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Future-proofing the humans behind the tech. Follow Phil Gamache on his mission to help marketers level up and have successful careers in the constantly expanding universe of martech.
Philippe Gamache 0:00
What's up guys, welcome to the humans of martec podcast. His name is John Taylor. My name is Phil ganache. Our mission is to future proof the humans behind the tech so you can have a successful and happy career in marketing.
Philippe Gamache 0:26
What's up everyone, today we have the pleasure of sitting down with Dr. Jules Jas Senior Marketing ops manager at six cents and adjunct professor at St. Edwards University. Joe's got her start wearing multiple marketing hats including web management and SEO for a variety of SMBs and later a big recruiting firm and Jules decided to go back to school to pursue a PhD at the University of South Wales undertaking work based doctoral research while working with a growing EECOM company. She later worked as a Marketing Automation Manager at a few different tech companies including Mattel and a talent software startup. Then Jules decided to move from the UK to Austin, Texas to take an Assistant Professor of Marketing gig at St. Edwards University. And she's still currently a part time adjunct professor there. She's also freelanced in marketing operations, kind of moonlighting a little bit and she also joined blue prism after that as a senior marketing ops manager. Finally, she had a short stint at Adobe before settling in at six cents, where she's currently leading marketing operations. Jules, thank you so much for your time today. Really excited to chat Awesome. Thank
Julz James 1:33
you for having me.
Philippe Gamache 1:35
This episode is brought to you by our friends at knack. launching an email or landing page and your marketing automation platform shouldn't feel like assembling an airplane mid flight with no instructions. But too often, that's exactly how it feels. Knack is like an instruction set for campaign creation for establishing brand guardrails and streamlining your approval process to knacks no code, drag and drop editor to help you build emails and landing pages. No more having to stop midway through your campaign to fix something simple Knack lets you work with your entire team in real time and stops you having to fix things midflight check them out@naqt.com That's kn a K and tell them we sent you. This episode was brought to you by our friends at customer IO oversold the note legacy marketing automation platform that is still struggling to update its user interface. I've done a tour of duty with all the major marketing automation platforms and many are definitely similar customer I O is the most intuitive and beautiful platform. I'm talking about the industry's top visual workflow builder to design and implement your unique messaging strategy. Powerful A B testing features inside your workflows not just on subject line sense, hold out testing functionality to see the incremental impact to your messages. Queue draft mode. So you can QA messages and conditions in production with real users before anything is sent. Copy workflow items, so you don't have to repeat the building process again and monitor campaigns tests and key list membership growth from your personalized dashboard. The icing on the cake marketers using customer to have seen a 20% increase in conversion rates from strategic messaging. So stop using clunky old tools and adopt a multi channel approach that creates joyful interactions with your customers start a free trial without a credit card customer.eo And tell them we sent you. I listened to a lot of your past podcast episodes. So really grateful for all the interesting topics you've you've shared there. One thing that I kind of pulled from from threads is that a lot of your interviewers are kind of shocked to hear that you teach university level students practical automation skills, I actually have the pleasure of not being too much of a stranger to that myself. I don't have your formal education. But at the our local university University of Ottawa in Canada, we ran this 10 week intensive post grad course on digital marketing. And it was taught by 10 different instructors and I had the pleasure of covering a full week on automation and martech. I taught that for three and a half years. My favorite part and I'm curious to hear like your favorite part was seeing all the minds that were blown when when we're introducing them to martec and some of the capabilities and also seeing a lot of the early students graduate and go on to have cool careers with like local martec and marketing ops agencies. So my first question I got a two parter for you here like did you do all the course content yourself for the marketing specific stuff? And what was your favorite part of of teaching?
Julz James 4:38
I'll try to remember both of those questions. But yeah, I I love teaching and really getting it backwards. I love teaching because like I said, seeing students who kind of see I teach on the masters course now so they're in jobs. They're most of the time doing some sort of marketing role or marketing adjacent role and teaching them practical. have skill sets. One I can apply to everything that I do today. So I, every example I give is, in my job today, this is what I do. And this is how I use this tool. And that really seems to resonate with the students. That is actual practical knowledge. Because when I did my degree 20 plus years ago, that horrible word because 20 years ago, it's it was the six P's or the four P's and four Porter's Five Forces and all these things from the 60s, that and 70s and 80s that I have never used in my career, even like early start marketing careers I've never actually used I don't think I've ever put out a four piece I don't think I've ever used a Porter's Five Forces. And so I wanted to have make sure students had the skills and when they go into like the real world of marketing, they know what actually are they they're kind of letting themselves in for the one thing that the one thing when you ask like undergrads, especially what do you think marketing is like, I used to teach when I was full time, like the very basic, like fundamentals of marketing course. And the first question would be, what do you think of when you hear the word marketing, and they'd be like social media marketing, advertising, TV ads, and I'm like, teeny tiny part of marketing I used to be, we used to be like all known for like doing pretty pictures and cuddling or coloring things in. But now it's all about technology. Now it's all about driving revenue. Now it's all about using the tools that we have to prove kind of marketing's work because we can track all of these things. We have all of these technologies. So we have analytics, we have Marketo, we have Salesforce, we have visible, we have all of these tools to track everything that we do today. And that is, I think, really interesting, because most students don't think about that they think about when they go into a marketing role. They're just going to do social media, or they're just going to go and do some advertising. Well, actually, that's not very many roles anymore. It's now focus a lot more on just on the actual numbers and being able to, to see kind of what doesn't doesn't work and be able to kind of drive our strategy. So that's kind of one of the reasons I I really love teaching. And listening it I think when students have like, given me feedback, they've always said, I like to see that, you know, like, what you're talking about, and to is things that you can relate to, like, I can be like in work today, I did this thing. And I use this piece of technology. And I built these reports, or I did this. So they can really, really make sense versus think of it as a theoretical time on which you have to build like a four piece model out. So that definitely helps. And then in terms of creating the courses, pretty much all that content I create, we create from scratch, I created also the tools and technologies course, I created the social media marketing course social media analytics course, on the masters course, and then for