The Truth About Marketing Ops with Kelly Jo Horton, Head of Lifecycle Marketing Ops at Atlassian | Ep. 374

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0:55I'm here with Kelly Jo, the head of Lifecycle Marketing Ops at Atlassian. And we're going to talk about, if you don't know, I used to be in Marketing Ops, one of my favorite subjects, Marketing Ops. But I want to ask Kelly Jo, how did you get into Marketing Ops and why would you decide to get into Marketing Ops? Does anyone really decide to get into Marketing Ops? Nobody decides to get into Marketing Ops. No, it's usually some sort of weird accident, right? I was working at a startup that did social media marketing, you know, campaigns for B2C, basically, for music labels, movie studios, gamifying things, you know, and we got acquired by Marketo.

1:43And so I went from this B2C world of doing all these social media marketing events and things like that. And I ended up in consulting at Marketo in this 99 % B2B world and just got dropped right in the deep end. And that is how I ended up in marketing operations, totally by accident. Yeah, that's usually, it's always by accident. And I didn't even know what marketing ops was. And I was like, I want to get into marketing. And I thought I was a Pardot consultant. And it was my first job. And I was like, what's Pardot? What does running a marketing ops system look like? And I did it for eight years.

2:26And it was a fun journey. But let's just get into what is marketing ops first. I feel like people need to lay down what is a marketing ops job? What does it look like now? And why does a team need a marketing ops squad, a marketing team? Well, I think it has changed and evolved so much in the last 10 years even. In the beginning, it was basically everybody thought of marketing operations as email. And with the thousands and thousands of platforms that are out there now and AI and everything else, depending on which company you're at, you may have different responsibilities, but you're basically supporting the structure underneath marketing and sometimes sales and sometimes rev ops, the technology structure, the lead flow, the data.

3:23And it has just expanded so much that I feel like our job descriptions are different at every company. Our responsibilities are different. The lines are really blurry. If you try to define what a marketing ops person does, it's different at every company. So I think it depends on which organization you sit in and who you report up to what the breadth of the job is. So it just depends on what company you're in. There are technical roles. There are strategic roles. It's best if someone in this industry has technology experience, marketing experience, sales experience, go-to-market experience. If you understand the lead flow from beginning to end, the entire funnel, that's what makes you really valuable in this industry.

4:20I always say that marketing ops is a hard role because you actually have to know what everybody on the marketing team does and then also what all your stakeholders does. you don't have really one you have one specialty in what you do but the knowledge level is you have to learn you have to know what demand gen does what metrics they using what seo does what um so it's super hard and then you actually have to know how to deploy systems analytics uh process to make those people's lives easier. And then you do another, how no sales, what finance is doing, all these things. So it's such a broad role.

5:08It's a broad role. It's crazy how much you have to know. It is. It's like a unicorn role. I mean, and you have to be able to be not only technical, but customer facing. You have to be able to have conversations at the engineering level. You have to be able to have conversations at the executive level. So it really is, it takes a long time to develop those muscles in this industry. And so when people are starting out, you know, they may start as a campaign operations manager and just building emails, but along the way, they're going to learn, you know, what happens down the funnel and how does sales work and how does marketing work.

5:45So I think starting as a campaign ops person and then learning from there, you can expand, but it's a crazy amount of knowledge that we have to constantly keep up with and learn with new platforms, new technology, AI. Every single day, I learn something new. And I've been doing this a really long time. I wanted to go because you have a really good analogy of how to work with marketing ops, what it should look like to work with marketing ops, and how people should see marketing ops in an organization. So could you go over what if a marketing leader or a sales leader or a product leader wants to come work with marketing ops, what does it, what is marketing ops, what does it look like to work with marketing ops?

6:40I want to just tell people who have never been in marketing ops before, I know you think that you're ordering fast food. You think you're going through the drive-thru and you're going to get your meal in five minutes. And then you get upset when it doesn't come in five minutes. And if you customize that order, it's definitely not coming in five minutes. What we actually are, I would say, is a Michelin star restaurant. We are a team. We are an entire business. And you need to think, you don't know what goes on behind the scenes. You don't know what goes on in the kitchen. You don't know what the prep work is, you know, the reservation system, whatever.

