With Jan Aclan, Marketing Operations Manager at PandaDoc
Jan Aclan, Marketing Operations Manager, at PandaDoc, discusses the importance and value of MOPs being cross-functional. He shares how to build cross-functional relationships, his move from demand gen to marketing operations, and being accountable to the funnel.
Jan Aclan is the Marketing Operations Manager at PandaDoc. He was an economics, statistics, and actuarial major in school. Today he leverages his analytical mind to build sales teams and manage marketing programs. Jan enjoys the opportunity at PandaDoc to grow careers and experiment with the best-in-class SaaS tools.
How do you facilitate cross-functional relationships?
It happened almost organically because my boss at that time was based in San Francisco and our Salesforce admin at the time was based in San Francisco. I was based here in the Tampa Bay area where we were building out the SDR team.
For a while, I was the only representation of marketing on the East Coast, let alone anyone with any sense of operational support. For the first three hours of the work day I was the go-to guy for marketing or operational support. That helped build a lot of trust with the SDR team. That helped me in turn say, “Hey, SDR team, I need your help in getting this out on campaign or getting this cadence better adopted.”
Most of your marketing campaigns are going to be as successful as the rest of your team.
I view the SDR team and the Demand Gen team as my internal customers. As Operations, I'm not interfacing with external pain PandaDoc customers, but I am interfacing all day with the SDR, Demand Gen, and revenue marketing teams. A lot of what I'm building, whether it's reporting automation or just defining processes and documentation, I'm delivering that to my internal customers here.
If I can get feedback from the SDR team and critiques from the management team, that will help me improve what I'm delivering to them. That ultimately builds value for the specific top of funnel teams and ultimately for the company as a whole.
How did you move from Demand Gen to Operations?
I was doing a lot of operational work, but took ownership of being in that cross-functional role. I accepted the fact that I was the guy to bridge any marketing campaign or marketing idea and follow through with the SDR and sales team.
I didn't explicitly speak up and say, “Hey, can I get my title changed to Marketing Operations?” When I joined the marketing ops team, we were being very intentional about centralizing a lot of our overall operational functions. That includes our data science team and our Salesforce admin. It also includes our broader Biz Ops team and of course, Sales Ops, Marketing Ops and Customer Success Ops. I was brought on because I was already that kind of centralized cross-functional team player between sales and marketing. It made it a natural fit.
Where does Marketing Ops fit in the organization?
There’s a lot of talk and ideas of being cross-functional in an organization. That's easier in a centralized operations function. When I introduce myself to new marketing teammates or new sales teammates, I always say that my accountability is to the funnel and corporate strategy first. That happens by me helping you.
