How Marketing Compliance Prevents Burnout & Accelerates Growth with M.H. Lines

Marketing operations compliance has become critical as GDPR fines increased 15,000% with regulations expanding beyond billion-dollar corporations to small companies. This roundtable explores how marketing operations professionals leverage compliance requirements to secure system investments, properly evaluate AI and automation tools through technical validation before business integration, and prevent team burnout through clear role definitions and agency partnerships. Learn strategies for overcoming shiny object syndrome with structured tool evaluation frameworks, understanding total cost of ownership including implementation and run costs, and positioning operations as strategic enablers rather than tech killers.
 

M.H. Lines

She is co-founder of Stack Moxie and serves as a board member of the organization. She has extensive experience building cross-functional operations centers of excellence at major companies including Microsoft and IBM Watson Health. She specializes in marketing operations, compliance, test automation, and helping organizations manage complex go-to-market technology systems.

Transcript

Kawal: So, hello.
Kawal: Welcome to our next episode of Roundtable Series Ops in motion.
Kawal: I’m Kawal, and we are joined by a very familiar name in the marketing and rev operations world, that is MH Lines.
Kawal: She’s a co-founder of Stack Moxie and serves as a board member of the organization.
Kawal: Good morning, MH.
Kawal: Thank you for being with us here today.
MH Lines: Oh, it’s so lovely to meet you.
MH Lines: Thank you for having me.
Kawal: Thank you.
Kawal: So, let’s get started with some of you know, an introduction about yourself.
Kawal: Can you tell us more about?
Kawal: So we know a few things, but I think you can talk a little bit more about yourself.
Kawal: Love to hear that.
MH Lines: Yeah, I really learned about marketing ops when I joined an early-stage startup, and we had a ton of website traffic, and I went and sat down with a gentleman in Atlanta named Christopher Claus, who is brilliant, kind of one of the people who founded the concept of internet security.
MH Lines: And I said, Look, I’m trying to figure out what to do with all of this.
MH Lines: And he said, Well, how’s your SEO?
MH Lines: And I said, What does that stand for?
MH Lines: And so kind of jumped in feet first, leading marketing, but trying to understand technology marketing in the very early days and how powerful it could be for a company.
MH Lines: Fast forward a few years, and I got to build big cross-functional ops centers of excellence with Microsoft.
MH Lines: Microsoft and then IBM Watson Health.
MH Lines: And yeah, so that’s, that’s kind of how I came into the Ops world.
MH Lines: It’s really something I love.
Kawal: It sounds so interesting.
Kawal: And when you recall all of these things, you feel so nice about today that the path and journey have been so good.
Kawal: We have grown and learned so much.
Kawal: When I was listening to you, I could recall my journey that I started, you know, working on MailChimp.
Kawal: And what I knew about marketing operations was.
Kawal: Just importing a list and sending emails out, and there was a time I was given Salesforce as a CRM to handle, and it was like a huge thing to handle at that time because I hardly knew anything about CRM OK, there are a bunch of records that go into it.
Kawal: That’s it.
Kawal: But I had a good mentor, and it did nothing but annoy salespeople.
Kawal: It was like such an experiment and a product that was built for the purchaser, not for the user.
MH Lines: Yes, right, right.
Kawal: But luckily, I had a mentor, my manager, Jamila, who was really good and she has a good understanding of, you know, a marketing operation, CRM and all of that.
Kawal: So she did an excellent job of handholding and, you know, getting me through that.
Kawal: And I, I really learned a lot with her, and, you know, from there my journey started.
Kawal: And then I worked with different enterprises and different agencies, and did, you know, learn a lot across different tools like Marketo, and I did implementation of Marketo and HubSpot and all that.
Kawal: So it was a great, great start, I would say.
MH Lines: Yeah, well, especially if you have a mentor.
MH Lines: I think so many of us, our mentors are.
MH Lines: Marketers, not operations people.
