Philippe Gamache  0:07  
Music. What's up, guys, welcome to the humans of martech podcast. His name is John Taylor. My name is Phil Gamache. Our mission is to future proof the humans behind the tech so you can have a successful and happy career in marketing. What's up everyone today, we have the pleasure of sitting down with Ashley Johnson, marketing technologist at Microsoft. Ashley started her career at Trend Micro, a global cyber security company as a sales and marketing associate with rotations as a lead qualification rep, then a marketing coordinator, and finally a marketing ops and automation associate. Eventually, she would get promoted to Marketing Automation Manager, where she was responsible for all things building QA campaigns across a variety of martech tools. She then took on the role of senior marketing operations manager at Cornerstone on demand, a talent experience platform. She rolled out a content intelligence tool and a webinar engagement platform there, and today, Ashley is marketing technologist at Microsoft. She's on their platform operations team, where she strategizes and consults on how the martech stack is used across different work streams of the business. Ashley, we're so excited to chat with you today. Thanks so much for your time.

Ashleigh Johnson  1:20  
Thanks for having me y'all and thank you for that wonderful welcome. I'm excited to be here. This

Philippe Gamache  1:26  
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Jon Taylor  3:06  
Thanks for joining us. And it's always interesting with Phil's intro is kind of going through your career and how you've landed at your current position. I want to start off by asking you knowing what you know today and where you're at in your career and how you got into martech, what advice would you have given yourself a decade ago when you first started in martech, and what kind of advice do you think our listeners can take from your experience there?

Ashleigh Johnson  3:29  
I would say, to be open. I when I landed in this industry, I had no idea what it was, right. I would act in college at a time where we didn't learn about marketing technology yet your standard like branding, public relations, content management, and that's the career path that I had set for myself. And so I landed here kind of a chance, luckily, that I attribute it all to that rotation program at trend that eventually introduced me to marketing tech in the marketing operations space. So I would just tell anyone that's early in their career, anyone that's still in college, definitely be open. Because there's so much more in the marketing world, in this space to learn than what you're taught in college. And so when you're on that job plan, don't be so narrow minded. Oh, I want to be in PR I'm only going to get PR jobs. That was what I had, issue I had for the first few months of a job price. So definitely keep those options open and know that there is so much more to marketing than what you are typically taught in your college days. Yeah,

Philippe Gamache  4:36  
definitely the four Ps even remember what they are anymore, but yeah, it feels like what I was taught in college is so far moved from where I ended up stumbling into and I feel like the we chatted with some folks that are doing, like post grad certifications that are trying to prepare marketers for graduating with. Like, more hands on experience, and actually like working in martech tools. So feel like it's shifting a little bit, but yeah, I came around the same time as you were. Things were quite shockingly different by the time you hit the market. And I was handed, like, my first keys to marketing automation tools, and was just like, hey, not really sure how to use this stuff. Can you just learn it? You're like, a fresh grad, you know, technology. So, yeah, I feel like most folks in martech, especially the time we came around, were just like, Oh, how'd you get into martech? I stumbled into it. It didn't notice when I graduated

Ashleigh Johnson  5:35  
Exactly.

Philippe Gamache  5:39  
We actually chat with a lot of folks that are more on the startup side of experience, like marketers that worked in SMBs as well as recently had a lot of founders and and folks that are kicking around startups in the martech space. It's not every day that we get to chat with someone who's at what you could say? You know, 225,000 enterprise tech giant in Microsoft. I'm curious to ask you, like behind the scenes, what is it like working at at a big company like that in martech? My My only taste of like, big enterprise, not even enterprise like I was at a company called automatic the parent company of wordpress.com and we're about 7000 people. The cool thing internally was, like, we were all set up in like, micro sub teams, almost. So there was like, president and a marketing team in that one sub team, but there was like, a bunch of sub teams just curious, like, what you can share from from your martech experience at a tech giant like Microsoft so

