Tips to "Do More with Less" in Marketing Ops with Colton Slauson

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.

Hello and welcome to another episode of OpsCast, brought to you by marketingops.com, powered by the MoPros. I am your host, Michael Hartman, joined today by co-host Naomi Liu. Hey, Naomi.

Hey, Michael.

It's been a while since just the two of us, right? I know. I mean, he's just coming back from, you know, sunny Hawaii. Vacation, right?

Yes. How dare he?

He's been working too much while he's been on vacation. Like, we need to— he's going to hear this and he's going to know that we know. Anyway, well, let's get into it. Um, so excited about this. And this is— I think this episode is going to resonate with a lot of people these days. We're going to be talking about how to kind of ideas for doing more with less. So we have our guest today who will be sharing some of his own experience with doing that. So let's get into it. So joining us for the conversation is Colton Slauson, who is currently Senior Marketing Operations Manager at Sendoso with their big news. We're recording this the day after they announced the acquisition of Alice or merger. I don't know how they're actually describing it. So prior to joining Sendoso, Colton has worked at marketing operations agencies and consultancies. in-house in both marketing operations and web areas. He has also started and sold a web design agency, so he's had an active career. So Colton, thanks for joining us today.

Yeah, excited to be here. Thank you.

All right. Well, you know, one of the things that, you know, we like to do because there's never been one consistent thread of how people end up in marketing operations is kind of have people share a little bit about their career journey. So why don't we start there? You know, maybe tell us a little bit about your career journey, how you ended up where you are. And if there are any key moments or pivotal decisions or people you think had outsized influence on the trajectory of your career up to this point, we'd love to hear about that and share it with our audience.

Yeah, awesome question. And I think that's very much true. Whenever I've talked to anybody within marketing ops, everybody's career path is so different. I feel like I always say that I fell into marketing operations. It definitely wasn't anywhere on my choices of career path necessarily, just because it was unknown to me, especially as I was going to college. I mean, I went and got my degree in digital marketing, and then when I was graduating, you know, I was applying for anything and everything that had marketing in the title. And it was a similar-ish time that we're in right now where you're not just like handed interviews all the time. So I was kind of just applying for anything with marketing in the title and Turns out I got an interview with Instructure as an intern doing marketing operations for them. And I remember in the interview I mispronounced Marketo. I think I pronounced it market too, like market too or something like that, which is so funny to look back on.

But I've, I've heard lots of different pronunciations of Marketo and Eloqua. Both. So yeah, you know, don't feel bad.

No, and I didn't either. I mean, it was silly, but at least it didn't, you know, sway their decision when it came to hiring me. But, uh, was able to, to work there, did a lot of, uh, the event management as far as it comes to kind of gathering that information into Marketo and out to the sales reps. Uh, then I kind of transitioned into a manager role, and that's kind of where I've been, uh, since. And now I'm a senior manager here at Sendoso, kind of handling Marketo, uh, a bit of Salesforce stuff. Uh, Lean Data is like my baby right now. Uh, I've been in Lean Data for months now, just kind of simplifying processes because it was really, um, overcomplicated. Uh, and I feel like that's a common thread that I've seen throughout my career is It's fun to automate things, and I, and I love automating things myself, but I think we often overcomplicate things that we're trying to automate because there's the capability of doing it this way. But in reality, it, it makes things complicated and it makes it harder for people if you were to leave, or even just explain it to the people that are there. But I've been here for a little over 6 months now, I think. And I've been loving it. It's been really fun. It's a really cool product.

It's great. No, I remember, I know some people who were there early on. I don't think they're there anymore. So you mentioned that you're senior manager now or senior marketing ops manager. So how big is your marketing ops team? Is it just you? Is it— it's just you. You can't see us. He's got one finger up. So team of one. So how, I'm curious, like in terms of the size of the rest of the marketing team, how big is the rest of your marketing team?