the undergrads, we also have books to help us but I'm sure you will know marketing operations books, like they don't really there's a couple of people I know like Daryl Alfonso like, bought his book out. And it was great. However, like, there's no books around Salesforce doesn't mean there's a sixth sense book, but it's not about how to it's not technically about like the platform because things change all the time. So as soon as you bring a book out, it's gonna go so yeah, everything I developed, was using off the skill sets and knowledge from having done it for so long. But also like blogs, and things like community, law, market or nation. Anything, any ebooks that people have been bringing out, because that actually is much more relevant. Again, it's like real time real world, like experiences and examples. And then yeah, building the content. So we spent a lot of time looking at what all the objectives were of the course is a master course is the one that I teach on now. So there's the masters of digital marketing and analytics, I forgot the title of the course and, and some writing analytics. So we basically split that course down. So between myself the head of our department at the time, and then a couple of the other professors we basically broke it down and said, What do we think is going to be relevant, there's some stats courses in there which are really relevant because you still need to know how to use Tableau or Domo, or SPSS for some measurement. There's some kind of capstone courses that some practical courses so it's a combination of everything. And obviously for me, I was like tools and tech give me anything that's technology based I'll do all the marketing tech stuff because that's why live and breathe obviously would definitely the help of there were some really great resources and there still are like HubSpot has a great Academy with all that free training Marketo used to the head of Technical University online i don't know if anyone ever played with that. And that was great like that. I I tell my students go through that so they could get an understanding and kind of play in a simulated environment. I did it with also shift paradigm. Now they now are they had like a six bricks core. So like trying to get the students hands on work, Salesforce Trailhead. I'm using that. So there's a lot of great results. Since I don't have to build, like training, like Central training out, but the theory behind it and just talking about, like why we do these certain things. Yeah, pretty much built all of that out rollers. And then every time I teach it like I'm teaching social media marketing analytics right now. I tucked it in just before Christmas, but I bring the deck up. And I literally refresh it every single time because you look at the dates on the things and I'm like, Okay, this is out of date, or that's up, or we're looking at the trends and the trends change. So you can write course content, but you also have to constantly refresh it.
Jon Taylor 10:31
I was listening to your interview on the pretty funny business podcast, friends of ours. And it was it was an awesome episode, by the way, everybody should check it out. But I was kind of blown away a little bit that to hear that you were actually an electrical engineer and a former life and still uses school, your hobby. You're such an interesting person, by the way.
Julz James 10:48
Really easily. That's all it is.
Jon Taylor 10:50
Yeah, I think it's just fascinating. Like, as you're talking about the courses that you teach all the different roads that lead to martech and marketing operations. One thing that has been coming up a little bit with our guests is just like, coding, no code, like I'm all, all for this type of a trend taught myself a little bit of coding. And I noticed that like, I started almost from this point of view of like, I didn't feel like an engineer unless I knew how to code. But I'm gonna make an argument here. I'm curious, what you think about it is that martec folks actually employ some great examples of engineering and architecting systems, even if they don't, quote unquote, code, the systems are using automation in ways that I think employ like this higher level of engineering function. What do you think about this 100%
Julz James 11:34
I think when people hear marketing operations and Mark tech, and we try, and it's really hard to explain what you do as a marketing operations person, and I'll tell people, I'm a, like an IT systems analyst, but for marketing, or IT systems admin, but for marketing technology, like making them all work together. And people are like, Oh, you must know how to code, you must know this. And I'm like, I know the basics of HTML, basics of JavaScript, basic, like basic at a very basic level stuff. And I think you don't have to have the skill set of coding, but you have to have an understanding of how those things work together. And that's the important thing, I think from like from an engineering standpoint, and you hear so many people who've come from like engineering backgrounds, one of my other professors I worked with, he was a an automotive, and aeronautics engineer, before he came into marketing. So like, we all have this, as much as I hate math, we will have this kind of understanding of how numbers work and how technology works. And so if you can understand that piece, you don't have to have a coding background, you just have to know the basics. I mean, the basics always help. So if you can go into like a HTML email, and you have to change a Heading tag, or you have to change a p tag, like to know that basics is really helpful. But most of the time, so many technologies now have bought in, like drag and drop. So make it much, much easier. I've been playing around in different tech, and I don't, I don't necessarily know how to build API's or SQL like in fully in depth, but I can do a drag and drop mic and figure out how to like make these two thing connections work, using like this teeny bit of SQL. And I think that's, that's true. I think that's true of a lot of things, any any ops roles, not necessarily just marketing up, but rev ops, sales ops, anyone who goes into an operations role, they think, Oh, we must be very, like coding heavy, or it must be very tech heavy. It's not it's really understanding how systems work. That's what it's about. And I think the biggest thing is also being curious, like being willing to troubleshoot and find problems. And that's the one thing I loved about when I do my engineering stuff is I was I wasn't coding I was I was building circuit boards. And I was pulling apart engines and like, blowing up engines, doing doing all those fun things, skills in automotive company. So we got to do some really fun things. But the math didn't come into play until towards the end. And actually, when the math came into play in engineering, I went I'm out. I actually don't like maths. I don't think like this engineering thing is for me, didn't realize it in marketing, I would be using maths. Just yeah, so it's definitely that make sense. It's not more, it's more an understanding of how everything works. Versus you don't need to know the ins and outs of JavaScript or API's or it definitely helps you advance in your career. And if you think you want to go into like more of an architect role. It definitely helps. But you don't have to have a 100% coding background. I'm the same I'm self taught completely self taught, which is one of the other reasons why I like teaching it because I had to redesign a website and have a company full of the developers actually my research company, company full of developers, they get they said, Oh, I explained we need to redo their website was worst thing I've ever seen. And I was like, great. I've got 20 developers here like that ecommerce platform developers. Can you help glide? Can I have someone to help me Get this website like fixed and sorted. They were like, Nope, he go, here's, here's that here's like, here's the login, let's go and do it yourself. And it literally was all in code. And they kind of opened up and went. So Google, what does this mean? And it's big in my way around that website without without the help.
