Open Source Reference Data for Marketers

October 3, 2017 By Josh Hill

Open Source Reference Data for Marketers

A little secret about this site – one of the top pages since 2012 has been the Global 2000 data page. People are constantly looking for a clean data sheet of standard data, or what financial firms call “reference data.” One of my earliest posts was a Country Picklist text file formatted for Marketo’s old Form 1.0 system. Why? It was painstaking to create the right Country picklist formatted for full ISO names. And one of my favorite posts and tools is the Personal Domain list for cleaning a list or managing email deliverability.

Other reference data examples include the list of German Salutations, Australian States, and Canadian province abbreviations.

Without these difficult to compile tools, life in Marketing Ops would be a bit harder.

At a recent Marketo User Group, someone spoke about a new project called the Marketing Open Data Project. This site is an open source resource of reference data that includes standard values such as Country, State, or non-corporate domain names.

I had a chance to interview Allen Pogorzelski, Vice President of Marketing at Openprise, and one of the founders of the site. Here’s our interview:

Why did you decide to set up an open source dataset project like this?

The Marketing Open Data Project was a natural extension of the work Openprise and our customers were already doing. As you know, Openprise is a data orchestration solution that allows marketing teams to automate how they onboard, clean, enrich, and unify data across systems.

It takes data to clean and enrich data. For example, if you want to fill in missing City and State fields in your Contact records, or normalize all of your State field values to two-character postal codes, you need a data set to do that.

As we’ve added more and more datasets to the Openprise solution to address new use cases, our customers realized that they could benefit from the data that other customers were creating. For example, we’ve curated a list of hundreds of suspect contacts names (a.k.a. “The Mickey Mouse List”)—we doubt “Barack Obama” really downloaded your marketing whitepaper, so you probably don’t want to route that lead to your ADR team. Sharing this type of list and letting others build on it benefits everybody. The Marketing Open Data Project has grown to include a wide range of datasets that are useful to marketers, and a group of volunteers are continually adding to it.

How do you source the data? How much should I trust the data?

Data curated through the Marketing Open Data Project comes from a variety of different public and private sources. Some are widely available from government sources, like our datasets of Postal Codes by City, State/Province, and Country. Others, like the Mickey Mouse List and more obscure ones, like a list of Portuguese job title keywords, were created and continuously improved by Openprise customers that have agreed to help and by Marketing Open Data Project volunteers. You can trust the data because it’s been vetted and continuously improved by the Marketing Open Data Project and Openprise communities.

How do you maintain the data?

Many of the datasets rarely change—like census data. Others are constantly changing, like the Mickey Mouse List of questionable names. Volunteers are always making suggestions, and those suggestions are vetted by Marketing Open Data Project volunteers before they’re formally updated into the free datasets you can download on the Marketing Open Data Project website, www.marketingopendata.org.

Data management is a big challenge for many marketers, so much so that it is often left for last. As martech pros, we both know data quality is holding back firms from extracting the maximum ROI from many initiatives. How do you sell data management to executives and busy marketers who may not be experts in this space?

Great question. We often work with marketers that are interested in data management/data orchestration solutions, but are concerned about getting executive buy-in. To help, you can download the whitepaper we’ve written on that topic, How to Build a Business Case for Data Management. There are a couple of things that are important to consider. The first is that CMOs who haven’t spent time in the trenches working hands-on with Martech don’t know the issues you face, and you have to build your business case with numbers to establish the ROI. Make sure you have your industry benchmarks and statistics at your company ready to go.

Sirius Decisions wrote a great piece, The Impact of Bad Data on Demand Creation. Their research shows that when a company improves the quality of its marketing database from average to strong, it can yield 2.6 more deals for every 100,000 names, or $390K in additional revenue, assuming an average deal size of $150K.

If you wanted to build a business case using your own data, you could start with these areas we cover in our Openprise whitepaper:

The second thing to make sure you do is tie your data management project to the other key initiatives that matter to your CMO. That might be marketing automation, ABM, predictive analytics, attribution, personalization, or segmentation projects. You need great quality data for any of those initiatives to be successful.

How can someone join the project to keep the data fresh?

That’s easy. Just visit marketingopendata.org, scroll down to the bottom of the page where there’s a form, and let us know that you’d like to volunteer. You can volunteer for as much or as little as you want–as little as a few minutes a month, if you like.

