In junior high I was in the concert band. I played trumpet, and I was supposed to practice at least five days a week. I was lucky if I practiced even once a week. And sure enough, I never really improved. To be fair, the stakes were never high enough to matter all that much, but failing to commit here caused me to get pretty disheartened with my musical talents, and I walked away from the instrument and music entirely pretty quickly after that. Sometimes that lack of commitment can be instructive on whether we really want what we’re after. Turns out for me, making music just wasn’t a calling. But a part of me wonders if I had stuck it out a bit longer and really thrown myself into the work. Would I be any different today?

Sasha Dichter wrote a great post recently on the value of committing to practice 4 days a week.

Not seven days. And definitely not one day. Four days a week. It’s the idea that this is just enough repetition and effort to actually see yourself grow and improve in whatever you’re working at.

I’m not sure it’s exactly four days – for instance, I’ve found a ton of success posting here five days a week, but I completely agree that “once a week” just isn’t enough to hope to make a lasting change in yourself. The trick with four days a week is that you only can have so many things that occupy that sort of commitment in your life at once. It forces you to choose what you do and what you set aside.

We recently went camping with some friends in a nearby state park. To plan the trip we had to pick dates and book our site months in advance. Camping reservations have gotten to the point where if you don’t plan way in advance, you may never find a site. Gone are the days of just showing up and finding something, at least on a weekend.

Camping has always been appealing to me as a way to disconnect in the relative seclusion of the outdoors. But there was no way that was possible on this trip – it couldn’t have been noisier or more crowded.

We still had a fun time, but as we packed up and left Sunday, we noticed everyone else was gone too. If you were camping on a Sunday night, or even a Monday or Tuesday, You’d probably have the place to yourself.

Or better yet, skip the car and go backpacking instead. Certainly there’s fewer people willing to make that kind of effort. It’s worth embracing the stuff that most other people overlook as too hard or too much work. Certainly you’ll have less competition that way, and you may just find satisfaction in the very fact that you’re taking the “hard” way instead.

The current zeitgeist of business and leadership advice is all about deciding early, and deciding now. To not wait for perfect information, and just keep forward momentum. I think it’s true you’ll never have 100% certainty or perfect information about anything, and chasing it can cripple morale and productivity. But I don’t think it’s as black and white as advice would suggest.

Suppose you need to solve an urgent, but short term process fix with a not ideal, but workable solution. Your cost of waiting is high, but the cost of mistakes may be low. You’re better off making your decision now and moving on.

But suppose you’re hiring someone new on your team. If you’re dealing with a dry candidate pipeline, do you decide on hiring the candidate you’re not enthralled with, but is the best you have at the moment? Hiring now satisfies the short term pain, but potentially creates disaster later if a mistake is made. In that case, waiting and seeking out the right candidate, even if it means to passing on a lot of “okay” candidates is likely the right call to make.

For every decision you must weigh the cost of waiting against the cost of failure. Whichever side the scale leans to is your clue to wait or act now.

is not a 30 minute meeting. A true “quick sync” is a 5 minute conversation to solve one small point, within a project that is otherwise baked. It’s figuring out the arrangement of the frosting. It’s not determining the ingredients of the cake batter.

We live in a culture that is now aware of the dangers of a meeting heavy environment (even if we haven’t done much to remedy this affliction). And we’re all walking on glass to avoid being seen as “that person” who wastes everyone’s time with scheduling one too many meetings.

I used to be a big “no meetings” proponent. But I realized pretty quickly that’s an unrealistic expectation in most organizations. And in fact, for organizations already dependent on meetings, simply running a meeting better is a shorter path to success.

You can be all about a meetings-light philosophy, but sometimes, a meeting is what you need. When this happens, you don’t need to hide behind it as a “quick sync” if it’s really something bigger. Your audience will thank you for the context.

Most marketing ops people seem to long for a fresh slate with their martech stack. If only they could start over from scratch in Marketo, they’d build it right this time. Yet once we get into these systems, even in ideal circumstances, the issues start to crop up. Inconsistencies in how things were built. Old, retired programs not being properly disabled & sunset.

