How to Continuously Learn and Grow in Marketing Ops with Raja Walia

Hi, I'm Michael Hartman.

I'm Naomi Liu.

And I'm Mike Rizzo.

And this is OpsCast, a podcast for marketing ops pros and RevOps pros, created by the MoPros, the number one community for marketing operations professionals.

Tune into each episode as we chat with real professionals to help elevate you and your marketing operations career.

Hello everyone. Welcome to another episode of OpsCast brought to you by marketingops.com, powered by the MoPros. I'm your host, Michael Hartman, today joined by Naomi Liu. Naomi, I think this is one of the few times you and just, just you and me.

So, I know, just the, just the two of us.

Just the two. Okay. I don't think we need me singing.

No, can't harmonize with you.

No, wouldn't. I'm not sure that would end well, so we'll just cut it. Um, like I even had, couldn't even really do much in that, that marketingops.com rap song that Mike just reposted recently. So, uh, anyway, so let me move on then. So joining us today, uh, we're going to be talking about how to learn and grow in your marketing ops role. Uh, and joining us to talk about that is Raja Walia. Raja, I should have asked you before, like, did I pronounce it right?

Well, you can get to that. Yeah, no, you're good. Yeah. Raja Walia is good. A lot of people call me Raj or Raja. I will tell you a lot of people just call me Raj.

Got it. Okay. So Raj is the founder and principal consultant of GNW Consulting, a marketing automation CRM consulting company. GNW is the latest in a series of marketing and marketing operations and marketing automation consulting organizations that he's been a part of. And I think he had a little bit of a stint in-house in a marketing role, but Raja, welcome. And thank you for joining us today.

Yeah, no, pleasure to be here. And actually, I've never had an in-house role. So ever since my career kicked off, I've always been in consulting outside of like, you know, whatever jobs you get after college and whatever comes up, uh, whatever comes up and whatever jobs will accept you after you get your degree. Uh, but I've always been in consulting. So ever since I started my career.

All right. There you go. So I, there's failure number 1 for me. Definitely. So, well, at least first one on this, it's probably not the first one on the day, but, um, so, okay. So I really, I think this is going to be a good one for the folks who are our listeners. And, um, because I think a lot of folks, I know I get a lot of questions. We see them in the marketingops.com community about like, how do you learn? What should I learn next? That kind of stuff for folks. But before we get into that, um, so we just highlighted a little bit about your career. Why don't we, you share a little bit about, you know, your career, um, and, uh, what led you to stay in consulting the whole time? And, and maybe one of, one of the things I know I'm interested in is, are there sort of, sort of points in your career where you sort of could have gone down path A or path B that, you know, kind of led you this way? And, or are there people that you think were significant in, in kind of helping you through your career?

Yeah, no, absolutely. Um, so kind of give you a background about myself. Uh, me, myself, I started consulting, I want to say in 2011. Uh, I worked for a consulting agency at the time, and that was actually just when marketing automation was kicking off. At that point in time, I don't think Marketo had branded themselves as Marketo, but they had just rolled out certification after the first year of consulting. Uh, so I was one of like, I think the first 10 pilot members of the original, original, original Marketo certified. exam or whatever, whatever essentially that was, that was called. Um, uh, real quick, the second part of your question as far as what made me stay in consulting.

Yeah. So, 'cause I know I, I started in consulting, different kind of consulting way back in my career, and then I, I shifted away and I always, I think I always thought I would go back to consulting and then never did.

And, uh, you know, consulting's one of those things is that once you, either you hate it or you like it. And I always, and I just gravitated, gravitated towards it. Mainly just because there were so much, uh, differences, right? There's so many companies that you work with. There's so many marketing strategies. There's so many flavors and so many builds that you learn across platforms. So, you know, I originally started with like, you know, Marketo and then I slowly expanded to HubSpot, Eloqua. At one point in my career, I was certified in Pardot and Marketing Cloud. And I'm active certified in Salesforce and Dynamics and, you know, slowly kind of go down the realm of strategy. And I think one of the best parts about consulting for me was that it was never the same. I think one of the things I always felt going in-house is you market one product, maybe we have expansions, there's upsells, and it gets kind of, and it gets a little bit like, uh, I want to say it gets a little bit repetitive, right? Because essentially you're marketing one product and the life cycles are always anonymous, close one, where are upsell opportunities? But with consulting, you get the idea, you get the benefit. I want to say not even so the idea. Um, well, you have to have ideas actually. With consulting, you have to have ideas for multiple organizations, whether it's B2C or whether it's B2B. So I think that's one of the things that just made me stay in consulting for the longest time, because when one project stops, another project starts. And sometimes there's 10 projects that starts and you have to be very quick on your feet and you have to be very intuitive enough to know what a company's or what a company's goals is. goals are, sorry, and how does that tie into their current tech stack? How are they leveraging it? Um, so first when I started, um, you know, I think everyone had every strategy in the world, right? They would, they would talk about like lead scoring as this mythical thing and they're like, you can score leads and you can organize them and people will know that the points make them, the more the points, the better. And now I think, uh, kind of tying into the topic is like, you know, what What makes, uh, like, how do, how do you grow in your marketing ops career is like, we've come to a point where you really have to kind of like know your shit. Like there is no more pie in the sky strategies anymore. Like you have to understand technology because if you don't, you might be able to pitch yourself and you might be able to sell yourself. But as soon as you start actually doing the work, people will catch on relatively quickly that, hey, you know what, this is, this is someone that has either been doing it for a small amount of time or it's just been bullshit, like from the get-go. So, and I think that's one of the cool things about consulting is because you're constantly getting knowledge checked. You're constantly getting, does this person actually stand behind what they're saying and do they know how to do it? Like actually physically do it compared to not do it. And I think that's one of the things that kind of keeps me on my toes is because even though I founded GNW Consulting and, you know, we've grown exponentially over the last 4 years as an organization and we have clients that are with, you know, various marketing automation platforms, not just one, is that you get knowledge checked and you have to be, you have to do your due diligence and make sure your knowledge is on point. If not, a person that just started that's been doing more research will find out very quickly if you're, you know, if you're just blowing hot smoke, uh, or if you're blowing like hot air their way. So I think that's one of my favorite parts about consulting.

