Running a Marketing Operations or Automation Team? If so, you might be new to management or to the roles required to be successful. In this presentation from MOPSCON 2019, I talk about the 4 Pillars of MOPS, the roles and skills that your team will specialize in, and how to manage personal and team growth.
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Building World Class MOPS Teams at MOPsCON by Etumos
1. Building World Class MOPS Teams
MOPSCON 2019
presentation by Josh Hill, founder of MarketingRocsktarGuides.com
2. 2
ABOUTJOSHHILL
Josh Hill
Sr. Director of Marketing Automation at RingCentral
• 5x Marketo Champ & Alum
• Wrote that Guide and founded marketingrockstarguides.com
• Over 40 projects and installs
• Goal: automate marketers’ stories at scale
A bit about me
6. 6
Workflow and the pillars
Platform
•Architecture
•Integrations
•Scale
Development
•Front End
Dev
•Highly
technical
integrations
and data
Campaign
Ops
•Run
programs at
scale
•Ensure flow
of responses
Intelligence &
Data
•Data Science
•Funnel
Analysis
•Reporting
7. How does team or company
size affect the division of
labor?
15. 15
Ideas for keeping the team engaged
Swap areas of responsibility every 6 to 12
months.
Incrementally add new areas
Everyone gets at least 1-2 new projects each
quarter to build skillset as part of work goals.
Reward increased skills with increased system
ownership & access
Let people own a system or sub system
16. 16
Sandboxes are for more than just training.
Build a mirror of your funnel in sandboxes as a
proving ground for integrations and new tech.
Don’t just deploy to production
Allows team members to join stretch projects
safely and reduce risk to your funnel.
It’s ok to fail
Importance of testing, QA, and sandboxes
18. 18
Learning marketing technology
Just do it.
Read the manual.
Find people who are curious.
Find people willing to fail or test their ideas
before asking really basic questions.
🧐
🧐
😎
19. 19
Managing quality
Four eyed or six eye reviews.
Document it all.
Checklists – but it’s hard to enforce.
Experience – people should understand how to
spot anomalies.
Remind people they can STOP any campaign or
project anytime – better late than wrong.
20. 20
1. Find time to document systems, etc.
2. Do not rely entirely on recorded videos.
3. Do live training, let the newbie drive in sandbox.
4. Show people where they can learn from others like the forums.
5. Find people who ask questions before getting in too deep.
6. Build an Onboarding Kit with the Order in which someone should
learn, the people who should teach them, and links to docs.
7. Offboarding – use that two weeks to have the person document
every single thing they do.
Training & knowledge transfer
22. 22
Hiring great MOPS people
1. Curiosity – do they try things first instead of asking “Where’s the
send button?”
2. “Failed engineers” or “technically inclined sales or marketers”
make great newbies. Especially in Marketing DevOps.
3. Can the candidate explain a process in detail?
4. Give them cases with minimal detail to see what kind of
program they come up with.
5. Ask them about their mistakes. Look for people who can walk
through what happened, own it, fix it, prevent it. No
embarrassment.
24. 24
Team expectations & values
1. Transparency
2. Mistakes happen…it’s ok if
you’re transparent.
3. Reinforce good behaviors
and skill growth with
rewards (new projects, cash,
etc)
4. Actively questions.
5. Scale and idea driven
1. Hiding mistakes or
concerns
2. Pattern of bad behaviors
3. Pattern of mistakes and not
learning from them.
4. Lack of interest in role.
5. Lack of engagement with
you, team, or work
Values Bad Patterns
25. Bad behaviors or lack of
learning are long term
patterns.
Don’t be blind to them.
26. 26
When to part ways: the hard talk
1. Skill growth isn’t meeting expectations (yours or theirs)
2. Pattern of mistakes and not learning.
3. Not coachable on skill or behaviors.
4. Hides mistakes or issues repeatedly.
27. 27
When to part ways: leaving the nest
1. Ready to take on your role.
2. Your stack or firm size can’t provide them with skill
growth.
3. Anyone to whom you’d say, “Call me anytime you are
always welcome here.”
