We moved into our house nearly four years ago, and I still don’t know the names of my neighbors. I didn’t intend this – but in the first few weeks of moving in, the time to orient myself in the neighborhood never came. And now it’s a little too late to try and introduce myself to the neighbors.

When you start a new job or project, there’s so much to learn initially, but the drive is high to make an impact and contribute early. Something’s got to give, and often it’s the relationship building with the stakeholders that matter on the team. Or maybe it’s learning the lingo of the organization.

Putting forth effort to learn won’t pay off early, but it will pay off eventually.

One of the most valuable, yet underrated skills in technical marketers is their ability to relate complex ideas to non-technical audiences. It’s nice to design a brilliant lead nurture program, but you also must:

a. Document it in a way that your work can be maintained and built on once you’re gone (or get hit by a bus)

b. Educate the rest of the organization on the material value of your work (in efficiency, revenue, etc.)

If you skip these two steps, you might as well have not bothered building anything at all.

Clear, and thorough documentation is not most people’s idea of a raucous good time, but building systems where you’re the single point of failure is just irresponsible, and should be a red flag for any hiring manager. Increasingly I ask to see candidates’ examples of documentation to test for this. How they explain themselves on paper says a lot about their thought process and ability to articulate ideas clearly.

To test for a candidate’s ability to educate, I ask for them to give a presentation on a topic they’re familiar with. Explain why you made the decisions you did. What were the outcomes? How did you know what you did worked?

Interviews only show one dimension. You’ve got to test for the rest.

In my early days of using marketing automation, I kept hearing Eloqua had deeper functionality than Marketo. But I had no firsthand experience until now. And as I now use Eloqua on a daily basis, I think the stories are only half true.

Take lead scoring for instance. In Marketo, you can build whatever you want in terms of scoring with a bunch of smart campaigns. And it’ll work. But if you want to have separate behavioral and fit scores AND a total score, you’ll need to duplicate your logic for every rule to speak to two fields. And if you ever change your scoring model, you’ll have to do a lot of leg work to rescore your existing leads (or just not even bother).

In Eloqua, scoring is a piece of dedicated functionality, that automatically runs on both behavioral and fit dimensions. If you want to change your model, you can, in one place, and it will automatically rescore all your leads.

Eloqua tends to specialize on use cases, while Marketo takes a more sandbox approach. There are pros to each, but the tradeoff I’ve found with Eloqua is it feels terribly disconnected and inconsistent across systems. There’s areas of the system that look like they were released in 1995, speaking to other functionality that feels more modern.

I used to like poking fun at Marketo when they’d do some big UI overhaul, focusing on aesthetics over functionality. But there’s something to be said about a cohesive experience across the platform that is glaringly missing in Eloqua.

Eloqua has always been more function over form, but I wonder if that is enough these days, especially as Marketo has either closed the gap on features, or rendered differences irrelevant with the massive third party ecosystem of integrated apps.

What often separates a good salesperson from a bad one is follow up.

Did you actually seek out answers to the more technical questions I had on the call?

Did you share the documentation and resources I asked for?

I’m always surprised how often these steps get missed. Quality of sales interaction is a huge reflection on the customer experience. If you’re thorough with good follow through, that’s a good sign you’re a company I want to work with.

When you buy a bag of coffee at the grocery store, or the coffee shop, they always ask if you want your beans ground. It’s the default action.

Yet if you talk to any coffee snob, or the barista themselves, they’ll probably admit that this is a bad idea that leads to stale, bitter coffee. Meanwhile coffee ground right before brewing is far fresher and more flavorful.

We know this when we order a cup of coffee, but for some reason the concept doesn’t translate to the home. Maybe it’s because of the convenience. But I think it’s mostly because it’s hard to know what stale coffee tastes like if that’s the only way you know it.

If we don’t take time to notice, routine will happily keep us stuck on one track, blind to the better path right in front of us.

