WEBVTT
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Hey everybody.
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I am not Michael Hartmann, but I am one of the co-hosts of the show.
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And today we are joined with Naomi, our other co-host Naomi say hello,
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Hello?
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Hi, not Michael Hartmann
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I, yeah, I not Michael Hartmann I get to be the host today because Mr.
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Hartmann is busy with probably some marketing operations work as we all are.
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But thank you for joining us on this episode.
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Our guest today is Evan Dunn.
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Evan is currently the director of growth marketing at Syncari.
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Prior to joining Syncari earlier this year, he's held several roles in marketing, including other leadership roles in growth, marketing, digital and social media.
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In addition, he has experience in customer success.
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in addition, he has experience in customer success as well as being VP of product at resonance AI.
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Evan, thank you for joining us today.
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Thanks for having me.
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Mike Naomi
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cool.
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I know you and Hartmann had a chance to sync up before no pun intended on the Syncari bit but.
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you pronounced it correctly.
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I did get it right.
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Which I think that's just due to all the conversations I've been having with you and the team lately.
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But before we go too far, I know the overall theme is, why aren't we talking more about project management in marketing operations.
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And so I'm excited of dive into that.
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But you're the second person that has a background in linguistics, and apparently you do some performance poetry.
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So could you maybe tell our listeners about how you went from linguistics to marketing and product development?
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Yeah, the linguistics track is unsurprisingly.
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One of millennial necessity.
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We'll say, had to get a different job, non linguistics that made money and ended up bouncing around a bit and freelancing for do you remember when people used to pay.
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To have their own blogs produced.
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Yeah.
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back in the day I did Twitter marketing and WordPress and some email stuff that was half of a full-time job.
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And from there I went to the agency side and then that resonance AI, startup analytics company, really fun.
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And the other performance poetry thing happens occasionally, not on podcasts.
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Not on podcast, so we won't get any poetry out of you today.
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Maybe, but probably not
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all right.
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So merging the worlds of linguistics, performance, poetry, and the social medias, bro.
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social media is, yeah
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what is your feeling on bro?
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bro.
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I only noted as a slur.
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I don't
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You're like, it's a really good growth tactic.
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It's the only way to hack the algorithm of LinkedIn.
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I have attempted two poems for work to be shared as work products.
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It is not easy to poetry fi professional things.
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Yeah, I doubt it.
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Couple weeks ago, I was in LA and my friend got me tickets to something called freestyle love Supreme.
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I don't know if you've heard of it, but it was, I think the backstory is it's Lynn.
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Manuel's like old college Trop where they do improv singing, wrapping, hip hop, and they take feedback from the audience.
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And everything is live it's all on demand.
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Like it's absolutely amazing.
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So I can just, it gives me a greater appreciation as to how difficult it is to rhyme completely unrelated words and phrases together.
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I feel like it's that something you probably
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Yeah, I like doing it.
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too.
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I think on
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Oh, yeah, I will check that out.
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I I, it sounds familiar.
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I definitely can't freestyle.
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That is a whole separate category of skill.
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I like being alone in a forest when I'm composing.
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It's a bit different, there is weird synergy to use a terrible word between linguistics and poetry and marketing, you're thinking all the time about what people are going to react and in linguistics, there's some really wonderful nerdy names for the things we think about all the time in market.
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There's pragmatics and semantics.
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Pragmatics is semantics people know, right?
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It's your brain producing, meaning pragmatics.
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It's how the meaning is perceived.
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So what happens in the other person's brain?
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And they're two completely different disciplines because they're two completely different activities.
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Yeah, so there's a lot of things to pull from, when you think about audiences and how they hear what you say.
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As we all know, it's so hard not to get caught up in excitement about your product and your ideas.
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That is a market that you get lost.
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Speaking to your audience.
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Yeah, I find that really hard.
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In every role I've ever held around the marketing and growth side of things getting outside of talking, cuz you're just inside the organization, you're constantly inundated with, what does the product do?
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What does it capable of?
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And pulling back and going, okay what does the audience actually want to hear?
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They don't want to hear just about us all the time.
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Like, how do you speak to them in a way that, resonates, which, speaking of products.
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Okay.
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Sounds this topic that we're talking about today.
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So project management the importance of that in the marketing and revenue operations sector there are.
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This topic comes up frequently in the community.
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Not just the tools that are used, but also a little bit about the methodology.
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I have pretty strong opinions about whether or not Agile's really a framework that, that whether you're marketing or marketing broadly is actually a thing that you should be doing.
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But it sounded like from your experience in leading product development, That sort of helped shape your opinions on the value of project management.
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And now it seems like you're taking some of that experience to apply that to your marketing function and growth.
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And I don't know about marketing ops.
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I know that the team ATSY got, different tool sets available to them, but wondering, just Hey, how has that experience shaped your view of the importance of project management as it relates to the role that you're doing?
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Yeah I don't know about you guys, but I I am not natively organized.
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I had never used a calendar tool when I graduated college.
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Like not even a planner, never recorded appointments that started becoming problematic pretty quickly.
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And I never wrote down to-do list and I have a terrible memory.
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And
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How did you ever get anywhere?
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it's like
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Yeah I cannot relate to that at all.
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I'm sorry.
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Yeah, I hope there's sarcasm there.
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For my sake, it was so bad that it was actually a problem at the first job I had outta school.
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And since then have basically become a huge fan of like bullet journaling and these sort of like disciplined approaches to.
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Managing your priorities and your schedule.
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25 minute focus chunks.
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The brain can only focus for 42 minutes.
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Those kind of things.
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I pepper throughout my productivity.
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Obviously with little children, they break your frameworks all the time, but yeah.
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To your question, exactly there was a specific.
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Event recurring event that we started creating at residence AI that took us from literally from P and E product engineering, not knowing what next week held to actually getting several weeks out, months out, visibility roadmap.
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And that was that every Thursday afternoon, we had a meeting at three, I think.
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And if requests for demos and new product features and sort of things weren't in by that time, they did not happen the next week.
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And this taught me so many things.
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This taught me the power of forcing functions, of setting boundaries and saying, look, you can't.
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Ask us to build a landing page.
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In two days in marketing writer, you can't turn around and say, Hey, we got a big customer coming.
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Can you do a demo with them within two days, this kind of thing?
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It created rhythms, it created breathing room and it created at first, we knew what we were doing next week and then it just rolled forward, where then people knew imagine if marketers knew what they were doing a month from now, we laugh because it's hard and.
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Marketing ops and marketing together.
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We could talk about that for a minute, but I have a lot of ideas about how the two seem more disjointed than they need to be.
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There's ultimately marketing ops is a strategic contributor, and knows what works.
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They see the data more than anyone else they're looking at it all the time.
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So they should be feeding the marketing executioners, if you will, with the the rhythms and the Intel to.
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To to drive that strategy forward in a way that isn't heter Skelter.
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And you brought up agile.
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I think there's a point where for a lot of people trying to deploy these framers, they are making efforts, they've got click up or air table or right.
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Or, these different tools.
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But, and they're trying to do short standups, but what's happening is they're still pivoting daily.
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They're still changing what they're working on daily.
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They're just documenting it a little bit better and having meetings about it a little bit.
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So yeah, lots there.
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Yeah.
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I felt that through the majority of my career but I think that stems from the work environments or just like the stage, rather the stage of the organizations that I've worked for.
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I don't have, I'm glad Naomi's on this episode with us.
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Because there's a, she's been in her role for quite some time and built a lot of rigor just from past episodes and having many conversations with her.
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And so I'm curious to hear sort of your feelings on project management and how it's related to the way that you run your org, Naomi.
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But I definitely resonate with.
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The who's got the loudest voice in the room or the next shiny object that we could look at or do, or the, the idea that's oh, that's a good one.
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Let's go do that right now.
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Whether that's here in the community, we sometimes we do that.
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Or in the organizations that I advise, I experience that on a regular basis.
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Most of those are pretty early stage.
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And I think that, as I said at the start of this That is indicative of the stage of the organization, oftentimes as well, just cuz you're, I don't know, there's a whole bunch of different ways to turn a phrase on that one, but everybody's just like trying to look under every single rock every day, trying to figure out what's the next thing that's gonna move the needle.
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And sometimes you're go to market messaging and motion isn't refined enough.
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And so you're just like, I don't know someone make a decision please, but anyway, Naomi I'd love to hear your thoughts on.
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Larger org marketing, project management.
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How that actually pans out
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Yeah.
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I, it definitely, wasn't something that just came about overnight.
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It's definitely something that is multifaceted, it's evolved over time.
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And it's changed as well, even though, maybe the people have not changed, the business changes process changes COVID happened, there's always things that.
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Will change how people are working together and just trying to make things more efficient.
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For us it's a matter of not just like project intake and just, keeping the bandwidths on the team balance, but it's also.
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Communicating out to our business partners that, this is the bandwidth of the team at any given point in time so that they can see and give us heads up that, Hey, if we have, major integration projects or if we want to onboard a new vendor, or we want to do some kind of mass migration that they know what our bandwidth is, that they're not, stacking things on top of us, that we can then.
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Either not handle and have to go back and say, Hey, you really should have given us this as a heads up earlier so that we could handle this and give you appropriate timelines.
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For us, a lot of it is just this constant feedback.
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And also enforcing SLAs.
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I think that's something that a lot of people don't necessarily talk about.
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They talk about.
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How am I tracking the work?
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How am I, accepting how, what does the intake look like?
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But they're not necessarily talking about, what are the SLAs for what is an acceptable amount of time to turn, an email campaign around an email campaign with.
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10 languages, an email campaign that has, multiple follow up steps or landing pages, or, trigger, actions or things where we need the SDM to follow up and give us that feedback back.
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Those are all things that are like super complex that we try to bucket into groups.
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It's not exact science, but it's something that I'm super curious about with other organizations too.
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It's if one email as estimated at, 30 minutes and this nurture sequence has five of them plus that's, the formula could potentially be worked out, but it never seems to actually happen that way.
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And then there's always scope creep too.
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So it's can we also add this?
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What about this?
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Oh, by the way, have six more different languages.
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I want to add to that.
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So
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Oh, yeah.
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The
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can we do personalization, dynamic
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So I I haven't been in a marketing obviously, but I've known some really good marketing op folks.
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And I'm curious what you guys think about this phenomenon.
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What I often notice is that do ops folks tend to have some discipline around creating SLAs, enforcing, communicating, and intake, right.
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Prioritization.
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But if the marketers have none like zero.
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Your discipline on what they're, the question often from the op side seems to be, are you sure about this strategy?
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Given limited resources and time and focus, like this is way different from last week's requests, how do you play a role in helping the company grow?
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Which is the ultimate goal, right?
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When.
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You have this seat where probably because of habit or role title, it doesn't seem like it's okay for you to say this is a terrible idea, which I'm sure terrible ideas all the time.
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what
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would say segmentation is a huge thing too, right?
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It's not always just building, if you just sent an email, but like sometimes a more complicated piece can be segmenting out your audience, especially if you have a, if you have a complicated business model, making sure that, you're validating your data.
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Are these actual customers, or are they, it's just, it's not, it's just not always, let me just send this email out to everybody in our system.
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Are you ready with the right messaging for an exact versus an operator or what have you.
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Yeah.
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It's exactly the reason why organizations need to have some marketer.
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whether it's a marketing ops person, proper or.
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Someone that has at least enough acumen to say there's a certain level of data inputs that we need so that we can then go back and say, okay, here are the standards that we can leverage, right?
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Like personas or segment by product type or.
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What have you.
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And so as you go to execute campaigns, you're being advised by the data inputs that you established right at the foundation.
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Because most of the time, just as we were saying a moment ago, like you've got ample opportunity to put a promotional campaign out the door of any kind, and you're looking at a blank piece of paper or, blank, Google doc or whatever, and you're going who's this for.
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the goal of who you want to reach, isn't actually possible because the foundation wasn't built and we keep arguing that the marketing ops person needs to have the strategic sort of seat in the room.
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And be a part of those discussions to enable, it's an enablement function to be able to say, Hey, this is what's possible.
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Given the state of what we've got today, here's what we need.
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And you're right.
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Most of the time, you don't feel comfortable.
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I think saying, Hey, this is crazy.
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Like, why would you try this?
