63: Recaping takeaways from guest episodes in season 1

Humans of Martech

Season 1 featured our first 50 episodes, 20 of which were guest episodes. In today’s episode we’re going to recap our key takeaways from each guest episode in season 1.

Our first guest episode featured Lauren Sanborn, Director of RevOps at CallRail. She recently moved over to DataRobot, an AI cloud platform for Data Scientists.

Aside from leaving us with several marketing and sales alignment tips, my favorite takeaway from Lauren was to not be so hard on yourself if you don’t know what you don’t want to do (for work). Her advice was to get out there and try different things so you can start to mark off what you don’t like. Eventually you’ll find something that you love.”

Our next guest in episode 07 featured one of our most senior and perhaps most accomplished guest, Brian Leonard, former co-founder of TaskRabbit and now CEO of Grouparoo (recently acquired by Airbyte).

Brian went pretty deep on the relationship with marketing and engineering and my favorite takeaway was that marketers and engineers shouldn’t think of themselves as doing completely different things inside a company. At the end of the day, both groups are there to move the needle on the business. So the best way to think of it is to come together to power the right stack.

Instead of pitching to product, marketing needs this, pitch it as, the company needs this and this is how it will benefit everyone. For example, marketing attribution isn’t a marketing or a marketing ops thing. It’s a company thing.

Next up was our boy Nick Donaldson in episode 10, fresh off a new consulting gig at Perkuto. Another marketer who’s moved on to another company, he’s now running Marketing Operations at Knak.

Nick is wise beyond his years and my favorite takeaway from our chat with him was that the number 1 skill to succeed in marketing ops is curiosity. Early in your career Google and twitter are your best friends. There’s so many smart people that have been in your shoes and are nice enough to share those insights. Find them. Read them. Learn from them.

So 10 episodes in and we already had a RevOps Director, a CEO and founder and a consultant. We also had a Professor. In episode 11 we were joined by friend of the show Jonathan Simon.

This might have been controversial amongst his peers at the University but we’re happy to report he’s still in his current gig (lol). My favorite takeaway from our chat with Jonathan is that you don’t need a degree to have a successful and happy career in marketing anymore. More than anything, marketers need to be adaptable to changing tech and strive to be lifelong learners. He talked a lot about side hustles and starting something, in his course he actually gets all his students to start a blog and build something during their time there.

Episode 17 featured Ottawa native Julie Beynon who leads analytics at Clearbit. Things got technical pretty fast but I think Julie did an awesome job introducing data warehousing and making it seem a lot less intimidating.

My favorite takeaway was when she explained that a DWH doesn’t have row limits and isn’t limited by your laptop’s CPU. She loves a Google sheet as much as any data driven marketer, but at some point, startups need to upgrade from that clunkiness to a data warehouse solution.

It’s been fun seeing the martech landscape shift from; APIs for everything and we integrate with all your tools to – we build on top of your data warehouse or we connect natively to Big Query.

Keeping to the data theme, we had Steffen Heddebrandt in episode 19. Still almost a year later he’s trashing Google Analytics on LinkedIn (lol). He’s the co-founder of Dreamdata, an attribution solution for B2B startups and SMBs.

Attribution still gets a bad rep, we heard Corey trash it in season 2, but Steffen has solved big pieces of this puzzle at his startup. My favorite takeaway from our convo was when he declared that when it comes to revenue attribution, GA is basically close to useless for B2B companies. Multi touch attribution software does sound like magic when you’ve tried to orchestrate it yourself, but give Dreamdata a spin if you’re still skeptical about it.

Episode 25 featured Naomi Liu, Director of Global Marketing Ops at EFI. Naomi spends some of her time mentoring future marketing ops leaders and was hiring for an entry level marketer on her team at the time so we centered our conversation around how to ace your first marketing job.

My favorite takeaway was when Naomi said that new marketers should be asking lots of questions. Be that annoying kid in the back seat asking all of the questions.

Episode 27 featured friend of the show and local Ottawa social media maven Erin Blaskie. She recently made the switch from leading marketing at Fellow to go back to freelancing as a fractional CMO.

My favorite takeaway was when we asked her how marketers should choose between the freelance route and working in house. She thinks everyone should try both. Throw out everyone else’s definition of success and make your own by trying different things. Big company, startup, agency, freelance, give them all a shot.

In episode 37, we had another manager who was hiring on her team. Shannon McCluskey leads marketing ops at Clio and my favorite takeaway was when she described the role of marketing ops.

We are not order takers, we’re active consultants designing our own destiny. Sometimes we need to evaluate solutions our partners haven’t thought of. We don’t always say yes to every request we’re given.

Episode 39 featured co founder and CEO of Kank Peirce Ujainwalla. A well known face in the martech scene, we asked him to weigh in on the html vs text debate for emails.

He said it’s important to do a mix of both. Text emails have that personal feel, but HTML is still super important for all your visual users and telling your brand story.

Episode 41 featured another local Ottawa and social media expert and now head of marketing at Fellow – Manuela Barcenas.

She’s also a productivity nut and my favorite takeaway was when she said that her biggest productivity superpower is knowing what to work on when you open your laptop in the morning. Time blocking and planning your week ahead of time by scheduling tasks and deep focus blocks.

In episode 44, friend of the show Roxanne Pepin from Rewi...