**MOOPs** Episode 4 - Chelsea Kiko, Director of Marketing at McGraw-Hill

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 rev ops pros created by the MoPros, the number one community for marketing operations professionals. Tune in to each episode as we chat with real professionals to help elevate you and your marketing operations career.

Thanks everyone for joining us for another episode of Welcome to the Marketing Ops TV. I'm Jessica, one of your hosts, and I'm joined today by Chelsea Kiko. Chelsea, I'm gonna go ahead and get started with, tell us a little bit about who you are and where you currently work.

Yeah, sounds good. Thanks for having me. My name's Chelsea Kiko. Like you just mentioned, I am the Director of Marketing Operations at McGraw-Hill for the K-12 side of the business. And I really lead our marketing automations, email marketing within our systems, and our marketing ops data infrastructure backend system integrations type of team. a year and a half. My previous life, I've been in agencies, other larger corporations, so I've definitely been around the block when it comes to doing marketing ops.

Uh, yeah, you're, you're definitely one of the kind of originals in the scene. Uh, how long have you been practicing marketing and revenue operations, Chelsea?

Yeah, I would say specifically marketing and revenue ops, about 7 years that I've been really in the systems and, and working them day to day.

Awesome. Uh, I'll get to the mistake we're going to talk about in a little bit here, but at what point in your career did the mistake we're going to touch on today happen?

Actually pretty recently. Um, and I feel like it takes a lot of guts to like own up to a mistake where I'm currently at the organization. So let's hope a lot of people from my company don't watch this. Um, but yeah, it was only, I want to say I was in I was here for about 6 months. So it was about a year ago and I should have been an expert. I still think I am an expert, but this was a pretty, a pretty shitty mistake. So.

So what exactly were you trying to do that caused the mistake?

So this one's kind of funny and interesting because I was trying to fix another mistake and you know how you try to fix something and then just, it just keeps compiling. That's kind of what happened here. So I was trying to fix, we were having an issue with our task routing to our sales reps. So we notify a sales rep when somebody reaches— well, we don't do a threshold, but when someone does like a hand-raiser form, sales-ready form, we reach out to them with a task. And our task routing broke for some certain pieces of our hand-raiser forms, and I was trying to remediate that and send those tasks back out to the sales reps.

Oops. Internal mistakes are always so stressful, in my opinion.

Yeah.

What systems were you in when you were working on this project?

I was in Marketo for the marketing automation system and Salesforce for the CRM.

Awesome. And so like kind of what specifically happened from an error standpoint? What broke? What caused the moves?

Well, the first thing that broke was actually it was the way the routing was set up and we were tokenizing a field that is relied upon for the systems to trigger a workflow to create a certain task in Salesforce. It's kind of the best way to describe it quickly. Um, and we noticed that the issue— we went to update some of our routing programs. The issue was live for about a week. So some of the only way that we can kind of fix our routing problems is by manually routing the tasks. So essentially I'll go back through and see everybody who should be contacted by a sales rep, send out the task to the rep and fix it. So I felt like I was the superhero for the day. I was going to fix it. So excited. Um, at the time we had a big duplicate problem. So I'm sure a lot of people can kind of commiserate on that where we have some people who are dupes, 3 times, quads. I mean, we have the whole thing. So instead of doing a fix of, you know, like a program membership or a smart list, I just did it by email address because I pulled the report from Salesforce. Yeah. So not sure how I didn't catch that. I think I was just trying to fix it quickly. So I ran what, you know, in Marketo it's called a smart campaign. I ran it by email is. Um, and, you know, I thought the tasks would be sent to the reps. So here the reps got like way more tasks than needed to. Um, I think one rep at one point reached out to me and she was supposed to only get like 72 tasks and she had like over 400. So yeah, so there's no way to— yeah, of course the reps had to see it, right? I mean, of course they did.

Was that rep Notifying you that they had 4x as many tasks as they should have, the first thing, first person that caught it, or did you know something had gone wrong prior to that?

So I did not catch it again. I don't know how I didn't. So what I— one rep, I sent out an email to all the reps that were affected. I was like, hey, I fixed this problem. This is what makes it worse because I like owned it that it was me. Hey, it's your marketing ops manager here. I fixed a big problem for you, like tried to come to save the day. And I got, you know, I don't know if your stomach ever sinks when you start to get replies to things. But I saw replies coming in from reps and I thought I was going to be like, great job, this is awesome. I immediately got like a pit in my stomach because everybody was saying, hey, I have duplicate tasks, or this task came through and it's the same task 4 times, what's going on? And then I was going through them and it like hit me. I was like, oh my gosh, because I did email address, it just compiled them all up. And that's really how I got notified.

Yeah. Oof, that's the worst. Yeah, I've definitely had somewhere I was not the person to catch it. And I know exactly what like pit in your stomach feeling you're talking about. Yeah. Was there anything you could do to remedy this situation?

