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Marketo Summer and Winter Release 2016 Thoughts

September 13, 2016 By Josh Hill

Marketo ABM Module

Marketo has been hard at work at several key enhancements for marketers of all types. As many are about to be released on September 23, I thought I would discuss these and how they can be helpful to marketers and marketing technologists. The enhancements are a combination of technical back-end upgrades; ideas we’ve been waiting for; and larger visionary projects.

Summer 2016 – September Release

Account Based Marketing Module – released September 13

Marketo ABM ModuleThis is Marketo’s long awaited entry into ABM. In the past month, I’ve seen two demos that include great tools such as

  • Lead to Account Matching – but this isn’t going to auto convert SFDC Leads to Contacts. It’s more about associating the leads based on various fields so that you can communicate to them using Marketo. A big step.
  • Reporting – this includes engagement data and Interesting Moments.
  • RTP Integration – better target people by Account, Stage, and other criteria. Marketo is also releasing the ability to Schedule RTP campaigns….although this also appears in the December release…

While I’ll keep the rest under wraps for the big release, do keep in mind this is a paid add-on based on the number of Accounts you decide to track.

[Update: Sept 17, 2016] Now that the big release has occurred, you can check out more on Marketo’s site. Marketo handles all the key areas of ABM. You need really good data in your system because you will create a big smart list of Account names, domains, etc for Marketo to track. Tracking and targeting will include this list and then allow you to reference it using a special set of Filters and Triggers. This should bring together matching Leads and Contacts. The ABM tool will also try to rank Accounts based on total Contact/Lead Score along with other activity, like Interesting Moments. From the demos I have seen, parts of this do not happen automatically. Marketo documentation hints at many new features such as Named Account Filters, Triggers, and RCE Dimensions. Note that Engagio’s “play” concept is not a part of the new ABM tool. You can easily build out personalized nurtures and call tasks in Marketo based on Named Accounts. I do recommend this at least through MQL or SAL.

Moving to ABM represents a big change to how Marketo’s system thinks and I expect it will be an iterative process over the next year.

Audit Trail

Wow, as an administrator and architect of these systems for a long time, the Audit trail is probably the most exciting change. Now we can finally see full details of who changed an Asset, Flow, etc and why. How many times have you, your team, or consultants changed something accidentally (or intentionally), but the basic log info told you nothing about who or what. In the past, I had to call Support to ask for a specific log for a specific Asset. Now I can resolve these questions fast myself. I see this as not just a move toward a more robust system, but as a tool for better training.

Email 2.0 Updates and API access

I’ll let Pierce Ujainwalla of Knak and Gregoire Michel discuss the details, it’s great to see Marketo is incrementally adding capabilities and fixing bugs the Nation asked for. With API access, Email 2.0 becomes much more flexible for a variety of external plug-ins that create highly complex emails.

Miscellaneous and Helpful Updates

  • Multiple Branding Domains – for all of the B2C or multi-brand businesses, this can be a big help to choose specific domains so spam filters don’t see you as a threat.
  • Program Tokens!  The long awaited ability to select a Program ID, Name, or Description for placement into assets and flows is happening! This change will help add richness to Interesting Moments and flexibility to flows.
  • Enterprise Key for MS Outlook MSI Plugin – now IT can use one key to install the Outlook plugin instead of calling you everytime.
  • New SMS Integration – While this is a Vibes Launchpoint release, it represents a new addition to the SMS integrations that have been fairly limited so far. Now there are 17 providers in the ecosystem with varying degrees of capability.

Fall 2016 – December Release

Miscellaneous changes

  • Is Anonymous finally going away – this is the next step in the long running changes to Munchkin. At this point, it shouldn’t affect anyone, but you should double check that you’ve prepared properly for removing Is Anonymous TRUE or FALSE properly.
  • MS Support – Edge and Outlook 2016 now supported. For all of us Mac lovers, Outlook can finally be useful again.
  • Program Creation and Cloning with the REST API – this could be a big deal for some large scale operations.  Think of externally built app that walks inexperienced Marketo users through a process and it just creates the right things in Marketo. I know of some custom work out there and I’m sure this will make it better.
  • MS Dynamics errors now appear in Notifications – helpful for all of the MS Dynamics people out there.
  • Custom Objects continues to become a more robust database option. Database pros will no doubt love this.

Email Headstart

Looks like this is coming out of Beta to ensure large email sends actually get released at the time intended. As we all know, large sends will actually begin at the scheduled time, however, emails could take hours to reach the entire list. Looks like only Email Send programs can use this right now. Will Engagements be next?

Thoughts on the Roadmap

With a large community and a desire to stay visionary, Marketo’s product managers have a lot to contend with and limited resources, just like at your company. Many of the Summer and Winter updates are incremental changes that help a small portion of the Marketo Nation, while a few like ABM and Audit Trail can benefit many of us. However, many features marketers want continue to have fallen behind under Ideas. Features that would mean a reduction in the complex logic workarounds we find in the Forums as well as UI enhancements. I would really love to see Marketo spend at least one Release Cycle a year working through these continuing requests. Be sure to go to Ideas and vote up your favorites today.

