People like to criticize the northwest whenever we get any amount of snow accumulation. We rarely see more than 2-3″ of snow, and yet it tends to shut cities down for days when it happens.

Why?

While the northwest doesn’t often see the volume of snow as places like Minneapolis, Chicago, or Boston, it’s dealing with two factors that multiply the danger of a couple inches of snow.

Our roads are usually above freezing, so the snow that does stick melts to slush, and then freezes overnight. Roads turn into literal sheets of ice. Combine that with hills, and you start to see why 2″ of snow in the northwest is like 2′ elsewhere.

Usually one number doesn’t tell the whole story.

When marketing teams find out sales teams have been writing and been sending out their own email marketing, it’s usually followed by groans of despair.

“Is it full of a bunch of typos?”

“I bet they used our brand in the incorrect possessive tense.”

“Did they just share a product update that’s not ready for prime time?”

Marketing will then dictate that all email must be created or approved by marketing first. Sounds straightforward on paper, and maybe it works for awhile. But invariably marketing teams get busy, no one wants to do it, yet sales’ need for new content continues. And there’s another problem that emerges too.

“These marketing emails are too polished. They don’t sound like me”

Polished emails can work fine when they’re coming in an HTML template and from a marketing email alias, but they look and feel awkward when you try to shoehorn that same approach into what is meant to be a personalized, 1:1 email.

If you’re not going to take the time to write templates one-to-one, then the middle ground I’ve found works is to build templates with personalized sections. Perhaps the first few sentences are customized to the individual lead, while the remainder of the message is stock content. Not as nice as a handwritten letter, but certainly more scalable.

The Basecamp guys have this concept of “Don’t scar on the first cut”. Don’t build policy because of one minor issue. Just because one sales email is a little rough around the edges doesn’t mean marketing needs to completely turn the process upside down.

I keep seeing articles highlighting the talent gap in marketing ops and with specific marketing automation tools. These tools are mostly walled gardens, where you really only get access to them if you’re a paying customer. Now with more companies demanding qualified talent, it’s a bit of a catch-22 for those looking to break into a marketing ops career.

Marketo made a few public shows of effort to start university outreach programs and partnerships with marketing departments. But they never seemed to go anywhere with the idea. It always felt like a PR puff piece, but not a substantial effort to teach hireable skills to the next wave of marketers.

It’s even more frustrating when you talk to universities, most who completely lack the resources and faculty expertise to keep up with pace of change in this space.

There’s tremendous opportunity to create an educational sector of marketing technology. Perhaps it’s led by the vendors themselves, or through a separate party. And I think it could succeed in both private bootcamp-style courses or as part of university marketing curriculum. Martech is on its way to becoming a mainstream profession, but with that journey comes a responsibility to educate the next generation.

I often hear teams complain about their current technology investments, wishing they were using tools better suited for their business, but trapped in long term contracts. They say they’re too invested to change at this point. Or that they’ll make a change once their contract is up.

But really this is just a game of weighing two different kinds of cost.

Long term contracts are a sunk cost. The commitment you made last year, or the year before that is long decided on. You can’t go back and change it. And any rational decision you make moving forward must be made independent of your past decisions.

So, if the thousands we spent last year are in no way associated with the thousands we want to spend this year, then the question shifts to one of budget. Who wants to pay for two redundant tools at once? That’s where the second type of cost, opportunity cost, comes in. You can view a new $50,000 or $500,000 contract as unnecessary, redundant spend, or flip it on it’s head. What are you losing out on by not making that investment, and sticking with the current solution? Time? Efficiency? Talent?

I imagine most marketing ops pros I know would attest that one of the most frustrating aspects of starting a new role is the sheer lack of documentation on systems and processes.

But it should be no surprise why documentation is overlooked:

1. When you’re a small marketing ops team, maybe just a team of one, it’s hard to imagine a need for anyone else caring about it.
2. “Documentation” evokes imagery of long, complicated process documents. Not exactly fun material to create (or consume).

But documentation can be a lot easier when you think of it differently. Sometimes documentation is the more in-depth guides, ideally on a shared intranet site or wiki rather than locked away in some unfortunately named word document gathering dust on a shared drive. But it’s also as simple as quick tooltips within the apps you’re using.

