With Crissy Saunders, CEO at CS2
Crissy Saunders covers how to make Marketing Ops a strategic ally rather than a team that just takes orders. You’ll learn why Marketing Ops should own data and analytics, but that doesn’t mean everyone in MOPs needs to know coding.
Crissy Saunders is the CEO and Co-Founder of CS2, a B2B SaaS marketing agency started in the heart of Silicon Valley and now supported by a remote team across the US.
She has over a decade of experience in marketing operations and demand generation. Crissy constantly strives to learn the best ways to optimize what are known as the 3Ps of Tech Marketing: People, Process, and Performance.
What are some examples that helped position MOPs as a strategic ally rather than just a team executing?
Try to find out your business goals. Even though those goals change you can still develop a framework to align their projects with those business goals. Sometimes it’s simple problems to address like finding any issues with the speed to lead. Make sure your lead life cycle is tracked and measured the right way.
Other companies may work with multiple key stakeholders. Work with those clients to figure out how you can create more cross-functionality between sales ops working with your sales development team and any other teams.
Create the definitions of the life cycle together to find the key points, how to measure that and how to continually report on it over time.
How do you align the technical teams that deal with data with the go-to-market teams that need to use that data?
A lot of organizations use BI tools to get insight from their data. If you do that, you still rely on the technical team to get insights. There’s nothing wrong with those tools, but realigning the data gatekeeper can prove to be more beneficial.
You should have collective access to data. You then align the roles and teams within that context. When data is being best used and leveraged it's really when it's within the workflow of these different teams.
For marketing, they probably need access to some of that data around your customers and around your accounts because they need to do things like scoring and segmentation. That way they can really ensure that they're creating a great experience across the whole customer journey.
I see Marketing Ops as owning the customer journey, operationalizing that and making sure it's efficient. Customer experience is so important to a company now because there's so much that the customer's doing on their own outside of working with sales. Nowadays people are not gating a lot of their assets.
Getting some of those key insights or also making sure that that journey that they're doing on their own is super important when it comes to having a competitive advantage. I almost even think that there might be one person now being added to a marketing ops team in the future who just focuses on the customer journey, what communications are going out, are they aligned?
Should Marketing Ops learn SQL, Python or other programming languages to query the database and gain other insights from the data?
That may set the wrong expectations. A lot of people are already leery of getting into Marketing Ops because there’s so much to know. Adding programming languages on top of it makes that burden that much heavier.
It can certainly be helpful to know a little bit more about SQL or other programming languages. Don’t do yourself a disservice by thinking you have to know everything.
If you aren’t good at programming, it doesn’t mean Marketing Ops isn’t for you. It just means that you are maybe best suited in a different part of Marketing Ops.
