With Brooke Bartos, Marketing Operations Leader at Invoice Cloud
Learn how Brooke Bartos from Invoice Cloud accelerated her career growth in Marketing Ops. She’ll cover attribution and what you need to do before you can get value from platforms that use it. You’ll also find out more about sales and marketing alignment as well as why data-driven CMOs help change the narrative of Marketing Ops from a cost center to a revenue generator.
Brooke Bartos is the Marketing Operations Leader at Invoice Cloud. She is a data-driven digital marketing professional with expertise in marketing automation, strategic planning, analytics, and communications in the B2B and B2C space.
Brooke has undertaken successful implementation of ABM strategy, engagement marketing and lead nurturing, and martech integrations for Marketo. She’s achieved funnel and sales growth across marketing channels including marketing automation, social media, content and blogs, trade shows, collateral, and print publications.
What attributes do you feel are absolutely necessary for accelerated career growth?
You need to push yourself and look for opportunities for challenges.
I was always an athlete in school. I was always the type to really push myself and I looked for those opportunities for challenges. When I wanted to move into that Marketo admin role and got pushback, it hurt, but it fueled a little bit of fire. The process of having to interview someone for the job that I wanted continued to add fuel to the fire. When the door finally cracked open just enough for me to get a shot at it I just went full speed at it.
I sought out every opportunity that I could to continue to not only grow my own skill set, but to prove to the people who did believe in me that their trust and their faith was well-placed.
What do you say to people who are frustrated with and confused about attribution?
A lot of these attribution tools aren't cheap, depending on what you're, what you're looking at. It doesn’t make sense to use them unless you know the basics in your CRM and marketing platform. You won’t be successful with those platforms without first having success from the foundation you built in your CRM and marketing automation platforms.
At Invoice Cloud, we’ve standardized tracking where web traffic is coming from and the different channels. That's something that anytime you're talking to an attribution vendor, they're going to talk to you about: are you using UTM parameters?
Before you even start to get into those conversations about a platform, standardize processes like the use of Salesforce campaigns or dynamics campaigns. Make sure you are assigning campaign membership and progression statuses in your marketing automation platform. That's going to be your base. Then you can start to look at those types of platforms and get what you need out of them.
How can you have an impact in strengthening a relationship with sales when you’re in a marketing ops role?
One of the most important things to remember in marketing is that our customer is not only our prospect. Our sales team is too.
A lot of the sales cycle now happens within marketing before the handoff occurs to sales. The more information that we can prepare them with, the better we can educate that prospect, which makes the job of sales easier. Sit down with the sales team and actually listen to them. Look at their pain points as opportunities versus challenges.
Find those opportunities for impact even if they’re little wins. Those little wins can start to build a foundation of trust. If you can create that feedback loop, sales will start to feel like you’re listening, making adjustments, and trying to support them.
Why is it so important to have data-driven CMOs and how can that really help accelerate marketing operations?
If you take a step back and look at how much technology and data and these integrations have evolved, 15 years ago most of these platforms that we're using now for digital marketing didn't exist at all. As these people moved up in their organizations to become directors they didn't have that hands-on practitioner experience that many people today do as they rise in their careers.
Digital has become a bigger piece in marketing with that evolution as opposed to the traditional, “Hey, we put out a PR piece in the newspaper,” “We got an ad in a magazine,” or, “We went to this trade show.”
We've moved into this digital world. We've moved into integrations and a lot of things where marketing impacts the entire customer experience from the very first interaction, whether it's with an ad or your website or search through time spent on site, your emails, even into your sales engagements, but becoming a customer.
When you can impact customer experience in that way, you accelerate the pipeline. You’re also given the opportunity to help engage your existing customers. Your lifetime customer value becomes a part of that too.
Marketing can start to transition into being a revenue generator instead of a cost center with that ability to connect the data. While in the past marketing dealt with mostly brand awareness campaigns with magazine ads or those trade shows. You couldn't connect those with anything. Now we actually do have the data that we can look at behind the scenes to say, okay, pipeline, revenue, and marketing all touch that. Here's how we can optimize our spending.
Those are the things that are going to be important to CMOs, especially when they can start to take ownership for pipeline and revenue generation and say, “Hey, marketing is committing to generating this amount or influencing this amount,” you're starting to speak the language of business.
