What to think through when building your marketing operations team.

Identifying the right marketing operations team competencies is the difference between a team that executes and one that transforms your organization. For the last 15 years, I have been managing marketing and marketing operations teams. I have done everything from inheriting team members to hiring new individuals to promoting and creating more depth to the team. Some of the areas my team covers include web technology, marketing automation/email campaigns, data, marketing budgets, and reports. I have worked at small companies with fewer than 100 employees and large enterprises with more than 16,000 employees, and I have found that all organizations feel pressure to do more with less. What I have found while managing teams is that there are core competencies and soft skills that make a productive and impactful contributor to marketing operations.

Marketing Operations Team Competencies for Success

Learner Mindset

Since there is no consistency in the responsibility of a marketing operations professional, this individual must be ready to figure out anything. I always think of this as the tinkers, the ones who love figuring out how things work. These folks jump on Google, ask a question in a Slack community, or get on a support call with the vendor to figure out how something is working. While interviewing these folks I ask situational questions to understand how they went about solving the issue and what the outcome was from the solution implemented. As an example ask the candidate “Tell me about a technology you implemented, and what was the outcome?”

Innovative/Fearless Approach

The MarTech landscape has exploded from just over 1,000 marketing technologies to now topping over 10,000 vendors and solutions. There are multiple new tools and solutions being created every day, and your marketing operations team needs to learn how they work, if they will deliver what solution is needed by your organization, how they integrate, and how to scale the use of the tool. Your marketing operations person might be certified on one specific software but now, your company is asking them to take on more. The best marketing operations folks are excited about learning new technology, creating more efficiency, and collecting more data allowing the rest of the marketing team to understand how their marketing strategy is performing.

Creative Problem-Solving

For a long time, I thought creative only meant designing ads, writing copy, or painting pictures. I started to be told I was creative when I was figuring out how to solve challenges with limited resources, and repurposing content in different formats to new audiences.

Another way to think of creative is a scene from Apollo 13. The spacecraft has had an issue, and now ground control needs to instruct the astronauts on how to repair the ship to get back to earth. The ground crew is provided all the materials the astronauts have on the ship to figure out the solution.

That type of creativity is what makes a strong marketing operations professional as they will have to work with the current go-to-market technologies to accomplish what the requester are asking.

To translate the Apollo 13 to work a marketing operations administrator is around integrations and downstream impacts. Let’s look at an example of what a Marketing Ops admin might be asked:

 “Why did an executive register for an event and not receive his confirmation?”

The issue: the confirmation depended on an industry field missing from the form. This requirement stemmed from sales rejecting MQLs without industry data. The fix: apply Clearbit enrichment post form fill so confirmations always send, improving both lead quality and customer experience. First discovery, the form did not have an industry field on the form, as industry field triggers the confirmation.  

Interview Best Practices

When you are meeting with candidates or assessing your team, make sure to always ask situation-based questions. What you want to understand is how the individual went about their work, what challenges they faced, how did they overcome those challenges, what were the outcomes and how did they learn from those outcomes. Keep questions open-ended so the individual can show how they think.

Here are a few example questions:

Tell me about a time when you had to quickly learn a new tool or platform to complete a project. What was your approach? 

Think of a time when technology wasn’t working the way it should. How did you troubleshoot or find a workaround? 

Share an example of when a system or tool went down at a critical time. What did you do to keep work moving forward? 

Don’t Over-Rely on Certifications

Don’t lean too heavily on confirming candidates have vendor-issued certifications for their product knowledge. Over time, a lot of these technology vendors have changed how they manage certifications, there is no true test within the platform to confirm how they administer the software, and the exams are usually multiple choice questions.

Having previous experience in the platform does not confirm that the individual knew what they were doing. A lot of marketing automation platform users fell into this role, and had to figure it out. Some had the traits mentioned above for them to become masters of the tools. Others did not, and made messes of the system for future admins to clean up.

Most hiring managers do not have experience in the tools and cannot ask the nuanced questions that would identify if the individual was successful or not as an administrator. Instead, during your interview conversation if you notice one candidate complains about a specific product where others have not, dig into why they did not like that software. It might be that candidate was not provided good foundational knowledge of the tool, and they did not seek help to understand the software. Candidates that do not realize they are empowered to figure things out, go to platform user group meetings, join marketing operations Slack channels to ask questions, or read the product materials, they are not a good candidate for the marketing operations role.

Successfully building Marketing Operations with the right competencies

One of the most exciting elements of the marketing operations team is change. The way our stacks were constructed and built is changing. AI is now a big player in this space. New tools are entering the space quickly. As a manager of these individuals, keep to those three basic characteristics for your marketing operations team. Individuals with these traits will help you navigate the AI landscape, consolidate your technology stack, and keep your organization meeting your customers where they are.