Welcome to the art of marketing operations, a tailor podcast. Here you can
grow your knowledge about marketing operations, listen to ideas and strategies to help you
scale, grow and optimize your efficiency, drive your speed to market and enrich
your work life. Let's get to it. Welcome to the art of marketing
operations, a tailor podcast. I'm Glen Bottomley, and today my guest is
Daryl Alfonso, head of Global Marketing Operations at Amazon web services, one of
the most influential on demand cloud computing platforms for individuals, companies and governments in
the world. Thank you for joining me today, Daryl. Hey, thanks
Glenn, thanks for having me. I'm really passionate about marketing operations. I
love how your podcast is called the art of marketing operations. It's a beautiful
name. Excited for our conversation. That's excellent. What thank you do?
Well, let's first start with the fact that you are a global thought leader
for marketing operations, and I'd like to actually put a plug in for your
blog at Darrell alfonsocom which offers numerous blog articles about marketing operations. So can
you share a bit with our audience why you wanted to start your blog and
where your passion for marketing operations originated from. Yeah, good question. Thanks
for that. You know, the blog actually fits articles that are too long
for my linkedin posts. I find that I often more of right weekly micro
articles on Linkedin and those are my favorites and sometimes you just you can't fit
everything that you want to say in one of those short I don't know,
it's like maximum to paragraphs in a linkedin post. So that's where that where
the blog came from. But I'll I'll tell you that. You know,
marketing operations, I think, are really poised to be the future marketing and
business leaders and they are just coming out from the woodwork now. They're just
coming from from out from behind the scenes. I think they're coming into the
forefront of marketing and and end of the entire go to market function because of
the reliance on data, the the the digital transformation, the move toward remote
work. There's so many reasons why marketing operations why it's such a great time
to be in marketing operations and I think that a lot of people we know
that working in in this field, but a lot of you, other people
don't know that. A lot of marketers are just starting. A lot of
marketers are, you know, they know they like digital but they they don't
know what to do with it. So I think that that's that's that's where
a lot of my content come from and a lot of my thoughts come from
to sort of help those marketers guide them down in marketing operations path, and
it's been really nice. It's been so nice. I get I get direct
messages probably every other week of someone saying I just started in marketing operations.
I love the the Post that you're putting out. It's helping me throughout my
career and that's the really the reason why why I do it. That's excellent,
you know, it's very inspiring too. I've had the opportunity to read
many of your posts as well and really really powerful, practical and it's just
really great. So thank you for doing that. I think it's a great
service to the to the to our group into the industry. So thank you
so Darrell. As the head of Global Marketing Operations at Amazon web services,
I would imagine that one of the biggest challenges that you face daily is how
you run a marketing operations functional area at a global scale. So can you
speak to how you prioritize what you and your team work on each day and
what's the most important thing you've learned running a global marketing operations team to ensure
success? Yeah, you know. So I first want to say that it's
definitely different, because I have worked at startups and act at midsize enterprises actually,
and the difference is between between that and a mega enterprise like Amazon.
Amazon definitely requires some different structure some different thinking. So I will say that
not all of this applies to to two companies. I would say that that
my main advice is to really keep focus on on the business and on the
customer and on business results, and that's the way that you that will really
guide your marketing operations projects. However, as you scale, you're going to
run into, you know, communication challenges, workload issues and all this sort
of thing. The way that I do it is to break up marketing operations
into different parts and have, you know, individuals responsible for those, for
those areas, and the main areas are marketing, product and engineering, enablement,
which basically means training and support right thanks to enable or in power stakeholders,
Bi and analytics, and then platform administration. So those four functions are
how we split up the group, and each of them are responsible for different
things. So I'll just call it a couple. You know, platform administrations
are responsible for the Martek and ensuring that those are set up to allow marketers
to create great digital experiences and and and all of the different projects that goes
into it. You've got bi and analytics that focus on, you know,
on the metrics and the data that are piping in from all the different systems
coming into one place and informing how we make better marketing decisions and marketing investments.