Yeah, there's 8 of us. So it's a fairly small team. We're adding another person from Alice to our team. I'm kind of, I'm part of marketing, but I'm also, I report to someone over RevOps. So I have meetings with the marketing team, but technically I'm under the RevOps Umbrella, uh, which is just 2 of us and will be 3 of us on Monday. Um, so it's the Salesforce admin and RevOps, you know, manager, and then it'll be a Salesforce analyst on Monday from Alice, and then me over marking ops. But I've been transitioning a lot of my work over— not transitioning, but adding some work to, to my plate on the Salesforce side of things, just because I think it's important to You know, be in that space as well. And especially when there's so few of us, it's important for us to kind of cross-collaborate and cross-work. So I've been helping Juno understand a little bit more about the— so our Salesforce admin— a little bit more about the Marketo side of things as well.

Sounds good. Naomi, I'm gonna put you on the spot here. I hadn't planned on that, but so if I got the math right, Colton, somewhere around 7 marketers to 1 marketing ops support, maybe, maybe a little, maybe a little bit Yeah, I don't know what it'll be when you get the second person from Alice and their other marketers. I assume there's some other marketers, but is that about the ratio? I know yours is a different organization, but would you say like your team is kind of in that same ballpark, 7 to 1?

No, only because we support more than marketing, right? So it's not just marketing people that we do work for. We also do work for HR, IT, sales ops, product marketing, our sales reps as well. So, there's a lot more. So, I would say that ratio is even larger or smaller or larger, whichever way you want to look at it, right?

Your odds are longer, something like that.

Yeah, your odds are a lot— exactly. But what I've found, you know, and There are times definitely, and this week is definitely one of them, where you do feel stretched quite thin. And there are lots of changes that come aboard, whether it be through technology or processes or whatnot. And something that I found to be really helpful is in all of the groups and the business partners that we support is to find that champion, right? So, that one person that we really work quite closely with that can take the information that we that we think is important and distill it back down to their teams, right? Not to say that we don't communicate to the wider group. We absolutely do, whether it be through QBRs or through Chatter posts or through email updates. But there are just some things that for— and I don't know if you feel this way too, Colton, but the majority of like, especially very granular things, not every single person, not all of your 7 people marketers are going to care or— Like, it'll be maybe in one ear, out the other, and then they don't really think about it again. And then 6 months later, it'll be like, what was that that you said? Or, you know, just completely forget because it's not— and it's nothing. It may not be applicable to them. And I'm sure that's happened to me too, right? To all of us that, you know, IT says something, don't update this thing on your computer, and then you go and update it anyways, right? But I find that there's always going to be that one person who is has a bit more technical aptitude, who is just really interested in the ins and outs and how things work. And I find that just aligning yourself and identifying those people across different organi— across different units within the organization can help to alleviate some of the questions, I guess, if that makes sense.

I totally agree.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, Naomi, you mentioned your QBRs. I still, like, I love the idea that you're doing that.

Yeah.

It's one of the few things going on.

We're due for one, actually. We're due for one.

All right. Could I sit in and see how it goes?

I'm just going to black bar out everything.

I just want to audit that class. So yeah, that's good. Well, so I think just, I think in my experience too, Naomi, it's, I think it's been similar to yours in where I think the number, the ratios of marketers to marketing ops team members is also larger than 7. So, but 7's not, I don't think 7's crazy. I mean, I think that's in the ballpark as well. I mean, I think it's unusual where they have more than that. All right, so I think Naomi sort of touched on something I think where we're gonna go, Colton, which is when you and I talked before, when we were getting ready for this, you mentioned something about keeping in mind who the customer for marketing ops is. So what's your take on this? And then we can kind of dig into maybe if there's more than one, we can talk about those all specifically.