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But oftentimes it's because at least in my experience, I felt that that individual who is close enough to the foundational elements of what it takes to put a campaign out.
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Wasn't brought into the discussion soon enough.
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And then you're just like it's basically just gonna be a no, like we just can't do the thing.
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And here the team spent all this time coming up with this great plan and they're like, sorry, we don't have the skills to do that.
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Or the tool or whatever.
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Yeah, this is why I think that question was what I presented to El for a topic was why aren't we thinking more about project management disciplines?
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Are you familiar with the rice scoring model for
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Oh, yeah.
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So it comes from product engineering land, right?
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Reach impact confidence effort.
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So reach is how many people will this.
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The impact seems redundant, but it's what level, what degree of change would this tactic
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How significant is this going to be on the business?
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So you're gonna reach a certain audience, potentially large or small, but the impact of the effort on the organization, depending on what lever you're pulling on, if that's acquisition or revenue, or what have you with to what degree is it going to impact that particular lever?
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Exactly.
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And then confidence is how successful will we be at pulling this off and effort is how many hours dollars been this gonna take?
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So there was a hypergrowth unicorn.
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I was at where we were looking at launching more sophisticated paid efforts.
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And I created a spreadsheet and loaded in 20 of my own ideas and, everyone else's ideas and just started scoring them across.
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These parameters so that we could sit down marketing op did review it and say, look, here's where we're capable.
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Here's where we're not.
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And here's what surfaces as obviously we all believe is going to be the best use of time.
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I think in marketers, there's this inherent resistance to taking the time to list out and score.
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A list of tactics and strategies that we could invest in for X period of time.
00:17:37.325 --> 00:17:38.447
And then stick to them.
00:17:38.491 --> 00:17:43.932
And I'm still puzzling through why we are so averse to slowing down, to speed up.
00:17:43.932 --> 00:17:47.876
Cause we move a lot faster if we all work together on what we're going to work on.
00:17:48.326 --> 00:17:48.686
Right.
00:17:49.497 --> 00:17:52.047
I, yeah, I totally agree.
00:17:52.106 --> 00:17:55.166
I, it seems.
00:17:55.751 --> 00:17:56.981
In my career so far.
00:17:56.981 --> 00:18:02.345
And I don't know about you, Naomi, how you guys do any prioritization around managing work and things like that.
00:18:02.440 --> 00:18:10.418
I think probably on the campaign op side of thing is where a lot of this is centering on right now, but I've definitely experienced that.
00:18:10.449 --> 00:18:15.414
There's just, there's always this OKR established for the organization and then they trickle down.
00:18:15.795 --> 00:18:19.154
and then somehow it's like completely diluted.
00:18:19.154 --> 00:18:20.500
And you almost don't even know.
00:18:21.185 --> 00:18:25.780
like what part of the metrics you're trying to impact with the go to market motion.
00:18:26.201 --> 00:18:28.362
And I don't know if that's, a reflection
00:18:28.517 --> 00:18:29.096
I feel that.
00:18:29.172 --> 00:18:37.511
bad messaging or bad project management or bad leadership or some mix of all of that, but it's a struggle.
00:18:38.051 --> 00:18:39.341
So campaign ops, I.
00:18:39.403 --> 00:18:46.067
Let me just hear from you Naomi, before I pick up on another thing, I want to hear what your thoughts are around campaign ops and all that stuff.
00:18:46.067 --> 00:19:01.189
For us, it's like we have it, actually, we we flushed out an SLA where we say, if we're just completely, there's really only so many hours into a day that when we all have the same amount of hours, if there are conflicting projects that we just do not have the bandwidth on the team to execute them all It goes in order of time sensitivity.
00:19:01.189 --> 00:19:07.789
So things like webinars and in-person events or anything that absolutely cannot be moved date wise.
00:19:07.789 --> 00:19:30.656
And then it goes by lead gen and then essentially everything else, unless it is something around a critical Bug failure or something where there's a really massive recall for a product or ink or something like that, then those will take precedence, but it's just, thankfully we haven't had too many situations where we've had to just really sit down and be like, okay, we can do these two things, but it means we can't do these two.
00:19:30.656 --> 00:19:32.032
We haven't had too many of those.
00:19:32.032 --> 00:19:40.100
There's just, there's a handful of times that I can recall that's happened, but but most of the time it's yeah, time sensitivity and lead gen definitely take precedence above all else.
00:19:40.230 --> 00:19:43.770
Do you ever hit points where there's so many time sensitive things?
00:19:44.010 --> 00:19:47.196
You have to make trade offs, even within that scheme
00:19:47.196 --> 00:19:50.500
Before COVID definitely just because there were.
00:19:50.521 --> 00:19:52.951
We were doing a ton more of in-person events.
00:19:53.019 --> 00:20:05.068
It's definitely started to pick up again, but and most things are now virtual, but those things can be moved if they need to be, but you cannot necessarily move, a trade show that you've signed on a year in advance type of thing.
00:20:05.119 --> 00:20:07.099
Before COVID definitely, yeah.
00:20:07.099 --> 00:20:08.299
Now not so much.
00:20:08.299 --> 00:20:08.599
Yeah.
00:20:11.359 --> 00:20:11.660
Yeah.
00:20:11.671 --> 00:20:12.240
I like that.
00:20:12.240 --> 00:20:19.334
You're I think if I was to think about the frameworks that we've talked about, at least the one right now, we touched on productivity.
00:20:19.334 --> 00:20:28.153
So maybe there's a Pomodoro technique that you leverage to stay focused as an individual prioritizing a roadmap could potentially be done based on rice scoring.
00:20:28.259 --> 00:20:34.588
And then it seems like the output of a rice score may fall into a, okay.
00:20:34.588 --> 00:20:37.138
We've decided these are the items we wanna prioritize.
00:20:37.138 --> 00:20:38.068
And some of them will.
00:20:38.106 --> 00:20:42.029
Time sensitive because we decided that a webinar was an important thing for us to do.
00:20:42.099 --> 00:20:56.325
Evan, I don't know if your team currently has this sort of tooling built in or program, but, I think it's the marketing ops persons responsibility or that part of the org's responsibility to be able to.
00:20:56.395 --> 00:21:10.056
We have the ability to pretty much execute roughly one, X number of in person or online events per week, per month, per quarter whatever the timeframe is, maybe I'm wrong in that though.
00:21:10.060 --> 00:21:17.942
But Naomi, are you advising your org on what the capabilities are in terms of like how many, and that's why it doesn't come up.
00:21:17.942 --> 00:21:19.083
There's like less conflict.
00:21:19.893 --> 00:21:21.093
Look, we set the baseline.
00:21:21.093 --> 00:21:23.762
Like we can do two a week or two a month or whatever.
00:21:25.133 --> 00:21:27.472
No, because we've always been able to manage.
00:21:27.472 --> 00:21:29.990
And it's I feel like we've shot ourselves.
00:21:30.080 --> 00:21:32.940
Like we're, it's, we've shot ourselves in the foot that way, because.
00:21:34.619 --> 00:21:40.349
We have streamlined things to a point where it's really easy for us to flex.
00:21:40.420 --> 00:21:44.240
It just depends on how much postmortem they get.
00:21:44.268 --> 00:21:51.167
So now we're at a point where if we're really slammed, you're probably not going to get a.
00:21:52.173 --> 00:21:57.393
Post campaign write up or postmortem or a, Hey, we probably shouldn't ever do this again.
00:21:57.393 --> 00:22:00.303
Or, if we do this again, this is what I would change.
00:22:00.574 --> 00:22:04.594
You probably won't get that automatically, if at all, unless you ask us.
00:22:04.653 --> 00:22:13.713
But if we do have a bit more bandwidth and there is breathing room, we will definitely take more time to sit down and just do a proper review and full end to end workup.
00:22:13.713 --> 00:22:14.385
And those are.
00:22:14.385 --> 00:22:19.370
Like bonus add-ons for our business partners that they definitely like, and they do see it too.
00:22:19.403 --> 00:22:23.123
If we're just slammed they're there, there's gonna be things that they're not gonna get.
00:22:23.272 --> 00:22:30.022
We will very rarely miss like major deadlines, but something has to drop.
00:22:30.059 --> 00:22:31.349
And that's usually what will drop first.
00:22:32.444 --> 00:22:40.756
That's such a shame too, cuz that's like core to the business, like understanding of is this working or not?
00:22:40.814 --> 00:22:42.476
We'll pick it up afterwards.
00:22:42.476 --> 00:22:49.099
Like we will do, we do our marketing ops QBR where we will review them and say, Hey, these are the top five campaigns.
00:22:49.099 --> 00:22:50.720
And these are the top like bottom
00:22:50.899 --> 00:22:56.879
I definitely wanted our listeners to hear that Naomi's and her team are really lazy and they never follow through with reporting.
00:22:57.605 --> 00:23:00.694
At all I'm just kidding.
00:23:00.714 --> 00:23:01.096
Evan.
00:23:01.096 --> 00:23:08.624
So do you have like guidelines established right now within your team at Syncari on, what you think is possible?
00:23:08.653 --> 00:23:11.278
Or is it really just no, this is what we need to do.
00:23:11.283 --> 00:23:13.798
It's driven by the go to market motion more than anything else.
00:23:13.798 --> 00:23:15.568
So figure out how to make it happen.
00:23:15.576 --> 00:23:19.700
And now you're leaning on groups like Naomi and their team where they're like, yeah, we just made it work.
00:23:19.760 --> 00:23:24.009
We're definitely young group of marketers in seat here at sainty.
00:23:24.250 --> 00:23:26.795
So we're still figuring out how to build this stuff together.
00:23:26.795 --> 00:23:32.282
And I don't, and I think that's part of it is there's no the code is not written right on exactly how to become productive as a team.
00:23:32.282 --> 00:23:34.506
It depends a lot on the tools you guys like and yeah.
00:23:34.506 --> 00:23:37.355
What you've seen working in the past, and also so much as we're talking.
00:23:37.955 --> 00:23:38.375
Twice.
00:23:38.375 --> 00:23:42.336
Now we've delved into specific channel types and tactics, right?
00:23:42.516 --> 00:23:44.195
Events and email.
00:23:44.286 --> 00:23:48.257
We haven't even touched on paid on demand, like all this other stuff.
00:23:49.156 --> 00:23:51.548
And and like what it takes to run a website.
00:23:51.567 --> 00:23:54.427
We've joking about this the other day, Mike, it's the website.
00:23:54.427 --> 00:24:01.103
So like the worst, hardest to maintain most fragile, most sensitive, most public products, ubiquitously worldwide.
00:24:01.153 --> 00:24:02.423
And marketers are stuck.
00:24:02.423 --> 00:24:05.004
I think a lot of our franticness stems from that.
00:24:05.065 --> 00:24:07.524
So at RI we're still figuring it out.
00:24:07.571 --> 00:24:13.872
There are definitely strong opinions I have in terms of like, how can organizations begin to build these muscles?
00:24:14.231 --> 00:24:16.541
And it's in a time like this, right?
00:24:16.571 --> 00:24:24.134
Where people are wondering how long they have till their org realizes they are burning too hot cash flow wise.
00:24:24.197 --> 00:24:25.758
That they can stick around in their jobs.
00:24:25.758 --> 00:24:32.993
Like now is the time for us to deploy personal discipline, team discipline and leadership discipline.
00:24:32.993 --> 00:24:36.683
That feeds healthier processes.
00:24:36.701 --> 00:24:42.174
When in fact, I think most of us are actually turn, as you mentioned, like turning over every rock, right?
00:24:42.414 --> 00:24:48.285
Trying to find growth to stave off the threat of any sort of contraction as a business.
00:24:48.359 --> 00:24:51.269
We should instead find these rhythms together now.
00:24:51.296 --> 00:24:59.950
And that might look like, individuals learning how to work with paper or bur bullet journals or just their own sort of task lists.
00:24:59.950 --> 00:25:03.210
It might look like deploying a project management tool through grid effect.
00:25:03.910 --> 00:25:09.596
It might look like leaders really leaning in and, you mentioned how OKRs often just get like created and then abandoned.
00:25:09.596 --> 00:25:10.089
Really true.
00:25:10.117 --> 00:25:12.770
But leaning in and tracking those for their teams.
00:25:12.817 --> 00:25:15.530
Even if you're a marketing leader, you have an ops resource, right?