 

Filed Under: Marketo User Guide

Interview with Frannie Danzinger of Predictive Intelligence Platform 6sense

August 18, 2016 By Josh Hill

frannie-danzinger-6sense

frannie-danzinger-6senseToday, I spoke with Frannie Danzinger, Head of Market Development for 6sense, a Predictive intelligence martech vendor.

Josh: In the Martech Maturity Model I wrote about last summer, I placed Predictive tools at Stage 6 – the very end of the 24-36 month growth cycle for firms. Do you agree with this? Where do you see Predictive being the most useful?

Frannie:

I agree and disagree here. This is a nice, linear model. And in many ways, Predictive is in the same place that MAPs were six years ago – still being tested and adopted. If a firm is sophisticated in their use of martech, then yes, Predictive has certain benefits. And if a firm is not at Stage 6, and they already bought Predictive, then their mindset is more advanced and ready to use Predictive.

Where I disagree with this model is that the people involved do not always need the technology assumed by the model. As times evolve, marketers are increasingly ready to open the floodgates of predictive scoring without a full martech stack. At Enterprise and Mid-market firms, where most have a CRM system and likely have a MAP (marketing automation platform), marketers’ primary focus is on net-new acquisitions. Our product 2sense focuses on net-new with web analytics and limited internal data. This gives us the ability to drive ABM strategies without input from all of the other martech datasets.

Thus, it is entirely possible to use Predictive much earlier in the martech lifecycle than you suggest.

[Josh – I’ve been hearing this from predictive vendors, so I’d love to hear from customers – is this your experience too?]

Josh: How does 6sense think about ABM+Predictive? What’s different about ABM+predictive vs. statistically correlated lead scoring?

Frannie:

For leading B2B organizations of all sizes, Account Based Marketing (ABM) has become the dominant strategy to ensure high-value target accounts are being marketed to in a way that is highly personalized and specific. As ABM adoption has soared, with more than 70% of B2B companies focused on implementing ABM, the selection process of identifying target accounts has become the most critical component of effective strategies. The introduction of predictive intelligence has allowed organizations to build lists not simply on gut instinct and static look-alike demographics, but on buyer activity that demonstrates a business need and propensity to purchase.

ABM strategies are built on a company’s ability to create target account lists based on the business needs and challenges they are uniquely positioned to address. Having access to buyer activity through predictive intelligence allows marketers to identify accounts with greater precision and confidence. Now, enterprise and mid-market customers have the ability to create targeted account lists on continuously monitored intent data, enabling them to track the needs and trends driving the evolution of their customers and iterate accordingly

Josh: Which firms are most ready for predictive tools? Which are not?

Frannie:

Forward thinking firms will always be more ready to embrace predictive tools. Are the marketers ready to be uncomfortable with new technology as well as challenge assumptions real data brings? Companies that are more open to data-driven marketing and believe in decision-making powered by data will better reap the advantages predictive offers because of how they respond to the results. Companies with data-driven cultures are more receptive to applying and integrating predictive cross-functionally and are quicker to transition quantitative results into more efficient and effective real-life practices.

The most sophisticated and informed companies are increasingly using analytics to explain and predict performance and facilitate their decision making. As organizations place more of a focus on analytics, sales and marketing can align and concentrate on the data to improve business processes and overall team performance. Businesses that optimize analytics and predictive to the fullest will continuously rely on the numbers to help drive change, seek new opportunities and identify the best ways to improve efficiency and results.

In terms of the minimum volume of data required to build predictive models, they’re not just volume-based, but instead rely on the quality of the data signals. The ideal is two years of historical data.

Josh: If you had budget for just 3 tools, which would you purchase to run ABM?

Frannie:

  • A DMP: (e.g.: Oracle DMP (BlueKai))
  • ABM Tool: (e.g: Madison Logic, Terminus, Kwanzoo)
  • A DSP: (e.g.: Media Math, Turn)

Filed Under: Marketing Technology

Interview with Marketing-Dev Pro Sanford Whiteman

August 3, 2016 By Josh Hill

Let’s talk more about the emerging discipline of marketing devops or marketing systems developer with one of the masters, Sanford Whiteman. Marketo Nation users know Sanford as the ultimate resource for scripting and deep systems answers, helping people put together custom experiences that are not in the box.

The context is that there are some people who aren’t quite engineers or marketers, but who work to integrate martech systems or create non “out of the box” experiences for people. Sanford goes deep into the reasons for coding integrations and on-page magic as well as the kinds of code that may be needed.

If you are a web developer, self-taught coder, or practical coder a role in marketing-devops may be for you. If you are like me, a marketing operations pro, Sanford’s insight is valuable for a deeper understanding of the customer experience, stack integrations, and how a developer can help you make better decisions.

