Marketing operations (MOPS) is an evolving, multidisciplinary, and multifaceted function with a single goal: to improve and prove the value of marketing. MOPS is about blending people, processes, and martech to drive that single goal. In this four-part blog series, called “MOPS and Optimizing Martech,” we’ll explore the role of MOPS in: (1) developing a martech strategy, (2) integrating new martech into an existing stack, (3) driving martech adoption by enabling people/users, and (4) maintaining and adapting a martech stack, with a focus on scaling and future-proofing said stack. In this post #1, we speak with Kristin Connell, Head of Marketing at Sojourn Solutions, about developing a martech strategy and how that strategy becomes a foundation for effectively selecting, implementing, and integrating all martech. As our 2021 Marketing Operations Report  explains, MOPS maturity is a key to realizing the full value of martech, from strategy to integration to adoption and beyond: “MOPS optimizes the relationship between marketing and technology,” says the Report. “It’s no accident that the stronger a company’s MOPS function, the better they do (1) deciding on the right technology and (2) integrating that tech into their organization, meaning, not just systems integration but also having the right people with the right training so that the technology actually delivers value.” Martech strategy: A GPS & North Star Martech optimization is a bit like chasing the sun. You might be able to see the destination, but reaching it is a never-ending journey. No matter how far you’ve come in your MOPS maturity or your martech stack, you can always improve marketing effectiveness (and your martech). Just because the journey is never done doesn’t mean you shouldn’t embark on it. You need to, actually. As with every worthwhile journey in life, you should begin with the destination in mind (spoiler alert: that destination is a place called “better”). You should also have a well-considered plan, along with a good roadmap for getting to “better.” Will you need to modify your plan and your roadmap along the way? Yes and yes, but that’s also an inevitable part of the journey. Having all of your marketers running in different directions chasing after the latest martech isn’t a plan or a roadmap: it’s chaos. Sojourn’s Connell explains that “investing in martech without a martech strategy already in place is like playing a game of ‘pin the tail on the donkey.’ Yes, blindfolded and dizzy marketers might occasionally get lucky and hit the donkey’s tail – even a broken clock is correct twice a day – but more likely than not they’ll miss the target, and those misses will be incredibly costly.” How to develop your martech strategy Don’t go out and buy “cool” martech because other marketers are buying it or because a vendor salesperson promises you eternal joy and sunshine. Strategy is important because resources of time, people, and money are limited – you can’t aim at everything and expect to succeed. Developing a martech strategy begins with choices and priorities based first on a clear understanding of your customers, their journey/touchpoints, and how you seek to address their needs with the resources you have.  “A martech strategy should optimize your customer experience, help empower your employee experience, and positively impact pipeline growth and revenue,” says Connell. “A martech strategy gives you a baseline to determine what’s working, what’s not, and the ability to pivot as necessary to improve your results.” It’s a needed compass and roadmap.  Good martech strategies are data-driven, with MOPS typically playing a significant role. Developing a good strategy is about asking a series of foundational questions, including: where do our customers spend their time, and if largely online, what channels/sites/communities do they frequent? With what devices? How do they prefer to engage with us? What does that engagement look like across their buying experience? Can we measure buying intent via signals we collect from our customer interactions?  “You need to drive your martech strategy with relevant data insights about your customers,” says Connell, “and these insights will help guide and inform what type of martech you need, with what functionality, as well as helping you understand what people with what skills/training you need in order to build and maintain a successful martech stack.” MOPS: Structuring an approach to strategy-building It’s not enough to ask and answer the basic strategic questions described above. You need a structure and a process in place to drive the ongoing development of martech strategy. Strategy can never be ad hoc or  “set and forget” because (again) you’re chasing the sun, trying to reach “better” every day, every month, every quarter.  “Depending on the size of your MOPS and marketing organization,” says Connell, "you should have a documented, structured approach that includes cross-functional governance for all martech investments. You should set up a process that allows anyone to submit a request and make a business case for new martech.”  A cross-functional team (including members from MOPS, IT, and business units) should be defined to review these ongoing martech requests, obviously considering relevant criteria like fit into the customer journey, available resources to implement, use, and manage the requested martech, budget-related considerations, and other business priorities that are part of your martech strategy. If the martech review team approves the request, they can then help determine next steps to work with martech vendors and internal stakeholders to onboard the martech smoothly.  “As part of any request for new martech,” says Connell, “the primary use cases for the martech should be identified, clearly described, and aligned with your martech strategy and desired business outcomes. In my experience, the best way to narrow down any martech decision is to identify and explain which martech tool best addresses these use cases. You obviously have to consider costs, support, and other factors, but none of those matter at all if the tool itself doesn’t meet your primary use cases.” A final word on the role of MOPS MOPS is simply crucial to developing and carrying out any successful martech strategy, and to enabling martech tools to fully realize their anticipated value. MOPS itself, and MOPS leaders in particular, have acumen and experience looking at the bigger strategic picture when it comes to martech, moving far beyond any individual martech request to guide decision-making that creates an outstanding customer experience and the greatest impact on pipeline and revenue.  When this strategic focus is lacking, when martech stacks are built in an ad hoc way and bolted on like some Frankenstein monster,  “it leads to wasted resources, unrealized value, and team members becoming frustrated, burned-out, and even leaving a company,” says Connell. It might seem like the costs of doing this important, upfront strategic work are high, but the costs of NOT doing it are absolutely devastating for any marketing organization. Buying martech without a strategic focus, one typically driven by MOPS, is marketing malpractice at its wasteful worst. To learn more about how to develop a martech strategy to improve (and prove) your marketing effectiveness, reach out to us here . Next post in this series:  MOPS and optimizing martech: Getting martech integrations right (post 2 of 4)

This post was updated May 12, 2023, and originally posted December 17, 2021. Marketing operations (MOPS) is an evolving, multidisciplinary, and multifaceted function with a single goal: to improve and prove the value of marketing. MOPS is about blending martech, people, and processes to drive that single goal. In this four-part blog series, called “MOPS and Optimizing Martech,” we’ll explore the role of MOPS in: (1) developing a martech strategy, (2) integrating new martech into an existing stack, (3) driving martech adoption by enabling people/users, and (4) maintaining and adapting a martech stack, with a focus on scaling and future-proofing said stack. The stakes are always high when it comes to martech integration. As Sojourn’s 2021 Marketing Operations Report  explains it: “The long and often arduous process of integration must be completed before any value can be extracted [from martech] and even then, few organizations take full advantage of a given technology’s capabilities . . .Companies with a named operations function are more than twice as likely to say that martech integration is a significant strength.” To better understand why effectively integrating new martech is so important for marketing success, we spoke with Sojourn’s Phil Boyden  (Partner and Alliance Manager). “You need to connect and leverage your martech and your data in order to build a clear, actionable picture of your customers that you can act upon,” says Boyden. The more you know about customers, the better you can serve them the right messaging at the right time. “As you’re mapping the customer journey and all its touch points,” says Boyden, “your technology stack needs to connect to and follow that same journey in a seamless, integrated way.”  Martech integration should be viewed as a holistic process involving more than just connecting tech. Also critical? Marketing and sales alignment, data strategy and analysis, measurement, and the people and teams required to run everything. Getting martech integration right isn’t always easy, but it’s essential for marketing and MOPS effectiveness , as we’ll explain. The growing complexities of martech integration There are over 11,000  martech tools/apps now available to help you market effectively, adding to the complexities of martech integration. If you always selected the best-in-class martech tools for your particular needs, they may not necessarily integrate with the tech stack you've got now. “Middleware can start to come in to help. You need APIs and middleware that are capable of speaking smoothly to any of these pieces of martech as they get integrated into your existing martech stack,” says Boyden.  New martech tools are not always going to integrate at the push of a button, no matter what martech sales people might say about “plug and play.” Middleware can help with orchestrations or data flows, helping tools and systems speak to each other. There are also tools that can help transform your data to ensure it can flow in and out of martech and middleware to support integrations.   