and neuroscience and how to thoughtfully integrate AI into your product.

About Anthony

• Anthony started his career as a CRM consultant at Deloitte Belgium where he got his first taste of SFDC
• He moved over to Waeg (wahg) as a business & tech consultant where he continued advising companies on CRM but also started expanding to martech
• He later joined 4C as a Lead Consultant for Marketing Automation
• He took a turn in-house on a 1 year contract as Marketing Automation Lead at Toyota Europe where he rolled out SFMC
• During his consulting years, Anthony teamed up with his friend Jonathan where they met at Deloitte and they each started three startups from scratch, of which the first one was together
• In 2019, Anthony and his co-founder went all in on their 4th startup; DESelect  
• Today, over 1000 organizations use the marketing optimization platform, including T-Mobile, Volvo and Cornell University and many more

Taking the Entrepreneurial Plunge

Anthony was asked about what steps should be taken by those looking to start their own business, and his advice was nothing short of bold: drop everything else and dive in. He likens this to a dramatic moment from history—imagine being at the siege of Troy where the commander torches your only ride home. It's a vivid picture of commitment; there's no going back, so you might as well give this fight everything you've got. This total commitment, Anthony argues, is crucial because it keeps you sharp and wholly focused on your venture.

He openly admits that feeling 100% sure of yourself all the time isn't realistic. Doubts creep in, and that's normal. But, Anthony believes in a kind of all-or-nothing approach. It's either you make it, or you don't, and while this sounds stark, it simplifies many decisions and helps keep your spirits up. According to him, being an entrepreneur is about pushing past your comfort zone and constantly dealing with the discomfort of uncertainty.

Confidence does more than just keep you moving forward; it's also a beacon for others. When you believe deeply in what you're doing, it shows, and that energy is magnetic. It attracts the right kind of people to your team—those who are not just skilled but who also share your passion and drive.

Key takeaway: Dive deep into your entrepreneurial journey with no backups to distract you. This level of commitment sharpens focus and fosters a necessary resilience that not only propels you forward but also draws in a team as dedicated as you are. This combined momentum is often what turns startup dreams into reality.

Validating Business Ideas Before Coding

Anthony shares a refreshing take on starting a new venture, underscoring the significance of validating an idea before plunging into development. He suggests selling the concept before writing a single line of code, a strategy that contrasts sharply with the more traditional path of product development. This approach involves interacting directly with potential customers to gauge interest and gather feedback, which is crucial for shaping the product in its earliest stages.

Drawing from his own entrepreneurial journey with a previous venture, Anthony recalls the pivotal moment he identified a real problem to solve. This insight didn't come from brainstorming in isolation but from his observations while consulting. Noticing marketers' frustrations with certain technical tasks provided the initial spark for his business idea. By focusing on a concrete problem experienced by many, he set a solid foundation for his startup.

The true test of his concept came when he leveraged his existing network within the Salesforce ecosystem. By discussing the potential solution with former clients and gauging their interest, Anthony not only reaffirmed the demand but also built initial customer relationships. This method proved powerful when a client's request for a price quote pushed his team towards actual product development—a clear sign that the market saw value in their idea.

Key takeaway: Start by selling your idea before you build it. This strategy not only tests the viability of your concept beyond immediate acquaintances but also engages potential customers early in the process. By involving them in the development journey, you can ensure that your product addresses real needs, enhancing your chances of success. This proactive engagement can be a crucial strategy for marketers looking to validate and adapt their innovations effectively.

How to Keep an Eye on All the Changes in Martech?

Anthony kicks things off with a half joking nod to the Humans of Martech podcast, suggesting that a regular listen might be just what’s needed to keep up with the fast-paced world of marketing technology. His real answer though is: get your hands dirty.

Forget spending your weekends buried in whitepapers or certifications—though they have their place, Anthony argues that nothing beats real-world experience with the tools themselves. He points out that a few minutes spent tinkering with new software can teach you more than hours spent in seminars or reading product marketing materials.

He’s quick to criticize the heavy reliance on analyst reports and industry experts, which he feels can obscure more than they illuminate. Anthony's experiences have shown him that many of these resources are tangled up in marketing strategies or even pay-to-play arrangements, which don’t always give the clearest picture of a tool’s value.

Anthony also believes that companies should carve out a portion of their resources for pure experimentation. He recommends about 10%—not just as a token gesture but as a genuine investment in future capabilities. Sure, some ideas won’t work out, but those that do could be game-changers, providing significant advantages down the road.

Finally, Anthony underlines the importance of community involvement. Whether it’s joining user groups, attending tech meetups, or just going out for dinner with peers, the connections you make and the insights you gain can dramatically steer your career and enhance your understanding of the field.

Key takeaway: Dive into the practical side of martech and engage directly with the community. This hands-on experience and network involvement are invaluable for staying updated and effectively navigating the complexities of the marketing technology galaxy. These efforts will enrich your personal growth and improve your org's innovative capacity.

The Timeless Essentials of Martech Expertise

When diving into what makes someone exceptional in the martech field, Anthony gets right to the point: it’s all about knowing the fundamentals of marketing deeply and personally. While it might seem like a given, Anthony shares from his own experience how crucial this understanding is. Coming from a tech and CRM-heavy background, he admits that fully grasping what marketers need didn’t come immediately. It’s not just about the tools; it’s about knowing the people using them—their ...

What’s up everyone, today we have the pleasure of sitting down with Maja Voje, Founder of Growth Labs and the Author of GTM Strategist.

Summary: This episode with Maja is a playbook for startup marketers, growth advisors, early stage founders and anyone curious about go-to-market strategies. We untangle the most popular questions about growing early stage startups, from picking the right early channels and leveraging qualitative insights, to uncovering the limitations of willingness to pay and locking down the moving target of product market fit. We also cover how to overcome biases, leverage intuition and simplify all things go-to-market.

