With Britney Young, Marketing Operations at McKesson
Britney Young from McKesson explains how the transition from small to large organizations starts with your mindset. You’ll hear more about how to scale your tech stack as your company grows.
Britney Young is in Marketing Operations at McKesson. Britney has ten years of professional marketing experience focused on digital marketing strategy, marketing operations and social media strategy.
She has advanced experience creating, managing, monitoring and reporting on digital campaigns. Britney’s key strengths include: demand generation, social media marketing, digital campaign strategy and lead nurturing with marketing automation.
How do you transition from a small to large organization?
In all of my previous roles, I had always been on teams of maybe 10 or 15 marketing people. Marketing Operations was a team of one or two. When I first made the transition to McKesson, it was very different. For instance, all of a sudden I was not the only one in Marketo. That was different in a sense that previously I had always known everything that was going on in my instance and how that all worked.
When I made that transition to McKesson, not only was I now in multiple instances, I also inherited multiple instances.I didn't quite know or understand where everything was or why it was. It took time to really learn all of that.
One of the other lessons I learned was to let go of that mindset of being involved in everything. In a large organization there are many teams, many people, and a lot of people that go into making decisions.
If you are used to being the only one who's actively involved in decision making you have to let that go. Instead, learn who these other teams are, their roles and how you can best partner with them on different initiatives.
What’s the best way to manage requests made of Marketing Ops as a company scales?
You can begin to use project management tools even at a small company. You can still get started with that process driven mindset to make it a habit to put everything in the tool, like Asana. Even if you have a team of one it helps to keep track of everything.
Using a project management tool as a small team can help manage expectations as well. WhenI was a team of one doing Marketo I had a ridiculous expectation of the amount of campaigns they wanted me to produce. Because I tracked everything I was able to go to our VP and say, “Hey, I need help. I can't continue to do all of this by myself.” You can use it as a way to justify additional resources, which might include bringing on an outside agency.
An agency can really help you scale. You're getting expertise not only in the execution, but also in the strategy. It gives you a sounding board if you are a team of one or two or five. Plus, you get excess and exposure to all of the clients that that agency has.
What initiatives have you undertaken at McKesson to spearhead sharing knowledge with other marketers on your team?
I’ve found it most helpful to schedule what we call ‘Let's Learn Marketo’ sessions. It's just a quick 30 minute recurring meeting with different teammates where we can talk about anything and everything and answer any of their questions they have on a current project or something they want to learn.
Those meetings are helpful not only because they're learning, but even for me and my own time. I love to teach and share knowledge, but I don't always have the time to do so. Getting random questions here and there really isn't the most effective way for me to be able to help. Structuring that conversation in the meetings has been the most effective way for everyone involved.
How can you protect your brand and prevent aggressive prospecting?
Start with your data. Who actually comes to your website? What are those personas? We found a lot of small businesses came to our website. That helped us rewrite our content because everything we had, even the ‘spray and pray’ emails was speaking to a larger audience.Once we understood it was the little guys using the website we thought about what is most useful for them?
It started with understanding who’s coming to the website and understanding the personas. Then we took a look at our content. Finally, you need to analyze. Who is our content speaking to? Are there any content gaps? We had a lot of bottom of the funnel or top funnel content, but there was no middle funnel content. That's what was really missing for us. There were small businesses that really had key questions about things like price or differentiators. Once we adjusted the content, we started seeing more success with our strategy.