Philippe Gamache 15:19
At least today, you'd be able to throw snippets of that and charging it and ask it to figure some of that stuff out. It's totally, yeah, I totally resonate with this idea of knowing enough to be dangerous and know how to like dig deeper. And I think there's no shortage of AI tools out there today to help you take that entry level SQL skills until like, helping you understand a little bit more and speak that like developer language, so that like when you're having those meetings, you can be eye level and understand like the tables that they're talking about. And so, yeah, it's a very powerful one. One thing I wanted to ask you about was like, you mentioned, like a bunch of these, these martech tools and a lot of your systems experience. I myself haven't had the pleasure of working in sixth sense. I've been like learning about the platform from an external perspective. But you shared ahead of this interview, that sixth sense, doesn't actually use lead scoring per se, like you the team kind of dog feeding like using sixth sense as a team. You've adopted this account based focus centered around intent data and six QA modeling. So basically, like qualified accounts, right, instead of qualifying leads, or qualifying multiple leads within an associated account. So I'd love for you to just walk us through like how, as your marketing ops team, have you switched the focus from driving MQL to engaging with personas in your ISP, your ICP, to drive qualified accounts?
Julz James 16:59
It's definitely hard. Yeah, when I joined, when I joined Sixth Sense, they had kind of pretty much moved away from scoring, but there was still some scoring happening. And they were focusing on accounts. But as a, as an ops person who's been doing this for many, many years, I kind of came in and went. So what's what, why why no lead scoring? What's happening, like why I, I couldn't, it took me probably six months to get my head around, not using lead scoring. And that they actually turned off our lead scoring be hurt. Because I was like, I've been like the lead scoring is everything lead scoring is everything we should be doing. We dropped we live our world by MQLs. But realizing that actually using like the tool, we obviously, we use our own internal tools, using sixth sense being able to see which accounts are actually in market and being able to drive based on their intent based on do they fit our ICP? Are they what binds us kind of stage? Are they in? What keywords are they looking for, we could then drive those account level qualifications come through. So we call them six Q A's. It's kind of like the standard functionality of sixth sense uses AI to be able to figure out who those excuses are use predictive modeling, to figure out who all kind of propensity to buy accounts are going to be. And then we kind of flipped on its head of saying, Okay, so now we know the right accounts. So we kind of know, the companies of who he was searching for keywords like us or our competitors. They haven't filled in a form yet. But they we kind of know the accounts and who they are. And that was the that was kind of the biggest thing to me of, obviously, we're so driven by the everyone was everyone was filling a content form, everyone must download something, we must be able to score these people because they downloaded a form or they downloaded an ebook, or they register for an event. Those aren't necessarily just the things that qualify someone, actually people at the company searching for your keywords going on your website, being able to track what pages they're looking what being seeing, obviously seeing what campaigns are engaging with, because that all kind of drives into that intent scoring model. Once we start to see that engagement, being able to then say, Okay, now we know the accounts, obviously the reps, the first thing that you'll get from any rep, if you are not working the MQL is who do I need to speak to? And that was huge. For me. I was like I was like, but how? How do we know? How do we know who the reps need to speak to like, because obviously, the reps now have these qualified accounts. They have to know who they have to go after. So that's where on the upside, we spent a lot of time figuring out the personas on the accounts. So we're spending time to look at who who are the buying committees because again, we know that we have an amazing research team here. So Kerry Cunningham did a lot of work of figuring out like, who are those? What do those buying committees look alike? Because we know it's not just one person anymore. We know it's 567 it could be up to 13 or 14 people who are on a buying committee. And then we looked at all of our closed one deals and said Okay, so who were the people on those opportunities? is not necessarily the names but the types of people. Is it an ops person? Is it a sales Exec? Is it a marketing leader? Once we figured out that, that then drove everything we do in operations to say, Okay, now we need to go and figure out, do we have the right people on the account? Do we have the right persona? So we have like this ginormous, ginormous persona. Map out we have 33 personas that we use. The key personas, there's about 10. But there's kind of 33% as we have in the system, it drives all of our basically job titles down into persona. We can then look at in Salesforce, do we have these right personas on these accounts are six QA? And then if we don't we use our own tool, we use sixth sense to go and say, okay, so Company A six QA there is someone at that account that is searching for us. How do we then we figure out, do we have the right personas on that coffee, we have the persona stamping to the contact, if we don't have the right personas, we use our orchestration tool to go and find the right people, and then put them onto the account so that when sales is basically gets that six QA, they have the right people, they have the right account, they know that they're literally actively searching for us today. And I think that is much more efficient and effective than Joe Bloggs downloaded a ebook, go and speak to them. Because Joe Bloggs might be a marketing assistant, it might be research or it could be an intern. They might not be the right person. But then we also don't focus on just one person at the account. The team looks at the sales team looks at this thing. We call it multi threading. So we know that there's the four key personas we have to go after. So the the reps will go and speak to those four key personas, whether it's through peer to peer nurtures, whether it do it through SalesLoft. Through like sales cadences, we have conversational email, which is our internal tool, our internal AI email tool, which is actually really cool. We're doing some really, really fun things with that. But we're able to kind of have conversations with multiple people. And then find the right person and get the right people on those opportunities like it. It takes it takes a village it takes like the entire ops team, it takes working really closely with the sales team, it takes working really close with our analytics team. And I think that's one thing I really enjoy as six senses because it's not just Why didn't my lead MQL? Like they're not the conversations that we have with our reps anymore. It will be this account six to eight. Why did this it's QA Have I got the right account? Not the right people on my account to go after? What kind of strategy can I use? Which tool should I use to have conversations with them. And that definitely changes the mindset of just, we need to MQL everyone because that's our goal. That's not our goal. Our goal is we are driving revenue, we're driving pipeline, we're able to tie everything we do back to like, how much are we influencing those opportunities being opened?