00:25:15.536 --> 00:25:25.280
Like still lean in and learn the data enough so that you can help create the visibility, the throughput tactic to outcome all the way up to strategy.
00:25:25.745 --> 00:25:36.213
Yeah, I think the best marketers that I've ever had a chance to work alongside knew the data that you know, was available to them.
00:25:36.513 --> 00:25:45.160
Like they took the time to go study that, which means, hopefully they had a good partner in the marketing org and the data org, marketing op side of things to help them get there.
00:25:46.644 --> 00:25:49.071
But I think, you touched on some key things, right?
00:25:49.432 --> 00:25:56.754
Currently at the time of this recording the state of things is there's a series of layoffs happening and organizations.
00:25:56.754 --> 00:25:58.375
I think there's a correction happening.
00:25:58.375 --> 00:26:01.452
We've all been seeing it in the SAS tech sector in general.
00:26:01.535 --> 00:26:04.535
To each their own on the opinions of why those things are happening.
00:26:04.535 --> 00:26:05.944
But the ability.
00:26:06.634 --> 00:26:19.279
To report on your team's capabilities, your go to market motion, the cost of those things and aligning that back into those key decision makers to help them make the right decisions.
00:26:19.345 --> 00:26:21.924
Definitely can stem from project management.
00:26:22.254 --> 00:26:22.605
One of my.
00:26:24.789 --> 00:26:33.295
My gripes, I guess with the word project management is that it's like nebulous in nature.
00:26:33.333 --> 00:26:39.211
There's a lot of folks that when they hear project management, they don't think about people in resource management.
00:26:39.262 --> 00:26:42.712
That doesn't that part doesn't come into their, to their mind.
00:26:42.712 --> 00:26:50.425
They're thinking more about oh, I just have to like, for event managers, it's like more about ordering the stuff and making sure the power's there.
00:26:50.425 --> 00:27:04.608
And, there's project management in that fashion that has very little to do with staffing and resourcing and planning for growth of an org there's project management, Naomi, with the work that you've done on integrating systems or anything like that.
00:27:04.671 --> 00:27:07.941
That don't have a reliance on people, but I.
00:27:07.961 --> 00:27:24.126
When you go to the organizations like project management Institute, PMI, the real standard of, I, I would argue the closer standard of project management is really about the people and the resources themselves, that it takes to go execute on doing all the rest of the work.
00:27:24.126 --> 00:27:39.951
But I'm curious, like, When you both of you, I guess whoever wants to go first when you hear project management, at least in your orgs or in an interview process, whether it's interviewing candidates or roles that you've interviewed for, is that where your head goes?
00:27:39.951 --> 00:27:50.114
Like you think about oh, I need to know like how much time, someone has to be able to work on something or do you go the other route, which is like more like task management and all those kinds of things.
00:27:50.923 --> 00:27:52.723
I don't think people talk about project management.
00:27:54.358 --> 00:27:55.449
Naomi you go first.
00:27:55.449 --> 00:27:57.512
I think it's a little bit of Colme colo B.
00:27:57.557 --> 00:27:58.968
And I think every right.
00:27:58.968 --> 00:28:01.847
I do though, but I feel like every organization's gonna be different.
00:28:01.847 --> 00:28:03.018
You can't, I don't know.
00:28:03.018 --> 00:28:07.699
I just, I don't like pigeonholing it like that because it's always, you're always gonna have situations where it.
00:28:07.962 --> 00:28:08.623
Changes.
00:28:08.623 --> 00:28:09.042
I don't know.
00:28:10.032 --> 00:28:12.252
That's just my 2 cents.
00:28:12.312 --> 00:28:12.883
Mr.
00:28:12.972 --> 00:28:13.962
Not Michael Hartmannnn
00:28:14.853 --> 00:28:20.596
About my alarm is the fundamental problem of okay, everybody's saying like, why don't we talk about project management more in marketing ops.
00:28:20.596 --> 00:28:21.421
It's which part.
00:28:21.557 --> 00:28:35.295
Yeah I definitely would happily switch out the word for something more ambitious, like discipline or rhythms because ultimately everything costs something, it is amazing how much it costs to correctly set up market.
00:28:35.954 --> 00:28:39.105
Channels and programs and Salesforce campaigns in alignment.
00:28:39.180 --> 00:28:41.849
For any tactic you want good throughput attribution on.
00:28:41.916 --> 00:28:46.537
And people don't realize that when they ask marketing to go execute stuff like sure.
00:28:46.537 --> 00:28:47.976
And you'll have no idea how it did.
00:28:48.043 --> 00:28:53.046
But I do think, yeah, project management is a very pigeonholing term.
00:28:53.046 --> 00:28:53.855
I can agree with you there.
00:28:53.855 --> 00:29:15.149
I definitely I've seen organizations that try to do time tracking and stuff, and that just seems it to me, it's like the emphasis on in office, the emphasis should instead be on outcomes, actual work products produced and how those are rolling up toward OKRs and towards revenue impacts or however you're measuring how much time you spend and how much And where you do that time.
00:29:16.410 --> 00:29:17.759
it's a bad phrase where you do that.
00:29:17.759 --> 00:29:21.482
Time is is arbitrary, entirely arbitrary, right?
00:29:21.504 --> 00:29:26.305
And this is where ultimately we're talking about like outcome management, right?
00:29:26.305 --> 00:29:30.612
If you're expected to do, to produce X in your role you should know what that is.
00:29:30.882 --> 00:29:36.642
You should have your opinions and your boss should have your opinions and ops person should have opinions about what that is.
00:29:36.721 --> 00:29:38.041
And same goes for ops teams.
00:29:38.521 --> 00:29:47.875
But often I think what happens in marketing is there's, digital technology and all these different tactics and changing landscape has vastly fragmented what we work on.
00:29:48.715 --> 00:29:56.455
And so any given day, I can go learn a new tactic or try a tactic that I think will work.
00:29:56.506 --> 00:29:57.945
And that conundrum.
00:29:58.651 --> 00:30:01.080
almost precludes the very thing we're emphasizing.
00:30:01.083 --> 00:30:11.731
It makes it so hard for us to focus, and in small MIS fall, fo small focuses, fortune, those kinds of things really do hold water in these environments that are so fragmented, but it's hard,
00:30:12.406 --> 00:30:13.907
Yeah, and I totally agree.
00:30:13.913 --> 00:30:15.917
It's incredibly difficult.
00:30:16.036 --> 00:30:24.019
I guess no matter the size of the org, Naomi's made it clear that there are times where it can get pretty hard even with really good rigor that they built over time.
00:30:24.089 --> 00:30:35.850
Michael, you and I were talking right before we started recording this, about some, the projects that are coming onto my team's plate that are completely outside of our day to day.
00:30:35.896 --> 00:30:41.443
And so there's only so much we can handle, but with all these massive projects that we're also.
00:30:42.178 --> 00:30:46.154
Expected to deliver, at what point, what takes the precedence, right?
00:30:46.154 --> 00:30:51.199
It's obviously we wanna make sure that these large scale projects, whether, and this goes for anyone in ops, right?
00:30:51.199 --> 00:31:05.416
Whether it be through acquisitions or divestitures or whatever you might be working on, those are things that are gonna distract and take away from your day to day campaign ops and execution, and just like self learning and keeping on top of the things that you're supposed to know as part of your job.
00:31:05.445 --> 00:31:08.506
So how do you manage and juggle all of that?
00:31:08.895 --> 00:31:09.105
Yeah.
00:31:09.146 --> 00:31:10.337
Did you read the release notes?
00:31:10.367 --> 00:31:13.038
Cause it's no, I'm dealing with all this other stuff.
00:31:13.788 --> 00:31:14.538
oh, you didn't hear about that
00:31:14.552 --> 00:31:16.682
up for the webinar that talks about it.
00:31:16.712 --> 00:31:17.492
Haven't watched it
00:31:17.553 --> 00:31:17.869
It's okay.
00:31:17.898 --> 00:31:21.212
Maybe that's what we'll do on our next podcast that we launch.
00:31:21.212 --> 00:31:26.052
It'll be just a read of notes so people can just hear them like injected into their ears.
00:31:26.407 --> 00:31:26.532
for
00:31:26.597 --> 00:31:28.603
an as SMR type of situation.
00:31:28.703 --> 00:31:29.183
I see.
00:31:29.453 --> 00:31:31.553
You're like, okay, I'm just gonna fall asleep now.
00:31:31.566 --> 00:31:41.176
So I wanted to talk, touch on something that I think you, Evan and I, Evan, you and I were talking about earlier, you hinted at it just a moment ago.
00:31:42.706 --> 00:31:49.125
It's this problem of optimizing for done and the struggle like.
00:31:50.819 --> 00:31:58.388
The real struggle that comes from like this demand gen sort of marketer org in the marketing ops org.
00:31:58.470 --> 00:32:08.676
How sometimes there's this misalignment and I myself like have experienced this where I have to wear both hats sometimes as a marketer and a marketing ops person, a growth person.
00:32:08.676 --> 00:32:10.172
What have you it's.
00:32:10.180 --> 00:32:16.899
I'd really like to get that campaign out the door, cuz it's a good one, but I don't have all of the little inputs built.
00:32:16.899 --> 00:32:20.480
I didn't use the UTM builder that I signed up for and I didn't hook up.
00:32:20.510 --> 00:32:33.274
I didn't pre-build the campaign, but I know how important that is for me, cuz at some point I'm gonna want to know how that thing went, but the business needs to grow and it feels like the demand gen marketer, part of me is like pulling and optimizing for done.
00:32:33.740 --> 00:32:42.125
And the marketing op person is trying to pull back to say slow down to go faster, as you said earlier, and it's just such a struggle.
00:32:43.819 --> 00:32:44.539
It totally is.
00:32:44.539 --> 00:32:53.129
And I think both ops folks and marketers need to ask themselves what is actually essential, what fields do I actually need in place to measure?
00:32:53.369 --> 00:32:57.809
What programs and campaigns and Salesforce market etcetera, do I actually need in place?
00:32:58.470 --> 00:33:04.656
To collect the right amount of attribution, not complete, not perfect, not every UTM content variable.
00:33:04.656 --> 00:33:06.829
What have you, and then for marketers, right?
00:33:06.835 --> 00:33:08.839
What meetings do you actually need on your calendar?
00:33:08.839 --> 00:33:21.378
Cause those one on ones where you rehash what you did at your weekly sync, probably aren't always so crucial or, the five tactics that might not drive much impact aren't as crucial as the one that's really gonna be worth the investment.
00:33:21.405 --> 00:33:25.608
And it, it does take serious time to consider these things.
00:33:25.608 --> 00:33:38.113
And what I challenge, like all of us with our bad slack habits and sleep habits to think about is how do you give your brain space for diffuse thinking you're familiar with diffuse versus focus, thinking, focus thinking is what we're doing right now.
00:33:38.113 --> 00:33:40.062
It's exhausting or engaged.
00:33:40.062 --> 00:33:40.663
We're focused.
00:33:40.663 --> 00:33:42.732
We will be so tired after this conversation.
00:33:42.972 --> 00:33:46.956
This is why zoom fatigue is a thing diffuse thinking is you're washing the dishes.
00:33:46.956 --> 00:33:47.767
You're vacuuming.
00:33:48.636 --> 00:33:49.747
You're making dinner.
00:33:49.747 --> 00:33:51.139
You're, cleaning up the yard.
00:33:51.170 --> 00:33:52.940
Your brain has backup space.
00:33:52.940 --> 00:33:54.680
It uses to solve problems.
00:33:55.430 --> 00:34:00.740
You'll find yourself so creative after not focusing on the problem.
00:34:00.792 --> 00:34:03.942
But we're not giving ourselves the room today as humans, right?
00:34:04.022 --> 00:34:15.597
To step away from the screen, step away from the meetings and come back fuller, ready, or to focus, ready to prioritize and make those trade offs that we need to make together to.
00:34:15.666 --> 00:34:17.586
To succeed and continue to grow.
00:34:17.682 --> 00:34:21.124
See, this is the thing with project management in general, right?
00:34:21.124 --> 00:34:23.653
Like we've gone a bunch of different directions and I would argue that.
00:34:23.706 --> 00:34:40.231
It all can really be helped by having really good, pragmatic process and project management in your life, whether it's personal or on a team, Naomi, can't push back and say, we can't do this without having this system in place to be able to say, we can't do this.
