The marketing movement. Why we find labs? Marketing apps. All right, we're here to talk about our one of our favorite topics that Judy and I love to talk about.
And can honestly talk about for hours, which is marketing operations, some do's and don'ts, quick tips. We could probably talk about it for an hour and a half. Let's just get to do it. What's your do's and don'ts around team alignment?
Let's go there first. Yeah. I mean, I think the biggest thing that I'm commonly seeing when we're working with companies and a gap in marketing ops, just in general, is A, they have nobody. In charge of it.
There's not really a dedicated head count. Or if there is someone working on operations, there's not a lot of alignment between marketing ops and sales ops, which I almost feel like that line is pretty fuzzy. Like having how much easier is your job when you have an amazing Salesforce admin, somebody that understands marketing's request into Salesforce can help you build out workflows, custom fields, understands how it all works without that person, and without having that like connection with SalesOps. It's almost impossible to drive things forward, especially if you're looking to do change processes that impact both marketing and your sales team.
So I think it's really just can be a head count gap. Sometimes it's not properly staffed or the teams don't overlap at all and they treat sales ops and everything happening with sales completely differently than they treat marketing ops and everything happening with marketing. I definitely agree. I think that's like where RevOps, you know, in this term of RevOps, and like I think that's where it started from.
Except for like, you'll have like RevOps, but you still have people siloed underneath it, which is interesting. I just look at it as like the most successful companies that I see work have their own operations team, and they work with all organizations or all departments in the organization. So they, you know, marketing might have a request and we say, hey, we want to create this new field on this opportunity, and this is why. And they're looking at it from a more strategy point of view, but then also to make sure no other workflows that the marketer might not know about, don't break.
Right? So I also feel like it goes kind of hand in hand with enablement. Like we want to make a change on the marketing side to, let's say, requiring contacts on opportunities and sales floors, which I cannot stress enough how important of a do this is. Like definitely make sure all opportunities have to have a contact and you can lock that down in sales floors.
You can make it so an opportunity can't be created unless there's a primary contact associated. You can make it so you can only create the opportunity off of the contact record. But these things that you want to implement that and they require like full process changes or a whole team to be trained, I think the enablement piece of it is super important, making sure there's going to be someone that's enforcing that with sales, because you can ask sales to do whatever we want in sales floors. And it's, you know, really hit or miss on if they're always going to listen to you.
So I think kind of closing the loop or having an enablement part of your operations team as well is important. Somebody to really drive that home and make sure the team's actually doing it. Another big do, I would say for this category is also aligning your marketing sales, even potentially CS team, but really a stage, funnel stage definition and service level agreement process stock. And I see a lot of these where they have stage definitions of like what it is and what like the marketing team does or doesn't do or what the sales team doesn't do.
But oftentimes, almost I would say almost like 70% of the time what's missing is the actual operational component behind it, which is like, which field gets triggered when that happens? What automatic workflows are put in place when an opportunity gets converted? You know, what what fields do we use in certain reports to report on these different stages? So everybody in the organization is aligned.
That's like my number one, you like start there, like you'll be way set up for success. And then I would also say to like revisit that every quarter to make sure that it's still accurate. Teams are still following it. It still applies.
So that would be a do for me as well. And then it's not like overly complicated. I feel like sometimes people set up these funnel stage scenarios that have too many stages and too many things they're trying to measure and like kind of lose the why behind what is really the point of what you're trying to track. But you brought up a good point just talking about the stages in general.
And I'd say probably one of the biggest gaps or misses that I see with the companies that we work with is not date and time stamping when anything changes, specifically stage changes in your funnel, but also like time stamping when the demo requests happen, or when your primary conversion point happens. So you have that really easy for reference. And you can follow up if sales is not replying to your demos. You have the exact specific date in there that can be referenced of how many days behind they are on following up on that.
But I can't even like sophisticated companies with pretty big ops teams will not have time stamping in place. And it just blows my mind that people are reporting on their funnel or trying to report on their funnel and they're not able to see the actual, yeah, right? It's pretty wild because it's so basic. If you think like larger companies would have it more set up, they'd get a set up.
They go. I'm not a sales force admin, but the documentation is pretty straightforward. It's like a default out of sales force to set up a timestamp field. So I won't speak for the admins out there.
I'm sure it's more complicated than that. But it seems like a no brainer. You should definitely have that in place. I'm gonna put that in my hard do list.
You definitely need to have time stamps. Time stamps and contacts and opportunities are my non-negotiable. That's 100%. Because if you don't have time stamps, and you're just going off to say like opportunity stages, but you're not stamping when that opportunity stage occurred, your historical reporting is not going to be accurate.