Philippe Gamache 22:47
Yeah, very cool. Appreciate you unpacking. Do you think that there's a world where you can have both account based scoring also lead scoring? Because like one of the shortfalls you mentioned, it's like, well, we have like the account based model now and we know companies to target and go outbound for, but we don't really know which specific people from that account to tell our SDR team to go after. But the lead scoring model would at least tell you maybe know who the decision maker is. But who potentially is that champion or that like first researcher persona, who's like starting that research? Like the sixth sense, like kind of marry the two together? Like can you still see individual people who were active on the site? Like at least from like a first party data perspective? Yeah, we
Julz James 23:33
can see those people's okay, yes, you are an organization that doesn't want to go fully yet. Account base, which lots of companies don't I've spoken to people and they're like, do you want to go fully, and we have lots of conversations with customers. And that's the ops team, the sales team, the marketing team will actually have conversations, like we'll have phone calls with our customers. And it freaks them out when we're like, we don't use scoring, like lead scoring, everything's account based and not a lot of companies are ready to go fully account based. So yeah, combination of the two, you can use a lead scoring, you could use intent data, you can actually build those two together to create like your MQL. And you can have your six Q A's, and you can be MQL. So your intent doesn't necessarily have to be sorry, your MQL doesn't necessarily have to be just behavior in terms of they filled in this form. It could be they filled in this form, and also someone from this account is showing high intent. Add that to your lead scoring model as well. And then you're even driving towards kind of a semi account based love model. So you have like the who and the account and the intent and the actual physical actions, you can start to pull it together. And I've done that in a couple of places before. Very cool. Yeah,
Jon Taylor 24:39
I've worked with six cents a little bit on the website of things. So like with the plugins and being able to like kind of amend the six cents data overtop of like web analytics data and one of my clients I've noticed this almost shift and something we've talked a little bit with other guests. I'm just curious your take on is just like this, we as marketers over the last particularly 10 years have gotten a little drunk on all the analytics that we can get off of. But like you mentioned that like, a lot of people's perception of marketing is really that front end, the social media, the advertisements and stuff. I kind of feel like we're in the stage where we're starting to recognize, hey, I've to build brand to build intent and demand, we've got to do things that aren't directly measurable. But we still need to measure them, we still need to understand the intent behind them. Do you think that tools like sixth sense, are enabling people to be a little bit more free placing bigger bets out there in the market and building your brand in ways that maybe you wouldn't? If you're just driving towards like, I need content downloads so that I can get MQL? And then like hitting this target? What are your thoughts on that?
Julz James 25:46
Yes, definitely, it gives me it gives you the ability to because you're not necessarily driving on, we must have these lead scores happening. It can help with driving, we want to try this really cool ad campaign. And we can see in six months, like who's engaging with those ad campaigns, it might not necessarily drive straight to revenue, but because we can then start to track who is going to the buying stages, like not everything has to tie back to revenue, it could just be we want to move this set of accounts from one buying station or the buying stage. It could be as simple as that. And so if we're doing sending out an awareness ad, or if we're sending out some nurtures like oh, we have a peer to peer nurture, which is for net new records that come in very basic level kind of high level content. We are we're six senses as some things you might be interested in. Because again, we don't know always who is searching for respond and get the right person as we want to be like Oh, someone your account, someone your company was searching for us or was interested in our sixth sense product. We use that to drive to the next stage of their buying journey. So you're not always so focused on I have to generate 500 MQL this month. So I have to create this much content, and I have to make sure it's behind 75 different forms. It's I want to drive people's interest in our product. But on top of that, we're also looking at what other competitors they're searching for as well. So it's not just looking for so it's not just engaging with us. It's those key words. So are they searching for our competitors? Are they searching for keywords related to us? And I think if you are driving all of your content, there's 1000s and millions of keywords out there, I think it's very hard for any company to create enough content to match all those keywords, and to match all of that intent. Whereas to have that freedom to say like, Well, we were just focusing on these keywords, and we're focusing on this intent. We can do some really fun, like some really awesome campaigns. And we just we just recently launched once called W data vendors like a Valentine's campaign. And it's something that a b2b brand would not normally do is kind of completely out of the box. Because it's driving like we were kind of playing with it to see what can we do because we're not focused on we have to get the MQL is with focus on these sets of accounts moving from this stage to this stage. And if we generate six Q A's from that, awesome. It kind of helps us it helps give us that little bit more freedom. Yeah,
Jon Taylor 28:04
I think that freedom in marketing is key. And I always feel like we're so artificial in the way that we tried to like generate the funnel and lifecycle like, we're humans, like how do you buy like we feel very impulsive. Like there's there's an element of emotionality to add in capturing that I think is is really cool. Thanks for outlining that.