About Maja

• Maja started her career bouncing from government consulting, journalist intern and Program Manager roles
• She then kickstarted her entrepreneurial journey and launched Growth Lab, an early version of her consultancy where she moonlighted as a consultant
• She worked at Google on Speech Ops, where she led a team of 9 on a globally coordinated technology development project
• She later worked for various startups across London and Brussels; leading marketing, comms and growth strategy 
• She then worked remotely for a web3 blockchain startup based in Hong Kong and took on the role of CMO where she raised over 20M in growth capital and attracted 16,000 early adopters 
• She’s a mentor at the Swiss Entrepreneurship Program
• She’s the author of GTM Strategist, a comprehensive guide on launching a new product and gaining PMF
• Today she’s doubled down on her consultancy Growth Lab where she’s worked with brands like Heineken, Bayer, Miro and ProductLed. She’s also taught Growth principles to more than 50,000 students around the world including employees from Tesla, Apple, Deloitte, Adidas…

Maja, what a wild and amazing journey, thanks so much for your time today.

What CMOs and Growth Advisors of the Future Should be Doing Today

Maja shares straightforward advice for those setting their sights on a Chief Marketing Officer or growth advisor role: stick with it. Jumping from one project to another without fully engaging in the entire lifecycle—from planning to execution to scaling—might seem dynamic, but it lacks the depth that comes from true commitment. She believes that the real insight into marketing leadership springs from not just launching a product but also from nurturing it and watching it grow to a stage where it can be replicated efficiently and effectively.

During the interview, Maja described what she calls a "speed learning period." This intense phase of hard work, though daunting, is invaluable. Here, you're not just working; you're absorbing through active participation. It's a time filled with late nights, teamwork, and, yes, lots of pizza and energy drinks. It's about making the most out of the resources around you—mentors, colleagues, and the safety net of not yet playing with your own money.

Maja also touched on the psychological barriers like imposter syndrome that can stunt growth. Her advice? Push past those doubts. Success breeds confidence, and with each win, the blueprint for repeating those successes becomes clearer and more intuitive. She advocates for a mix-and-match approach to professional roles: try a bit of mentoring here, some part-time consulting there, and see what suits you best.

She’s passionate about remaining relevant and adaptive in the fast-paced marketing world. For Maja, it’s not just about keeping up; it’s about continuously applying what works on a larger scale and helping more people with those proven strategies. This excitement for her work shines through when she talks about scaling what works and bringing more value to more clients.

Key takeaway: To really prepare for a CMO role, immerse yourself completely in projects and embrace the learning that comes with each phase. Avoid hopping too quickly from one opportunity to the next without reaping the full benefits of your experiences. Stay versatile, stay engaged, and remember, adapting proven strategies on a wider scale can amplify your impact and keep your skills sharp in a competitive field.

Recognizing the Value of Simplicity in GTM Strategies

When Maja talks about marketing strategies, she hits home the need for simplicity. It's easy for marketers, especially the seasoned ones, to fall into the trap of making things more complicated than they need to be. Maja explains that the smarter you get, the harder it can be to keep things straightforward. You start seeing more angles, more risks, and more possibilities, and suddenly, you're stuck—nothing moves because you're overthinking every detail. This is what Maja refers to as the "curse of intelligence." You know so much that it actually starts to hold you back.

In her view, one of the biggest hitches in deploying marketing strategies is the sheer overwhelm of options. This often leads to what she describes as "analysis paralysis." You end up doing nothing because you're too caught up in your head, dissecting various possibilities and scenarios. And in a world where speed to market is crucial, being stuck in this loop can be disastrous.

But there's more to it. According to Maja, bigger companies often struggle with decision-making because it feels safer to spread the responsibility around. This might mean bringing in various consultants and team members to weigh in, which can drag out the process even further. It’s like trying to cook a meal with too many chefs in the kitchen—everyone has an opinion, but dinner never gets made.

Maja stresses the importance of creating a culture where it's okay to make mistakes. The best teams, she says, treat failures as stepping stones to better solutions. They use a scientific approach, testing ideas, learning from missteps, and gradually getting wiser. It's about creating a space where people feel secure enough to try new things without fear of retribution if they don’t hit the mark right away.

Key takeaway: Keep your marketing strategies simple. Don’t let knowledge become a barrier to action. Encourage a team environment where trying and failing is just part of the process, because that’s how you find what really works. This not only keeps your team moving forward but also ensures you remain agile and responsive in a competitive marketplace.

GTM for Products that are Good but not Great

Maja delves into the raw experiences of working in startup environments where resources are tight but ambitions run high. She shares that the perfect product is a myth that hinders more than it helps. It's a common trap for many startups—they spend too much time polishing a product instead of getting it into the market to start learning from real customer feedback. Maja emphasizes the importance of launching early and initiating those critical feedback loops that inform successful go-to-market strategies.

In her journey, Maja has seen startups falter not just because their products were imperfect, but often because they weren't communicating effectively with the right market segments. She recounts how targeting can make or break the initial traction of a product. Sometimes, a pivot in the target audience, whether geographic or demographic, can dramatically shift the results. Maja advocates for starting small and embracing activities that might not scale initially but can provide invaluable insights and early adopters.

For example, Maja describes a CRM startup's approach to finding its niche. They simply posted an invite to their beta version in a large Facebook group and quickly gathered their first 100 users. This initial user base helped them understand that their product wasn't suitable for e-commerce but was a hit with solo entre...

What’s up everyone, today we have the pleasure of sitting down with Adam Greco, Field CTO / Product Evangelist at Amplitude.

Summary: Adam is a leading voice in digital analytics and he unpacks event-based analytics and how it’s transformed how marketers interact with data. Data tools are complicating the martech landscape with overlapping functionality and confusing terminology so Adam breaks down the nuanced difference between product analytics, customer data infrastructure and ETL. Adam also walks us through how his team combines marketing, product, and experience analytics getting a fuller view that informs smarter, more effective strategies. We also cover the shift to interactive dashboards as well as warehouse native martech and what it means for marketers. Marketers need to work closely with data teams to ensure these new tools are practical without being overwhelmingly complex, allowing them to lead confidently in their industries.

