I think a lot about durability in the systems I maintain these days. Durability, to me, means maintaining continued functioning even in non-ideal or unexpected situations.

Durability is building around the increasingly common bot clicks on email links when designing scoring or activity alerts. Should we lower the weight of email engagement in our models? Is a click really what should dictate a nurture stream transition anymore?

Durability is accounting for adblock users when building heavily tracked digital experiences. What happens when none of our tracking works? Does the user still get where they need to go? Do we have a way to bucket that activity separately?

An ops friend of mine told me over coffee recently how he and his team like to turn requests for campaigns or system changes into literal storytelling. Where they walk through what should and what’s expected by the user, as a way of identifying the “What if’s” lurking behind a seemingly simple request. Usually issues arise when we only think about a problem from one angle – our own. Stepping into the shoes of the customer often reveals a whole other world of considerations. And designing for those is how you get to durability.

This discussion over whether to allow public email domains (like gmail, yahoo, etc) on forms is worth a read. And it got me thinking about something my friend Glen wrote about “Your Problem vs my Problem”.

Companies make decisions to gate off public domains for a few reasons. But the ones I’m most familiar with are:

• It’s too hard for sales to make contact with a public domain
• We can’t reliably enrich and route records who don’t give us a business address
• Leads who use public email domains are junk

The decision to validate against these public domains is easy when armed with the arguments above. And implementing it is even easier with most form tech. But in solving your problem, you make it someone else’s problem (that of the user’s).

If I’m interested in your asset, but don’t necessarily want to be immediately hounded by your sales team, I may just use a public email address. It’s not that I’m not interested in your product or offer. It’s that I want to engage on my own terms. Can you blame most users for this behavior, when the best practice culture in marketing has made pretty much any digital B2B interaction pretty darn predictable?

Your sales team may be right – I probably won’t be super responsive to their attempts to schedule a meeting with me. And yeah, your enrichment probably won’t be as effective. But I am still a real, engaged name in your system. I may just not be as ready to go down your strictly defined funnel as you’d like me to be.

The point is – there’s still value to allowing public domain users through the content gate. Most of all, recognize by solving what you view to be a problem, you are then creating a new problem for your users. You can make that tradeoff, but just recognize that it is, in fact, a trade off.

A good support team will try and resolve an open issue as quickly as possible, both to solve the issue for the customer, but also to meet their own KPIs. Most of the time, aligning support engineers to velocity of case resolution drives good behavior, and makes customers happy.

But when the case doesn’t have a totally clear answer, the habit is still to close early and often. If I’m in the customer’s shoes in this situation, the support rep’s eagerness to close out my case comes off as flippant. It feels like they’re passing the buck.

Anyone in a position of managing support tickets should build considerations for these cases where speedy resolution isn’t an option. Ask whether your KPIs are in pursuit of the interests of your customer or your company.

It’s conference season for marketing ops, and the only question I seem to be getting asked by vendors and colleagues is: “Are you going to conference XYZ?”

I think this is my off year. At least for the big shows. I’m not as closely tied to Marketo as I once was, and not nearly invested enough in Eloqua for a trip to their conference to be worthwhile. Instead, I think this year is a chance to explore the smaller shows, or simply skip conference life entirely this year.

Especially with the Marketo summit being absorbed into the greater Adobe conference, I think there’s more opportunity than ever for a smaller MOPS and martech practitioner focused show. Those in-the-weeds war story sessions are what most practitioners register to see, yet are often lost in a sea of product and sales pitches veiled as case studies.

It would be great to see someone really lean into that sort of content. I know I’d attend.

When a company hosts their first successful customer conference, it’s common to see them decide to take things on the road with regional roadshows under the same banner and concept. And it’s common to see these roadshows fail.

It’s hard to translate the magic of a big conference with customer from around the world to a one-day event in local markets.

Part of it is because the very fact that it’s a “roadshow” indicates this is the pared down, simplified experience. It’s a signal that says: “This isn’t where a big announcement is going to happen.”

Also working against most companies is the fact that they treat these roadshows with too heavy of a sales focus. The expectations are always too high on the revenue goals, often even more lopsided than the big event they were spawned from. The cards are just too stacked against the roadshow for it to have much chance of succeeding.

There’s two areas to consider in solving this disconnect:

Stop trying to connect the roadshow to the bigger event. Instead make them something new and unique. And perhaps it’s a simpler, smaller event than you realize. Even a casual dinner or roundtable discussion with customers and key company leaders is likely worth as much goodwill as a big, high production value event.

And stop treating your own customer events as a lead retrieval exercise. Sales will result from these over time, but these events should be viewed first as branding and relationship building exercise, and demand gen second.