Philippe Gamache 28:22
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Jon Taylor 30:02
one thing I want to ask you about is automating automation. We're kind of talking before but I just want to give you the mic here and, and get your take on this like increasing efficiencies, automating super repetitive tasks that kickoff other automations like the inception of automation. Give us a lowdown here.
Julz James 30:18
This is something I've been working on for probably the past. I'll hang on what we in February. Five or six months now I'm playing with Taco Bell cup of Khartoum. So it's a kind of an automation tool. And it's been really interesting to figure out those laborious the one thing that I the reason I got into automation as a whole is, as humans were inherently lazy, we want to figure out the shortest route to do something. So I was manually lead scoring 60,000 records every single week doing an Excel spreadsheet with a VLOOKUP. So I was like, there must be an easy way to do this discovered automation, like does it all. For me, we have these smart campaigns and flows. That's great. And now I'm like, so what else can we do to make even that even those automations quicker and easier. So, using workato really discovered that you can actually automate even more things inside Marketo than Marketo would normally allow you to do. So like, right clicking cloning program or webinar program can take some time, like you do the right click you clone, you sit there and wait for it to open up, you have to go into their smart campaigns make any edits for a webinar program. Using mercato, I've been able to get we have a we have customer trainings, we have customer trainings in it's about anywhere from 50 to 100 Customer trainings webinars a month. So obviously, you can imagine we have to go in and set up 50 to 100 webinars. And this is just one of one of the many things that we do but setting up the customer trainings, right click clone, go into the forms, make those changes, go into smart campaigns, update all the emails with the right date. So you're updating all the tokens. You can imagine 50 to 100 times how long that was taking. It was pretty much someone's full time job. And then on top of that, you have to do all the QA and make sure it all works. So using micarta, I was able to like from an Excel spreadsheet, take that information, run it through a carto and then basically clone and create all of those programs, all the Salesforce campaigns update all the tokens. And it went from something like 60 plus hours to 30 minutes. Wow, do that. And that like using Nasaan. Like okay, so if I can do this, like if I can basically free up someone's will take them a week and a half's worth of work before the QA just just cloning and repeating. And that was kind of being fairly kind of conservative on the terms of how to clone this and update this. And to update the tokens. I tried to work out how much it would take to and I think I said the in minutes per program to automate that. To free up someone's time to actually be to be able to spend time on more interesting and fun things, not just cloning and repeating. I was like What else can we do? How far how far can we push this thing. And that's that's really where my focus is right now is like efficiencies between the team like the team. So we spend a lot of time doing list uploads, we spend a lot of time creating web like creating events and programs. We also have our nurtures, we have all the standard automation things, how else can we make it quicker. So we have cmo we have our CMO coffee talks. It happens every week. There's two events happening every week. We have it going now to recurring webinar. Now you cannot connect recurring webinars like they did doesn't physically happen. So we were manually every twice a week on the Friday downloading the list from zoom, putting into Salesforce as it was up a list upload. Like there must be an easier way to do it like we must be able to again save time. Same thing in micarta, we figured out now that we can actually connect to meetings, recurring zoom meetings come through, Waikato puts them into zoom, get sales zoom link, we get the Zoom link pushed up back into a token, they get their reminder emails with the right links. And then once the meeting is over, it pulls all that information automatically from zoom, creates a Salesforce campaign and uploads them all into Salesforce campaign like this. And so as soon as the meeting is finished, everything's there and ready to go, then obviously, being our CMO coffee toxic, this gets a lot of high visibility in the organization. So we've now automated that. And we only literally launch app last Friday. But just saving saving that time of LIS downloading the list upload would take an hour maybe to do that and creating a Salesforce campaign that now frees up some someone else's time that they have. They don't have to spend that hour or two hours, every week, every week doing the same thing. Go into zoom, download it, get the list, create the Salesforce campaign, upload it like that doesn't have to, that doesn't have to happen anymore. So there are some really interesting ways in which I was kind of automating the automations. Like we are driving, figuring out how can we speed up processes and we don't want to have to list up loads all day every day because we have events obviously we get lists from from third party events. It takes time to clean List, get all the right data like capsulize things in the right way. There are tools now that help us do that. And also, there's multiple tools that will do that just Bill Carter was the one that I spend a lot of time working in. And that's kind of where that going back to like, like coding question of, I don't know, a lot of SQL. But using mercato, because there's some, some real funky things that we're starting to do. I've had to kind of get my SQL hat back on again and be like, okay, so how do I join this to this? And how do I D, dupe this and that and make all this lowercase. So it's been like, I don't necessarily know the ins and outs of SQL, but I can use enough to be dangerous, make this process that used to take some time, more efficient and effective. And I think we're going to be pushing even like our new financial year to start here, we're going to push it even further of what else can we do to free up the T team's time because we're, I mean, everyone's always busy. Everyone's always so stacked with things to do. If we can, if I if I can even free up 10 minutes or someone's time of not having to clone a program like it comes in our Asana request, we can automate that program gets created and cloned or like even just to do that. Make someone more efficient and effective. Anyways, it's just it's just, it's really interesting, just figuring out where we can save time, and then where it gives you then gives the team time, more time to do fun things like in mop. So we want to try things differently. We want to see if we can break things we want to try notice in a different way, or we want to see how we're going to pass information. So it's all about making the most of like being able to grow the team. So they're not spending two years, doing lists of loads all day, every day. I don't want if anyone I know people who do that, like I don't want anyone to have to do that as their daily job. I want them to be able to learn and grow and understand like, increase their skill set in operations. And so if I can take that laborious task away from them, to give them time to do that, that's what I want to do.