00:34:40.561 --> 00:34:43.958
If you don't know how much time is being utilized to go to market or whatever.
00:34:45.498 --> 00:34:47.942
That if I was tuning into this episode, right?
00:34:47.942 --> 00:34:53.372
I'd be saying project management, whatever version of it, you're talking about it.
00:34:53.582 --> 00:34:55.652
The outcome to echo.
00:34:55.682 --> 00:35:09.332
Another phrase that we use today is the ability to say yes or no to different work or give yourself the space to be able to go accomplish other work.
00:35:11.086 --> 00:35:17.305
That's whatever version of project management that you want to go implement, I would say is probably one of the key takeaways here.
00:35:17.305 --> 00:35:17.769
What do you think?
00:35:20.079 --> 00:35:23.739
Can I leave you with a quote that I feel like is in full agreement with that?
00:35:23.919 --> 00:35:24.309
Sure.
00:35:25.028 --> 00:35:29.349
Every time you say yes to something you say no to something else.
00:35:32.929 --> 00:35:33.548
is that true?
00:35:33.577 --> 00:35:35.561
It's really making my brain hurt a little bit.
00:35:35.951 --> 00:35:38.891
It's probably cuz of what type of thinking is it that I'm doing right now?
00:35:39.431 --> 00:35:40.211
Focus thinking
00:35:40.511 --> 00:35:41.740
I'm way too focused.
00:35:41.740 --> 00:35:44.351
And so like my brain is tired and I can't handle it anymore.
00:35:45.941 --> 00:35:51.192
it's these boundaries this time we have limited time and teams and yeah, we don't need to boil the oceans.
00:35:51.243 --> 00:35:52.623
We just need to channel the rivers.
00:35:52.690 --> 00:35:53.630
Yeah, absolutely.
00:35:53.830 --> 00:35:55.897
I I have to agree though that I.
00:35:56.842 --> 00:35:59.906
Personally, like I've been trying to focus a little bit more on my health.
00:35:59.936 --> 00:36:02.346
I've been on three runs this week, which is incredible.
00:36:02.376 --> 00:36:07.929
Ask me in a week if that helds true or not but it definitely opened up the creativity channels.
00:36:07.989 --> 00:36:08.319
I.
00:36:08.844 --> 00:36:12.984
Felt like I was thinking of new stuff or coming up with new ideas, which is super important.
00:36:12.984 --> 00:36:15.173
So I think that message certainly resonated with me.
00:36:15.173 --> 00:36:16.804
And I hope the rest of the listeners too.
00:36:16.804 --> 00:36:21.227
Before we wrap this episode I do want to ask you Evan.
00:36:21.857 --> 00:36:23.486
I think, an audience that.
00:36:23.861 --> 00:36:26.021
You interact with on a regular basis.
00:36:26.021 --> 00:36:28.511
And the roles that you've had is marketing ops.
00:36:28.511 --> 00:36:32.391
I think Syncari has a unique purview on marketing ops in general.
00:36:32.601 --> 00:36:35.374
So you're probably getting inundated with a lot of that all the time.
00:36:35.374 --> 00:36:40.441
I'm curious, we haven't asked this question in a while and I'm maybe I'm dropping it on you cold.
00:36:40.471 --> 00:36:44.131
So I apologize, but what would you say is a fundamental.
00:36:45.136 --> 00:36:46.426
And it can't be project management.
00:36:46.493 --> 00:36:49.595
To become a certified marketing operations professional.
00:36:51.500 --> 00:37:03.533
First I have no idea, but if I had to take a stab I do think like data architecture is huge and I'm not just saying that because I work at RI I'm saying that because part of the reason I joined RI was.
00:37:03.863 --> 00:37:15.293
In the last two hypergrowth unicorns that I was a marketer at performance marketer at, I was auditing every single lead that came through because checklist errors and HubSpot to Salesforce saying, or what have you.
00:37:15.863 --> 00:37:24.185
And what helped so much was to have conversations where the ops person walked me through the data schemes, saying okay, here's what I've created.
00:37:24.185 --> 00:37:25.235
Here's how they relate.
00:37:25.565 --> 00:37:26.915
Here's the fields that are essential.
00:37:26.915 --> 00:37:28.655
Here's the optional context fields.
00:37:28.705 --> 00:37:30.088
I'd have those conversations that come away.
00:37:30.088 --> 00:37:36.307
And I would think of campaigns that could use just using those fields that existed already without asking for more data.
00:37:36.378 --> 00:37:42.517
I think marketers can be fueled by the data expertise that the ops teams can bring to the table.
00:37:42.517 --> 00:37:48.021
But if they're not, then you're gonna get asked for new data for different data for, they won't be updating the data.
00:37:48.026 --> 00:37:49.286
Go all different ways.
00:37:49.286 --> 00:37:57.416
And so I think there's a, that's a huge opportunity ops as to serve marketing norms is te teach us how to think about the data we're working.
00:37:57.941 --> 00:37:58.541
I like that.
00:37:58.541 --> 00:38:02.778
I think the output of that too, as I'm trying to think in real time, like, how do you test for that?
00:38:02.778 --> 00:38:05.313
If there was a certification program, like how does that actually work?
00:38:05.343 --> 00:38:14.523
Maybe the output of that would be like, you have to show us your, a mock data schema lesson that you would teach to a demand gen marketer or something like that.
00:38:14.523 --> 00:38:14.913
I don't know.
00:38:15.093 --> 00:38:17.553
What do you think Naomi data scheme is you in.
00:38:18.603 --> 00:38:18.993
I'm in.
00:38:20.952 --> 00:38:26.523
I'm all about the homework evaluations and I'm being very sarcastic right now, in case you can't tell.
00:38:27.978 --> 00:38:29.388
homework evaluations.
00:38:29.388 --> 00:38:29.737
Yeah.
00:38:29.737 --> 00:38:31.013
If it's not paid, don't do it.
00:38:32.033 --> 00:38:33.113
It's the takeaway there.
00:38:33.743 --> 00:38:34.161
All right.
00:38:34.161 --> 00:38:36.756
Evan, thank you for joining us today.
00:38:37.266 --> 00:38:43.044
I really appreciate you taking the time for all of you that are the avid listeners, or if you're new listeners.
00:38:43.113 --> 00:38:47.725
We are officially the podcast of marketing ops.com.
00:38:47.755 --> 00:38:50.605
The home of the Mo pros community.
00:38:50.965 --> 00:38:52.249
So come join us.
00:38:52.298 --> 00:38:55.419
Hang out, talk, shop, meet folks like Evan, Naomi, Mr.
00:38:55.419 --> 00:38:57.061
Hartmannnn please keep listening.
00:38:57.181 --> 00:38:58.851
Send your recommendations on.
00:39:00.181 --> 00:39:02.431
Topics guests that we might be able to have.
00:39:02.731 --> 00:39:09.601
If you decide to create your free profile on the website, you can also ask to be a guest of the show it's right there on your profile.
00:39:09.653 --> 00:39:14.632
You can, it'll be an email that reaches me or just slack me or reach out on LinkedIn.
00:39:15.322 --> 00:39:16.492
So thank you, please.
00:39:16.492 --> 00:39:21.032
Rate review, listen and subscribe until next time.
00:00:23.580 --> 00:00:24.390
Hey everybody.
00:00:24.390 --> 00:00:29.280
I am not Michael Hartmann, but I am one of the co-hosts of the show.
00:00:29.339 --> 00:00:35.370
And today we are joined with Naomi, our other co-host Naomi say hello,
00:00:35.640 --> 00:00:36.359
Hello?
00:00:36.390 --> 00:00:37.469
Hi, not Michael Hartmann
00:00:37.588 --> 00:00:43.009
I, yeah, I not Michael Hartmann I get to be the host today because Mr.
00:00:43.009 --> 00:00:47.674
Hartmann is busy with probably some marketing operations work as we all are.
00:00:47.739 --> 00:00:50.019
But thank you for joining us on this episode.
00:00:50.073 --> 00:00:52.653
Our guest today is Evan Dunn.
00:00:53.222 --> 00:00:56.192
Evan is currently the director of growth marketing at Syncari.
00:00:57.143 --> 00:01:05.388
Prior to joining Syncari earlier this year, he's held several roles in marketing, including other leadership roles in growth, marketing, digital and social media.
00:01:05.987 --> 00:01:08.777
In addition, he has experience in customer success.
00:01:12.288 --> 00:01:18.438
in addition, he has experience in customer success as well as being VP of product at resonance AI.
00:01:18.468 --> 00:01:20.358
Evan, thank you for joining us today.
00:01:20.957 --> 00:01:21.948
Thanks for having me.
00:01:22.038 --> 00:01:22.801
Mike Naomi
00:01:22.801 --> 00:01:23.087
cool.
00:01:23.087 --> 00:01:28.210
I know you and Hartmann had a chance to sync up before no pun intended on the Syncari bit but.
00:01:28.299 --> 00:01:29.579
you pronounced it correctly.
00:01:29.620 --> 00:01:30.700
I did get it right.
00:01:30.730 --> 00:01:35.147
Which I think that's just due to all the conversations I've been having with you and the team lately.
00:01:35.156 --> 00:01:43.057
But before we go too far, I know the overall theme is, why aren't we talking more about project management in marketing operations.
00:01:43.082 --> 00:01:44.715
And so I'm excited of dive into that.
00:01:44.939 --> 00:01:53.311
But you're the second person that has a background in linguistics, and apparently you do some performance poetry.
00:01:53.641 --> 00:02:00.512
So could you maybe tell our listeners about how you went from linguistics to marketing and product development?
00:02:01.337 --> 00:02:04.216
Yeah, the linguistics track is unsurprisingly.
00:02:04.216 --> 00:02:05.736
One of millennial necessity.
00:02:05.796 --> 00:02:17.447
We'll say, had to get a different job, non linguistics that made money and ended up bouncing around a bit and freelancing for do you remember when people used to pay.
00:02:18.016 --> 00:02:20.716
To have their own blogs produced.
00:02:21.211 --> 00:02:21.572
Yeah.
00:02:22.096 --> 00:02:30.317
back in the day I did Twitter marketing and WordPress and some email stuff that was half of a full-time job.
00:02:30.385 --> 00:02:36.877
And from there I went to the agency side and then that resonance AI, startup analytics company, really fun.
00:02:36.955 --> 00:02:41.814
And the other performance poetry thing happens occasionally, not on podcasts.
00:02:42.069 --> 00:02:45.430
Not on podcast, so we won't get any poetry out of you today.
00:02:45.925 --> 00:02:47.664
Maybe, but probably not
00:02:47.830 --> 00:02:48.069
all right.
00:02:48.069 --> 00:02:54.516
So merging the worlds of linguistics, performance, poetry, and the social medias, bro.
00:02:54.532 --> 00:02:55.951
social media is, yeah
00:02:56.003 --> 00:02:57.143
what is your feeling on bro?
00:02:58.358 --> 00:02:58.578
bro.
00:03:00.427 --> 00:03:01.867
I only noted as a slur.
00:03:01.939 --> 00:03:02.539
I don't
00:03:03.125 --> 00:03:05.344
You're like, it's a really good growth tactic.
00:03:06.425 --> 00:03:09.485
It's the only way to hack the algorithm of LinkedIn.
00:03:10.235 --> 00:03:16.955
I have attempted two poems for work to be shared as work products.
00:03:18.064 --> 00:03:24.895
It is not easy to poetry fi professional things.
00:03:25.669 --> 00:03:26.449
Yeah, I doubt it.
00:03:27.860 --> 00:03:35.584
Couple weeks ago, I was in LA and my friend got me tickets to something called freestyle love Supreme.
00:03:35.584 --> 00:03:40.774
I don't know if you've heard of it, but it was, I think the backstory is it's Lynn.
00:03:40.778 --> 00:03:51.727
Manuel's like old college Trop where they do improv singing, wrapping, hip hop, and they take feedback from the audience.
00:03:51.926 --> 00:03:56.366
And everything is live it's all on demand.
00:03:56.366 --> 00:03:57.930
Like it's absolutely amazing.
00:03:57.930 --> 00:04:07.890
So I can just, it gives me a greater appreciation as to how difficult it is to rhyme completely unrelated words and phrases together.
