Seth Godin’s got a great podcast episode on pizza. He talks about the endless pizza options across this country. And yet most of it is terrible. Because pizza is made around convenience. Convenience for the customer, and convenience for the person making it. Easier ingredients. Shortcuts in the kitchen.

But convenience, for all its merit, tends to be the antithesis of quality (at least in this example). And you see a similar tradeoff where marketers are increasingly pursuing personalization, yet are trying to do it at scales never achieved before. At times it feels impossible. Combine that with the fervor around ABM, a practice entirely built around good targeting and personalization. And yet one of the most common questions about ABM is about how to scale.

And I’m not sure you can, past a certain point. Because as you scale, you start to trade quality for convenience. Convenience for the marketer’s time. Convenience for the budget that can only stretch a dollar so far. All at the expense of the quality the end user sees. Maybe not in terms of the physical paper quality of the direct mail piece they’re sent, or the technology used to sequence and orchestrate activity across sales and marketing. Instead, it’s the quality of a precisely researched and targeted audience. Of a truly tailored, personal experience.

This of course is a spectrum to play on – we can’t be all quality and no convenience. But I think we default too quickly to prioritizing the latter, and then wonder why the outcomes we seek aren’t materializing.

Just like good pizza takes time and ingredients to get right, we should consider the same in our marketing efforts.

If you’re the data expert on the team, it’s tempting to be the gatekeeper for all the data and insights. After all, it’s hard and time consuming—especially on a smaller team—to try and make experts out of everyone.

But as the organization grows, the demands for data and the insights it provides will grow, and it’s not likely the analytics-savvy staff will growing at the same pace. So you’ve got to find another path. And I’d argue, much like marketing operations roles that serve more as enablers than executors, a strong analytics manager ought to focus more of their time on building the processes and training, not just reports. The goal of the analytics department should be in decentralizing the majority of analytics needs. Breaking down the walls and democratizing the data.

It’s harder this way at first – and will feel like pulling teeth, especially for team members for whom analysis and reporting tools don’t come as easily. But over time, doing this offloads the everyday analysis needs and directly empowers the people who need it. And it frees up your analytics team to focus on solving the bigger data challenges, or uncovering new opportunities no one even thought to ask about before.

I recently got a new mouse for my home office, the Logitech MX Master 2S. And I think it’s the best mouse I’ve ever owned. The ergonomics are just perfect. It can hop between devices easily. It has this amazing scroll wheel that I can’t believe hasn’t been ripped off by every other mouse maker. It’s the perfect tool.

It’s always amazing to me how much using the right tools can make a world of difference to how I get work done. Whether it’s a mouse, or a favorite pen, or the right applications. When we use the right toolset for years, we take it for granted. But the moment we’re without our needed tools, we immediately notice their absence. And if we change too many things at once, it’s like our whole system is turned upside down.

These are dependencies in your work – and it’s worth clearly identifying where those dependencies lie. Is it in the technology you use in your job? The physical tools you need? The environments you like to work in? You should know where you’re most vulnerable to change. And where possible, figure out a back up plan. Try out the alternatives. Consider the what-if scenario that everything does change. How do you keep moving forward?

You can still have your favorite tools. Just recognize nothing is permanent.

The holy grail for many marketers is being able to show, closed loop ROI on their programs. To be able to say with confidence – if we spend $1 here, we’ll get $2 there.

And once you’re there, it’s tempting to boil things down into this black and white story. Focus on the efforts that double your dollars. With the goal of finding all those channels that make the numbers work, and keeping them running.

Of course, most of us are dealing with finite budgets and finite time. There’s only so many areas we can invest, and some of those areas can hit diminishing returns the more money we throw at them. All of a sudden, $1 only buys you $1.50. or $1.10.

This is all ignoring the fact that there are efforts out there that have the potential to 3x or 4x your investment (or much more). It might be a new channel altogether, or it’s a different way of executing what you’re already doing. Better targeting, or perhaps better personalization.

It’s easy to draw an analogy between a factory assembly line and the allocation of marketing spend. That it’s about optimizing one area, and then moving on to the next. But the reality is that every time you think something is perfectly optimized, the game has changed on you. There’s new competition, or a new channel dynamic. Or your efforts are just getting stale.

Optimizing marketing spend and return is a constant game of finding new angles and retesting and rethinking what worked in the past. There’s no “done” in this game, and the sooner we recognize this, the sooner we can get back to work.

I’ve been writing here every weekday for months, and because of that frequency, the days blur together. I don’t often recall well what I wrote a week ago. Let alone a day or two ago. Part of that is because writing here is a morning ritual that is terminated by starting my workday. I step out of one state of mind into another. I think it’s the same reason why we tend to forget something we needed to do the moment we walk out the front door. It’s like a light switches off.

Because I don’t often remember my past posts in detail, I sometimes wonder if I am retreading stale territory. And I probably am. I’m not sure it would be possible for me to be completely unique ever day. But I suppose the point of this process is not to build a library of unique viewpoints. Instead it’s an evolution where I can return to ideas to form them further, post by post.