Ashleigh Johnson  6:41  
far. So I've been at Microsoft two and a half years now, and y'all, I'm still trying to get used to this environment. Coming from two companies which, like you, I considered them enterprises, right? But compared to where I am now, they're so much more smaller. I came from two places in which I was on marketing ops teams that ran mops to the whole entire company. We were global teams, you know. And it was also a small team of between like three to seven people, depending on which company I was at Microsoft. That is not the case. If you can imagine, there are multiple teams that work in the martech space. I can't even tell you who some of those teams are. What some of those teams do. I work on the side that supports our enterprise cloud products and services. My team is also pre sales. So if you think about that, there's also a team that support that supports post sales. You have Microsoft, a company that has plenty of products. So thank the gaming side, thank the hardware side. There are teams in those spaces that I again, I can't even tell you who they are. I can't even tell you what their martech stack looks like, because that's how big the company is. And so for me, having to come in this Kevin, coming from a space in which I knew, I worked closely with marketing, I worked closely with sales, I knew everything that was going on across the company, as far as martech, and coming to a space in which I have such a very small area, section, very Small purview into it's my space, in my space only, and not having that visibility into other areas of the company. It was definitely a mind my shift change for myself, because I am very much a big, big picture thinker, and it's kind of hard to be that here when you're in this position. And so definitely still adjusting and definitely still learning, and I know I will never know every single thing that's going on within this company, and I just kind of have to be okay with that. Yeah,

Philippe Gamache  8:51  
I feel like sometimes it's a full time job just knowing everything that's going on, or you'll you need a full team of people just to, like, read all the updates and be part of all those meetings, to be in touch with everything that the big mothership is doing. But I'm curious if you can share like the upsides, like the stuff that you enjoy so far, of that enterprise experience. Maybe touch on like, personally, I think that two of the like, common negative narratives of like, working for enterprise versus startup is, one, things are way slower. Like, sometimes you're just working on the same stuff for months over months, and like, you're just waiting for approvals and multiple layers of things. And number two is you don't get a, like, a breadth of experience. You kind of touched on that a little bit already, but, like, you're not wearing as many hats as you could be in startup, and you're kind of, like, focused in your one little area. Maybe, like, give me the counterpoints of, like, the the positive side of those points, if, if, if you have that handy. Yeah,

Ashleigh Johnson  9:57  
I do love collaboration. Here. It's. One of my favorite things about the business and the people, the different people that I get to work with, there is a role and a job for everything here. And so there's always going to be someone new that you are working with, depending on what you're working on. And I am very fortunate to have encountered some great people, some smart people, some creative people, in my projects, in a topic like Mike's one of the comments you just said, it's there. It's definitely not slow paced, as you can imagine. And so there is always a project. There's always something new. And so gaining a wide range of experience has been good. I come from a background that was primarily events focused at my other two companies, and so coming here and being able to step outside of that and get new experience, and the martech space, outside of that event space, has been amazing,

Jon Taylor  10:59  
I think, something interesting from your own journey, and you're kind of touching on a little bit, is this idea of finding your own path in martech and marketing operations, as you mentioned earlier, like people don't go to school to become marketing ops professionals, or at least not when we all came up in this profession. One of the kind of sub themes that we have going on in the show, and I want your take on is this idea of curiosity and the mops professional like, I think that you're going to spend a lot of time if you're a mops person, living like this engineering perspective of figuring things out and the nuts and bolts of things. But there's also, like, the curiosity of the people element that you mentioned as well. Talk to us a little bit about how curiosities played a role in your own career. And what do you think people can take away from like, you know, developing their own curiosity as a skill in martech?

Ashleigh Johnson  11:46  
Yeah, that is actually one of my favorite traits. I love about myself, is my curiosity mindset, and I do think I attribute it greatly to me having the career success that I have so far, like we searched from before we the Marquette space. There's not really guidance around it, right? At least in many of the companies, many of the teams I've been on, it's kind of just Okay, you go in, you figure this out yourself. And so you have to have that curious mindset of trying to understand how tools and tech work. In that mindset of like, okay, how can I solve this without really having that guidance laid out for me, without really having that documentation laid out for me? I One of my favorite things I've loved to do, and I did this a lot at trend and currently at Microsoft, I love to shadow senior team members. And so there are two people from both of these companies who I've learned a lot from. Because of them, I have been able to get into new tools. Even now I am shouting a senior team member taking helping her with projects that she's working on, with the goal of eventually taking those completely over for her and so just gaining that experience in those spaces by shadowing new team members, raising my hand and be like, hey, I want to learn what so and so is doing right, because we think about it. I've also been in all these roles within all these companies. Everyone has been siloed to their roles, their rnrs and so raising my hand and being like, can I learn what she is doing or what he is doing? Because I have interest in it, and I do eventually want to gain more knowledge and experience there that has been a huge, huge health.