00:04:07.979 --> 00:04:10.050
I feel like it's that something you probably
00:04:10.069 --> 00:04:11.860
Yeah, I like doing it.
00:04:12.050 --> 00:04:12.050
too.
00:04:12.330 --> 00:04:12.780
I think on
00:04:12.955 --> 00:04:14.875
Oh, yeah, I will check that out.
00:04:14.875 --> 00:04:16.336
I I, it sounds familiar.
00:04:16.407 --> 00:04:18.372
I definitely can't freestyle.
00:04:18.372 --> 00:04:20.697
That is a whole separate category of skill.
00:04:20.697 --> 00:04:24.148
I like being alone in a forest when I'm composing.
00:04:24.229 --> 00:04:38.710
It's a bit different, there is weird synergy to use a terrible word between linguistics and poetry and marketing, you're thinking all the time about what people are going to react and in linguistics, there's some really wonderful nerdy names for the things we think about all the time in market.
00:04:39.580 --> 00:04:41.787
There's pragmatics and semantics.
00:04:41.787 --> 00:04:44.157
Pragmatics is semantics people know, right?
00:04:44.157 --> 00:04:47.427
It's your brain producing, meaning pragmatics.
00:04:47.427 --> 00:04:49.106
It's how the meaning is perceived.
00:04:49.163 --> 00:04:51.044
So what happens in the other person's brain?
00:04:51.078 --> 00:04:55.109
And they're two completely different disciplines because they're two completely different activities.
00:04:55.109 --> 00:04:59.605
Yeah, so there's a lot of things to pull from, when you think about audiences and how they hear what you say.
00:05:00.174 --> 00:05:05.095
As we all know, it's so hard not to get caught up in excitement about your product and your ideas.
00:05:05.095 --> 00:05:06.924
That is a market that you get lost.
00:05:06.979 --> 00:05:08.149
Speaking to your audience.
00:05:08.344 --> 00:05:10.173
Yeah, I find that really hard.
00:05:10.269 --> 00:05:20.971
In every role I've ever held around the marketing and growth side of things getting outside of talking, cuz you're just inside the organization, you're constantly inundated with, what does the product do?
00:05:20.971 --> 00:05:22.052
What does it capable of?
00:05:22.052 --> 00:05:25.207
And pulling back and going, okay what does the audience actually want to hear?
00:05:25.207 --> 00:05:27.128
They don't want to hear just about us all the time.
00:05:27.128 --> 00:05:31.335
Like, how do you speak to them in a way that, resonates, which, speaking of products.
00:05:31.365 --> 00:05:31.605
Okay.
00:05:31.610 --> 00:05:33.585
Sounds this topic that we're talking about today.
00:05:33.590 --> 00:05:39.216
So project management the importance of that in the marketing and revenue operations sector there are.
00:05:39.890 --> 00:05:42.230
This topic comes up frequently in the community.
00:05:42.312 --> 00:05:46.344
Not just the tools that are used, but also a little bit about the methodology.
00:05:46.673 --> 00:05:55.043
I have pretty strong opinions about whether or not Agile's really a framework that, that whether you're marketing or marketing broadly is actually a thing that you should be doing.
00:05:55.057 --> 00:06:04.177
But it sounded like from your experience in leading product development, That sort of helped shape your opinions on the value of project management.
00:06:04.238 --> 00:06:10.605
And now it seems like you're taking some of that experience to apply that to your marketing function and growth.
00:06:10.672 --> 00:06:12.231
And I don't know about marketing ops.
00:06:12.501 --> 00:06:23.523
I know that the team ATSY got, different tool sets available to them, but wondering, just Hey, how has that experience shaped your view of the importance of project management as it relates to the role that you're doing?
00:06:24.798 --> 00:06:28.509
Yeah I don't know about you guys, but I I am not natively organized.
00:06:28.509 --> 00:06:32.806
I had never used a calendar tool when I graduated college.
00:06:32.806 --> 00:06:40.359
Like not even a planner, never recorded appointments that started becoming problematic pretty quickly.
00:06:40.869 --> 00:06:44.469
And I never wrote down to-do list and I have a terrible memory.
00:06:44.586 --> 00:06:45.125
And
00:06:45.125 --> 00:06:46.374
How did you ever get anywhere?
00:06:47.423 --> 00:06:47.693
it's like
00:06:48.019 --> 00:06:49.799
Yeah I cannot relate to that at all.
00:06:49.830 --> 00:06:50.279
I'm sorry.
00:06:50.365 --> 00:06:53.164
Yeah, I hope there's sarcasm there.
00:06:53.206 --> 00:06:59.357
For my sake, it was so bad that it was actually a problem at the first job I had outta school.
00:07:00.048 --> 00:07:07.278
And since then have basically become a huge fan of like bullet journaling and these sort of like disciplined approaches to.
00:07:08.508 --> 00:07:11.327
Managing your priorities and your schedule.
00:07:11.405 --> 00:07:12.905
25 minute focus chunks.
00:07:12.905 --> 00:07:14.615
The brain can only focus for 42 minutes.
00:07:14.615 --> 00:07:15.995
Those kind of things.
00:07:15.995 --> 00:07:18.365
I pepper throughout my productivity.
00:07:18.755 --> 00:07:22.446
Obviously with little children, they break your frameworks all the time, but yeah.
00:07:22.446 --> 00:07:25.908
To your question, exactly there was a specific.
00:07:26.984 --> 00:07:43.432
Event recurring event that we started creating at residence AI that took us from literally from P and E product engineering, not knowing what next week held to actually getting several weeks out, months out, visibility roadmap.
00:07:43.461 --> 00:07:48.020
And that was that every Thursday afternoon, we had a meeting at three, I think.
00:07:48.380 --> 00:07:56.794
And if requests for demos and new product features and sort of things weren't in by that time, they did not happen the next week.
00:07:57.455 --> 00:07:58.883
And this taught me so many things.
00:07:58.883 --> 00:08:03.866
This taught me the power of forcing functions, of setting boundaries and saying, look, you can't.
00:08:04.351 --> 00:08:05.762
Ask us to build a landing page.
00:08:05.762 --> 00:08:09.751
In two days in marketing writer, you can't turn around and say, Hey, we got a big customer coming.
00:08:09.751 --> 00:08:12.272
Can you do a demo with them within two days, this kind of thing?
00:08:12.333 --> 00:08:25.323
It created rhythms, it created breathing room and it created at first, we knew what we were doing next week and then it just rolled forward, where then people knew imagine if marketers knew what they were doing a month from now, we laugh because it's hard and.
00:08:26.043 --> 00:08:27.693
Marketing ops and marketing together.
00:08:27.693 --> 00:08:34.441
We could talk about that for a minute, but I have a lot of ideas about how the two seem more disjointed than they need to be.
00:08:34.441 --> 00:08:40.020
There's ultimately marketing ops is a strategic contributor, and knows what works.
00:08:40.081 --> 00:08:42.870
They see the data more than anyone else they're looking at it all the time.
00:08:42.870 --> 00:08:49.345
So they should be feeding the marketing executioners, if you will, with the the rhythms and the Intel to.
00:08:50.769 --> 00:08:54.594
To to drive that strategy forward in a way that isn't heter Skelter.
00:08:54.640 --> 00:08:55.600
And you brought up agile.
00:08:55.600 --> 00:09:03.100
I think there's a point where for a lot of people trying to deploy these framers, they are making efforts, they've got click up or air table or right.
00:09:03.100 --> 00:09:04.250
Or, these different tools.
00:09:04.317 --> 00:09:12.168
But, and they're trying to do short standups, but what's happening is they're still pivoting daily.
00:09:12.798 --> 00:09:15.078
They're still changing what they're working on daily.
00:09:15.288 --> 00:09:19.212
They're just documenting it a little bit better and having meetings about it a little bit.
00:09:19.279 --> 00:09:21.589
So yeah, lots there.
00:09:21.679 --> 00:09:22.043
Yeah.
00:09:22.112 --> 00:09:33.113
I felt that through the majority of my career but I think that stems from the work environments or just like the stage, rather the stage of the organizations that I've worked for.
00:09:33.166 --> 00:09:36.568
I don't have, I'm glad Naomi's on this episode with us.
00:09:36.593 --> 00:09:44.154
Because there's a, she's been in her role for quite some time and built a lot of rigor just from past episodes and having many conversations with her.
00:09:44.154 --> 00:09:51.689
And so I'm curious to hear sort of your feelings on project management and how it's related to the way that you run your org, Naomi.
00:09:51.750 --> 00:09:54.360
But I definitely resonate with.
00:09:54.432 --> 00:10:01.757
The who's got the loudest voice in the room or the next shiny object that we could look at or do, or the, the idea that's oh, that's a good one.
00:10:01.762 --> 00:10:02.668
Let's go do that right now.
00:10:02.679 --> 00:10:06.519
Whether that's here in the community, we sometimes we do that.
00:10:06.565 --> 00:10:11.485
Or in the organizations that I advise, I experience that on a regular basis.
00:10:11.541 --> 00:10:13.712
Most of those are pretty early stage.
00:10:14.192 --> 00:10:32.870
And I think that, as I said at the start of this That is indicative of the stage of the organization, oftentimes as well, just cuz you're, I don't know, there's a whole bunch of different ways to turn a phrase on that one, but everybody's just like trying to look under every single rock every day, trying to figure out what's the next thing that's gonna move the needle.
00:10:32.870 --> 00:10:36.163
And sometimes you're go to market messaging and motion isn't refined enough.
00:10:36.193 --> 00:10:43.078
And so you're just like, I don't know someone make a decision please, but anyway, Naomi I'd love to hear your thoughts on.
00:10:43.938 --> 00:10:46.999
Larger org marketing, project management.
00:10:47.028 --> 00:10:48.327
How that actually pans out
00:10:48.342 --> 00:10:48.942
Yeah.
00:10:48.978 --> 00:10:53.190
I, it definitely, wasn't something that just came about overnight.
00:10:53.235 --> 00:10:59.043
It's definitely something that is multifaceted, it's evolved over time.
00:10:59.067 --> 00:11:07.259
And it's changed as well, even though, maybe the people have not changed, the business changes process changes COVID happened, there's always things that.
00:11:07.524 --> 00:11:11.794
Will change how people are working together and just trying to make things more efficient.
00:11:11.815 --> 00:11:19.829
For us it's a matter of not just like project intake and just, keeping the bandwidths on the team balance, but it's also.
00:11:20.274 --> 00:11:40.196
Communicating out to our business partners that, this is the bandwidth of the team at any given point in time so that they can see and give us heads up that, Hey, if we have, major integration projects or if we want to onboard a new vendor, or we want to do some kind of mass migration that they know what our bandwidth is, that they're not, stacking things on top of us, that we can then.
00:11:40.208 --> 00:11:48.053
Either not handle and have to go back and say, Hey, you really should have given us this as a heads up earlier so that we could handle this and give you appropriate timelines.
00:11:48.081 --> 00:11:51.009
For us, a lot of it is just this constant feedback.
00:11:51.029 --> 00:11:52.268
And also enforcing SLAs.
00:11:52.268 --> 00:11:54.908
I think that's something that a lot of people don't necessarily talk about.
00:11:54.913 --> 00:11:55.627
They talk about.
00:11:55.677 --> 00:11:56.846
How am I tracking the work?
00:11:56.846 --> 00:11:59.406
How am I, accepting how, what does the intake look like?
00:11:59.406 --> 00:12:07.958
But they're not necessarily talking about, what are the SLAs for what is an acceptable amount of time to turn, an email campaign around an email campaign with.
00:12:07.988 --> 00:12:17.549
10 languages, an email campaign that has, multiple follow up steps or landing pages, or, trigger, actions or things where we need the SDM to follow up and give us that feedback back.
00:12:17.574 --> 00:12:21.324
Those are all things that are like super complex that we try to bucket into groups.
00:12:21.403 --> 00:12:26.323
It's not exact science, but it's something that I'm super curious about with other organizations too.
00:12:26.813 --> 00:12:38.704
It's if one email as estimated at, 30 minutes and this nurture sequence has five of them plus that's, the formula could potentially be worked out, but it never seems to actually happen that way.
00:12:38.771 --> 00:12:40.213
And then there's always scope creep too.