Yeah. So, yeah, and this obviously depends on the organization that you're at, but for me here at Sendoso, my customers are the actual customers, the prospects coming in on our website, et cetera, and then obviously the marketing team and then the sales team. I think a couple years ago I was very much focused on the sales side of things because being kind of the in-between marketing and sales, I was always like, all right, if marketing is doing their job, it's going to send stuff to me basically. And then I give that to the appropriate sales rep. And so I was very much focused on making the salespeople as happy as possible, which I still try to do. But I had it a little backwards, I think, in In that I need to prioritize the customer's experience over the sales reps. So, for example, a little bit ago, I made an update in prioritizing the sales team because it would make something process or a process for them a little bit easier. But at the end of the day, it made it harder for our customers to book a meeting with us. It was just a little bit longer of a process, which wasn't ideal. So, you know, that next morning I got up and I was like, all right, I'm switching that. I'm sending a message to our sales team and saying, hey, for right now, this is the way it's gonna have to work until we get this new platform in that will set it up the way that we want it to. But right now, due to the limitations through the platform that we were using at the time, we had to do it this way. And obviously that's not the ideal situation for your sales team to have a little bit extra work, but I would rather have the customers be able to book a meeting quicker with less hoops to jump through versus the sales reps having to click an additional button or whatever it was. So I feel like that's kind of where I'm at right now, where customers are number one, and then making sure that our marketing team is set up to get the sales team that ideal prospect into their queue. And then if I'm doing that right, the sales team's gonna be happy because they have a full a full list that they can work through that day without, you know, too much, too many complaints there. So yeah.

It's interesting. Well, did I, I think I probably went on to my rant about internal customers that whole term with you, didn't I? Not sure if I did or not.

No, I don't know.

Oh, let's say I hate that term. So like, I think customers are customers, right? But, you know, there are internal people that you have to work with and be accountable to. And I think So I don't want to go down that rabbit hole, but I'm curious. I mean, you talked about a specific example where you— I don't know if you changed the priority or you use sort of a mental model heuristic, whatever you want to call it, to prioritize those external customers over the internal stakeholders that you're also working with. Are you doing that on a case-by-case basis? Do you have something that you You know, you have those in some sort of hierarchy and do you communicate, how do you communicate that with those internal folks?

Yeah, I mean, it definitely is a case-by-case basis just because, I mean, what we do in marketing ops is a wide range of things. So each thing could impact the sales team a little bit differently than something else. So just to have a blanket statement and say, oh, it's always going to be the customer over the salesperson every time is not completely true, but knowing that there are certain instances where one change in a particular process will have a larger impact on a sales team, this in this case versus another one, is pretty important to keep in mind as you're going through your updates. And in terms of just communicating those changes to the internal stakeholders is, I mean, I work really closely with the sales leader, so I want to make sure that he's aware of the changes that are being put in place. And then either I will ask him if he would like me to distribute that information out to his team, and typically there's a document with that, or if he would like to just pass that on himself. Just depends on how he would like it, just because I don't want to step on his toes and kind of change the flow of information to his team. if there's already a bunch of stuff going out, because I know sales teams can get inundated with a lot of changes and updates and this new product, this new thing. And so I don't want to interrupt that at all.

Naomi, I know you and I both have worked at large organizations. And have you— do you have any kind of structure that you use for this? Maybe— I know I used to have one that I try to use in most places that Particularly for larger, like more project-oriented stuff. Now, day-to-day tasks, it's a little more of a kind of SLA-driven probably. But what do you have a, do you have a framework that you use for prioritization?

Whoever asked me the most recently, to be honest.

Last in, first out.

Yeah, exactly right. That's kind of, no, I, Honestly, and this might not sound— this might not be a popular opinion, or maybe it is, but when you've been in marketing ops for a while, you kind of have a gut feeling as to like what is going to be the most urgent and what can be pushed out a bit more. And, you know, yes, someone can say there's a deadline for this day, but a lot of times those deadlines are arbitrary because they had to put something into, you know, be able to hit submit on an intake form or something like that, right?

Sure.

I think when you've been doing this role long enough and you either have on one hand a project that has a million little tasks that are just super annoying to complete, but it will be completed in like 5 minutes versus something that just really takes a bit more, okay, what are the downstream effects of this? How do I communicate it out? Who do I need to let know first? Do I need to check with anyone? Even though it's a one-time thing, possibly it can just be a bigger bit of a bigger mental load. And sometimes it's just a gut feeling, you know, fly by the seat of your pants marketing ops.

Yeah. You know, it's funny you say that because I do, I do think that there's something about having the experience and making sort of informed decisions about it. I think the one thing I would add is that I do tend to prioritize things that affect like lead flow.

