Senior Marketing Operations Manager and Senior Manager, Strategy & Analytics at Lucid
Peter Kirk and Stephanie Cameron from Lucid speak about how marketing ops and analytics teams can work together more effectively. You’ll also hear more about how to turn user stories into tech specs to facilitate a better cross-functional relationship between marketing ops and data teams.
Peter Kirk is the Senior Marketing Ops Manager at Lucid. He joined Lucid as the Demand Generation Manager, rebuilding their product qualified motion from the ground up, resulting in $5MM+ in pipeline and a 20% increase in response rate from all sales outreach. Peter also scaled live chat globally, driving 30k+ conversations and $2MM+ in pipeline.
Stephanie Cameron is the Senior Manager, Strategy and Analytics at Lucid. She began her career as an analyst at Cornerstone Research before joining Pinterest as an Insights Solutions Lead. Three years later she accepted the role of Manager of Strategy and Analytics at Lucid before moving to her current position of Senior Manager, Strategy and Analytics.
How do you make sure Marketing Ops and Analytics are on the same page?
(Stephanie) Everything that we do is supporting the KPIs and the overall objectives of the department as a whole. In order to make it work, process is just important, as well as rituals. This is factored into when we do our quarterly planning or plan on any projects. We make sure that we're prioritizing things according to the level of impacts that it will have on the business and that we stay closely connected there.
In order to actually have that information in that context there are a lot of meetings and things that support connection between teams. That way we stay in touch with what are those high level initiatives that the growth team is working on so we can be strategic partners instead of working on things that are different in priority.
(Peter) We do have rituals, although we don’t call them rituals internally. For more proactive work, like what Stephanie's talking about with quarterly planning and projects that are a bit more impactful than one-off requests, we always come together and write a brief. That’s a way for us to hash out our thoughts on paper. Then we can use that brief to align with other teams and have a solid document showing exactly what we're thinking in a way that won't change over time.
As far as reactive work goes, we always try to stay in touch on any one-off requests. Maybe we need to set a data set poll or have something analyzed. It goes both ways. We can take requests as the marketing ops team, maybe from analytics, and analytics can take requests from us as well.
(Stephanie) What we don't want to do in Analytics is be data monkeys that pull numbers, but we don't really know why. Having an understanding of the data means that if somebody comes to us with a problem, a lot of times we can come up with a solution that maybe they didn't have in mind. If they come to us with that solution and we just deliver it without thinking, we might miss a better way to do things.
Keep Analytics in mind and making sure to include us in the higher level discussions as well is important to get the most impact out of the data we can provide.
How do you make sure Marketing Ops and Analytics are on the same page?
It's helpful to understand at a high level what Marketo is doing. When it comes to data or getting data in the right format, Peter ends up translating the limitations and the structure of that data might look like.
There's also this other aspect of how you actually get data in and out of these differences systems, which ends up impacting a lot of different teams. There are some examples of this on projects we’ve worked on. From an analytics point of view we don't always understand the capabilities or the limitations of the way that Marketo or Salesforce might package up that data. We definitely lean on Peter and Marketing Ops to be able to help us with that.
How do you turn user stories into tech specs?
(Peter) The need to have a feedback funnel into marketing ops is an increasingly greater need. I try to dig deep into any sort of feedback as it's surfaced. Sometimes we get a piece of feedback that seems really tiny but it would actually be really impactful if we implemented that feedback for all of our sellers. You need to dig into the feedback you get quickly.
Just as important is keeping track of all of the feedback that you get. Maybe there's something that you can’t implement right now because it’s a bit too far fetched but perhaps that request is going to come in from several different teams. That shows there's an aligned need for us to move quickly on something.
In that “digging in” process you can figure out how you could potentially frame something to a technical team in a way that really makes sense. First, figure out how to convince yourself that this feedback is really impactful. Then, translate the requirements into the way you think before translating further.