The Marketing Open Data project is a fantastic start to core data cleaning and standardization. Remember to build upon that foundation with cleaning flows and tools to keep your list in tip top shape.

Marketing Operations Team Size Calculator

September 12, 2017 By Josh Hill

At the behest of Grant Grigorian and Kristen Malkovich, producers of the Architect’s Garden MOPs podcast, we are providing you with a “Team Size Calculator.” Despite all of the helpful blog posts on marketing operations team structure, there isn’t a clear way to calculate how many people you need.

Often, it’s not until we are preparing marketing budgets does the discussion of team size arise.

How many people do I need to run marketing automation or operations?

Answer: It depends.

Marketing Automation may not equal Marketing Operations. This is a subtle distinction. We’ve seen that when people say “marketing automation” they often mean “who is the Marketo Admin?” The size of that team could be very small, while Marketing Operations or even Revenue Operations could be quite large. Those teams may encompass reporting, analytics, sales ops, data or devops, marketing systems, etc.

Some firms do quite well with one or two people, while others have 20 or 30 people. The difference? Often it is complexity, not the size of the firm.

Some situations we’ve encountered:

Demand Gen runs the MAP: .5 or 1 FTE is the “admin” usually this team rarely gets past Stage 3 on the Martech Maturity Model™.
Demand Gen dedicates 1-2 FTE for Admin and harder work. This team may get to Stage 4 on the Martech Maturity Model™.
Central Production Service: 1-4 people, but this can vary widely.
Global – Distributed: usually 1-3 Global Admins with 1 expert or admin per Region. The experts train marketers and the global team enforces rules and deals with global projects or rules.
Global – Regional only: 1 global admin with 1 or more Regional experts.
Large Scale Operation: may not be global, but activity and complexity requires FTE to own processes and help marketers. Perhaps 1 FTE per major system involved, with team leaders. This is where the various factors below inform the “rules of thumb.”
Workload: can’t get it all done, so hire more people.
Reporting & Analytics: 1 FTE once reporting becomes a burden.

Need insight into how to build your Marketing Ops team? Edward Etumos has a great video to provide insight between the “architect” and the “specialist” roles.

How to Calculate Potential Team Size

Included here is our Team Calculator with lots of assumptions and possible tools. Please be sure to adjust assumptions and ratios for your situation.

Factors to Consider:

Marketing Team Size
Number of Marketing Programs per time period
Company Employee Size
Revenue and Revenue Ratios to spend on Marketing
Size of Demand Gen Operation
Data complexities
SaaS Product and Integrations
Preference for In House vs. Agencies

Rule of Thumb Methods

In the Calculator, these items are placed for you to answer: Yes or No. It’s a rough estimate that you can scale back depending on the various factors.

Global Team: Distributed Admins vs. Global. – generally, you need at least one Admin or Expert per Region and Globally to enforce rules and train marketers.
Central Production Team – use the calculators below, but at least 2 people.
Sales Operations – if you have a Sales Ops team, you likely need at least one corresponding person to help manage the integration.
Database Size – At one or two million records, you need at least one person for every doubling. It’s not the scale, it’s that if you have that many records, your operation is much larger and there is lots of activity.
Level of Activity – this can include number of programs run per week, budget, data flow.
Product Integrations – if you run a SaaS firm, then each major product you connect to your MAP will require someone to manage it. At least during the build out, more than one person is needed.
Marketing Data Warehouse (MDW) – large organizations build MDWs and there must be at least one database admin who runs the tool and its connections to other systems.

Production Calculators

In small firms or early stage firms, or first time MAP users there will be one marketer who “owns” the MAP and learns how to use it. That person by default becomes the admin and the person to help. If you are building a central service, it’s helpful to understand the total workload, average hours, etc.

Programs per Week
Hours per Program (average)
Total Hours Required per Week
Divide by 40 hours/week
# of FTE you need to consider

See the sheet for more!

Agency vs. In-House

Once you have the Production information ready, you can compare In House vs. Agency. As consultants ourselves, there are many good reasons to hire one, and some very good reasons to build a pipeline of people in-house.