About Adam

• Adam is one of the leading voices in digital analytics
• He’s managed marketing and customer success teams at enterprise companies and consulting firms
• He’s been Senior Director of Marketing and Analytics at Salesforce 
• He spent nearly a decade as a Senior Partner at one of the best-known analytics consultancies in Analytics Demystified where he’s advised hundreds of organizations on analytics best practices
• He’s been a Board Advisor at various well-known startups, analytics associations, capital funds and universities 
• He’s authored over 300 blogs and one book related to analytics
• He’s a frequent speaker at big-name analytics conferences
• Today he’s Field CTO at Amplitude, where he focuses on providing content, education, and strategic advice on how to build better products

Understanding Event Based Analytics

Adam unpacks the shift towards event-based analytics, a concept that may seem confusing to those accustomed to traditional digital analytics. He explains that back when the internet was simpler and mostly about websites, tracking was straightforward: look at pageviews and sessions and hope for conversions. But as technology evolved—think smartphones and apps—the old methods became less effective.

Mobile apps changed the game. Interactions on these platforms are brief and frequent, shifting the focus from long sessions to brief, meaningful interactions, each marked as an event. Adam points out that his company, Amplitude, was at the forefront of adopting this approach, realizing that tracking every tap and swipe gave a clearer picture of user engagement than the traditional methods.

As both websites and apps became integral to user experience, the analytics field faced a choice: stick with the old or adapt to the new. The answer was overwhelmingly in favor of event-based analytics. Major players like Google and Adobe redefined sessions as just another event, creating a unified model that could track interactions across platforms, be they digital or physical, like visiting a store or calling customer support.

This evolution means marketers can now see a fuller, more dynamic view of how users engage across different platforms. Understanding that a session is a collection of events, rather than a fixed time slot, offers a richer, more nuanced understanding of user behavior.

Key takeaway: Embracing event-based analytics allows marketers to capture the full spectrum of customer interactions, offering a granular view that is vital for crafting targeted, effective marketing strategies. This approach not only keeps pace with the evolving tech landscape but also provides the insights needed to enhance customer engagement and satisfaction.

Product Analytics vs Customer Data Infrastructure vs ETL

Adam explains the evolving landscape of martech tools, focusing on how they intersect and differ, simplifying a topic that can be quite bewildering for even experienced marketers. Initially, the task for marketers was to employ simple tools provided by companies like Google or Adobe, which handled data collection via embedded codes on websites or apps. These tools offered convenience but at the cost of flexibility and depth in data manipulation.

With the advent of more specialized tools, the dynamics changed. Customer Data Infrastructure (CDI) tools like Jitsu, MetaRouter, and Rudderstack focus mainly on collecting first-party data from apps and websites, pushing this information directly into data warehouses. They don’t delve into analytics but excel at gathering clean, structured data.

On the other hand, Extract, Transform, Load (ETL) tools such as Airbyte and Fivetran specialize in integrating data from various third-party tools into a central warehouse. They transform the data during this process to ensure it fits well within the existing structures and schemas of a company’s database, enhancing the data’s utility for comprehensive analysis.

Customer Data Platforms (CDP) like mParticle and Segment represent a more holistic approach, incorporating features of both CDI and ETL. They not only aggregate and organize data but also enrich it, providing a robust platform that supports marketing automation and personalized customer experiences based on the unified data they help curate.

Adam highlights that while CDI, CDP, and ETL tools are vital for data orchestration, they often lack robust analytical capabilities. This is where Product Analytics tools like Amplitude step in. Amplitude starts with some features of CDI but integrates extensive analytics and visualization capabilities, allowing marketers to not only collect and see their data but also to derive meaningful insights and build complex reports directly.

Adam also emphasizes the importance of flexibility in Amplitude’s approach to integrating with the broader martech ecosystem. Despite the overlap with features typically found in CDIs, Amplitude continuously expands its capabilities to better meet the needs of its users. Central to its philosophy is maintaining an open system. Unlike some platforms that might restrict interoperability with competitors' tools, Amplitude encourages its users to integrate as they see fit, whether that means using Amplitude in conjunction with other products or relying on it more heavily for certain functions.

This openness not only provides users with the flexibility to tailor their data strategies precisely but also offers potential cost savings by allowing them to choose the most effective combination of tools for their specific needs. By listening to customer feedback and adapting its offerings, Amplitude aims to provide the most value, ensuring that clients have the best tools at their disposal, no matter the complexity of their data needs.

Key takeaway: Marketers looking to refine their tech stacks should consider how each tool fits into their broader strategy. Integrating platforms like Amplitude that handle multiple functions—from data collection to visualization—can simplify operations and cut costs. This approach not only makes managing marketing technology easier but also ensures that teams can quickly adapt to changes and opportunities in the market, keeping them one step ahead.

Converging marketing, experience and product analytics

When Adam penned his thoughts on the convergence of digital marketing, experience, and product analytics back in 2021, the concept faced skepticism. Fast forward to 2024, and the landscape validates his insights, showing a clear trend toward unified analytics platforms. The separation of marketing, product, and design analytics is becoming obsolete as companies recognize the inefficiencies of siloed data approaches.

In his early career at companies like Salesforce,...

What’s up everyone, today we have the pleasure of sitting down with Mandy Thompson, CEO and Co-Founder of Digital Reach.

Summary: Mandy shares powerful mindsets and practical frameworks for marketers aiming to future-proof their careers in the complex galaxy of martech mixed up with AI, data privacy, and genuine customer engagement. We cover the art of documentation to avoid feeling like you’re in an Indiana Jones adventure sifting through digital cobwebs from ghosts of marketers past when you dive into a company’s martech setup. We also examined the use of intent data, urging a balanced approach that respects privacy. She highlighted her practical use of virtual whiteboarding to pre-plan automations and using ChatGPT for marketing automation use cases. Most importantly, Mandy shared how blending personal authenticity with professional savvy creates genuine connections, far more valuable than superficial likes on social media.