Yes, that 100%.

That is probably the, like the one thing that trumps just about anything else. You know, and then after that, it becomes things that actually do have a deadline, right? An event has a specific date and you need to get things out, that kind of stuff. But otherwise, I'm with you. A lot of it is sort of judgment based on other things. And, you know, it's hard to prioritize and optimize everything. And it's at the end of the day, you know, probably leave most days with a list of things that we could have done and it's not complete and it never will be. Yeah. So if you're an inbox zero person, this is not the job for you.

I am, but I'm failing at it terribly right now.

I gave up on that a long time ago.

I think another important part of this too is when you get a bunch of, you know, however you're intaking, you know, projects and things from outside teams or internal teams, whichever. Is asking follow-up questions. I feel like oftentimes we, we just quickly jump into the task at hand expecting to know exactly why they're wanting this update made or this change made. But asking a few extra questions oftentimes has helped me understand the prioritization, but also even eliminate the project entirely because sometimes it could be something that, you know, for example, I had a an old VP of mine at a past company come to me with an urgent request that she wanted all of our sales reps to get basically anytime any new piece of content was added to the website, get a notification that that was being done, which was great. But I mean, at the end of the day, that's a lot of notifications going out. She wanted to run this through Marketo. I was like, this is not This is not the situation, you know, how you want to do this. This is not it. And at first I started going through and I was like, okay, I can do this, whatever, you know, I'll figure out something.

Yeah.

But then I stopped for a second. I was like, okay, let me ask a few follow-up questions. And she was just under a lot of stress from the sales side of things, which we were able to just create a newsletter that came out once a month. And that was sufficient for them to know what is coming, you know, out in the next month. And these are some of the things that happened last month. So just like asking additional questions can either eliminate the task entirely or it can help you understand how long is this thing going to take? Are there other stakeholders that need to be involved? Because maybe from that initial Asana or Jira or whatever you're using, task that was sent over to you didn't have all the details needed to understand the full scope of the project.

Yeah, that also brings up, and I learned this actually from being on the other side of it where I was requesting stuff. At this point, I was doing web stuff, but I was with an IT team that supported the website. And so I got very frustrated sometimes because I thought my request made total sense, and it did to me, right? And they took it as— 2 things that were wrong with it. One, they made assumptions about what I said, or they interpreted it in a different way, which was actually Now that I think back, like, totally be expected. The others, they thought I didn't leave it, like, that I absolutely needed everything I was asking for. When in reality, I wanted them to be more consultative, right? And clarify, do we understand you? And if they thought that, like, you know, say I had $100 to spend on, or 100 hours to spend on something, you know, and what I had asked for was going to be 1,000 hours, right? I want them to tell me, like, how can we make progress towards it? Or does it even make sense to do it? And I think that's what you're getting at, right?

Is—

Yeah. Asking those questions about, or offering alternatives once you understand what it is they're trying to achieve. Because sometimes that full solution that someone, or full thing that someone's asking for is doable, right? Almost all of it is doable, but the amount of time and effort it would take or cost in some cases is not necessarily worth it. And especially if it's something where you're not sure, like, is it actually going to be beneficial? Do you want to invest that much incremental effort on it. So I like that approach too.

And I would just add on top of that too, once you have nailed down the project and it is in whatever task management platform you have, make sure that that list of projects that you're working on is public. Obviously you can pick and choose which ones are, but the ones that are to other teams, make sure that that is public and people can access it. So when they do send over a task and they're like wanting to— this is like the most urgent thing ever because everything's urgent to everybody, right? Let them see what you're working on at the time and let them know like, hey, if you're going to bring this in, what are you going to push down? Because oftentimes it's going to be something that they requested last week and they still want. And now this other new thing that is more urgent now, you know, can shuffle up the queue. Yeah.

Yeah. So do you— I mean, you mentioned Asana and Jira and there's others. So do you treat those— I generally classify them as repeatable kinds of requests, right? Things that are usually short-term or repeatable. Do you treat those similar? Do you go through the same sort of process either mentally or actually You know, in how you handle it as you do for things that are maybe a little more long-term, like mid to large size projects. Then, you know, you mentioned lean data. I don't know if you had like a full sort of a full project in quotes to build on from that. How do you handle that?

