Humans of Martech

So pumped about this lineup of upcoming episodes on Humans of Martech ?? ???? Simon Heaton -- Director of Growth, Marketing at Buffer and former Growth Leader at Shopify ?? Jacqueline Freedman ?? -- CEO and Founder at Monarch Advisory Partners and former Martech leader at Grammarly and WeWork ?? Pranav Piyush -- Co-Founder and CEO at Paramark.com, Reforge Instructor and former marketing leader at BILL, Pilot.com, Adobe, Dropbox, Padlet, PayPal ?? Benoit Leggieri -- Head of Growth at Livestorm and former Growth leader at HUB Institute, Paris’ top think tank ? Liam Moroney -- CEO and Co-Founder of Storybook and contributing writer at MarTech ?? Erin Foxworthy -- Industry Lead, Advertisers & Agencies at Snowflake and former Advertising leader at Horizon Media and Microsoft Advertising ?? Ron Jacobson -- Co-founder and CEO of Rockerbox ??♂? Jared DeLuca -- Director of Operations at Appcues and former IoT Automation and Connected Panel Ops at Keurig Dr Pepper Inc. Don't miss any of these awesome conversations but subscribing at humansofmartech(dot)com ??

Setting expectations as an advisor is vital to every successful engagement, particularly in the Martech/MOPs space. That's where my partners become an extension of my team to help reach their goals. While I may no longer personally write email copy, code, and deploy emails, this doesn't mean I can remove myself from typical day-to-day operations. Why? If you're too far from the work, you can't optimize it fully if you don't understand it. I've encountered many "experts," "gurus," and inflated internal titles, and these folks don't even know how to send an email –?not to mention a complex, triggered journey. Have you, too? ?? Shoutout Phil Gamache and Humans of Martech!

Marketing operations teams aren’t just martech mechanics. They have the potential to help architect your annual planning process, but too many companies don’t even give them a seat at the table. Marketing ops is well equipped to guide the planning process. Structure. Strategy. Alignment. These are the foundations they bring to what often feels like chaos… or throwing darts at a board. There’s a blueprint for doing this right that doesn’t involve a bunch of scattered spreadsheets with different version names. I recently sat down with Jim Williams. A man who’s seen more Q4 scrambles than a Denny’s breakfast line cook. He’s a former senior leader at Eloqua, Influitive and BlueCat and is currently the CMO at Uptempo – the leading enterprise marketing operations software. In our conversation on Humans of Martech we covered: - How to structure a bottom-up marketing plan - The difference between Chief of Staff and VP of Ops - How to better estimate project lift - How often you revise an annual plan - How to connect your plan with your budget - And a bunch more stuff! Listen, watch or read on humansofmartech(dot)com!

The top rant of the season might have to go to Andrea ?? Lechner-Becker from episode 123. Her theory for why B2B content is boring as f*ck is because marketers are often very bad at connecting to the human element (your customer, your boss, your peers, etc). Andrea's attended CMO happy hours and thought that these people were completely unable to hold another conversation with a human being. Conversation is a skill and something she's thoughtfully worked on. She has specific questions that she asks during awkward settings to get to know people better. She got them from researcher Arthur Aron who initially developed them to make a lasting connection between two people. You need to do shit like this if you're a socially awkward person or an introvert. You're trying. So why do most B2B companies all sound the same and have shitty content blablabla? Because they ain't trying very hard to be different and they don't care to make it not suck. We need to learn the art of communicating the benefit of the benefit. And that's always tied to the human element. You don't sell grass seed to someone, you sell them a beautiful lawn. That's what people care about, they want the best looking lawn in their hood. Nobody wakes up one day and decides that they need Quickbooks in their life. Instead, people have a need for less pain in their ass from manually doing invoicing. Which means spending less time on crap you hate doing. Email automation software's true benefit is ease of use because you don't want to accidentally make a mistake and send the wrong email to someone and look dumb in front of the whole company. B2B teams are bad at getting in touch with those kinds of emotions. We don't just help you send invoices, we help you sleep better at night. And the problem starts from the top. Most of the people running businesses don't get marketing. They don't get how to communicate 1-1 or 1-many. They ask questions like 'what's the ROI of this going to be?' Marketing is part art and part science and there's a ton of stuff that we should be doing that doesn't have a direct correlation to revenue. Sometimes you just have to believe. Marketing is magic.