00:12:40.236 --> 00:12:41.663
So it's can we also add this?
00:12:41.698 --> 00:12:42.358
What about this?
00:12:42.358 --> 00:12:44.779
Oh, by the way, have six more different languages.
00:12:44.779 --> 00:12:45.679
I want to add to that.
00:12:45.679 --> 00:12:46.039
So
00:12:46.250 --> 00:12:46.669
Oh, yeah.
00:12:46.720 --> 00:12:46.939
The
00:12:46.939 --> 00:12:48.649
can we do personalization, dynamic
00:12:48.964 --> 00:12:53.509
So I I haven't been in a marketing obviously, but I've known some really good marketing op folks.
00:12:53.509 --> 00:12:55.578
And I'm curious what you guys think about this phenomenon.
00:12:56.058 --> 00:13:07.818
What I often notice is that do ops folks tend to have some discipline around creating SLAs, enforcing, communicating, and intake, right.
00:13:07.818 --> 00:13:08.749
Prioritization.
00:13:09.558 --> 00:13:11.964
But if the marketers have none like zero.
00:13:12.504 --> 00:13:20.841
Your discipline on what they're, the question often from the op side seems to be, are you sure about this strategy?
00:13:20.901 --> 00:13:30.572
Given limited resources and time and focus, like this is way different from last week's requests, how do you play a role in helping the company grow?
00:13:30.576 --> 00:13:32.072
Which is the ultimate goal, right?
00:13:32.491 --> 00:13:33.031
When.
00:13:33.706 --> 00:13:45.456
You have this seat where probably because of habit or role title, it doesn't seem like it's okay for you to say this is a terrible idea, which I'm sure terrible ideas all the time.
00:13:46.971 --> 00:13:47.390
what
00:13:49.221 --> 00:13:51.410
would say segmentation is a huge thing too, right?
00:13:51.410 --> 00:14:02.586
It's not always just building, if you just sent an email, but like sometimes a more complicated piece can be segmenting out your audience, especially if you have a, if you have a complicated business model, making sure that, you're validating your data.
00:14:02.586 --> 00:14:10.927
Are these actual customers, or are they, it's just, it's not, it's just not always, let me just send this email out to everybody in our system.
00:14:10.956 --> 00:14:15.223
Are you ready with the right messaging for an exact versus an operator or what have you.
00:14:15.913 --> 00:14:16.093
Yeah.
00:14:16.121 --> 00:14:22.831
It's exactly the reason why organizations need to have some marketer.
00:14:23.581 --> 00:14:26.461
whether it's a marketing ops person, proper or.
00:14:26.528 --> 00:14:39.115
Someone that has at least enough acumen to say there's a certain level of data inputs that we need so that we can then go back and say, okay, here are the standards that we can leverage, right?
00:14:39.115 --> 00:14:41.934
Like personas or segment by product type or.
00:14:42.569 --> 00:14:43.319
What have you.
00:14:43.319 --> 00:14:48.929
And so as you go to execute campaigns, you're being advised by the data inputs that you established right at the foundation.
00:14:49.589 --> 00:15:05.064
Because most of the time, just as we were saying a moment ago, like you've got ample opportunity to put a promotional campaign out the door of any kind, and you're looking at a blank piece of paper or, blank, Google doc or whatever, and you're going who's this for.
00:15:07.879 --> 00:15:21.019
the goal of who you want to reach, isn't actually possible because the foundation wasn't built and we keep arguing that the marketing ops person needs to have the strategic sort of seat in the room.
00:15:21.071 --> 00:15:27.603
And be a part of those discussions to enable, it's an enablement function to be able to say, Hey, this is what's possible.
00:15:27.693 --> 00:15:30.745
Given the state of what we've got today, here's what we need.
00:15:31.345 --> 00:15:32.044
And you're right.
00:15:32.044 --> 00:15:34.247
Most of the time, you don't feel comfortable.
00:15:34.247 --> 00:15:36.081
I think saying, Hey, this is crazy.
00:15:36.081 --> 00:15:37.401
Like, why would you try this?
00:15:37.410 --> 00:15:48.018
But oftentimes it's because at least in my experience, I felt that that individual who is close enough to the foundational elements of what it takes to put a campaign out.
00:15:48.677 --> 00:15:50.778
Wasn't brought into the discussion soon enough.
00:15:50.927 --> 00:15:54.754
And then you're just like it's basically just gonna be a no, like we just can't do the thing.
00:15:54.754 --> 00:16:01.447
And here the team spent all this time coming up with this great plan and they're like, sorry, we don't have the skills to do that.
00:16:01.510 --> 00:16:02.540
Or the tool or whatever.
00:16:03.096 --> 00:16:12.794
Yeah, this is why I think that question was what I presented to El for a topic was why aren't we thinking more about project management disciplines?
00:16:12.799 --> 00:16:15.014
Are you familiar with the rice scoring model for
00:16:15.194 --> 00:16:15.644
Oh, yeah.
00:16:15.702 --> 00:16:17.692
So it comes from product engineering land, right?
00:16:17.731 --> 00:16:20.052
Reach impact confidence effort.
00:16:20.107 --> 00:16:22.028
So reach is how many people will this.
00:16:23.033 --> 00:16:29.168
The impact seems redundant, but it's what level, what degree of change would this tactic
00:16:29.394 --> 00:16:32.183
How significant is this going to be on the business?
00:16:32.183 --> 00:16:47.294
So you're gonna reach a certain audience, potentially large or small, but the impact of the effort on the organization, depending on what lever you're pulling on, if that's acquisition or revenue, or what have you with to what degree is it going to impact that particular lever?
00:16:47.970 --> 00:16:48.600
Exactly.
00:16:48.689 --> 00:16:56.459
And then confidence is how successful will we be at pulling this off and effort is how many hours dollars been this gonna take?
00:16:57.000 --> 00:16:59.459
So there was a hypergrowth unicorn.
00:16:59.464 --> 00:17:03.750
I was at where we were looking at launching more sophisticated paid efforts.
00:17:03.834 --> 00:17:11.162
And I created a spreadsheet and loaded in 20 of my own ideas and, everyone else's ideas and just started scoring them across.
00:17:11.250 --> 00:17:18.347
These parameters so that we could sit down marketing op did review it and say, look, here's where we're capable.
00:17:18.347 --> 00:17:19.367
Here's where we're not.
00:17:19.398 --> 00:17:24.857
And here's what surfaces as obviously we all believe is going to be the best use of time.
00:17:25.968 --> 00:17:33.708
I think in marketers, there's this inherent resistance to taking the time to list out and score.
00:17:33.737 --> 00:17:37.307
A list of tactics and strategies that we could invest in for X period of time.
00:17:37.325 --> 00:17:38.447
And then stick to them.
00:17:38.491 --> 00:17:43.932
And I'm still puzzling through why we are so averse to slowing down, to speed up.
00:17:43.932 --> 00:17:47.876
Cause we move a lot faster if we all work together on what we're going to work on.
00:17:48.326 --> 00:17:48.686
Right.
00:17:49.497 --> 00:17:52.047
I, yeah, I totally agree.
00:17:52.106 --> 00:17:55.166
I, it seems.
00:17:55.751 --> 00:17:56.981
In my career so far.
00:17:56.981 --> 00:18:02.345
And I don't know about you, Naomi, how you guys do any prioritization around managing work and things like that.
00:18:02.440 --> 00:18:10.418
I think probably on the campaign op side of thing is where a lot of this is centering on right now, but I've definitely experienced that.
00:18:10.449 --> 00:18:15.414
There's just, there's always this OKR established for the organization and then they trickle down.
00:18:15.795 --> 00:18:19.154
and then somehow it's like completely diluted.
00:18:19.154 --> 00:18:20.500
And you almost don't even know.
00:18:21.185 --> 00:18:25.780
like what part of the metrics you're trying to impact with the go to market motion.
00:18:26.201 --> 00:18:28.362
And I don't know if that's, a reflection
00:18:28.517 --> 00:18:29.096
I feel that.
00:18:29.172 --> 00:18:37.511
bad messaging or bad project management or bad leadership or some mix of all of that, but it's a struggle.
00:18:38.051 --> 00:18:39.341
So campaign ops, I.
00:18:39.403 --> 00:18:46.067
Let me just hear from you Naomi, before I pick up on another thing, I want to hear what your thoughts are around campaign ops and all that stuff.
00:18:46.067 --> 00:19:01.189
For us, it's like we have it, actually, we we flushed out an SLA where we say, if we're just completely, there's really only so many hours into a day that when we all have the same amount of hours, if there are conflicting projects that we just do not have the bandwidth on the team to execute them all It goes in order of time sensitivity.
00:19:01.189 --> 00:19:07.789
So things like webinars and in-person events or anything that absolutely cannot be moved date wise.
00:19:07.789 --> 00:19:30.656
And then it goes by lead gen and then essentially everything else, unless it is something around a critical Bug failure or something where there's a really massive recall for a product or ink or something like that, then those will take precedence, but it's just, thankfully we haven't had too many situations where we've had to just really sit down and be like, okay, we can do these two things, but it means we can't do these two.
00:19:30.656 --> 00:19:32.032
We haven't had too many of those.
00:19:32.032 --> 00:19:40.100
There's just, there's a handful of times that I can recall that's happened, but but most of the time it's yeah, time sensitivity and lead gen definitely take precedence above all else.
00:19:40.230 --> 00:19:43.770
Do you ever hit points where there's so many time sensitive things?
00:19:44.010 --> 00:19:47.196
You have to make trade offs, even within that scheme
00:19:47.196 --> 00:19:50.500
Before COVID definitely just because there were.
00:19:50.521 --> 00:19:52.951
We were doing a ton more of in-person events.
00:19:53.019 --> 00:20:05.068
It's definitely started to pick up again, but and most things are now virtual, but those things can be moved if they need to be, but you cannot necessarily move, a trade show that you've signed on a year in advance type of thing.
00:20:05.119 --> 00:20:07.099
Before COVID definitely, yeah.
00:20:07.099 --> 00:20:08.299
Now not so much.
00:20:08.299 --> 00:20:08.599
Yeah.
00:20:11.359 --> 00:20:11.660
Yeah.
00:20:11.671 --> 00:20:12.240
I like that.
00:20:12.240 --> 00:20:19.334
You're I think if I was to think about the frameworks that we've talked about, at least the one right now, we touched on productivity.
00:20:19.334 --> 00:20:28.153
So maybe there's a Pomodoro technique that you leverage to stay focused as an individual prioritizing a roadmap could potentially be done based on rice scoring.
00:20:28.259 --> 00:20:34.588
And then it seems like the output of a rice score may fall into a, okay.
00:20:34.588 --> 00:20:37.138
We've decided these are the items we wanna prioritize.
00:20:37.138 --> 00:20:38.068
And some of them will.
00:20:38.106 --> 00:20:42.029
Time sensitive because we decided that a webinar was an important thing for us to do.
00:20:42.099 --> 00:20:56.325
Evan, I don't know if your team currently has this sort of tooling built in or program, but, I think it's the marketing ops persons responsibility or that part of the org's responsibility to be able to.
00:20:56.395 --> 00:21:10.056
We have the ability to pretty much execute roughly one, X number of in person or online events per week, per month, per quarter whatever the timeframe is, maybe I'm wrong in that though.
00:21:10.060 --> 00:21:17.942
But Naomi, are you advising your org on what the capabilities are in terms of like how many, and that's why it doesn't come up.
00:21:17.942 --> 00:21:19.083
There's like less conflict.
00:21:19.893 --> 00:21:21.093
Look, we set the baseline.
00:21:21.093 --> 00:21:23.762
Like we can do two a week or two a month or whatever.
00:21:25.133 --> 00:21:27.472
No, because we've always been able to manage.
00:21:27.472 --> 00:21:29.990
And it's I feel like we've shot ourselves.
00:21:30.080 --> 00:21:32.940
Like we're, it's, we've shot ourselves in the foot that way, because.
00:21:34.619 --> 00:21:40.349
We have streamlined things to a point where it's really easy for us to flex.
00:21:40.420 --> 00:21:44.240
It just depends on how much postmortem they get.
00:21:44.268 --> 00:21:51.167
So now we're at a point where if we're really slammed, you're probably not going to get a.
00:21:52.173 --> 00:21:57.393
Post campaign write up or postmortem or a, Hey, we probably shouldn't ever do this again.