That's interesting. Um, I'm just so curious, going a little bit off track here, but I want to follow up on something. So I'm curious when you, that, that being checked for knowledge, that aligns with my experience in being consulting, right? So you're sort of forced to stay up with stuff. I'm curious, do you get called in from either clients, new clients or existing clients when they're considering new, new technology?

So, um, well, it's not too off track, but we get called in at various stages. With our clients, so it could be they they could be in the vendor selection process. And since we have clients that you know have different platforms, they'll ask us which is our favorite one. And then based off on their skill set, like if someone's more technologically advanced, you know how to write SQL queries and run code, and you're a B to C customer. Well, I guess what you know what Marketing Cloud might be the king. But if you have someone that's a very good marketing strategy person, but you know it might be like an ops role, or they might not be very technical, then you have other platforms like Marketo, which is huge, that comes into play. So we will either get pulled in from a vendor selection. We're trying to do this. What is our tech stack? Do we have this tech stack? And what do we do with it? Like, are we optimizing? Like the standard consulting type of questions people get asked, right? Yeah.

Well, it's, it's, sorry, it was, so it was top of, not sort of top of mind for me because I had a, I was in a conversation earlier today with somebody talking about Who was it? It was actually, it was a martech vendor was asking for input on like, how should we be selling to marketers or marketing tech people? And, and, um, like they were struggling and I was like, I think part of this is because, you know, marketing tech or marketing ops people tend to be, A, they're really busy, right? Like to get their attention alone, right? So they're, they're going to be wanting to get moved stuff along and We're used to sort of evaluating stuff. Like I was, we got in the conversation about if I asked for a demo, I want a demo. I don't want you to be asking me a bunch of questions at the same time. So we actually had a couple of episodes on this like a year ago on like, we actually talked about how to sell to marketing ops. And then we, we actually had a couple of salespeople who wanted to counter that, which was great. We actually had a really good conversation, but at the same time, I'm like, the reason I'm saying that is because I I know that your demo's gonna be like a really clean, right? Controlled environment of data and system that is like, this is the best case scenario. But I'll also be looking like, okay, I wanna know, given what I know about my shitstorm, right? In my environment.

Yeah.

Right. What, or what, you know, maybe it's not even a shitstorm, but I know that there are issues or nuances or difference in the way we go to market than the way they think about it. That, um, you know, I can pretty much go like, okay, I get the strategy or the potential of this, but I'm not sure I could— it will match up with us right now. Right. Or I might.

And see that, that what you said right there is probably like one of the most key things in the modern day marketing automation space, right? Like knowing what I know and knowing what it is like, does that strategy match up with the technology? And does that Does that strategy match up with my business objectives, right? So when you, when you want to grow in your ops role, whether you're starting, you have to make sure that, because I mean, the tech landscape is so huge and people will sell you the most pristine conditioned environments. And then when you get it and you start setting it up, either data isn't there. And that as something as consultants, you just know, right? Like Naomi said it, like, you know, you said it, like, it's just, you just know, like, that is not. the current state of things for yourself. And I think when you grow into your ops role, that's something that is, is tenure. Like you just, you just learn that over time rather than kind of believing a flashy demo.

Yeah.

What did I say? What I always say, uh, Michael, is that I wanted you to present your deck backwards.

Uh, yeah, that's really, that's, that's the secret with Naomi.

Yeah. So, yeah, it's present your deck to me backwards because I want to see the end. Yeah. I don't need to see what Fortune 500 companies also utilize your platform.

I totally, I was like, I don't need to see your logo page. Like, I don't care. Not right now. Like, at some point, if we get further along, maybe that makes a difference. Yeah.