What could go wrong? (A lot) Much can go wrong with integrations, resulting in a stack that looks like a Frankenstein monster of random parts that don’t bolt together seamlessly. Boyden offers the example of “a company we spoke with where some of their preference forms sent data to one place and other forms sent preference data to another place -- they also had their CRM and MAP collecting and sending data.” The company had a custom integration sitting in the middle to make the data flows work, “but it was misfiring,” says Boyden. By the time they realized they had a problem, he says, they had no clue about what was “the actual source of truth regarding their customer data. So they couldn’t tell which systems were working or not.” There were ripple effects as a result. “They didn't know whether they were complying with GDPR. They didn't know whether they could contact any of the people in their database. They therefore had to stop communicating with their customers and get this mess fixed,” says Boyden, “and then try to track stuff back.” To make a long story short: the integration mess ruined all the company’s marketing efforts and put them in jeopardy of breach regarding GDPR, triggering potential legal liability and penalties. That’s an integration nightmare. Common integration challenges A great new martech tool comes along to save the day. You get told by an enthusiastic salesperson that integration is simple. They have this out-of-the-box integration included and it's a single click which sets up right away. It’s exactly what you wanted to hear. What could possibly go wrong? “When you get into the details of integrations, a lot can go wrong,” says Boyden. It might turn out that your customer data in custom fields is not included in the “out-of-the-box” integration. So you buy or build new options to solve your problems and next thing you know, you've got more issues than before “such as siloed data and then you have to find workarounds or make other adjustments that can disrupt your marketing efforts,” Boyden says. Marketing efforts can get disrupted and martech tools can get quickly abandoned or banished to “the island of unintegrated martech.” Planning and executing effective integrations Planning your integrations well in advance is key. “You need to get everybody involved in the same room at the start and build a roadmap,” says Boyden. “You should have discussions around what needs to happen, hash out disagreements, and then define a consensus around who does what and when, what data should flow in and out, the timing of everything and how to handle potential disruptions, along with what steps are required to make the whole integration process work.” It’s highly likely that existing data flows would be impacted during the integration of the new martech tool. Reporting would also likely be disrupted. How will you work around these issues every step of the way? “You can have the world's best martech tool and the best middleware for the integration,” says Boyden, “but it's no good if you’re not actually supporting your people and the business during the integration process.” That requires effective planning, execution, and coordination.  Consultants can help, bringing a clear focus on the big picture. They’ll understand all the systems that are in play and what the role of each system is within the integration process. They know which team members to speak to, and how to guide them. “Too often with companies integrating tech, the right hand doesn't know what the left hand is doing: good consultants will pull everything together and guide the project so the work gets done efficiently and with minimal disruption,” Boyden says. Sojourn, for instance, has expert professionals from different backgrounds who can draw upon their expertise to drive effective martech integrations for a client company.  “We know marketing operations, what data needs to flow where and when, we know the relevant platforms and how the entire integration processes should work,” says Boyden. “Marketing has often been viewed as a cost center, but we help marketing clients improve and prove marketing  as a revenue-driver.” That shift changes everything, helping marketing not only integrate martech effectively but also get more budget and more credibility with the C-suite.  For more information about MOPS and martech, and how you can build your MOPS maturity in order to improve marketing outcomes, reach out to us . Next post in this series:  MOPS and optimizing martech: Driving the adoption, utilization, and optimization of martech (post 3 of 4)

A recent webinar from Adobe  (free) focused on what strategies, tactics, and actions marketers can take now to change the way they engage customers in the coming cookie-less future. Host Ann Handley  and Adobe’s Eric Matisoff (Adobe evangelist for analytics and data science) and Ryan Fleisch (Adobe’s head of product marketing) highlighted 3 practical practices that brands can implement now in order to thrive in our cookie-less future.  On creating a strategy around first-party data Matisoff: We're seeing our [Adobe] customers taking an inventory of their data now in light of changes happening to cookies. They want to identify where they are now, where their data is coming from today. How are they using data and where does it live across all of the different MarTech and ad tech solutions? We recently ran a customer survey to find out where their most valuable data is coming from. They said it’s coming from datasets like digital properties and web analytics, mobile app analytics. But in addition, they’re seeing even more data coming from systems like transactional systems, CRM systems, and even operational data stores. The customers that I talk to are all over the spectrum in terms of data maturity. Some are centralized and ready to adapt quickly, while others have their DMP, their CRM, and their analytics system where none of them are talking to each other. There's a fundamental shift that’s happening, both in how data is organized and centralized as well as in the technologies that are helping empower and activate that data. Fleisch: It’s important to separate first-party data from zero-party data. First-party data is data that we might collect via first-party cookies [from domains owned by a brand] to understand customer behaviors. Zero-party data comes from actually having an interaction with the consumer and asking for their consent or their preferences. So when it comes to data strategy, you might have data to understand who someone is, data that helps you understand how customers act or behave, but then overlaying all that with zero-party data to help you understand their preferences. All this helps you build understanding and trust.  On customer consent in the cookie-less future  Fleisch: Customer consent needs to start with how much consumers really understand about what they’re actually consenting to. We surveyed marketers, asking if they believed consumers understand what you mean when you ask for consent. Basically, every marketer said “yes, customers understand.” But when we asked consumers, the majority said they understood consent, but then when you went a bit deeper, maybe asking about the meaning of terms or their familiarity with things like GDPR or CCPA, most consumers had no idea what those are. The first step for consent is keeping it simple and explaining exactly what you're intending to do with the data. I recently went to a new website from the UK, and it was a perfect example. A box popped up and simply said, ‘we use browsing behavior to improve your user experience.’ Then below that it said, ‘which of these preferences are you okay with?’ It gave preference control over which data can be collected from the person. And then it said, ‘if you want to learn more, here's a link.’ It clearly laid out the value proposition for customers getting better experiences by giving their consent and data. And it gave the customer a sense of control.  On “data collaborations” in the cookie-less future  Fleisch:  In the past, partnering on data sounded dirty. But a whole new category of data collaboration is becoming stronger now. If third-party data was where marketers got their scale in the past, just buying broad swaths of audiences, that tactic is now going away. First-party data is incredible in terms of precision and accuracy, but there's limited scale to it. So it comes down to what data collaborations we can do either within our company or with other brands to get the most extensibility out of that first-party data. For instance, you might be a brand that has different business units, so you could collaborate on data between business units to enrich profiles and understand the same users across different pieces of your business. You might also have another brand that you've agreed to collaborate with and ask customers to consent to data sharing for both brands. Each brand can understand a better version of their customers across both brands. There's more brands starting to adopt CDPs and technologies to do this data sharing. They're going to get a good understanding of their consumers, but they might not understand those consumers in terms of everything else the consumer does.   Finally, there’s an advertising use case. You could just go to a publisher and say, ‘find me people who look like this customer profile or segment.’ You can collaborate with that publisher to say, ‘here's a seed audience that I have, can you help me either find these customers or find similar customers?’ That's a great way to get reach and scale from your available data. On data governance  Matisoff:  Data governance was once the least sexy thing you could ever talk about. Now, thanks to the requirements of consent, changes to cookies and data privacy from browsers and governments, as well as consumer expectations, data governance is more important than ever. When we talk about governance, we're talking about how data is collected and used and controlled. Is it going to be used just for analysis, for activation, for data collaboration? And as you're thinking about those governance needs, you also need to ensure you have the right technologies for flagging data and preventing data breaches. A strong data governance infrastructure takes people, processes, and technology. Related Content:  Data Governance for Marketers: A brief guide with your questions answered Fleisch: How do we actually label data so we know where it came from and what we can do with it?  And as the data comes in, how is it managed? And as data goes out, how is our governance control enforced? Governance is about having the right technology in place that allows you to move from having disparate data systems to having one system across all relevant teams and the entire business that has good governance to it. To learn more about how your marketing operations team can help your business thrive in the coming cookie-less future, reach out  to us today.