I often get confused looks when I describe my profession. “Marketing Operations” is a rather generic term for anyone who isn’t already exposed to it. It gets even trickier and we get more specialization within it, where one marketing ops professional may look and act completely different from another.

I like to break ops into two purposes intertwined.

1. Ownership of the technology and systems that make a modern marketing team run.
2. And the insights to know whether activities using those tools are working or treading water.

You can’t have one without the other – a great tech stack and process is a great waste of time if you can’t articulate the insights on how it is working. And we all know how far you’ll get with analyzing bad data from a shoddy system.

“It looks like we have similar connections”/ “It looks like we both work in [generic industry or job function]” = How do you do, fellow kids?

“I’d like to add you to my professional network on LinkedIn” = I cannot be bothered to put even an ounce of effort into this interaction.

There’s a seemingly infinite number of ways you can do Linkedin connection requests poorly. A big part of this, I think, is because most connections are treated pretty selfishly, framed in a way that only the requestor has something to gain.

So the answer then is to justify the value to the requested party, right? Well, sort of. I still reject plenty of sales reps trying to connect with me to suggest how they can save me thousands on paid advertising, or the recruiter who wants to tell me all about this exciting opportunity that she is not actually allowed to disclose much of at all.

The trick is timing and relevance. If you’re selling a piece of software, you’ve got to approach me at a time when I’d realistically be able to make a purchasing decision (and it’s not December, or even November). You also need to have done the research to confirm my current solution is inadequate, and have a clear proposition for why your solution is worth considering as an alternative. And you need to leverage our shared network. Mentioning how a contact I know is already using your product and loving it is a really good step towards getting a foot in the door.

This all sounds like a lot of time consuming work. And that’s the idea. In a world where we can instantly reach out to anyone on these networks, the bar has raised on what gets noticed or ignored. If you don’t put in the work to rise to the top of the inbox, you never deserved that connection anyway.

I’m surprised how often I still see low unsubscribe rates touted proudly in companies.

Don’t pat yourself of the back about your low unsubscribe rates. These days it’s easier to mute or simply filter messages than to even be bothered to click the unsubscribe link in an email.

Just because people aren’t unsubscribing doesn’t mean they’re interested in your email. You’ve got to look at rest of the data, namely click rate (though even that is tricky with bot clicks to contend with) to see how engaged (or unengaged) your audience really is.

Unsubscribe rate is a bit like online reviews – you only hear from the really negative, passionate audience. But just because the rest of the people are silent doesn’t mean you have no cause for concern.

If you were to watch my two dogs play together without any context, it would look a bit like they were fighting, trying to bite at each other’s ankles and pin the other into submission. You might even try to break them up.

But once you spend any time with them, you realize it’s just harmless play.

In the workplace, the same dynamic is at play. A coworker is overly defensive in a meeting. You can choose to interpret that behavior as being entirely about you, and attack back. Or empathize with them for a moment, and recognize they’re simply stressed about an upcoming deadline.

Chances are there’s always more to the story than at first blush.

The popular narrative on Linkedin is to only hire for passion – that any and all skills can be taught along the way. I think it’s true passion matters, but as the sole factor? Probably only in junior or entry-level jobs.

You’re not hiring someone with zero sales experience to be your next VP of enterprise sales. Organizations already know this, but it’s a prettier picture to think all companies should hire on passion alone.

If you’re a candidate, recognize that passion only takes you so far. I’ve interviewed people with all the passion in the world, but no experience in the job I was hiring for. If I was looking for someone completely new and moldable, they’d be a great fit. But if the role clearly requires some prior experience, don’t be surprised if passion alone doesn’t cut it.

If you recognize this early, find ways to relate your seemingly irrelevant experience to the job at hand. If you work in financial analysis, but want to get into marketing, explain how that background will help you bring a new perspective to the table. It’s not enough to say you’re simply interested in it. You’ve got to show how you can apply yourself as a unique resource.