The Marketing Operations Strategist - Steal my lead and account scoring guide

Find a way to be comfortable networking, even if you’re introverted by nature. In-person events are better, but if you are shy, you could start by posting in the different MOPs Slack groups.

Work on becoming as AI literate as you can, as quickly as you can. More and more companies are asking hiring managers to see if AI can take over jobs before opening them up to humans…AI is not at the point where it can replace us, but we will do well to be positioned as admins of AI for marketing, sales, cs, etc. Even if you can’t afford a course or tons of time, sign up for ChatGPT and practice prompting.

If you’re young and don’t have many things holding you in one location, consider moving somewhere for a high-impact, high-learning role. It’ll be great for both your experience and your networking, and you can always work remotely later in your career.

Create a plan with clear milestones and timelines as soon as you can. Share this early and have conversations with partner groups to get their buy-in on the milestones and timelines.

Don’t forget to back up your data from HubSpot. Download everything and keep it in a secure place. Too many people forget to download a backup and regret it later.

Plan the data transfer carefully. Map out fields between systems, and decide which value will be the master value for each field if there are any conflicts.

Plan the migration of the integration with your CRM carefully as well. What is your API limit vs. the size of your database? What are the sync settings and which value will be master? Also, even better if you can create a custom field with “[old system] ID” so you can track the records as they migrate from system to system, especially if you’re having overlapping time with both systems.

Only bring over assets and campaigns that are relevant. Some campaigns are just too old to be really relevant anymore. I typically export a sheet of lists, landing pages, email templates, and campaigns and have marketers mark which ones we can leave behind.

Be sure to not lose focus on the PEOPLE and FEELINGS. Some people focus so much on forcing a tool migration that they forget that change management is key to adoption and retaining top performers. Help them understand that they will be taken care of, that there is exciting new functionality or wins to be seen, that they will still be able to succeed in their role. Additional tip here: what are the marketing goals for the quarter the M&A is happening? Can leadership build in some buffer room to acknowledge the disruption this change causes? If marketing is massively disrupted they might struggle to hit all of their goals, and if they are punished for that, that will lower morale real quick.

I love this change journey diagram (there are many others out there like it, too). It shows the typical journey a company goes through — keep in mind that different people can be in different stages of the journey at different times, so you have to create messaging that resonates with all of them and makes them feel as psychologically safe as possible.

Take advantage of this change to improve things like automations. Simplify, simplify, simplify — I once took a huge Eloqua infrastructure and narrowed it down to one Engagement Studio program and a handful of automation rules. We were only able to do that because we took the opportunity to cut out legacy fields and automation that were left behind by previous MOPs folks.

Overall, when it comes to these specific migrations, you’ll find that Pardot and Salesforce might have more enterprise-friendly features, but that DOESN’T mean you have to adopt those and over-complicate. I’d look to keep things stable for the cutover and then look at any complexity additions with scrutiny, as we need to stay as agile as we can these days.