Josh: Is there an emerging discipline of “marketing devops” and what does that look like to you?

Sanford:
I’d like to think we’re carving out a new discipline!

It’s becoming clear to marketing groups large and small that SaaS doesn’t mean “It just works!” From the start, it’s just meant that a product’s feature set will work (relatively) reliably in the cloud and your IT staff can be (relatively) detached from day-to-day maintenance.  But there’s never been a guarantee that the new features and integrations you want will be built quickly, or ever!  SaaS vendors can’t survive without APIs these days, and those APIs can smooth over user frustration…but you need to have someone on hand (if not on staff) to work with those APIs.

I think there are three distinct tiers where this discipline is expanding:

  • the client/browser tier.
  • the middle tier, where you integrate services from within the martech stack itself.
  • the app/database tier.

I’m lucky to be able to work on all sides, but that may not work for everyone.

At the client, you’re doing stuff like

  • customizing how forms package data for the CRM/MA stack.
  • tweaking web tracking to integrate anonymous analytics with named leads.
  • integrating third-party landing page builders with your back end.
  • tracking lost web activities and all manner of browser-based troubleshooting.

In the middle, you’re

  • sending leads to outside services, typically using webhooks, and working with returned data.
  • writing your own webhook endpoints for advanced workflows.
  • looping back to call the vendor API from within the vendor’s infrastructure (very meta!).

On the app/database level, you may be

  • populating a martech data warehouse with lead data and behaviors
  • building internal-use web apps to request campaigns or query leads
  • importing internal product data into the vendor database as custom records

Josh: What is the skillset of a marketer-developer?

Sanford:
Working at the client tier — where, in my experience, it’s easiest to get a foothold in this new marketer-developer world — you have to have “be one with the browser.” So above all, true knowledge of JavaScript — not jQuery or other simplifications, but raw, down-and-dirty code. Whether or not client-side martech embeds a JS framework (it often does not, in order to keep the code footprint lean) underneath it all is standard JS, so if you want to troubleshoot, tweak, and extend, come armed!

You don’t have to be an advanced JS developer, don’t get me wrong, but you must have done more in the past than copy-and-paste snippets from blogs.

In working on a company’s public-facing website, after all, you’re taking the company’s reputation and revenue into your hands. You should already think of yourself as a coder and been paid as such in the past, even for small projects. I think one of the biggest liabilities in martech right now is non-devs nervously impersonating developers because management doesn’t yet get the need for a specialist. It’s a nerve-wracking position to be in, and these folks are happy just to have someone who trusts her/himself to do the work. Even if it takes a few iterations because the person is relatively junior, at least the marketer’s job isn’t on the line anymore.

[Josh – I believe copy-and-paste tweaking of code is a great way to learn the basics, but Sanford’s right that you should not do this with business dependent sites. I always tell people I can do just about everything until we need to code and I’ll go find someone like Sanford to code the experience]

Tied for second, after JS, would be understanding of the HTML DOM and at least some of how HTTP works under the hood.  You’ll be doing things like adding 3rd (or is it 4th?) party enrichment libraries to a form, where the form itself is embedded from your martech system into your CMS, and the CMS has its own JS module loader. So you have to know where script order and dynamic DOM elements intersect, when cross-domain posts (CORS, et al.) work or don’t work, all that fun stuff.

Working in the middle tier may be the easiest of the three.  If you’re only calling simple APIs, you need to get JSON and XML to understand HTTP responses, and you need to be familiar with URL encoding, query strings, and GET vs. POST. 

In the grand scheme, really basic. But there’s a huge difference between someone who can instantly catch that a question mark needs to be encoded, or that a JSON object has an extra level of nesting, and someone to whom that stuff remains a frightening foreign language.

Again, the difference is in fundamental comfort level more than top-tier expertise: you’ll walk into places with broken configs all over the place and you have to take in mistakes at a glance. You might waver about whether your changes will fix the problem, but you can’t waver in making those changes.  One of the things you’re offering is the confidence about wider technology that both marketers and marketing ops folks can (understandably) lack.

If you’re building endpoints for the middle tier, you can get by with pretty-good PHP, together again with that core understanding of HTTP requests and responses. Better still would be knowledge of “endpoints-as-a-service” like StrongLoop or Lambda, where you can use JS, Java, or Python in environments that are perfect for the stateless character of webhooks, like a hook that changes a date format or throws a single row into a remote database. My coolest webhooks are under 10 lines of JS hosted on AWS.  Once you’re adding persistence, of course, things can rapidly get quite advanced. I can’t tell you whether to use Redis, MongoDB, or CouchDB but you should acquire an opinion about such things!