About Mandy

• Mandy started her career plunging into entrepreneurship launching an Advocacy and Consulting firm where she ran Marketing and sales for 3 successful years, growing the team to 25 people and crossing 1M in rev in the first year
• She later sold everything she owned and went out on her own traveling the world as a digital nomad – freelancing as a copywriter and a web developer. She developed and produced an online course that generated 7 figure returns
• She co-founded Digital Reach, a digital agency where she spent 8 years focused on sales and account management, before becoming CEO where she’s spent the last 3.5 years growing the agency 300% YOY
• She’s a member of Pavilion and RevGenius, she’s also a Treasurer Board of Directors at the New Mexico Psychedelic Science Society

Finding Your True Self in the Workspace

Mandy shares a piece of her life with us, a story that's as much about the tattoos on her skin as it is about the unseen marks her experiences have left. It's a peek into the life of someone who's part of the LGBTQIA+ community, a proud woman in a world that still wrestles with equality, and a professional who's dared to blur the lines between her personal and professional selves. Her story isn't just hers alone; it echoes the journeys of many who feel like they're juggling multiple identities, trying to find a spot where they fit in without having to compromise on who they truly are.

She talks about starting with what's comfortable and pushing the boundaries from there. It's like dipping your toes into the ocean to gauge the temperature before plunging in. Mandy found that the more she shared, the more she discovered people who were like her or, at the very least, people who were open to embracing her totality without judgment. Her tale is a reminder that often, our fears of rejection are far greater than the reality of it.

The pandemic, for all its chaos, played a surprising role in Mandy's life. It pushed the professional world into a more authentic space, where business suits met bedroom backgrounds in Zoom calls. For Mandy, it was a time when the digital nomad lifestyle she had always embraced suddenly became the norm. The shift wasn't just about work cultures becoming more accepting of remote work; it was about the world getting a glimpse into the personal lives of its workforce, making everyone a bit more human.

Mandy's discussion about the intersecting circles of our personal and professional lives—how we must find that sweet spot where we can be true to ourselves while still rocking our roles at work—is insightful. She doesn't shy away from dressing up for an important client meeting, not as a betrayal to her identity, but as a nod to the professional context. It's about knowing when and how to showcase different facets of ourselves, a dance between being authentically us and professionally adaptable.

Key takeaway: Embracing your full self at work is less about a grand revelation and more about small, confident steps towards being true to who you are. For marketers, this means understanding that your personal story and how you choose to share it can become your strength, allowing you to connect on a more genuine level with your audience, colleagues, and industry at large. It's about finding your voice in a way that resonates with both who you are and who you aspire to be professionally.

Genuine Connections Over Likes on Social

Mandy's got a point that'll make you rethink your whole LinkedIn strategy. It's easy to fall into the trap of thinking you need to blend in to get ahead. You know the feeling, scrolling through your feed and it's like everyone's marching to the beat of the same drum. But Mandy's here to tell us that's not where it's at. The real magic happens when you break from the pack and share what makes you, well, you. It's not about racking up likes or followers. It's about striking a chord with the people who get you.

She's pretty clear on one thing: chasing popularity isn't the goal. Imagine reaching your career milestones, not because you played it safe, but because you were real with your network. Think about it. Do you really need thousands of likes to say you've made it? Nah. If your post lights up the day for just a handful of people, those are your people. They're the ones who dig what you're saying and that's worth its weight in gold.

Let's be real, though. It can sting a bit when you see others with their crazy-high follower counts and endless stream of comments. Mandy feels that too. Putting yourself out there and then hearing crickets? Tough. But she's adamant that finding your voice and your tribe beats playing it safe any day. It's not about shouting into the void but whispering to those who are actually listening.

Mandy reminds us that the digital world is vast, but the corners where we find our kindred spirits are precious. It's less about impressing the crowd and more about connecting with the few who truly appreciate your uniqueness.

Key takeaway: Don't lose yourself in the quest for likes and approval on LinkedIn. Authenticity is your superpower. For marketers, remember, it's the genuine connections that count, not the size of your audience. Focus on those who resonate with your true self, and you'll find not only your tribe but also your path to true professional fulfillment.

Treat Your Marketing Team like Your Agency Within the Company

Mandy has this straightforward way of talking about managing marketing teams that feels like a breath of fresh air. She takes us behind the scenes of running an agency, where it’s all about juggling different accounts and making sure everyone’s rowing in the same direction. It’s this dance of making sure what you promise on one hand, you can actually deliver on the other. And it all boils down to something she calls mutual accountability - a two-way street where the team and leaders keep each other in check.

The trick is to always have a clear picture of what’s doable. Mandy points out how essential it is to match up the team's workload with what clients are asking for. It's pretty much like saying, "Let's not bite off more than we can chew." If someone’s schedule is already packed, promising a client that their request can be done next week isn't just unrealistic; it's unfair to the team. It's about finding that sweet spot where the team's capacity meets client expectations without anyone having to burn the midnight oil unnecessarily.

Mandy's a big fan of using smart tools to keep everything on track. She talks about something called teamwork, but it’s clear the real teamwork happens when these tools give everyone a clear view of the workload, deadlines, and what's at stake financially. It's not just about checking tasks off a list; it's about making informed decis...

What’s up everyone, today we have the pleasure of sitting down with Dr. Julz James, Senior Marketing Ops Manager at 6sense and Adjunct Professor at St. Edwards University.

Summary: Jul is a marketing ops leader and a martech Professor who's rewriting the rulebook on how to navigate the martech galaxy. She walks us through automation inception, like a dream within a dream, and how she’s leveraged an iPaaS tool to automate her automations. She also unravels intent data and how her team has moved beyond lead scoring to adopt account scoring. Sprinkle in her freelance learnings, and you've got a recipe for someone who's not just working in marketing ops but thriving, bringing fresh insights and strategies to the classroom. This episode is a nice reminder that with a bit of curiosity, a dash of adaptability, and a love for teaching, the galaxy of martech tools isn't just approachable—it's yours to automate.