In House Benefits
- The sole focus is this instance.
- Talent pipeline to avoid “key person” risk. (And build your empire).
- Long term cost is less.
In House Negatives
- Harder to remove underperforming staff.
- Less flexible as work goes up or down.
- Talent may not have right skills.
Agency Benefits
- Easy to scale up or down.
- Swap consultants if underperforming or clashes.
- Easy to find right skill for one-time project.
Agency Negatives
- Building an initial relationship.
- Paying for overhead in cash.
- May cost a lot more than building in-house talent.

NOTE: An important thing to consider when factoring cost/hour. In-House may cost less per hour but, at first, may take 2-3 times longer. When it’s work that will be repeated, it may make sense to invest in training with a consultant.

The calculator can help you navigate these decisions. We’ve seen many firms have 1 FTE and leverage an agency for implementation services, hard projects, or just need extra staffing for awhile.

For our team, success occurs:

When a clearly defined SOW is established
Good working relationships are created with communication protocols
A solid framework and check-in process is built

Ultimately, it is up to you to determine how many people you need, but if you’d like additional insight, we help our clients make these decisions. Give us a call.

Marketing Automation Salaries 2017

August 30, 2017 By Josh Hill

It’s been nearly nine months since my last update on this topic. In this quick post, I’ll talk a bit about the salary information I’ve seen recently.

There are increasing data points related to marketing automation salaries. This week, I did a search for “marketing automation salaries” and discovered many more dedicated pages than in December 2016. This is good news since that means a better understanding for those negotiating salaries on either side.

Salary Survey Data

At the Marketo Summit 2017, Inga Romanoff and Jason Seeba presented their latest Marketo Salary Survey. Of the 200+ respondents, 81% were using Marketo for more than 1 year. Thus, be careful when comparing data to experience with other platforms. I would tend to believe similar experience levels with Eloqua, Pardot, and HubSpot would yield similar salaries.

The data show us a long tail with 31% between $75k-99k/year as a median salary range. People with 1-3 years of Marketo experience should expect to be in this range. People with much more experience were generally above $100k.

Entry level staff should experience $50k-99k for 1-3 years.
Managers or more than 3 years of experience with Marketo will start to see salaries around $100k, however, the bands shown indicate to me that many Managers are making less than $100k. Those above $100k have more overall experience or specialized skills outside of marketing automation.
Consultants always make more on average, even with less experience.
Geography matters, but high salaries mean high cost of living.
Companies in the 250-999 employee range tend to pay more for Marketo experience, on average. Smaller firms and larger firms likely have more inexperienced staff dragging down the averages.
Size of Marketing Team has no real impact on salaries.
Marketo Champions, who are typically more experienced, make more. From experience, I would say this was a good selling point to get an interview, but the experience level itself was what got me higher compensation.

Unfortunately, the cross-tabs shown aren’t enough to really judge overall work experience against Marketo experience. I have seen plenty of people with similar marketing automation experience receive similar salaries even though their overall experience is wildly different.

From my experience getting hired and hiring people, I still see a bulge at either end of the market:

More inexperienced people are showing up and still in the lower range as shown in the salary data.
More experienced people in marketing automation are in high demand as Consultants, Admins, and Marketing Automation Architects who are asking for $100k+ salaries (as shown in the report). This group I call “people who know what they are doing and can be trusted to do it right.”
Few mid-range people – solid Marketo or marketing automation users looking for marketing automation or operations roles. If you’re a marketer who is comfortable in Marketo, perhaps it’s time to explore roles in mops?

How much does level and title matter?

I continue to see confusion in the market caused by how Marketers have made themselves feel better over the years. In last year’s discussion of marketing levels, I wrote about how this works. Marketing automation and operations is struggling to get past these Title, Level, Experience names as the field becomes more mature. Here is some of my recent thinking from chats with industry leaders and hiring experts.

