Building A Marketing Operations Playbook
Mike and Ian Shields walk through building a marketing operations playbook, covering documentation, tech stack alignment, lead source attribution, and campaign management. They show how to organize internal communication and processes so your marketing ops team actually uses what you build.
We could do like some brief intros just in case people don't. Don't generally know who both of us are. So I'll jump because I'm blabbing. Hi everybody. Thank you Kyle and Diana for having us on. I appreciate it. I have been a long time HubSpot user. I don't even know, maybe 10, 15 years, whatever. It's been a long time. And definitely a super, super fan admin and just all around lover of marketing automation and marketing operations. I'm the CEO and founder of MarketingOps.com, which is a professional community to help elevate all of you in your career as marketing operations professionals. And we've got a great, great community. It is broader than just HubSpot admin work. So if you ever want to talk about some other topics, you are more than welcome to come hang out with us at any time. And later today we'll show you some additional community resources that we hope that you check out that Ian will be sharing with you. But I'll let Ian introduce himself real quick too.
Hi all, my name is Ian Shields. Been using HubSpot for about 10 years now. Been doing demand generation marketing ops for about 14 years now. An independent consultant. Do my own thing and let's see, my spirit animal is a polar bear.
Nice, I like that one. I didn't know that about you after all this time.
Yeah, there you go.
I have more questions. We'll have to get those to those later. All right, so what's that now? So today we're going to talk a little bit about a marketing operations playbook. So to tee this up, I will definitely share my screen, but let me, let me give you a little bit of a backstory. So as a admin marketing operations professional, you're herding a lot of cats, right? Like there's a lot of moving parts. You're trying to manage a tech stack, all the data that goes into it and the people that are going to be using it. And I believe that your core responsibility absolutely. Is to create that documentation, even though it formed that we offer it on marketingops.com or in partnership with super is a way for you to just sort of have a jumping off point to say, hey, what are all the things that I should be thinking about as it relates to aligning my organization's use of the technology platforms that we have and really usher your ability to go have meaningful conversations with the rest of the sort of groups inside of your organization.
Right.
So ideally a marketing operations playbook once it comes to Fruition is actually not just an isolated document that you plug away on all the time. It's giving you the ability to go have meaningful discussions about how the business operates and how people need the technology to support their different roles in different departments and really allows you to expand your footprint. So if you're an embedded employee, it's a great resource for that. If you're an external consultant, excuse me. Also a great way to try to bridge conversations with the rest of the go to market organization. So hopefully that's helpful to sort of set the tone for the way that I think about a marketing operations playbook and its utility, I guess. Let me go ahead and share my screen. Everybody seeing that looks good. Cool. Just very plainly you'll see that there's a structure to all of this, a table of contents, so to speak. But right at the top, really the goal of this entire piece of documentation is to first and foremost define the apps that you're using in your tech stack and then go and define the process and really work on aligning marketing and sales. And I would argue in the world that we are in today as we think about revops, if you've got a support and customer success organization in it, you absolutely can draw lines into all of those departments as well through this material. So I feel like I am going to be talking a lot at you. I. It's. I'm going to guide you through effectively what's already in here. And Kyle, if you've got questions, you want to go deep, anywhere anybody wants to stop me, I feel like I'm saying things where a bunch of people here on this webinar today would be like, duh, Mike, like, yeah, I know what that means. So I apologize, that's how I feel. But if you find this helpful, please give me a word of encouragement because I'm hopeful that this is asking about how you know, leads work or what an MQL is or what have you, being able to point them to a source of truth where this is like an established and agreed upon kind of solution is just, you know, hey, here it is. We have it documented here. Go to this link, right? Or go click on this card and view it over here. In this super environment that we have for you, like whatever it is that you do, however you bring your stuff to life, is a super nice asset to have as someone working on the tech stack all the time. So I don't think I need to repeat myself here, but it's pretty clear, right? You're going to have a section inside of your playbook that documents your sales enablement solutions. Again, I would argue you could add in more around client success and other things. I actually do take it as far as looking at internal communication tools because it's not just how your business works with the customers that are coming into your environment, Right. And your tech stack and your go to market, but it's also how your team and your internal team needs to know how to communicate with you and where to go for certain things.
Right.
I think your job as a sort of marketing operations technologist and someone who's just trying to understand the breadth of all of the things that are going on in a business, if you're going to go document everything, you might as well also create a resource that makes it easy for your team to understand where to go to get the rest of the resources that they need.
Right.
And so in this example, hey, Mike.