The term data governance can sound vague and a bit off-putting, so we’ve decided to answer some basic, foundational questions about the concept. The questions and answers below aren’t intended to be comprehensive, nor are they tailored to meet the specific data governance needs of your particular organization (we don’t know you that well, not yet). They’re meant to give you a clearer understanding and a starting point for more research.  What is data governance?  Data governance defines the rules for who can take what action, upon what data, in what situations, using what methods, according to the Data Governance Institute . Data governance has become increasingly important for marketers because of recent changes around data privacy. This includes regulations such as GDPR and CCPA (California’s data privacy law), as well as changes by big data players such as Apple and Google that offer greater protections for customer data. Why is data governance important for marketers?  Data governance can be viewed as the “rules of the road” for how marketers handle customer data. At its foundation, data governance doesn’t just protect customer data, but also protects organizations from legal liability triggered by data breaches and other forms of data misuse. It also protects a company’s reputation, because bad data governance and data breaches are potentially embarrassing and can negatively impact brand goodwill. All of that impacts marketers and how they work. The Essential Guide to Data Governance  explains the importance of data governance as follows: Data Governance is required to ensure that an organization's information assets are securely, legally, functionally and efficiently managed throughout the enterprise to secure its trust and accountability. It drives the legal and ethical standards of the business and represents to its shareholders the strict guidelines to which the business adheres to both to its customers and the wider community. Where does data hygiene fit in?  Data hygiene is essential for data driven marketing, making sure your data is clean and therefore usable for marketing efforts like lead scoring, segmentation, and personalization. For organizations without good data governance, forms might be created in an ad hoc, ‘as needed’ way with little consideration for data hygiene. When different marketers create their own form fields, your CRM and marketing automation platform can get clogged up with hundreds of custom fields, duplicate fields and open text fields without any structure.  This ad hoc approach doesn’t “lead” to easily usable leads and quality customer data, but creates an un-hygenic mess of data spaghetti that will need to be untangled  someday by someone (alas, likely be a marketer). Good data governance prevents this data hygiene nightmare from happening. What are the benefits of data governance?  There are many benefits, but here are four of the most critical for marketers: It ensures quality data.  A vigorous data governance program keeps your data updated and clean. Data management can be painstaking, monotonous work, but the process can be made more efficient if your data management team keeps everything up-to-date and relevant by following good data governance. Effective data governance enables organizations to maintain information it can use and decreases ROT (redundant, outdated, and trivial information) and data spaghetti. When dealing with multiple data entry points, for instance, some data will typically be duplicated and input incorrectly. Good data governance enables you to eliminate these data discrepancies from the source (e.g., the field form) in order to create a single source of truthful, high-quality data marketers can leverage. It clarifies and defines roles and expectations.  Identifying who in the organization will have access and responsibility/accountability for managing data helps you outline specific roles and the legal expectations inside each role. Requiring anyone who accesses certain levels of data to sign NDAs (non-disclosure agreements) around data adds an additional layer of clarity and security.  It improves decision making and planning.  Data has become an essential driver of marketing and business decision-making. Good data governance enables authorized users to access the same data, thus eliminating data silos within an organization. IT, sales, and marketing teams work together across functions, sharing data and insights, saving time and resources while driving value as they “sing from the same hymnal.”  It improves compliance.  Good data governance makes it easier for your organization to be fully compliant with the latest data privacy regulations, including GDPR, HIPAA, PCI-DSS (Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard), and more. In addition, data governance software can provide masking as a data protection technique, allowing organizations to become compliant more easily.  How can my organization build a good data governance strategy?  Building a good data governance strategy will require the following steps, as described in  The Essential Guide to Data Governance : Step 1. Define who is responsible for data governance planning. While the IT department is important, you should build your data governance team with people from across all functions that use data. “Organizations should consider electing a data governance board, data trustees and cross-business functional heads to lead the discussions,” advises The Essential Guide. Step 2. Identify Data Access. Map roles and responsibilities, access and security levels, which will guide how your organization handles data governance. Creating a data access agreement provides a clearly documented layer to your strategy, describing security levels and identifying which roles have what responsibility for stored data. Step 3. Scale data systematically.  Data tends to grow and become more complex over time. You’ll need tools and processes that enable you to scale and standardize data collection and storage systematically. Forms and interfaces for inputting data should be user-friendly and automatically feed into your single source of truth. Step 4. Be flexible with evolving data privacy changes.  A good data governance strategy and infrastructure has the in-built capacity to flex, to adapt and change along with evolving regulatory changes as they impact your data infrastructure. Good data governance is never a “set and forget proposition” -- it must be built to adapt. Step 5. Maintain quality as you grow and go. You’ll need a process to audit your processes, your data, how your people comply with your data governance regime, and more. Good data governance is a constant process that takes an ongoing quality assurance mindset. Want to learn more about good data governance? We’re experts in data, data management, and good data governance. Reach out to us  for a conversation tailored to your organization’s needs, or learn more  about how we work to help solve your data challenges.