Working at the data/app integration tier, you need to have conceptual command of how long and wide streams of JSON or XML, often embarrassingly de-normalized, can be transformed into a scalable SQL schema. (I don’t see NoSQL favored in this space.)  You need to think about bulkifying and checkpointing and intelligent retry logic, since you’ll be fetching data from rate-limited and (let’s put it nicely) not-always-up services.  You may not be able to choose your weapon from among MSSQL/MySQL/Oracle/Postgres because your client/employer already has a vendor commitment, so you should be ready for any of these (if you’ve been using MySQL-only awesomeness, that’s cool, but be aware of what’s standard and what’s not). For your application platform, I love me some PHP, but this is more the place for .NET, Java, or NodeJS where long-running processes are more comfortable. Using Apache Camel and like integration engines will lead to more resilient implementations that you won’t need to check in on constantly, which is preferable if you’re a busy consultant.

Together with all the above, you need an ease with the vendor platform as used day-to-day by marketers, admins, and marketing ops managers. Note I said ease — not necessarily expert knowledge of every non-API-exposed nook-and-cranny of the product. Similarly, you don’t need to attempt thought leadership in the marketing space. There’s only so much you can know, and believe me, you will have your hands full trying to figure out how familiar UI features are surfaced, translated, and sometimes mangled beyond recognition when accessed via API. You’ll spend hours filling in missing documentation or correcting doc errors, which doesn’t leave time for book learning. And it’s okay to have some lingering blind spots about the product. I couldn’t tell you much about Marketo’s Calendar, for example (though now that I’ve said that in print, I’ll have to go learn!).

Josh: How much of a programmer or Computer Science engineer do you need to be successful in this role? Is it overkill to be in CS?

Sanford:
Good question!  Because of the inevitable emphasis on JavaScript, I have to say a CS background would help. JS was once derided as too simple for “real” programmers, but it turns out to be a laboratory to explore (and get bitten by) core CS concepts, like race conditions, concurrency, async programming, event-driven architectures, and OOP.

You’ll see me responding to posts in the Marketo Community with remarks like, “That code has a race condition and will lead to unexpected consequences in such-and-such situation,” although I’m pretty sure the person who pasted the code has no idea what I’m talking about. Sometimes there’s no way to rephrase such concepts in layman’s terms, so “talking the talk” is an advantage.

That being said, I don’t have a formal CS education myself: I was a theater major! But I’ve had many years since then to hone my impersonation of a no-nonsense engineer. In all seriousness, though I was always a math person, even after entering IT professionally I spent a long time on the systems side (managing firewalls, networks, and mail servers) before getting into code proper. So there’s clearly no need to have been a coder since birth. But you have to be willing to peek at CS books, and when you’re not in school anymore, that stuff can be really dry.

Even better than an academic CS education, frankly, is working directly with mail, database, web, and/or DNS servers, since your martech universe is made up of those layers. Unfortunately, with services moving to the cloud, those positions are relatively scarce now.

In the (g)olden days, there’d be an in-house person poring over SMTP logs for delivery errors, managing DNS records, and looking into HTTP 500 errors: that person, adding a bit of dev experience, would be perfect to move into the marketer-developer role. If you do have one of those jobs now and are looking for a change, it’s a great time.

Josh: If you were hiring someone to take on your job, what could they expect to do every day?

Sanford:
Lots of debugging. I experience the web in a very different way from most people: it’s a lot of inspecting production sites in Chrome or Firefox DevTools and/or running them through a proxy like Fiddler. If I’m lucky, I get to build solutions on a dev site, but more often the damage is done by the time I’m brought in — a form’s not posting or not rendering, Munchkin isn’t logging clicks, a video embed was rolled out without analytics hooks — and my contact in marketing has no access to the underlying CMS. So I spend a lot of time watching the wire and the DOM and testing JS fixes in the console. (I use debugging tools like CodePen and ngrok to isolate issues when possible, but working directly in the browser is a reality.)  And the clock is ticking because the site is live to the world and there are lot of unhappy people.

Then, once I’ve found the fix, I send the code back to my contact so they can go through channels to update the site. It can be a heavily bureaucratic process, so you have to know how to test your own code, including cross-browser, so it doesn’t fail in-house validation and you lose trust.

Of course, the above are the bad days! When there’s not an acute crisis, I work on packaged client libraries which are managed more properly with WebStorm + git and have a real QA and release process.  An example would be multi-touch enhancements for Marketo forms. Getting my clients to go from single-use scripts to packaging all their Forms 2.0 behaviors in one place is a prime objective. Hard to enforce, though, when indeed you can just throw a whenReady listener on any page.

When working on the app/database side, there’s a similar debugging-heavy experience. It’s not just calling a REST API endpoint and parsing a predictable response into a db. It’s analyzing the ways in which the response departs from documented expectations, how the data structure changes in response to changes made in the UI, whether foreign keys or point-in-time de-normalized values are returned, how values can go missing from an API perspective (a non-no for a martech data mirror, as you can imagine).  There’s an healthy mistrust that you develop, which as I remarked above results in you writing your own documentation for commercial software.