MH Lines: Like the first brilliant operations people I worked with, who really understood what we were doing, a gentleman named Gary Kamakawa.
MH Lines: And a woman named Kristen Lee at Microsoft.
MH Lines: And they’re like, No, no, no, no, we don’t want you to run this with marketing metrics.
MH Lines: Like the marketing team is going to own their metrics.
MH Lines: What are the metrics that we should own as operations people?
MH Lines: And I came back to them with a list of 700 things I could think of that were operational metrics.
MH Lines: And Gary, like, rolled his eyes at me.
MH Lines: He was like one of those great mentors who do not put up with your dumb ass bullshit and like expects the absolute best out of you.
MH Lines: And he was like, Nope, these are not operational metrics.
MH Lines: Let’s think again.
MH Lines: How do we know the system is working?
MH Lines: And so it really informed how I think about everything to this day.
Kawal: Very good, right?
Kawal: I mean, then, you had that learning and that kind of built your base, and you have that foundation with you forever.
Kawal: Really nice to have such mentors in your life.
MH Lines: Yeah, it’s cool.
MH Lines: It’s one of the reasons I like to mentor people today.
MH Lines: Like I will pretty much take.
MH Lines: Phone calls with anyone who’s trying to figure something out, and let’s be honest, most of them have gone on to far better careers than I will ever have, and I’m so proud that I get to know those people and learn from them.
Kawal: That’s, ‘s really lovely.
Kawal: OK, so we can hop on to another, I think, one of your favorite topics, which is compliance.
Kawal: So, how important do you feel it is, you know, compliance for going to market and the revenue system to stay?
Kawal: On top of, you know, proper rules and policies, and what do you think about it in practice?
Kawal: So, you know, what are some of the key things that you want to watch out for when you are setting it up, or you are helping someone or mentoring someone?
MH Lines: Well, I mean, I think it’s getting trickier and trickier, right?
MH Lines: Because it used to be that you were setting up a system, and the hardest thing you had to do was integrate Marketo to HubSpot.
MH Lines: And maybe integrate a web platform on the front of it.
MH Lines: And then you just wanted to make sure the consent was working and there weren’t really repercussions, right?
MH Lines: Like if you’re spamming someone, you might damage your reputation, but there weren’t real issues.
MH Lines: Now there’s GDPR and California privacy and all of these regulations that are popping up where they’re paying severe, severe fines.
MH Lines: So, like GDPR, the fines have increased, 15,000% that they have levied in the last year and the year before that.
MH Lines: And remember, we’re starting with the billion-dollar fines.
MH Lines: The First fines that were levied four years ago were billion-dollar fines against major corporations.
MH Lines: And so they’re not just ratcheting up for the big companies now, they’re ratcheting up for small companies.
MH Lines: And so I think having to worry about that, and then all of this AI transparency.
MH Lines: So if you bolt on an AI tool, are you bolting it onto a system and giving it access to fields that have PII, or God bless if you work in healthcare?
MH Lines: Or financial systems, and is that AI able to access that data, or if you’re giving it access to the front end of your website, are you violating consent, tracking cookies?
MH Lines: My company, where I work today, does test automation, and we have never once found a data privacy consent system that doesn’t have errors.
Kawal: That’s nice.
Kawal: I mean, it’s, it’s really becoming that important because compliance is.
Kawal: It’s getting deeper, deeper, and different countries, different regions have different ways of handling compliance.
Kawal: Of course, with these tools and compliance, things are getting complex, but if we have, you know, a good foundation of compliance, it definitely helps the marketing and RevOps team to move things faster.
MH Lines: Yeah.
MH Lines: I think that’s such a good point.
MH Lines: I’ve, I’ve been getting all of my privacy certifications, and there are all these concepts of privacy first, and I’m like, yeah, that’s nice.
MH Lines: Like privacy.
MH Lines: He is an excellent internal lever for ops people to use to get these practices in place.
MH Lines: And, and privacy is excellent, right?
MH Lines: Like I, I actually deeply care.
