Overview
Starting a new role is exciting. We’re all ready to dive in and make the impact we promised in our interview process, but where should you get started?
We asked our team and compiled these expert tips on what you should do and ask in your first 90 days in a new marketing operations role.
Month 1 – Get to Know Your Team and MarTech Stack
Understanding Your Team and Collaborative Partners
- Who works in MOPs? What skill sets do they have and are there any gaps? It’s an efficient audit to look at your team in terms of the 4 pillars to identify which skills you have, which you need, and which are missing. (Amy Goldfine recently talked about how she did this in a recent Must Contain podcast.)
- Who are the stakeholders that depend on MOPs at your organization? Understanding their priorities and goals as well as what works for them and what could be improved will help you set goals and prioritize objectives that are impactful.
- Begin building relationships with other teams such as sales, product, and customer experience. Collaboration and alignment between these teams is essential and can become mutually beneficial – making friends here early is the best bet.
Auditing Your MarTech Stack
- Be honest – how mature is your marketing stack? Understanding the level of maturity of your stack informs if you will be building it up or optimizing existing technology investments.
- If it doesn’t already exist, create a map of your stack and how each of your tools is interconnected. Make sure you’re not just asking your marketing team! You’d be surprised where marketing-based technology lives in the organization. This can help you identify redundant technology and improve cross-department collaboration.
Month 2 – Process and Systems Governance
Marketing Operations Processes and Alignment
- What processes do marketing operations currently own? Take extra note of anything missing and what would be better owned by another work group.
- What is working well today and where are the breakdowns? Digging in here can often yield some quick wins.
- Understand the greater sales and marketing strategy and how MOPs fits in.
- Don’t forget systems processes! What processes are in place to manage key MAP functionality like unsubscribe, privacy compliance, bounce management, and syncing MAP with CRM. Here are some handy guides on auditing Marketo, Account Engagement (or this one), and HubSpot.
MAP Systems Governance
- What are the rules of your tools? Is there any documentation? Is there a clear definition of roles and responsibilities for specific tasks? How about naming conventions? PLEASE LET THERE BE NAMING CONVENTIONS.
- Audit the access and permissions for your core systems. Are permissions siloed or aligned with responsibilities? Are there too many admins? Are your admins still at the company?
Month 3 – Reporting, Strategy, & Expectations
Defining Reporting & KPIs
- What are the KPIs for your team? Are you collecting the right data points to get the answers? Understanding the questions your management has can help direct your time.
- Tying your marketing operations reporting to revenue isn’t as easy as monitoring lead quotes and basic email stats. It does help you get a seat at the table and justify additional budget, headcount, and respect.
Refining Strategy and Setting Expectations
- Review the findings in comparison with stakeholder goals and create your own playbook with a prioritized list of areas that need attention. Align your prioritized to-do list to effort and impact and build out a roadmap to outline the order of projects with high impact mixing in those with low and high effort. Be sure to identify some quick wins to show immediate impact!
- Include the projected business impacts for each of your priorities and also highlight the opportunity costs of not tackling them! The latter is often forgotten and can help establish urgency and importance.
3 Things to Avoid When You Start a New Marketing Operations Role
Implementing new marketing technology too quickly
We all have tools we are most familiar with and prefer, but a rip-and-replace strategy is often unsuccessful in your first quarter. First get to know your team, stack, and business goals – this will help you build a business case when a change or new tool needs to be adopted.
Getting stuck in a reactive cycle
MOPs and firefighters have a lot in common – fighting fires is part of the job. Without strategy and planning, however, MOPs can easily become a reactive role which can make it harder to make space for and implement the bigger initiatives. Documentation, SLAs, and process alignment go a long way to eliminating fires.
Forgetting to set boundaries
Many of us have multiple skill sets in MOPs, but sometimes being a Jack or Jill of all trades can pull us in too many directions. Setting clear boundaries on your time and your role out of the gate makes it easy for others to respect them, and you.
Conclusion
A new job can be a whirlwind of tasks and emotions. Having a clear strategy and plan of attack in your first 90 days emphasizes to everyone that you were the best possible hire. Go forth and conquer!