Helping users pro bono. Online and offline, at least every couple of days.  As you might recall, Josh, there was a point in mid-2014 when I suddenly sprang up on the Marketo Community as a know-it-all about Munchkin and forms! It wasn’t as effortless then as it is now, but I knew the only way to continue to learn was to look at somebody’s else’s real-world problem and solve it. With the attitude that “I am going to figure out how this can be done.”

 It can be taxing, but it’s not wholly selfless: beyond your clients, user communities for enterprise products are where you’re going to learn about the real world. Some community users will make choices you just know are off, and you can guide them toward a different goal and its solution, learning how to justify that decision. Other times, you bite the bullet, realizing that a marketer’s desire to have a form work a certain way may come from higher-ups more than their own stubbornness: either way, you’ll meet clients with similar unbending requirements, so get used to it!

Scanning the Community back then, it was clear that the marketer-developer was a common fantasy, but probably didn’t exist. There were so many threads where the initial answer was “hire a developer” and the response was “we have a developer, but s/he has no idea how this works.”

It also seemed like (and unfortunately still does) even if a developer were in the picture somewhere, they didn’t have a Marketo account, or they had one but didn’t feel like logging in. As a result, all the questions are routed through a non-technical marketer (usually without any sample code, just “my developer says it isn’t working”). I still see this happening and it’s so frustrating. I don’t mind saying that any developer who can’t ask their own questions is probably in the wrong position. A marketer-developer definitely needs to engage with the user community, even if it means seeing (eek!) uninteresting questions about channels and programs.

Fielding off-the-wall ideas. No two ways about it, once you offer yourself as a resource who can do anything with a martech stack, people will come up with things that, well, could be done yet shouldn’t be done.  Whether it’s because of reliability, scalability, expense, legality, ethics, or all of these.  Having a bit of a marketing mind is useful here because you can honestly say, I understand the desire… but you can also serve as a logical voice because you know about the practical difficulties, and can stop bad ideas from becoming budget items.  On the ethical front, as a techie you’re probably better tuned in to privacy, security, scams, and scandals, even if you’re not yourself particularly zealous.

Evaluating vendor promises. Some things can’t be done, but a vendor is upselling them anyway. I’ll keep the details vague, but a vendor recently promised to perform a certain type of data mining across a 5-million lead Marketo database, real-time, non-batched, updating constantly throughout the day in response to user behaviors.

The vendor was sure they could work it out… as soon as my client signed the contract, of course. It was great to be there to think it through, poke holes on the client’s behalf, and ultimately save them six figures of vaporware. That’s one of the things you’re there for: to be called first, before anyone makes any hasty technical commitments. You might not charge for every hour you spend doing this kind of work, but you prove yourself indispensable.

Dipping into deliverability. Because of my reputation as “the” marketing-affiliated techie, I’m occasionally brought in on deliverability problems because in-house IT has washed their hands of such matters. They won’t even do a DNS dig, because “Isn’t this all sent by your high-and-mighty SaaS platform?”

 But waiting for vendor support to tell you why email bounced to certain domains is a slow process (that’s going to be a low-priority ticket, since after all, the bounce was probably not in error). So it’s good, though not necessary, to be available for extra work outside of coding. Remember, you’re often helping folks that literally don’t know the first thing about SMTP, and they’re in a panic. You don’t have to be an expert, but as long as you are confident in your use of tools you can add value to the situation.

The real work. When I can get a break from the above, I code. 🙂 To be honest, the marketer-developer role feels quite reactive overall. Though I have longer-term commitments as well, I’m frequently doing one- or two-day site-specific engagements, like a form with some specific JS-driven UX and data management expectation… that’s almost like the one I built for another client the other week…but turns out to be 80% new code (plus I always like to try new tricks). Even though such projects are scoped out in advance, they have a built-in urgency because, well, you allocated 4 hours, so you’ve got to keep moving!  Even a longer-term project with very stable expectations still involves the debugging stops-and-starts above, since nothing is exactly what it seems in martech.

Josh: Which kinds of firms benefit from having this as a separate role?

Sanford:
Without someone in the marketer-developer role, the switch to SaaS can leave marketing in a permanent state of “settling.” I feel all firms with a martech investment should at least have a trusted consultant serving as marketer-developer. [Josh: I agree most of the time]

It’s not practical for someone to be a pure marketer for N days in a row, then switch gears suddenly into technical mode. They won’t keep, let alone build, technical skills that way, and the only way to do the job well is to spend time dissecting martech every day.

Unfortunately, save for some tech firms, companies typically don’t want to pay their employees to help other people online, or to set up artificial “what-if” problems and solve them. So this role may be best fulfilled by a consultant unless the firm can ensure that there’s a consistent flow of technical projects.

Firms that have a significant in-house CRM team and a robust martech investment, yet don’t even have an on-call mar-dev, are losing out. Of this I’m sure, even if I only have case studies! Here’s a good one, though: my favorite client from way back, for whom I do all kinds of other non-martech stuff like proxy servers and database clusters, had been using Marketo for a full year without having lead activities tracked on their main site. Even though they knew it was broken, there was no one to own the problem.