MH Lines: I feel like that’s kind of my commitment to my customers, is that I’m going to protect them.
MH Lines: But the benefit that comes out of those practices is like how much easier it is to manage a system when you’ve got like that testing and monitoring and excellent processes in place.
MH Lines: You’re never going to be able to go to your boss and say, Hey, CMO, I think we should get no new campaigns out this quarter because I need to stop and get all this crap in place.
MH Lines: Like they’re never going to give you, or I need to like have this huge budget to be able to get all these things in place for the quarter and disrupt our work, but your compliance team is going to demand it.
MH Lines: And so if you can work with your compliance team to get it in faster, now that your systems are working better, you can get 3 campaigns out next quarter because everything is that much more efficient.
MH Lines: So I think being able to leverage what’s happening in compliance to get the investments to make your system better, you’re the freaking rock star of your company.
MH Lines: Now you’re able to use these tools with wild abandon, implement them faster, switch tools when the vendor you picked starts to suck, and there’s a new cool kit on the market.
Kawal: Yeah, of course, that is really, really important.
Kawal: So with compliance and now AI and automation, there are so many automation platforms and tools that have been introduced, and AI, also, we have many tools coming up.
Kawal: So, how do you see like over 4 to 5 years, what would be, how the responsibilities of MPs and RevOps would be, to be reshaping it?
Kawal: What’s your view on that?
Kawal: How do you feel about it?
MH Lines: So, like on a basic level, I think ops people are still fairly continuously thinking about their job as being a marketer who gets email campaigns out as opposed to being the person who owns the system.
MH Lines: And so, I, I, I think our role is so central to that if you think about being the person who owns the most expensive technology system at your company, because, I mean, that’s really what we are, right?
MH Lines: If you’re, if you’re a sales.
MH Lines: And marketing tech, you are owning the system that costs more than all of their Azure, DevOps, and Data put together.
MH Lines: And so if you think about taking that responsibility and how that system should be churning out money for your company, and you’re owning that end-to-end system, that’s a very different thought pattern.
MH Lines: So I think those of us who think of ourselves as, I’m the girl who Fanny abouts with the email, then like you’re going to be just someone who’s helping to make sure that the chatbot launched.
MH Lines: But if you’re the person who thinks about owning that system, then you’re going to own more and more and be more and more critical to the future of your company, and you’re going to make your career on it.
Kawal: Yeah, right.
Kawal: I mean, you said it right.
Kawal: I think, yeah, in automation with that coming up, it’s essential for the human side of operations to become, to be there to help align the teams, to manage that change that would happen, and also enable the adoption of, you know, across all of these GTM functions, right?
Kawal: And operation will have to become that gatekeeper, right, sitting there and looking at automation, if everything is done responsibly, because there are so many things tied in and so many processes together.
Kawal: There’s compliance, there’s AI, there are automation tools, and everything has to be ducted in together so that things run smooth and even this, it is aligned to the revenue and the business goals, right?
Kawal: Of course, I think that could be the new trend or new changes that we would see in RevOps.
MH Lines: I mean, I think the way you said it’s right.
MH Lines: Like, it’s really easy to focus on the tools, but an operations function, by the way, operations by, by just virtue of the word operations, is always the support function, right?
MH Lines: We’re not going to be the person who makes the strategic decision on, you know, which audience to go after.
MH Lines: We’re the support functions that make that decision possible and then make those tactics possible.
MH Lines: But I, I agree with you completely.
MH Lines: It’s people, process, and tools.
MH Lines: Like, how do you do the change management?
MH Lines: Who are the right people using your head, because AI can go and do the technology for you? If you’re not going to use your head anyway, you might as well just let AI make all those decisions, and they’re going to be not great ones.
MH Lines: You can hire an intern to just make as many bad decisions as well.
Kawal: Yeah, yeah, you’re right, and that can, I mean, AI can break it or make it.
Kawal: It’s on AI then.
MH Lines: Yeah, 100%.