You know, it's funny. It's funny because when I actually do pitch decks for companies and, you know, they want to know what about our consulting, like, you know, packages and services, the second slide is a bunch of logos and I'm like, all right, this is my validation page. These are the companies we've worked with and we move on from that one. Right? Like this is, the logos are just there to give you some sort of, you know, some sort of easement, like, okay. It's just not like, you know, uh, uh, a mom and pop shop or something, or it's not, it's not something like local or something that you made up. Like these are actual companies that have trusted us and we move on. It's like a 1-second slide and that's how it's exactly its pitch. So.

I have actually gotten that question, like, um, a couple of LinkedIn, like a bunch actually of people on LinkedIn being like, do you ever want to see logos on a presentation? And I'm like, well, actually yes.

Yep.

And it comes when I'm trying to do internal selling.

Exactly.

And I'm trying to tell the people who hold the purse strings, right? These are what our competitors or people in our industry are using, and we need to do the same or similar, right? So that's when I do want to see logos, especially if they're competitors of ours or in the same landscape.

That is exactly the same for me. Like it's, it's important just not I think it's important at a different time. So I'd be curious. So, Nami, I'm just curious. So what Raj said about, um, like seeing new stuff all the time, having been in consulting, like that resonated with me. And like, but I'm in a, I'm in a big, like in an organization where I think his, his description of like the same, basically the same stuff, selling the same stuff to the same audience, right? No, no, no.

I'm not saying it's boring or anything.

I'm just saying like, no, no, no. But I think I'm curious though, because Nami, you work for, you also work internally, but you Do you just even, like, you work with across multiple brands, right?

Mm-hmm.

So do you, do you feel like you get some of that kind of creativity of like applying stuff in different ways because of that?

For sure. Because every business unit has its own needs, right? And, um, not all of the requirements are gonna be the same. So we are, we are, my team is run like a small, like an internal agency for the company. Definitely. It sometimes feels like you're working for a bunch of different companies, but, you know, trying to align everything under the same, um, end goal.

So.

Yeah.

All right. Well, let's, so let's get into some of the things that we, we're gonna talk about, Raj, with you about, um, kind of how you, like, because you've been in consulting for a while, um, and you were sort of forced to keep up with stuff, maybe going all the way back. I think you mentioned this, like you were in, I'll call it an OG, right? With, with, yeah. Was it Marketo or whatever? But Yeah. What, like, what have you seen kind of in the landscape of marketing automation or martech in general? Right. What do you see that you've seen that has come along and gone, gone through that way? And what have you learned? And what do you think we should be looking at? You know, how do you think people, whether they're in-house or consulting, can then kind of try to keep up with what's going on?

Yeah, no, I mean, a lot from the very, very starting, I think. If you go back to like 2011, when Mark, uh, when MarkTech or marketing operations, even before MOPS was MOPS, right? Like before even the word marketing operations consisted, everyone were like marketing managers and you had a, you had a platform that you used, you know?

Yeah. I was an e-marketing person for a while, like whatever that was. Like nobody uses that anymore.

I was a marketing manager 1. Yeah. You know, I'm not sure where the 1 was or where the 2 began or where the 3 began or anything like that, but I was originally a marketing manager one, and this was before Marketo had programs and before, you know, marketing operations was a thing. But one of the things that I've seen kind of change drastically is that, you know, it circled back to what I was saying is like, the knowledge of something new can be kind of overhyped and fluffed up. And I think there were a lot of strategy that existed that no longer kind of applies or is kind of like what we were saying is, is like, yeah, obviously, right? Like the whole pitch your deck backwards. We know in what you're selling us. And it's the hardest thing to do is to sell to marketers is because when you look at a preheader, you don't look at it as a preheader that has something. You look at what the preheader is, what the subject line consists of. Is there a hero image? Is there a CTA button? And I think one of the biggest changes with marketing operations over time Is that more and more the next generation of marketers are just more tech savvy, right? So it's very hard, even though technology and the concepts are kind of the same, you can't talk about concepts anymore. You have to talk about actually, you know, rolling up your sleeves and doing the work. And how does it, how does it trickle down into what you're saying into versus like, versus just talking about this unicorn jumping over a rainbow. Shitting Skittles, and all of a sudden you have marketing operations in a nutshell, and then all of a sudden you have revenue, right? That's I think the biggest change is that if you talk to someone that's a CTO or a CIO, or even at the highest level, they know their products in and out. And from a marketing perspective, the biggest thing that's changed is when you have you know someone at the C level, they need to understand the product and the technology in order to devise a a cohesive strategy. And I think that's one of the biggest things that I've seen change is that you can't walk into a group of people such as yourself or even Naomi or into an org and say, lead scoring will solve everything. Okay, well, how, like, how is it going to solve it? How do we implement it? Where do we start with all those questions were never asked, because when we used to pitch decks to companies, and we said lead scoring is this amazing thing, and you can rate your leads and You know, they're hot, warm, and cold leads. And people are like, that's amazing. That's the most, that's the most brilliant thing I've ever heard. And now it's more of like, okay, well, what's a hot lead? Like, how do you define it? What are the characteristics? What are the, what are, what is the ideal customer profile? All of those other components you have to be able to talk to, but you also have to be able to know the product that where it's being implemented to truly kind of graft a strategy that makes sense.