00:21:57.393 --> 00:22:00.303
Or, if we do this again, this is what I would change.
00:22:00.574 --> 00:22:04.594
You probably won't get that automatically, if at all, unless you ask us.
00:22:04.653 --> 00:22:13.713
But if we do have a bit more bandwidth and there is breathing room, we will definitely take more time to sit down and just do a proper review and full end to end workup.
00:22:13.713 --> 00:22:14.385
And those are.
00:22:14.385 --> 00:22:19.370
Like bonus add-ons for our business partners that they definitely like, and they do see it too.
00:22:19.403 --> 00:22:23.123
If we're just slammed they're there, there's gonna be things that they're not gonna get.
00:22:23.272 --> 00:22:30.022
We will very rarely miss like major deadlines, but something has to drop.
00:22:30.059 --> 00:22:31.349
And that's usually what will drop first.
00:22:32.444 --> 00:22:40.756
That's such a shame too, cuz that's like core to the business, like understanding of is this working or not?
00:22:40.814 --> 00:22:42.476
We'll pick it up afterwards.
00:22:42.476 --> 00:22:49.099
Like we will do, we do our marketing ops QBR where we will review them and say, Hey, these are the top five campaigns.
00:22:49.099 --> 00:22:50.720
And these are the top like bottom
00:22:50.899 --> 00:22:56.879
I definitely wanted our listeners to hear that Naomi's and her team are really lazy and they never follow through with reporting.
00:22:57.605 --> 00:23:00.694
At all I'm just kidding.
00:23:00.714 --> 00:23:01.096
Evan.
00:23:01.096 --> 00:23:08.624
So do you have like guidelines established right now within your team at Syncari on, what you think is possible?
00:23:08.653 --> 00:23:11.278
Or is it really just no, this is what we need to do.
00:23:11.283 --> 00:23:13.798
It's driven by the go to market motion more than anything else.
00:23:13.798 --> 00:23:15.568
So figure out how to make it happen.
00:23:15.576 --> 00:23:19.700
And now you're leaning on groups like Naomi and their team where they're like, yeah, we just made it work.
00:23:19.760 --> 00:23:24.009
We're definitely young group of marketers in seat here at sainty.
00:23:24.250 --> 00:23:26.795
So we're still figuring out how to build this stuff together.
00:23:26.795 --> 00:23:32.282
And I don't, and I think that's part of it is there's no the code is not written right on exactly how to become productive as a team.
00:23:32.282 --> 00:23:34.506
It depends a lot on the tools you guys like and yeah.
00:23:34.506 --> 00:23:37.355
What you've seen working in the past, and also so much as we're talking.
00:23:37.955 --> 00:23:38.375
Twice.
00:23:38.375 --> 00:23:42.336
Now we've delved into specific channel types and tactics, right?
00:23:42.516 --> 00:23:44.195
Events and email.
00:23:44.286 --> 00:23:48.257
We haven't even touched on paid on demand, like all this other stuff.
00:23:49.156 --> 00:23:51.548
And and like what it takes to run a website.
00:23:51.567 --> 00:23:54.427
We've joking about this the other day, Mike, it's the website.
00:23:54.427 --> 00:24:01.103
So like the worst, hardest to maintain most fragile, most sensitive, most public products, ubiquitously worldwide.
00:24:01.153 --> 00:24:02.423
And marketers are stuck.
00:24:02.423 --> 00:24:05.004
I think a lot of our franticness stems from that.
00:24:05.065 --> 00:24:07.524
So at RI we're still figuring it out.
00:24:07.571 --> 00:24:13.872
There are definitely strong opinions I have in terms of like, how can organizations begin to build these muscles?
00:24:14.231 --> 00:24:16.541
And it's in a time like this, right?
00:24:16.571 --> 00:24:24.134
Where people are wondering how long they have till their org realizes they are burning too hot cash flow wise.
00:24:24.197 --> 00:24:25.758
That they can stick around in their jobs.
00:24:25.758 --> 00:24:32.993
Like now is the time for us to deploy personal discipline, team discipline and leadership discipline.
00:24:32.993 --> 00:24:36.683
That feeds healthier processes.
00:24:36.701 --> 00:24:42.174
When in fact, I think most of us are actually turn, as you mentioned, like turning over every rock, right?
00:24:42.414 --> 00:24:48.285
Trying to find growth to stave off the threat of any sort of contraction as a business.
00:24:48.359 --> 00:24:51.269
We should instead find these rhythms together now.
00:24:51.296 --> 00:24:59.950
And that might look like, individuals learning how to work with paper or bur bullet journals or just their own sort of task lists.
00:24:59.950 --> 00:25:03.210
It might look like deploying a project management tool through grid effect.
00:25:03.910 --> 00:25:09.596
It might look like leaders really leaning in and, you mentioned how OKRs often just get like created and then abandoned.
00:25:09.596 --> 00:25:10.089
Really true.
00:25:10.117 --> 00:25:12.770
But leaning in and tracking those for their teams.
00:25:12.817 --> 00:25:15.530
Even if you're a marketing leader, you have an ops resource, right?
00:25:15.536 --> 00:25:25.280
Like still lean in and learn the data enough so that you can help create the visibility, the throughput tactic to outcome all the way up to strategy.
00:25:25.745 --> 00:25:36.213
Yeah, I think the best marketers that I've ever had a chance to work alongside knew the data that you know, was available to them.
00:25:36.513 --> 00:25:45.160
Like they took the time to go study that, which means, hopefully they had a good partner in the marketing org and the data org, marketing op side of things to help them get there.
00:25:46.644 --> 00:25:49.071
But I think, you touched on some key things, right?
00:25:49.432 --> 00:25:56.754
Currently at the time of this recording the state of things is there's a series of layoffs happening and organizations.
00:25:56.754 --> 00:25:58.375
I think there's a correction happening.
00:25:58.375 --> 00:26:01.452
We've all been seeing it in the SAS tech sector in general.
00:26:01.535 --> 00:26:04.535
To each their own on the opinions of why those things are happening.
00:26:04.535 --> 00:26:05.944
But the ability.
00:26:06.634 --> 00:26:19.279
To report on your team's capabilities, your go to market motion, the cost of those things and aligning that back into those key decision makers to help them make the right decisions.
00:26:19.345 --> 00:26:21.924
Definitely can stem from project management.
00:26:22.254 --> 00:26:22.605
One of my.
00:26:24.789 --> 00:26:33.295
My gripes, I guess with the word project management is that it's like nebulous in nature.
00:26:33.333 --> 00:26:39.211
There's a lot of folks that when they hear project management, they don't think about people in resource management.
00:26:39.262 --> 00:26:42.712
That doesn't that part doesn't come into their, to their mind.
00:26:42.712 --> 00:26:50.425
They're thinking more about oh, I just have to like, for event managers, it's like more about ordering the stuff and making sure the power's there.
00:26:50.425 --> 00:27:04.608
And, there's project management in that fashion that has very little to do with staffing and resourcing and planning for growth of an org there's project management, Naomi, with the work that you've done on integrating systems or anything like that.
00:27:04.671 --> 00:27:07.941
That don't have a reliance on people, but I.
00:27:07.961 --> 00:27:24.126
When you go to the organizations like project management Institute, PMI, the real standard of, I, I would argue the closer standard of project management is really about the people and the resources themselves, that it takes to go execute on doing all the rest of the work.
00:27:24.126 --> 00:27:39.951
But I'm curious, like, When you both of you, I guess whoever wants to go first when you hear project management, at least in your orgs or in an interview process, whether it's interviewing candidates or roles that you've interviewed for, is that where your head goes?
00:27:39.951 --> 00:27:50.114
Like you think about oh, I need to know like how much time, someone has to be able to work on something or do you go the other route, which is like more like task management and all those kinds of things.
00:27:50.923 --> 00:27:52.723
I don't think people talk about project management.
00:27:54.358 --> 00:27:55.449
Naomi you go first.
00:27:55.449 --> 00:27:57.512
I think it's a little bit of Colme colo B.
00:27:57.557 --> 00:27:58.968
And I think every right.
00:27:58.968 --> 00:28:01.847
I do though, but I feel like every organization's gonna be different.
00:28:01.847 --> 00:28:03.018
You can't, I don't know.
00:28:03.018 --> 00:28:07.699
I just, I don't like pigeonholing it like that because it's always, you're always gonna have situations where it.
00:28:07.962 --> 00:28:08.623
Changes.
00:28:08.623 --> 00:28:09.042
I don't know.
00:28:10.032 --> 00:28:12.252
That's just my 2 cents.
00:28:12.312 --> 00:28:12.883
Mr.
00:28:12.972 --> 00:28:13.962
Not Michael Hartmannnn
00:28:14.853 --> 00:28:20.596
About my alarm is the fundamental problem of okay, everybody's saying like, why don't we talk about project management more in marketing ops.
00:28:20.596 --> 00:28:21.421
It's which part.
00:28:21.557 --> 00:28:35.295
Yeah I definitely would happily switch out the word for something more ambitious, like discipline or rhythms because ultimately everything costs something, it is amazing how much it costs to correctly set up market.
00:28:35.954 --> 00:28:39.105
Channels and programs and Salesforce campaigns in alignment.
00:28:39.180 --> 00:28:41.849
For any tactic you want good throughput attribution on.
00:28:41.916 --> 00:28:46.537
And people don't realize that when they ask marketing to go execute stuff like sure.
00:28:46.537 --> 00:28:47.976
And you'll have no idea how it did.
00:28:48.043 --> 00:28:53.046
But I do think, yeah, project management is a very pigeonholing term.
00:28:53.046 --> 00:28:53.855
I can agree with you there.
00:28:53.855 --> 00:29:15.149
I definitely I've seen organizations that try to do time tracking and stuff, and that just seems it to me, it's like the emphasis on in office, the emphasis should instead be on outcomes, actual work products produced and how those are rolling up toward OKRs and towards revenue impacts or however you're measuring how much time you spend and how much And where you do that time.
00:29:16.410 --> 00:29:17.759
it's a bad phrase where you do that.
00:29:17.759 --> 00:29:21.482
Time is is arbitrary, entirely arbitrary, right?
00:29:21.504 --> 00:29:26.305
And this is where ultimately we're talking about like outcome management, right?
00:29:26.305 --> 00:29:30.612
If you're expected to do, to produce X in your role you should know what that is.
00:29:30.882 --> 00:29:36.642
You should have your opinions and your boss should have your opinions and ops person should have opinions about what that is.
00:29:36.721 --> 00:29:38.041
And same goes for ops teams.
00:29:38.521 --> 00:29:47.875
But often I think what happens in marketing is there's, digital technology and all these different tactics and changing landscape has vastly fragmented what we work on.
00:29:48.715 --> 00:29:56.455
And so any given day, I can go learn a new tactic or try a tactic that I think will work.
00:29:56.506 --> 00:29:57.945
And that conundrum.
00:29:58.651 --> 00:30:01.080
almost precludes the very thing we're emphasizing.
00:30:01.083 --> 00:30:11.731
It makes it so hard for us to focus, and in small MIS fall, fo small focuses, fortune, those kinds of things really do hold water in these environments that are so fragmented, but it's hard,
00:30:12.406 --> 00:30:13.907
Yeah, and I totally agree.
00:30:13.913 --> 00:30:15.917
It's incredibly difficult.
00:30:16.036 --> 00:30:24.019
I guess no matter the size of the org, Naomi's made it clear that there are times where it can get pretty hard even with really good rigor that they built over time.
00:30:24.089 --> 00:30:35.850
Michael, you and I were talking right before we started recording this, about some, the projects that are coming onto my team's plate that are completely outside of our day to day.
00:30:35.896 --> 00:30:41.443
And so there's only so much we can handle, but with all these massive projects that we're also.
00:30:42.178 --> 00:30:46.154
Expected to deliver, at what point, what takes the precedence, right?
00:30:46.154 --> 00:30:51.199
It's obviously we wanna make sure that these large scale projects, whether, and this goes for anyone in ops, right?
00:30:51.199 --> 00:31:05.416
Whether it be through acquisitions or divestitures or whatever you might be working on, those are things that are gonna distract and take away from your day to day campaign ops and execution, and just like self learning and keeping on top of the things that you're supposed to know as part of your job.