We recently watched two completely different climbing documentaries: The Dawn Wall and Free Solo. The former is a story of perseverance and determination. It’s the story of how two guys had a dream, one everyone called them crazy to pursue, a reality.

The latter tells the same lesson, but is shadowed by the fact that the dream is not just crazy, it’s downright unsafe.

Of course, the end result is the same for both films- the protagonists achieve their goals, complete with triumphant guitar riffs. But for me anyway, Free Solo is a lot less relatable, and a lot less justified. As we watched, my wife and I were constantly yelling at the TV and the idiocy and recklessness of Alex Honnold.

There’s a difference between crazy and unsafe. You have to be a little crazy to pursue some goals in work and life. But to do so at the expense of your health, well-being, or that of others is where I draw the line. Goal setting is really about recognizing this boundary. And it’s probably a little different for everyone.

There’s nothing wrong with setting a big, crazy goal to pursue. Just learn to recognize when you’ve crossed over from ambition into recklessness.

One of my friends was interviewing for a big job recently – and the first round of interviews went well. Except, the feedback was that he didn’t quite look like VP material. They were referring to how he dressed. To be fair, he’s not a poorly dressed guy. But he didn’t quite match the straight-laced look of the other executives at the company.

He wasn’t out of the race, but it was a mark against him. He had another round of interviews, and had to make a decision – lean into his style, or conform to theirs? It was a crisis of authenticity vs the social pressure of fitting in.

My friend ended up taking the gamble of sticking to his style, and he got the job anyway. It’d be easy to say that the lesson here is to just “be yourself”, but of course we all know this could just as easily have gone sideways for him. In fact, I bet most of us know someone in a similar situation where things didn’t quite work out so well.

To navigate this sort of situation, you’ve got to read the room, and know when to stand your ground and when to concede. And the unfortunate news for those hoping for a rule of thumb is that this awareness only comes with lessons from practice and learning from failure.

I’m a big spreadsheets guy. Excel and Google Sheets are my go-to applications for some quick number crunching. But I’ll admit, I’m not super organized in these. Usually it’s a dataset and a pivot table or two.

Often when I’m away from the data for a couple of days, I return to a completely incomprehensible spreadsheet.

But it’s even worse with other people’s spreadsheets. Have you ever noticed that someone else’s spreadsheet rarely makes much sense to you?

The problem I think has to do with how open-ended spreadsheets can be. We love spreadsheets because they are so flexible for what we want to do. But because there aren’t many guardrails, it’s hard for anyone but ourselves really make sense of them.

It’s be like designing and building a home without and preconceived design standards or codes to follow. Sure you may end up with a home perfectly designed for yourself, but good luck selling it to anyone else. Or even enticing someone to come visit.

To be fair, I don’t think the solution is to put more guardrails up – spreadsheets are useful precisely because they are the digital equivalent of a piece of scratch paper. A yellow legal pad. Instead of handicapping them, we should instead know where they end, and where a more prepared, structured system is needed. A data warehouse, a BI system.

If you’re testing at theory or hashing out an idea, a spreadsheet is fine. But if it needs to be shared, it’s time to put thought into presentation and usability, and to do so, get out of the spreadsheet.

I used to want to be an engineer, but found I just wasn’t strong enough in math to keep up. So I switched to business, jokingly because I though I was a bit better at math than the average student there. I figured it’d be an easier path.

Of course I never thought math classes I took in high school and college would ever be something I’d use much in the real world, even in business. That’s always the joke right?

But as I found my way into digital marketing and then marketing ops, I suddenly found all those math skills start coming in handy again. It starts small. A simple conversion rate calculation. But then I was doing survey analysis, or forecasting our lead & opportunity trends.

This kind of stuff scares off students. It scares off most adults too. People hear math and assume it means calculus. And yeah, sometimes there are areas where calculus could be used (though I’ve never needed it). Really the majority of it is about basic arithmetic and maybe a bit of algebra.

Sure, the tools do most of the math for you. But where it comes in handy, and why I like to test for math skills, is in verifying the results. In understanding what’s going on behind the numbers. In showing the work. I am always amazed at how easy it is to take a number at face value, and to later find out it’s not what you thought it meant.

The type of people I like to work with are willing to question those assumptions, and do the math themselves to confirm. There’s a general shortage of proficient marketing ops talent, but an even smaller subset of talent that really embraces the math. If you want to stand out, that’s a decent place to start.

When you build process for others, and especially when that involves a service level agreement (SLA) from others – recognize that this is a two sided arrangement.

In exchange for getting your requests in the right fashion, you have to meet your requestors halfway with communication and clear expectation of delivery. Recognize the reason why process exists in the first place – to establish predictability. If you do not reliably honor due dates or communication in that process, don’t be surprised if people decide to take a shortcut to bypass your process.

If you are working to get people to submit requests a certain way, make sure that request queue is not a black hole. Establish clear expectations on what happens after a request is submitted. Give people visibility to what’s in queue. Communicate regularly on status updates.

Anyone can build a request form to dump people’s requests in a list they can look at someday. But it takes thought and planning to get people to keep following that process.