With host Darrell Alfonso
Every job experience really built on itself.
I got my start in advertising, migrated to general marketing, and functioned as a one-person marketing team for the next eight years. I touched technology and marketing in every aspect and developed a wide breadth of skills.
Wanting to learn more, I entered the marketing ops space after joining an organization looking to rapidly scale to sell. I moved into enterprise organizations and lead marketing operations and technologies teams, currently I am with Goodwin.
It’s using all my experiences that I’ve gained throughout my different roles. My experience has helped me understand every element of marketing, and I’m in charge of the web team, CRM team, email team, and an operations team that actually focuses more on the budgets. So, it’s using everything I’ve ever done, and I get excited to leverage that knowledge.
It’s all about relationship building. Not just in your own department, but with your IT counterparts, customers, and other groups within your organization. Having complete understanding of where the asks are coming from helps you plan better and build the best solution to meet the need.
When I was at CFO Publishing, I got to work directly with leadership, who made it very clear what the company was trying to achieve. I was able to take that information, think it through, and put a strategy in place to accomplish those needs. Talking with different departments to determine their logic and their “why” can be instrumental to the role.
Sometimes you just have to ask for more. We were seeing an explosion of content created by our team year after year—they were making almost 10x the previous year’s content—but the team was never expanded, and people were getting burned out. We knew we had to ask for more, but we could only do that by telling the full story.
So we tracked everything. We figured out how many asks there were, how many hours they took to fulfill and so on, until we had all the numbers.
Then it came down to figuring out if any of the requests could be automated. And if automations were possible, could we bring in the technology for a reasonable price?
If there wasn’t a system, I strongly recommended consultants to help with the workload because it just wasn’t worth stressing the team out. Thankfully we did a restructure right before COVID to help with some of the bandwidth issues and it kept the team from burning out.
It’s really important to give people the resources and the support to help with the workload, so they can take vacations and recharge. I work really hard to keep my team motivated with tangible rewards such as vacations, Amex gift cards, cookies, and a lot of appreciation.
I’m very proud of the path I took throughout my career, but I would tell myself to have patience and not put so much pressure on myself to climb the ladder.
A Slack community to share strategic marketing operations best practices