About Julz

• Julz got her start wearing multiple marketing hats including website management and SEO for variety of SMBs and later a big recruiting firm 
• Julz then decided to go back to school to pursue a PhD at the University of South Wales, undertaking work-based doctoral research while working with an growing ecomm company
• She later worked as a Marketing Automation Manager at a few different tech companies including Mitel and a talent software startup
• Julz then decided to move from the UK to Austin Texas to take an Assistant Professor of Marketing gig at St. Edwards University and is currently still a Part-time Adjunct Professor
• She also started freelancing in marketing operations and would later join Blue Prism as their srn Marketing Ops Manager
• Finally she had a short stint at Adobe before settling in at 6sense where she’s currently leading Marketing Operations

A New Approach to Educating the Modern Marketer

Imagine walking into a marketing class and instead of cracking open a dusty textbook that smells like the '80s, you're handed a sandbox loaded with today's leading marketing software. This isn't a scene from a futuristic movie; it's what Julz is bringing to the table in her marketing courses. Gone are the days of learning marketing theories that feel like a DVD. Julz has swapped them for lessons on the tools that marketers actually use in their jobs today.

Julz loves teaching not for the sake of it but for the lightbulb moments she sees in her students when they connect the dots between class material and their day jobs in marketing. She draws from her own reservoir of experiences, sharing how she navigates the marketing world with tools like Marketo and Salesforce, making her classes a treasure trove of real-life wisdom.

Her approach is refreshingly practical. Remember learning about the four P's and Porter’s Five Forces? Julz believes those concepts are as relevant to today's marketing as a pager is to personal communication. Instead, she's all about diving into the digital tools that shape modern marketing strategies, shifting the focus from memorizing models to mastering martech.

Creating course content is no walk in the park, especially when the galaxy of martech tools changes faster than you can hit refresh. But Julz is on top of it, crafting her materials from a blend of up-to-the-minute blogs, community discussions, and the latest ebooks. It’s about making sure her students aren't just keeping pace but are ahead of the curve, ready to apply what they've learned in real-time scenarios.

Key takeaway: If you're in marketing and looking to make your mark, take a page out of Julz's playbook. Forget the dry theories that gather dust on a shelf. It's all about rolling up your sleeves and getting your hands dirty with the tech that's shaping our world right now. Being quick on your feet, always hungry to learn something new, and getting cozy with the latest martech? That's the secret sauce for not just making it but also having fun.

Unlocking the Secrets of Martech Without Coding Skills

Ever think you need to be a coding guru to rock at marketing tech? Julz has some news for you: that's not the case. Picture this: you're more like a tech-savvy wizard, weaving different digital tools together, making them do exactly what marketing needs them to do. And guess what? You don't need to write lines of code to pull it off.

Julz puts it simply – her gig in marketing operations is kind of like being an IT whiz but all jazzed up for marketing. You get systems to play nice with each other, not by coding from scratch but by knowing just enough to make smart tweaks here and there. It's like knowing how to change a tire without being a mechanic. Sure, dipping your toes into HTML or JavaScript is helpful, especially when you need to adjust something small on a website or in an email. But the real game? It’s all about seeing the big picture, understanding how different platforms and tools fit into the marketing puzzle.

Drawing from her own adventures, Julz shares how her journey through engineering and tinkering with gadgets wasn’t about the math or the mechanics but about solving puzzles and being curious. Whether it’s figuring out why a campaign isn’t performing or integrating a new tool into the tech stack, it’s this curiosity and problem-solving drive that counts.

Here’s the kicker: the world of marketing tech is becoming more user-friendly by the day. Tools that used to require a developer to set up can now be managed with a few clicks and drags. This shift doesn’t mean technical skills aren’t valuable; it just means the focus is shifting towards strategy and understanding how to connect the dots between different technologies to create a seamless marketing engine.

Key takeaway: Jumping into marketing tech doesn’t mean you need to bury yourself in code. It’s all about understanding the flow between different tools and technologies and using that knowledge to craft marketing strategies that hit the mark. So, if you're curious, ready to tackle problems, and can think on your feet, you’re already well on your way to making a big splash in martech, no coding required.

Why Qualified Accounts Beat MQLs in Modern Marketing

When Julz landed at 6sense, she walked into a whole new playbook for marketing ops. Gone were the days of obsessing over who's scoring what in leads. Here, it was all about tuning into accounts showing us buying signals, loud and clear. It took her a hot minute — okay, six months — to really get why they weren't sweating over lead scores. Ditching lead scoring felt like saying goodbye to an old friend, but it opened her eyes to a smarter way to connect with potential buyers.

Think of it this way: It's not about waiting for someone to wave a flag saying, "Hey, I downloaded your ebook!" It's about catching those signals that someone's already scoping you out, ready to chat about what you do. They call these signals from their AI buddy at 6sense, the 6QAs. It's like having a secret decoder ring that shows them who's already thinking about buying without them having to say a word.

But here’s the wild part: Once you spot these ready-to-buy accounts, how do you know who to talk to? That's where things get really interesting. They dove into their win stories and figured out who's usually in on the buying decision. Not by names, but by their roles. Are they in ops? Sales? Marketing? This wasn’t just a wild guess; it’s about knowing the committee that’s going to nod yes or no to what you offer.

Their sales conversations shifted dramatically. Instead of chasing down every single lead, they started having real talks with the right folks in these companies, all thanks to a mix of their own tools and a hefty dose of strategy. They’re not just throwing darts...

What’s up everyone, today we have the pleasure of sitting down with Kevin Hu (Hoo), Co-founder and CEO at Metaplane. 

Summary: Dr. Kevin Hu gives us a masterclass on everything data. Data analysis, data storytelling, data quality, data observability and data anomaly detection. We unpack the power of inquisitive data analysis and a hypothesis-driven approach, emphasizing the importance of balancing data perfection with actually doing the work of activating that data. He highlights data observability and anomaly detection as a key to preempting errors, ensuring data integrity for a seamless user experience. Amid the rise of AI in martech, he champions marketing ops' role in safeguarding data quality, making clear that success hinges on our ability to manage data with precision, creativity, and proactive vigilance. 

