More and more companies are searching for adept professionals to care for their developing marketing technology stack. Yet, many are only outlining the email marketing support in their job descriptions – the market wants better automation but hasn’t embraced the impact of marketing operations. Devasmitha Reddy, a former Marketo implementation consultant with over 200 implementations, and I sat down to discuss what is happening in the marketing world. What we uncover will surprise you.

Kyle Hamer: (00:09) Hello, welcome to the summit, the podcast where we bring you the knowledge and insights from industry leaders and professionals. No fluff, no double digit growth overnight schemes, just real people having real conversations about real challenges inside of business. My name is Kyle Hamer and I’m your host. I’m here today with my good friend Devasmitha Reddy. But I say that right? Or is it a, is it still ready now that you are married or maybe I should have asked that before we started recording.

Devasmitha : (00:38) No, you got it right. It’s still Reddy.

Kyle Hamer: (00:41) That’s awesome. Um, well we’re going to talk a little bit about marketing automation and marketing operations and you know, I think this is something where there’s a lot of misinformation in the market that I’m super excited to talk with you. Now I know you and I know what I’m, what’s your background and experiences just just from having worked with you personally, but for our listeners, there’s meant that, can you tell us a little bit about you and, and how you got involved with marketing?

Devasmitha : (01:11) Sure. Um, first of all, thank you Carl for inviting me. This is super exciting. For me to be on your podcasts. Um, and a little background about myself, I’m an electronics and communications engineer. The degree I really don’t really talk about with an MBA in marketing. Um, so I’ve been in marketing ops since, uh, 2010 I started off as a Marketo Salesforce admin or an it company. Um, and then a few years later I moved into business consulting at Marketo, um, helping companies roll out their marketing automation. Um, and as a, as a consultant there, I worked with several companies. I think if I, if I kept track of it, it was a little over 200 companies. Um, and some of them were companies that were brand new to marketing automation. They hadn’t used marketing or implemented marketing automation before. Some of them were really advanced, well, worst with it, and really wanted to take their a implementation to the next level. Um, and then there were some that, uh, we’re switching tools. So, um, that’s sort of my background. I’ve been in marketing operations. Um, as you can see for the most part of my year.

Kyle Hamer: (02:25) Well, like I think your, your engineering background and things that you’ve done in that space has been been beneficial.

Devasmitha : (02:32) Okay. Yeah, I definitely would say that. Although I remember when I, um, when I started engineering in college, the first day I went back home and I told my dad, there’s no way I’m going to get through four years of college. Um, but, but I think today as I look back, um, it definitely does give me, um, a sort of a problem solver or an way of looking at things. So that I would definitely give it. But other than that, um, if you, if you want to talk electronics or communications other than knowing how to spell those words, there’s really not more that I can even talk about.

Kyle Hamer: (03:15) Well, I think with most engineering backgrounds in the methodology, or at least the thought process they teach you that it has direct application in the day to day world of what we do on the automation and operations side. Now, one of the things that you didn’t mention or you, you did talk about the vast number of companies that you worked for and worked with in your Marketo role, but you did something that was really interesting. You said, hey, I’ve been kind of living in this, this bubble over here of this was a best practice and the best way to do it, but you actually left Marketo and went to go do, um, marking automation and operations hands on leading a team. Is that, but I, I have that right. Correct.

Devasmitha : (03:59) Correct. You got that right in. Um, and as much as I enjoyed my time as a consultant, um, I really wanted to switch sides or the change and then, um, really own, uh, numbers, be responsible for something and execute campaigns, um, and see how much of what we were telling people where best practices and uh, you know, sitting back and saying, hey, go do this. Um, to actually apply that and be responsible for something. And that’s why I switched over to, from consulting to actually running marketing ops at a startup. [inaudible]

Kyle Hamer: (04:34) yeah. And, and you had a unique experience there where, you know, initially you were kind of the operations manager person by, by yourself and that that role grew to where the, the, as the business scaled and got bigger, you had to work through all kinds of really interesting things, which, you know, leads me kind of to the topic today, what is marketing operations and what is marketing automation? I mean, I, I think at a Oh holistic level, I’ve seen all kinds of really interesting things that are out there. When one person said that it basically does everything but cure cancer. When we were, we were reading that the last time we were chatting and having a pretty good giggle. Um, but in your opinion, having been on both sides, right, both the, the implementation side for, for a company who’s selling this software tune, living with the bruises, do you see a difference?