Martin Kihn is Senior Vice President of market strategy for Salesforce Marketing Cloud . During a recent Dreamforce virtual presentation  (full presentation, log in required), he described the future of data and privacy in a cookie-less world, and offered 5 tips for how marketers can thrive in it. What follows are excerpts from Kihn’s Dreamforce presentation... The background: Cookie-less is coming Don’t forget, it's not just about the cookie.  “Whether it’s third party, first party, or any party, the cookie is just a random string of letters and numbers that identifies the browser for a single domain. Ultimately, the cookie is a means to an end. So even when cookies go away, there’s going to be other means to the same end that might be even better.” What marketers need.  “Marketers need the ability to find and reach prospects and customers, i.e., addressability. We also need the ability to measure and improve our tactics, which is accountability. The end of third party cookies is a kind of turning point - an existential moment. Cookies are just one part of a much bigger story, which is actually a major rethink of what's going on in marketing right now.” A major rethink re: cookies and tracking.  “In a recent version of its iOS operating system, Apple released the app tracking transparency framework. It requires an explicit opt-in for “tracking” for all app users from their store. The opt-in rates have been pretty low, so this diminishes the effectiveness of the IDFA or the in-app ID for mobile. Both Apple and Google have proposals now to obscure IP addresses from the header web pages. Apple also recently released privacy protection for email making open rates and deliverability harder to measure on email campaigns. So basically a lot of the identifiers that you've relied on as a marketer, both to target and measure at a personal level at a unique individual level on the open web are already in the process of changing.” What's currently being considered to replace 3rd party cookies.  “There's a whole lot of activity and debate happening now in forums like the W3C, which is the worldwide web community, the standards bodies for the internet, platforms like GitHub where engineers go to chat with one another about the future of addressability and accountability, targeting and measurement browsers, and apps. If you're interested in following any of these debates, just Google “privacy sandbox,” and you can read some of the proposals. Here are 3 of the ideas being considered: FLoCs. This is the most famous and it stands for federated learning of cohorts and it groups people into cohorts or groups based on their browsing behavior. And it's done by the browser. So it's using machine learning or algorithms.  User Control (Ad Topic Hints). There's another more recent proposal that came from a Facebook engineer called add topic. This one would let people themselves explicitly indicate what kind of marketing they'd like to see.  Interest Groups (FLEDGE). And there's a whole other set of proposals that would let publishers and brands put people into groups using tags. This is more akin to the way things work today. And that would help marketers create audiences for things like retargeting around product categories and interest groups.” 5 tips Marketers should be doing now  First tip - Don't panic.  “The changes to cookies may sound like a big deal, but a lot of them are very gradual and you're going to have time to prepare. So keep using cookies for now -- and remember that we're all in the same boat, including your major competitors. Let's decide collectively to frame this in terms of what we're gaining rather than what we're losing. What we're gaining is a web where everybody knows the rules and consumers are comfortable with how their data is being used. We're going to be using groups and cohorts more, especially outside of our own channels, but this isn't new. Anyone who's done digital marketing for the past 10-15 years knows that in the past, this was how marketing was done.” Second tip - Get comfortable with groups.  “It’ll be more about segments and micro segments, rather than chasing the elusive dream of one-to-one marketing, at least for acquisition and upper funnel work. A big part of this is going to be better analytics. Now is a really good time to get your team to map out the differences in observed behavior between the type of people who opt in to tracking and the type of people who don't opt in. This will tell you how, or even if, you can use data from users as a kind of mini sample for your user base. Think about how you would apply cohorts rather than one-to-one for both targeting and measurement across your campaigns. For example, retargeting in the future is going to be at a higher level, certainly not at the product level, but at the category level and subcategory level of groups of products.” Third tip - Understand that measurement is going to be hyper-important.  “Mixed attribution models are going to have to be more sophisticated. You're likely going to have to do more experimentation, hypothesis testing, to validate assumptions. You’re going to need advanced tools, like consolidated data for different platforms, so-called walled gardens (like Facebook, Amazon etc.) that are a growing part of media plans and that are very difficult to measure together. Marketers who invest in data science talent, who invest in tools and do more testing are going to be more successful, they’ll see better results.” Fourth tip - Rely on first party data.   “First party data is data you get from your customers and prospects with their consent. First party data is absolutely critical to how you build trusting relationships. When you get better data, you can build better models and more personalization, you then get better engagement, which gets you more and better data. That’s a flywheel effect. Data tends to attract more data.” Fifth tip - Rely on Customer Data Platforms/CDPs.  “The Salesforce CDP customer data platform was released in 2020 and it's really taking off with our customers right now. It provides tools for first party data management analysis with the main uses being communication, privacy, insights, analytics for marketing, and beyond. CDPs are built to unify data from different MarTech and adtech systems.” Reach out  to us today to learn even more about Salesforce Pardot and/or Salesforce Marketing Cloud and how to thrive in a cookie-less future.

Note to Readers: “Building a Successful MOPS Team” is a 5-part blog series that focuses on people. The series will cover: (1) when and how to hire MOPS talent, (2) how to onboard talent, (3) how to effectively manage a MOPS team, (4) how to support professional development within MOPS teams, and (5) how to approach the future of MOPS. We asked Sojourn Solution Delivery Directors Claire Robinson and Carmen Gardiner, both with long experience working within MOPS and helping MOPS teams on behalf of Sojourn Solutions, to share their insights with us (and you) for this blog post series. “In the future, MOPS is only going to grow in scope,” says Carmen Gardiner. “MOPS didn’t even exist as a dedicated function two decades ago. Back then, marketing operations meant sending emails and preparing reports. Now MOPS encompasses life cycle management, attribution, privacy, governance, data plans, content management, reporting, you name it. The function has just exploded in scope.” What does the future hold for MOPS and MOPS professionals? We asked Gardiner and Robinson to gaze into their crystal balls and offer advice for adapting to the future of MOPS.  MOPS will increasingly blur into SalesOps and RevOps. Gardiner sees MOPS increasingly merging towards sales, customer success, IT, and other functions.  “If you think of a Venn diagram,” says Gardiner, “marketing ops is blurring in from the left side and sales ops is blurring in from the right side, and then there's revenue blurring in from the top. Eventually they're all going to overlap. I just don't know if MOPS and the other functions are going to maintain their autonomy.” Robinson agrees that MOPS will blur with revenues (and potentially into RevOps): “MOPS is going to have to help people see how revenue is being generated, and that's where data and analytics play a big part, attributing revenues to marketing and to other teams,” she says. “That's quite a big shift in mindset and skill set for some people, particularly within marketing. I think we're moving away from the creativity-first side and towards this data and analytical side.” Balancing tracking with data privacy will become an ongoing MOPS challenge. “I’m so interested in observing how we're going to track or predict customer behavior in the future with all this available data, but also while keeping people's privacy in mind and complying with emerging data privacy regulations,” says Gardiner. “Data privacy is evolving, and will continue to evolve as a major issue impacting MOPS.” Bringing meaning to data will get harder and will matter more. “Within MOPS, we have all this data we can use to predict what people are going to do next,” says Gardiner. “But the hardest problem remains knowing what to do with all this data and being able to understand what it's telling you and what it's not telling you. Separating the signals from the noise is difficult. And then believing your analysis enough to actually change your approach is even harder.” Talent will increasingly make the difference in MOPS. “Today, every organization including startups can afford marketing automation.  I think the easy availability of technology makes MOPS people even more important,” says Gardiner. “Creativity will be a key differentiator. And being able to make intelligent decisions based on available data will offer competitive advantage to organizations. People drive all that.”  Empathy will remain essential. “MOPS has always been, and will always be, a highly-collaborative function. Being able to understand the challenges that other people are having within different functions is going to help you understand how you can help them with those challenges,” says Robinson. “What MOPS is there to do is enable others to meet goals, so applying empathy is key to helping people change and succeed.” Never-ending curiosity about technology and human behavior needed. “MOPS professionals will need to understand and keep pace with what's new and what's available technologically,” says Gardiner. “Curiosity about technology and curiosity about human behavior will always be needed, because marketing operations is really a study of human behavior and how we can better affect human behavior with our actions.” Carve out dedicated time for reflection. How do you keep updated on the latest developments while you're so busy doing your MOPS job? “You have to set aside structured time to be curious, to reflect, and to talk with other people who are experiencing what's happening out there,” says Gardiner. “And once a new trend or idea is on your radar, start to think about what it might mean for you and your team and the way you do business down the road.”  Adaptability and resilience required. “You’ll have to be okay with being told you need to stop doing what you’re doing right now and accept that you need to learn some new technology. You're probably going to have to be okay with learning more about data and analytics, but also about business processes,” says Robinson. Choose depth over breadth. “I've always been a proponent of depth of experience above breadth of experience,” says Gardiner. “If you're a Jack of all trades and master of none, then you're not going to be extremely valuable when tough projects come along, when critical thinking and critical problem-solving are needed, because you won’t know enough. Go deep into something first and then you can broaden out and go wider.” Be ready to embrace change (because it’s coming). “The future of MOPS will require us to learn complicated technologies and processes, because we have to prove and show business value in everything MOPS does,” says Robinson. “Just being open to that will put MOPS professionals in a good place. People need to keep up because technologies have always changed and buying behaviors have always changed, and those changes won’t be stopping.”  If you’d like to learn more about optimizing your MOPS team and your marketing, reach out to us here . Full series here:  Building a successful MOPS team: When and how to hire MOPS talent (post 1 of 5) Building a successful MOPS team: 10 steps to onboarding MOPS talent (post 2 of 5) Building a successful MOPS team: How to effectively manage MOPS talent (post 3 of 5) Building a successful MOPS team: Developing your MOPS talent (post 4 of 5)