Yeah. It's interesting. Um, how do you think? Um, do you think that's become even harder as there's been this proliferation of marketing technology platforms that are like, I, I think of 'em as very sort of bespoke for really niche things, right? That you generally, you have a core, right? Some sort of marketing automation platform, a CRM, and then after that, like things sort of are quite different.

Some sort of content. Yeah. Some sort of content manager.

Yeah.

I don't think it's, and this is obviously my personal opinion, I don't think it's become more difficult. I think it's just choosing of what array of products are the easiest for your team to use and get to your goals. Like, it's not necessarily like ABM strategy conceptually makes sense, but what product is going to help you achieve your ABM strategy and which one can you use easily and train net new people? and onboard as fast as possible. I feel like those are the items that people have to look into, into, like, you know, sometimes when people go with a big name company and they'll be like, yes, we need this. Why? Because everyone's using it. Not necessarily the case because your onboard to onboarding time is where it's going to kill you, uh, the most. Right.

Like, so, like, I think it's interesting. So for like, ABM is a great example for me. Like I've never actually implemented an ABM platform because every time I get into the conversation with the companies I've been at, I always push back and go like, I don't think we're ready from an organizational standpoint to just go and buy technology. It's not going to fix our strategy or how we approach things, right? So like we have to think differently. And I do, and I think we can probably make some steps forward with our existing, like our core tech stack without buying new stuff. And what was interesting, the one in particular I'm thinking of, like we couldn't even get to a top 100 account list.

Yeah.

What's the point of ABM technology then?

Well, so ABM is a huge push, right? Like everyone wants ABM. And there's a lot of product and vendors out there. And what they do is they can consolidate all of what you're talking about, the technicalities of it easier. Like they just make it easy for you to identify what your target accounts are. Well, if you don't know, once again, what your target accounts are, or what the digital makeup of those target accounts are, those technologies, will give you whatever that you plug in. And if you don't know what you're plugging in, then the output is going to be just as, you know, is just as bland. So you don't even know what you're paying for a product. And that's where people get into conversations like, why are we paying for something that we're not using? You know, traditionally, ABM strategies really fall under like 2 concepts. You know, one are doppelganger accounts, and one are land and expand model. And you can do that within your CRM. Like, you know, you don't need, you don't need a piece of software to essentially kind of show you, you just need a piece of software to make your life easier to consolidate all of those things.

Yeah. So this is really interesting. Uh, my dogs agree with you there. You can hear them.

Um, they're just like all about ABM. I'm telling you, that's, that's, that's how hot of a topic it is. Even people don't understand ABM. You mentioned ABM and people's ears perk up. Um, I'm, I'm speaking on ABM at B2BMX just regarding that topic, uh, particularly, uh, topic. But I, sole reason I chose that topic is everyone's ears are always out because that's what Google's top 10, you know, ABM strategies going into 2023 blogs are, you know, taking over everyone's feed and stuff.

Right. So, um, shifting a little bit here. So one of the other things we've talked about is like, how do it, like, are there differences in the type of marketing or marketer that you are like So I think, I think it's probably safe to say the majority of the people who are listening to our podcast are mostly B2B. Um, so probably some B2C, we've had a few guests on that were more B2C. So, um, I guess there's a difference, but one of the things I've noticed lately is a lot of B2B marketers talking about like needing to kind of bring in perspective or similarities, some of the B2C kinds of things. I think basically saying don't be boring, right? Try to be—

Yeah.

But, um, do you, what do you, what is your take on, uh, like, are there, are there more common things that are common in sort of, I hate to use the term best practices, but principles, I guess, for B2B, B2C? And you even mentioned something B2Student, which we could elaborate on maybe if you want, but, or do you see there, there's more differences? You know, what do you, what are you seeing that's common or different those?

So, so business to student or B2S is essentially just mainly for the higher ed space that I've done consulting and that's what they call their B2S.

Make sure you get the 2 in that one there.

Yeah, the number 2. Yeah, the B2S. Yeah, the BS. Um, but that's common in the higher ed space because they always market, you know, they refer to their, you know, prospects as students. We refer to our prospects as prospects and they don't refer to them as clients. Um, you know, obviously they're students, uh, they're continuing their education career or something.

No, I'm very familiar because I have a high school senior right now.

Yeah.

All right.