I mean, the smaller like repeatable ones that are coming into me are typically from, you know, the general marketing team for events or or random, you know, Marketo programs, campaigns that need to be spun up, or an email here and there. Those, I mean, really don't require too much follow-up. We've gotten to a pretty good place where, where the intake form has the information I need, and if needed, you know, I can always just Slack them back and forth here and there, but generally doesn't require too much information. However, yeah, like if it's— if it is a bigger project, and, and typically those projects are either ones that I create for myself Or are coming from the Salesforce team, the RevOps side of things to really improve our process, which we meet consistently enough that typically that information can be gathered on those calls, which doesn't require too much extra meetings or extra back and forth, which is nice.

Yeah. Just curious because I think I know the answer for Naomi, but for Colton, are you in an organization where some of the marketers actually are able to go into like Marketo and do things or not?

They, they can, yes.

They can.

Some of, some of them better than others, but we really don't do too— we have a pretty good, we have quite a bit of traffic on our website, so we don't have a ton of like extra campaigns for events and such that are coming through consistently enough. That it's too crazy of an idea that I could just do it myself and get it done in, you know, 5 minutes versus them having to remember 3 months apart here and there how to do things, you know? I do have training videos that I've sent over to them and docs, but even then, sometimes it's just easier for me to spend 5 minutes and go through it myself.

But yeah. And Naomi, if I remember right, yours are more centralized, like highly centralized structure, right?

Yeah. Definitely. But there are, you know, like I mentioned earlier on this podcast, that there are folks who have definitely more technical aptitude and have expressed interest to be able to do some things. We do have like different permissions in Marketo that we do give them limited access so they can't, you know, delete or send out an executed campaign, but they can definitely go in and they don't need to wait for anybody, for us to go in and make some copy edits or swap out an image or something like that. Right. So they can definitely go in and self-serve that way. But it's interesting because, and I don't know, Hilton, if you've, if you notice this too, is that I've found that a lot of folks will, they like the idea of having access, but they actually don't utilize it. You know, it's like, right? Like, I, you know, I can cook my own food, but I sometimes I just wanna go to a restaurant and someone cook for me, you know?

Yeah. Especially, well, depending on the platform too. I mean, HubSpot is a little bit easier to like understand. For the most part, it still can be complicated. But like anytime I've like talked about it with Marketo, people are always like, yes, I'd love more access. And then you give it to them and they get in there like, actually, I have no idea what I'm doing.

Please. For sure. Yeah. Right.

Rewind that and, and remove that, please.

Yeah. I do think it ma— I think it does matter which platform. Like, I think you, I think Marketo from my experience is the one that's the Challenge— most challenging for a non-technical person to be able to really get around too much.

Even over Eloqua? Or you're not even considering them as part of the—

No, no, no. So I'm thinking the one I don't have experience with is whatever Pardot is called now. Um, but, but Eloqua, I think, is actually a really easy interface compared to others for like creating content. Now, all the other stuff. It's different too. But I think one thing that I've seen, because I've worked at different places where they've been sort of a hybrid or they've been centralized or they've been mostly out in the field with the marketers. And when it was centralized, the one thing that seemed to work really well was the centralized team building, say, emails. And then when tests were sent out, rather than that coming back through yet another, like an ongoing recurring request to make updates. And this was a global situation. So with support globally, so it was time, time lags and everything else built into it is starting with to give the idea of some marketers the ability to at least go and edit, do minor edits on content within, say, an email. So comma was in the wrong place or punctuation or spelling or things like that and just make a quick fix. And then that was it. So.

Until 6 months later, the entire email template gets corrupted and you can't figure out why.

Well, okay.

You guys are laughing because you know it's true.

Fair enough. Well, I mean, so I don't know about you, but have you ever, like, we used to have a shared spreadsheet for UTM generate, UTM tracking generators and like every, every week, like someone would erase the formulas, you know, and we'd have to roll back and luckily you could do that. But yeah, that's the kind of stuff that happens.