And then product, for example. One of the things that I that
I think that a lot of people miss or may not know about when you
get into enterprise marketing operations is that all of a sudden you have the resources
to develop custom tooling that will support marketers. So you're not it becomes more
than just hey, which marketing platforms are Martek do we purchase? The question
becomes which one should we purchase and which one should we build for ourselves,
so that that's one of the differences between enterprise marketing operations and then sort of
the the the smaller companies. Yeah, actually, that's a that's a very
good point about custom you know my own experiences it's been that, as you
just described, there's there are some aspects that are sort of shrink wrapped right
out of the box. You're you're doing sort of the happy path going down
as a specific solution. But inevitably, as you get larger the business is
more complex. You you can't get what you need, you can't get from
sort of point a to point b through that happy path, through standard functionality,
and that customization really is the only way to get that. And so
how do you know that sort of tipping point? What are the keys for
you? If you think about our audience who maybe some are working at a
global scale now, others who may not be, when you're going from where
you reach that threshold that you have to custom you know, jump over into
custom are there trigger points that you look for that that indicate to you,
okay, this requires a custom solution? Yeah, that's a good question.
I think there's a maturity part of it and then our resources part of it.
That's more that's that's a little bit natural. So if you don't have
the talent and budget to do it and you're already a little bit underwater,
when it comes to marketing operations projects, it's probably not the time right but
as as I think you your company starts to mature, starts to get bigger,
more and more people are coming on, then you start to almost get
that choice of okay, you know, maybe with half your time you can
actually start to develop these these solutions or start to partner with with it internal
development engineering resources to do it. So that's kind of like the really practical
answer. But but one one thing that that I will say is that you
can start to sense it when all of your projects, you start to use
things, it's like middleware, or you start to use lowcode, no code
applications like a Zappier or Worcado, to start connecting things together because because the
the Martech that you're buying off the shelf doesn't get you where you need to
go. And then all of a sudden it's well, how can we connect
them together? And and and this is such a fascinating topic, because you
have marketers that are essentially creating their own solutions by weaving them together. And
you know, I find that really inspire and really cool. So that part
that that parts Nice. But when the more often that you do that I
think you'll your team starts to realize, hey, we're not even using the
tools the way they were intended. We've made something of our own, and
that's that, I think, is another indicator of hey, maybe it's time
to explore what it might look like to build our own stuff. HMM,
yeah, that's excellent advice, because it's your point. Then you also,
I think, you find pickups and budgets, because if we're realizing that,
you know, we're actually using this almost completely custom there's probably other tools,
you know, in the Mar textack that you're not using. You know that
you could paybe jettison from your from your stack and pick up dollars to reinvest
elsewhere. Now, Darrell, you've mentioned before, I know that honing your
ability to problems, solve is is more important than sort of platform knowledge.
So can you I love that phrase. So can you unpack that a little
bit more for our audience? Yeah, you know, I think that this
May rock the boat a little bit for people that, you know, have
affinities for one specific platform or another, but it's kind of a larger question
of, you know, getting too comfortable with specific scenarios or specific tools or
just just anything in general. You know, like I knew, I know
a bunch of a bunch of former co workers that became almost institutional knowledge experts
within their organization because they had been at the same company for seven years and
then all of a sudden, when they change roles or change jobs, it's
like they're a deer in the headlights, you know, they don't know how
to cope with these new things. They don't know how to do things differently
and how to solve problems without everything that they had before. And that,
I think, happens when you get really familiar with one platform and then you
switch to another or someone takes it away for for something. So you end
up you end up lost. So the idea of these transferable skills is so
key and it comes all, it really comes down to to problem solving.
What I find really helpful is to take different frameworks and apply them to your
work, and that's how you do a lot of your problem solving. Because
when you do that and you start on paper, and it could be something
as simple as the impact effort matrix or some you know it's also called the
Eisenhower Matrix. Right were you rank your list of projects based on it's their
their relevant impact and effort, and that helps guide your decisionmaking. By starting
with that on a piece of paper and then bringing in the technology and later,
you save so much time and you you become much more effective as a
professional, and I think that that's one of the challenges that marketing ops faces
today. To be honest, they have a huge list of things to do.