Kawal: OK, so, I think with this many, you know, shiny tools coming into the market, there’s something called a shiny object syndrome that we’ve been seeing.
Kawal: Like every tool there, there are new tools introduced every week.
Kawal: So it’s, it’s really fascinating to explore these new tools.
Kawal: But what I feel about these new tools is like a few things that we can do to keep a check on this, like start with the problem and not with the tools.
Kawal: So, whenever you have any challenges in the organization, we can start asking questions to ourselves, like, what are the business challenges that we are solving?
Kawal: Is this tool a fit for it?
Kawal: Like, is it worth exploring this tool?
Kawal: Or, you know, we can check with the alignment of the strategy, like, does it fit into the tech stack that we have?
Kawal: Does it fit with the system that we are already using, or does it, you know, integrate with the tech stack that we have, and how is it helpful to scale?
Kawal: So, I mean, a disconnected tool would cause more damage than, you know, saving us or giving us that platform to scale on.
Kawal: So that would be really dangerous for the, for the, organization.
Kawal: And I think testing before investing is also really important because when we start with a small pilot, it would be helpful to check a few things and check the functionalities and how the user is adopting and how is the ROI before even buying and committing to the new tool, which is really, really important.
Kawal: I mean, everybody’s so excited for the new tools out in the market, but it’s really, it’s really fascinating because, being in marketing operations, you feel the tools.
Kawal: When you see the new tools you want to try, you want to do different things, but we have to be mindful of a few things like how this tool is going to fit into, how it’s going to integrate, even though the features look really cool, it is important to ask us like, is it going to drive that revenue?
Kawal: Is it going to improve the efficiency, or is it going to help the team or strengthen the current processes?
Kawal: So I believe these things could help us, you know, check any of the new tools that are there in the market.
MH Lines: OK, so I’m aligned. I want to first take us back up to the first point.
MH Lines: And then I want to come back to the, how do we, how do we decide if the tool is the right tool?
MH Lines: I think it’s crucial at this point to take a second, like coming back to that SEO discussion, right, when I first learned about SEO, like if I didn’t know SEO existed, because it didn’t exist when I first started building websites, I know I’m 37 and I was there at the very beginning, but, If we don’t explore and just have an understanding of how the world’s changing, which I think is what’s happening with these tools, then we’re going to miss a big trend that could really take our, our business forward.
MH Lines: So, when thinking about someone who is managing a large team, I think it’s a really great 10% project to give different people every quarter.
MH Lines: I like the ideas of Kaizen, where you have like 1 or 2 or 3 focused improvements.
MH Lines: I think right now every team, marketing and sales team should have a Kaizen that is just out there, shiny tooling it, right?
MH Lines: Understand what’s happening, what’s possible, what works, what doesn’t work.
MH Lines: I think that’s a great place to work with a partner like you guys to understand, like, tools, how they can be applied.
MH Lines: I was just at a Salesforce conference.
MH Lines: And talking to the consultants who have deployed the various AI conversational intelligence tools, they have an excellent idea of what works in practice and what the actual cost of deployment is on those.
MH Lines: And so I think working with a consultant who is touching a bunch of these and deploying a bunch of these in practice, so you don’t have to waste your time on something that really could never work.
MH Lines: So I think the shiny tool syndrome is different today than it was 5 years ago because they could be transformative, and you don’t want to miss it or be really, really late to the game.
MH Lines: The second one is, OK, so we found something that does align with our strategy, or we’ve aligned our strategy to what’s now possible.
MH Lines: How do we make sure to deploy it?
MH Lines: I think there are two phases of that.
MH Lines: The first one should be a technical evaluation, and does the goddamn thing work on a fundamental level?
MH Lines: Because most of the time it doesn’t, right?
MH Lines: When we are testing.
MH Lines: A chatbot needs actually to respond more than 90% of the time.
MH Lines: And if you think about your experience with your ChatGPT on your personal desktop, even if you have the upgraded version, a lot of times it just stops responding.