Do me a favor, can you zoom in a little bit? People are like, ah, it's a little small.
Oh, zoom in more. Okay, got it.
Just a little bit here.
Is that better?
Yeah, that's a bit better. And I know in the chat I'm following along here, People are saying, hey, like trying to get to the super link. We'll get to that. We'll go through this document and then we'll take a moment to like walk through it so everyone, everyone can have it in their super cool.
Amy, is that a little bit better? I see you're saying it's. You're on a laptop. I'm trying to go as big as I can here. Okay, sorry. I have this massive screen too. So this is like. So, yeah, the internal communication tools. I think it's really important to call out how your team works, right. How to access them, where to go, where to post a question. Actually, I skipped ahead here right at the top of this document. I highly recommend, whatever version of this doc you have living, I highly recommend that you have a really easy way for someone to go put in a request. In this case, I call out that you should link this to a Google form or whatever tool you're using to ingest requests from your clients or your teams, just call that out right away, make it easy for them to do that. But again, as you. So that ideally, if you ever wanted to have anybody get some help with one of the solutions, you can point literally anybody in your organization to this document and say, hey, this is your, I don't know, dictionary of where to go to find the help that you need and who's currently responsible for these things. So who's your manager, who's the support person, who's the key stakeholder? And you'll see that as sort of a recurring theme throughout the rest of the sort of like categories inside of this environment.
Getting lots of questions about how people can access this doc.
Yeah, so this one is the one that's like accessible through. I'm not here to sell you guys this. It's a $20 template, but super has it available. There's a magic link that was actually posted if you want to grab it out of the Super. It's free. You can literally get access to a free version of this through them which will show up in your account like this. I just structured the folders a little bit differently into these different categories and in each one of these I actually have an overview video about the section, etc. So yeah, there's the link again in the chat. So hopefully that's. Hopefully that's helpful. Yeah. And then. Okay, so. So we're in this category of demand generation tools. We're talking about what it is that the tool is used for and I think just being really, really clear about that with your organization.
Right.
Establishing sort of the utility of the products that you're purchasing. Ideally, when this is a living document, not just a one and done kind of thing, you will be able to go back and reevaluate if the tech stack you have today is what you need.
Right.
Are you sort of checking all the boxes again? I'm not going to shy away from the boring nature of documentation, but how critical it is to have that resource internally or for your client. This is a great deliverable too. If you're like a consultant, say, hey, this is what we're going to do. We're going to come in and we're going to document your entire process, your tech stack and we might even make it live inside of the tools that you live in.
Right.
By bringing it to life with like a Super type of situation.
Oh, I disagree. I don't think documentation is boring. Right. It's only.
I love it, but some people are like snore.
Yeah, it's going to be as dull as what you put into it. So if you can add a few easter eggs. Right. A little bit of celebration as people go through and like fill it in or consume it, it makes more interesting and fun. And yeah, it's not just going to be like a word doc like this. You can definitely do a loom video. You could have a lucid or mirror bar chart these visuals that also show it like we all learn in different ways. We consume information differently. So if you see that your team isn't easily reading it, maybe you just do a two minute video and they can easily like okay, yeah, I get it. I can watch it at 2x. Mike told me I'm envious of his mic. I got it, I got it.
Yeah, they came back just to watch the mic.
Just mic.
Just the mic. But it's also, you know, I think I try to straddle the line between like those that are consultants and working at agencies versus like embedded on teams. Right. You know, I think it's easier to escape the repeat question when you're agency or a consultant, you know, there's, you're not inundated constantly with like hey, where's this thing? Or how does this work? Or what have you. Because usually there's probably just a couple of points of contact that actually have access to you. But when you're on an internal team, boy, this is super helpful, right? Every single time some BDR or CS person reaches out and is asking about how you know, leads work or what an MQL is or what have you, being able to point them to a source of truth where this is like an established and agreed upon kind of solution is just, you know, hey, here it is. We have it documented here. Go to this link, right? Or go click on this card and view it over here. In this super environment that we have for you, like whatever it is that you do, however you bring your stuff to life is, is, is a super nice asset to have as, as someone working on the tech stack all the time. So I, I don't think I need to repeat myself here, but it's pretty clear, right? You're going to have a section inside of your playbook that documents your sales enablement solutions. Again, I would argue you could add in more around client success and other things. I actually do take it as far as looking at internal communication tools because it's not just how your business works, right. With the customers that are coming into your environment, right. And your tech stack and your go to market, but it's also how your team and your internal team needs to know how to communicate with you and where to go for certain things.