About Kevin

• Kevin did his undergrad in Physics at MIT
• He later collaborated with his biologist sister, assisting in analyzing five years of fish behavior data. This experience inspired him to further his research and earn a master's degree in Data Visualization and Machine Learning
• He also completed a PhD in Philosophy at MIT where he led research on automated data visualization and semantic type detection 
• His research was published at several conferences like CHI (pronounced Kai) (human-computer interaction), SIGMOD (database) and KDD (data mining) and featured in the Economist, NYT and Wired
• In 2019, Kevin teamed up with former Hubspot and Appcues engineers to launch Metaplane, initially set out to be a product focused on customer success, designed to analyze company data for churn prevention
• But after going through Y Combinator, the company pivoted slightly to build data analytics-focused tools
• Today Metaplane is a data observability platform powered by ML-based anomaly detection that helps teams prevent and detect data issues — before the CEO pings them about weird revenue numbers.

How to Ask the Right Questions in Data Analysis

When Kevin shared the profound impact César Hidalgo, his mentor at MIT, had on his journey into the data world, it wasn't just about learning to analyze data; it was about asking the right questions. César put together one of our favorite TED talks ever – Why we should automate politicians with AI agents – this was back in 2018, long before ChatGPT was popular. 

Hidalgo, recognized not only for AI and ML applications but also developing innovative methods to visualize complex data and making it understandable to a broader audience, was the most important teacher in Kevin’s life. He helped Kevin understand that the bottleneck in data analysis wasn't necessarily a lack of coding skills but a gap in understanding what to ask of the data. This revelation came at a pivotal moment as Kevin navigated his path through grad school, influenced by his sister's work in animal behavior and his own struggles with coding tools like R and MATLAB.

Under Hidalgo's guidance, Kevin was introduced to a broader perspective on data analysis. This wasn't just about running numbers through a program; it was about diffusing those numbers with context and meaning. Hidalgo's approach to mentorship, characterized by personalized attention and encouragement to delve into complex ideas, like those presented in Steven Pinker's "The Blank Slate," opened up a new world of inquiry for Kevin. It was a world where the questions one asked were as critical as the data one analyzed.

This mentorship experience highlights the importance of curiosity and critical thinking in the field of data science. Kevin's reflection on his journey reveals a key insight: mastering coding languages is only one piece of the puzzle. The ability to question, to seek out the stories data tells, and to understand the broader implications of those stories is equally, if not more, important.

Kevin's gratitude towards Hidalgo for his investment in students' growth serves as a reminder of the value of mentorship. It’s a testament to the idea that the best mentors don't just teach you how to execute tasks; they inspire you to see beyond the immediate horizon. They challenge you to think deeply about your work and its impact on the world.

Key takeaway: For marketers delving into data-informed strategies, Kevin's story is a powerful reminder that beyond the technical skills, the ability to ask compelling, insightful questions of your data can dramatically amplify its value. Focus on nurturing a deep, inquisitive approach to understanding consumer behavior and market trends.

Bridging Academic Rigor with Startup Agility

During his career in academia working alongside Olympian-caliber scientists and researchers, Kevin garnered insights that have since influenced his approach to running a startup. The parallels between academia and startups are striking, with both realms embodying a journey of perseverance and unpredictability. This analogy provides a foundational mindset for entrepreneurs who must navigate the uncertain waters of business development with resilience and adaptability.

At the heart of Kevin's philosophy is the adoption of a hypothesis-driven approach. This methodology, borrowed from academic research, emphasizes the importance of formulating hypotheses for various aspects of business operations, particularly in marketing strategies. Identifying the ideal customer profile (ICP), crafting compelling messaging, and selecting the optimal channels are seen not as static decisions but as theories to be rigorously tested and iterated upon. This empirical approach allows for a methodical exploration of what resonates best with the target audience, acknowledging that today's successful strategy may need reevaluation tomorrow.

Another vital lesson from academia that Kevin emphasizes is the respect for past endeavors. In a startup ecosystem often obsessed with innovation, there's a tendency to overlook the lessons learned from previous attempts in similar ventures. By acknowledging and building upon the efforts of predecessors, Kevin advocates for a more informed and grounded approach to innovation. This perspective encourages entrepreneurs to consider the historical context of their ideas and strategies, potentially saving time and resources by learning from past mistakes rather than repeating them.

Key takeaway: Embracing a hypothesis-driven mindset should be familiar grounds for marketers. Challenge your team to identify and test hypotheses around underexplored or seemingly less significant customer segments. This could involve hypothesizing the effectiveness of personalized content for a niche within your broader audience that has been overlooked, measuring engagement against broader campaigns.

Balancing Data Accuracy with Rapid Growth

For startups grappling with survival, the luxury of perfect data is often out of reach. Kevin points out that data quality should be tailored to the specific needs of the business. For instance, data utilized for quarterly board meetings does not necessitate the same level of freshness as data driving daily customer interactions. This pragmatic approach underscores the importance of defining data quality standards based on the frequency and criticality of business decisions.

At the heart of Kevin's argument is the concept that as businesses scale, the stakes of data accuracy and timeliness escalate. He highlights scenarios where real-time data becomes crucial, such as B2B SaaS companies engaging with potential leads or e-commerce platforms optimizing their customer journey. In these cases, even slight inaccuracies or delays can result in missed revenue opportunities or diminished customer trust.

This discourse on data quality transcends the binary choice between perfect data and rapid action. Instead, Kevin advoc...

What’s up everyone, today we have the pleasure of sitting down with Simon Heaton, Director of Growth Marketing at Buffer.

Summary: Simon helps us explore Buffer's martech journey, highlighting their shift from traditional tools to a product-led approach driven by data and server-side analytics. We unpack their use of Customer.io for automation and hold out testing, Redash for data insights, and their agile sprint model that fosters continuous innovation. Discover how Buffer's small team thrives with efficient, data-driven strategies.