Um, well, The difference between B2B and B2C, I, you know, this is going to be very, I'm not sure if it's going to be an unpopular opinion, or I don't know if it's going to be a popular opinion. I'm not too sure. A lot of people talk about these components as like very separate. They say, well, B2B marketing is you're marketing to the business and business to consumer, you're marketing directly to the consumer. So consumer side has to be more flashy because you have to get a person's attention, right? That's the, that's ideally like, oh, they have these buttons, they have these graphics. And one of the things that technology has changed is everyone's removing themselves from the conversation of the main purpose of any type of marketing is getting, getting your prospect, I'll just call them that, to notice what you're talking about and to believe what you're saying is true. And you can have the flashiest email in the world, but if it doesn't drive home any kind of messaging, it's kind of irrelevant. Um, design, I feel like, has gone the way of, you know, cascading style sheets inside, you know, it's just design inside email is very, is very heavily looked at as the end-all be-all to get someone's attack, uh, attraction. But as consultants, we know that if a person never gets your email because every single company has so many filters blocking it, Mm-hmm. it's It's never going to work. So when people really talk about in the consulting space, like, hey, we want to be more like B2C, it's not that B2C emails, if you look at, you know, MailChimp or whatever companies like open rates, and that's where like the strategy drives from. It's not necessarily like B2C open rates are drastically crazy high because of the, because of what they're delivering, right? Like what the design or what the messaging is, but a lot of B2B marketers think that The emails need to be more B2C related, but what is B2C selling? What is the product? Their volume of people that they're marketing is a lot higher.

Right.

So I think, um, the original, like, you know, to go back to your question is like, you know, what can B2B take from B2C? I think they can, B2B marketing can really kind of take away like, what is a good cadence? You know, not every email needs to go out Monday, Wednesday, Friday at 8 AM, you know, Business, business to consumer marketing is 7 days a week.

Yeah.

I check emails on Saturday. You check emails on Saturday, right? There's a big thing at myth, you know, a mythos in B2B is we only want to deliver Monday. People are busy. We're going to send an email Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday at optimal time. Don't send Friday. People are going to drive home. And B2C is just like, we don't care. We're just going to send you an email. We're going to send you an email because we know that you're going to either read it or you're going to talk to messaging and a lot of B2B clients that we worked with, we've just randomly A/B tested. We just shot an email out on Saturday and lo and behold, you know, your kids are, I mean, I have 2 young kids and they go, they go to naps effectively between 12 to 3 PM. And we just shot an email out at 11 or 4 or something like that and glance and there you go. Boom. You had a higher conversion rate just because people are not busy through the day to day. So like, I think that's the, those are a couple of concepts to kind of take away from B2B versus B2C marketing. It's not getting structured into that.

Well, I think that's an interesting, like, that's a really interesting point in that. Um, 'cause I think a lot of people when they see like, what can B2B take from B2C, they think about the, the creative elements, right? And the copy and the, the, the tone of voice, things like that. But—

A lot of exclamations and emojis.

Well, yeah, but not even that. But I think your point of like, oh, well actually, like, don't be afraid to challenge your assumptions about like, is it okay to send on a Friday afternoon? Like I tell our, I've actually, I remember years ago seeing some data and I have no idea if it's still accurate that Friday afternoons were actually, were a great time to get senior executives if that was your target audience. Because Friday afternoons, they're not in meetings, they're cleaning up their email, and if you catch 'em while they're in their inbox, right, you got a chance. So like, um, yeah.

And you know, one of the, one of the biggest things To, to not take away is that B2C marketing and the design heavily focused is going to, is going to actually deter you because, uh, when, when I say deter your like open rates or your engagement rates is because in B2B marketing, a lot of people use Outlook. We have scanners, like if we work at corporations, you know, B2C marketing is Gmail, Yahoo, iCloud, you know, uh, top 3 and then a couple other ones I can't think of right now.

Hotmail still, Yahoo.

Yeah, live. Yeah, in Outlook. And in B2B, if you go very design heavy, or you start using custom font, you start throwing Google Fonts in there, that's an immediate, you know, we did, we did so many validity tests through Everest. And we just found that if you, the more design you have, and I mean, everyone knows this, right? It's not like something, it's not like a crazy strategy that I'm saying is that in B2B marketing, you want to take design from B2C, you're not going to get the same return as B2C because They're sending to people that have Gmail accounts or Ymail accounts and we're sending to Outlook and, you know, yeah, we were sending Outlook or business domains that are very heavily monitored. So, yeah.

Curious, Naomi, like in your, have you ever had challenges with that? Like people saying, oh, we can only send on certain days and times of day. And have you ever—

Yeah, I think, um, yeah, actually it's interesting because just a couple of weeks ago I had like an email trends and best practices call with my internal business partners where we kind of debunked a lot of these things, um, and saying like, well, who said, who said that? What's the source? Why?

Yeah.

Right. And how, and then I actually polled, um, our business partner. I was like, how many of you actually check email on a weekend? How many of you actually check email on, in the evening? Right. Um, and so it was, I think it was pretty eye-opening for everybody. And I was just like, you know what? We don't know until we try. And it's better to try an A/B test than to just make these assumptions based on information that is potentially out of date that we just don't have any basis for. So why don't we just try? And so I think that was really well received and there's definitely, um, uh, more openness, I think, to, you know, it, it seems to be this like mental block where people are like, I don't wanna send work email on a Saturday.

Yeah.