Awesome Apex devs and SFDC admin? Check. Awesome .NET web team? Check. But someone to do that “be the browser” type of troubleshooting I mentioned above, knowing they were working on a SaaS product that supposedly Just Worked? Nope. So the problem remained unsolved until I got approval to find and fix it (took several hours and was a Munchkin bug, for the record). Needless to say, that particular company has no trouble understanding why a marketer-developer on speed dial is critical. But for every company who reaches out, there must be who-knows-how-many who’ve given up on solving problems.

Josh: How can a marketer-developer help marketers tell their story better?

Sanford:
With apologies to Bishop Berkeley: if a marketer tells a story and doesn’t get multi-touch attribution, did they make a sound?

In seriousness, if we look at storytelling as a series of episodes told across different media (transmedia) then stitching together audience reactions to the collective story is critical. Whether you adapt the story on the fly like a choose-your-own-adventure style, a.k.a. real-time personalization — or maintain a single narrative, your technology needs to be a step ahead of you, not behind.

Perhaps the marketer-developer can be the story’s chorus, maintaining the collective throughline — from a Twitter card, to an Unbounce LP, to print, to Facebook, to email. Without the marketer-developer, you have only episodes, and no way to know if they’ve been heard.


Wow, thanks Sanford. This is unique insight into an important part of creating a customer experience. It’s not good enough to use one or three platforms anymore. Your entire stack needs a seamless, human oriented experience for the audience. Often, the only way to do that is with code.

Filed Under: Marketing Technology

The Rise of the Marketing Developer and Systems Integrator

July 26, 2016 By Josh Hill

During the 2016 Marketo Summit, I had a couple of interesting conversations with my colleagues and with consultants regarding a potentially new discipline of “marketing devops” or “marketing integrations.”

My colleagues are a part of the integrations and developer side of martech where they are struggling to find people with the intersection of skills in Marketing, Databases, and APIs. This role could be called a Marketing Developer or Marketing Tech Integrator.

Much like SaaS companies’ DevOps teams that product uptime and deployment, Marketing DevOps works to ensure the martech stack is operational, delivering the correct data, and delivering leads.

The idea of a technical integrator within Marketing is an important insight because more and more firms have larger, customized martech stacks. Seth Ulinski, Senior Analyst at TBR, wrote about “dark martech” recently. The survey he interpreted showed about 50-60% of respondents across marketing functions saying they had “internally managed” solutions. Ulinksi interprets this to mean that large portions of the martech stack use homegrown integrations or tools on a daily basis. Who is creating these tools and managing the dark martech stack?

What is a Marketing Technology Integrator/Systems Manager/DevOps?

I can tell you what it is not. It’s not me. A lot of marketers who entered Marketing Operations in the past 5-10 years were people like me, with a background in technology, sales, and marketing. Few were well versed in programming languages or web developers in a prior life.

A few marketing operations professionals did enter the field from engineering or from web development. Essentially, anyone who had a good grasp of the use of computers, the internet, and was a good marketer, could become a great marketing ops manager.

Yet, without a developer background, there is a limit to what a marketing operations person can do on her own. There is a point where a marketing operations pro knows they need a developer. While I can translate requirements across Sales-Marketing-Technology, I still need a developer to help me fill in the customer experience gaps like:

  • Complex workflow or decisions on Page or in CRM.
  • Faster processing.
  • On page dynamics using jQuery or JavaScript.
  • Integrations that are not native or non-standard, such as a data warehouse or production database integration.

At this point, I may find someone internally, but often I look for a martech agency with developers. A few of you may be familiar with Sanford Whiteman on the Marketo Community. That’s the kind of expert many want to work with.

Sanford, however, is a real developer. He can build from scratch many of the small pieces that tie your customer experience and martech together. But how much of a “coder” do you need and what are the ideal intersections of skills that make up a “marketing systems” person?

Some of you may be wondering if such people and roles exist already. From my search of LinkedIn (below) and Google, it seems some terms are around. “Marketing Devops” certainly is not and returned few results. Surprisingly, the latest hot term, “marketing technologist” ranks very low.

What is the skillset of a successful Marketing DevOps person or team?

Do you need a full blown, potentially expensive developer for every situation? Do you need someone with a CS degree?

Maybe, maybe not.

Since this is still an emerging discipline, these skills and tools encompass a range of possibilities.

Tools and Skills

The effective marketing devops manager understands the following kinds of tools and can develop business specific workflows.  Skills related to data and customer experiences include:

  • JavaScript
  • jQuery
  • Apex Code in SFDC
  • Rage
  • API coding and uses
  • HTML/CSS

There are more “systems integration” functions that could include tools like

  • SQL
  • ETL jobs
  • Boomi and Talend
  • Excel advanced functions
  • Database administration

What are the daily tasks of a marketing devops manager?

