There are a handful of marketing operations leaders who are at the top of their games, driving themselves, their teams, and seed by their businesses beyond the status quo to achieve leading-edge MOPs performance. They’re the people who are motivating and empowering others, while transforming new ideas into better ways of working.
One such exemplary MOPs leader is Atanas Vasilev, Senior Director, Marketing Operations at Progress Software. Progress is the leading platform for developing and deploying strategic business applications. Progress also enables organizations to effectively manage their data platforms, cloud and IT infrastructure.
Vasilev and the Progress MOPs team have partnered with Sojourn Solutions for well over a decade to drive the continuous improvement of their marketing operations. We spoke recently with Vasilev about how he approaches being a MOPs leader.
How do you define success for yourself and the MOPs team you lead?
Vasilev: My team and I work to ensure that Progress has 24/7 lead processing. We also make sure we’re the center of excellence for Progress when it comes to marketing technologies, lead management, and supporting the overall demand generation efforts within Progress.
We have pre-defined KPIs that we constantly track and use to measure our success. So our top KPI is not losing one lead, which means that all leads that Progress generates, regardless of the channel, should get processed and stored in Salesforce. Sometimes we might have delays in processing, but we never lose a lead.
We also work to generate valuable insights for the marketing organization that can unlock value and inform how we do campaigns, helping us drive better customer engagement and higher conversion rates.
How did you first come into marketing operations?
Vasilev: I spent almost 15 years in digital marketing, so my background is mostly in technology. Now that I’m in marketing operations, I still work in technology to some extent. But I find that marketing operations is a much broader and more mission-critical function for the organization than, say, digital marketing.
What skills and experiences are important in your MOPs leadership role?
Vasilev: The three pillars of what I and my team do are (1) systems (2) data and (3) process. By process I mean knowing how marketing and sales work, and having very good project management skills to drive operational excellence. Data is so important: a successful marketing operations professional should have a background in, and be comfortable learning about, how data informs what marketing does.
People management skills are also crucial, because the work of marketing operations is sometimes stressful. The team is often working on solving challenging problems and are under time pressure. Being a good manager of people helps set the right culture and expectations, so people can be productive and handle the pressure well.
How do you approach your professional development?
Vasilev: I approach professional development internally and externally. When it comes to internally, the best way to learn is talking with people in other functions. I might meet with a sales rep and ask them to please walk me through how they closed a deal. What exactly did they do from when they received the lead until they closed it?
I also learn externally from outside partners such as Sojourn Solutions. Our partnership has provided me and my team with a lot of know-how based on Sojourn’s experience gained from working with other companies who might have similar use cases as we do. I also use Forrester to keep track of trends and best practices in marketing operations.
And of course, I receive a lot of input and knowledge from the three big vendors for marketing automation platforms: Oracle, Adobe, and Salesforce.
How do you develop your team and give them the resources, skills, and support to be successful?
Vasilev: All of my team members have to become certified experts, in the platforms we use. They take courses around being an Eloqua Implementation Specialist, for instance, or learn project management skills. Learning on the job is important here.
Whenever I hire talent, I look for someone with at least some experience with marketing automation platforms. If you hire someone who has zero experience and knowledge on MAPs, it'll probably take them two years to be effective.
The second best hiring criteria is past experience in a marketing role, if you're coming from a demand gen function, for instance, that helps you understand the processes we use.
What's been your biggest challenge and your biggest accomplishment as a MOPs leader?
Vasilev: My biggest challenge is that all eyes are on us. Let's say Progress sees a drop in lead volume or lead conversion for a certain product line. Everyone will start asking us what's wrong. Many times nothing is wrong when it comes to, say, Eloqua or the demand gen process itself, but maybe the overall business cycle is slowing down and buyers are losing confidence or budget.
Sometimes, of course, the problem may be with our processes or system or our data. We then have to analyze the situation and come up with good solutions, and quickly.
Our biggest accomplishment is that we never lose a lead. It's 24/7 open running here. We do our job every single day and we help keep the marketing team and overall business running. We provide a platform that’s stable and that works reliably for our people. That’s a source of pride.
How do you use external partners like Sojourn?
Vasilev: There are two main use cases. First, when we need extra hands and we need it now. Unfortunately, things can happen unexpectedly and there might be too many ongoing projects for our team. That’s when we go outside for more hands.
The second and bigger use case is when we don't know something and so need “strategic consulting” because we don't know what we don't know. In such situations, we ask Sojourn to provide us with new ideas for navigating situations that maybe we don't know how to navigate.
Outside consultants have typically seen multiple use cases from different companies and know how to approach building and implementing the right solution for the right use case. Our internal team hasn’t seen all those use cases, nor have we developed and customized different solutions to address them. That’s when we call upon an experienced strategic consultant like Sojourn.
Any final thoughts for MOPs professionals?
Vasilev: If you are a person who feels fulfillment from the fact that what you've built works and it's mission-critical for the business, then you’ll be right for marketing operations. It’s not a great profession for people who need constant external validation.
When I was in digital marketing, the fulfillment came from rebranding or redesigning the whole company website. You built a splashy presentation and showed everyone the cool things you created. You got a lot of attention and maybe some awards. But if you're in marketing ops and doing a really good job, nobody will chat about how great you’re doing. People outside your team maybe don’t even understand what you’re doing.
If you’re not doing a great job and something is going wrong, everyone will want to reach out and tell you. The reward for marketing operations is intrinsic and intangible: no news is good news. As a mentor once told me, the best thing you can do as a manager is to make it so you are no longer needed by your team. You build a solid organization and grow your people so they can do everything without you.
If you’d like to improve your Marketing Operations team and maximize the ROI of your marketing operations, we can help. Learn more about us or feel free to reach out directly today!