Ultimately we dream about building the perfect system the first time, but perfection is never how things turn out. Instead, we ought to recognize these systems are ever-changing environments, in constant need of maintenance, like a garden that will be choked with weeds without attention and upkeep from the gardener.

No amount of dreaming about a clean slate will solve this. In fact, if you embrace a regular cycle of clean up, organization, and refactoring old processes to current needs, you can realistically keep that “shiny new car” feeling, and the efficiency it brings.

You can tell if an ops person has any user experience saavy by the picklists on their forms. Consider the country select picklists on a “contact us” form. Most start like this:

• Afghanistan
• Akrotiri
• Albania
• Algeria
• American Samoa
• Andorra
• Angola
• Anguilla
• Antarctica
• Antigua and Barbuda
• Argentina
• Armenia
• Aruba
• Ashmore and Cartier Islands
• Australia
• Austria
• Azerbaijan
• ….

You gotta admire the thoroughness of most of us ops people. We’ve got to have every country on there, in alphabetical order. I wonder how many leads they get from Antarctica a month?

What’s thorough and logical from and ops perspective ends up being an annoyance for customers. They get to scroll through hundreds of irrelevant values. A clever marketer might put their biggest markets at the top of a picklist instead. An even smarter marketer might skip the field entirely and rely on inferred or enriched data instead.

You can see this same dynamic at play in products too. I was recently trying to book a flight through our travel agency. My home airport is SeaTac, and yet the app defaults me to the SPB airport code, which is a tiny seaplane terminal on Lake Union in Seattle. Wouldn’t it be nice if the app remembered my home location? Or the airport I typically fly from? Or better yet, if it put likely irrelevant locations near the bottom of the list?

Growing up, I always admired my dad’s sense of direction. He never seemed to need a map. He never got lost. He always knew where we were going, even on vacation in a totally new place.

Once I started driving, I discovered that I too had a similar sense of direction that I couldn’t explain. It just seemed to work. Once I had been to a place, I could usually find my way back in the future. I got very interested in geography, maps, and compasses, and their uses came easily to me.

So when Google Maps started becoming a thing, and we all started carrying mobile GPS devices in our pockets, I was on board. The maps app is still one of the most used features on my phone. But a few years back, I started noticing my normally sharp sense of direction had dulled from what I remembered.

I was growing more and more reliant on the app to tell me what to do and where to go, and less on my own internal compass. At first, this seemed like no big deal. Who needs a great sense of direction when we’ve got the answer in our pockets? Plus I wasn’t any worse off when my long division skills atrophied, replaced by excel formulas instead.

But being caught enough times without a phone, a signal, or a charge reminded me of the value of an internal sense of direction. I’ve since backed off on overusing navigation apps. I still use these apps as a map, to research my route beforehand, but I now almost never use the turn-by-turn directions.

And the good news is the skill returned to me once I started practicing again. Plus there’s something satisfying about finding your own way. I think this article puts it best:

Practicing navigation is a powerful form of engagement with the environment that can inspire a greater sense of stewardship. Finding our way on our own — using perception, empirical observation and problem-solving skills — forces us to attune ourselves to the world.

There’s a great chapter in The Obstacle is the Way on process. When dealing with big, challenging work, the big picture matters at times, but most of the time, it’s best focus on the small, doable pieces of work in front of you rather than getting lost in the what if’s of the big picture.

In the chaos of sport, as in life, process provides us a way. It says: Okay, you’ve got to do something very difficult. Don’t focus on that. Instead break it down into pieces. Simply do what you need to do right now. And do it well. And then move on to the next thing. Follow the process and not the prize.

This is of course simple advice but hard to follow every day. I’ve found though that the key to making this work is to keep your thoughts and your workspace organized. When we leave tasks and projects ambiguous. When we haven’t done the work to organize their component parts, it’s easy to avoid them for the big, confusing ideas they currently are. But taking the time to organize your thoughts around them. To plan “if it could be done, here’s what I’d do first”, it has a way of disarming the work of the ambiguity that causes us to fear and avoid it. Instead, we transform the work into a set of steps, akin to a cooking recipe.