Or not a work email, but like a work marketing email on a Saturday.

Right.

Right.

But, but, and I'm like, but then why?

Worst that's gonna happen, they'll get offended. I, I don't know why, you know?

And that's the, and that right there, I think is like consulting 101, right? And that's what I love about consulting is like, how do you know if you haven't tried? And the worst thing that they're going to do is they're going to unsubscribe to you anyway, right? Like no matter what, like they're going to unsubscribe whether they receive an email on Monday, Wednesday, Tuesday, but it's not like someone's going to get an email on Saturday and be like, these unsubscribe, like, you know, the, if we can work until 10 PM and the whole work from home items and everything that's talked about, like all of this stuff, people check emails during the same time. It's the, you know, the worst case scenario is someone unsubscribes, but they're gonna unsub— if that person was gonna unsubscribe, they're gonna unsubscribe Monday through Friday just as much as Saturday and Sunday.

Uh, yeah, I think, I think it's like the more important thing is regardless of when you send it, is it, is it gonna be useful and valuable to the recipient? Right. And if it's not, it doesn't really matter when you send it.

Yeah.

You know what I mean? All right, so let, let's get into this. So you already talked about like as a consultant, you're expected to be sort of the expert on probably a lot of things, even things that are new. So what, what are some strategies that you apply to keep up with stuff and kind of continue to learn that our listeners could benefit from, that they could try to apply to their own sort of career and development?

Yeah, so that's kind of a tough question because it's one of those things, it's a mindset. There's not really anything that I apply. Like, I don't go out of my way to do something. I mean, it's not like I, I'm not going to sit here and tell you like read every tech notes that come with your platform. You know, I, I'm a big fan of technology and one of the reasons I've stayed in consulting and martech so long is because I like technology, right? So if you like something, you're going to pay attention to it. I really Really terrible at fantasy football because I have no idea what's going on. Why? Because I'm not vested into it enough. So it's not, I, I don't have, I don't have a subscription to a newsletter. I don't get like a 10 top, top, uh, you know, top 10 topics. This is trending. I think if you're in the MOP space and you're looking at like, even in your guys' channel, you know, for the, so for the Slack channel, like I feel like being part of communities in my personal opinion is a lot more important. Because in those type of communities, that's where people are asking questions. Like there's so many questions I've answered inside like your Slack channel where someone posts something and there's stuff that someone is posting that even I didn't know about because they found a different solution to it. I feel like those to me matter most, like being engaged and being part of those communities. I feel like that's what helps you learn, like asking people that have either done it or doing it. Or have done something or will be doing it, right? Like, I feel like those are where I kind of put all my time into. I mean, yeah, I read patch notes. I kind of have to, right? Like, you have to know what Marketo is changing or what marketing automation platform is changing. But I think that's probably would be my recommendation is join communities and connect with people that are actively working on projects, doing it, and then see what you can learn from them, see what takeaways, because that's the best way to And, you know, increase your skillset. Like, that's a skillset I have. I don't have a skillset of reading documents or watching YouTube videos. I have a, I have a skillset of doing and listening and working with other agencies, uh, in my career. And that's where I learned everything.

Yeah, it's interesting. I, um, early in my career, a lot older than either of you, I think, but I, like, I, to keep up with stuff, I subscribed to like very nerdy, like publications that were free and I was pretty consistent about reading them. I mean, the idea, like there wasn't really this idea of a community, but it's interesting. Just again, just today, earlier today in the marketingops.com Slack, I had posted a question like last week and people chimed in and someone actually, I was like, hey, can you talk about this? Because it's like, I didn't, I, something I hadn't seen. And that person gave me a call. We talked for 15 minutes and I learned a whole bunch like in 15 minutes, just Like that. So it's, yeah, it's a pretty interesting area.

And that's where, that's where you and I got connected, right? Like there was, there was no, like, you know, LinkedIn is such a broad atmosphere and, you know, there's so many agencies, there's so many companies, there's so many people working on stuff, but that's where you and I got connected and that's where we had our conversation as far as like, hey, like what do you do?

Yeah, that's where it started. Naomi, I'm curious, like how do you, like how do you and maybe your team, like how do you help your team keep up to date? kind of, uh, like learning and developing on whether it's technology or process or whatever?

Yeah, I think, um, and this goes back to how I structure my team, right? So everyone on my team is a subject matter expert in their own area. Um, it's, uh, what I did not want is a team of kind of marketing, information generalists. So the way that my team is structured, everybody can, you know, um, execute a campaign end to end. Everybody is, you know, very proficient in Marketo, either has passed their MCE or is taking their MCE within the next couple of weeks, actually. Um, and so every, so everybody has that same baseline, right? So that helps with things like coverage and holidays and, you know, people being out of office and things like that. But additionally, every person has their own kind of like area that they're responsible for. So I have a full-blown web developer on the team. Um, a data operations person, a process slash documentation analytics person, and then somebody that I, who doesn't sit on the ops team, but, um, is on a different team, but I, I do rely on for some design stuff. And how that has benefited the team is that not everybody has to know everything exactly perfectly, right?