Devasmitha : (05:32) Great question. Yeah, absolutely. Uh, and actually as I was, um, thinking about it this morning, um, I think back when I, early on in [inaudible] [inaudible] I started off as a Marketo admin or a Salesforce Admin for the company that I worked for, um, which was almost 10 years ago. I think back then, most companies really only had, um, one person that was really the administrator of a tool. And that was what most people considered marketing ops, like in operations. It’s really just that one role where someone came in, hit the run button on campaigns and we went back, um, to now I think my marketing operations has evolved the much broader than that. Um, and to me, marketing operations is sort of like the brain work that your marketing team operates on. Um, I think it on walls, um, strategy and planning and coordination and, um, analytics.

Devasmitha : (06:39) A big portion of it was also reporting, making sure everything’s working fine, um, and, and so on. So it’s not really just, um, that one person that’s sort of like the administrator, but it’s someone that, yeah, does a much broader and bigger role. Um, and to add to that, I think, uh, like you said, many people I think used marketing operations and marketing automation sort of interchangeably, um, which makes it confusing. But I think those are completely different. I think marketing automation is something that you can plug in to make your marketing operations more efficient or faster or to scale. Um, but, but to me, marketing operations is something you need to have in place and it’s much broader and automation is only a small part of it.

Devasmitha : (07:33) No, Devasmitha, especially as we looked at, like when you and I first got started working together for Oh, for the software company that we were implementing Marketo for is most organizations are absolutely of the old opinion. You have one Salesforce administrator, database administrator, and that’s what you need in order to run a marketing operation effectively. But if you don’t have a process or you don’t have a, uh, yeah, if you don’t have a process or a methodology to how you’re marketing, if you don’t have a plan, there’s literally nothing. The army, yes, I couldn’t agree more with that. There is really nothing to automate. And then [inaudible]. Okay. Why don’t we to look at it though. Um, Kyle is maybe you, while I say you need to have marketing operations in place, like a process of plan, a methodology, like you said before, you can even think automation that said, I s I also think that every marketing team can use marketing automation. But yeah, it’s about the order of these things, right? You can’t just have a marketing team with no marketing ops in place with no plan in place that wants to implement automation because really are you trying to automate?

Kyle Hamer: (08:56) Well, the, I mean, look, that’s what, when you and I first got introduced, that’s exactly what was going on. They had a product marketer that hadn’t been there very long in an events coordinator and they were like, hey, we want to move from Pardot to Marketo and hey, Devasmitha and me, Kyle there, you know, you guys are gonna put this together and I’ll, I’ll never forget. It seemed so obvious. Uh, but I must have missed that. Ask the question you said, all right, so what campaigns are we bringing over? And I said, nothing. We’re building from scratch and the silence on the phone. Yeah. Yeah. Right. So what are we building? Okay. Oh no, but that, but marketing automation, I don’t know. We’re building a, we’re going to, we’re going to build a cure for cancer. And where do you use this tool to get there?

Devasmitha : (09:46) Right. And oftentimes I feel like it marketing automation was this. Um, I think at certain points in time, I was this buzz word that with something of a magical thing, like a magic wand that would overnight resolve all your problems and then suddenly you wake up to a lot of leads and you’re starting to hit all your numbers and boom, you’re doing really well. So I’m like, no, that’s not what’s going to happen. You’re not going to plug this in and then wake up too late hitting your targets. You know, I have, I don’t know how, how we ended up there, but I did come across a lot of companies that sort of have this opinion of monkey automation that would, that would solve all their problems. You know what in, in what I’m seeing and where I think what we’re seeing in the market, cause I follow in, in, in read a lot as it relates to technology.