Right.
I think your job as a sort of marketing operations technologist and someone who's just trying to understand the breadth of all of the things that are going on in a business, if you're going to go document everything, you might as well also create a resource that makes it easy for Your team to understand where to go to get the rest of the resources that they need.
Right.
And so in this example, hey, Mike.
Do me a favor, can you zoom in a little bit? People are be like, ah, it's a little small.
Oh, zoom in more. Okay, got it.
Just a little bit here.
Is that better?
Yeah, that's a bit better. And I know in the chat I'm following along here, people are saying, hey, like trying to get to the super link. We'll get to that. We'll go through this document and then we'll take a moment to like walk through it so everyone, everyone can have it in their super cool.
Amy, is that a little bit better? I see you're saying it's you're on a laptop. I'm trying to go as big as I can here. Okay, sorry. I have this massive screen too. So this is like. So, yeah, the internal communication tools. I think it's really important to call out how your team works, right? How to access them, where to go, where to post a question. Actually, I skipped ahead here, right at the top of this document. I highly recommend whatever version of this doc you have living, I highly recommend that you have a really easy way for someone to go put in a request. In this case, I call out that you should link this to a Google form or whatever tool you're using to ingest requests from your clients or your teams. Just call that out right away, right? Make it easy for them to do that. But again, as you, as you sort of are documenting how your team works, you know, at the time, Slack was still pretty new when I first wrote this document. So I was teaching people how to turn off G Chat because I was like, we don't use this, like, here's how to turn it off. But you know, you obviously can maybe skip that now then how your team meets and all those kinds of things. I've even gone so far just quick anecdote here or additional note. I have gone so far as to say, where do your marketing team members store files for themselves? Where does the marketing team need to access materials? And then what's the internal open folder structure for the rest of the organization? And you sort of call that stuff out in here too, right? So that way it doesn't matter who's interacting with the document. They know where they can go to get assets. Think like PDFs, graphics, logos, all those kinds of things. Things that would be normally accessible to the rest of the organization can go in that folder. And then the other piece of documentation is like hey, this is where the team goes. And if you're on the team, you should have access to this and so on and so forth. Okay, here I am just rambling away and it is impossible for me to keep up with the chat. So just call out if there's something I need to pay attention to right now because I'm pretty good at multitasking, but this one's too hard. So life cycle management, all right, this is pretty core, right, to our roles as admins, as marketing operations professionals, largely. And I do go so far in this document as to call out sort of the key differences between the marketing pipeline, the marketing life cycles, and maybe how sales would interpret those things. I'm not saying that they're different, they are one and the same, but we all know that a sales organization is going to, you know, say the word lead and we're going to have very different definitions of what those two things are.
Right?
A lead just by. To illustrate the point, a lead for us might be something more like very top of funnel, very light bit of information is known about them, right? Like maybe they filled out a demo form like, you know, around 45 or more days ago or whatever.
Right.
Um, but on the sales side, there's like actually two different kinds of leads, right? There's an inbound lead and there's an outbound lead, and they might actually be referring to it as lead the object, not lead the status. Right? So these things really matter to sort of the flow of, of how your business operates.
Right?
And, and just again, you know, for, for those of you who maybe didn't hear at the very beginning, like, this document is your way to establish alignment between your tech stack, your people, your process and your technology.
Okay.
And you are the person that can usher those conversations and ultimately get agreement on, hey, this is what we over here in marketing, I've worked with the marketing leadership team, I've worked with the rest of the organization. I've built out all of these qualifiers to identify people by these stages. And now you're. Imagine you're sitting in front of your sales leadership team, right? And you say, this is what we said. An MQL is. Is this today your understanding of what a marketing qualified lead is?
Right.