Philippe Gamache  13:32  
Very, cool. Yeah, I love the the opportunity of being able to to raise your hand and not just like, get your hands dirty and other things, but lean on experts. Like, I feel like that's one of the upsides of bigger companies, is, yeah, you have this broad network within that company, and you're meeting new people, and you get to learn from experts, as opposed to, like, in a startup. Like, Sure, you can wear a bunch of hats, but like, most of the time you're self learning, and learning by, like, reading other people's blog posts that have, like, tried to do that because there is no textbook in martech, but at least in a bigger company, you get that mentorship, the guidance, getting to, like, interact with a lot more people. So I really like that answer. I think that we talk a lot about AI on the show with some folks, and this idea of, like, soft skills becoming more and more important over the next couple of years, and I think that, like, you're really flexing those in an enterprise space more often than than in a startup, maybe. So I'm curious your take on this here. Like, I think a lot of folks we've had on the show have mentioned that communication, business, strategy, empathy, collaboration, all of those things are more important than technical skills. Do you agree with that? And how has your view of the importance of soft skills or people skills? I think we're not supposed to say soft skills anymore. But how has that evolved? Over your career? Can you share, maybe, like, some practices or routines at Microsoft that has helped you develop your your people skills over time?

Ashleigh Johnson  15:07  
Yeah, I 100% agree with that statement that people skills are maybe not much more important, but maybe, like, equal equally important here, um, I would say two of the biggest ones for me that I have trying to then develop over the years are communication, as well as project planning. Being in this space now, where I am actually leading initiatives and projects in at Microsoft, those are essential to my success, as well as the success as those who I'm working closely with. So communication, I have had to learn how to be very descriptive, right? I've had to learn that not everyone has the same mindset. Not everyone had the same understanding, whether you're talking to a fellow marketing technologist or whether you're talking to someone on the business upside those two, they have a different understanding right of how things work, and so be descriptive. Don't get too technical, depending on who your audience is, as well as trying not to be too high level. An example of that, like if I'm going into a project meeting and I am picking up a project, I can't have the assumption right, that everyone involved is going to understand, have the background needed right for this project. I need to go in give a clear and concise, hey, this is what the ask is. This is what's going on. This is what needs to be done, x, y, z, spell that out, versus going into this project and saying, Okay, y'all like, let's, let's get started without giving any additional background or context. So that, for me, has been a huge learning and so I actually have this habit now going into any meeting with having an agenda spelled out on even handing it off beforehand so that people can review and add anything additional that they need to be as well as just sending those follow up notes. That's something that's been very kind of like drilled in our heads here at Microsoft, and especially as AI and co pilot right is becoming a thing. We are encouraged record your meetings, take that screen transcript that co pilot does for you, edit it if need be, but also send it off, like, utilize that so where there are just clear action items through action steps that comes from that, I think

Jon Taylor  17:34  
it's pretty interesting what you're discussing, and I'm a huge advocate of the skill set that you're talking About. Like, I think in martech, we are especially marketing operations, like, if you think of it from like, the perspective of Lego, like we're often given a whole pile of Lego and we're gonna go make something right, all the blocks fit together, and they can make something really cool, but we're often missing the instruction manual, and especially when we have to convey that to other people. I thought you did a really great job of kind of conveying how you've buttoned things up in terms of communications for others. What about documenting systems, like making sure that you kind of have the Center of Excellence, like, what kind of processes do you have for making sure that when you deploy new tech, or you integrate with additional systems, or you're enabling other teams, that you have this comprehensive but actually usable, paper trail of how these things go together.