Philippe Gamache 36:55
Very cool. I love the topic. I love how you're calling it automating automation, or I think JT had a good idea for the episode title, their automation inception. But it's or
Jon Taylor 37:07
no mops people harmed in the making of this webinar, what you're describing there like ferrying lists from system to system, like there's some agency that's crying right now thinking, Oh, God, where are my billables? Coming from? But
Julz James 37:18
yeah, and it is it is harsh, it can, but if it's going to help, like if we can save the company money, and it means I can actually get someone internally extra, like get an extra headcount to help the team, then that's what I'm going to do. Because if it helps the team grow, it's going to help the company overall. Yeah,
Philippe Gamache 37:35
I think one of the benefits of having a bigger mops team is that you can have a Jules on the team who is responsible for like thinking of things like hey, like, there is a repeatable process here, these list uploads are taking way too long. Maybe there's a better way to do this. And you go off on Discovery land and you try stuff, and we're caught Oh, and then you come back and be like, Hey, let's try this out. The reality in smaller teams, or even like one person mob steam is that they're so reactive on continuing to do the stuff they need to do because there's a bunch of other stuff on the list that like, there isn't as much time or like they lack the ability to dedicate time to thinking about like different ways of like improving the current work that that they're doing. And you talk about this a little bit, mobs a palooza when you debated the merits of this, like decentralized model of building a mops team, versus centralized and hybrid. You talked about having been the individual mops person, in previous companies in a decentralized model and how hard it is not just to like balance what you're doing and finding other ways of automating that. But also preventing marketers from chasing shiny objects is something we talk about a lot here. What advice do you have for listeners that are in those shoes today? The one person mops team or maybe even like smaller startups, and like they're wearing the mops hat, but a bunch of other hats, too? How can they focus on being both an educator and an architect for martec?
Julz James 39:10
It's, it's definitely difficult when there's when you're a small team. And I'm very, very lucky that we have the team here that we have, which gives us some time to be able to go and do those, those really fun things. And I know how hard it is when it's just you. I think that's one thing that one thing I wonder what like the automation stuff is i I won't be able to talk about it more because I want to show people that like, we have this recipe like you can go and the good thing about what kind of we can share, I want people to take those tools and make more of them when they don't have time they don't have time to necessarily not gonna say innovate. They don't have time to think about ways in which we can speed up the upload process. But I think for smaller organizations, it's it's having that it's having that drive to think about what's the thing that I do every single day and even if it's just one thing Dang, what's the one thing that I do repetitively, that I can figure out how to how to make better. And it can take some time. But I'm like tokenizing their programs, like blew my mind when I first realized that thing was possible. Because same thing when it was just me and I was just cloning an email program and going into email and making the changes and going to the next email and making the changes and going to the next email and like literally the same webinar date, putting it in the same place like four different times like invite emails, reminder, emails, confirmation emails, seven different plays something the same webinar title and webinar date. Once I found like tokens, something as simple as that was like, Oh, hang on this is it's gonna take me eight hours, or whatever it is to tokenize an entire program template. But if I spend that time to do that one thing, in the long run, it's actually going to save me so much more time. And I think that's with small companies or small organizations. It's sometimes being, having having the willingness to be like, okay, if I'm doing this thing over and over again, there must be an easy way. And then kind of taking that step back and saying, Okay, it's Mike, it's gonna take me a day to do this thing. But in the long run, I know it's gonna save me time. So being kind of not gonna say brave enough, but like just having the confidence to say, I need to do this thing, I need to build this tokenized program, or I need to build this recipe, or I need to figure out how to automate this, whether it's set up new smart campaigns for country standardization, something as simple as that, to figure out what that thing is, to show like how he's going to save time, because once you started saving time with one thing, and then you start figuring out that other next repetitive process, like countries and countries, standardization was one of those, oh, I'm trying to build a list. And I've got 75 versions of the United States. Although there must be why every every time I was building this, when I first started with Marketo, was I'd go and get the list, I'd go and find all the all the different variations of going through like a change date of value, if I wanted to keep it clean. And every time I did a campaign, I would do that and was like, there must be there must be an easy way. Like that's the whole point of Marketo, like the power of it is we can run those automated campaigns. So understanding the power of the tool is also really good as well. I think not everyone always understands how powerful some automation tools are actually a lot of automation tools can be they just think, Oh, I'm just using it to send emails, or I'm just doing like a basic nurture campaign. And then thinking about actually, how far can I push this tool? You don't necessarily have to get other tools in place. But how far can I push this tool? When you figure out how far you can push like a tool, you then figure out okay, what else can I do outside of this tool as well? Like I did it way back way back when where we had a big event. Multiple was in the big kind of conference online conference kind of When COVID Before what COVID was actually kind of hit one of the clients built a landing page had, they had 25 different options of sessions they could attend. And I was like, well, we either send out 25 Different confirmation emails if they select all of these sessions, which is going to really blow up someone's inbox and really going to annoy someone. Or I figure out how to send one email with all of the confirmation links in it. So I taught myself velocity scripting, I was like, okay, there must be a way to do this thing. Like I said, As humans, we are like we are lazy. So I always try and think about I was not listening to all humans. I'm lazy. I want to figure out the quickest and easiest way to do something. So the next time it happens, like next time that event comes up, I'm like I've already built this, grab that velocity script over, everything's ready to go. Save me so much time. So I think that's the biggest thing and in decentralized or like small person teams, single person teams, it was really relying on the network around me. And I tell the story a lot but when I lived very first day on my very first marketing automation job as a marketing Global Marketing Automation Manager. I kind of I understood the premise of it, I understood the strategy behind it, I kind of got how it worked. And I'd been doing these manual the manual scoring and I played around in like elecard I played around a little bit Makaton and some of those basic ones from back in the day. But I've never opened Marketo to that my first day on the job, I open it up and went shit. Yeah. What do I do now? So like,
Philippe Gamache 44:26
what is this user interface? I had it myself myself.