Specialists (Jr, Sr) – this “level” is often confused with “Associate” or “Coordinator”. I have decided to start using this as “person who is becoming an expert and is not usually a people manager. More like Marketing Automation Engineer I, II, or III. IBM, GE, and Google are good examples of putting people on “super engineer” tracks if desired.
Associate/Coordinator – in marketing, this denotes “entry level.” I prefer “apprentice” for entry level. But most people know this is for those fresh out of college.
Manager – I’ve learned recently that “Manager, Marketing Automation” means people manager, while “Marketing Automation Manager” means mid-range experience or even Admin at a smaller firm. This is a critical distinction because more experienced people who have or want team leadership will be attracted to the former title.
Marketing Automation Admin – could mean different level of experience at smaller or larger firms. However, it’s typically an individual contributor role unless it comes with “Global” or says it’s a managing a team.
Marketing Automation Consultant – typically an expert or mid-range experience who is part of an agency or solo agency.
Marketing Automation Architect – until recently, I’ve seen this title exclusively at consultancies. Sometimes it is written as Solutions Architect, which is more in line with process and tech consultancies. I am a big fan of this role because it denotes expertise, a level of maturity, and experience. This a “customer facing role” where I would feel comfortable delegating critical relationships and design work and confident of someone’s work output. In terms of career path, I would see this as one step above Sr. Specialist, Admin, or a variation of the Manager roles. As a consultant, I would expect a promotion to Engagement Leader from this role.
Director, Marketing Automation or Operations – always implies team leadership, however, startups and smaller firms could mean this role in the marketing automation admin. Startups always say this is a “hands on” role and you should not expect to delegate for some time. The expertise of people in this role varies from Admin level with low overall experience to very experienced people managers with tech/process experience.

[Update: December 13, 2017]: Bizible’s 2017 end of year salary survey.

I’m curious what your experiences are with salary ranges or that mid-range experience level. Let us know below.

Interested in getting a role in marketing automation? Send me a note! If you’ve got potential, I know people.

Automate Email Reply Management with Siftrock and Marketo

February 3, 2017 By Josh Hill

Since I started using Marketo, I’ve seen quite a few people ask if Marketo can automatically handle Out of Office replies to mass emails. Email replies can be mined for valuable list building details, including new leads, bad leads, or organizational changes. Which salesperson doesn’t want a “Let’s chat” reply? Wouldn’t Marketing love to record a reply as a Success in a Program?

With thousands of email replies each day or week, there’s no way to keep up. Salespeople filter them out, never bothering to look. Marketers have other things to do after filtering unsubscribes. Whether you use an email alias with a proxy box to manage “marketing@yourfirm.com” or you use Lead Owner Email Address, reply management can become a real problem for everyone.

Reply types often include:

Out of Office (with or without Please contact…)
Left Company or Retired
Unsubscribe or hate replies.
Human replies such as “I’d love to chat…” or “Let’s talk in a few months”
Spam Filter – click here to verify you aren’t a bot/spammer.
Soft Bounce – temporary error.
Hard Bounce – permanent error such as User Not Found, etc.

There are undoubtedly other categories and if a human has to go through a few hundred, or a few thousand per day, there is no opportunity to scale your system.

Why look at replies in the first place?

It turns out automated replies from your audience can be helpful to your sales efforts. Each category can help generate a new lead, or help you clean your list. RingLead coined this process as “re-bound marketing.” Salespeople often use the replies in this way or to expand the buying team while someone is away. I know as a Salesperson, I would scramble if I suddenly saw my key buyer left the company! I also received a lot of forwards from our marketing alias that turned into great opportunities.

The challenge, of course, is if you send thousands or millions of emails per day, or month, or per year, how can you reasonably manage the volume? Enter a tool called Siftrock.

[Disclosure: I was given a trial account for this How To and have purchased Siftrock for an employer.]

Reply Type Use Cases

Before we delve into the setup of Siftrock, let’s create a few common use cases for reply management.

Type of Reply	Action to Take	Notes & Considertions
Hard Bounce	If Hard Bounce, Email Invalid=T	Hard bounces can vary in type, such as User Not Found, Left Firm, or “Your domain is marked as a spammer.”
Soft Bounce	Marketing Suspend for 14 days	Usually a temporary error or OOO reply.
Out of Office	Marketing Suspend for 14 days Extract new leads	Would be great to identify date they return, but that’s in the future. Can we extract other contacts from their reply, and is that legal?
Vacation	Marketing Suspend for 14 days Extract new leads	Would be great to identify date they return, but that’s in the future. Can we extract other contacts from their reply, and is that legal?
Left Company or Retired	Email Invalid=T Lead Status=Left Company Revenue Stage=Junk Extract new leads	Can we find out who replaced them? Can we extract other contacts from their reply, and is that legal?
System or Unknown	Human to review	Check the Siftrock Inbox
Human	Human to review	Forward to Sales Rep or check Siftrock Inbox

Siftrock System Setup

When setting up Siftrock for the Trial or paid version, you need to ask IT to do several DNS changes. From experience, I recommend not starting your Trial until the DNS changes are fully verified. Siftrock did keep extending the trial until this part was setup. Siftrock now has a “quick start” option to receive forwards from an existing box, however, I did not test this feature.

