With Jenny Coupe, VP Global Revenue Marketing and Adam Aragon, Sr. Manager, Digital & Web Experiences at ActiveCampaign
Jenny Coupe and Adam Aragon are a power duo at Active Campaign. They work in tandem to make sure new metrics of measurement take into consideration the goals of disparate teams and seamlessly factor into the UX/UI. They advocate for aligning teams under Rev Ops to streamline the flow of business and stress looking for future trends to spot useful certifications in MarTech.
Jenny Coupe is the SVP of Global Revenue Marketing at Active Campaign.
With 25+ years in B2B Marketing, including several start-ups and larger companies such as Akamai and Silicon Graphics, Jenny specializes in building predictable revenue by leveraging the power of data.
This approach has set the standard for SaaS technology marketing and helped her earn numerous awards including the Top 50 Women in Revenue That You Should Know and the Top 60 Most Influential Marketing Thought Leaders.
Adam Aragon is the Senior Manager of Digital and Web Experiences at Active Campaign.
He has proven an extensive record of web creation, management, administration and instruction. Over the course of his career, Adam has designed, maintained and implemented over 1000 websites.
His background in marketing-focused research, statistics, and technology lets him grasp the 'big picture' for a company’s goals and missions. He’s proficient in multiple hosting, SaaS, CRM and cloud environments including AWS, Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and various server configurations.
With the focus on Rev Ops, how do other teams align?
(Jenny) We've got a few teams that are partners in crime. We have Marketing Operations, which was actually a new discipline for my team. I hired that team within my first three months of joining the company. That was really the foundation for everything else.
A key part of that was aligning with finance business ops. Revenue ops lives in sales and is traditionally probably referred to as more of a sales ops function. Taking that lens of revenue around key operational areas drives that alignment across the business.
We've also got things like conversion rate optimization functions that line up directly with Adam's team, who of course runs the website. That's another kind of key alignment point between operations and the website and the rest of the business.
(Adam)
One of the first things they did prior to me coming on board was to take the site team and bring them into being a part of marketing.
A lot of times Dev is just the end result and not part of the flow or the process itself. Another one of the first steps was to make us lateral with everyone.
We worked right alongside the CRO to help him implement and help him plan more effectively with SEO and analytics. We are right there, shoulder to shoulder, helping make these decisions and giving like the dev insight.
How do you align data collection across different teams?
(Jenny) Just because you can measure it doesn't mean that it's important. First, you need to align and decide: what are we measuring? Why are we measuring it? We need to make sure the inputs match the outputs we’re looking for.
For example, you can measure things on your website, right? Pages visited, conversion rate interactions, balance rate, and exit pages. Some of those may matter to your business. Some of those may not.
By starting with the objective and then identifying what are those key inputs to get you to those outputs that give you those insights on the business, is what's critical.
Making sure that, for example, your operations team is lined up with the website team on something as simple as, “Hey, if we're going to ask questions on phone, we want to make sure that we actually have these fields, and they map this way into our CRM.” Then we can actually get these insights.
(Adam) Dev works backwards from the outcome to get the data needed for reporting. We try to flip the right switches to see what data affects that final net result. Then we know we want to include a specific field that has supporting data.
We also have the concern of how that fits into our UI UX. How does that affect the customer experience? How do we track the user behavior? We need to know whether or not they're engaging with that kind of new element. We try to back each other up in that regard.
What certifications should technical marketers pursue and to what level?
(Adam) If there's an ecosystem that your company is a strong part of, a certification makes sense. If you are a Salesforce based company and work in Salesforce all the time, having a Salesforce certification is a no brainer.
The easy route to determine what certifications you should have is to ask whether you’re using a tool. If it’s a tool you use in and out of your day-to-day lives then yeah, you should be certified.
It gets more nebulous with cutting edge tech. Marketing technology is reinventing itself and disrupting itself at a pace like no other technology.
A lot of those certifications, especially more broad or general ones, are outdated by the time you're done with them. The question posed to me at one point was what certification should I pursue?
The answer to that is to keep your ear to the ground. See what’s coming down the horizon. What's the next wave of tech? What's the next tool? What's the next thing that really looks like it's going to be disruptive or really looks like it's going to be promising? That’s what you should be getting ahead of.
