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

Hey! 👋

Hope you’re doing well!

In this edition of the newsletter, I have a lead and account scoring guide that I’ve put together, based on best practices and my personal experience. This will probably be my last “101-esque” post for a while, although someone told me an ABM story recently that made me feel like maybe I need to create a quick cheat sheet for that too. 😅 Anyways, sooner rather than later I’m looking to focus more on AI/automation/tech implementation/GTM/revops stuff. Stay tuned! 🧠

But first, I want to share the results of our poll from last week:

Do you think the marketing operations job market is getting better?

🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ Yes, a lot better (8)
🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️ Yes, a little better (19)
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 Not sure (37)
🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️ No, it's a little worse (24)
🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ No, it's a lot worse (10) 98 Votes

Yikes, not great. 😬 Or at least, not what we were hoping for near the end of last year. Some folks were kind enough to send some additional insights, here are some of those:

In my experience, there are more roles than the freeze of 2022/2023, but they are highly competitive. The only real edges you can have are: 1. Being able to relocate and work in-office, 2. Being the best-known expert in a tiny niche/being AI literate, 3. Networking in via warm intros or knowing someone at the company.

SO, my recommendations in light of all of this:

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. 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.

Either way, keep your head up! We’ve been through many changes and job market contractions, don’t get too sucked into the doom-and-gloom cycle.

Here’s a new poll for ya — I’d love to see what your focus is right now, and if there are any specific trends:

Before we dive into the main content, please check out a quick word from our sponsors, who are kind enough to support this free MOPs content 💖:

Default has some fantastic enrichment waterfall and website intent functionality on the way — I honestly can’t believe how much they’ve built in the last year! Instead of having a bunch of disparate tools with tons of integrations to manage, you can manage one tool and do SO MANY workflows. Check out Default’s upcoming enrichment waterfall and website intent features here.

At Vector, we’re building the coolest ABM platform I’ve seen in a while — but it’s a CBM (contact-based marketing) platform! Now you can see exactly who’s on your website, who’s showing intent (even off of your website!), and even buying groups within companies. It’s really cool stuff and worth getting on your radar (and not just because I work there 🤣). Check out Vector’s new Funnel Vision platform here.

Okay, now to lead and account scoring! 👇

📖 Here’s The Ultimate Guide to Lead & Account Scoring. 👈

Here are the key pieces what I want you to take away:

• Use fit, engagement, and intent to drive precision.

• Weigh first party intent signals more heavily — think demo requests or pricing page views.

• Apply decay logic so old engagement doesn’t mislead you. Use your typical sales cycle length as a goalpost for this.

Once you get v1 to a good spot, build out more and innovate:

• Integrate 3rd-party intent data from providers like 6sense, Bombora, Vector, and G2.

• Use AI for predictive scoring and next-best action recommendations

Make scoring fit within your larger lifecycles, and take advantage all of the data that is relevant:

• Define clear thresholds (MQL, SQL, SAL) and map to account tiers.

• Combine signals: An ad click is nice. A demo request is gold. 🥇 

Okay, my last pro tips:

• Audit your model quarterly. Too many teams set up scoring and forget it for too long.

• Get regular feedback from sales. If you can, set up a channel in Slack or Teams to make it easy for them to get support/give feedback. Focus on ease of feedback for them, they’re busy selling!

• Simplicity + iteration = long-term impact. Take advantage of the data that’s measurably relevant, don’t set up a bajillion signals. It becomes too much to manage and a bit of a black box for sales, where they are unclear as to why someone was surfaced to them.

What I’m up to/what I’m studying 💭

I’ve been neck-deep in HubSpot reporting, and while there is a learning curve with any new tool, I’m really liking how user-friendly it is! I also just watched the first episode of the latest season of Love Island US — anyone else watching? 👀

Oh, and I’m planning a trip to NYC (most likely Manhattan) — I love food and entertainment, any recommendations? 🙏

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:

Yes! I go more in-depth on this in my course with a template, but here are some helpful resources:

Sercante’s 13 Best Practices for Migrating to Pardot from Another Marketing Automation Platform

EBQ’s Migrate HubSpot to Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (Pardot) [Step-by-Step Checklist]

My own tips:

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. 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.

4. 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.

5. 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.

6. 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.

7. 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.

8. 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.

I hope this is helpful, thanks for writing in!

Thanks for reading,

❤️ Sara