Step 1: decide on a CNAME that will route replies back to Siftrock’s SMTP server. If your IT Security team has concerns about this, then discuss it with Siftrock’s team. As long as you carefully follow the DNS steps, you should be ok. Let’s say you use:

reply.marketingrockstarguides.com

Step 2: Technical Setup – go through the steps on your DNS record.

Step 3: DKIM/SPF – yes, you should do this. While this isn’t 100% necessary to start, you will experience the same deliverability pitfalls you would when asking Marketo to send on your domain’s behalf. Setup DKIM/SPF for your Siftrock CNAME and test it with a Gmail account and other tools.

Step 4: Marketo Integration – Siftrock does require API access to at least the key email management fields like Unsubscribe. However, if you decide to allow Siftrock to add new Leads based on the reply parsing, Siftrock will need full API access. Remember, Siftrock won’t take actions you don’t ask it to. Siftrock also integrates directly with Act On, HubSpot, and Eloqua.

Deliverability Questions

When testing, I did not see any impact to deliverability, with several small tests from 500 to 2000, then to 100,000 per send. Sub-domains typically take on the reputation of the main domain or the actual sender IP. The sender IP is still your Marketo (or Eloqua) instance IP, however, the Reply To IP will be Siftrock. This should work as intended as long as DKIM/SPF are properly handled inside Marketo.

Updating an Email Asset in Marketo

As part of the setup process, I recommend creating a test program and to clone a real email asset which can be tested in the wild.

Modify the Email From and Email Reply To to use something like

hello@reply.marketingrockstarguides.com

in both fields. Any replies will go directly to Siftrock’s server for processing. You will not see a reply to your corporate inbox. There is no need to create such a box at your firm’s email server. I felt a bit weird not having a box on my server, so think of Siftrock as your new email box for these aliases. You will have the opportunity to review all Human or Unknown replies within Siftrock.

Siftrock Workflows and Types

Using our Use Case table above, we’ll create a few workflows to tell Siftrock what to do with each reply type. In this post, we’ll discuss the Marketo version, although other connectors may have similar functions. It’s important for you to review Siftrock’s reply type list because it constrains the workflow creation even though you can create branching and filtering logic once you choose a Reply Type.

Before you Begin

I recommend using the above Reply Type Table to map against Siftrock’s types as well as to determine how to treat each Type. In Marketo, you will want to create a Program to contain all of the Static Lists to use for each Scenario. You may also need to create Siftrock mirror fields or even trigger flows as you decide how to handle incoming data. Do this first.

Marketo Reply Type Management — Siftrock relies on Marketo lists and triggers for the final steps for each Reply Type.

For example, Siftrock won’t assign a lead to the Sales Rep, so if you create a New Contact from a Reply, you’ll need a workflow in Marketo to pass this lead back to SFDC. It is possible to leverage a mapped “Lead Owner” field that exists in Marketo to Siftrock, then create a forwarding rule in Siftrock to route the email to the correct person, or a shared Sales Alias.

Create a New Contact from a Reply

This use case can be a powerful aid in building a list. There are some concerns I personally have with how legal it is to just add new people to your list. I’d consider simply forwarding such leads to Sales, or at least Suspending them and sending to Sales. Siftrock walks you through this case, but here’s a summary.

Choose a Reply Type and decide if you want to create a new contact (lead) or work the Sender’s Email Address

Choose a Static List — For Marketo, you must choose a Static List to use. Be sure to create the List in advance

Use Fields — For New Contacts, you have to match the SIftrock Fields to Marketo fields. Siftrock recommends using Mirror Fields for most situations. Under Static Field Mapping, you can choose to update a Marketo field’s value whenever you receive this Reply Type.

Filter out leads — Only now do you decide if you want to Include or Exclude certain values from entering this flow. You can use things like Reply Text or others. Marketo fields are not available here.

