What BDMs actually need to see in Salesforce
Most marketing ops teams build reports for themselves. Then they hand those reports to the sales team and wonder why the sales team doesn’t use them. The reports are technically correct. The data is clean. The visualizations are tidy. And the BDM closes the tab within a week and goes back to working off a […]
Last-touch, first-touch, multi-touch: The question to answer before you pick a model
If you spend any time reading about marketing attribution, you’ll find a lot of posts that look like decision trees. First-touch if you’re optimizing for awareness. Last-touch if you’re optimizing for conversion. Multi-touch if you’ve graduated to a more sophisticated view of the funnel. Linear, U-shaped, W-shaped, time-decay, data-driven, position-based. The posts treat the choice […]
Sync rules are contracts, not defaults
The software industry has a concept called a data contract. It comes from data engineering, and the idea is simple. When two systems exchange data, the agreement about what gets sent, in what format, with what guarantees, should be explicit and enforced. Not implicit. Not assumed. Not whatever the default in the integration tool happens […]
The three-layer documentation system for marketing ops
Most advice about documenting a marketing ops system falls into one of two buckets. The first is “use Notion.” The second is “write SOPs.” Neither is wrong, but neither is enough. If you have ever sat down to actually document a system you inherited, you know that the hard part isn’t picking a tool or […]
What inheriting an undocumented Marketing Ops system actually looks like
If you have ever taken over a marketing ops system that someone else built, you already know what I am about to describe. If you haven’t, this is the part of the job nobody warns you about, and the part that determines whether your first year goes well or badly. The system I inherited had […]
The day I learned my last-touch attribution was actually first-touch
If you run a B2B marketing team on HubSpot and Salesforce, there is a reasonable chance your last-touch attribution is not what you think it is. I learned this the hard way, in a system I had inherited, and the cause was so small and so quiet that I want to walk you through it. […]
Nobody Told Me Data Governance Was Part of My Job
I didn’t come up in marketing thinking about data governance. Nobody does. You learn HubSpot. You learn how to build a nurture sequence. You learn what an MQL is and how to argue about it with Sales. Data governance sounds like something that lives in IT, or legal, or somewhere with a lot of acronyms […]
Sales Called Our Leads Garbage. They Weren’t Wrong.
There’s a specific kind of meeting every marketing ops person dreads. Sales comes in with a spreadsheet, points at a list of MQLs, and says some version of: these aren’t real leads. I’ve been in that meeting. And the uncomfortable truth I’ve had to sit with more than once is that they had a point. […]
My CRM Had Hundreds of Properties. Half of Them Were Ghosts.
Nobody builds a messy CRM on purpose. It just kind of happens. A field gets added for a one-time campaign and never cleaned up. A workflow gets cloned because building from scratch felt unnecessary at the time. A lifecycle stage definition quietly shifts but the records sitting in that stage don’t move with it. None […]
RevOps vs. Marketing Ops: Same Thing? No.
I’ve been asked this question more times than I can count. Usually by a hiring manager. Sometimes by a Sales leader who means well. Occasionally by someone who just sat through a conference keynote where “Revenue Operations” was used to describe everything and nothing at the same time. So let me just say it: RevOps […]