MH Lines: It’s not even that it’s not working.
MH Lines: It’s that it literally, like, or it’s hallucinating or that it’s drifting.
MH Lines: No, it’s literally just not working.
MH Lines: So, I think there’s a certain level of analysis of, here are our test cases, we expect this thing to respond 99% of the time.
MH Lines: We expect it to be right 85% of the time.
MH Lines: And doing that analysis first before you get excited about, will it integrate with our tool set?
MH Lines: To me, that’s a basic level of, does it work?
MH Lines: Because if it’s not going actually to integrate with our tool set.
MH Lines: They say they have an integration through Zapier, but it’s only got one API endpoint, so it doesn’t actually work.
MH Lines: We’re going to have to get the engineering team.
MH Lines: Let’s understand our total cost of ownership, and if it works on a functional level, and then does it solve the business use case is the second piece
Kawal: OK, so, I think with this many, you know, shiny tools coming into the market, there’s something called a shiny object syndrome that we’ve been seeing.
Kawal: Like every tool there, there are new tools introduced every week.
Kawal: So it’s, it’s really fascinating to explore these new tools.
Kawal: But what I feel about these new tools is like a few things that we can do to keep a check on this, like start with the problem and not with the tools.
Kawal: So, whenever you have any challenges in the organization, we can start asking questions to ourselves, like, what are the business challenges that we are solving?
Kawal: Is this tool a fit for it?
Kawal: Like, is it worth exploring this tool?
Kawal: Or, you know, we can check with the alignment of the strategy, like, does it fit into the tech stack that we have?
Kawal: Does it fit with the system that we are already using, or does it, you know, integrate with the tech stack that we have, and how is it helpful to scale?
Kawal: So, I mean, a disconnected tool would cause more damage than, you know, saving us or giving us that platform to scale on.
Kawal: So that would be really dangerous for the, for the, organization.
Kawal: And I think testing before investing is also really important because when we start with a small pilot, it would be helpful to check a few things and check the functionalities and how the user is adopting and how is the ROI before even buying and committing to the new tool, which is really, really important.
Kawal: I mean, everybody’s so excited for the new tools out in the market, but it’s really, it’s really fascinating because, being in marketing operations, you feel the tools.
Kawal: When you see the new tools you want to try, you want to do different things, but we have to be mindful of a few things like how this tool is going to fit into, how it’s going to integrate, even though the features look really cool, it is important to ask us like, is it going to drive that revenue?
Kawal: Is it going to improve the efficiency, or is it going to help the team or strengthen the current processes?
Kawal: So I believe these things could help us, you know, check any of the new tools that are there in the market.
MH Lines: OK, so I’m aligned. I want to first take us back up to the first point.
MH Lines: And then I want to come back to the, how do we, how do we decide if the tool is the right tool?
MH Lines: I think it’s crucial at this point to take a second, like coming back to that SEO discussion, right, when I first learned about SEO, like if I didn’t know SEO existed, because it didn’t exist when I first started building websites, I know I’m 37 and I was there at the very beginning, but, If we don’t explore and just have an understanding of how the world’s changing, which I think is what’s happening with these tools, then we’re going to miss a big trend that could really take our, our business forward.
MH Lines: So, when thinking about someone who is managing a large team, I think it’s a really great 10% project to give different people every quarter.
MH Lines: I like the ideas of Kaizen, where you have like 1 or 2 or 3 focused improvements.
MH Lines: I think right now every team, marketing and sales team should have a Kaizen that is just out there, shiny tooling it, right?
MH Lines: Understand what’s happening, what’s possible, what works, what doesn’t work.
MH Lines: I think that’s a great place to work with a partner like you guys to understand, like, tools, how they can be applied.
MH Lines: I was just at a Salesforce conference.
MH Lines: And talking to the consultants who have deployed the various AI conversational intelligence tools, they have an excellent idea of what works in practice and what the actual cost of deployment is on those.