Note to Readers: “Building a Successful MOPS Team” is a 5-part blog series that focuses on people. The series will cover: (1) when and how to hire MOPS talent, (2) how to onboard talent, (3) how to effectively manage a MOPS team, (4) how to support professional development within MOPS teams, and (5) how to approach the future of MOPS. We asked Sojourn Solution Delivery Directors Claire Robinson and Carmen Gardiner, both with long experience working within MOPS and helping MOPS teams on behalf of Sojourn Solutions, to share their insights with us (and you) for this blog post series. Continuous upskilling seems to be the present and future for MOPS professionals, as new technologies and new marketing approaches continue to emerge. A lot of the skills MOPS professionals use today will likely be obsolete within five years to a decade, as more tasks get taken over by automation, AI, or other advances we can only imagine. As more aspects of MOPS get automated, MOPS professionals will have to evolve their skillsets to add value. A willingness and aptitude to develop your skills throughout a MOPS career is a prerequisite to success. We asked Claire Robinson and Carmen Gardiner to offer tips for how MOPS managers can support the development process of the MOPS professionals on their team. Nine tips for how MOPS managers can support MOPS pros development Enable MOPS professionals to lead their own development.  “One of the best things a manager can do is to enable MOPS talent to lead their own development,” says Robinson. “What you don't want to do is hand hold somebody through their development process or direct it for them. That doesn't set them up for success and doesn't teach them anything. If a MOPS manager is too directive, the person simply won’t learn the skills they need to drive their own development, to understand precisely what their passions are, what they’re good at, what they need to learn, and how to go about learning things for themselves.” Be a development coach.  “The MOPS manager should be a good coach, encouraging the person rather than being too prescriptive about how the person should develop themselves,” says Robinson. “That could mean drawing out the interests and passions of the person during employee evaluations and check-ins rather than giving them a development agenda that’s driven by the manager. You should facilitate and support, but they need to decide the direction of their own development.” Pay close attention to your people.  “You really need to pay close attention to the team and trust them,” says Gardiner. “As their manager, you need to be that supportive person on the team who enables the success of others. Look for what skills they enjoy using and which ones they’re good at using.” Catalyze development conversations to evaluate interests.  “For the MOPS manager, it's about knowing how to start the development conversation and guiding people through that exploration of their interests rather than defining it for them. You facilitate rather than direct these conversations,” says Robinson, “which means asking the right questions and listening carefully to what people say and don’t say.” Gardiner agrees. “The MOPS manager should hold structured, regular conversations with every member of the team around development,” she says. “And if you've been paying attention, you should know what interests and affinities they have. If you don’t know, then ask them directly about their aspirations and where they’d like to go next. For example, if they saw someone speak at the Oracle conference and it inspired them, then offer to help them submit a paper. Speaking and translating your expertise and accomplishments into an engaging story can be a great learning experience.”  Advocate for a large training/development budget.  “I started my career as a teacher,” says Gardiner, “so I've always been a big proponent of continuous learning and professional development. I've always carved out a large training budget, and advocated for it year to year. Having those resources allocated in advance makes team and individual development easier.” Incentivize people to use the allocated training/development budget.  “Incentivize everyone on the team to use part of the training budget in order to meet their yearly bonus goal. Make it part of how you evaluate their performance. It doesn’t matter whether they submit papers for speaking engagements or webinars, or if they do internal training for others on the team or within the organization, or if they get outside training and certification. Whatever they want to do, you need them to further their learning and development,” says Gardiner, “so incentivize it.” Develop skills through challenging projects.  “As a manager, you need to give each team member increasingly challenging projects and see how they handle it. If they come to you with questions and can still finish the project with minimal supervision, then you know they're good self-managers,” says Gardiner. “If they don't ask you any questions or if they ask too many questions, that’s a potential problem. When you see that, you know they're either not self-managers or maybe this particular project is outside their current skillset. Use all that feedback to help you help their development process.” Don’t forget to develop yourself.  “As a MOPS manager, you are the model for the whole team: you have to do for yourself what you do for your team in terms of spurring and encouraging development,” says Robinson. “If you've got to lead a team through change, which every MOPS manager must, you yourself need to feel comfortable and confident navigating change. The manager’s self-development is a good place to model the development of the team.” Know that development is never done.  “When it comes to anything within MOPS, but especially the development of your team, it can feel like the job is never done. That’s because the goalposts are always moving, just as new technology and new trends will always continue to evolve,” says Robinson. “The MOPS manager’s role is to help the team learn how to be adaptable, helping them develop a mindset that accommodates change. So that might include scenario planning -- getting people to think about what they’ll do if XYZ happens, so when change comes, they’ll have a better idea of  how to react and how they can change as a result.” If you’d like to learn more about developing your MOPS team talent - and thus your marketing performance - reach out to us here . Next in this series:   Building a successful MOPS team: Preparing for the future of MOPS (post 5 of 5)

There is no more important metric in a marketing organization than return on investment (ROI). If a marketing activity fails to bring in more revenue than it cost, then it cannot be justified; likewise, a marketing activity with a positive ROI is always a good idea, by definition. However, measuring ROI is not as straightforward as we in the marketing world would like it to be. There’s first point attribution, last point attribution, and all points in between, leading marketers to ask the question – which method of measuring ROI is the best? A helpful analogy   When thinking about complicated systems like a marketing/sales operation at an enterprise-level business, analogies can sometimes be helpful. Imagine that you are a pilot sitting at the controls of a modern jumbo jet, and you want to assess the situation the plane is in. In front of you is a dizzying array of dials, gauges and indicators – much like the array of marketing metrics, dashboards and reports that indicate marketing and sales performance in a typical organization. The equivalent of measuring ROI in this situation would be an equally key piece of information for the plane – such as your air speed. If this critical number dips below a certain level, the plane will stall and fall out of the sky (much like your ROI dropping below zero). Surely, in a state-of-the-art jetliner, the pilot is able to access a single, easy airspeed number to assess the situation?  If only it were that simple Worryingly for those of us itching to get on a flight after Covid, the answer is no. There are many types of airspeed , and a pilot in such a situation may have to use as many as 3 different air speed measurements to get an accurate estimate of the situation. Complicating matters even further, as well as “air speed,” there is also “ground speed” to consider – a number many planes have to call down to air traffic control to ascertain, leading to some amusing anecdotes  about ground speed one-upmanship amongst glory-hungry pilots.  All of which is to say – even basic critically-important questions such as “what was my marketing ROI” and “how fast is this plane going” do not and should not have simple answers. Both questions can be answered differently by measuring a complicated system in different ways. Instead of relying on a single number, astute marketers and pilots use multiple measurements to form a complete picture of the situation.  Multiple approaches, multiple ways A great example of the utility of multiple measurements is comparing different marketing channels. Email, for example, only becomes relevant in the marketing journey after an email address has been given by the contact. This means that other marketing channels such as social media or pay-per-click will always look better than email in a first-touch attribution model, as they tend to feature more strongly at different stages of the customer journey. Using a last-touch attribution model alongside a first-touch model would show email in a more favorable light, leading to a more balanced evaluation by the marketing team.  By combining multiple approaches to revenue attribution and measuring it in multiple ways, marketers can gain a more complete understanding than if they rely on a single number. And when it comes to ROI, knowing your numbers really is just as important as knowing how fast your plane is flying. Questions about how to make marketing attribution work for your business? It's one of our favorite conversations - reach out  today!   Editor's note: Steve McConnell is a Marketing Automation Consultant at Sojourn Solutions based in London. He's recently completed his Oracle Eloqua Marketing 2021 Implementation Specialist certification (yay - congratulations!), and enjoys writing the occasional blog post.