Kyle Hamer: (10:43) What I’m seeing is there’s a lot of confusion still by companies of what is marketing automation versus what is marketing operations. Thank you. You alluded to it earlier where it’s like, well, you know, they’re, they’re absolutely different, but you’ll see people that’ll have marketing automation specialist or marketing operations specialist must know Marketo and be good at email campaigns. It’s like both. That’d be like a subset that’s not really marketing media. [inaudible] it is operations. It is automation, but, okay. Okay. Right. Why is there so much confusion? Yeah, I think it stems from the fact that it started off like that, right? It started off as now there are all these fancy automation tools and we need someone dedicated to me running those tools. And I think that was the starting point of people. Actually, I’m coming up with a role on the marketing team. [inaudible] was limited to just that tool or that platform or a system that they were running.

Devasmitha : (11:48) Um, and over time and soon enough people realized that you can’t be, or the automation piece if you don’t understand how the entire team operates and you know, the purpose of that automation. And so I think, hmm, soon that role evolved into something way broader. But I think, yeah, in my opinion, I think people confuse, get confused or mixed the two up. Um, they’re definitely not interchange, right? They’re not interchangeable. They don’t mean the same thing. And I think one of the things that’s really interesting, you touched on there, that we’re, when you think about the market from a technology standpoint, was it 2007, maybe 2004, you know, you had the first marketing automation email marketing tools make their way out, right? The way back in the day there was players like Silverpop who ended up getting consume. No, you had, oh man, I just heard of him the other day, but they got bought by a Eloqua.

Kyle Hamer: (12:56) Um, you know, and then there’s this, this, this explosion of email marketing. Start off, you know, maybe you had 15 players in the space to today, there’s over 9,000 different technologies that you can apply between what you’re tracking and what you’re using and how you’re integrating, what’s your journey look like? And it’s just, it’s just, just, it’s, it’s overwhelming in most organizations haven’t really kept up. They still see marketing operations as emails and it’s so much bigger than that. It’s even so much bigger than just digital. Right. Or, or your digital strategy. So what are ways that you’ve seen companies successfully address operations for, for long term success or at least near term, being able to digest what they’re seeing happen in that, um, inside their business or, or inside the market with the explosion of Tech [inaudible] one, one thing that I’ve seen, hmm. Common across most successful teams is, um, when like one recognizing that there’s a need for a dedicated resource to be managing your operations and actually depending on [inaudible] on the size of your operations and the size of your team and your marketing team and activities, really, maybe even an entire marketing ops team, right?

Devasmitha : (14:22) One is even recognize that you, that there is a need four a team or a resource and then second realizing that sooner than later. Right. A lot of times, I think back in the day a marketing, marketing ops hire wasn’t in anytime soon. They people marketing teams waited to be a certain number or size before they could even consider or think about having a marketing ops person. I feel successful team

Devasmitha : (14:51) is someone that Ah, or successful teams are those that have a marketing ops person early on, maybe even their first three hires. [inaudible] first two, your first five hires of their marketing team. Um, and I think that the timing of when you have a dedicated marketing ops person is really important. Um, you know, going back to my, my definition of okay, marketing ops being the theme work, the sooner you have a dedicated marketing ops person that has, um, that’s involved in, in the strategy and you know, really laying out, um, everything starting from the tools you’re using to coordinating between teams to the execution to knowing what you want to report on, what are your KPIs. Um, just having that person earlier on the team really I think is one key to success.

Kyle Hamer: (15:46) Well, look, and I think, you know, I’ll, I’ll echo that based on the way we did our hiring, when we, you know, eventually that role where we started working together, I ended up leading the team of marketers there for, for that organization. Okay. And it became evident very quickly, even for all of the understanding I had around automation and operations, that being the head of a department and understanding and, and, and knowing how to do right, make the tool do what you needed to do is different than actually having somebody dedicated and focused on it full time. Because when you’re, when you, you know, a lot of organizations will say, Oh, I need, I need somebody who’s good at writing, or I need somebody who’s good at managing or creating campaigns, or I need somebody who’s good at shows. A lot of organizations need that, uh, the strength or capability to lean into marketing operations for, for letting there talented players do what they do best.

