The Marketing Operations Strategist - How to find time to be more strategic (and to avoid burnout)

Hello! In this edition of the newsletter, we’re going to get a bit more tactical.

Something that I hear about all of the time: Sara, I’m a team of 1 or 2. I’m under-resourced. How can I get everything done? How can I find time to be strategic? How do you get everything done? 😱

The exact solutions here will vary by which tools or methods you have available to you, but if you even take one of these tips to work tomorrow and start using it, it’ll save you time.

Take these tips to work to free up your time…

1. Set up a Slack and Asana integration with an intake channel.

Switch out the tools if you need to (for example, if you use JIRA instead of Asana), but regardless of the tool — if you can create one centralized place for requests, that will save you and your team some sanity. Then, if you can automate ticket creation from that intake process, that will save you even more time. I prefer the Slack channel model because then the whole team has visibility into the channel and can swarm issues (rather than an issue sitting in one person’s inbox and waiting for them, specifically, to have time). All of this saves you admin time upfront…BUT another great pay-off is that, if you consistently use a ticket management tool like Asana, you can organize it to track time-per-ticket, allocation of items, and capacity. You can then share this or use it during capacity/resourcing conversations at work. Even if you use email, you could have a group email create a ticket in your ticketing system, or have folks use Google Forms to submit a ticket that creates a line on a Google Sheet. Just start somewhere!

2. Use automation internally.

I see too many folks forgetting this — you already have automation at your fingertips, use it! If you use Marketo, look into setting up some standard smart lists to capture malformed leads, even better if you can set up a campaign to alert you when those leads come in. If you can be alerted of malformed leads immediately, you can dive into what is likely a broken integration or terrible list upload quickly, rather than reacting hours or days later. And it does all of the upfront work for you, constantly listening and looking for issues!

You can also set up reports in Salesforce, and have them sent daily or weekly to specific users — this can be a great way to hold campaign managers accountable for having correct campaign statuses, or sales folks accountable for updating records. Just use the report to filter for incorrect values or blank fields, and you can let the reports do the talking for you.

This is a paid option, but I would be remiss to not mention Stack Moxie, which can help by sending automated test leads through your funnel, and then check to ensure that the end result is expected. This will help you monitor issues with web forms or lead routing, which can be harder to monitor without a specific tool.

By implementing these things, you can avoid having to manually log into your systems to check them every day — let the tech do the work for you. I’d estimate that you’d save at least 1 hour a day, and that’s probably conservative…because if you can pick up on an issue when it’s minor and fix it before it becomes massive, that can save you hours and hours of time and distraction.

3. Use tools like Slack Workflows and Polly to automate polls, stand-ups, etc.

If you find that your team is spending too much time in monotonous, live stand-ups, you can use Slack Workflows to set up an automated check-in message. What I like to do is set up an automated message, soliciting reacji votes — if enough folks give a 👍 to needing a live meeting, we meet live. They also have the option of adding a comment to indicate if they only need 1 or 2 team members’ time, rather than the entire team. This can help save everyone time and can raise the team morale, as stand-ups don’t become painful nagging meetings (if someone isn’t updating tickets or doing their part, you can just meet with them 1:1 🙂 ). If you’re really fancy or have an engineering team, you can even set up auto-delegation of tool access to new team members! I could go on and on about Slack because I find it so helpful…so be sure to check out if your tools have integrations into Slack, what functionality you may not be using, etc! If you don’t use Slack, see what integrations your messaging tool (or email) has available.

Polly is another great tool for teams, because you can set up polls, trivia, Hot Takes, and other games.

4. Ask for agenda notes for meetings. Ruthlessly cancel or minimize meetings that are not helping you drive towards your goals.

This one can be tricky, because you may not always have the power to do this by yourself — but if you can set the tone early that you need agenda notes to prepare for a meeting (or, let’s be honest, to determine if it needs to happen at all), you’ll be better off. I try to explain to folks that if I don’t have an agenda, I can’t figure out how to show up prepared or determine how to prioritize the meeting. If I find that a meeting is not helpful or productive, I’ll ask if we can decrease it to every other week, and then eventually phase it out if it continues to not be especially useful.

Be careful about having team redundancy on a call as well — sometimes, it makes sense for multiple team members to be on a call if it is something urgent — but if it isn’t, see if one or two team members can join live and then post a summary/follow-up in your team channel, so folks can keep up-to-date but not burn out on meetings.

Sometimes, a meeting really could just be a Slack message. 😅

5. Templatize and re-use whatever you can.

Don’t create every new thing from scratch. I repeat: DO NOT create everything as though it’s a brand new request!