And you. And then inevitably they're going to be like, no, right? Or yeah, actually we were pretty lined, which would be magical. And once you get that agreement, this becomes your locked and loaded. Like, hey, this does whatever just happened, the record that just came in, the account, the person, the whoever, does it fit these criteria. Because if it doesn't, this is what we, as a team, as an organization, as a go to market operation team. Agreed. Is the stage that it should be in. And it's your fallback to be able to like work through some of those nuances. So you should try to be as detailed as possible as you go through building out the lifecycle sort of definitions in here. I will say it is, it is just not reasonable to expect that you're going to be able to like identify every single edge case of what makes somebody an mql. Like, it is just, it's just not a thing. Like I was at a SaaS company. There's product usage data, there's like the interactions on the website. There's all of these things that like put people through the lifecycle. They go through it, they decline, they go into a nurture state, they come back, you gotta sort of wipe their statuses and do all of these crazy things. That is, that is just, it's just not possible to document every single bit of how that works. But getting at least to the core of like what as a team really defines sort of the. Maybe like the first entry into what qualifies somebody to be an mql, that's a really important thing to get documented. Okay. Obviously I don't need to go through every single one of you have probably built out definitions before or set statuses inside of a HubSpot account. And we all know that in order to go backwards, you got to clear steps and all those other fun things. I don't think you need to document those things in here. Those are for your superpowers to, you know, to remain yours. Don't give everybody the secret sauce, but if they ask you those questions, it's always worth sharing. You know, hey, how come this person can't go back to sales qualified? Well, because we didn't write a rule for that. Okay. So again, I just, you know, I don't want to belabor the point, but just really working through the difference between lead and MQL and working through some of those definitions, this is a great, great, great opportunity to call out. And in my case, I don't, I don't know if I used appropriate colors here necessarily, but you know, if we said, hey, here's this lead inbound on the sales side, that's on the marketing side of the house, we would refer to that as an mql.
Right.
We would be identifying that as an MQL at this point. And then a lead outbound, you got an outbound team, they're like, you know, doing all their stuff, scraping contacts, whatever, putting them into the database. Those are actually going to sync over to your marketing automation platform as elite.
Right.
And it's important to call that out so that the team has a shared understanding of sort of the nomenclature, dating conventions and lifecycle stages. And then, you know, go, go so far into like rules on opting in can be found later in the document, et cetera, et cetera. So you'll see sort of down below more about that. Okay, Any other questions? I have to. John, thanks. Thanks, fella. I appreciate that. All right, data flow. I think this is really, really important when it comes to tech stack documentation. This is a super rudimentary data flow diagram. Ian and I have both built way more complex things. Ian does way more of the complex stuff than I do these days. But I think just think about who the audience is of who's going to consume this document. Maybe give them a snapshot of how the core sort of go to market system might work. In our case, that your company here, that was down there when I had built this originally was. Was mavenlink. And so we were actually ingesting data from our users straight into our HubSpot account. And then we had this sort of active sync called out here between Salesforce and HubSpot based on certain criteria. And if you want to build another version that's more robust than this, I suggest you link out to it, but maybe not try to house everything inside of one because visually it's just like darn near impossible as arrows done. And then this is like obviously a hot topic for everybody. I think if you've been to any of our sessions across the board, whether that's at Monte Palooza, the conference, webinars, you name it, right? In the community, just discussions broadly. Lead source attribution is never perfect. Don't expect it to be. And use this as a way to set up some of the guiding principles on how you will attribute leads to specific lead sources or categories or what have you. I'm seeing the Salesforce comment now. Hey, look, some people still use it, okay? And so it's really important for you to at least put in some of the guiding light on who your key stakeholders are that define how lead sources enter and are managed inside of your tech stack. You can see here. At the time we had our SVP of marketing, our senior digital marketing manager, myself as the marketing operations manager, and then we had a sales ops manager. All of us sat in a room and fought with, okay, well, what does it mean when XYZ happens?
Right?
And we tried to establish some sort of groundwork around inbound, outbound lead management, how you actually attribute sources across the board. Again, this is a really important thing to call out this template and this framework is something you can go fill in. It should be unique to your business and it should evolve. You will inevitably find edge cases and I'm going to cover some of those now, which I left in the template. Here's an example. If there's an enterprise named account that enters your system, how are you meant to handle that? You can imagine you've got enterprise sales reps doing all kinds of work trying to reach into this account. Someone comes in and they clicked a PPC ad, it's like, well, do we really want to give it credit to the paid channel? Right? Like we don't know. We need to work through those things. Time based scenario. Imagine a record comes into your database and it sits stale for a really long time. Or it demo no shows and it gets recycled and let's say it's been nine months since that record has come in. That opportunity was created nine months ago as a team. How do you want to set the lead source based on that?
Right?