In our recent global webinar, Empowering Marketing Operations Improves Marketing Performance , the underlying message throughout the conversations was clear - more than ever, MOPS is a game-changer for enterprise B2B organizations. Speakers Dan Vawter, Managing Partner at Sojourn Solutions, Madeleine Bergquist Marketing Manager at Adobe EMEA North, and Stefan Tornquist, SVP, Research & Learning for Econsultancy, discussed the findings of our 2021 MOPS Report . Below are four essential takeaways from the webinar: On the “proper” role of MOPS (Vawter and Bergquist) Sojourn’s Vawter explained that “the job of MOPS is to make marketing more efficient and effective, to improve and prove marketing performance.” He detailed the following 5 key functions of MOPS:  “Lead management, meaning how leads are defined and nurtured across the customer journey,” “Martech optimization, meaning how technologies are sourced, integrated, and staffed,” “Customer data management, meaning how data is defined, reported, analyzed, cleaned, and shared,  “Performance management or measurement, meaning how performance is defined and reported,” and  “Marketing governance, meaning how data is organized for compliance and privacy.” Bergquist succinctly explained the role of MOPS: “MOPS are the people who can actually prove and improve the value of your marketing spend. When you can’t do that, you waste lots of money. That’s the most basic business case for MOPS. “ On how MOPS enables companies to adapt better to change (Bergquist) Bergquist explained how MOPS helped Adobe respond rapidly and flexibly to the COVID-19 pandemic: “When the pandemic arrived, we quickly changed some of the industry vertical nurtures we had in place, particularly for impacted industries like travel and hospitality. Some of these industry verticals were just turned off completely because we felt they needed to be left alone to work their way through things. We also changed the way we communicated, trying to be as supportive as we could with advice on how our customers could transition from face-to-face customer engagement to a much more digital-first marketing approach.” The agility MOPS enables helped Adobe make that rapid adaptation possible. Adobe also changed on the internal side, as Bergquist explains: “we changed how we scored leads. The biggest scoring activities pre-pandemic were face-to-face activities such as trade shows -- anything where you met with people in person pretty much meant an instant AQL in our systems. But because nobody was meeting in person anymore, we had to quickly adapt. So telemarketing, for example, became a new channel for scoring, which we’d never had before. We also diversified our virtual events, and planned a whole host of them.” On how MOPS proves and improves marketing impact (Bergquist and Vawter) Bergquist offered an example: “We have 3 main areas within MOPS: campaign operations, data analytics, and martech. Because each area and each individual within has a global view, they're able to catch stuff that might otherwise be missed. For example, we recently had a scenario where there was a high bounce rate from content syndication leads, and it was something like 12% when it should be less than 5%. So because it was the same person responsible for all the 3 global regions, she was able to quickly do a comparative analysis with the other two regions. Her analysis showed that the other two regions had a bounce rate of less than 5%, so there was obviously something wrong with the one region. She then flagged the issue to the team and they were able to take that data back to the supplier and renegotiate, basically saying ‘you've given us some leads that aren't of the right quality for us.’ That fast and data-driven approach impacted revenues, proved value, and improved performance.”  Vawter offered an example: “We worked with a company that hired a new CMO who set new expectations. Marketing would now need to measure and understand exactly what was working and what was not. And they had to do this in order to justify marketing spend. They’d been measuring last-touch for attribution, which was absolutely not going to cut it with the new CMO. So they needed the ability to measure every touch of the customer journey, and figure out which marketing channels and content were working in order to prove value and justify budget moving forward.  They worked with a vendor to integrate the technology into their existing platforms and modified all of their different processes. They also had to change mindsets because everybody was used to thinking about campaigns as opposed to touchpoints.  The result of all this effort was that they were able to measure every touch point of the customer journey. They had a fairly large budget and discovered that some of the spend was not performing well, while some was. Based on these insights, they shifted their budget and that improved performance immediately, by 30% in one paid channel. They were also able to see the impact of content at different stages of the funnel, which helped them improve content relevance and distribution. The lesson here? MOPS is core to understanding the touchpoints across the customer journey and helping companies improve revenues.” What MOPS success looks like (Vawter) “We started working with a client back in 2018,” said Vawter. “They had many challenges: (1) they had very limited capabilities, (2) they were in a large organization with lots of divisions, different products, and technology silos, (3) their marketing and sales teams worked completely separately,  and (4) all the silos were causing confusion, duplication of effort, and lack of efficiency. Over the course of two years, they were able to create a centralized center of enablement that all of their different marketers and sales people could go to for support. They built out a process for cross-team collaboration across data, leads, best practices, and thus dramatically reduced their time and cost for launching campaigns. They cleared up their lead management flows, and marketing and sales alignment happened. As a result, they were able to increase their maturity to support more campaigns with more complexity, and became more aligned with their customer journeys. They made significant gains across multiple revenue measures, and were using their technologies to create better, more seamless customer experiences. A strong MOPS function was instrumental here to improve impact and revenue, as well as enhance the customer experience.” Watch  our full, on-demand webinar. Download our 2021 MOPS Report .