About Simon

• Simon started his career in the agency world at Banfield in Ottawa, Canada
• He later moved over to Shopify where he would spend nearly 7 years, first as a content Marketing Manager and later as the Senior Growth Lead, Acquisition
• Simon’s also worn a part-time teaching hat for over 5 years, he was an Instructor with Telfer School of Management at UofO as well as a Professor at Algonquin College
• He’s a startup mentor for founders that are part of the Singapore-based equity fund at Antler
• Today Simon is Director of Growth Marketing at Buffer, the world-renowned social media management platform

Buffer’s Marketing Tech Stack and Why it Doesn’t Include a CRM

Buffer’s marketing strategy is unique. They don’t use a traditional CRM like HubSpot or Salesforce. Simon explains that Buffer is a product-led company without a dedicated sales team. This means they don't need typical CRM functionalities like lead routing and scoring. Instead, Buffer relies heavily on data and product analytics to drive their marketing efforts.

The core of Buffer’s operations is their data warehouse, with Segment acting as their Customer Data Platform (CDP). This setup allows Buffer to integrate various tools and centralize crucial information. Mixpanel, their product analytics tool, is pivotal in this system. It gathers both product usage and marketing data, providing a comprehensive view of user interactions.

Simon highlights the importance of server-side tracking and integrating data from diverse sources such as AdWords, Customer.io, and Pendo. This integration helps Buffer understand the user lifecycle and measure the impact of marketing efforts beyond basic website metrics.

Tools like Customer.io are also essential for Buffer. It manages most user communications, making it a critical component of their stack. The combination of Mixpanel, Customer.io, and other integrated tools ensures that Buffer can seamlessly track and analyze user behavior.

Key takeaway: Not all B2B companies need a CRM or a sales team. A product-led approach, using robust data and product analytics tools, can effectively drive your marketing efforts and provide comprehensive insights into user behavior.

The Power of a Visual and Intuitive Automation Flow Interface

Simon loves working in a smaller team like Buffer, where he can get hands-on with their tools daily. He highlights how Buffer uses Customer.io for their marketing automation, a tool he's familiar with from his previous experience at Shopify. Unlike Shopify, which eventually switched to Salesforce Marketing Cloud for more enterprise-level needs, Buffer continues to thrive with Customer.io.

Buffer relies on Customer.io to manage email marketing, push notifications for mobile apps, and various communication programs. Simon appreciates how the tool handles both marketing and transactional communications, offering a unified view of user interactions. This integration ensures consistency in messages, whether they're marketing emails or product notifications.

Simon praises Customer.io's user-friendly interface, especially the journey mapping functionality and the WYSIWYG editor, which make it accessible for non-technical team members. Despite its ease of use, the platform also boasts deep technical capabilities, allowing for extensive customization through HTML and API integrations. This flexibility has been crucial for Buffer's needs.

The integration with Segment, Buffer's Customer Data Platform (CDP), is particularly valuable. Simon emphasizes that having all data in Segment and seamlessly integrating it with Customer.io enables precise data handling. This setup ensures accurate and timely data flow, essential for personalized and effective marketing automation workflows.

Key takeaway: Even as a small team, you can effectively manage complex marketing automation needs by choosing user-friendly tools like Customer.io that offer both simplicity and deep customization. This approach allows your non-technical team members to contribute meaningfully while ensuring your technical needs are met, enhancing overall efficiency and personalization in your communications.

Experimentation and Holdout Testing at Buffer

Experimentation is a cornerstone of Buffer’s approach, and Simon is particularly enthusiastic about the capabilities provided by Customer.io. He explains that the platform's holdout testing functionality is essential for validating new programs and comparing campaign performance. Unlike some tools, Customer.io counts a delivery for the holdout group, simplifying the tracking process over time.

The integration with Segment and Mixpanel is a game-changer for Buffer. This setup allows them to surface Customer.io data in Mixpanel, creating unique reports and dashboards to support their experiments. Tracking differences in behavior between groups becomes straightforward, thanks to the detailed delivery events logged for both test and holdout groups. This level of detail ensures that Buffer can effectively measure the impact of their campaigns.

Simon also highlights the ease of A/B testing within Customer.io. Whether at the message level or within workflows, the platform’s randomization logic allows for extensive testing. Buffer can run tests on content, sequencing, and other variables, ensuring they continually optimize their marketing efforts. The ability to branch workflows and test different variants simultaneously is particularly valuable, enabling ongoing experimentation.

Key takeaway: Leverage holdout testing and detailed event tracking within your marketing automation tools to gain deeper insights into your campaign effectiveness. This approach allows you to validate new programs, compare performance, and optimize your strategies based on precise, data-driven insights.

Testing Journeys and Templating Language with QA Draft Mode

Simon praises Customer.io's QA draft mode, a feature he finds invaluable for Buffer’s marketing automation. This functionality allows the team to build complex workflows, trigger off specific data points, and test the entire process in a production environment without actually sending emails. It’s a unique capability that Simon has not found in other tools, making it a standout feature of Customer.io.

Simon highlights how QA draft mode lets them see real users qualifying for different branches of the workflow while emails remain in draft. This means they can verify that users are correctly segmented and the emails look as intended, all without prematurely sending any messages. This testing phase is crucial for catching errors that might not be evident during initial previews.

Buffer has used this feature for several initiatives, such as new onboarding iterations and product notifications. Given the high frequency and volume of these emails, ensuring everything works perfectly before going live is essential. Simon appreciates that once the testing phase is complete, it only takes a click to start sending the validated emails to users.

This capability saves time and reduces the risk of errors in live campaigns. It allows Buffer to maintain high st...

What’s up everyone, today we have the pleasure of sitting down with Amrita Mathur, VP of Marketing at ClickUp.