Ashleigh Johnson  18:25  
So documentation is a huge topic right now for me, I am actually leading a knowledge management initiative on my team, because it currently doesn't really exist. It existed from previous, from years ago, but those team members no longer are there. They're no longer part of the company or the team. And so when we look at my current team, none of us use what is in place. And so I am spearheading an initiative in which we are completely revamping our knowledge management space, completely rebuilding like our playbook, and at which point it'll be released to external teams, and at that point maintained going forward. And so I even Microsoft and previous companies, knowledge management, unfortunately, has not been a huge focal point, which is unfortunate, right? Because it's something that has always been talked about on all teams, like, we need this. We need this. Yes, we can document this, you know, briefly, internally, but it doesn't really, it hasn't really become much of anything. It's been failed attempts, honestly, just failed attempts from all around and so I'm really hoping, being here in this space, that we can get it up and running and that it can be maintained, because it ends up important, right? Because when you have a team member that leaves, you know you have someone in new coming in this space, they need to understand what's currently in place. And if no one else on the team understood that space, it's kind of it goes back to them having to figure out themselves. But there should be instances where they shouldn't have to do that, right? And so just trying to make valleys accessible is one of my big, big goals. Right now,

Jon Taylor  20:10  
I love it. I have a background, actually, in technical communication. I used to be a technical writer for for a hot minute, but now as a consultant, I find myself kind of navigating the wasteland of martech tools. And what I mean is, when you said, like, when a team member leaves, like, what's left in their stead, like there's always this vacuum of knowledge of how to use this tool. Why did this tool get deployed in the first place? How is it set up? And then, as goes, years go by, and then you're like, Oh, I've got to go back and figure this out. I'm sure at Microsoft, you're using a ton of AI tools and copilot. This episode

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Jon Taylor  22:35  
just to kind of dovetail a little bit into this, I've been using AI a ton for my own documentation processes, like a combination of voice transcripts and using AI to kind of take those voice transcripts and create documentation. I'd love to just get a peek into kind of how you're using AI behind the scenes in your role.

Ashleigh Johnson  22:54  
Yeah, so I will admit y'all, I was very resistant to AI, and so I started using it maybe two, three months ago, consistently, but we have been encouraged, right? Obviously, copilot lives within just being like Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, etc, so I've been using it greatly in editing. So whether I am writing documentation or just passing an email, I'll quickly do Copilot to Hey, can you make this sound better? And may or may not use that something that we are going back to knowledge management, something that we are actually practicing right now is having the subject matter expert hop on the call record that have them explain the process, and then having copilot data transfer up to see what kind of written communication is spit out, and if we can just easily go in and edit that, that will make that documentation so much more easier and so AI in itself. I know it's such a hot topic, y'all just don't resist don't resist it. I've learned the whole hard way. I've like put it off for so long, and it's so funny, right, coming for a company that is in the spearhead of AI, it's like, I couldn't avoid it any longer, so definitely just embrace it. Embrace it.

Philippe Gamache  24:10  
Yeah, I'm curious to ask you, like, what, what was the tipping point from, from having you go from, from being resistant and maybe touch on, like, the hesitancy you had there, but yeah, like, curious about the tipping point that just made you go, like, all right, yeah, I guess, I guess I gotta, like, I dive into this.

Ashleigh Johnson  24:26  
There has been a lot of encouragement internally, and it kind of just came like, okay, I guess I gotta start using this. Um, thankfully, there were a lot of trainings that were done internally to where I can, kind of, I was able to just hop on those. Really, really learned how to use the new copilot within different aspects. But I guess I was just resistant, because it's something new. And I really, for me, it was like, Okay, why would I sit here and type something waste the time of letting this thing edit it? And then continue to go back and forth right before I found like, burgers that are like, so for me, it wasn't really a time saver, but I will admit now that I was wrong. And so there are a lot of advantages, there are a lot of there are a lot of cool things that are coming, and I'm excited to see what happens in this space. I know that people are people are wary of it, people just scared of it, but people are this little topic of it taking jobs away, but I think it's only going to enhance how we work and make it more efficient.

Jon Taylor  25:35  
I think there's a moment of pause here for a lot of our listeners as well. And I do some consulting where I like talk about AI and the usage that I that I employ my own consultancy. And I think one thing that we have in this hype cycle, which is worth remembering, is that, like, it's still early, and we're still trying to figure out how to use all these tools, I am curious, though, from your your take and your career, like you have an interesting vantage point to kind of take a look at how technology is deployed, your own usage of other technologies. Like, one of the debates that Phil and I have had, kind of offline and online on the podcast, is who deploys AI tools in the marketing team and then martech world, like we've had a lot of guests talk about, like, Mops being at the intersection of martech and AI, that it's like, you know, marketing operations creates a center of excellence. They help unroll it. It's nice, orderly, organized rollout. I'm kind of becoming more of the opinion that it's more purpose driven, bottom up, driven by the use case. It's going to be a bit more free radical. And it's kind of like putting a genie in the bottle, just two extremes. There is probably some in the middle. But I'm curious about your take on this. Curious about your take on