7:23So I want people to understand that when you ask for, is just an email, you need to understand that there is all this structure and logic that we build into that email underneath so that the thing that's supposed to happen when someone fills out a form actually happens and then that lead gets passed to sales and then it gets routed to the right person and then the life cycle changes from mel to mql to sal or whatever it is there is a lot of plumbing that happens underneath that i think people don't realize so what i would like to say to all the marketers out there if you've never worked in in mops, the way to work best with us is to come, um, with a complete package of your request.

8:16And instead of like, we were talking about, you know, building a house instead of telling us you're, you really love this sink and you want it, you want to install this sink. You haven't told us what the house looks like or where the bathroom is or what happened. Does the plumbing in place like when I turn on the water, does it work? So I want you to think of the fact that it's not just an email. It is so much more underneath. And so work with us like a partner. You're going to come to us with a request. We want you to know exactly what the outcome is that you want. So we know what success looks like for your campaign request.

9:04So you're going to come to me and say, I want to send this email. And I'm going to ask, okay, what does success look like? What do you want that person to do? What's the CTA in that email? And then if it's successful, what do you want to happen to those leads? Like, where do they go? Is sales prepared to talk to these people? Do They have what they need for their talking points or their outreach sequences or whatever it is. It's a whole, we are your strategic advisors. We're your partners. We're also your plumbers and your electricians. And we need to build the foundation for whatever you are requesting to work.

9:45So just keep that in mind when you send an urgent request. There's a lot of work that goes on in the background that people don't understand. And we just want you to understand that it's not simply creating an email. There's a lot of plumbing that goes into it underneath, and we want you to be successful, and we want it all to work the first time. So bring your A game when you send a request to us. I love that because I do remember when I would get requests for marketing ops, and there were 15 in the pipeline. And people are like, why did you only get to five this week? And then you have to go to explain.

10:28Those five are not just send an email. It's set up the logic, make sure it gets tagged correctly, make sure we QA it, make sure nothing breaks in the process, make sure. And there's 18 different things for that one request that you said. Yeah. Yeah, you want to get it out fast. And also when you want to get something out fast, what else are you pushing off that list that we needed to do that week too? Because that fast thing, I think that's also gets misconstrued is, okay, you want an email today. We could push things off, but just know that that next thing that you want might not get done because you want this urgent request.

11:07Right. And I think that's why it's really, really important to have structure and process in place. and luckily since I work at Atlassian, I have all these tools that I can use for free. And I had used Jira at previous jobs, so I was very familiar with Jira and Confluence. But I run our team almost like an engineering team. We have sprint planning, we have tickets, We have an automated system we're building that will allow stakeholders to submit a ticket. And if there are any related processes underneath, it will create those other tickets for the other teams that have to be involved. We have dashboards where we can see exactly what our capacity is for the team, like how many story points we call them, right?

12:01How much time does each person have? and what that does is it allows us to when like you said when stakeholders request something and we're really busy and their thing is urgent we have a dashboard we can show them okay here are all the other requests what what would you like us to push off the plate so that we can take your urgent request so i think it's super important for mops teams if you don't want to just become order takers. And you need the data to back up your capacity. You need the data to back up how long it takes to create each of these requests. And you need some sort of tools so that you can report on it and show what's going on and stay organized so things don't fall through the cracks.

12:53And that's why we, this past year, moved to sprints. We had been using Jira, but not in any really structured way. So I would say run your team like an engineering team, because we all know how interrupt-driven this job is and how chaotic it can get. And it's really, really helpful to have everything structured in projects in JIRA. And that is kind of what keeps us sane most of the time is just having that underlying structure. Oh, I totally agree. I used to do that too. And I used to leave those points. We didn't use the call points, but hours, whatever. Like leave a couple hours every week for those urgent requests.

13:40So if an urgent request comes, we have those points. I think this is an interesting rabbit hole to go down. Could you explain the high level of what you set up and what someone could set up to make a process? Because I think it would work for a lot of different teams of setting this up where there's a form submit. There's a what happens after the form submit? What happens next? What happens next? What does the step-by-step look like for you to set up with JIRA and Confluence? And what does that look like? So we have a very structured JIRA ticketing system. We're even trying to streamline it even more because when I got to Atlassian earlier this year, we have many different ticket types because each team kind of had their own projects.