That was me yesterday, literally. I go into the UTM builder and the dropdowns aren't selecting. I'm like, oh no. So yeah, had to figure out what was going on. And thankfully it wasn't too long, but yeah.

Yeah.

Yep. I think we've all been there. If you haven't been there, you will be there, right? Yeah. Okay. So you hinted at this kind of switching gears a little bit, Colton. You mentioned this when earlier when you're talking about complicated tech stack. So I think you and probably all of us would be advocates for trying to minimize the complications and complexity, I guess would be the better word, of the tech stack. How do you approach and what kind of recommendations would you have for our audience on how to avoid the trap of, or the siren song of complicated creative stuff that you can do in automation or integration or whatever?

Yeah, this is a tough one and also a fun one for me because I feel like as marketing ops people, and maybe this is just for me, but who knows, you'd let me know. I love technology. I love tinkering with random things at my house or whatever. And I feel like that kind of translates well into my career in marketing ops is I really like learning new technologies. But the con of that is that I can often get trapped into the, oh, this is a really cool product, this is a really cool thing, and I would love implement this. And somehow I get budget here and there sometimes to do that. And then at the end of the day, I'm like, hold up, I'm a one-person marketing ops person, you know, team. I can't manage 20 different platforms in an efficient and, you know, well-thought-out way. So at the end of the day, it really comes down to how much time can you really dedicate to your tech stack? And how many people, yeah, can you allot to each one of these tech type, you know, tools that you have in your belt. When I got hired here at Sendoso, Sendoso has gone through a lot of changes over the last couple of years, you know, and hasn't always been good. So there's been a lot of layoffs here and there. And so I was hired there. There wasn't anybody in marketing ops. They, they were using an agency at the time, which is— they're awesome. But there's a— after a certain point, you need someone internal to be able to, to, you know, understand the whole complexity of the business, right? So I was hired the start of my third week. There was a layoff. Basically everybody on the RevOps team except for the Salesforce admin was let go. He was just started his 2-week PTO trip in Japan. So I was still getting access to all the things, didn't have Salesforce admin access, but got that and was able to adjust some things. And so how this kind of plays into managing complex tech stacks is, I mean, being a technology company, a tech stack ourselves, we used to have this pattern of swap deal swapping. So we would get your platform and you would get ours, right? And it looks nice in terms of like a deal going through, right? But at the end of the day, it really doesn't get too much in terms of revenue depending on the deal. But we did that for so long in the past that we had basically, you name it, we had it and do. And we're going to the— we're through the point right now where every department's really minimizing what they have in their tech stack. And that's been a huge part of me and and the rest of the RevOps team is really getting down to what's necessary, what's going to actually help us process our prospects through our systems and get our salespeople the most actionable data that they can to do their jobs most effectively. So when I got here, there was, I mean, my tab is still filled with a bunch of bookmarks of different tools. Thankfully, it's gone down quite a bit, which has been nice. But I feel like this question, there's 2 parts. There's the number of tools that you have. You could probably cut out some. You probably can and save your company a lot of money there. But also in terms of the automation and the processes that you're building out, simplifying those. So I feel like that's where, yes, you can eliminate tools, but where you're going to have the most freedom to go and make change. I feel like is going in and reviewing your auditing, your systems, and seeing where you can simplify things down. For me, it was really simple because we had a layoff. I was needed to go into— I was needed to go into lean data and revamp our lead routing processes. And so that was just like a no-brainer, had to go in there and do it. But through doing that, I audited the system and realized that there's a lot of fluff in there that was when we were a 700-person company. And now when we're 100-person, there's a lot of change that happens within that difference, right? And so really simplifying down what is needed, it really simplified our system and really made it a lot more efficient. So we didn't have to do all these territory assignments. It was really just a round robin now, or— And really being able to add in additional things like now we're connected to Slack through Lean Data, which helps us be notified when certain hot leads come through, et cetera, that we weren't doing before, but we were doing a bunch of other stuff that wasn't really needed. So I think there's just 2 parts, the actual tech stack, but also what you're doing within the tech stack that probably is overcomplicated and can be simplified down.