4. Money isn’t a motivator.
28. 28
Team Building
Core Values
Transparency
Constant Growth
Curiosity
Continual Learning
Right Tools
Give people the tools they need
Always pay for scale
Always pay for talent
Right Skills, Right Job
Find the person who fits best
Let people be the expert
Let people expand
Gets the Job Done
Commitment to Quality
Delivers
Notes de l'éditeur
Welcome to MOPS Con 2019, happy to have you here,
This is pre recorded and I will be on the live chat window to do live Q&A.
Today I’m going to talk about how to build a stellar Marketing Operations team. First we’ll talk about the core areas that make up MOPS and the roles involved.
Then I’ll talk about growing the team and each person.
https://etumos.com/marketing-operations/blog-defining-mops-marketing-technology/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Division_of_labour
Ed Unthank posted this a few months ago and it accurately captures the core MOPS disciplines that have emerged. Whether you call it by these names or something else, these should feel familiar.
pillars map to people in your organization and how you can build up the team within each sub discipline or as a whole.
When many of us began in MOPS around 2010, the division of labor barely existed – now that MOPS is a full fledged function, career path, and discipline, it makes sense to discuss the emergent sub disciplines, with Ed Unthank breaks down into these Four Pillars.
Within MOPS, you can break down the responsibilities into four major areas. I’ve worked in all four, as I’m sure many of you have. As a team leader, it’s important to have a good understanding of all four areas, yet you do not have to be an expert in all four --- nor do I recommend it!
At a smaller firm, such as many of the startups here in the Valley or around the world, there will be a single MOPS person responsible for many – or all of these areas. While less so these days, quite a few people are actually Demand Generation Marketers. As MOPS has become a function, the Demand Gen area usually sticks with Campaign Operations pillar as many field marketers or webinar generators will work inside the MAP for their particular needs, while a MAP Admin works in one or two of the other pillars to support scale and data for those marketers.
The modern marketing assembly line - Platform, Integrations, Campaign/Floor Managers, QA, and reports from actual field use.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:At_Boeing%27s_Everett_factory_near_Seattle_(9130160595).jpg
Think about the assembly line and the division of labor. Not everyone can or should do everything in MOPS. I’ve always known my limitation is knowing technical requirements and being able to hand those to developers, but staying out of that code. Never a good coder, but I understand what a developer needs to discuss and see and how to talk with them. Same thing with marketers and with Sales people since I’ve done both jobs.
The four pillars do not necessarily lend themselves to an assembly line entirely, but you can think of them as a delivery mechanism for telling your organization’s story at scale - from the underlying infrastructure to the feedback loops of response data and changes to messaging.
In my current role, I run a team that covers parts of all four pillars -- I have an Architecture Team, which includes email and Page devs, integrations; I have an Event Operations Team focused on the processes for Field and Major events --- that team owns tools like Cvent, Webinars, and Marketo Event Templates for scale; and I have an ABMS/Email team. What my team does not do is reporting beyond email deliverability. MOPS has other teams dedicated to reports; data scientists, and what I call Marketing Systems or DevOps – real engineers or close to it.
From Ed’s blog post, we can look at how one or two employees handle the work across the pillars.
Very unlikely to have reporting or technical specialists here.
As you grow, you might have someone focus on Admin and Scale vs. execution.
While we see A LOT of Director of MOPS roles around, very few actually have 4-7 people like this. They should, because you need a reporting specialist, an Admin, and good campaign execution staff who understand how to start scaling the system. Sometimes those Campaign people will be actual demand gen marketers, or maybe live outside MOPS.
Depending on the size of the tea and firm’s needs, you will certainly reach Director or VP of MOPS with this kind of breakdown. A surprising number of very large enterprises I’ve spoken with have not even thought about their MOPS department like this. They should and you should too. As your company grows, you should have a 1-3 year team growth plan based on the Four Pillars and expeted needs.
And it’s ok if your CMO or other leaders want to place Marketing Intelligence or BI elsewhere. You will still have some level of reporting or data integration expert on the team to interface with that team to ensure they get the right data. Your architect will assist to ensure the martech stack is always supporting business requirements.