Need to create a walking deck from your team? Find another manager’s deck and ask if you can take some inspiration from them, or see if there is a corporate template you can use.

Need to create some enablement content? Set up an initial template that you can copy and paste, and just switch out text, videos, or images.

Are your marketers creating every campaign list from scratch? Set up some commonly-used lists and just have them copy the building block list — so they are only spending their time adding customization.

Struggling to keep projects organized? Create a project planning template that people can copy and paste, rather than starting from scratch. Even better — if you have an established project plan template, sometimes you can even get stakeholders to help you fill it in!

Because we get overwhelmed by hot deadlines, we sometimes get stuck in a reactive mode where everything has to be custom-made…but if you can set aside a few hours over a few weeks to start creating templates, this can save you a lot of time in the longer term.

6. Standardize everything that requires consistency.

You might have read my automation tip above and thought to yourself — well wait, Sara, how do I know if a lead is malformed? 🤔

Simple: standardize fields that matter, and then set up lists and campaigns to capture incoming leads that do not meet the standardization rules.

A great example of this is the Country field — if you allow it to run wild, for United States you could have U.S.A., U.S., United States, etc — which is chaotic and hard to manage! If you standardize Country so that all integrations and list imports are using “United States” for the United States, it’ll be easy to pick up on leads that are incorrectly formatted. It’ll also be much easier to set up other automation like lead assignment rules.

7. Continue to audit your day-to-day work and look for opportunities to make it more efficient.

Don’t just listen to me, or other folks online — we don’t work with you, so we don’t know every possible opportunity for time savings. Look at your repetitive tasks and ask yourself: am I the person who needs to be doing this (perhaps it can be delegated)? Is this repeatable enough that I could create a template or automate it? Or, is this worth my time at all? If we try to do everything, we’ll get nothing substantial accomplished — so look at your top priorities, compare them against your work, and then see what you can automate or delegate.

8. Protect your time and your health.

Block out time on your calendar for deep thinking, getting tasks or projects done, and taking breaks. If people don’t respect a “break” block, call it something that looks more serious — I think it’s fine to label it as a doctor’s appointment or needing to take your dog out for a walk. Label it in a way that people respect it, so they don’t try to schedule over it unless it truly is something earth-shattering. I’ve even spoken with teammates before and have schemed to set up “time together,” where it looks like we are meeting but really we are just using each other as an excuse to get heads-down time. 😆 

Some folks will hate the idea of being less-than-honest, but it is SO important to carve out time to take care of yourself — to get in some movement, meals, and mental breaks — or you will burn out. And, unfortunately….not too many companies will make it a point to look out for you, so make sure you are looking out for yourself and your teammates. If you burn out, it’ll take you so much longer to get anything done — it’s a bit counter-intuitive, but I promise that if you take time for yourself you will be more productive than if you don’t.

Recommended book of the week:

Learning resource of the week:

Helpful AI tool of the week 🤖

Need some data analysis help? ChatGPT now offers the ability to analyze things in your Google Drive, like Google Sheets! Keep in mind that AI can get it wrong, so double-check results before you share them out — but, as this continues to get better, this could save us all tons of time! I’ve been tinkering with it to get familiar so I can use it as it gets more and more accurate and feature-rich. 😁 

What I’m up to/what I’m studying

This week, I’ve been focused on exploring all of the new tools out there…tools like Clay, FullEnrich, and of course emerging AI tools. Although I’m sharing my day to day, time-saving tips with you in this newsletter, I continue to explore the new tech and services out there to see what else I can take advantage of. What tools are you exploring? 👀

Dear Sara ✍️

New to marketing operations? On a team of one at your company? Shy/introverted? Wish you could ask a question to an experienced marketing operations professional, without them knowing who you are? Here’s your chance! Submit an anonymous question to me here and I’ll answer a new question in every issue.

Here’s my answer to a question from last week:

A little-known fact is that, within larger FAANG-like companies, technical individual contributors (ICs) actually have higher salary bands than non-technical people managers. This can vary as you go up the management chain, but I think it’s important to point out: you don’t need to be a people manager to make money. If you continue to build your technical skills and experience, you can become an architect, senior architect, and even get into marketing technology/data engineering. You could focus on becoming a data engineer, a software engineer that focuses on marketing needs, or a senior marketing technologist. If you’re in the phase of trying to figure out what you want to do, I’d recommend checking out job listings and seeing what feels like the right fit!

What else do you want to hear about from me?

I have a bunch of content lined up, but I want to hear from you — did you enjoy this issue? Is there anything specific you’d like to hear my take on? Please do reply to this email with any and all feedback! 😄 If you enjoyed this issue, please refer your friends by forwarding this email/sending them here!

Til next time,

❤️ Sara