The full time marketing devops person will typically handle a range of these tasks:

  • Grill potential vendors on API, security, and instructions for integrations.
  • Test different integrations.
  • Troubleshoot bad imports or workflow errors.
  • Create and monitor data pulls and inserts between systems.
  • Manage system load and find ways to do data transforms faster without impacting lead flow.
  • Design and build data flows between systems.
  • Interface with Product, Sales Operations, Business Operations, and Finance to help Marketing, Sales, and Marketing Ops automate customer facing processes.
  • Vet that the integration uses the correct fields and APIs.
  • Customizing workflows or data transforms to meet internal security, data security, and custom requests.
  • Build customized experiences on customer facing email or websites.

How Should You Leverage Marketing DevOps?

In my experience, there are two critical areas where this new role helps firms create the desired customer experience the most:

  • Integrating and Automating Data Between Departments.

Marketing automation isn’t just about nurturing leads and data appending, it’s about automating and controlling Customer Onboarding, Invoicing, Renewals, and helping Sales. The more you can un-silo data for use in messaging, the more possibilities you have to connect with customers properly and not just as a faceless corporation.

Thus, the need to manage those integrations increases as a company grows. Each new integration requires proper handling. I know of firms that boast of having 20 or 40 vendors in their martech stack. That sort of boast requires marketing devops and systems integrators to work effectively. I would always ask a developer to help with key integration points.

  • Enhancing the Customer Experience.

While this enhancement can mean many things, I usually start with ensuring the on page experience and data collection is human friendly. That might mean creating special forms to pull/push data. It might mean a custom partner lead collector. This enhancement could also mean creating a multi-step form process tied to the product. The possibilities are endless.

Do You Need Marketing DevOps?

There isn’t a lack of tools or technology, there is often a lack of skills or understanding to building a martech stack for your business. Scott Brinker pointed out that a recent Wrike study probably undercounts the total tools in martech stacks. Why? Because there are many tiny tools and patches across systems, free or paid, that make up a stack. Yet, most marketers only recall the top 5 or 10 paid systems they know of. You might even consider your syndicated content vendor integrations as part of the stack too.

Wrike recently published How Marketers Get Things Done: The State of Agile Marketing in 2016. This survey is revealing the new requirement of integration and integration management, a perfect intersection for marketing devops. A few data points illustrate there is an emerging need for integration specialists. For example, 22.4% of respondents said their biggest challenges were “finding, learning, and integrating new marketing technologies” and 19.1% said “continuing to effectively scale.” Wrike said the responses were greater when just looking at respondents from Marketing Ops. Wrike went further and said New Marketing Technologies create

“pressure on marketers and marketing operations teams to assess tools for value, test them, present an internal business case, get them integrated into their stack…”

And 18.8% of marketers said Accounting and Finance were the most difficult to collaborate with. How could effective integrations help you here? How could it help Finance? While the survey indicated collaboration tools are partially to blame, I believe this is more about department priorities, security of data, and legal requirements than actual discussions.

Scott Brinker analyzed this report too and brought up integrations and the size of martech stacks. The survey showed 89.6% of respondents believed their tools were very to somewhat integrated. Wrike found that “40% of large teams say their tools are very integrated, while only 23% of small teams” thought so. Larger teams, at larger firms, are more likely to have large stacks that require tight integration from the front end to the back end. That sort of integration depends on more technical staff.

To answer the question of “Do you need marketing devops?” let’s look at the next question Wrike posed: “How satisfied are you with the level of integration of your key tools?” 77% said they were at least “satisfied” and larger teams are more satisfied. I bet those teams have someone who would be classified as “marketing devops.” Those less satisfied are likely relying on less technical staff to manage their stack.

What makes a great marketing developer?

To some degree, the ideal person depends on your firm and ability to find and pay a consultant, freelancer, or hire FTE. In my experience, the following set of skills are typical of the successful candidate:

  • Familiar with API programming enough to troubleshoot or build.
  • Familiar with SQL, ETL, Boomi, and similar tools.
  • Familiar with JavaScript and jQuery.
  • Web or UI developer – not an HTML/CSS designer, someone who builds with JavaScript and jQuery.
  • Someone who has a history of building product to front-end connections.
  • Someone who can manage the larger components, understand the business reasons for them, and also knows the lower level pieces that make connections work.

Which firms need marketing devops?

Again, this will depend a bit on how much you need to bend tools to your needs. Wrike’s survey supported the notion that larger firms, with larger martech stacks need this kind of person.

Firms with large stacks. (20+ tools). This is supported by Wrike’s survey.

  • Firms who need product-stack integrations.
  • Marketing Ops Agencies to support customers.

In an upcoming post from Sanford Whiteman, we talk about having such an agency or developer freelancer available and on-call. Small to medium sized firms won’t usually have enough work for a full time marketing developer. But there’s always a code tweak or customer experience that just cannot be done in the existing vendor boxes.