Summary: Building a brand from zero is all about diving deep into what makes your audience tick and tailoring your messages to hit just right. Amrita digs into this, stressing the gold in blending hard data with your gut in order to spot what truly connects. It’s not about the immediate wins; it’s hunting for those less obvious cues that hint you’re on to something. When it comes to team-building, she’s clear: bring on board folks who are curious, the ones who ask all of the questions and are unafraid of constructive criticism. For Amrita, the secret sauce to thriving in marketing, beyond all the strategy and insights, boils down to enjoying the ride and the people you’re with, transforming work from a mere grind to an adventure worth every second.

About Amrita

• Amrita kicked off her career at a startup in Toronto that was later acquired by OpenText, there she wore many different marketing hats, and later progressed to Redknee as Product Marketing Manager
• She briefly shifted to customer success at Jonas Software, concentrating on customer growth and retention and later returned to product marketing at Toronto Region Board of Trade
• She then became Director of Marketing at PriceMetrix/McKinsey, where she led marketing planning and team hiring
• She also led Demand Marketing at Vision Critical where she focused on go-to-market strategies, demand generation, and martech
• Amrita then moved over to Top Hat as Vice President overseeing Demand Generation, Marketing Operations & Growth
• Shen then joined a startup called Konsus founded by two Norwegian entrepreneurs who secured seed funding from Sam Altman and the Slack Fund. There she led the rebrand of the company to Superside and built a team that helped the startup grow from 0 to $4M in year 1 and reach $60M by year 4
• Finally, Amrita has recently joined San Diego-based ClickUp, the popular productivity platform valued at over $4B, known best for their SuperBowl ad or their music album

The Myth of the Ivory Tower in Tech Leadership
Amrita’s journey at ClickUp shatters the common myth of the ‘ivory tower’ often associated with leadership roles in substantial tech enterprises. Despite the company’s impressive valuation and extensive team, she emphasizes a hands-on approach that defies traditional expectations. At ClickUp, there’s no detachment between the upper management and the operational workforce; instead, the organization champions a flat hierarchy. This structure not only promotes visibility across all levels but also encourages direct involvement in operational tasks, regardless of one’s title.

The ethos at ClickUp, as Amrita describes, mirrors what’s often referred to as the ‘Stripe model’—a reference to Stripe’s renowned flat organizational structure. This approach ensures that despite rapid growth, the company maintains an environment where every individual, from interns to VPs, is expected to dive deep into the minutiae of their work. It’s a testament to the belief that understanding and engaging with the details are paramount to effectiveness. ClickUp’s CEO reinforces this by advocating for a culture where being ‘in the details’ is not just encouraged but required.

This philosophy stands in stark contrast to what Amrita experienced towards the end of her tenure at Superside, where she could afford to step back, confident in her team’s ability to manage without her direct oversight. At ClickUp, the scenario is vastly different. The expectation to remain operationally involved means leadership roles are as much about rolling up your sleeves and getting your hands dirty as they are about strategic oversight.

The ClickUp model demonstrates a pivotal shift in how companies view leadership and organizational structure. It challenges the notion that senior positions are synonymous with distance from the day-to-day operations, highlighting the importance of a collaborative and transparent work environment. This approach not only ensures that leaders remain grounded and connected to their team’s work but also fosters a culture of accountability and shared responsibility.

Key takeaway: At ClickUp, success is found not in the isolation of leadership roles but in their integration within the operational fabric of the company. This model serves as a compelling blueprint for marketers: to stay relevant and effective, immerse yourself in the granular aspects of your work, foster transparency, and maintain a willingness to engage across all levels of the organization.

Choosing Between Testing and Informed Decision-Making
Amrita sheds light on a prevalent misconception in the marketing world: the notion that every decision should be subjected to testing. This idea, while rooted in the desire to make data-driven decisions, often becomes a stumbling block, delaying action and fostering indecision. With ClickUp’s significant web traffic and signup volumes, one might assume an endless capacity for testing. However, Amrita points out that this isn’t always the most effective approach. Traffic isn’t uniformly distributed across all initiatives, necessitating a more discerning strategy for deciding what to test and what decisions can be made based on informed hypotheses.

For instance, the launch of ClickUp’s AI product, Click AppBrain, presented a scenario with zero initial traffic, making traditional A/B testing impractical at the outset. Instead, ClickUp opted for a bold approach, deviating from conventional landing page norms to create something distinctive and engaging. This strategy, as Amrita describes, is about ‘zagging’ when others ‘zig’, striving for uniqueness in a crowded marketplace. The success of their unconventional approach is evident in the substantial interest generated for their launch event, demonstrating that not all marketing initiatives need to be prefaced by rigorous testing.

Amrita’s philosophy extends to broader marketing decisions, where not everything falls neatly into the ‘testing’ bucket. Certain endeavors, like sponsoring a podcast, defy straightforward measurement. The decision to proceed often hinges on understanding the audience and trusting the medium’s reach rather than on direct testing outcomes. This highlights the importance of leveraging different marketing disciplines to create compelling campaigns that might not initially lend themselves to A/B testing but are nevertheless rooted in strategic thinking.

The approach to testing at ClickUp underlines a crucial balance between data-driven decision-making and intuitive marketing strategies. While A/B testing remains a valuable tool for optimizing conversions and understanding user behavior, Amrita’s insights remind us that marketing’s artistry lies in knowing when to rely on data and when to trust in creativity and market understanding.

Key takeaway: Marketers should focus on cultivating an ability to discern which initiatives require validation through testing and which can advance based on informed hypotheses and innovative thinking. This approach not only streamlines decision-making but also encourages creativity and differentiation in a competitive landscape.

Optimizing for Velocity of Learning in Early-Stage Marketing
In the formative stages of Superside, Amrita encountered the challenge many startups face: limited traffic and the pressure to demonstrate growth through experimentation. Instead of focusing solely on the quantity of tests, the emphasis was placed on the ‘velocity of learning,’ a concept introduced by her CEO. This shift in perspective, from quantitative to qualitative insights, paved the way for a more flexible and insightful approach to growth.