Kyle Hamer: (16:45) And for us the, you know, the, the day that was golden was when we hired our, our first marketing operations person. [inaudible] and they, I mean they came in and you know, they didn’t necessarily have a breadth of experience, but we spent time developing and training them. They, they offloaded so much of the, the mechanics and the, the a technology tuning, if you will, to make things work that it allowed the operation to breathe and think about all of the things going on for marketing right now. This person’s asking, well, what’s my timeline on when, when this is going to get through design and how long do we have to wait for, um, copy and what, you know, what’s the sequencing and what are they? They became a mini project manager even in their operations role. It opened up, like I said, a whole new possibilities for the efficiency of, of our little team. And we had a small team that when we first got there, they were generating, I don’t know if less than 600 leads a month. And those leads weren’t even making it to the,

Kyle Hamer: (17:49) to the sales reps.

Kyle Hamer: (17:50) I think they had a backlog of a ridiculous number, several thousand leads that were just stuck. They were stuck in between their two systems. Um, and by the time we had our marketing operations person in, uh, they, you know, we were fleet freely moving several thousand leads a month directly into the sales reps inbox within, you know, four minutes of somebody filling out a form or completing an action. And that, I mean, that was just, he was monumental. What it meant for the business and the sales team and morale and the relationship. I get you just really as critical. You’re right. Awesome. And I think, um, you touched upon a very important point. There were, yeah, there’s really two aspects to this. Read broadly. You need, ah, someone to be thinking about what’s next, the bigger picture, vision, strategy, aligning with what, where the business is headed and so on.

Devasmitha : (18:45) And at the same time, you need someone that his hands on working on making all of it happen. But I think one of the things that a company struggled with is they’re trying to find this hybrid of, or this person who can, you know, design your email, set up in Marketo, hit the run button, clean up your database, and at the same time stay on top of where the company’s headed, what you should do next, what are the other tools out there, um, see where marketing fits, um, or aligns with sales and so on. Right. I think that’s really challenging for one person and it is a time consuming job. Like regardless of how much you automate, um, I still think there’s, there’s a lot to do that Cannes on work to do other than just sit back and think a strategy. So I think it makes marketing operations that much more challenging because you need to be both the thinker and the door.

Kyle Hamer: (19:50) Yeah. You’re, you’re, you’re spot on the great ones, you know, they had the capability to move freely from one end to the other. But the, but the challenge is, is most companies haven’t taking the time to develop their own framework or methodology or, or process for what does marketing operations really support? What does it really do? So they take somebody fresh out of college or you know, off of a couple of different jobs. There’s somebody who shows some interest in technology and they shove them into this spot and they say, okay, now do our email. Well, just the email function alone, you gotta think about deliverability. You got to think about, um, you know, the, the, the data and there, every time you create something, you build something new. There’s always going to be sediment. There’s going to be trashed. There’s going to be, there’s going to be clean up that needs to be done behind it. And this was, I mean, it was just painful for us

Kyle Hamer: (20:47) to learn, but we went through four sales leaders in three years. And what do you think happened every time we got a new sales leader? You think our marketing operation and process stayed the same?

Devasmitha : (20:58) Nope. You go back to square one.

Kyle Hamer: (21:02) That’s exactly right. So, you know, I didn’t, didn’t get the chance to do 200 and, and kind of set away and walk, but I did one four different times and know four different methodologies and that the amount of trash and when I say trash, just junk data, oh this person cared about this particular attribute that’s tied to the website or this person cared about this as it relates to opens inside of emails or this person cares about seeing it as it relates to when the sales person picked up the phone, whatever, whatever the, the, the methodology led to you’re reworking your entire operation and then, you know, you cut a big swath and you get a lot of it done, but then you had to go back and tie up all the little details. I mean, you’re, you’re um, you know, we’ve touched on it, but maybe we haven’t really defined it yet. I think you have a really good definition of what is it, what is a good marketing operator look like? What’s a good marketing operations person? What are the skills and [inaudible] talents and neat things that they have, if you will, that makes us the good ones.