They just start tackling it one by one, by whatever sort of ranking
that they had at the moment or, you know, as you probably know,
whatever the the big boss says they should do first. You know what
I mean. And the and that, that, I think, is where
we get into trouble. Yeah, yeah, well, exactly well, and
it particularly in your in your space, I mean some of these global challenges
that that you are faced with. I think that this notion of I love
this notion of transferable skills, because I think this is good counsel that you're
that you're giving here about how you what's the saying? You know, when
you once you've mastered the Hammer, every problem looks like a nail. And
so you know, if you if you get so in tuned in, so
aligned with one particular tool, one particular approach, you don't maintain that sense
of flexibility that gives you the resiliency in the versatility to, you know,
respond to really unique problems that come up. You know, if you suddenly
switch to you know, switch a company, switch to a different division,
some other function, you know something. It's a really can hear what you're
saying about, you know, honing those higher level problem solving skills and then
the other pieces, whether it's a platform or technology, those come along the
way. You can learn those, but you know, get the higher level
skills there too. That's great advice. Yeah, yeah, and I see
that all the time. I mean, I'm not saying that, especially if
you're going the consultant route or, like you're building your own agency. The
platform knowledge is fine and and it is very beneficial. So I'm not saying
don't study it. You know, you should become a subject matter expert in
whatever you're doing. Yeah, but I think that people bet the farm on
that and then they find themselves running into problems later, you know. So
definitely keep that in my gut. Yeah, kind of a yes and so
no, DA are. One of the things that I also know that you
mentioned is that marketing operations is a constellation of different skills. So you mentioned
it even the beginning. Marketing, digital demandin system administration, business and analytics,
Platform Administration, marketing and product enablement, etc. So how do you
have you found that you can effectively connect in tie all of those disciplines together?
How do you know if or when your team is performing at its optimal
level? Yeah, that's a good point. So I think goals is a
big part of it, and this is how I think about this is how
I think about goals. I think that, especially for marketing operations, you
need to be splitting your goals down the middle. You need fifty percent devoted
to business impact. Examples are revenue influenced revenue pipeline generation, MQL's, if
that's what your organization measures, and then all the way up the funnel from
you know, visits to email clicks and the databasic growth. And then fifty
percent of your time also needs to be on things that I like to call
for defying your position, and these are long term investments that you're making in
technology, in process, in people that will ensure the stuff ability of your
marketing programs in the future. And this also includes on the fortifying side.
This also includes things like data security and marketing compliance and consent, which a
lot of people forget about, is really important. So now that you're splitting
up your sort of goals on those two fronts, I think that that that
on one hand, you're it's almost like playing offense and defense. Okay,
if you're if you're if you're in a basketball game, you know what's your
strategy do you have? You have an offensive strategy or you have defensive strategy?
Well, you actually have both and you need both to play on both
ends of the court. And that's how that's the way I look at it
too, and most, most marketing teams, unfortunately, they just come at
it from one or the other, offense or defense. You know, they
have a they have a plan to acquire a bunch of leads, but they
don't know how to you know, they don't have a plan for for organizing
and structuring their data to personalize campaigns and set them up for great marketing in
the future, or they don't they don't have a plan to opt people in
and make sure that they're they're capturing consent and and and and recording that consent
for long term. You know, application and then all of a sudden they
want to they want to expand into Europe, but they can't, you know
what I mean. So I think that that's the way that I like it.
I like to do it at a high level, is that you're splitting
up your goals and then each team member you can almost can have those goal
split as well, so where as someone that's focusing on to man Jin can
also focus on, you know, something a little bit more long term,
because demangion tends to be short term. Yeah, that it what a what
a really effective. Simple to explain, complex to implement, I would imagine,
for sure. But I love the simplicity in the elegance of your modelcause
I think that there is a sense that everything has to be growth, growth,
top of the line. Top of the line. Everything's growth, growth,
growth. But I love the even the phrase, you know, for
to fine your position. It is those things that are if you don't fix
this, you could lose growth at a later time. If you don't if
you don't address this, you could lose existing share. Forget about new share.
Someone taught me a long time ago they call that closing the back door.