Yeah, so I had to think on my feet really quickly. And again, I mean, this is a really good learning opportunity for me and I'm kind of happy it happened really that I learned about it. So what I did at first, 'cause I was so desperate to just get it off the sales rep's plate. Um, I went through and I actually had some— we have an agency who supports us and I had some team members. I was like, guys, listen, this is my bad. We all need to just kind of team, you know, team up on this. I went through, we went through and assigned them all to me. So all these duplicate tasks, I was like, let's just get them out of their view first. So then I was getting hundreds of emails that like tasks were being assigned to me. And at the time I didn't care because I was like, let's just take them off, you know, the rep's dashboard. So that's how I, I think That worked the best because it was a quick thought. I was like, all right, let's just hide the problem, and not in a bad way, but make sure the reps don't see it right away. And let's just, you know, scoop it under the rug, um, so the reps can handle their customers correctly. And then I did more cleanup on my end after they were all assigned to me.

It's actually a pretty good solution.

Um, yeah, I mean, oh wait, because you have to think the only thing that really implicates is reporting, right? And like Yeah, reporting's real time, but normally we report monthly or quarterly. So I was like, well, let's just— I don't want the reps to work the wrong task, so let's just take them off right now. So yeah, um, in hindsight, I probably would do it that way all over again.

That's always nice if I do it again. Good mistake. I fixed it. Yeah, I'm like, level-headed Chelsea says I did it the right way.

Yeah, now that I'm not freaking out.

Big thing in mistakes is Obviously learning from them. What did you learn in the remediation process of that?

Well, I actually did some things afterwards to help with it. Obviously solve the duplicate problem, right? But for, for those who are larger organizations, it's not that easy. So we share our Marketo instance with 2 other BUs, and to solve the duplicate problem is like a year-over-year process. So I was like, okay, I can't solve the duplicate problem. So how can I solve this moving forward? I actually have something something that I keep. It's like in my notes. It's called a gotchas task. I wouldn't say task, it's a gotchas list where I've had it my whole career, which is funny because I still have it, where it's like, you dumbass, why did you do that? And I put it on the list. So I have things from when I was doing email marketing to when I was doing more campaign planning. I— it's just something I've kept over time where I always will remember, okay, I know that I made that mistake. And the other thing we did too is we now have an error dashboard that we created, which is actually amazing because we to see anything that goes awry within our data infrastructure. But the nice thing is, if we notice there's a duplicate task that's being created, we actually get alerted now versus me finding out a harder way, you know, people letting me know. So it kind of helped us understand a use case for a dashboard for our team.

I have, I have slash had the same like gotcha list of like, hey dummy, don't do that. Or like things that I had to Google enough times that I was like, I'm just writing this down somewhere because I'm sick of asking somebody Google how to solve that thing that I know I learned that one time. Yeah. So I think that's a common, common way to solve the problem. Um, beyond that gotcha list, do you have any specific other processes you've put in place, uh, to avoid that kind of mistake in the future?

Yeah, I would say, um, more what we do now is, um, as my team has grown and our strategies have grown, um, we do a lot more reporting. Uh, the one thing I don't want to happen anymore is because I want to keep my team credible, credible. I want people to trust us and trust our work. That's why I created something like an error dashboard. I also have team members of mine do certain monthly type of operation pieces that help us keep up and running where we should catch any mistake that has come through, whether it's a routing issue, an email issue, a data issue. We should have enough infrastructure and processes in place now that if something does go wrong, we should find it and be able to get in front of it and communicate it. Because to me, I think that's more important, right? Like I think what sucked the most about this, this issue that I had was some sales rep who you're always trying to have a good relationship with came to me. And that's what really got to me. So I think now that we have more error-prone processes in place, hopefully we won't run into this type of issue again.

Nice. Um, a couple of final thoughts before we wrap. What would you say to someone who's made a similar mistake? I think the worst ones are when there's internal stakeholders involved. So some Somebody who screwed something up internally, what would you say?

Uh, depending on what industry you're in or what you do, one thing I always tell my team is like, listen, at the end of the day, it was a task to a sales rep, right? It wasn't— we're not talking about, you know, breaking up a family. We're not talking about a terrible healthcare mistake. I mean, it's nothing remotely to what serious something else could be. So I'm big on putting things into perspective. So if somebody went through something similar So what if a rep has 4 tasks to work instead of 1? Okay, they might be annoyed by you for a little bit and you can fix it later, but just breathe, move on. At the end of the day, it's, it's really not that big of a deal. So I try to talk myself down a lot to it. Of course, we take pride and integrity in our work, but we all mess up and it happens. And most people are understanding because, you know, they've been in the same situation before.

All right. Usually I take a similar approach internally of like, in this case, no one got hurt by the mistake that we've made. Do you have any other advice for any fellow marketing or RevOps professionals?

Yeah, I think along the lines of like the MOOPs and really trying to work with other people is have compassion if somebody else makes a mistake. So, you know, we, our team all the time, there's whether issues happen or, or somebody messed messes up, treat your team to just understand that we're human. And, you know, try to teach them a lot of things. What I do is whether it's, you know, mentees that I have or my team itself is take ownership, say how you're going to fix it, communicate it out and just own it. You know, don't get defensive, don't try to finger point. And most people are compassionate and will work with you on it. So that's my biggest advice is like if somebody else messes up, don't finger point, just own it as a team and try to move forward with it because you might be in that same situation You know, a day, a year down the road, you want— you would want to have that same support system.

I bet that's really good advice. Perfect. Well, that's all my questions. So thanks so much for taking the time to chat with me.

Thanks for having me on.