With Jerine Erice, Senior Marketing Operations Manager at Reciprocity
Jerine Erice talks about learning more about Rev Ops to strengthen your relationship with marketing and sales teams and grow your career. She covers the pros and cons of working as a consultant compared to in-house, and how asking for help is one of the most beneficial things you can do.
Jerine Erice is the Senior Marketing Operations Manager at Reciprocity. She is an accomplished marketing operations professional with advanced technical skills in CRM administration using Salesforce.com (SFDC, Marketo and Pardot), as well as other integrated Software as a Service (SaaS) applications. Jerine is also a Marketo Certified Business Consultant.
How does learning about the business side benefit Marketing Ops?
I think the business side is important for marketing ops folks to learn, because that is what's going to open the gates for career development. That will enable a marketing ops person to become a rev ops leader or a CMO or something at that level.
As a marketing ops leader, sharing knowledge with the marketing and sales teams allows you to go beyond “this is my silo and I own this goal and this number.” You start to be able to have deeper conversations about what you’re really working toward. Everyone knows the goal and everybody can be on the same page.
I find a lot of joy in developing those relationships and learning more about the business side of things. Learning how a business runs and the fundamentals of how to make a business successful means asking, “What does that really look like?” “What are the things that we need to consider?”
I'm really grateful for our leaders that we have at Reciprocity because they're always thinking about how to launch a product. What does that mean? What are the components around that? When we're talking with investors, what are they looking for? What does that mean? What's that impact on our business? I’m really having a lot of fun learning those new things.
What are the pros and cons of working in house compared to consulting?
One of the biggest pros in consulting was being able to learn from different companies. They all had some of the same problems. As a consultant, you solve that in different ways across different companies. You can take what you learned and bring it over to another company.
Another pro to consulting is the flexibility in time. That was actually a very freeing concept because in-house sometimes things can be a little bit more fluid. You're competing projects and priorities in house. With consulting it's all about competing time. I have to figure out where I can put that time to be the most efficient because if I have 20 hours to do a project, I have to get it done in 20 hours.
A con for consulting is that you don’t get as deep with the company. You don’t know the reason a specific process is in place, or the reason why they don't have that process in place is because they actually need help with it. You won’t know the impetus for how a structure was put together before but you’re working under that structure because an executive wants it that way. Understanding a lot of those intricacies is more difficult in consulting.
A pro to being in house is that you get to really learn how your company works. I find that to be so invigorating. The con is the competing priorities. Sometimes when you're in-house, you're taking a look at those projects and going, “Oh, shoot, I have to shift this now because of a product launch,” or, “I have to shift this now because of budget.” So it's constantly trying to figure out how to, how to manage those priorities.
How do you transition to owning more of Rev Ops in Marketing Ops?
You have to kind of say it out loud and actually ask for it. I'm still learning to vocalize the things that I want better. When I had interviewed for Reciprocity, I did make it a point to say, “Hey, this is what I do. This is what I can offer, but this is where I'd like to head.” They had a clear indication of where I wanted to take my career. That's probably the first step to make that declaration with whomever you're working with.
Asking for help is one of the most humbling things you can do but that's really what's getting me to where I want to go. Ask for that help about what you want to learn more of.
If anything, my consulting background has given me the confidence to finally speak up and do things like that. As a consultant, you're learning about the project and the organization, but in so many situations they're also looking to learn from you. It's a very symbiotic relationship.