I’ve been quieter than usual lately on LinkedIn (and in other aspects of life) as I navigate through grief while also feeling immense gratitude. My beloved grandpa passed away after 91 incredible years of living life to the fullest. He was not only my best friend but also my greatest inspiration, especially in my professional journey. Until his final days, he continued to serve as the CEO of his company, which he built and cherished for over 50 years. He positively impacted thousands of lives throughout his life, and I am deeply grateful for the wisdom he shared with me. Since I was a child, he taught me not only about business but also about the joys of fishing, dogs, and so much more. ???? I want to thank Phil Gamache at Humans of Martech for granting me the opportunity to mention two of the most important men in my life.

This week is AI week at Census! ?? Our ops team has deployed LLM prompts across our own internal data stack using Census’s built-in AI column creator (called GPT Columns). This week, we’ll be sharing step-by-step guides for: ?? Classifying support tickets with a home-brewed sentiment analysis engine ?? Automating fit scoring in Salesforce ?? Personalizing email copy, without onboarding any additional tech And way more. To kick things off, here’s a compilation of some of our favorite prompt types we tested: https://hubs.la/Q02XWb7W0

If you enjoy reading my thoughts on attribution, then, boy, do I have news for you! I had the pleasure to chat with Phil Gamache on all-things-attribution this month for Humans of Martech. We covered: ?? Why attribution is more of a compass than GPS in guiding marketing strategies. ?? The many limitations of Multi-Touch Attribution (MTA), regardless of new privacy changes ?? Incrementality Testing: when to do it, when not to even bother with it ?? Self-reported attribution (HDYHAU) and how it’s more useful than you need ?? With LLMs or not, why marketers need strong data foundations and why SQL is the perfect place to start Since I don’t do podcasts often, would love to know what you think. Drop follow-up questions as comments, and I’ll help you. If you disagree with any of the points, I’m always more than happy to change my mind! (But you might have to work for it.)

How on earth do we show the overall impact of marketing efforts without losing our damn minds? I’ve chatted with a bunch of marketing attribution experts and 3 things are coming to light: 1 - Multi-touch attribution over-credits search and is pretty bad at showing you the path to conversion. 2 - Incrementality tests aren’t the golden alternative. There’s PLENTY of situations that don't fit the bill. 3 - MMM takes too much time, data and effort for the average team. This stuff is hard. It’s confusing as hell. And there isn’t a silver bullet to any of this. But Barbara Galiza’s approach is one of the clearests I’ve heard so far. She’s a well known marketing analytics consultant for various companies like WeTransfer and Veed, she also produces technical content for data brands like dbt Labs, Mixpanel and Amplitude. She doesn’t represent a vendor so her approach to attribution is pragmatic. Instead of prescribing a single model to clients, she matches each channel to a unique attribution style. The key is pairing each strategy with the right method. In our conversation on Humans of Martech, she explains why: - Why SQL remains unmatched to improve your data literacy? - Why MTA over-credits search campaigns - Why MTA fails at credit distribution and path to conversion - Why some strategies don’t fit incrementality tests - Why over-analyzing often costs more than it’s worth - Why attribution should guide decisions, not validate biases Watch, listen and read the recap on humansofmartech(dot)com

As someone who's worked with over 150 martech tools and advised tons of vendors on their product roadmap, Steven Aldrich the Co-CEO of Ragnarok, Inc. is incredibly well positioned to talk about the next decade of evolution in martech. He shares his take how the explosion of GenAI is set to disrupt martech and how upcoming tools are positioned to be GenAI enablers. Marketers will go from being journey orchestrators to setting rules of engagement and letting the machine run itself. And not because you have all this fancy internal build and intensive resourcing, but because you can buy a point solution that's a lot more off the shelf. ??

Watching the legendary Darrell Alfonso open the day at MOps-Apalooza talking about zero-copy data and warehouse-native architectures being the future of building martech stacks ??