14:31And so they would come in and the fields weren't the same or some didn't have the sprint field visible or the story point field visible. So what we're trying to do is align everything so that when somebody submits a ticket, we also have like a Confluence page where you pick the kind of ticket you want to submit. You click a button. It opens the submission form. And it has, I think it's really, really important to have these fields that are mandatory. like you can't submit a ticket until you have the link to the Salesforce campaign that these people are going to go to. You can't submit a ticket if you don't have the link to the asset that you want downloaded.

15:17You can't submit a ticket unless you have all your UTM parameters lined up, et cetera. So we have created this form that creates tickets. And I think the key is to not allow people to submit a request if they don't have all of the information that you need to build whatever it is they want. I think that what you just said saves so much time up front because the problem with a lot of teams is, are these lazy requests you get? And then you have to, as the marketing ops team or the rev ops team, go back and say i need utms i need to know where it's going i need this i need that and then it looks like you're being the the bad person and delaying the process and not doing the work but it really if you set up a process where they have to do it that means they have to do some of the lead work on up front and actually understand this is a big deal because if it's actually a priority you would know you would have these things set up if it was actually something you wanted to do you would fill out the fields and follow the process yeah yeah go ahead i was just gonna say it saves a lot of time you're right we waste a lot of time with the back and forth if we don't have everything we need so it's really important to structure your ticketing system to have all the fields that you need for all the data that's required in the right format and on all that stuff So it's really important to structure that up front and train people.

16:55Get your stakeholders used to doing that and push back. It's hard to say no. I know MOPs people are a bunch of people pleasers usually, and it's really hard to say no and send something back. But the more you do that, the more you are getting people used to the process and they'll start following it. Yeah. So it looks like there's a page. It has a bunch of different links where it could be like, I need an automation for this or I need something for this. I'm just saying high level. Then they go and each link has different form fields because for an email, you need these things for those. So after someone submits a form, what does that look like in the backend?

17:39How do you set that up? So is there like approval part of a ticket before it goes to a person or does it auto go to a person or how does it do it? Yeah. We have right now we're structured where different types of tickets. Some are auto assigned to people depending on what their specialty is. And some are not auto assigned. And we have a triage team that's like a round robin every week. So we have two people on triage every week and their job, besides their day job of all their other responsibilities, their job is to make sure all the unassigned tickets are assigned to the right people. Because I do have specialists on my team.

18:21I have people who focus, who know events really well and all the weirdness of events, you know. And then I have people who, you know, focus on ABM or other things. So the triage team will assign anything that's unassigned every week. We also have a Slack channel that has a bot in it. And so our stakeholders can go into that channel and they can ask a question and the bot will try to answer it. And if it doesn't, it'll open a ticket for them. So we have that as well. and then we also have another Slack channel that shows all the tickets coming in so that we can go to one place and see them too.

19:09So it's just a number of things, but the triage idea is fairly new because you don't want your tickets to be dropped. And so you need somebody who's on the hook for that week. It's kind of like, you know, back in the day in tech support, we used to have the hot phone. And if you carried the hot phone, you were on call, right? If you were in IT or something, And you were on call for the week. And we have two people every week who are on call to make sure everything gets assigned to the right person. Yeah, because the last thing you want to do is lose respect of your system you set up and you miss a ticket.

19:46And then they say, this ticketing process doesn't work. I want to do something else. And then they complain and complain. But I was going to ask you, I know you said the bot, which I think is super smart, which could answer probably where could I find this? or this report is here or like it's in here. What are things now since AI has become a big thing? What are some things you are using or thinking about using in marketing ops to help streamline the process with new AI technology that is out there? We have access to a lot of approved AI tools at Atlassian, and we're encouraged to create our own agents.

20:32We have an agent library. So we are figuring out all kinds of ways to use it. I personally love it for looking at data and answering basic questions. People ask us all the time, why didn't this MQL? creating an agent that will go look at the systems and come back with an answer so the person so that the person doesn't have to dm us but to answer basic questions like that why didn't why didn't yeah this mql which is a very common one i expected 200 mqls where are they um you know we have all kinds of little things that can be answered over and over again that we like to use agents for and like the bot in Slack that we can train.