You know, you always want the front door open, bring in as
many new accounts as you can, but you guys got to close the back
door as well so you prevent customers from from exiting as well. So I
love the simplicity of your model. Thank you so much for sharing the yeah,
and one of the things also that was embedded in your response are you
mentioned you may want to, you know, expand in Europe, and so
there's that global nature and so you know, I know at Amazon you've described
in the past how marketing operations technologies, you know, your internal teams,
could literally be used by thousands of users. The example I remember you gave
me was Amazon's email platform itself has more than a thousand internal users who send
emails literally to millions of customers. So I mean that's really the scale of
that is. Just let that sink in for a moment. So what have
been some of the best strategies that you've employed to ensure effective use, governance
to but also consistency when you're supporting that many users and just that many customers?
Yeah, good question. I think. I think one thing to keep
in mind is that I'm definitely, definitely a proponent of decentralizing campaign operations.
I think it's more agile, it's scalable and it's very inclusive all, also
inclusive of cultures and and what a I what I mean by campaign decentralizing campaign
operations is if someone an a pack or Japan, if their marketing team wants
to use, you know, the email marketing program and engage their customers that
way, we enable them to do that with our our guidelines. So I
think that that's that's a really important thing to know. You know, it's
not like it's not like a thousand people on my team. We have a
much more a smaller central team. So so I think that the the the
main things that really help with this is having a strategy for adoption, training
and governance that comes with checkpoints and sort of verifies that users are have the
knowledge that they need and are also doing doing the things that they need to
do to make sure that the customer experience is good. Here's an example of
that. For email marketing platform, we actually have different levels of permissions based
on the training that each individual user goes through. Right so they have an
initial on boarding, several hours of learning, several hours of practical building and
exercises. All of a sudden they become a builder, but in order to
actually, you know, get to the next level approving assets and some other
other process oriented permissions, they have to take an additional class and actually pass
a test that verifies that they know what are, what our atws best practices
are in policies are and that they know things like, you know that you
need an unsubscribe link at the bottom of you know, the really base,
really basic stuff. But but you'd be surprised how many people don't. Don't
know that. And then we actually have a top tier of marketing technology user
for email. We actually call them email bar raisers, and email bar raisors
have an even longer, a much more robust set of training that they have
to do and we actually require them to be Marquetto certified experts. So they
need that external certification and those are the ones with the most permissions within the
system. So I think it so I think that's a big part of it.
Is that is that that sort of idea of earning more permissions the more
you learn, and I think that that's that's a fantastic way to do it,
almost elegant, like you mentioned before, like a ll yeah, yeah,
yeah, right. What I powerful phrase. They're earning permissions. I
love that and and also, you know, sort of there's a career component
to that, you know, excelling in your in your role, continuing to
grow, excelling to try to get the next rung improvement, continuous improvement in
your job. I think that's excellent. I love that. And so let's
stay at this level of thinking, you know, sort of big picture,
because I know that one of the key problems that you and I've chatted about
in the past is that leaders that are in marketing operations today may not necessarily
be thinking big enough. So, in other words, you know, instead
of just running campaigns or or administering a system or optimizing a MARTEXTAC, you
know, instead we really need to be thinking about how are we really improving
the customer experience? How are we leveraging data to provide more value to to
our customers and users? How do we generate more revenue, and just thinking
beyond essentially the the technology. So how do you recommend that marketing operations leaders
should do this, you know, to help them, particularly when there's so
many struggles with limited budgets and just constant demands, etc. What are your
thoughts yeah, there's two things I'm thinking about. One is, like you
mentioned, that obsessive focus on customer experience, and by that I mean the
end customer, the ones is actually paying the bills, and then to get
really good at you know, I call this translation, right, and you're
translating the concepts that are so natural to us that work in marketing operations to
the executive level, to the finance level, to the sales level. Like
what, what does it mean? So many people don't understand what the value
of quality data means. You know, it's just something that they just,
Oh, they just think about. But so so if I ask, if
I ask for, you know, Fiftyzero to invest in data quality, an
executive might say why? What are what? Why do we need that?