I feel like there's a 3rd item too, which is there's this hidden cost of you actually need people to maintain these systems, right? So, you know, and that could be you actually need more people, which has real costs, or you get such a small sliver of people's time dedicated to any one of those. And usually those get squeezed if it's not one of the core ones. And then, you know, you're probably spending most of your time in 2 or 3 of them, and then the others that still have stuff going on that maybe you don't know about, right, is still going on. Maybe it breaks and you don't know about it till 2 days later. Right.

Yeah.

So I think there's a risk there and a potential cost. This also gets into then, you know, one way I guess that you could avoid some of that pain is by having solid documentation, right? Are you, like, how do you, are you doing stuff with documentation? Was there any when you walked in, right, into that sort of chaotic situation?

The agency did a— they're really good at documenting out things, but I mean, they documented the processes that they built out or had worked on. They weren't going in and doing things that they didn't touch, which is understandable. So when I came in, there was— I mean, we had an issue with demo requests. We were having like someone even like the day my first interview, someone reached, you know, tagged Sendoso and said, hey, I've submitted like a million demo requests, nobody's reached out to me, what's going on? You know, super, you know, high engagement information is being sent over to you, but nothing was happening. So that was like a huge thing that I had to just quickly go in and audit. And then obviously there's been iterations of that. But yeah, documentation is a I mean, I think that's— it is the bane of most people's existences within marketing operations. It's either you do it well or you don't, but you're always going to be switching a job here and there. And if someone before you didn't document, then you're kind of left hanging, trying to understand what's going on. But yeah, I got in here, there really wasn't a ton, but I like going through and just auditing systems anyways. And so what I typically do is have just like a Google Doc that is just like a mind dump of everything that I'm noticing. And then I typically take that document into a wireframe depending on what the process is, if it can be wireframed. But then I go into, you know, just wireframe it out. This is the starting point, this is where all the entries are, and this is what— where it's going. So I always do a current state, and then I go in and blow it up and make a future state as well, just because there's always a lot of improvements there. Yeah.

How do you, how do you, do you have a way that, like, do you block a certain amount of your time to be able to do some of that? Or how do you, like, how do you make time for that?

Yeah, I mean, a lot of it is, yeah, blocking time on my calendar. Fortunately for me, I don't have a ton of meetings. I probably have 10 meetings all week, which is great, you know, a couple each day. And then the rest of the day I can go in and, and really schedule some busy work time for myself to knock out those tasks that have been, you know, up on my, on my queue. So, but I mean, in instances where I have been busier and I've had more meetings, it really comes down to, yeah, blocking out your calendar. And, you know, there's gonna be things that get added to your calendar last minute that are urgent here and there. But I found that people are really understanding of a full calendar and they're not going to like double book you all the time. So just making sure that you plan ahead in terms of your— yeah, I've been fortunate at least. Yes.

Naomi, I'm curious if— do you— how important is documentation to you and your team there? And how do you make time for that within it?

I think it's something that you have to stay on top of because if you Don't it just becomes a huge mess, obviously, right? And the flow, the workflow that I generally have taken on is that everybody owns the documentation for the area that they are the subject matter experts in, right? So if they are responsible for X, then they are responsible for documenting X and maintaining that documentation. I tend to do short, quick updates to our business partners in. Salesforce Chatter, but I also use it as almost like a chapter guide for me of things I need to remind myself to do update documentation. So, if I'm announcing something to the wider organization and I'm saying, hey, we just rolled out X, right? I tend to probably about, I'd say once a quarter, go back and make sure that all of the documentation that's related to all of the announcements that I've put out on behalf of marketing ops has been properly updated and documented. That's just kind of the workflow that we have fallen into within EFI. Obviously, if there's anything that is, like, more crucial, like field mapping or data hygiene stuff or anything around privacy laws, right, that gets updated immediately.

Sure. Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, so it sounds like you just, like, you've got an embedded discipline within the team. That's an important thing. That's good. Do you— I'm sorry, I know you didn't prepare this, but is that part of how you evaluate your team too in terms of reviews and whatnot? Is that part of their goal is to keep that up to date?