Because as we all know, opportunities change stages. Hopefully you're going forward, but some of them might go backwards. Then so when you look back six months later and you wanna say how many opportunities did I have in this specific stage, you don't actually know unless it's in that stage right now. It's hard to see the historical.
So I think that's like the key importance of why date stamps are so crucial. And you gotta set them up from the beginning. Like when you're doing the implementation of your sales force incidents, build them then. Build them immediately because it's not retroactive.
Like you can't go back and fix this data if you miss the time stamps. Yeah, they said someone wanted to make notes. Exactly. Okay, that leads into, we're talking about stages and opportunity stages.
It kind of leads into a hot topic, which is lead source and how to think about lead source, and what you should care about, what you should not care about. So I know one of the big things that we work through with a lot of our clients is making sure this is a do. And we have some don'ts here too. We can make sure we get in there to some don'ts.
But making sure that you are tracking the last campaign before the conversion point, and then you are capturing that. So that you can know, before, when I mean conversion point, that's typically an MQL, something that's going over to your sales team. Hopefully high intent MQL, right? From a demo or a contact ask request or something like that.
But you need to be tracking what that last campaign was because we're out of the days of, oh, the first touch is the conversion touch. Like that's no longer. That's not how sales works anymore buying processes work. So be curious on your thoughts of how you help recommend clients to set that up and best practices.
I agree. I definitely see a lot of people just relying on kind of first touch. And obviously there's some great tools like HubSpot, for example, in the way it tracks original source, it's going to do that all out of the box for you. And it's great to be able to see the high level what channel is bringing in traffic.
But you want to see what that conversion point is and which channels are driving which conversion points. I would also add to just general recommendations around tracking most recent campaign, but really taking advantage of the sales force primary campaign field, which is going to populate when you're converting a contact to an opportunity. It's going to be the last campaign that contact was in prior to the opportunity creation. So then you get that like, what was their touch before revenue, which I think is important too.
I think another big kind of mistake I see people only doing first touch and not tracking the conversion point, but also just like real broad ambiguous sources. So almost all of their data either looks like it's coming from website or advertising or referral. Like they're just really big bucket categories. And I think there's a lot of opportunity to add in a lead source detail field within HubSpot.
It's original source drill down one and drill down two. And that happens already. So you're in part ought tracking specifically, a little more detail, the sources advertising, which channel, if the source is website, give me a little more granularity on where they're converting on their website. I think I'll often see reports where there's just really nothing you can draw from it.
There's no conversion point data. It's just high level channel. Like we know most of the leads are coming from the website. Like this is how we expect, which is adding that extra layer of granularity there.
But on the flip side, I also see people that go into complex with their lead sources, and they're trying to track first touch every touching between the custom attribution models, trying to go really complex with weighted touch points across an attribution model, which is kind of a nice takeaway. It's just attribution in general, which I know is a really hot topic for us. But I think it's a balance between getting the information that you need to be informed and knowing that the attribution software is not going to show you the whole picture, and then going too far the other direction where it's like, you can't even really explain why you set up your complicated attribution model the way you did. You can't clearly explain why you want to measure weighted touch points in the way that you're doing it.
Just kind of, you need to have it, keep it simple. Go back to the basics. I agree. I think that's a good don't there.
Don't overcomplicate it. Get pretty simple with it. You can look at first touch, last touch, and our main touch that we look at is that conversion touch, right? The conversion point that happens before revenue, and that's definitely what we recommend clients to do.
The other, I would say, number in regards to attribution, then a do is to add a self-reported attribution field to your forms. Obviously, anyone knows we're fine labs. So we've been recommending this for a while, but. My word of Q4 is self-reported attribution.
If you believe you were fine last while, and you don't know what it is, shame on you. There's a whole other podcast episode, actually, on the attribution mirage, which is a really good one to go revisit and listen to. But basically, just add a form to your field, or add it to the field form that says, how did you hear about us? We recommend it to be free text, and then you can map that into categories.
It's pretty simple to do. But this also doesn't replace your salesforce fields and all that. It's to give you additional context into what the customer is telling you is the most important. We've seen some crazy data to help uncover what's really driving organic and direct, and some of those dark social channels.
So for the attribution category, this is probably the number one do that we recommend. 100%. Take anything your attribution software is telling you with a grain of salt, and then layer in self-reported attribution to really see the full picture. Obviously, there can be some cool things uncovered, but I software we're not going to totally discount it.
But how often are we seeing the software pick it up as organic or direct traffic? And then the self-reported is saying that they heard about you on LinkedIn, or they listened to your podcast, or a friend referred them, or they read about you in a Slack community, and none of that is ever picked up by the attribution software. So yeah, definitely. And that's my third mandatory do, is self-reported attribution.