We already have data, etc. Etc. But if you say something to
the effect of Hey, listen, by making this fiftyzero investment, we can
enrich sixty percent of our database with these key data points, enabling our campaigns
to be x percent more personalized it, and we anticipate the conversion rate to
go up by x percentage, you know, resulting in this in this amount
of revenue, that's a very different conversation and a different ask and all of
a sudden it makes sense to most people. So you know that that answering
the why question for for different people in different audiences is so important, I
think, because a lot of people don't know. You know, and and
that's where, that's where that big gap between marketing ops and the rest happens,
because we say what we're working on and no one gets it. I
think that that translation, that translation piss pieces, is really missing. And
I also, you know, going back to the idea of customer experience,
this I think helped you think big because it's really inspiring. You know,
it's it's it. You know, when you think about someone coming to your
website and immediately understanding what it is that you do, immediately being able to
comprehend either sign up for a free trial and start working or being able to
at least get in touch with somebody to get the information that they need to
make a buying decision. You know that, I think improving the experience for
the customer. That's inspiring because, to be honest, it's more rare than
it is common. You know, when you when you go to websites,
you know, and I'm sure you've tried, you try to buy different platforms
by different software and it's a mess. You know, it's it's Clunky,
it's cumbersome, it's not buyer centric. So just by having marketing operations,
and your entire company, by the way, focusing on the customer and what
they're experiencing, it's a competitive advantage and it will it will help really make
a name for yourself in marketing or in other things too well. In one
of the things that I know that when when we chatted in the past,
when you talk about the why, and I know one of the things in
one of the techniques that you use is always starting with the end in mind
and painting the picture of what success will look like so that you can sort
of propel and move your team forward. So I you know, I think
that you know that's just a powerful way of sharing the why, is describing
and painting the picture. Can you elaborate on that a little bit about how
you do that? Yeah, I think that a lot of it is putting
yourself in the shoes of the customer. I think that's a really important one.
A lot of it is, I think, comes with experience. To
you know, an example is when you when you when you go, when
you go to any landing page, for example, you know you read through
it and you try to to figure out what the next steps are. This
gives you really great insight into what your customers are doing and what they're thinking.
And for most companies, if you go to their websites, if you
go to their landing pages, it's very difficult to ascertain what exactly they're doing
and what exactly they're offering. So I think that that is one of the
major ways in how you can sort of think big and paint a picture of
what's possible. Another thing that I like to do is I actually like to
show or mock up and paint the picture of what reports will look like in
the future, and I think that that one's a really cool one. So,
for example, at the beginning of the year you would say you would
you would put together you could just do it on excel, put together a
spreadsheet of yeah, so this is the way the revenue trended over the entire
year. This is how the leads grew over the year. This is the
database and the quality of it over the year. Is it? This is
these are the different channels and how they contributed to each one and then you
can actually look that, look at that as you're sort of North Star and
say, well, this is what the goal is and this is and you,
when you share with share it with you can even share this with executives.
This is what we're aiming toward. And then once the year starts and
you find that you're off track, it can bring you back and that's why
it's so that's why the the measurements of things like gages have always been really
popular and really helpful, because it lets you know if you're closer or not.
You know, and you know we get bombarded with so many things to
do that oftentimes we just kind of lose tracks, like, well, where
are we? You know, we're in the middle of the the five freeway
in you know, and there's a bunch of fields out here. I'm not
exactly sure, you know, and a lot of your team will forget where
they're going hit. So I think that that is is really important too,
to have that sort of vision of what you want the numbers to look like,
to remind people of where we're going. Well, and what is spectacular
way to augment what we were chatting about here is that, you know,
painting a picture of the end in keeping the end in mind. It's one
thing to paint what that picture is for the customer, but your contribution here
about the importance of, in addition to painting the picture for the customer,
also painting the picture for the internal team and what the reports would look like.
As you stated, the gage is the dashboards and and then, armed
with that information, you know, if we did this, imagine what you
could then establish or evaluate about the market, your customer base, growth opportunities,
etc. So what a what a really unique way that you do that,
Darrell, about it's painting the picture at both. It's sort of like
the external picture end in mind, but there's also that internal picture, you
know, end in mind. So thank you for that. That's that was
really interesting. Yeah, it's almost like a little bit of a play on
words, because essentially you are painting picture. Yeah, right, because the
reports, the reports, unfortunately aren't real. Yeah, there's really you know.