Yes.

So, there, everybody is responsible for their area and there's situations where when we're on a team call or whatnot, Um, if there's things that will impact, you know, the way that our team functions or process or what, or, um, how we kind of aid our business partners, they will let the team know. And so that way everybody, we can just mindshare and it's just a lot better than everybody trying to keep on top of everything all at once. Um, like that movie, what is it? Everything Everywhere All at Once or, um, Right. Yeah. So it's just, it's, it's made it much easier to handle because like, as you all know, Everything changes all the time.

Yeah. That's interesting. And in my case, cuz I'm going through a little bit of like shifting a little bit of kind of responsibilities around, but part of it is to also build in coverage just like you, like we didn't have that. There was not a lot of slack for that. Um, and, but one of the things I do is I try to make sure as I'm working with them, especially for the folks who are relatively new, either to the business or to this function is try to answer it, like provide the context about why we're, why either why I'm suggesting something or doing something, but I want them to understand the why. Because I think beyond the technology, because I think we've all hinted at it, right? There's usually more than one way to solve a business thing, especially in marketing, right? With technology, there's not necessarily one that's better than the other set of trade-offs, but I try to help them think about like that, the broader perspective, um, particularly if we're talking about things that tie in with like marketing to sales kind of lead, lead flow and things like that, because there's just so many things that are downstream that you have to take, think about. And that, I think that's the thing I try to do for my own team. And then, yeah, for myself, I, I try to keep up with stuff. Community is definitely a piece of it. I mean, I probably said it several times on these podcasts, like if I could, I'm trying to like, If I could imagine what my career would've been like had this been around 20 years ago, like it would've been, I think, a vastly different experience.

You would've retired cuz you would've invested in Slack.

Right?

Yeah. Yeah. But I mean, to Naomi's point, like even as, you know, a, as GNW Consulting has been growing, what she said is 100% what you have to do. Like everyone has to be, do, everyone has to be able to do Some part of a role in marketing operations, right? When we were, you know, when we were like, uh, I still talk about it, like wherever, everywhere where I worked when I was still starting and one person could build campaigns and, you know, if that person went on vacation, you would have to wait. Why? Because like that skillset was still being developed, right? So if you think about growth in marketing ops, like you cannot, you cannot be afraid of doing something. Like you have to be well-versed enough. To know that I can run a campaign, I can set up a program, I can execute an email, uh, you know, coding and stuff like that. Yeah, there eventually that gets into specialty skills, but even as GNW Consulting has been growing, the idea is everyone has to learn everything and then let's find out what your, uh, then let's find out like what your skillset is. What, like, what is the thing that makes you, you? And then you have your baseline and then you have something that you're very, very specialized at.

That's a good, in a good way. All right. So one other thing that, uh, Rajeev, you and I talked about is you, you'd mentioned something and total transparency for our, our audience, right? I, I didn't take very good notes when I talked to Rajeev. Um, he, he, you mentioned something about, um, kind of on-the-ground learning or, or like what in real time I think is maybe how you would've phrased it, but like, what do you mean by that and kind of How, how, how do you, how does that fit into this whole kind of idea of trying to continue to learn?

Yeah, I'll, I'll give you a prime example. And I, I don't recommend anyone trying this at all, uh, even remotely. So at first when I was starting in consulting, when I mean on the ground learning, I mean, it's just like doing something, following instructions well enough, and then not failing as hard as I've had, 'cause I've straight up deleted a company's Google Analytics account. Now, I don't recommend anyone doing that, right? That taught me a lot of things. But at the same time, when I talk about like actual lesson learned on the ground, what I'm really talking about is actually doing stuff, you know, not just talking in theoreticals and, you know, strategy and like getting wrapped up into like all of these, the top 10 things to optimize your marketing operation. Like, are they really top 10 things? Or they're really like 2 things somewhere over there. Like, so on the ground, just, you know, it's just a way of meaning, it's just a way of meaning like, you know, do it, test it, you know, you don't have, you know, marketing automation platforms currently allow you to send yourself an email, like be the target audience for yourself and execute a campaign with one person and knowing that you're going to send it to yourself and walk through that entire process. But that way, you know, you learn by doing. Right? And that's really what it means, right? Like, you know, knowing that, hey, something's gonna go off. What was it like? I think like last year, HBO, which is like a huge company, sent out like a giant email with someone like leaked token. And they were getting like, you know, made fun of and they released a statement and all that good stuff. That's all I'm talking about. Like that person, whoever did that, they learned by doing and they will never make that mistake ever again in terms of inside their entire life. Just like I will not delete a Google Analytics account for the entire company because I was up until 2 in the morning calling Google saying, can you please, please restore this account? My life and my job depends on it. Like, and like, once again, I wouldn't recommend people doing that. But that's kind of the, that's kind of like the, the backbone behind, behind it.