Where can you find Marketing Developers?

Not every company needs a full time marketing devops person. Larger teams with larger martech stacks certainly do.

  • Web developers.
  • Product integration developers.
  • GitHub
  • Consultancies or marketing automation agencies.
  • Answering developer questions on forums like SFDC and Marketo Nation. 

It is also interesting to note some of the terms used in LinkedIn. Very few people are describing themselves as “marketing devops” but there are more results for “marketing developer.” This data isn’t totally focused on People.

Linked In – exact – somewhere in the profile or job 16-Jul
marketing operations  307,340
marketing automation  90,312
marketing technology  71,143
marketing systems  35,668
marketing developer  5,525
martech  1,476
Marketing Technologist  918
marketing dev ops  67

What is your experience with martech stack integrations and front-end customer experience customization? Do you have a “marketing devops” specialist on call or on your team?

 

Filed Under: Marketing Automation

Predictive Scoring Interview with Tony Yang of Mintigo

July 13, 2016 By Josh Hill

Tony Yang Mintigo

Tony Yang MintigoToday I had the pleasure of interviewing Tony Yang, VP of Demand Generation for Mintigo, a predictive marketing company. While Account Based Marketing has stolen the show the past year, predictive has become more and more a reality at hundreds of companies. And, predictive tools are sending the message they do ABM too, building more complete pictures of Accounts more likely to convert to revenue.

In this interview, I chat with Tony about when Predictive is a good buy and how ABM and Predictive work together. Enjoy.

marketing-tech-maturity-modelJosh: In the Marketing Technology Maturity Model, I placed Predictive tools at Stage 6 – the very end of the 24-36 month build cycle for firms. Do you agree with this? Where do you see Predictive being the most useful for a company?

Tony: Predictive can be used across the Marketing Technology Maturity Model because some of our customers aren’t even fully using marketing automation yet. For example, we had customers forgo setting up a basic lead scoring model in marketing automation and jumping straight into using predictive for scoring. To get started, predictive models require a good set of data records to begin statistical analysis – we typically recommend that you model off of about 300 to 400 customers. For companies that are in the growth stage and don’t have hundreds of customers, we recommend that they look a little bit higher in the funnel and supplement the record set with late stage opportunities.

While companies that are earlier in the martech maturity curve can certainly benefit from predictive, in my opinion the marketers who are a bit further along and are employing multiple marketing channels and technologies can really see compounded value from predictive.  This is really driven off of the insights and predictive data from the models, because once you know what characteristics and buying signals make an account a better target than another – and if you get these data points into the rest of your systems – you can get the right message to the right audience through the right channels at the right time. This is automated personalization at its best.

Josh: Which firms are most ready for predictive tools? Which are not?

Tony: Most firms are looking for the proverbial “needle in a haystack” to find the “GlenGarry Leads.” If we look at the growth cycle of companies, there is a period where customers are few and product market fit isn’t necessarily attained. At an early stage firm, predictive has no power because it would be based on say, 5 records. There aren’t enough statistically significant inferences to say about those 5 records.  You might as well just call all of them to learn as much as you can about these accounts.

Since Predictive’s power is based on what we call the “Positive Set” of actual customer data when building and training your model, we prefer to see a company with about 400 closed-won records. As I mentioned prior, you can certainly supplement this list with late stage opportunities.

Basically, the predictive model will look for key common characteristics of those customers or late stage opportunities that will comprise your ideal customer profile. This profile, which we call your CustomerDNA™, is what predictive scores are based off of. The characteristics of your ideal customer profile as deemed important for your business by the predictive models are essentially derived from a variety of data including your standard firmographic and demographic data, technologies used, hiring patterns and trends, behavioral data, and purchase intent signals. 

Josh: How does Mintigo think about ABM+Predictive? What’s different about ABM+predictive vs. statistically correlated lead scoring?

Tony: Most firms start with a list like the Fortune 500 and say “let’s target the top 50 ecommerce companies on this list.” This is guessing because you don’t have any real data points to indicate whether or not they will buy.  And because ABM requires a lot of resources and time in order to succeed, you may be potentially wasting a lot on accounts that were never a good fit to buy your products in the first place.

Predictive marketing can not only help with ABM by identifying the best accounts, but it can also help discover “net new” accounts and leads, personalize your messaging to each account based on the account profiles from the predictive data, and enable your sales teams with these insights and buying intent signals. Thus, in the context of ABM, predictive isn’t simply about lead scoring anymore – it can help drive intelligent engagement with the right accounts who will most likely buy from you.

Summary

Predictive and ABM continue to merge to assist firms perform better targeting, instead of “best guessing.” While I see Predictive tools being used well later in a firm’s martech build cycle, Tony sees possibilities much earlier, even when firms must rely on late stage Opportunities, instead of customer data. Each firm is different and if your firm need enhanced targeting, you may want to explore Predictive products like Mintigo.

 

 

Filed Under: Marketing Technology

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