Devasmitha : (22:04) Yeah, I think for, I think one of the key things, um, your blend of what you just said is yeah, you need to be organized and really methodical about what you’re doing. Um, because there’s so many moving pieces to this. Um, you’re dealing with data stuff that’s really important. You’re setting up workflows, you’re your thinking process. So you need to be someone that organized and methodical and has a certain way of doing things. Um, I also think you need someone to be analytical or problem solver because you are dealing with tools and you will, something’s going to break, right? It’s not going to be perfect every day you’re going to come in and find something that’s missing or you have a record that’s not sinking and so on. So you, you have to be someone that’s a problem solver. Another important thing I think is a lot of times I see, I received this requests of, Hey, can you just change the name of this field? And you know, on the top of it, it really looks like a simple request that takes a minute. But you,

Devasmitha : (23:08) I think a good marketing ops person is someone who can okay, educate and then also tell the rest of the team what it means to change that one field. I mean essentially being able to see the long [inaudible] impact of things, um, of the changes that you’re making. Um, and if the process and rules that you’re set, putting it in place. And I think there’s a fine balance, right? A lot of times you don’t want to be the bad year for your team to move forward. Do you want to be quick? And then, um, cause it’s important to get certain things out of the, at the right time, but at the same time you need to be someone who can see the value of doing that or the damage of doing that. Um, and so you need to have the ability to think long term. Um, and I think another, I guess is a common common thing across all marketing rules I feel like is, is being a team player because a marketing ops person is someone that [inaudible] um, works with not just the marketing team but also the sales team, the product team. And so you need to be someone that, uh, again, coordinate across teams and also be a team player to bring everyone together. I think there was, in my mind, those are, uh, some, some of the top things that make a good [inaudible] ops person. Yeah. It’s interesting when you think about marketing, a lot of times marketing is thought about as top of the funnel, creative, big hairy ideas.

Devasmitha : (24:39) What you talk about in marketing operations sounds very practical. Sure. Is very pragmatic. Um, how can leaders or people who are running departments who are highly creative, uh, get the most out of their operations team, what’s the best way to do that? Hmm. Um, I think one is [inaudible] when you’re trying to implement something or you know, get, get, go to market with something. I think there’s two aspects. There’s the positive aspect. There’s also the operational aspect, but those really go hand in hand. And I think it’s really important for leaders to be able to, um, you paint the vision or translate what it is that they’re trying to do and what can in hand with their operations team to make sure that that’s executed the way they want it to be. So I think communication and then being able to, um, involved in marketing ops person, Aye.

Devasmitha : (25:49) You know, right at the top level where you’re coming up with strategy, not at a point where you’ve thought of everything, you know, really come up with how you want it executed and then you give it to your ops teams to say, there you go. I feel like that’s kind of late in the day, right? Cause your operations team is the, the team or the person that’s the expert at executing what you just came up with. And a lot of times you have constraints and limitations that you need to deal with, but you need to be aware of that. Me Actually Change, um, your creative ideas. So, uh, a key thing is bringing your ops person right at [inaudible] you are the time that you’re, you were thinking of your strategy or your plan. Um, and I think that’s, that’s important in order to be successful. I think one of the things

Kyle Hamer: (26:43) that you, you nail with that perspective there has meant the [inaudible] is a lot of organizations think of marketing last [inaudible] and I know that, that that sounds counterintuitive given the work you know, in this space. But a lot of times it, how do I drive revenue? Give me more leads, make more phone calls, more activity. But sometimes the strategy or the planning piece comes to having a seat at the table for it to be most effective. And in a lot of organizations, marketing may not have the best seat at a table. What I think you bring up is really interesting though, is that the, the takeaway here for, for marketing leaders is, is take your operations people and having them become part of your plan building. But even just your, your own strategic marketing plan for the year that your operations team or individuals on your operations group built.