Do you want to give it back to the nine month ago thing, right, wherever it came in nine months ago, Is that what we believe is the source of where that record originally came from? Or do you want to write in some other rules and say, hey, you know what, the actual winning value is the most recent touch point. And we're going to observe and recognize that it came out of some of these other channels originally as well. But when you think about the word credit, which I don't think is a bad word by the way, then you can make a rule here that establishes a foundation for you all to say, well remember we wrote this rule. When it's been longer than nine months, we're going to give it to the latest one. But when it's been less than nine months, we're going to give it to the original. This is the place for you to create that alignment across those teams and be that controller. You know what happens in a partner referral? What happens when it's an existing lead and outbound starts prospecting it? Here was the real world scenario I painted to somebody. You know this inbound lead is originally ppc, right? How do we ensure that all the future leads from the account based marketing activities are attributed to the original lead source? You gotta write in the process to be able to do all that stuff. And these are, you know, these are the jobs of a marketing technologist, marketing operations manager.
Right.
Obviously it kind of goes without saying we're talking about lead sources and attribution. This should be your place to document your approved lead source list. You can see at the time when this document was created. And what you may encounter in many client accounts is sometimes they start with a laundry list of literally everything is a lead source. Support, renewal, user expansions, account management, display, network, retargeting, existing customer, website, live chat, all of those are not lead source. Like we should categorize this and you can be the thought leader in your organization to help, say, hey, we should make this a little bit cleaner. Let's get to a place where it's easier to understand. Begin with the end in mind. How do you as a leadership organization want to sort of generally understand what's going on as it comes, when it comes down to leads.
Right.
And what's going on? And so let's list out the approved lead sources and clean that list up and then if it ever needs to change, go ahead and change it. I do think it's really important for you to call out the difference between lead source attribution and opportunity source attribution. If you happen to be an organization that is using a contact based environment and you're tracking lead sources at the contact level versus at the opportunity or account level, I think it's really important to do that. Once organizations convert to, what do you call it? Once organizations convert to using kind of like an account based model or they convert customers, right? They create customers. You might not want to totally recycle all of those. And so inevitably you just got these existing customers that are coming back into your pipeline. It's important to think, think through how do you sort of treat the opportunities perhaps differently than the way that you're looking at your contact. Okay, I'm going to keep going. It's a big document. Everybody's like, wow, this guy's talking a lot. The marketing campaign management and reporting, again, like super helpful template for you to jump in. This is not anywhere near as robust as it probably could or should be or would be inside of any client or organization account. But calling out your stakeholders, who's in charge of marketing, campaign management and reporting. I said I use this section to clearly outline where campaigns will be managed in more depth than just demand gen tools. If they overlap. I also cover the following. So you want to look at some naming conventions, conferences and event lead management, multivariate campaign tracking for later stage companies typically, again, we, at the time we were a HubSpot and Salesforce organization. So we had, we had to like really clearly define the difference between what's going on with campaigns in one tool versus the other. And so this was a place for us to do that.
Right.
We established some pretty standard naming conventions for us at the time. I would argue I've gotten a bit better at naming conventions thanks to Ian, truthfully. So in just a little bit, when I'm done sharing and we're almost at the end here, Ian's going to share a helpful resource that we're going to give to everybody. But in addition to that, we've got some more sort of naming convention related documents and resources for you as well. It's really important to just call out, hey, what's the thing that we're doing? How is it being used? How do we use HubSpot campaigns? If you're using other ways to measure your campaign attribution, then you need to call out the differences between how HubSpot is actually architected versus how Salesforce is architected or whatever it is that you're looking at. I also think it's really important. At the time we were producing a lot of assets and so we actually documented the exact process here on hey, when we offer a downloadable resource, how are we going to categorically roll those things up? So your team sort of always understands how to go look at the reports and the structure of your go to market activities. Right? Again, it's a resource for you and your sales team to be able to go in and understand how does the business actually operate and what is marketing doing to sort of organize all this information. So I think these are all fairly self explanatory. You're really just going through and calling out how you're sort of in interacting with these sort of different go to market activities. I think true to any organization doing any type of field marketing, it is, this is probably the thing that comes up the most. Hey, how do leads get into the system?
Right?
Or how should they be put into the system? Document that process here. Use this as a way to say, hey, we're going to first capture all of the data. We are going to then consolidate all of it into a CSV. We're going to upload it into HubSpot because HubSpot offers DE duplication right by email address. If we need to put it anywhere else, I will trigger a workflow to map the data somewhere else.
Right.
Whether that's a different system of record Whether that's, I don't know, like, you name it, right? A registration platform, what have you. But this is a super important piece of the piece of the pie. I also, you know, importantly call out, well, how does someone become a high priority lead from that activity?
Right?
