With Julie Beynon, Head of Analytics & Colin White, Head of Demand at Clearbit
Analytics and demand generation must work hand in hand to successfully align the market and drive sales. For Julie Beynon and Colin White at Clearbit that meant learning about specific tools and adding skills based on their different backgrounds.
Learn what tools and skills they recommend from experience in either marketing or as a developer to reach the top of your game in marketing ops.
Julie Beynon began her career in marketing working for Protus IP, a start-up company located in Kanata North's technology valley.
After that, she worked for nearly 5 years at Conceptshare, a start-up agency that pioneered creative proofing software. Deltek later bought the company.
She decided to freelance for a bit and realized the advantages of working remotely. When she joined Customerio's marketing team in operations and analytics, she got to work from home for the next 3 years.
More recently she became head of analytics at Clearbit. Julie brings the brains of a data analyst and the soul of a marketer to make Clearbit a powerhouse in SaaS.
Colin White began his career as a developer at GetGifted, Inc. He then cofounded Zora, an IT Services and Consulting firm in Ontario.
He moved into analytics with Outshine Online Marketing Inc before pivoting to Performance Marketing and Marketing Operations at Dash Hudson 2 years later.
Colin started as a performance marketing manager at Clearbit before moving to his current role of Head of Demand Generation.
What are some of the most relevant skills that give the ability to create maximum value as you've moved through your career?
(Julie) The biggest help would be to learn SQL. Beyond gaining access to data you may otherwise have to rely on engineering to give you, you build out the logical workflow in your brain. That really helps in marketing ops in general.
What was different about the path from a more technical background as a developer to marketing?
(Colin) I already had the logical workflow and technical knowledge part of marketing ops that Julie had to learn.
What I didn’t know were things like segmentation and why certain campaigns were run certain ways. I started learning on my own to bridge those gaps. You’ll see a ton of marketing books on my shelf. It’s a constant state of learning.
What’s the best approach for determining which marketing ops tools to use?
(Colin) I don’t solely use any one platform. On the super enterprise side, I’ll use Eloqua before moving to Marketo. Other customers use Hubspot so I meet them where they’re comfortable.
Each tool has its own strengths and weaknesses.
What are some of the best ways to drive alignment between sales and marketing?
(Colin) The biggest thing is to use the same KPIs. You need to be driving toward the same goal.
Work with sales, the sales managers, and VP to walk them through what you’re doing on the marketing side. Then they understand what you’re doing and can offer direct feedback on their pain points.