Ashleigh Johnson  26:44  
this. I do. I agree with your second Sami, that it just depends on what it is at Microsoft, while my team platform operations rerun, like our marketing automation platform. We do have engineering there in the background, but essentially it is up to us, me to determine how our platform is used, and so it I do think it's done a very differently between companies, right? Because even looking at my two previous companies, mop free and everything like there was no engineering. There was engineering didn't exist, like it was up to them to decide that. So I do think that is up to tool owners to understand the capabilities, and if they need to work closely with engineering to roll out, then yes, they need to, but ultimately it should be the tool owner's decision.

Philippe Gamache  27:38  
Very cool. I love, love this topic. I think. JT made this question nice and easy to segue into, into my next one. This is something actually that we've asked a lot of different folks that work in marketing operations, and regular listeners are going to be tired of me mentioning him. His name is Casey winters, and he wrote an article that lives rent free in my mind. He titled it the problems with martech and why martech is actually for engineers. So he argues in his article that martech is simply created as a response to engineering constraints within a company. And I think I'll know where you're leading with this based on your previous response and having no engineers at all in your previous companies, but you mentioned that there's a lot of engineers in the background on platform ops at Microsoft. So I'm curious your take there, and like the second point he makes is like martech is likely to decline because of competition from in house engineers and essentially successful Marty companies and vendors are going to be successful when they market to in house engineers, because they're the going to be the ones building tailored solutions for their companies, kind of like in house. So being part of these big companies, and specifically at Microsoft, I'm curious to hear like these, like build versus buy debates. Are there a lot of those, and what are your thoughts on is martech actually for engineers,

Ashleigh Johnson  29:08  
martech is for marketers. I can't tell you. I don't think I know any one in the martech space that has an engineering background. One I do it's that is a hot that is a hot topic question, goodness, yes, I have to be technical in what I do, but at the same time, I have to be able to strategize, right? I have to be able to strategize with marketers, with the business, on how we should be using these tools in tech. Are you able? Is a market is a engineer able to do that? Yes, a marketer can be technical, but can an engineer be a strategizer when it comes to marketing initiatives? Like I need someone to answer that question, because I think that will put this whole debate to rest. It's good news.

Jon Taylor  29:56  
It's a tricky it's kind of a tricky one, and it feels a little contentious, but I think. On, you're on a solid thread. I I'm nodding even in my head's not moving in that direction. It's funny because we've asked this question of many guests, and I feel like what you're hitting on is increasingly where I don't know where Phil's head's gonna land. I should ask him one day, but where my own head is right, like martech, and maybe I'll plant a seed here as well. Is that martech people in humans and martech and marketing operations people are engineers in a lot of ways. They just don't necessarily code or have a computer science background. But like, if you just take a step back and look at no code tools, like, what is coding? I know coding. It's like, if then loops, you know, recursive statements, like, are we just making it more complicated for ourselves?

Philippe Gamache  30:47  
Yeah, no, I like your point. Ashley, about like, ultimately, martech is about servicing marketers. It's working with marketers to understand their pain points and building systems and processes that enable them to do things faster and be more efficient. And even though you could make the argument that on the platform side integrations and API and like customizing stuff with JavaScript and whatever other like coding technology, like, maybe you could use engineers as part of the process. But when it comes to, like, the consultative piece that you just kind of mentioned, working with marketers and like strategizing around, like, how can we build something for you that, like, makes your life easier and understand in the context of marketers, I feel like that's that's like a perfect rule for a marketer. And like, you assign an engineer to do that. And, like, all right, well, I have to, like, spend a year learning what the hell a marketer does, yeah, and what their pain points are. So yeah, I really like your point.

Ashleigh Johnson  31:51  
I think it also goes back to what we talked about, um, expanding that knowledge. Right before this, I had no knowledge of coding or how integrations work within Tools, but having that experience now, of having being able to expand my skill set, there it has. It's been a good thing. And so I wouldn't necessarily say, and thinking about two integrations, it's not that complicated. Once you actually know what you're doing, right? It's not something that is engineering is always needed for. And so I do think a marketer going back, a marketer can be technical. An engineer can't necessarily be strategic.