Julz James 44:29
If you remember from 10 years ago, what it looked like and I was like, pretty, it's purple. But now what do I do? Marketo nation was like my, like my Bible. Josh hills like his Rockstar guide from like, back in the day. Like that thing I lived in, day in and day out. I was like, How do I do this thing? So there's so much there's so much educational materials and the network around you like Never be afraid to ask questions on nation join those slack groups like there's there's two people have the big slack group SmartStart slack groups that are out there, join them and ask questions. Because you'll be surprised how many people have been in the same boat, or aren't currently the same boat and are trying to figure out ways to do it. It's not it's not an island, when you're just one person on the team. It's really not just you, because if you do start to reach out and say, like, I have this problem, you're gonna get five or six people coming back and be like, well, here's, here's an, there's multiple ways to do it. But here are three or four different ways in which you can do this thing. And that's the other thing is just not, don't be afraid to ask questions. And I think as ops people, we are always asking questions, and we're always, always questioning and being curious about ways in which we can do things. And I think as a single person, team or decentralized team, you actually get more chances to do that. And you're more likely to do that. And you are sometimes in in a large or it's in a large org, you're just churning through things, because you think everything's working as it should. But when you get stuck in those little single person teams, you're like, Who do I speak to? Ask the questions. Don't be afraid to join the slack groups. Don't be afraid to join nation or having HubSpot has its own community like all these different communities and and reach out on LinkedIn join groups on LinkedIn, just there are people out there that will help.
Jon Taylor 46:16
I think there's a lesson there. I love that. Almost humility, but the gutsy start, right? Like you didn't open up Marketo. But now you're managing it. And you pivoted that to become I think I want a seven time Marketo champion. Wow. So I want to just kind of dive in there a little bit like your experience as a marketing operations Pro. One of the things that we had, we had a recent guest on and they were talking about freelancing versus being in house, and they really came down heavy on the idea that, you know, one year freelancing equals four years in house, it's something that Phil and I have debated back and forth a little bit, we have both kind of sides of the spectrum, I'm doing freelance, I've done a bit of freelance in my life. And I know you have, you've done both as well. So my current stance right now, just to kind of have a nice little middle ground is that I think that freelancing provides you with an opportunity to really level up your platform skills. But when you're freelancing is is one year of experience freelancing, it's not necessarily better or worse than being in house, but I'm just curious what your take is, you've done quite a bit of it yourself. So like, do you think every marketing office person should have a stint in an agency or a consultancy? Does it really make you better in house?
Julz James 47:28
Um, it definitely helps. I think if I wasn't freelancing, I've probably been in 30, plus different instances of Marketo through various freelance whether it's been a big project or a small project. So having that exposure to all of those different variations is huge. Because it will you will help you understand, like, everyone talks about best practice. And there's I don't think is any such thing as best practice for everyone. It's best practice for your organization. And freelancing really helped me understand that because I'd go into one instance and be like, Oh, so you do this thing this way. Go into another instance, the next day and be like, Oh, hang on, they do the same thing. But they do it this way. Because it's what works for those organizations. And I think having, having that knowledge of those different instances, and how they all work together, like it's the one thing I love, again, is being curious. I want to see how people do different things. I'm really nosy. How do people, how does Company A do their nurtures versus how to Company B do the dishes do they do nested notice they do standard emails like that really helps guide when you're in like a full time in house role, because having that experience again, if you're an in house rolling and you've only ever been in one instance, you don't necessarily see all of the different ways in which you can do things. Jen, Jen, Jen de Maria or Jen Keeler now and I have spoken Marketo a couple of times. And like Schrodinger, his cat, there's the site, there's multiple ways in which you can do the same thing. Like how you set up your forms, how you set up your compliance programs, how you set up your subscriptions, whatever it is, if you don't know what you don't know, like, if you don't, if you haven't been in different instances, you don't know how people set things up differently. People will talk about it on nation, and people give examples. But until you actually in there and playing with it. You don't really know what works for everyone. And you might think we've thought the best way to do something and you might have, but if you start to freelance and understand like, there's seven different ways to do this one thing, you then when you're in house, you can say well, actually, for us, we've tried it this way, let's try it the other way, because I've seen it the other way, and I've played with it and built it the other way. And I think with with freelancing like one year could be but when you could be with one client, one year could be with five clients. So it's definitely a difficult question to answer like is one year better than, like in house or or not in house? I think he's just working with even if it's two or three clients, like small clients, small projects, just getting into different instances, makes a difference. Agency definitely helps. I've never actually worked at an agency, but I can I know people who have and they've said that it's really been beneficial to them because they are surrounded by mops people and only mops people and they are working on very specific tasks or we have to do this thing for our clients. And that's really helped them grow. Because obviously if you're surrounding yourselves by like these amazing minds that are all doing the same thing, it helps expand your knowledge as well as going into those different instances. As a freelancer, kind of similar to the decentralized thing, like you are kind of on an island when it's just