I think anyone that works in marketing ops has horror stories like this, or anyone who's worked in the industry long enough knows has like instances where It's like Wednesday at like 3 in the morning and then they immediately wake up and like crawl to their laptop or bring it into bed and it's like, let me just double check that I'm sending this in the right time zone to the right people.

I think.

Yeah. Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

So, so that's, that's the premise behind it, right? Like until, until you do stuff like that, because once again, until you do stuff like that, you're never gonna not do it ever again. And I could tell you about my team. you know, that, you know, some relatively new, some tenured that have done stuff, you know, as G&W Consulting has been growing. We talk to clients, we're very open about it, we handle it, but that's, that's the premise behind it. So.

Yeah, I mean, I think there's so much, there's a couple of things there that pick up. One, I think is like, don't be afraid to try stuff, even if you feel like you don't know it all the way, right? You can learn from just trying. Um, the other part. And I, you know, I haven't thought about this as much lately, but I think it's really easy. I'm not like, it's, I think it's important to, you know, care about the work you do. But at the end of the day, for most of us, right, in these roles with, I'm sure some exceptions, right? If you have an email that goes out with tokens in it or delete the Google Analytics account, right? The world's not going to, like, nobody's going to die.

Yeah.

Um, nobody's like, No, he's—

we're not sending, we're not sending people into space.

Right. I mean, um, like I, I'm sort of fortunate enough that I have a, I have a friend who's literally is a neurosurgeon, right? And so like, I don't know how he, he handles that kind of stress. Um, I may have some idea, but like, I, that to me, I'm like, okay, that's like, that's a job where, you know, like your decisions can actually have true, true important consequences. And so, yeah. It's, it's, it's easy to get caught up in the, the frenetic pace of what we do and the expectations of always being on and that kind of stuff and delivering more faster with less, right? That it, it matters more than it really is. So, um, interesting stuff. All right. So what, I guess I'll just leave it with, is there anything else that you want to share with our audience about like how, you know, learning, growth, kind of keeping up with technology that We haven't already covered?

Yeah. One of the main highlights is that, you know, we're a technology agnostic agency. I'm a technology agnostic person, meaning I, I, I know HubSpot, Pardot, Marketing Cloud. There's things, even though they're unrelated, you can learn from other platforms. So don't, I would say don't put yourself in like this, I am a professional at one software and system. There's stuff that you're going to pick up from another platform. That's going to carry over, right? You're who knows what the future is going to hold. So as long the best way to like kind of diversify your skill is to learn more than one platform. Like do not be the best Marketo person on the face of this planet. Be a really good Marketo person, but a really good HubSpot, really good Eloqua, really good like dabble into all of these items because that's what's going to really round out your skill set. And I feel like that's where. I've personally had the most success at is that when someone's like, oh, you've used Delica, you've used HubSpot, you've used these items, you've used Salesforce, you use Dynamics. And, you know, pretty much don't, don't funnel yourself into just one, one item and learn it because there's things that you're going to learn. And we ran it, we ran across this. I pitch it. I say as much as stuff, or there's stuff that I've learned and there's stuff that, you know, consultants that work at GNW Consulting and that we've learned. That we've solved, like it's issues and problems that we've solved in one platform where we've gone into another platform and we have a resolution because we already solved it in something else, or we already know how this would work, uh, or how like a workflow or sequence is gonna affect a smart list or a flow. Like we've already seen those elements. So yeah, that, that, that would be like, I guess the biggest thing is like, don't, you know, the technology space is growing so much. Don't confine yourself into just one platform. Yeah.

Got it. Uh, I think that might generate some debate, actually. I think that's a common kind of thing that we have here. So good stuff. Uh, Raj, thank you so much. If folks do want to keep up with you or what you're doing, uh, what your agency's doing, what's the best way for them to, to do that?

Um, yeah, I mean, uh, go to the website, obviously. You know, you can go to gandwconsulting.com. Uh, we have a blog. You know, there's a LinkedIn page. The LinkedIn page is continuously updated as well. Uh, there's a lot of good stuff on there. There's a lot of good stuff on the website. The cool thing is I'm not a big fan of gated content because we live in a world where everyone's information is readily available. So if you want to go to the website, you can click on stuff, you can download it. And, you know, whenever people are ready to talk, you tell me, like, you're not going to have to give me your entire information because we live in a world where I already can technically have access to all your digital profiles. So LinkedIn or the website is pretty much the best bet.

So sounds good. All right. Well, Raj, thank you again for sharing with our, with our listeners, our audience. Appreciate it. And thanks to our audience for, for, uh, continuing to support us and provide us good feedback. And, uh, if you are interested in a topic that you want us to cover or a guest you want us to include, or you want to be a guest, feel free to reach out to Naomi, Mike Rizzo, or me, either LinkedIn or the marketingops.com community. Um, Naomi, thanks. It's always fun to get on one of these with you, so we'll have to do this more often.

I know you definitely—

so, um, Raj, thank you. To everyone else, we'll talk to you another time. Thanks. Bye.

Thanks everyone. Take care.

Bye.