21:28So it would be nice. The one thing I would really like to have an agent be able to do is to clean lists before list uploads because it's such a manual process when we get lists from events from different vendors. They're always structured differently. Even though we have a template, you know the data uh might be in the wrong column or whatever i would love to create an agent it's on my list create an agent to to look at these lists and clean them things like that i think are really valuable for mops like the the what i call the digital janitor responsibilities are things that we can automate with ai as long as it's secure mind you yeah i i agree i because If you think the average MOPS person today probably gets so many of those questions of, hey, where's this report?

22:27Could you look into this lead for me? Could you look into this for me? Hey, this is in the system. Where did it go? Could you direct me to this report? And also the list cleaning thing is so annoying because it stops you in your tracks and you have to go clean a whole list just to submit it into. And then people are asking you for that list over and over and the speed to get it in. Yeah, exactly. It's timing. We also, because we're at Lassian, we have Rovo AI built into everything, which means that for any agents that use Rovo or even the bot, it has access to all of our Confluence documentation.

23:10So someone could type in, you know, I, we get, you know, new marketers all the time, and we don't have time to train one-on-one, right? We do, we like the one-to-many. So we have a lot of Loom videos that are in our Confluence pages, and someone could ask Rovo, can you show me the Loom video that shows me the process to do X? and they can just go watch the video on their own time. We have a whole library in marketing ops of all of our documentation and confluence of recordings of trainings, short loom videos if someone just wants to know a little thing and they weren't able to attend a meeting.

23:56So, I mean, it's kind of a luxury to have all the tools for free. It's kind of, it's really nice. but we use all of it to help mostly onboard new people in other teams. And so that we don't have to answer the same questions over and over again, we will just direct people to a Loom video or recording a Confluence page. We have a whole library. So yeah, because we don't have time to do one-on-one. Could you explain for people who don't know that Atlassian stack of what are each tool used for in your role? If I was a marketing ops and I wanted Confluence, Loom, Jira, what would I use each one for and why would I need each one of those tools together?

24:48So as a marketing ops person, we use Confluence as like our wiki. It's the repository for all of our documentation, for all of our projects. We start Confluence pages for everything and share them across the company or share them just within the team privately. So that is how we document everything. And then Robo is the AI agent that you can search all of the – it searches Jira, Confluence, everything, all the tools. So Robo is in there to help us find things. We use Jira, like I said, that is our ticketing system. And it's customizable, which I really like. I used to be a Jira admin at another company.

25:37So I've been a Jira fan for a long time. But it's customizable to fit how you work, like what fields you want to show, what your workflow is. You could put in approvals from different teams and things like that. That's why I really like it. It's so flexible. so that we can change how it works ourselves. So we use that. We use Loom a lot because, like I said, we have hundreds of stakeholders. We can't do one-on-ones with people. We need them to self-serve. And the best way to do that is for us to create Loom videos to show them how to do something. So you have process documentation. If you're not somebody who learns that way, we have Loom videos.

26:22I'm a document person, but people like videos. So we use Loom and we have recordings of our calls. And we use all kinds of features in Jira for planning, for plans in there. There's just, I mean, everything is all tied together, which makes it great. And it's all searchable with Robo. So I can search for anything in any of our tools and find it with Robo. So otherwise, you'd be sifting through, you know, we have, we're a big company. I don't know how many people, 12 ,000 or something globally, or more than that. And so it'd be really hard to find things if you didn't have a really smart search engine.

27:06Campaign planning in multiple docs, approvals buried in someone's inbox. You don't have to be in marketing ops to feel this pain. Wrangle this chaos with Loom, the AI-powered video messaging that gets teams aligned. without another quick sync. Use it to walk through a brief or share feedback using your screen, your voice, and your annotation. Loom's AI even tidies the video for you with summaries, chapters, and filler word cleanup. Try it at loom.com. That's L-O-O-M.com. Yeah, I just remember starting in MarkingOps at the beginning where there's either documentation, limited documentation, or it takes an hour to find everything and then you you still get this documentation but you don't really understand what it means so then you have to go to ask and ask but if you have like loom for visual learners who could say that to create this you click this button and this button and then there's also a transcript so if you don't want to you could go and you and now with AI, you could just be like, Hey, find this video.