Yeah, yeah, because you have a you really are painting it.
Yeah, right, exactly. Yeah, no, I think that's excellent.
Now, Darrell, when you and I chatted before, I know that we
talked a little bit about the importance of sort of crafting a hierarchy of needs
for customers and just remaining laser focus on what on what customers want. And
I remember I shared a story with you about apple, and many people that
are listening here, probably you know, will remember this story, but that
when apple launched the iphone originally and then they launched the iphone three g the
IPHONE GS and then ultimately it took them all the way to iosthree dot oh
before they ever delivered copy and paste on the IPHONE. Now, clearly not
having that feature didn't hurt the sales of the iphone one bit and during those
first few years of the product because obviously apple, you know, knew what
was in, what was an important feature and what was not necessarily a critical
feature in the mind of the customer. So what strategies do you use building
out this hierarchy of needs to understand what's the most important things for your customer?
Yeah, this is such a good question and it's this is one that
made me really think, because I think I think about when I think about
this question. It's it's there is how you prioritize, you know, decisionmaking,
and there's some framework that you can use which I'll share. But there's
also this idea of, you know, how do they know that, that
it was the copy and paste feature? That is the one to leave out.
You know, it would still be successful. You know what I means.
I've been thinking about that a lot and how it is. So the
first is, you know, the framework that I like to use is that
you first need to start with the customer experience first and foremost, and making
decisions that are best for the customer. Then comes after that sort of Lens,
you look at the next level, which is business impact and contribution to
revenue. You always want to lean toward decisions that will help improve revenue and
then you you end up going to the you know some of the I refer
to this earlier as like fortifying your systems. You also want to look for
long term scalability of your platforms and processes, and then you also want to
look at things like security and customer data and their consent. So I like
that framework and that hierarchy to decisions to to sort of it makes it easy,
because if there's something that's going to drive revenue but create a poor customer
experience, that framework helps you in and the answer is no, we don't
do that because the customer experience is paramount. So that's that's how I address
these things is to come up with these frameworks. But the question of Hey,
when there's not data that's going to tell you what the answer is,
what do you do? And as I've been thinking about this, the word
intuition really kind of comes into play into mind for me, and I think
intuition comes from really knowing your industry, your customer and by studying your profession
and being curious about it over a long period of time. And you know,
unfortunately, that's where experience comes into play. You know what I mean?
I work with some young marketers every now and then and you know,
I admire them because they're run some tests, but they'll run tests on things
that just by just from my memory, I know aren't super important. You
know what I mean? They'll run tests on like the send date and time
of emails or maybe, like you know, just small variations in the subject
line where, you know, having done it before, I know that there's
bigger things to test than that. So that's just a simple example of how,
like, Oh, I don't really have the data to tell you that
this isn't the right direction. It's more of like my intuition that counts,
and I think that that's that's what happened with a lot of great sort of
product developments in the future. I think I think Steve Jobs had some into
intuitive feelings that these were the things that the customers really want and and and
what would really work and these set of things would end. So you know,
I know that that's not the best and maybe that's why. You know,
this is the the art of marketing operations, right? It's not.
It's not always a science, right. Yeah, I think intuition actually counts
for a lot and I think that one last thing I'm going to say about
intuition. A lot of it comes from trying, trying things and just realizing
it doesn't work. Yeah, and all that only come from experience too.