And so you're working again, remember, like, you're using this document to align the business. You're going to go to your field marketers, you're going to say, hey, all the salespeople want to know which of the leads we just imported are high priority. Well, there's a lot of discussion that has to be happened there, right? And then there's a lot of foundational elements that you have to help your field team. Say, hey, we need you to capture something, some signal from the conversations you're having on the floor to tell us that the like, you know, 10 out of the 150 scans you did were actually hot.
Right.
And we need, we need to be able to establish that alignment. So you work with team. In our case, we had a question that we were really old school. We would stand, I was the guy standing at the booth and I would pull people in and I would say, hey, do you want to learn more about mavenlink?
Right?
And they were like, sure. And so we're in this conversation, I was like, well, you know, what about when are you looking to make a decision? So it's this time frame to evaluate question, right? And anybody that was immediately or three to six months was set to MQL and this is where that definition was established.
Right.
But thankfully I was the field marketer guy, so I kind of like talked. I had a conversation with myself. I do that a lot, I guess. But the, the idea is that you're, you're ushering in that alignment again. All right? And then I told you earlier about internal document management. So I have a little section in here for that you might want to call out where the marketing team houses things and then the rest of the staff can house things. And then last and certainly not least, the definitions index. So the idea of like, what is an opt in?
Right?
That's a really simple question that someone asks with a really complex answer most of the time, right. It can be as straightforward as like somebody who's literally filled out a form, checked the box, and then click the button in the email for the double confirmation.
Right?
But maybe that's how you have to do it.
Right?
And so, and then, you know, defining the difference between opting in to be tracked on cookies on the website, which apparently aren't going away anymore, anymore. And really just getting alignment across the business here. I do have a fun little nugget in here. We use the term imql. It was a way to describe somebody that's an instant mql. So this is somebody that's legit, asking to talk to sales as quickly as possible. It is stored here in our definitions index. So that if we ever said that internally, we're like, hey, we have an imql. Everybody understands that that's somebody that's like hot, right? Versus, you know, your traditional sort of path to mql, which is lots of engagement, lots of, you know, interaction and signals. And then we as a marketing organization in alignment with sales, have said, hey, we think this is ready for sales.
Right?
Very different, you know, types of MQLs. In that case, immediately make qualifications like Nano. Okay, I have reached the end. Fun little nugget. It's funny all the things I say that I've never, never realized.
I say in the chat for forever.
Mike, it's there forever. Ginger, thank you for joining. Again, this is available as a kit. I saw something around links maybe not working right now. We absolutely will make sure that it is working for you. But ultimately, if you do want to bring this to life inside of the technologies that you're using, it is very handy for someone to go to the little pane on the right hand side. I will say, what is it called? The chrome extension. That's the word I was looking for. And type in the word MQL and then get the definitions surfaced to them and maybe a video you recorded that says, want to learn about MQLs? Here it is. It lives right here. You don't even have to go anywhere. No Google Doc or anything required. And there's little lightning bolts next to those things for people to maybe dip in and learn a little bit more. So I think if you can, I highly recommend you spend time thinking about ways to bring it to life. Documentation, unfortunately, does go to the wayside and it sometimes can feel like it just sits in the ether. And the more you can bring it to life, make it a part of your living sort of breathing process of your organization, the better that will be. And so I sort of highly recommend going through and doing that as best as you can. Okay, Ian, I'm going to share the power pack. Power up. Do you want to talk through some of it?
Yeah, absolutely. Bring on up.
Yes, Laura, this is. Yes, yes, sorry, I was answering your question. Someone is. I need to do a better job of Explaining that I'll prepare better next time to show that off. But yes, you can bring it to life right inside of your. Whatever apps you're using. As long as it's a web based browser, it's wonderful.
All right, Ian, so what we also put together is this what we're calling a power up pack. Mike, do you have it in. Do you have it in HubSpot? Yeah. And Zoom in on that. Yeah. So laptop or giant screen? Either way, it looks good. What we did is put together helpful resources as you want to level up your game. Right. With your knowledge and skills as a marketing operations professional. What communities are there, what events are happening? Is there newsletters and videos? So we found a collection of those and listed them all out. So if you scroll down here a bit, Mike, this is just a small example of how I do documentation is I want this information to live in the system that we're using and linking out to other places. So this is one that's free. Drop the link here in the chat. And it's helpful to have all these resources when you have a new team member or you're like, I forget, like there was a newsletter or there's some videos, there's a podcast I need to listen to. It's there in HubSpot. Find the link, pull it out. Okay. Some of my favorites are in here. I'm not going to call them out. Kyle, you're in many of them. But please, with this, don't get overwhelmed being like, wow, that's a lot. Have patience with yourself and just be like, pick and choose what sounds interesting at the time or what's relevant to you. And as you go through this content, something that's been helpful to me and I also recommend is like, if I listen to a new Rev Ops FM podcast with Justin Norris to make it stick in my mind, I try and think of like, what's one thing I need to take away professionally? What's one thing I can take away personally? I write them down, make sure that I have them. Something I can work on for the week or for the month. It helps a lot of those insights stick in my mind. So link is here. Kyle will also share this link to everybody at the event that's registered. I get that, right, Kyle?