28:14And could you diagnose the steps for me to be able to do this? And it can give you step by step, which is makes, which I thought for me was the hardest part. One of the most annoying parts of marketing ops is creating all this documentation, but now with tools like this, I know it is, we all do it though. It's really, I mean, in the end, And I've worked in IT before, and I think I learned, and tech support, and I learned a lot from working in an IT organization of how well everything is documented. They keep change logs. They have stand-ups. Everything is really buttoned up if you're in IT. And so I tend to bring that skill set when I manage MOPS teams because we need structure or it's chaos all the time, right?

29:05With all the requests coming in and all the stakeholders we serve, you've got to have structure and you have to almost think like an IT person to keep everything in line or people just get burnt out. yeah i think like any any size like where the you need this foundation i think i've been burned by not having the foundation of like setting up documentation early setting up ticketing systems early setting up because then you get to you in any job you teach people how to treat you so if you teach them early how to treat you as a mops team it saves you so much time This is what I tell people who work for me, any teams I've ever managed.

29:50I said, I will be the bad cop if you want, but I want you all to learn how to say no in the most respectful way. And tell someone why you're saying no. Don't just do something because someone asked. Ask why. why this is what I'm trying to teach people is to ask why when you get a request if you think there's a better way to do something ask why and tell them I think I have a better way to do this I think this would work better but don't just because if you just take orders you become an order taker you're seen as an order taker and people will treat you like they're in the drive-thru line at a fast food restaurant.

30:34If you serve them a five course Michelin star meal, they're going to understand how to work with you better. They're going to come back and really respect what you do. And that's, I know a lot of Mops people really feel like the job isn't respected because people don't understand it. And I totally get that. And I try, that's one thing I try to do at every company I've ever been at is to make sure that the role is respected and that people understand really how much we know how hard it is and understand what goes on behind the scenes. I do like that analogy because you have to stand up and show that you are the expert in this not that you are just someone who uh anything that goes goes because when you fight back and say no or there's a better way or this doesn't work with our system it proves that you are the expert in in in this field and people will trust you more you don't want to be that one person that people always dm behind the back doors to say could you please set up this email for me or because you become that person and then you could complain as much as you want but i've seen i've had this that the marketing ops that you said earlier the people pleaser and you um that's how you get burnt out that's how you stop liking what you do is because you become this order taken say no or don't have a ticketing system to show hey these are my ticket this is all my tickets for the week this is priority do you want to kick this off or do you not want to do this do you not want to do that um so i think what you just said is crucial for any marketing ops person to if you're starting in this role or a leader in this role to have that ability to do that absolutely i want to also ask you like what what should the modern day setup of mops look like because it's changed so much in the last and over the years so what did like could you explain what it looked like and so people know and what it it's transitioned to now um over the last few years it is definitely not a one-size-fits-all and it depends on your go-to-market the size of your company um you know and b2c tools can be very different than what works for b2b so it's really different.

33:09There is no one setup that works the same for every company. I think a lot of times that we don't have control over the organization we sit in, which is difficult. If you are sitting, I'll tell you what my preferred organization structure is, and I've only had this once, is to have a centralized demand center or whatever you want to call it that's responsible where the tools are centralized, the expertise is centralized, and it does not report up to a demand gen leader or a rev ops leader or anything like that. Because as soon as you report up to, let's say, demand gen, guess what your priorities are?

34:01Marketing. If you report up to RevOps, if that's a sales leader, your priorities become sales and marketing gets second. So I prefer to have, I think, the most successful organization. I mean, if you're big enough to have an organization, mind you, there are a lot of people who are a team of one doing everything. If you are big enough and mature enough to have an organization, that organization should be independent of influence for priorities from any of the other teams, I think. Because otherwise, it just becomes favoritism and the prioritization gets really, really difficult. um we also have an agency partner because we just have too much work so we there's a lot of basic email building that we push off to an agency partner and we qa everything they do but they do a lot of the building for some of the basic stuff um so having an extension like that allows you to flex, especially if you have a cyclical business where it gets really busy at certain times of year and you can't grow and shrink a full-time team.