Take salesforce reports for instance – I’d be willing to bet you’ve got reports in there that appear important, but no one understands. Even a simple bit of flavor text in the description is enough to remind someone (including the creator) what the report is, and why it exists. Adding that description shows this is an important element – and it takes almost no time to create. In fact, often the best documentation is the stuff that is created at the same time as the work it relates to. When you treat documentation like a separate project, it’ll likely never get done. But when you document as you build a new system or process, it becomes as much a tool for others as it is for yourself.

I can always tell that a new altMBA cohort is about to start, because I start getting daily emails from Medium letting me know of all the views of my altMBA posts.

I didn’t know it when I wrote them, but these posts have turned into some of the most evergreen content I’ve ever written. The same can be said for my early Marketo Protips articles on this site and the Marketo Community. They’re still relevant-ish today, enough to draw a measurable audience every week.

But this is rare. Most of the posts I’ve made over the last 3 months of writing here daily are barely a blip on my Google Analytics content reports. Partly that’s because of lack of promotion, but mostly it’s because they just aren’t that good yet. So, the secret to producing writing that resonates is to simply write more often. As Seth Godin says, “The problem is that you can’t have good ideas unless you’re willing to generate a lot of bad ones.”

I started using Marketo back in 2010, before the age of programs. I used to describe those days as ones where everything had to be built backwards. You couldn’t build the campaign until you built the landing page. You couldn’t build the landing page until you built the form. You couldn’t build the form until you had all your fields set up.

You had to start from the end of the process and work your way backwards. And every element was located in a separate area of the system. It was a pain to manage, and hard for anyone besides yourself to figure out how all the elements came together.

Eloqua feels a bit like those old Marketo days. You can still get the same stuff done in Eloqua, but it certainly won’t be as quick or straightforward as Marketo. You can see efforts the Eloqua team has taken to make the tool more approachable. The simple email send campaigns. The program canvas builder. But I fear much of it is still a bit obtuse to the average marketing ops user, not to mention a non-technical marketer. Maybe I’m just biased from nearly a decade using Marketo.

When snow accumulates on a rooftop, it builds up in huge, thick piles. If it snows enough, it makes the roof start to look comically large. But at some point, the pile can’t get any bigger. And just a bit more snow is all it takes to cause the whole sheet to fall off the roof at once.

Overwork is a bit like this. We add more to our plates little by little – in such small increments that we barely notice a change. But suddenly we’ve got way too much. One minute we’ve got things handled, and the next, it’s too much to bear.

Recognize there’s a limit to the size of the pile – and make sure what you’re adding to it is worthwhile.

Now might not be the time to read that meaty 5,000 word op-ed, but it sure sounds like an interesting read. You can of course save this to your bookmarks, or with a purpose built “read it later” app like Instapaper or Pocket.

But then something weird happens. Just adding the article to your bookmark list yields a similar level of satisfaction to reading it. In other words – we take satisfaction in simply saying “I plan to read this”.

Of course, the work of reading the article remains. We’ve still got work to do, and yet we’ve already got a reward. I think this is why most people’s reading lists tend to pile up and gather dust, rather than being a waiting room.

There’s two paths to solving this. If the article you’ve discovered is directly pertinent to the work you’re doing today – it’s probably best to read it in the moment, when the context will help the most. For everything else – it’s not enough to simply click “read it later” – you’ve got to plan when you’ll read it. Block time in your calendar. Condition yourself to seek your reading list over your social media feeds in times of boredom. Do what it takes, and stop confusing intention with action.

One of the biggest gripes I hear from new users of marketing automation systems is how hard it is to navigate their bizarre, counterintuitive interfaces. How even simple tasks are made more complicated or not even possible at all.

It’s fair criticism, especially when you look at polished, intuitive interfaces like Mailchimp that just…work. Why the big marketing automation vendors don’t copy more of what the downmarket vendors like Mailchimp are doing is beyond me. There’s already a massive talent shortage in this space, and it isn’t helped by making the profession inaccessible because of obtuse, poor UX tools.

Advanced users ought to value simple UX more too – it means easier training for non-technical users, and time saved by a faster ramp up on a new system or environment. Of the top of my head, here are just a few ideas to start copying:

1. Pre-built, plug and play GDPR and CASL compliance tools
2. Auto-tagging of in-email URLs
3. An intuitive, snappy content editor
4. Built in feedback management for test emails
5. Dashboards focused on simple, immediately useful metrics (and saving the rest for a double click report)