So I would agree great and when that someone described this to me, I
know that there's some discussion about that. Steve Jobs never really wanted to talk
to customers directly, because he is his thought was a customer would not be
able to necessarily articulate what it was that they were wanting, and so the
analogy that that I have heard in the past was that you know when a
went before television manufacturers created the remote control, if they were to ask the
customer, a customer probably would not have said when they had never seen a
remote control before. You know, if you could just create something, television
manufacturer, if you could create something, I don't know, something I could
hold in my hand where I couldn't I wouldn't have to get up out of
my chair, Walk over to the TV change the channel, and you know,
they wouldn't be able to articulate that. But it was this confluence of
factors of the technology are f the expanding, you know, cable networks and
more and more channels, and all of a sudden it was like you're getting
up so many times to change you know, it was like all of those
things combined to sort of have the lightning moment of someone creating the technology of
a remote control. And so, yeah, I think that's Fasciny. I
think the intuition and honing that intuition, that's that's salient advice. So thank
you for that. Yeah, and you mentioned the I think you hit it
right on the head when you said they couldn't articulate what it is that they
wanted, and that's because they don't know, and and and that. That
stuff kind of comes from experience. To like the example that I can think
of is I would always use these sort of cheapy headphones, you know what
I mean. For the stuff, I didn't know that I needed the air
pods until I got the air pods. And you do. You can't articulate
why until you experience it, you know what I mean, the to experience
how they don't they don't fill your ear, but they don't fall out.
How you know you can. You can take one out and and the the
the the, the music will pause. You put it back in and it
plays. You can talk to it really simple. You don't know these things.
All you know is the price it. Air prods are expensive, these
ones aren't, and like that's all you can articulate. But until you try
it, then you can say, Oh, this is why, right,
and I will never go back. Oh whatever. You know that. That's
that's that articulate. The word articulate. That's exactly right on. Oh that's
excellent, that's excellent. So in the spirit of continuous improvement, you know,
we're talking about how we can improve and in when you can know how
you're getting better. So where do you feel that marketing operations efforts today need
to improve generally, and and in what areas do you feel that most marketing
operations teams need to improve? So this depends on the type of you know,
we're marketing operations is in your org. If marketing OPS is an afterthought
at the moment for your company, maybe you're a smaller company or you know,
people just don't recognize recognize the value of marketing operations. I think that
you those teams can benefit from hiring some really digital savvy technical talent. I
think that you're leaving a lot on the table if you hire, you know,
just sort of generalist type marketers. So I think that that's that that's
a big problem now for the companies that are, you know, like us.
We value marketing operations and we hire the really smart people and we invest
in it. I think that those teams are lacking in prioritization, I would
say, and they tend to be systems oriented, almost like, and this
isn't an insult, but I'm just saying it's they have a very it oriented
mindset of how to implement technology and I it's main main goals are usually stability,
security, governance and scale right, but they miss all of the things
like business impact, revenue, customer experience, all of that. So,
you know, too many marketing operations operators that I run into have that sort
of iteam mentality and I think that they could benefit really from understanding the business,
understanding customers. So those are the things that I think are missing from
different words. That's great. Thank you so, Darrell. Before we wrap
up today's episode, What's the main takeaway that you want to leave our audience
with in understanding the challenges facing marketing operations executives today? You know, I
think it really comes down to to business acumen and the customer experience. I
was thinking, I was thinking about this. There's two things to think about.
And you know, I went to business school, but not but not
everybody has has gone to business school and not everyone needs to. I will
say the one thing that you learn business school is that your business will die
without revenue. So that's that's that's that. The main takeaway from, you
know, x plus years of study, right, is that your business dies
without revenue. And then what you learn beyond that and what you learn from
experience is that happy customers make everything easier. Right. So and and happiness
is is defined in many different ways, but it makes marketing easier, it
makes sales easier, it makes the the awareness and branding of your product easier.
That's where word of mouth comes from. So these two big elements,
I think, are something that are things that I find a lot of marketing
operations folks either don't know or they forget because they're their knee deep in the
swamp trying to fight the data issues, whereas you know, they're they're missing
the point in those things. You know, it's like that story where you've
got, you know, the the group of expedition years going through the forest
and they're chopping down the jungle and then, you know, one person climbs
up to the top of the tree and then shouts hey, we're going the
wrong way. You know, that story always may always so resonates with me
because it like it doesn't matter how hard you're working if you're going the wrong
way. So that that's that's something that I try to advocate to to marketing
operations everywhere, is that businesses die without revenue and that happy customers make all
the difference. I would say that those are things to remember well, that's
putting a fine point on it. Will leave it right there. Well,
this wraps up this episode of the art of marketing operations. Thank you so
much for joining us today, Darrell. Print is a costly and complex investment
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