Keep in mind you can go to the Inbox or New Contact list to review flagged leads for export or other needs.

Unsubscribe a Lead from a Reply (Human)

This was my original reason to get Siftrock up and running. I am a bit surprised there isn’t a default Type for this. It’s easy enough to setup.

Choose a smart list — Choose your smart list filters. Note I got this wrong and the Include should be filled in.

Summary of Siftrock Workflow — Now see a summary of the active workflow. Be sure to click back on Workflow to Pause if you aren’t sure.

Other Human or Unknown Replies

Also a powerful aid in list management. The replies that fall in here will be ones that aren’t clear to the machine, or are clearly human replies. You will also find non English languages in this inbox. If you are heavily non-English, you may consider creating a lot of custom filters or branching based on the email alias used.

Handling Lead Owner Email Address Replies

I haven’t tested this myself yet. A lot of firms rely on the Lead Owner Email Address that’s tied to Lead/Contact Ownership in SFDC. This allows marketing to send out emails that look like they come from Sales Reps. With the advent of Account Based Marketing (think tools like Yesware, Outreach, Engagio, and Salesloft), some reps already have some level of reply management. For marketers who still own this nurture, however, it’s important to still have the leads matched to the right rep, yet be able to send personalized emails at scale. To take the reply burden from Sales, Siftrock can be used.

From SalesOps’s point of view, it isn’t practical to reconfigure SFDC to have the User’s email address changed to be “josh@reply.company.com”. Instead, use a formula field in SFDC to pass back the Siftrock friendly email that you can use as a token. Roughly, here’s what to do:

Create a new field in SFDC on Lead and Contact, and make sure it is visible to Marketo.
In SFDC, add the the Formula:

if Lead Owner Email Address is josh@company.com, then field value=josh@reply.company.com

then take that token and replace it inside each Email Asset. Then test it before going at scale. In some cases, you may need to tweak the process to ensure Marketo sees the field or values properly.

You will go through all of this setup to ensure you can automatically take any Human reply to forward directly to the Salesperson. Both Marketing and Sales benefit tremendously from the automation.

Drawbacks of the System

The only concerns I had when using Siftrock is the Workflow interface is not immediately obvious. It’s not hard per se, but it’s not organized in the same way Marketo flows are or in a clear “If Reply is of Type X, then do this.” Yes, it does work like that, but interface doesn’t make it clear. The confusion is related to the use of colors and icons. For example, I accidentally cloned or edited workflows without intending to. It’s not immediately clear which workflows are On or Off, or if there are errors with them. When creating Workflows, Siftrock automatically turns them On, which may not be desirable with a fully live system.

There are a few use cases Siftrock is working on because of natural language processing complexities. While their processing is good, the reality is no computer is 100% at identifying subtleties in language the way a human would. This is more about setting your expectations if you are thinking of using Siftrock or a competitor. If your company works with a lot of non-English email, this tool will have limits. I’m pretty sure it will be easy to setup a lot of non-English rules using the Human/Unknown Reply Types. I don’t know if Siftrock plans to add other languages in the near future.

Terminology is a little muddled with Siftrock. For example, they say a Reply Type of “Bounce” means “soft bounce,” while Marketo uses “Bounce” as “Hard Bounce.” The word “General” means “Any Out of Office not otherwise classified.” There are a few other examples where we had to clarify precisely what was happening.

None of these drawbacks were critical to deploying the tool at all. Siftrock has been very helpful throughout the process.

Conclusions

Tools like Siftrock are a solid martech stack add on that helps marketing ops scale systems for just a few hours of setup work. Pricing is based on reply volume, which may not be a typical metric, so Siftrock estimates 2-3% of total send volume will have a reply. Those with very high email volumes may want to start with 1.5% as a minimum volume estimate. I recently read that human replies for B2B are at .02%.

Depending on your email volume and internal need for testing, you may want to ramp up slowly using certain types of emails. Unlike some vendors, Siftrock will warn you of overages before making price adjustments.

I recommend Siftrock to any marketing ops team. Humans should not spend hours filtering email replies – it’s not scalable. Siftrock’s support is solid, they are open to suggestions, and the product works.

[Updated Feb 3 for minor grammar changes; updated reply data]

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?