MH Lines: And so I think working with a consultant who is touching a bunch of these and deploying a bunch of these in practice, so you don’t have to waste your time on something that really could never work.
MH Lines: So I think the shiny tool syndrome is different today than it was 5 years ago because they could be transformative, and you don’t want to miss it or be really, really late to the game.
MH Lines: The second one is, OK, so we found something that does align with our strategy, or we’ve aligned our strategy to what’s now possible.
MH Lines: How do we make sure to deploy it?
MH Lines: I think there are two phases of that.
MH Lines: The first one should be a technical evaluation, and does the goddamn thing work on a fundamental level?
MH Lines: Because most of the time it doesn’t, right?
MH Lines: When we are testing.
MH Lines: A chatbot needs actually to respond more than 90% of the time.
MH Lines: And if you think about your experience with your ChatGPT on your personal desktop, even if you have the upgraded version, a lot of times it just stops responding.
MH Lines: It’s not even that it’s not working.
MH Lines: It’s that it literally, like, or it’s hallucinating or that it’s drifting.
MH Lines: No, it’s literally just not working.
MH Lines: So, I think there’s a certain level of analysis of, here are our test cases, we expect this thing to respond 99% of the time.
MH Lines: We expect it to be right 85% of the time.
MH Lines: And doing that analysis first before you get excited about, will it integrate with our tool set?
MH Lines: To me, that’s a basic level of, does it work?
MH Lines: Because if it’s not going actually to integrate with our tool set.
MH Lines: They say they have an integration through Zapier, but it’s only got one API endpoint, so it doesn’t actually work.
MH Lines: We’re going to have to get the engineering team.
MH Lines: Let’s understand our total cost of ownership, and if it works on a functional level, and then does it solve the business use case is the second piece
Kawal: Yeah, I think you’re very right.
Kawal: I have used ChatGPT on my system.
Kawal: So when I’m looking for something significant, some kind of, you know, reports that I have put, put in some spreadsheets together to get some information.
Kawal: And I’m looking for some kind of insight from it, and it says, Hey, I am not working right now.
Kawal: So I have to wait for it to reload, to reload, and sometimes it doesn’t even appear.
Kawal: So, yeah, that is right, and you have to have your IT team get into it.
Kawal: And obviously, everything involves a cost, so you have different plug-ins if even if you’re using Zapier or Make or N810, you have a cost involved.
Kawal: You have people involved, so people involved is also equivalent to the time and the cost that is involved there.
Kawal: So, yeah, so testing all of these things is really important.
Kawal: We should not get just excited by seeing this.
Kawal: They are good to have new tools, but then we should always see them as existing ones.
Kawal: Do they serve the purpose?
Kawal: Do they have the same features? Of course.
Kawal: Use that or leverage that.
Kawal: But if not, then try the shiny tool, but keep in mind these checks, like integrations and, you know, understand the complete functionality of it and how does it, how much it’s going to cost you, because you should not buy a tool and see that, OK, this is missing, this is missing, now I get to need to get this, need to get that, and then you club together, it’s going to be a considerable cost for you, and you never committed to that, you never budgeted for it, so all of these could land you into a trouble.
Kawal: So yeah, that is really important.
MH Lines: Yeah, I think it’s.
MH Lines: To your point, it’s the cost of implementation to make it work in your specific system and the run cost, right?
MH Lines: Like back in the day, Marquetto used to say, all of your marketers can use it.
MH Lines: It’s a push button.
MH Lines: They can now send their own emails.
MH Lines: It’s so easy.
MH Lines: And it, it really is a potent enterprise tool, which is valuable, but you need to have someone who is managing that tool.
MH Lines: You have to have the campaign ops and the marketing ops team to run it.
MH Lines: So what’s that run cost at your organization when you’re considering the total cost of ownership against an ROI?
Kawal: Right.
Kawal: And you have Marketo and Salesforce that were there, so it keeps breaking, you have to keep looking at it, keep investigating, and, you know, reviewing them time period.
