With Liz Medlicott, Director of Marketing Ops at Model N
Successful processes for Marketing Ops look different when you’re a team of one. Liz Medlicott from Model N shares how to manage expectations while being a team of one, when to use technology to automate, and how to achieve success as a fully remote worker.
Liz Medlicott is the Director of Marketing Operations at Model N. She’s spent over a decade in Marketing Operations with experience primarily in B2B software for enterprise, mid-market, and start-up businesses – including both public and unicorn companies.
Liz is skilled in Marketo, SFDC, Dynamics, ABM, data migration, data management and various marketing/sales tech stack tools.
Can you share how you’ve been successful as a team of one?
One of the pros is that you can get things done faster. One of the cons is that you have less people to get a larger volume of work done. In that case it can help to work with an outside consultancy. If your company has the budget for it, it can make your life much easier.
Making sure everyone on your marketing team has access to Marketo definitely helps. That usually means buy-in from the executive team to ensure access. That helps ensure that people know why something went wrong since they have access to the same information that you do.
Setting boundaries about what you’re responsible for in terms of the number of campaigns and other tasks helps to set reasonable expectations about your output as a team of one.
How do you maintain a balance between doing things manually and leveraging technology to automate?
There’s definitely an aspect of sometimes it's just too many tools to manage, even though those tools help with automating, there still has to be somebody who's setting it up correctly and making sure they still continue to work the way you want them to work.
There are certain tools that can make your life so much easier. When I first joined model N we had just ended our contract with LeanData. They reasoned that we have a small BDR team so we can build this in Marketo or Salesforce.
I built lead marketing In Marketo, but the problem was that I was also trying to do things like fuzzy matching for leads. It would take me hours anytime I wanted to update it. I started documenting all of the time I spent on it to try to build a case for myself for why we need LeanData.
We started back up with LeanData a few months later. It's so much more efficient, especially because we work primarily out of contacts. It can auto convert to contacts. We had somebody who was manually converting leads to contacts. The time it takes to do manually is ridiculous.
LeanData is an easy tool to manage. There's other tools that are much more complex. You should definitely make sure that you have the bandwidth to manage any automation tools if you're going to go with a tool that's more complex.
How has building strong relationships changed for you now that you work fully remote?
I joined Model N with the expectation of being fully remote. I love working remotely because, especially with marketing ops, sometimes I just need no one to be around while I'm building something.
When I'm doing board decks and stuff like that I need my space, but you also have to be able to work with a team. I'm constantly pinging people. The great thing about the team I'm on now is we actually are really spread out across the US.So I'm working with a lot of people on the East Coast. I'm working with some people in Denver. Everybody is really responsive.
You have to really over-communicate. If I'm gonna be out, I let everybody know. We all understand that people have lives. If you need to get something done outside of work, it's not a big deal. Just make sure to communicate and make sure to set up consistent meetings with the rest of the team.
Having those systems of communication in place like Slack, having good and efficient meetings is super important for success.