Good organization, both in how you think about problems, and in how you physically organize the work that needs doing (especially when it requires other people), is one of the best bets you can make to tackling the problems that really matter, and tackling them well.

Shifting a team’s work to revolve around two-week or monthly sprints can improve output and satisfaction. Especially as marketing ops teams grow and become more relied upon in a marketing organization, the ticket queue tends to pile up far faster than the output of the team can knock it down.

A sprint structure allows an ops team to set the constraints of the work, and avoid being sucked into the black hole of an endless ticket queue. So a more agile workflow here is almost a no-brainer.

But it’s easy to talk about the merits of a sprint structure, and another thing to execute on it well. For starters, choosing the amount of work that gets done in the coming sprint can be tricky. Forget about prioritization for a moment and consider just the amount of hours in the day available to each person on the team. Even with tickets well prioritized, most teams will find themselves with too much to realistically fit into a two week sprint.

I think there’s two steps to address this.

1. Translate the estimated time commitment/story points into a tangible moment on your calendar. I’ve written about the merits of using your calendar as a to-do list, and the same should be true with the work you and your team are committing to. It doesn’t have to be a perfect estimate, but a well padded two hour block for Tuesday is a good place to start. This is the only way you can help safeguard your team’s time to actually getting the work done, because a calendar slot directly recognizes the trade-off being made. Be aware of the pitfall of this approach by not scheduling your days too tightly though. You need some slack in the day, both for the tasks that invariably shift or take longer than expected, and for the miscellaneous stuff that always creeps in.

2. Perform your sprint planning at least a week in advance of that sprint’s scheduled start date. The beauty of this is that most people’s schedules are fuller within the next five business days. So if you get your planning in first, you get to decide how the hours get carved up, and where and when you’ll do the work. After all, if you don’t decide how the time gets used, someone else will.

As I’ve now spent more time with Eloqua, I can say it leaves much more room for customization than Marketo. There’s several layers of interconnected systems and subsystems in Eloqua that are just completely missing in Marketo. In some cases this yields some greater freedom and sophistication with programs. But as often it can add bloat to processes, and almost always means a more time consuming system to maintain.

Lead scoring is a great example of this. The system in Eloqua so different than Marketo, and manages to be at times much more useful, and others time maddeningly limited.

Here’s the gist of it. In Marketo, lead scoring works out of the box as a purely numeric score. You can break out behavioral/fit properties like job title, industry, etc from engagement properties like event attendance or form submissions, but it ultimately is just a single (or perhaps two) numeric values. You can add or subtract points for whatever action you want, and you can let the scores climb as high as you want too.

In Eloqua, score works off a matrix of fit and engagement criteria. A1 through D4. The alpha characters represent the fit, and the numbers represent engagement. Because the bounds of the Eloqua score model are fixed around these groups, scoring instead works by weighting different properties and activities to add up to a total 100% score for each category. So if you want to weight job title more highly than industry, you’d simply give it a higher % weight in the fit score area.

The key benefit of the Eloqua score model is the boundaries it sets. Increasing score in one area means a reduction in score for other properties. You have to make tradeoffs, as it’s not possible to score beyond the bounds of the A1-D4 matrix. And most valuable of all, since all scoring criteria in Eloqua are weighted relative to one another, if you change the model, you can automatically re-score every lead with the latest criteria.

This last piece is what makes the Eloqua model so useful. Not to say you cannot also re-score Marketo leads. But it is a lot more work to do. In short, Eloqua model makes it a lot harder to screw up a scoring model.

As someone so used to the Marketo way of doing things, I’m a little torn on who does it best. On the one hand, I like the controls and logic of the Eloqua model. It’s a much more on-rails experience that helps you avoid the common pitfalls of scoring models. But the lack of flexibility with it is odd, especially compared to the rest of the platform.

Ultimately I think the differences are mostly by preference – you can likely accomplish your scoring needs with either system. Just know that the philosophy and execution between the two is very different.