you. So it helps, it helps to understand how everything works. But if you don't have those people around you that you can ask those questions to, you might as well just be in house doing the same thing. Because if you're if you're freelancing, you're doing the same thing in that you didn't sciences, you're not really learning anything. But if you're Freelancer that is kind of looking at and how different ways of building different companies are building different things. And you're asking questions as to like, why do you do this this way? or speak to like other most people and be like, I've seen this in this instance. And I've seen that in that instance. Why are they doing in these two different ways? That helps, because I sometimes it's tough when when it's just a freelancer, like when it's just me, and I'm like, I think I'm doing this right. I have been doing this for a while now. But I think this is how you build a note. Well, this is what they're asking for. And it's in it's actually kind of scary being a freelancer because people are renting, not renting if people are
Philippe Gamache 51:21
renting your people are
Julz James 51:22
hiring you, because you're an expert in what they need help with. So you have to remember that, like they've brought me on because they need help with this thing that I specialize in. But it's also kind of scary that I'm like, Okay, it's me helping this entire organization. Am I doing it right? So that's also the other scary I think it helps the confidence piece because I'm like, okay, I can send out this email and I can build this thing for this $3 million, 3 million, 3 million records. contact database not a problem I'm promise I'm not going to send it out to the wrong amount of people. And I did like one of my clients I the only the one and only time I sent like a big mass email and screwed it up, like royally was a client sent out to eight 800,000 people instead of 30,000 people was able to stop it thankfully, because I didn't look at my own filters and my own filters. But yeah, it's it's gives you that confidence to like make those mistakes. But also you have to remember that the client is paying you for
Philippe Gamache 52:19
vertical. There's there's so many there's so much wisdom in that answer there especially like this idea of seeing the art of the possible by going into different instances and seeing how other folks have set stuff up myself in a house. Like one way I've done something similar is these like idea of like mindshare meetings that happen regularly with other companies and similar type of industries. And we do like a screen share. And like, sometimes we have to sign NDAs but it's like, here's how we're doing something. And we compare notes and we discover new tools, and we learn new ways of doing it. So yeah, I love love your points there, Jules. I think there's there's a bunch of other stuff we could have gone down rabbit holes on, but we're, we're already at time, we're gonna hit you up with one last question. We asked this for all of our guests. You're a mops leader, a professor, a consultant, an automation expert, a speaker, you're also a tattoo piercing studio owner, a double cat mom, a Funko, pop collector, a Potterhead. And also a car aficionado? Well, like I said, one question we asked all our guests is how do you remain happy and successful in your career? And how do you find balance between all of these things in your personal life? But all the things you're working on while staying happy?
Julz James 53:35
Good question. Like I said, I get bored, really easy, which is why I have a lot of interests and a lot of hobbies. And I think for me, that's the one thing is being able to find something that interests and excites me every day and figuring out what's, what's different. And what's new, and how can I try and do something different. is definitely one thing that helps me my career. And every day is different. And I think that's that's one thing that keeps me going is if every day was the same if I was doing list uploads every single day for two years, like I would not have been in mops for more than probably three months. But mops is always different. It's always changing. And what I did when I started in mops many years ago to what we're doing today, is still different. And I think what we're going to do in two years time is going to be different again, whether it's more automations whether it's the tools are going to change AI is obviously coming in and making a difference and having having that help us. The tech is constantly advancing. And I think if if as an ops person you are willing and want to learn those advancements. That's great. And that's that's what keeps me happy. And yeah, like I said, I just for me, I just really like trying different things. I say my brain is like a little sponge. I love to learn new things. I love to like try new things and I do lots of things because I want to keep kind of this busy. I want to make sure that my my brain is busy and kind of learning and trying something else because I can't do sit and watch TV. At the end of the day, like when my workday is over. I don't just sit and watch TV. I've got like the TV on the background, but I've got my laptop or my phone or on figuring out new things or trying new things, or I'm doing a different course or I'm like, doing if I'm teaching whatever it is like I am always I always kind of want to keep it going now. It can be exhausting. I'm not not saying everyone has to, like do all these things all the time. But for me, that's my happiness is just trying and learning. constantly doing something different. And just yeah, just keeping it interesting. That's that's a big thing. Very
Philippe Gamache 55:36
cool. I really appreciate that answer. I think there's a lot of wisdom there you shared a ton of stuff with with folks and listeners today. So really appreciate your time and figuring out a way to do this from from your closet away from all the rhinos in your house there. Appreciate that.
Philippe Gamache 56:00
Folks, thank you so much for listening this far. We really appreciate you being here. Just wanted to call out two things before we go. Number one, the best way to support the show is by signing up for our newsletter on humans of martec.com. We send you a quick email every Tuesday morning letting you know what episode just dropped. We include our favorite takeaways. So if you don't have time to listen to that one, no pressure, we have you covered with some learnings anyway. And number two proceeds from sponsors this year to have allowed us to venture into video. We recently launched a YouTube channel where we publish full length episodes. So if you want to see our radio faces, check that out. That's it for now. Really appreciate you listening again. Thank you so much.