Kawal: So you need someone to be there to watch out for that.
Kawal: Of course, that was really, really needed.
Kawal: So I have also seen like, there are, there are organizations which are trying to lean down the team because they want to, you know, cut down the cost, or they think that AI can really help them, you know, do all of this stuff and all that.
Kawal: So, what I feel is that organizations should, you know, watch out for their team.
Kawal: They should not let them burn out, right?
Kawal: By maybe investing in skills so they can give them different trainings or, you know, certifications, or they can also be part of some communities like marketing operation community.
Kawal: So you have the community, you can ask your questions in Slack, and there are friendly people out there.
Kawal: who have experience or explored these tools or, you know, applications, and they can give you their feedback, which is real-time, or you can also talk to them and learn more about it.
Kawal: That saves a lot of our time, you know, reinvestigating and starting from scratch and getting all of these things together, that saves our time and effectiveness and all that.
Kawal: I had really got some help sometimes, so that’s what’s really.
Kawal: Nice out there.
Kawal: And also, if organizations are spending on training, which is really good for the ops team to understand things in advance before they get into the tool and start exploring, we can learn on the go, but that’s not the right practice, right?
Kawal: And also like prioritizing, so leaders can help the team not to burn out by prioritizing the tasks and projects.
Kawal: And AI is, of course, there to do the repetitive tasks if you want some of it, like you know, routing logics and creating those reports or data cleanup.
Kawal: Sometimes, I mean, it does get wonky.
Kawal: You do not get the results, but sometimes you get it, so you may have to, you know, consider a few of the things, like how can you make it work.
Kawal: That allows a lot of internal ops teams to focus on the strategic thing, or even if you’re trying to get a new process or any new tools or anything new that you’re trying to do, they can plan it out with the leaders and can focus on that instead of doing those repetitive tasks every day.
Kawal: And yeah, the other thing would be like, you know, leaders can clearly define what would be the responsibilities of the marketing operation team, the sales teams, and all of that, so that.
Kawal: Of course, help the marketing operation teams not to burn out by thinking like I’m the only one to do everything.
Kawal: I have to do this.
Kawal: I have to take care of that.
Kawal: So I’ve been there, imagining what I used to do when I started my career working on Marketo and Salesforce Inc.
Kawal: I had these errors late at night, so I had been there late night working on the reports.
Kawal: Sometimes I would like to work continuously for 10 to 12 hours, getting those reports out there.
Kawal: And sometimes the spreadsheets are not responding.
Kawal: The Wheeler Cup is not working because I am drained out with all of those fixing and investigating and doing all of those things out there, and I can really relate to it if someone is there to tell me, OK, this is your responsibility and this is what the other team should be doing.
Kawal: So, so that really helps you initially in your career because then, I think marketing operation roles were not that well defined, like how they are right now, at least a much.
Kawal: Much better than what it is today, right?
Kawal: Earlier it was, it was tough.
Kawal: I used to feel that I had to, I am actually running this organization or entirely the marketing and the sales.
Kawal: Everything is on my head or on my shoulder.
Kawal: I used to think that, but now it’s much better compared to that era.
MH Lines: You and I are the same person, by the way.
MH Lines: I, I totally think about things that way, right?
MH Lines: Like if I am engaged in it, I take ownership and the success of it.
MH Lines: and with marketing operations, especially if you’re just in marketing operations, not in full revOps or not in full go to market ops, if the website is owned by a totally different team, it can, like the burnout is real because you can’t make the changes you need to make to make the system successful, or you don’t even have visibility over the changes they’re making that can be detrimental to your system.
MH Lines: So, I think that’s really hard as a marketing ops person, and I think that’s where the burnout does happen.
MH Lines: I also just don’t love the marketing ops team of one.
MH Lines: Like, I think you have to have an agency for a backup.
MH Lines: It’s, it’s just, I think that is where the worst burnout happens, is one person just trying to push all the buttons and make all the things happen constantly.