00:31:05.445 --> 00:31:08.506
So how do you manage and juggle all of that?
00:31:08.895 --> 00:31:09.105
Yeah.
00:31:09.146 --> 00:31:10.337
Did you read the release notes?
00:31:10.367 --> 00:31:13.038
Cause it's no, I'm dealing with all this other stuff.
00:31:13.788 --> 00:31:14.538
oh, you didn't hear about that
00:31:14.552 --> 00:31:16.682
up for the webinar that talks about it.
00:31:16.712 --> 00:31:17.492
Haven't watched it
00:31:17.553 --> 00:31:17.869
It's okay.
00:31:17.898 --> 00:31:21.212
Maybe that's what we'll do on our next podcast that we launch.
00:31:21.212 --> 00:31:26.052
It'll be just a read of notes so people can just hear them like injected into their ears.
00:31:26.407 --> 00:31:26.532
for
00:31:26.597 --> 00:31:28.603
an as SMR type of situation.
00:31:28.703 --> 00:31:29.183
I see.
00:31:29.453 --> 00:31:31.553
You're like, okay, I'm just gonna fall asleep now.
00:31:31.566 --> 00:31:41.176
So I wanted to talk, touch on something that I think you, Evan and I, Evan, you and I were talking about earlier, you hinted at it just a moment ago.
00:31:42.706 --> 00:31:49.125
It's this problem of optimizing for done and the struggle like.
00:31:50.819 --> 00:31:58.388
The real struggle that comes from like this demand gen sort of marketer org in the marketing ops org.
00:31:58.470 --> 00:32:08.676
How sometimes there's this misalignment and I myself like have experienced this where I have to wear both hats sometimes as a marketer and a marketing ops person, a growth person.
00:32:08.676 --> 00:32:10.172
What have you it's.
00:32:10.180 --> 00:32:16.899
I'd really like to get that campaign out the door, cuz it's a good one, but I don't have all of the little inputs built.
00:32:16.899 --> 00:32:20.480
I didn't use the UTM builder that I signed up for and I didn't hook up.
00:32:20.510 --> 00:32:33.274
I didn't pre-build the campaign, but I know how important that is for me, cuz at some point I'm gonna want to know how that thing went, but the business needs to grow and it feels like the demand gen marketer, part of me is like pulling and optimizing for done.
00:32:33.740 --> 00:32:42.125
And the marketing op person is trying to pull back to say slow down to go faster, as you said earlier, and it's just such a struggle.
00:32:43.819 --> 00:32:44.539
It totally is.
00:32:44.539 --> 00:32:53.129
And I think both ops folks and marketers need to ask themselves what is actually essential, what fields do I actually need in place to measure?
00:32:53.369 --> 00:32:57.809
What programs and campaigns and Salesforce market etcetera, do I actually need in place?
00:32:58.470 --> 00:33:04.656
To collect the right amount of attribution, not complete, not perfect, not every UTM content variable.
00:33:04.656 --> 00:33:06.829
What have you, and then for marketers, right?
00:33:06.835 --> 00:33:08.839
What meetings do you actually need on your calendar?
00:33:08.839 --> 00:33:21.378
Cause those one on ones where you rehash what you did at your weekly sync, probably aren't always so crucial or, the five tactics that might not drive much impact aren't as crucial as the one that's really gonna be worth the investment.
00:33:21.405 --> 00:33:25.608
And it, it does take serious time to consider these things.
00:33:25.608 --> 00:33:38.113
And what I challenge, like all of us with our bad slack habits and sleep habits to think about is how do you give your brain space for diffuse thinking you're familiar with diffuse versus focus, thinking, focus thinking is what we're doing right now.
00:33:38.113 --> 00:33:40.062
It's exhausting or engaged.
00:33:40.062 --> 00:33:40.663
We're focused.
00:33:40.663 --> 00:33:42.732
We will be so tired after this conversation.
00:33:42.972 --> 00:33:46.956
This is why zoom fatigue is a thing diffuse thinking is you're washing the dishes.
00:33:46.956 --> 00:33:47.767
You're vacuuming.
00:33:48.636 --> 00:33:49.747
You're making dinner.
00:33:49.747 --> 00:33:51.139
You're, cleaning up the yard.
00:33:51.170 --> 00:33:52.940
Your brain has backup space.
00:33:52.940 --> 00:33:54.680
It uses to solve problems.
00:33:55.430 --> 00:34:00.740
You'll find yourself so creative after not focusing on the problem.
00:34:00.792 --> 00:34:03.942
But we're not giving ourselves the room today as humans, right?
00:34:04.022 --> 00:34:15.597
To step away from the screen, step away from the meetings and come back fuller, ready, or to focus, ready to prioritize and make those trade offs that we need to make together to.
00:34:15.666 --> 00:34:17.586
To succeed and continue to grow.
00:34:17.682 --> 00:34:21.124
See, this is the thing with project management in general, right?
00:34:21.124 --> 00:34:23.653
Like we've gone a bunch of different directions and I would argue that.
00:34:23.706 --> 00:34:40.231
It all can really be helped by having really good, pragmatic process and project management in your life, whether it's personal or on a team, Naomi, can't push back and say, we can't do this without having this system in place to be able to say, we can't do this.
00:34:40.561 --> 00:34:43.958
If you don't know how much time is being utilized to go to market or whatever.
00:34:45.498 --> 00:34:47.942
That if I was tuning into this episode, right?
00:34:47.942 --> 00:34:53.372
I'd be saying project management, whatever version of it, you're talking about it.
00:34:53.582 --> 00:34:55.652
The outcome to echo.
00:34:55.682 --> 00:35:09.332
Another phrase that we use today is the ability to say yes or no to different work or give yourself the space to be able to go accomplish other work.
00:35:11.086 --> 00:35:17.305
That's whatever version of project management that you want to go implement, I would say is probably one of the key takeaways here.
00:35:17.305 --> 00:35:17.769
What do you think?
00:35:20.079 --> 00:35:23.739
Can I leave you with a quote that I feel like is in full agreement with that?
00:35:23.919 --> 00:35:24.309
Sure.
00:35:25.028 --> 00:35:29.349
Every time you say yes to something you say no to something else.
00:35:32.929 --> 00:35:33.548
is that true?
00:35:33.577 --> 00:35:35.561
It's really making my brain hurt a little bit.
00:35:35.951 --> 00:35:38.891
It's probably cuz of what type of thinking is it that I'm doing right now?
00:35:39.431 --> 00:35:40.211
Focus thinking
00:35:40.511 --> 00:35:41.740
I'm way too focused.
00:35:41.740 --> 00:35:44.351
And so like my brain is tired and I can't handle it anymore.
00:35:45.941 --> 00:35:51.192
it's these boundaries this time we have limited time and teams and yeah, we don't need to boil the oceans.
00:35:51.243 --> 00:35:52.623
We just need to channel the rivers.
00:35:52.690 --> 00:35:53.630
Yeah, absolutely.
00:35:53.830 --> 00:35:55.897
I I have to agree though that I.
00:35:56.842 --> 00:35:59.906
Personally, like I've been trying to focus a little bit more on my health.
00:35:59.936 --> 00:36:02.346
I've been on three runs this week, which is incredible.
00:36:02.376 --> 00:36:07.929
Ask me in a week if that helds true or not but it definitely opened up the creativity channels.
00:36:07.989 --> 00:36:08.319
I.
00:36:08.844 --> 00:36:12.984
Felt like I was thinking of new stuff or coming up with new ideas, which is super important.
00:36:12.984 --> 00:36:15.173
So I think that message certainly resonated with me.
00:36:15.173 --> 00:36:16.804
And I hope the rest of the listeners too.
00:36:16.804 --> 00:36:21.227
Before we wrap this episode I do want to ask you Evan.
00:36:21.857 --> 00:36:23.486
I think, an audience that.
00:36:23.861 --> 00:36:26.021
You interact with on a regular basis.
00:36:26.021 --> 00:36:28.511
And the roles that you've had is marketing ops.
00:36:28.511 --> 00:36:32.391
I think Syncari has a unique purview on marketing ops in general.
00:36:32.601 --> 00:36:35.374
So you're probably getting inundated with a lot of that all the time.
00:36:35.374 --> 00:36:40.441
I'm curious, we haven't asked this question in a while and I'm maybe I'm dropping it on you cold.
00:36:40.471 --> 00:36:44.131
So I apologize, but what would you say is a fundamental.
00:36:45.136 --> 00:36:46.426
And it can't be project management.
00:36:46.493 --> 00:36:49.595
To become a certified marketing operations professional.
00:36:51.500 --> 00:37:03.533
First I have no idea, but if I had to take a stab I do think like data architecture is huge and I'm not just saying that because I work at RI I'm saying that because part of the reason I joined RI was.
00:37:03.863 --> 00:37:15.293
In the last two hypergrowth unicorns that I was a marketer at performance marketer at, I was auditing every single lead that came through because checklist errors and HubSpot to Salesforce saying, or what have you.
00:37:15.863 --> 00:37:24.185
And what helped so much was to have conversations where the ops person walked me through the data schemes, saying okay, here's what I've created.
00:37:24.185 --> 00:37:25.235
Here's how they relate.
00:37:25.565 --> 00:37:26.915
Here's the fields that are essential.
00:37:26.915 --> 00:37:28.655
Here's the optional context fields.
00:37:28.705 --> 00:37:30.088
I'd have those conversations that come away.
00:37:30.088 --> 00:37:36.307
And I would think of campaigns that could use just using those fields that existed already without asking for more data.
00:37:36.378 --> 00:37:42.517
I think marketers can be fueled by the data expertise that the ops teams can bring to the table.
00:37:42.517 --> 00:37:48.021
But if they're not, then you're gonna get asked for new data for different data for, they won't be updating the data.
00:37:48.026 --> 00:37:49.286
Go all different ways.
00:37:49.286 --> 00:37:57.416
And so I think there's a, that's a huge opportunity ops as to serve marketing norms is te teach us how to think about the data we're working.
00:37:57.941 --> 00:37:58.541
I like that.
00:37:58.541 --> 00:38:02.778
I think the output of that too, as I'm trying to think in real time, like, how do you test for that?
00:38:02.778 --> 00:38:05.313
If there was a certification program, like how does that actually work?
00:38:05.343 --> 00:38:14.523
Maybe the output of that would be like, you have to show us your, a mock data schema lesson that you would teach to a demand gen marketer or something like that.
00:38:14.523 --> 00:38:14.913
I don't know.
00:38:15.093 --> 00:38:17.553
What do you think Naomi data scheme is you in.
00:38:18.603 --> 00:38:18.993
I'm in.
00:38:20.952 --> 00:38:26.523
I'm all about the homework evaluations and I'm being very sarcastic right now, in case you can't tell.
00:38:27.978 --> 00:38:29.388
homework evaluations.
00:38:29.388 --> 00:38:29.737
Yeah.
00:38:29.737 --> 00:38:31.013
If it's not paid, don't do it.
00:38:32.033 --> 00:38:33.113
It's the takeaway there.
00:38:33.743 --> 00:38:34.161
All right.
00:38:34.161 --> 00:38:36.756
Evan, thank you for joining us today.
00:38:37.266 --> 00:38:43.044
I really appreciate you taking the time for all of you that are the avid listeners, or if you're new listeners.
00:38:43.113 --> 00:38:47.725
We are officially the podcast of marketing ops.com.
00:38:47.755 --> 00:38:50.605
The home of the Mo pros community.
00:38:50.965 --> 00:38:52.249
So come join us.
00:38:52.298 --> 00:38:55.419
Hang out, talk, shop, meet folks like Evan, Naomi, Mr.
00:38:55.419 --> 00:38:57.061
Hartmannnn please keep listening.
00:38:57.181 --> 00:38:58.851
Send your recommendations on.
00:39:00.181 --> 00:39:02.431
Topics guests that we might be able to have.
00:39:02.731 --> 00:39:09.601
If you decide to create your free profile on the website, you can also ask to be a guest of the show it's right there on your profile.
00:39:09.653 --> 00:39:14.632
You can, it'll be an email that reaches me or just slack me or reach out on LinkedIn.
00:39:15.322 --> 00:39:16.492
So thank you, please.
00:39:16.492 --> 00:39:21.032
Rate review, listen and subscribe until next time.