Kyle Hamer: (27:43) I’m participating in that building process because there may be Aha’s or uh, levers that you can pull that you didn’t know tactically that fit in nicely in the end of the strategy and, and give you whole new markets or whole new groups or approaches that could have a, a significant impacting your, you know, your go to market for the next 12 months. Absolutely. Um, I definitely think marketing ops has and should have a seat on the table or beyond precisely for what you just said. Um, and I’ve seen that happen, uh, in my personal experience as well. Cause a lot of times and especially, uh, companies that are moving fast, um, or going for a goat’s birthday, it’s expected that you’re going to change, um, your approach or strategy maybe as often as every quarter event. Right? And a lot of times you don’t, um, you don’t have the time to think through everything and you’re moving at a pace that hard to keep up with.

Devasmitha : (28:50) Um, and especially in those scenarios, I think it’s very important for operations to be brought on early on cause you could be doing more damage than good. Um, and bringing on the ops person later to clean up the mess is really not fair and you could have saved a lot of time in trouble and maybe even come up, um, with a better plan if you have them on, um, early. So there you are with that f word, the f word that all marketers are like, Hey, I want my fair share. I want, you know, I want to be treated fairly. Take me seriously. Just call it, just call the leads. We gave you sales. Okay. Right. And I, and I, and I think now with so many tools out there, um, and the number is only increasing as we talk. I think it’s making it easier for marketers to be truly data-driven.

Devasmitha : (29:45) Um, and maybe this was a challenge several years ago, but I think now really that’s not, um, that’s not, that’s no excuse because there is many, many tools out there, a lot of ways to look at your data and show improve that you really deserve a seat on the table. Right? Yeah. And I think in a, you know, in another, in another chat we’ll get into attribution in data because that’s a, that’s a gigantic, gigantic sets of discussions. W what I can tell you is, is yeah, I think there’s a balance [inaudible] and I think, you know, maybe one thing that I’ll add to your, your marketing operations. Okay. Description. Beyond being a team player, beyond being detailed and highly organized and even beyond, um, being able to see long term impact is the ability to be creative and thinking outside of the box. Wow. Because what I think marketing a good marketing operations person is, is somebody who’s a rate blend of art in science.

Kyle Hamer: (30:52) And that art doesn’t mean that, hey, I’m really good at drawing something or it’s gotta be a Picasso. The art sometimes can be creating an experience or a continuation of a brand in a meaningful way using technology. That means that’s an art that some people don’t have. And sometimes that’s are based off of a hunch. If all we ever did was, you know, live off of data-driven insights, there’d be a lot of, uh, there’d be a lot of, uh, one trick ads are one trick ponies are one trick. You’re like the, there wouldn’t be a lot of diversity in the things that marketers try. And from a marketing operations standpoint, I think having that creativity in me and marrying that art and science together helps give a diversity and create contrast in your analytics and in your data. And so, so to me, I think, you know, that person being able to think beyond just linear, um, but into bigger spaces is a really important.

Devasmitha : (31:52) Yep, totally agree with that. Okay. So, um, look, you know, I think the, the, the, so I think when I, when I think about marketing operations, I think about marketing automation and kind of our chat today, it seems to me that the real takeaways are marketing operations is your framework and you automate inside of your framework. [inaudible] the automation is the execution. The operation really is tied to strategy. Would you agree with that? A pretty good summary. Yeah. I think you’ve got that right there. Yeah. To go over what I said, I think, uh, I think marketing operations is much broader and automation is just a small piece of, of your entire marketing operations [inaudible] and as you did, you look at that, it doesn’t mean you need one without the other. You can’t have both because you do need both. You should absolutely automate. Okay. Getting a marketing operator, it can be somebody for a company that doesn’t have a lot of money.