Note to Readers: “Building a Successful MOPS Team” is a 5-part blog series that focuses on people. The series will cover: (1) when and how to hire MOPS talent, (2) how to onboard talent, (3) how to effectively manage a MOPS team, (4) how to support professional development within MOPS teams, and (5) how to approach the future of MOPS. We asked Sojourn Solution Delivery Directors Claire Robinson and Carmen Gardiner, both with long experience working within MOPS and helping MOPS teams on behalf of Sojourn Solutions, to share their insights with us (and you) for this blog post series. Managing a marketing operations team is a challenging role if ever there was one. The MOPS function is multidisciplinary, encompassing technology, process optimization, and the relationship-building skills necessary to drive alignment within the MOPS team and outside of it. The effective MOPS manager wears multiple hats, must be conversant with emerging trends and be continuously upgrading their skillset to keep pace. Moreover, the effective MOPS manager enables and empowers others to collaborate and keep pace with change. What soft and hard skills does an effective MOPS manager need to succeed? What are the do’s and don’ts for MOPS management? In this post, Sojourn Solutions directors Claire Robinson and Carmen Gardiner share the following ten tips for MOPS management success: Understand the “proper” role of a MOPS manager.  “A MOPS manager needs to be able to support the MOPS team while also supporting the overall needs of the business,” explains Gardiner. “She needs to inspire people, including senior leadership, to think about future needs while maintaining the processes and standards of today.” What enables the MOPS manager to do that? “They need to have extensive experience with marketing automation, customer experience, customer journeys, sales, processes, analytics, security, governance, and relationship-building. They need to understand how all these work together to move the organization forward. You can't put a just-graduated MBA in the role without the experience and think they're going to be successful,” says Gardiner. Have a collaborative mindset and skillset.  “The effective MOPS manager needs to be highly collaborative because nothing MOPS does happens inside of a silo. MOPS relies heavily on many other teams for cooperation, feedback and support,” says Gardiner. “Without a strong manager with a collaborative mindset, MOPS teams will quickly turn into ticket takers who add no value outside execution.”  Adopt and maintain a ‘growth mindset.’  “MOPS managers need to be lifelong learners, to really nurture a growth mindset within themselves and within their team. The best MOPS managers get people thinking about how to make themselves better and thinking about how to make others better,” says Robinson.  Develop and strengthen your empathy and emotional awareness.  “Because MOPS managers are constantly dealing with people and because they also need to equip those people to deal with other people too, they need lots of empathy and emotional awareness in order to be effective,” says Robinson. “If you can’t read a room or can’t read other people’s non-verbal signals, then MOPS management might not be the right job for you.”  Be honest when delivering feedback.  “Oftentimes, managers don't deliver enough feedback, which is a problem, but when they do, it’s not clear and direct enough for people to understand and apply, which is another problem. You can still be kind when providing feedback, but you absolutely must be clear so people know what the expectations are and how to change what they’re doing,” says Robinson. Develop the ability to bounce between the big picture and the small details (i.e., between strategy and execution).  “The MOPS manager can be viewed as a ‘practical strategist.’ A lot of managers love to spend time in one camp or the other, focusing solely on strategy or day-to-day execution, but the MOPS manager needs to constantly toggle back and forth between both,” says Gardiner. Get comfortable with imperfection but keep chasing perfection.  “What keeps MOPS managers up at night are the expectations of other teams, including the senior leadership team. There's always that expectation of perfection. Where systems are concerned, perfection isn’t achievable, but it's the North Star you just keep chasing,” says Gardiner. “Teams are always asking for more, wanting more, and you need to prioritize all those needs in light of your current resources. That inevitable imperfection can cause insomnia.” Robinson agrees, explaining that It’s okay for MOPS managers not to have all the answers. “When you tell your team that you don't have all the answers, you also give people space to contribute, make mistakes and learn from them. You can still be credible when you don't know everything, and that honesty and humility is important for building the relationships you need to be successful,” says Robinson. Be curious.  “Great managers come out of the gate from a place of curiosity. They have a willingness to learn about new technology, and what that technology might enable within their organizations. They also have a deep curiosity about how people work and think,” says Gardiner. “Often, being curious and asking the right questions can be a key driver of MOPS success.” Surrender control.  “Being a leader is not about being in control, but about giving up control. If you have good people, then you have to trust your team to do their job. Let them know you're there to offer advice, answer questions, to give support, direction, and guidance, but then let them do what they do best. You are the buffer between them doing their jobs and all of the pressure and noise outside,” says Gardiner. Don’t dictate.  “What you should try not to do as a manager is dictate. It's demoralizing not to be asked your opinion or to feel like you're not part of the decision making process. If you're a dictator, your team will end up not trusting you and only doing what they're told, and they won't be happy. You're going to miss the best ideas because people won’t share with you,” says Gardiner. If you’d like to learn more about optimizing your MOPS team and your marketing, reach out to us here . Next in this series:  Building a successful MOPS team: Developing your MOPS talent (post 4 of 5)

Note to Readers: “Building a Successful MOPS Team” is a 5-part blog series that focuses on people. The series will cover: (1) when and how to hire MOPS talent, (2) how to onboard talent, (3) how to effectively manage a MOPS team, (4) how to support professional development within MOPS teams, and (5) how to approach the future of MOPS. We asked Sojourn Solution Delivery Directors Claire Robinson and Carmen Gardiner, both with long experience working within MOPS and helping MOPS teams on behalf of Sojourn Solutions, to share their insights with us (and you) for this blog post series. The stakes are high when it comes to onboarding new hires: “in terms of employee experience, onboarding is where you start to build loyalty and engagement with your talent, where you start to integrate the new hire into your team and organizational culture,” says Claire Robinson. “It’s important to get the right people involved in the onboarding process.”  When done well, onboarding lays the groundwork for long-term success for the new hire and the MOPS team. Effective onboarding, according to   the Society of Human Resources Professionals (SHRM), “can improve productivity, build loyalty and engagement, and help employees become successful early in their careers with the new organization.” But only 12% of employees think their employer actually did a great job with onboarding them, according to a Gallup  survey. That’s not good enough . . . Here are ten steps to drive onboarding success: Use a buddy system, job shadowing or mentoring.  “You should get someone on the team who does a similar role to agree to act as the new hire’s buddy, coach or job shadowing partner for the first few days or so,” says Robinson. “The new hire can then observe, ask questions, and feel safe from the start.” Put the new hire to work as a member of a cross-functional team.  “That way the new hire can sit back and listen and learn as well as create relationships with cross functional groups,” says Gardiner, “all in an environment where everyone is trying to solve a larger problem.” Discuss expectations with the new hire and how the role will be evaluated.  “It’s important that managers fully discuss expectations with the new hire, and explain how they’ll be evaluated, so they’ll know what to prioritize. That helps drive not only the daily workload of the new hire, but also their engagement and sense of belonging,” explains Robinson. Define reasonable expectations with stakeholders too.  “When you introduce the new hire to stakeholders, maybe on the first day, just say that the onboarding plan is ongoing and will last for X days,” says Gardiner. “Explain that the new hire will be fully up and running soon, but until that time arrives, their buddy or mentor is going to be helping them with any requests that come in -- so please be mindful of these expectations as onboarding happens.” Enable with tools and know-how.  “You need to equip the new hire with the knowledge and tools they’ll need to succeed,” says Robinson. “The manager should walk the new hire through how to use the tools they’ll need, showing them the processes they should be following. Of course, as a manager, you'll need to explain these things multiple times -- it takes some hand-holding at the beginning with any new hire.” Check in on progress.  “Putting some time frames around the onboarding process helps and so does having checkpoints. So based on your past experience, it may take a month for someone to learn X,” says Robinson. “After a month, you check in about X and listen for feedback from the new hire and the team. How’s the quality of the work the hire is producing and how can we offer more support if needed?” Gardiner agrees, and offers even more specifics: “Set up a 30, 60, and 90-day onboarding plan with the new hire. These plans work well because reviewing expectations within each time period takes the pressure off the higher achievers to hit the ground running while they're still being onboarded,” she says. “That’s important because onboarding a new hire too fast can wreak havoc on a marketing ops team.” Have regular stand up meetings with the new hire.  “A 15-minute stand up every morning with the manager and new hire will enable both of you to understand what they have on their plate for that day and if they have any questions, because a lot of new hires are hesitant to ask their manager for help,” says Gardiner. Check in with the new hire’s stakeholders.  “Ask how the team and others are working with the new person, because they're typically closer to the new hire than the manager is,” says Gardiner, "as you want to get the full picture." Give new hires honest and constructive feedback, as needed.  “The manager needs to give honest, constructive feedback on the hire’s performance,” says Gardiner. “So you might tell the hire, ‘you should listen more in meetings or you should be more communicative because this particular stakeholder prefers more communication.’ Then see if that constructive feedback resonates with the new hire. If it doesn't, then you might have some problems moving forward.” Be ready to admit you made a (hiring) mistake.  “No matter how thorough you were in the hiring process, there will be times when you make a bad hire. It happens to the best managers and teams,” says Gardiner. “If you’ve tried open and honest communication, if you've given feedback and mentored, and it’s still not working out, you need to be able to recognize that you've made a bad hire. And a bad hire can negatively affect everyone around them and blow your reputation company-wide as a manager.” So, yes, do everything you can to onboard the new hire. “But if it's not working out, don’t be afraid to admit it and move on,” Gardiner says. If you’d like to learn more about optimizing your MOPS team and your marketing, reach out to us here . Next in this series:   Building a successful MOPS team: How to effectively manage MOPS talent (post 3 of 5)

Note for Readers: “Building a Successful MOPS Team” is a 5-part blog series that focuses on people. The series will cover: (1) when and how to hire MOPS talent, (2) how to onboard talent, (3) how to effectively manage a MOPS team, (4) how to support professional development within MOPS teams, and (5) how to approach the future of MOPS. We asked Sojourn Solutions Delivery Directors Claire Robinson and Carmen Gardiner, both with long experience working within MOPS and helping MOPS teams on behalf of Sojourn Solutions, to share their insights with us (and you) for this blog post series. Marketing Operations is about optimizing technology, processes, and people to achieve marketing results and increased revenues. People are an essential component for MOPS success. “People are at the heart of MOPS because you can't automate and templatize everything,” says Claire Robinson. “You'll always need smart, collaborative people within MOPS going out and building relationships with other departments.” While technology and processes can be similarly available across organizations, “it’s the MOPS professionals who drive competitive advantage and carry forward the vision and strategy of any organization,” Robinson says.  Evaluating skills gaps within MOPS teams What happens when a MOPS team lacks the skills and knowledge to fulfill its strategic function? Evaluating a team and its skills should happen on a regular basis. “Managers need to pay close attention to aptitudes and skills as the team grows,” says Carmen Gardiner. “Even if you don't need a certain skill today, you might need it in the future. You want to know what skills are on the team and if there’s someone who has an aptitude for whatever skills the team might need to add, whether it's a people skill, organizational skill or a technological skill.” Once your MOPS team grows beyond a certain size, you’ll probably need to develop areas of specialization. “You can start training your people, get them certified, and create specializations within your team for areas like campaign creation, architecture, data analysis, or whatever you think you need,” says Gardiner.  You may also need to hire to add additional capacity. “It’s a red flag if you start seeing the team making more mistakes, missing deadlines, turning down projects and overall struggling to deliver quality output,” says Robinson. “When you start seeing your MOPS team losing motivation and getting burned out, you need to start asking whether you have the requisite skills and resources you need.”  Closing skills gaps: 4 steps before you hire You don’t always need to bring in a full-time employee/FTE to close the gaps your MOPS team faces. Here are 4 steps to consider before you go out and hire an FTE:  Train internally.  “Begin by checking in with your team on whether somebody would like to learn the skill you need, because that will impact whether you hire an FTE or train someone internally,” says Robinson. “And yes, there's clearly a time investment in training someone, but it can be better to develop your existing employees rather than looking outside.” Prioritize the gaps.  “You should be prioritizing your skills/knowledge gaps based on the strategic goals your team needs to deliver on,” says Robinson. “You need to define a plan to tackle the gaps that impact you the most. For example, and depending on your strategic goals, gaps in analytics or measurement/attribution capabilities might be more urgent to act upon than gaps in communication skills.” Be proactive rather than reactive on filling gaps.  “You never want to get to the point where you feel like, ‘wow, we need to hire an FTE right now,’ because that urgency can lead to hiring mistakes that could be very costly to your MOPS team and your culture,” explains Robinson. Anticipate your needs, identify your gaps, prioritize them, then figure out next steps asap. Bring in a consultant.  Whether you need to add extra capacity or an additional skill, hiring a consultant can be a good intermediary step because the consultant is much cheaper than an FTE. “A good consultant can simultaneously fill a skills gap and act as a mentor/coach for a MOPS team member,” says Gardiner. “But if you find you're spending more money on a consultant per year than an FTE, you may need an FTE.”  How to hire FT MOPS talent: 7 great tips Robinson and Gardiner are largely aligned on how to go about hiring MOPS talent. Here are their 7 suggestions: Get a referral.  “You always want to hire a person that someone else in your network already knows and can vouch for,” says Gardiner. Referrals can greatly reduce the time and risk of hiring. Include the team.  “Ask your team, especially anyone in the same or a similar role to the one you’re hiring for, to provide input throughout the hiring process, from writing the job description to filtering candidates to conducting interviews,” says Robinson. “Your own people have all this firsthand experience and knowledge of what it takes to be successful in the role.” Be thorough and candid about the job description.  “The more detail you can give about the challenges of the role and about how your team does things,” explains Robinson, “the more likely you are to get the right candidates with the right experiences applying.” Consider cultural fit.  “Smart companies are changing their recruiting process to carefully consider the cultural fit of candidates rather than just the hard and soft skills required,” says Robinson. Every MOPS team has its own chemistry and culture. Involve your team in interviews.  “Your team’s involvement enables them to decide whether or not they can work well with the candidate and assess their cultural fit. It helps having multiple perspectives on each interviewee,” says Robinson. Give candidates a test.  “Whether it's troubleshooting an email or a lead flow, or giving the candidate a set of data and having them present their findings, any real-world use case you can throw at candidates will be revealing about how they think and how they approach the work,” says Gardiner.  Watch for candidate red flags. MOPS professionals need empathy, an ability to read other people so they can build strong relationships within the team and across the organization. “Beware of ego,” says Gardiner, “because you need collaborators.” Look out if a candidate says, “I did this and I did that,” when they worked as part of a collaborative effort.” If you’d like to learn more about optimizing your MOPS team and marketing, reach out to us here . Next in this series:  Building a successful MOPS team: 10 steps to onboarding MOPS talent (post 2 of 5)