Jon Taylor  32:40  
Speaking about that strategic piece of babies switching gears a tiny bit. I love talking about MQLs as a topic we've talked about on the show. Actually, quite some time ago, I used to be in marketing operations, no longer there. I used to have MQL targets that I loved and hated at the same time, but in my head, like the idea of an MQL is this like lead that marketing thinks is ready, and everything else underneath of that, lead scoring, AI lead scoring, lead ratings, lead qualification, like it is really just at that level. But as we want to scale this, like putting in lead scoring is like a super modern approach to this. I know you have some experience in this area. I want to talk to you a little bit about how you scale the judgment call when we're talking about the strategy of, like, a martech human that's required to kind of make these decisions. But like, how do you make the scale that judgment call in a system like lead scoring, and how do you make sales happy while building a robust and scalable lead scoring system that can handle high volumes and keep everybody happy.

Ashleigh Johnson  33:42  
Something I learned is not everyone's gonna be happy. You're always gonna have that one seller that is complaining about what I would deem a good quality lady coming through saying that it's not a quality right? And so during my time at trend in cornerstone, I was able to work a little bit with our lead scoring models and revamping them. And for me, it's very much multi touch attribution. That is, I'm a firm believer in that, but it's quality multi touch, right? It's not having, Oh, someone put the link in the email that should not attribute to anything. For me, that is just junk. But you have someone that attends a webinar and then they do something else, like download a couple white papers that stacked on top of each other, that would equal, for me, a good solid and create MQL. But when you start to have conversations about, can we just have this click, or can we have someone that visit a website? Can that be stacked on top to eventually equal MQL, that's where I can see sales being frustrated about this lead, not really taking an actionable step to be qualified. And so I do think we just need to keep in mind like what is deemed action. Of all, everyone is going to have their own opinions there, but at the end of the day, it needs to be quality actions, and not just someone browsing a website, you know, a few days in a row. And that's that,

Philippe Gamache  35:13  
yeah, I think that's a really insightful take there. It's, it's close between like, MQLs and SQL in the debate around that and like when we ask folks their thoughts on on attribution and multi touch attributions, I'm curious to ask you about attribution. It's, uh, it's, it's, it's very polarizing topic. I feel like we've chatted with folks on the show that are not anti attribution, but almost like they, some of them don't even use Google Analytics. Like they don't even care about multi Dutch attribution. They focus on quality content, quality efforts. We know this is working because we're looking at the revenue chart, and that's going up. So we'll just keep doing what we're doing, like we've chatted with Ahrefs and Wistia and like, they don't care about attribution. But then the flip side is a lot of, like, Technical Marketing ops folks live in this multi touch attribution world. They know that it's not perfect, and, like, not all the data is 100% accurate because you can't track everything. But like, it's better than nothing, and it's better than guessing. And they spend an arm and a leg and trying to figure out this world, and they have multi models in there. So what's what's your take on this? Like, do you think the quest for perfect attribution can lead smart marketers to do dumb things? What? What do you think?

Ashleigh Johnson  36:37  
Yes, what I guess, who is defining what perfect attribution is, right? Like, everyone has their own opinion of what that looks like. And so when you start to hone in on like elite taking these little, tiny steps that ultimately mean nothing, you're not getting anything of quality in return. And so, like I said, I'm a huge opponent of multi touch. Like there's always so much you can go into Weave with it before you start. I don't say that we're dumb, but since you said it before you start to do something, let me

Jon Taylor  37:20  
switch gears here a little bit. I want to talk a little bit about field marketing teams. This is something I don't have a lot of experience directly with, but I've always been interested. I have a lot of friends and enterprise marketing teams and and larger marketing orgs from from my discussions with them. Is one of the challenges of working with the field marketing teams is that we have this, like distributed, almost chaotic environment, where field marketing teams are out there, they're getting results and they're doing things on the ground, and they want results, and they want them all yesterday. Whereas a lot of marketing ops folks and certainly the folks that we talk to on this podcast, they like an ordered, defined universe where everything works well together, like these things are diametrically opposed to each other, but increasingly and with, you know, with different Martex tools coming out, self serve martech tools and so on, we're seeing this kind of, I don't know, some of the people I talked to were talking about this trend towards having these tools to kind of manage the Field Marketing ops. You want to talk a little bit about your experience here, and kind of, I don't know, just for my own edification, yeah.

