With Katie Peters, Director of Marketing Ops at InVision
Marketing Ops can struggle to perform at its highest potential at product-led companies. Katie Peters from InVision discusses how to build a working relationship with Product Ops, must-have tools for Marketing Ops, and best practices for negotiating rates with vendors.
Katie Peters is the Director of Marketing Ops at InVision. As a Marketing Ops & Strategy Leader, she’s a problem-solver by nature.
Katie enjoys breaking down complex roadblocks and finding scalable solutions. Her personality type, INTJ, which is known as the "architect" -- meaning she tends to be rational, data-driven, and self-motivated.
How would freelancers or smaller outfits negotiate rates for platforms that charge enterprise-level fees?
You may have a very large database of potential users for a specific platform but not all of those users are going to be active all the time. One of the first things you can do with a platform is to negotiate with them based on how often your users interact with their tool.
You can take it a step further and archive those users who don’t interact with the tool at all to further lower your cost with people who then become unsubscribed to the platform.
Segment Analytics track events within a product at a PLG company. How can Marketing Ops best work with Product Ops to gain access to that data?
When I first started at InVision, Marketing Ops didn’t really know what went on with segment analysis. We didn’t know what events were being started or the results.
We worked on developing a relationship with the product teams by introducing ourselves. We familiarized ourselves with what each product team handled. Most product teams have no idea what Marketing Ops does for the organization, so we helped explain what we do. We let them know why we need to have the events within segment analysis directly impact our MQLs.
We worked with the product teams (and data teams since they head up naming conventions) to help link data. Now whenever anything new comes out in a product we have a good relationship to help figure out what segment is related to it, whether it gets sent to Marketo, and if we need to use it in our models.
What would you consider the must have marketing ops tools for PLG companies that have similar volume to InVision?
Having an email tool like Marketo that can handle larger volumes and more complex workflows is really key for us.
Being cognizant of API calls and volumes when you have such a large database is important. So is being able to utilize those types of connectors to batch things through.
Segment analysis is huge for us because it feeds into all of our systems and allows us to look at what product users are doing. If those product actions are highly correlated to enterprise customers and someone becoming an enterprise customer, having a scoring tool is always one of the top needs.
Some other tools would include Drift. It’s very helpful for chatting online. Pendo.io is really helpful for product companies because it allows us to reach our product users.