I mean, Deanna will do it, let's be honest. But yes, it will be shared.
Appreciate you. Yeah, share it out, make sure it's there. Probably do a few more of these. And then as far as naming conventions, happy to chat with that. Chat with y' all in Q and A about that. I have a document. It's not ready for the spotlight yet, but happy to chat through and talk about something that's near and dear to my heart organization.
Yeah. So thank you both. We do have some things in the Q and A if we want to transition over to that. It looks like only eight, so if anyone has questions, go put them in there. Alternatively, you'd like to play a round of applause Wrong answers only. And put some naming convention. Wrong answers only in the chat. I think that could be delightful and see if we can make Ian cry.
I've done it. Wrong answers only. And you can also put in like if you want a fun challenge, find a terrible one in your system. Copy paste it in the organization.
I think for your internal team it's important for you to have a cadence of often reviewing. Like let's just call it quarter. Like at least once a quarter you're setting aside time to go through and make sure that whatever section you own from that documentation is still accurate and either add or sort of redact or update the process in some way, shape or form in terms of getting the rest of the organization to use it. I do think it's important to host at least a quarterly business review on the processes and teach people. You do have to train them on this stuff. In the example of pre Superb Life, I would try to get everybody together roughly once a quarter for those that were willing to do the lunch and learn with me and I would try to talk them through the tech stack, the go to market process and all those kinds of things. I will definitely shamelessly plug that. Superd is probably one of the best ways that I've ever encountered for bringing documentation to life. You I'm a. I'm sort of that like cobbler's children has no shoes kind of person, you know. So like I don't. I actually haven't even taken the time to make it live in my account. Mostly because I'm just like stuck in my ways and just like too busy. But I have triggered a couple of cards inside of our HubSpot account where as we sort of interact with our community and members are joining, exploring new content and we need different internal team members or contractors to be able to have an understanding of what's going on and how we think about next steps to interact with them. We have the little icons inside of our account to say here's where you can go to get the resources you need to be able to answer some of the questions you might be getting. We're doing our best to continue to bring that documentation to life, but we're a really small team, you know, one day at a time. That would be my, my super hot tip. Pun intended.
All right, Chris asks, how do you balance the conversation slash education between a traditional approach to marketing ops and a full customer platform approach? For example, traditional approaches can tend to be very focused on lead gen and MQL SQL models, which can ignore many things happening outside of marketing.
Okay, where is the question?
It's in there.
Okay, I see it, I see it. How do you balance the conversation education between traditional approach and full customer platform? Interesting.
Read the room.
Yeah, yeah, read the room. Yeah, I think what's really important until you, until trying to decide how. I want to share that. If you ever feel like you have had enough experience as a marketing operations strategist, right. And you have started to gain the respect or trust of your organization to be seen as somebody that. And that every, by the way, like everybody here, your goal should be to like, not just be the person that's plugging away on the keyboard, like doing, making the things happen, right. Like, you don't want to be like the button pusher like person, like, oh, you're just the HubSpot person, right? Hopefully. I mean, I love that. I love being referred to as like the technology person for XYZ product, but I also really aspire to sort of like have more of that strategy discussion. And that does just take time and experience. And it also takes understanding the actual business, like what are the widgets and services that you sell, right? Like how do you make money as a company? How are teams comped, generally speaking. And as you learn sort of the fingerprint of the business, you can then start to ask more questions to your question, Chris. I think personally my experience has been the best approach is to ask more questions and get them to tell you what's going on. And then you're maybe not offering a different way or you're not sort of forcing your opinion on anybody. You're just really seeking to understand because your job is to sort of like corral the right, like help make sense of the world for these folks, right. And help the go to market process. So that's kind of a roundabout answer, but like it is, it's just a really delicate conversation and you don't want, you definitely don't want to accidentally interject at a time where maybe you haven't quite built that rapport to do that.
Right.