Kawal: I mean, that’s right.
Kawal: If you have an agency, you can actually divide the task between you and the agency, and you can take the help of the agencies where your skill sets are.
Kawal: May be limited or you need more help on something or if there is someone who is going out of office so that the organization can take help of the agency, that’s really good for marketing operations to do that because lean on one person or two persons to run entire operations, it’s, it’s way too much and a lot to ask.
MH Lines: And remember, this is the most expensive operations technology in your company.
MH Lines: And it is the backbone of all of your revenue.
MH Lines: So, having a single source of failure in your most expensive piece of technology for all of your company’s revenue, that seems really risky and dumb to me to let a company be in that position.
MH Lines: I also believe, though, that with technology, especially with what’s happening with AI, if we can ever get away from every new tool.
MH Lines: Creating its own database where the database is not talking and we don’t have an organized data schema drives me absolutely bonkers in our industry where everyone creates a new database with a different data schema for some reason just to make things complicated that if we can get away from that, I think marketing operations and go to market operations, sales operations can be heavily automated and because I believe operations is always a support function.
MH Lines: The goal should be to make it as efficient as possible.
MH Lines: You should have fewer brilliant, well-trained, invested team members, and you don’t need as many button pushers.
MH Lines: It should get simpler.
Kawal: Yeah, you’re right, you summarized it very well.
Kawal: I totally agree with that.
Kawal: I mean, you should have the skill set, and you should have all these things in place for marketing operations to, you know, thrill, and obviously, you’re going to see the results then.
Kawal: But yes, having so many Tools does not make sense; make things simple for you and keep things intact.
Kawal: Give your team the breather that they need, and always involve them in those business decisions so that operation teams understand what they are supposed to do and how they can make things better for you.
Kawal: I mean, all the businesses out there can actually do that.
MH Lines: Yeah.
MH Lines: Yeah, but you have to be an ops person who deserves this, of course, yes.
MH Lines: Yeah, like there are so many ops.
MH Lines: People who are there to say no.
MH Lines: They literally sit at the table when they’re finally invited to the strategy meeting and dump water on it, right?
MH Lines: Like, they’re like, no, that doesn’t work, that doesn’t work.
MH Lines: Well, most of the time, there’s a way to figure out how it can work, and your job is to come back with the cost so they can understand or give them advanced estimates.
MH Lines: We can do that.
MH Lines: That’s probably going to take a couple of headcounts.
MH Lines: Here’s how we can solve it, and they’re like, we don’t want a couple of headcounts dedicated to that.
MH Lines: All right, well, I’m here to give you information.
MH Lines: and support your decisions.
MH Lines: So I, I think being someone who, I, I think marketing ops people are very often the tech killer, not the tech enabler.
MH Lines: And start with no.
MH Lines: And so if you’re invited to the strategy seat at the table, you have to open up your mind a bit.
Kawal: Yeah, you have to come up with an open mind so that you understand the business, work with leaders, and make things work instead of saying no.
Kawal: That’s important.
Kawal: Hopefully, all of these changes with these tools, with the AI and the marketing operations should.
Kawal: Happen soon, and we hope as we live in this world in the next few years.
Kawal: So I mean, again, the human element is essential here, so the human element is only going to, you know, do all of these things, and marketing operations should be able to drive this very well.
Kawal: It’s just that they should have that zeal and energy and, you know, that commitment to do that.
Kawal: And I think that should be pretty good enough to go from there.
MH Lines: Amazing.
MH Lines: I love it.
MH Lines: Well, I love getting to talk to you.
MH Lines: This is really cool.
Kawal: Thank you.
Kawal: It was so lovely talking to you.
Kawal: Thank you, MH.
Kawal: I mean, I’m thrilled to host you.
Kawal: We had a really nice discussion about B2B marketing and marketing operations after a long time, so it was really lovely.
Kawal: Thank you.
Kawal: Thank you for being with us here today.
MH Lines: Thank you.
MH Lines: Great to speak to you.