Kyle Hamer: (33:06) They can start off with, hey, this person, yeah, I need a marketing. I need to automate my marketing, or I need marketing operations where, where do I go first? If you find the right person who’s detail oriented, organized, creative, um, wants to be a team player and has the ability to see both short and long term, that person can do both the strategy and the [inaudible] the work needed inside of the tool. [inaudible] that is my understanding is that that Unicorn does exist. Okay. I you call it the Unicorn. Um, I don’t, in my opinion, I think that is a unicorn. I have yet to see someone that is great at both and I think even if it is humanly possible, I just don’t think that that’s the best way to go about things, in my opinion. That should be, um, that’s a lot for one person to handle and to be good at.

Devasmitha : (34:03) Um, and I think it’s, it’s easier split, um, to be a team of two or more to do that. But to your point, I think most companies, and I also think it’s something that people need to, okay. Like outgrow themselves. It’s not something that you can just say and start off with. You could start with one person. You could start with marketing ops with no automation. Ideally I’d like to s like companies that start that way and then the outgrow that rolled soon enough and realized the need for an automation tool or more people on their ops team. And I think that’s when they’re really ready rather than, yeah, there’s no perfect solution here. You don’t want companies to start with like a ton of automation tools and uh, [inaudible] people team, um, did really start with that one person, get to a point where the one person can’t do everything, um, and can’t be the Unicorn you’re hoping that be and then build your team and build add automation to your operations and you know, optimize and scale that way. Yeah. Look, I think, I think one of the things here where we’re, we’re in complete agreement is, and I’ll use sales as analogy. You won’t take your top closer and have them be the administrator of your CRM. You just don’t do it. [inaudible] yeah. Unless that person is, you know, your top salesperson is in a consulting group and yeah, they’re your best Salesforce administrator. Even then it’s like, Eh,

Kyle Hamer: (35:37) Um, but it’s always been around. We just, we’ve, we’ve named it other, the things we’ve taken the, hey, I need you to call the local print shop and pull a list for this demographic to do x, Y, and Z , and they’ll send it. Well that’s part of the operations. You know, the person making the phone call, the person pulling lists, scheduling the, the mailing to go out. All of that work takes time and it’s part of the business strategy. But that was maybe handled by, uh, an assistant, you know, Sam or Sally, the, the office assistant, and we didn’t think much of it. And then it grew into, well, I need to send this email out because we need a newsletter. And that went to, uh, Peggy or Allen, the marketing managers, but they all have other full time jobs that they’re doing with the expansion of operations today. The consolidation of that effort and aligning the operation for strategy absolutely has to move beyond, Oh, we’ll just have sales. Our sales ops guy can do that. No. And maybe, but probably not. Like they have enough stuff to worry about for your sales team, let alone all the things your marketing team needs to get into the data to get into the analytics.

Devasmitha : (36:49) Okay. Absolutely. I think you nailed it there and oh, it’s it like how you picked, um, sales ops for an analogy. You know, for some reason people get it really fast when you talk about sales and sales off. I still struggle with how marketing and marketing ops can be. Two different things. And really you have the need for both. You know, it was, it was reading, it was reading a post the other day and I thought this was this fantastic. I shared it with you last week when we were chatting that somebody said, you know, can you believe that marketing operations or marketing ops isn’t even old enough as a position to buy a beer? And when you think about that, okay, yeah, marketing operations has been around, but it’s really just now starting to come into its own. It’s, it’s, it’s finally starting to find some footing.

Kyle Hamer: (37:37) Um, but it’s always been around. We just, we’ve, we’ve named it other, the things we’ve taken the, hey, I need you to call the local print shop and pull a list for this demographic to do x, Y, andZ , and they’ll send it. Well that’s part of the operations. You know, the person making the phone call, the person pulling lists, scheduling the, the mailing to go out. All of that work takes time and it’s part of the business strategy. But that was maybe handled by, uh, an assistant, you know, Sam or Sally, the, the office assistant, and we didn’t think much of it. And then it grew into, well, I need to send this email out because we need a newsletter. And that went to, uh, Peggy or Allen, the marketing managers, but they all have other full time jobs that they’re doing with the expansion of operations today. The consolidation of that effort and aligning the operation for strategy absolutely has to move beyond, Oh, we’ll just have sales. Our sales ops guy can do that. No. And maybe, but probably not. Like they have enough stuff to worry about for your sales team, let alone all the things your marketing team needs to get into the data to get into the analytics.