Because, you know, we see a lot and so we know about a lot about the business right away. And sometimes like I personally got really overconfident earlier in my career and was like not truly fully informed on. On the entire go to market. And what I learned is that I just have to ask more questions to be able to like have a better conversation about all that stuff.
Yeah, I think that's a really good point. Like Ted Lasso in the TV series, he says quite often like be curious, not judgmental.
Yeah.
So take the opportunities for one on one.
My experience has been the best approach is to ask more questions and get them to tell you what's going on.
And then meet with different people in the organization and Right. Take them out of that setting of the office. Maybe you take a walk, go grab a cup of coffee together, whatever that might be. But be curious about how that person is personally as well as what are their goals and KPIs like how do they view the world? And you can learn a lot just by being curious and trying to understand all the different people that are working in the business and those that are using HubSpot.
We have about six minutes left. We have at least that many questions to get through. But a trend I'm seeing both in the Q and A and the chat is people being a little confused about how to access this stuff. And I think maybe the most valuable we can do thing we can do with the last few minutes we have is make sure people can actually get to the resources we've been talking about today. So I don't know Deanna, if you want to do some super troubleshooting or Mike, you want to talk about your website and the Download and the $20 and stuff but I think, I think some folks need some help.
Yeah, sure. I mean I want, I want you to be able to bring this stuff to life and I would like for you to all have access to effectively the entire thing at not $20. My goal is to not sell you a 20 template today. My goal is to like help enable you and give you a jumping off point. And that is part of the reason why super and I work together to put this in there. So Diana, I will post a link to it. But like for the sake of like you know, you, you not having to spend 20 on it. Folks, like please.
Yeah, if you're having issue actually getting into it, you do need a super account. It you can sign up for a free account. You don't have to have a paid account. So if you go to that link that was shared that Kyle has pinned up there, go in it's going to ask you to join a team. If you don't already have a super account, you can create one right then and there, verify your email, and then once you verify your email, it'll take you right into that package. You just click, click, install package, and boom, it's right there and you get to use it. Tony's going to come show us, aren't you, Tony?
I love it.
I would love to be the person who's going to do that, but sadly, I can't get it to work either. So I just thought I'd let you guys know that Lindsay's looking into it. My side, I don't know what PSM.
Team for the win.
I know what she's saying. She's saying that it is there.
Okay, Lindsey fixed it so fast.
Check where you've installed it. If you've got a catch all base or you didn't select the base, just make sure that you've installed it into the. Into the base you think it's in, because the package won't create the base separately. The cards have gone in, but the base isn't being created. So for superducers, you'll know what I mean. It's in there. You'll just need to whack it out and do a bit of editing on it. Yeah.
Fame at last.
Check me out.
I'm here.
Can I talk about me?
Okay. Appreciate it.
Thanks, guys.
And then if it's. If it's okay with everybody, if you have any interest in coming to Maps of Palooza, please reach out to me. I did create a discount code for you all to be able to get a discount on whether you're looking to virtually attend or come in person. So it's called, it's hugs and MOPCOM 10 is the code, and you can use that at step four of the checkout process when you're coming in. I dropped it in chat for you. If you want to grab it, the link should work. We would love to keep talking shop about Martech and marketing ops broadly with all of you. That is all we do. It is a room full of marketing ops nerds, words, which is actually really magical. It also makes your brain super mushy by the end of the conference. Like, you're. You're in deep conversations so quickly that you're like, okay, I need. I need a cookie. Like, I need to take a break for a second.
All right, well, thank you both for being here. If folks want to connect with you two individually after this, what's the best place to find you.
I'm mostly on LinkedIn. That's the only true social platform I use. You are absolutely welcome to connect with me. Here is my. Here's my link. Certainly you can find me in the MO Pro Slack community as well. So you can come join us there if you'd like. But LinkedIn is super easy.
Mike doing my job for me.
He's so fast. Maybe the first time speakers ever beat you.
That was quick.
I had it. I had it ready. There you go.
For me. You can find me on LinkedIn. You also find me on the Slack communities. I'm in a few. I'm in the Sprocketeer Community Marketing ops, MO Pros, wizard of Ops, the Huddle and a few others.
Me too, by the way.
So, yeah, connect with me on LinkedIn or one of those Slack communities. Be happy to chat.
Great.
Well, thanks guys so much for being here. Thanks all of you for joining us the at this session of the Admin hug. Hope to see you all back next week and we're gonna call it here and let you all get back to your Tuesday. Thanks everyone.
Thank you. Appreciate it. Deanna, Kyle, thanks everybody.
Bye.