I think related to attribution and source tracking in another big area that I see gaps in is really related to utilizing UTM's, or just URL tagging in general. It's wild to me how many people use UTM's, tag all their URLs, and then just don't do anything with that data. They don't map it into their marketing automation platform. They're not capturing it in hidden fields on their form.
They're not sinking it over to Salesforce. This is not always going to be perfect data, but it's so much more insight into specifics, especially on some of the more direct channels, like Google Search, we're actually able to capture specific search terms and really use that granular data so you can look at closed one deals by Google keyword search over time. I think people just don't quite close the loop and get it all the way into being reportable. It's also persistent UTM's, and using JavaScript to make them persistent.
So not a coder, but I do have documentation links to how to implement this JavaScript that you can give to your web developer, and essentially makes it so that the UTM will store on whatever the next form submit is, even if it's not on the landing page of the person originally visited, which is huge for being able to capture that ongoing and not losing it after a first click, if they don't convert immediately. Yeah, that's definitely key. And a lot of companies don't have the persistent UTM setup either, even though it's like, some might think of it as an advance, but nowadays I feel like it should just be part of your UTM strategy. And I think you should have a UTM strategy.
You shouldn't just have random stuff that you're putting in UTM's. You should have, so a do here, is to make sure you have a master document where you're categorizing UTM's and you have a unified structure of what UTM's every team should be using and for what channel and how you define campaign and what you put in campaign that makes most sense to you. A lot of times it's like the wild west out there and you see like in GA, you'll see like crazy UTM's that they could be so much more streamlined and you would get so much more out of your data. So there needs to be like a UTM police a little bit to get this like off the ground and launch, but it will help you, right?
Just like capitalization or not capitalization, it's gonna show in GA like different. So I like the UTM police. There's values that like play better with Google Analytics, like using Google as your source value for everything coming in from Google search automatically sets up that integration. So your GA is gonna pick up all that traffic appropriately and categorize into your paint search category.
So just kind of some like best practice guardrails around UTM's as well, but I definitely hear you on a UTM police or a UTM overseer who's gonna make sure everything's being done consistently. I feel like I could go down a whole rabbit hole on Facebook not using it properly when it comes to just Google in general and Google Analytics. Set up Google Analytics goals, not having those tracking correctly and what I would call just like table stakes when it comes to implementing your Google setup. I could be another episode.
Yeah, Google topic on just why you're using Google wrong. Good wins. The one if there's any other kind of last things we wanna chat about. One thing that I typically see a lot is a don't is that's so easily avoidable is there's so much like workflow work that you can do in Salesforce that will help you so much and you won't have to annoy your reps and it'll make everything a little bit smoother.
So the don't is like don't let leads just sit in stages. Don't let contacts or opportunities just sit out there and like hope that the sales team or even whoever's supposed to be working that has oversight into it. So the do here to that don't is do build workflows in Salesforce to automate some of that. Like if it's been sitting for X amount of time, send an alert, follow up task.
If it, you know, contacts, status is move or account status is move, like you can have a lot of different triggers on that or opportunity stages happen. I see a lot of especially on like contacts and leads and Salesforce on those two objects, a lot of like simple workflows could be built to really clean out that funnel and that lead to handoff from marketing and sales. So that would be a don't in a do recommendation. Yeah, totally agree.
I think my final kind of topic here that I get a lot of questions about when we're working with different companies is lead scoring. It was such a hot topic for so many years. It was like everything needs to be this complex lead scoring model. Everything we're doing is triggered off these specific scores and I really think that people are conflating a score with intent to purchase.
I mean, just because someone has a highly score, even just someone hit MQL, like they could be on paper the right demographic, thermographic data, they're the right job title, they're in your ICP, they've clicked on a few of your emails, but they really do not care about buying your software and they haven't done any high intent action to indicate that. So I think it's really kind of moving away from relying on lead scoring and having it be more of a guideline for if we're looking at a big list of leads like these people are loosely about to fit and have done a bit more entropy higher priority than people that have not the right ICP fit at all and haven't done anything but do not assume that just because they have a highly score, it means they're ready to talk to sales. I think that's a big mistake I see pretty commonly. Yeah, I think lead scoring is just a little overrated in general since now.
It used to be a lot more important, you know, five, eight years ago, earlier in my career, I've loved lead scoring. I was like lead scoring was, you know, but now since people don't, they don't give their information, right? They remain anonymized for so much longer until they convert that it's kind of like the lower priority, like on the marketing ops, marketing automation, like to-do list. And I see the marketing teams using it more for like personalizing emails and things like that rather than using it to send stuff over to the sales team.
Yeah, totally agree. Well, I feel like we could do like five more episodes where we're just continuing their deep dive into do's and does.