Ashleigh Johnson  38:27  
So I worked very, very closely with boat marketing at Trin and cornerstone. Trin was also a unique situation in which mops and US Thought Marketing sat in the same exact team. And so they were, I mean, they were my clients, day in and day out, one of my favorite things that are rolled out during my time at Chen. What trend was that process that field marketers use to allow them to self service? Before this process was rolled out, I had to go in and build everything from scratch in our automation platform. And that's very hard to do in a very efficient manner, where you're working with 2015, 20, full markers who all need something, and to them it's very, very urgent, even though it's not. And so I was part of a team in which we first thing we did with we set up templates within our automation platform. Right these program templates allow the gold marketer to easily go in and clone based on what the need was, whether they were setting up an in person event, a virtual event, they would then go in and fill out tokens, and these tokens populated all their copy within their email. So like, easily, Date Time, your description, etc. Once that's set up, I would then go in and add creative. So talking about a very mostly faceted job at trend, I actually had to create the creative. So I was in Photoshop making banners, all that. Sounds before finalizing. And so a part of that was just enabling them, you know, there's a lot of training that took place within our automation platform so that they can go in and start to take the lead and create things themselves, without having themselves, without having to wait on me to, you know, eventually get to it when I can. And so something I've learned over the years is templatization, that is, like one of my favorite words, and something that has carried over with me through each company, making templates, no matter what tour using, whether it's your automation platform, whether it is a webinar platform, just making it as streamlined and efficient as possible. That way, whenever these build teams are coming in or wherever previous somebody's full markers were coming in, and they can easily clone populate you have a final QA, and then it's delivered. First is waiting on a technologist to come in and build from start to finish.

Philippe Gamache  41:04  
Yeah, great, great advice. I feel like there's probably more common in startup teams, marketing ops folks who are also jumping into Photoshop and helping with design there. But yeah, I feel like a lot of us have been there thankfully now Canva and these, like image generators and mid journey and Dolly are making things a bit easier. We're definitely having fun with it on the podcast here. So yeah, I really appreciate your your answer there, Ashley, this is flown by. We're already at the top of the hour, so we have one last question for you. We asked this to all of our guests. We know that you're a marketing technologist, but on top of that, you're a member of the stem Advisory Committee for Girl Scouts of Northeast Texas. You're also an active member of the Dallas Fort Worth alliance of technology and women and an active member of a fitness Ambassador Association. You've got a lot going on clearly, like I said, discussion, we ask everyone on the show, like, how do you remain happy and successful in your career with everything you've got going on? How do you find balance between all those things?

Ashleigh Johnson  42:08  
So one of the things I love about Microsoft being a West Coast company and I am social time. I bet I have my mornings to myself, and so I actually make time for the gym. Right time to come back. You know, get ready for the day. It's about 930 where I'm logging on, but it's still like I'm not having to rush into meetings, right? Because it's still 630 West Coast time. So making, just making sure that more my mornings are to myself, especially Monday through Friday. That's very, very essential, because if not, I will be going into the work day just a very non private person. And then on top of that, I am an avid traveler. I love to experience and explore the world. I am that friend like the moment I start to feel burnout or I'm overworked, I'm instantly looking for a flight deal somewhere. So just making sure that I am taking time away. I try to take two, like, very large international trips a year, and then outside of that, just explore the US, whether it is going to a music festival, going to a new city, going to visit friends in other cities, it's very that, honestly, it keeps me sane.

Philippe Gamache  43:21  
I love that great answer. I've got a lot of friends that are just like, yeah. Second I'm feeling overstressed, I'm just like, on Google Flights or on on a site looking for my next vacation. It's the nice little something to look forward to, yes,

Ashleigh Johnson  43:36  
yes. Like, why not that they had a round trip flight to Barcelona. You know this works. Have been my time frame. Let's do it. Yeah,

Philippe Gamache  43:43  
there's worse things to look forward to in life. So yeah, really great answer. Appreciate your time, Ashley, it's a super fun conversation. Thank you so much for being here and sharing your wisdom.

Ashleigh Johnson  43:54  
Thank y'all, thank y'all for having me.

Philippe Gamache  44:02  
You music folks, thank you so much for listening this far. We really appreciate you being here. I 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 martech.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 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. You.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai