The Marketing Ops Leader: Martech Red Flags, Influence w/o Authority, Cross-Channel Marketing and More

---

---

In this edition:

1. Underrated marketing ops skills

2. Selecting priorities

3. Martech red flags

4. The most difficult part about getting a MOPs job

5. How to do cross-channel marketing

6. Answering reader questions

---

Underrated Marketing Ops Skill: Influence Without Authority

We work across many teams, often without the ability to “command and control” to get our work done. Marketing ops need to be able to influence sales, demand, product, analytics, and many more.

Here are 3 key things you can do to improve your “influence without authority.”

1 - Alignment and shared mental models

Misalignment kills collaboration. Align your mental models (paradigm or “way of looking at things”) to find common ground and mutually beneficial solutions. For example, if both teams agree that having accurate and timely data is critical to getting the job done, it will be much easier to collaborate on a solution.

2 - Compelling + credible business cases

Partner teams want business success too. Your requests into other teams should include specific business outcomes, data-informed considerations, and alternative solutions and recommendations where appropriate. A good business case answers these questions: What outcome can we expect? What tradeoffs are we making? Why now?

3 - Collaboration on solutions

Rather than sending issues over, offer to work together to develop potential paths forward. While you may not have the expertise to solve everything, collaboration usually results in clarity and quicker resolution. Some ideas: offer to gather more data, set up stakeholder meetings, provide resources and documentation, and make yourself available for additional information requests.

---

---

Martech Red Flags

1 - “Once we purchase this new tool, we’ll really be able to get going.” Truth - You can’t buy a tool to fix bad marketing

2 - “This process is too complicated; you probably won’t understand it.” Truth - If someone can’t explain it simply, they likely don’t understand it well.

3 - “Setup and integration will be quick and easy.” Truth - Regardless of the actual steps, setup and integration need to be thoughtfully planned with all key stakeholders.

4 - “Our other clients do this, so it should work for you too.” Truth - While general principles can work for many businesses, each organization is unique and will require nuance to solve problems.

5 - “If this converts just one more sale, it’ll pay for itself!” Truth - This is an oversimplified sales tactic. Purchasing software always has multiple cost factors, including operational cost, opportunity cost, and labor costs.

6 - “This platform should solve all your data problems.” Truth - Platforms and data solutions don’t “solve” data problems. They ENABLE smart people to better solve data problems. Tools are a component of a larger plan to address the root causes of data issues.

7 - “We need this tool because our central resource won’t help us.” Truth - While procuring a tool outside of the normal processes isn’t always a bad thing, the solutions tend to be short-term (and when does short-term end?). "Shadow IT" is typically a sign of a core alignment problem. 8 - “This marketing tool will run itself!” Truth - Great Martech solutions require time and talent, period.

---

Poll of the Day

---

The State of Cross-Channel Marketing Report

I really don’t like marketing reports.

But truthfully, I loved this one.

The State of Cross Channel Marketing Report is nothing short of amazing. Authored by MoEngage and by my favorite cartoonist, Tom Fishburne.

ne at Marketoonist, this fully illustrated report contains actual data from 730 B2C marketers worldwide. The report shares practical advice and data behind what is working across cross-channel marketing today, with all the wonderful insight, humor, and cleverness that Marketoonist is known and loved for. 

Download the report today.

---

Answering Reader Questions:

How do I know what tech stack works for the company at any stage of GTM strategies? For example, brand awareness, lead gen, demand gen, etc.

At a high level, I think about getting the data strategy and platforms right (single-source-of-truth), the activation systems right (email, CMS, advertising), the reporting strategy right, and the workflow management right.

For stages like brand awareness and lead gen - it’s not necessarily the entire tech stack that needs to work for each stage. It’s that you have the right tools for each stage and that they work together in a functional way. So, look at the customer experience of an activation system like email or social. If the customer experience works as intended, then the next step is to see if the data from those interactions flows into your data hub and, ultimately, your reporting dashboards. If all of that works, then you have the right tool for each stage.

The marketing teams look to me to solve every problem, and they expect these grand, elaborate, fancy-social-media-post-worthy solutions or new tooling or silver service reports to solve what are normally very basic, simple problems like “have discipline, agree on the goal and stick with it,” or “use the self serve dashboard provided.” How do I get buy-in from the teams that sometimes simpler is better?

I feel for you! Been there.

My take: It is very difficult to get people to arrive at the answer “simple is better.” They have to learn the hard way, unfortunately.

Try this: build and ship a version 1 of the solution, and tell them that version 2 will come when things slow down. If you are like most marketing teams, things will never slow down enough to make a version 2 of something that is already working well.

The other part is culture. The “simplification” culture needs to start at the top, and then the champions of simplification need to show up every day to prove that it works.

Good luck!

Ask more questions here.