The Marketing Operations Strategist - Arguably the most impactful fix you can implement at your org: The Lead Washing Machine

Hey! 👋

Back in the day, the OG marketing automation platform was Eloqua. Eloqua is a super robust platform, despite being underinvested in since its acquisition…and one of the star features was a tool called a Contact Washing Machine. The idea was to format, standardize, and cleanse data.

Eloqua has lost its market share in the marketing automation space, but this app is genius, and has evolved into a pretty commonly used concept in the enterprise marketing operations world: the lead washing machine. 🧽🫧 

Let me tell you more about it after this quick sponsor mention:

Okay, back to what I want to teach you about the lead washing machine.

There are different variations of definitions for the function, but at its heart: it’s the centralization of a lead processing automation, where we strive to intake, format, standardize, cleanse, and optionally tag and enrich data.

We want to centralize these processes as much as we can because we want them to run in a specific sequential order. Why does that matter? Check out the left section of this diagram to see what happens when order of operations is not in place:

Tl;dr — it is CHAOS. One automation incorrectly overwriting the next, crappy enrichment data overwriting valuable user-entered data, lifecycle stamping and scoring getting all screwed up….the list goes in. The worst outcomes are what marketers often feel at the user level: incorrect reporting, incorrect lead flow, lead leakage, and overall frustration at the lack of data reliability/accuracy.

Okay, okay, now you get the point of the importance of a lead washing machine. But how can you implement it? There are a few key parts to include:

Record intake, cleansing, formatting, and standardization

INTAKE + CLEANSE: In this portion of the flow, you want to determine who will be pulled in (usually, we look at created date = today). You might want to use a smart list as a suppression list of folks to exclude from this overall process — see more ideas on what to include as spam here.

FORMAT + STANDARDIZE: Once leads are in the process, you’ll want to standardize them. A very common use case for this is standardizing country and state fields to match your values in Salesforce or your CRM. But it doesn’t stop there: you can catch stray/incorrect employee size values, or standardize any other critical fields needed for lead pass and follow-up.

Lead scoring

This one can be tricky, depending upon your MAP’s automation capabilities — but if I can, I like to centralize scoring within this lead washing machine/processor. This way, we can have one place to make changes, rather than disparate scoring mechanisms all over the place.

Lifecycle stamping

At a minimum, I like to stamp the initial lifecycle stage within this lead washing machine process. Even better if I can continue to push leads through this workflow and change their lifecycle stage in a centralized place, which means centralized management and transparency.

Tagging

Do you tag leads based on source, UTM parameters, or utilize system tags to help organize your database? This is a great place to evaluate and apply those tags.

Enrichment

This is another nice-to-have that is largely dependent upon your stack’s capabilities, but if you can at least trigger enrichment during this washing machine, it’s a great place to do so. This way, leads are enriched before they hit your CRM, which tends to be overwhelmed with account enrichment and other automations. How do you go about this? Either you could trigger an enrichment integration within a worklow UI, or change a field value to trigger a record to be picked up and enriched by an integration vendor. Think something like: Clearbit Processed? = True.

Lead routing

Typically, for most MAPs, this really consists of assigning the lead to a CRM user for syncing — but it could mean running assignment logic within your MAP, if marketing owns that process. You could also break this out into a secondary automation, as I show in the diagram…whichever makes the most sense for you and your team.

All this being said, please continue to measure how well your MAP can handle all of the automation in one place — while it is ideal for us as managers, if it slows down your instance too much, you may need to break the washing machine into multiple automations. That’s totally fine, and now you know each piece of processing that is involved and can break it apart accordingly.

If you’re interested in learning more about this concept and other critical processes, keep your eyes peeled for my upcoming Marketing Operations Master Playbook course. 👀🧑‍🎓 

Would you join a paid marketing operations professional community?

I’m working on some new concepts as I wrap up some current projects and am looking for feedback on what people are looking for. Is it a community? If so, what kind of content would be most valuable to you?

Learning resource of the week:

Helpful AI tool of the week 🤖

Admittedly, I have not used this tool a ton yet — but I find it intriguing and want to use it more soon. The value of theGist is that it can read your apps and provide helpful summaries (think: Slack) and updates (think: Jira deadline has passed). The product seems very early but has great reviews on ProductHunt and seems promising, as our worlds get inundated with more and more apps to keep track of and communicate within. (Reminder: this is not sponsored, this is just cool stuff I’m seeing out in the market, that I think you should be aware of)

What I’m up to/what I’m studying

Lately, I’ve been slammed with personal life travel and work travel. 😅 That being said, I’m continuously looking for more learning opportunities and Wes Kao’s executive communication class looks pretty dope. Again, not a paid mention — I mention it here because it’s what I’m considering lately. 🤷‍♀️ 

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:

There is a contentious debate about whether centralized operations will be named GTM operations or revenue operations…I think the name matters a whole lot less than the function/responsibilities do. I actually had an interesting conversation about this with a private marketingops.com mentorship group…folks asked a lot about titles, but I stressed the importance of 1) your direct manager and 2) how the function is valued within company leadership. These will be the make-or-breaks for any department.

Now, if you are asking more specifically about the transition from marketing operations to revenue operations, a lot of that has to do with expanding your knowledge to capture the full lead lifecycle — from lead to cash. The way I’ve chosen to do that is by joining an agency of folks who primarily focus on sales operations projects, to learn from them — and to help share my knowledge of marketing operations with them. Together, we complete the revops picture!

In terms of responsibilities, I most often see revenue operations orgs report up into a VP of RevOps, with director-level leads for marketing, sales, and customer success. So it helps to specialize in one specific GTM area, but if you want to move into leadership or become a more holistic freelance consultant, you’ll need to understand the full lead-to-cash motion.

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! 😄

Til next time,

❤️ Sara