Devasmitha : (38:48) Right. Couldn’t agree more. And yeah, like you said, maybe it’s on a no yet. There are ways to do things and then there’s the right way to do something. And I think the right way is to have and recognized the need for marketing operations. Um,

Kyle Hamer: (39:06) totally recognize, uh, recognize the need for marketing operations or hey, maybe you have a skilled operator or a skilled technologist inside your company, but you don’t have the, the process or the experience or the workflow. Man, I know some of the things that we’ve talked about, what you learned, uh, as you moved into the, did the startup and in growing from a small team of just you on the operations to a multiple team and decentralized, and we can get into all of that later, but the things that you learned, I bet you it would have been great to have a partner to somebody to kind of help to help you bridge some of those gaps. So you weren’t constantly drinking water through a fire hose.

Devasmitha : (39:45) Yup. I went from working on centralized to decentralized operations. And there’s, there’s, that’s [inaudible] that was such a big lesson in itself and I think it was a great experience. Um, just going through that good. Spoke with the company. Definitely something that we can talk about.

Kyle Hamer: (40:04) Yeah. I think, I think we should, we should pick that up for another day. But what I guess what I’m driving at is, is even if you have somebody internally that’s talented, it doesn’t mean that you can’t use partners or other folks to help bridge the gap to get you to the ideal world. He doesn’t, it doesn’t have to be expertise that you go out and you hire fresh out of college, you hire from another company, you can develop it, but you’ve gotta be patient with it. Right. It’s, it’s still young and, and evolving and developing and nothing’s more evident than what we’re seeing in the job descriptions and the job roles that are out there.

Devasmitha : (40:37) Right.

Kyle Hamer: (40:39) Oh so much to talk about related to marketing operations and marketing automation and we could go for hours. But today’s topic I think has been great in helping clarify, at least for me, and I hope for those that are, that are listening, the value of operations separate from, from automation and how they play and work together. So I want to thank you for, for being a guest this week. Devasmitha.

Devasmitha : (41:04) Thank you, Kyle. This was great. Yeah, it was

Devasmitha : (41:07) time well spent chatting about things that are

Devasmitha : (41:11) my favorite marketing operations. Oh, thank you so much for having me on your podcast.

Kyle Hamer: (41:16) Oh, it’s it. Like I said, it’s my pleasure and I, I really do genuinely think we should make this a thing. So every week tune back in and Devasmitha and I will pick some fun, interesting topic. Maybe we’ll, ah, we’ll find somebody that’s out there that’s uh, uh, oh willing victim to in and talk about their particular operation. But we’re going to try and deliver value as it relates to marketing automation, operations and all things related to technology. Uh, for those folks who are interested in learning more and expanding their horizons. Um, this has been Kyle Hamer, your host of summit. Uh, check out, uh, check us out on Hamermarketinggroup.com four access to the podcast and, and other things we got going on. Devasmitha, how can people get ahold of you?

Devasmitha : (42:05) Um, you can either message me on LinkedIn or you could email me at devasmitha@gmail.com and I’m guessing you want me to spell that out?

Kyle Hamer: (42:16) Yeah, I think it might be a, might be a bit of a challenge for some people.

Devasmitha : (42:20) Yes. Um, so that’s, uh, d e v a s m i t h a@gmail.com.

Speaker 4: (42:32) Awesome. Well, thanks again. This has been a great topic. We’re gonna

Kyle Hamer: (42:38) get off now and, and um, head to the rest of our afternoon, but we’ll be back next week with some more, uh, marketing operations, marketing automation insight. Have a great afternoon, great evening or wherever you at. Make it a great day because you know what, life’s too short, not

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