When people outside the profession talk about data science and analysis, they are often imagining BI and data visualization. It’s a question of Tableau vs PowerBi vs Domo vs Birst vs whatever else.

And data viz is important in conveying meaning to business users. But I think we jump way too quickly to tech shopping for BI tools without laying the proper data warehousing foundations. The popular BI tools try to do an end-round to this issue by allowing direct connection to data sources, and serving as surrogate data warehousing and ETL tools. This is an okay intermediate step, but the true goal should be a single source of truth – not in terms of report or chart, but in terms of data sources. And that is best accomplished with a singular data platform – be it warehouse or lake that these BI tools sit on top of.

Some of the biggest sources of misalignment across teams comes from inconsistent use of data across the org. Your numbers don’t match mine. By using managed, singular data sources of truth for things like bookings, pipeline, and accounts, you immediately establish more credibility with your analysis. Because your numbers don’t feel pulled out of thin air.

I think the reason most companies don’t do this is because it requires cross team collaboration, and a strong business systems team owner coordinating it all. It’s also because “data warehouse” is such a scary term to most business users, who’d be just as happy running salesforce reports than dip a toe into a more complicated, but far more powerful solution.

This shift to embracing singular data sources across the organization is challenging because it’s so rarely seen executed well, and I think many are skeptical investing more time into what they view as a pipe dream. Having worked in orgs with excellent data platforms, and others without a clue, I understand the friction to get those in the second group to the first. But know it is possible. You’ve just got to be willing to tackle the hard part of cross team collaboration to make it happen.

I was talking with a coworker the other day about methods of productivity. His solution is to block time on his calendar for specific tasks. It’s similar to Tomasz Tunguz’s approach.

The concept seems pretty smart on paper. We’re constantly dealing with overly ambitious task lists, and the effort to add one more item to the list isn’t an equivalent trade for the time required to do the work. There are not enough hours in the day to complete most task lists, and we rarely account for the other big time suck—meetings—in calculating what we can do on a given day or week.

But it’s an idea worth revisiting, because, to quote Tomasz, “To do lists fail because the user’s good intention and optimistic aspirations go unchecked. For the software, the marginal cost to add a new task is zero. For me, it’s a quarter of an hour or more. Managing tasks by calendar is the only productivity hack that recognizes this reality.”

But in practice, I just haven’t quite nailed it yet. Maybe it’s building in more padding for each task than I think I’ll need. Or leaving some buffer room in the day for when things inevitably shift. Or only picking a few choice priorities to give the time block treatment. But I’m going to try all the angles to see what sticks.

You can now learn a new language or technical skill from dozens of sites online, or in-person courses. If you’re anything like me, you idealize yourself completing all of those courses and expanding your knowledge. But the truth is that the majority of those courses we never complete, let alone start.

The problem is accountability. When we can drop in and drop out of any course, when we know the knowledge will always be there if and when we need it, when there’s no penalty for skipping a day of class – the impetus is gone to expend much effort to learn today.

That’s why the programs with strong adoption establish some element of accountability to drive the right behavior. The altMBA does it by creating social pressure to show up and contribute each week. Other institutions do it by establishing ranking and grades to create the idea that you’re working towards something. Either can work, though I quite like the altMBA approach, because it turns out, social pressure is one of the best motivators.

If you want to get into homebrewing your own beer, know this: 80% of the time spent is cleaning. People fall in love with the idea of designing a recipe, throwing in the ingredients, stirring the pot, watching the airlock bubble in the fermentation tank. And that is all fun. But to make a drinkable beer, sanitation is essential at every step of the process, and it’s far from fun.

But most work worth doing is a bit like this. There’s the glamorous bits we idolize. And then the rest of it. The tasks we forget about, but actually account for the majority of the time spent. For a consultant it’s the administrative tasks and legal work. For a marketing leader it’s the meetings and coordination emails.

When you’re daydreaming about another career or opportunity, you’re probably focusing in on the 20% of the work that’s visible and fun. But just to make a fair comparison, don’t forget about the other 80%.

I keep myself on the hook every day for writing here. It’s not always easy – it’s often hard to summon the focus required to put even a short few words together. The trick I’ve found is to sticking with this for the last four months is to “park on an incline” each day. That is, to set myself up for success by storing some momentum ahead of time.

I do this here by writing with at least a one-day backlog. So what I write today is actually what I wrote yesterday. Each day is then just a matter of polishing what I already started, and drafting the next day’s post.

Parking on an incline means anticipating and preparing for future challenges. I know if I skip this step, I’ll regret it later, because there’s no slack. No room for error. Current me is creating a problem for future me.

Most of the habits we want to form are built from this loop of anticipation and preparation for future outcomes. What separates the habits we keep from the ones we drop is how well we can keep this loop going. And parking on an incline is just a tool to maintain that momentum.