No, it's not a formal part of their goal. It's more if it doesn't get done, I just ask them, hey, why isn't it done?

Do it. Yeah, it's just— they say expect you to sort of— that's like normal expectation. Expectation, right?

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah.

And it's, it's one of those things where a lot of the documentation, it's, it's a feel-good thing to know that it's there and updated. But aside from the marketing ops team, a lot of us don't, like nobody, we find, I find that people don't really look at it unless you're doing something in that realm and then you go back and refer to it. Like, and it's almost, I find that a lot of the times when I'm referring to documentation, it's stuff that I wrote myself just to remind myself what I did. Right. And I'm dealing with something like this. actually, this very week, right, around cookies, and something that was implemented 5 years ago. And I don't remember the exact nuances of certain things, and I had to go back in and refresh my memory, right? And I guarantee you, nobody in those 5 years has read that documentation except me.

So.

Yeah. I mean, the one I think about is, I had a role once where part of my scope included an inbound team. Right? Like business development, SDR, whatever you want to call it. And the person I finally was able to hire somebody, one of the things I had that person do was document the process that she was using, including email templates, because we didn't have it automated or it was all manual from that standpoint. So that there was no backup for her. It was basically me when she was out. So for me, I was always referring back to it. And then I knew she was always updating it on a regular basis. In this case, it was It was like a wiki part of the project management system we had was where that lived. And so it just, it was interesting, like seeing that and it became very beneficial and that probably need to do, I need to be better about doing that with the core marketing ops stuff when I'm in those places. Yeah.

So something interesting that I, I found helpful for me in keeping up to date with documentation, because I feel like that's even harder. than, than starting the documentation or even just having the, like, the initial document created, because they should be like, you know, a living document. They should be updated and adjusted here and there as you, you build out your systems. Um, but something that I've recently started doing is as soon as I do complete or update a, a document, obviously I'll have, um, in the start of all my documents, it will have who, who created it, when That was last updated, who it's going to, who are the stakeholders, and what's the goal of this document. But on top of that, the last updated date, I'll set a calendar notification for myself depending on the type of document it is. Say if it is sourcing, maybe I should be looking at that on a monthly basis, or maybe it's a quarterly thing, right? I'll put it on my calendar. So when I get to that day, it's like, oh, check this document and make sure it's updated, which has helped me just, you know, a lot of times I'll just go in there like, oh, it really hasn't changed much. Maybe it has a little bit here and there. And I just add that to the updates at the bottom of the doc, which has been really helpful in just staying up to date because that's a lot of times something I forget about. And if I don't mark it somewhere, I'm never gonna do it again.

I think that's a great idea of sort of setting yourself a tickler reminder to check on those on a, Reasonable frequency. I think that's a great idea. Well, we've covered a lot of ground, Colton. Is there anything we haven't touched on yet that you think our audience would benefit from in terms of how to do more with less?

Maybe not with do more with less, but I think just in general with marketing operations is just be curious. I feel like the more curious of a person you are, the better you are going to be suited to this role. Just because there's always something new. And if you just shy away from that thing and say, hey, no, I'm not gonna deal with that, you know, whatever, you're not gonna get very far or you're gonna have a lot harder of a time. But if you're curious about how things are working, I mean, whether that's within your defined role or outside a little bit, it's always gonna benefit you in just learning a little bit more here and there. So, yeah.

Yeah, I thought you were gonna do a little Ted Lasso thing. Be curious, not judgmental, right?

Which is good too.

Yeah, probably. But like, it probably does apply in this world in this way too. Well, hey, Colton, this has been a great conversation. I think our audience is going to benefit from this. If folks want to, you know, keep up with you or learn more from you, what's the best way that they can do that?

LinkedIn. I have been off it for a bit right now, but LinkedIn is probably the best. Yeah.

Got it. Okay. Well, great. So Colton, thank you. Naomi, as always, so great. So thanks for for joining. And, uh, to the rest of our audience, we appreciate you continuing to support us. Until next time, bye everyone. Bye everyone.