The secret of great Martech managers?

I recently was on a Martech podcast, not published yet, where we started to go down the path of explaining the difference between good martech managers and great martech managers. Loved the conversation, but I feel like I didn’t get to complete my thought on the subject. 

So here it is: Want to know the secret skill behind amazing Martech Managers? 

It’s documentation. 

What? 

The ability to create, refine, and disseminate great documents is what I consider one of the master skills of martech. 

There are many other skills, and a lot of foundational skills. For example, it’s table stakes to be able to understand data, sales and marketing, and to be organized. 

But documentation separates the good from the great, because it helps you compound your efforts so that multiple stakeholders, teams, and customers can benefit. 

In a keynote by Scott Brinker, he stated that the 3 points of the Martech triangle are people, process, and technology. All 3 are needed for a cohesive, comprehensive martech strategy. People - people first. That’s a point I think we often forget, that it’s actually the stakeholders, both in and outside your organization that need to use the technology that you implement to drive business results. 

I first became aware of the power of great documentation a few years ago - after having built a fairly sophisticated (if I do say so myself) marketing automation deployment. I’ve always enjoyed live training, both in group and one-on-one settings. I thought I could help the learner understand the concepts behind the technology, if I could just see their reactions, and see if they were assimilating the information in the right way. 

One of the marketing managers, after becoming competent with the tools, spent her extra time creating a fantastic reference guide on how to use Marketo, Salesforce, Gotowebinar, and Wordpress together for an end-to-end campaign. The guide was complete with background information, checklists, helpful links - the works. 

I dismissed it at the time, my thought was “whatever works for you.” 

The next time I was on-boarding a new marketer, she asked for a checklist of the things I was showing her. I told her I didn’t have one, but one of our marketing managers had created one, which she could use - I did review it and it was accurate. 

What happened after that? Insanely quick ramp up to productivity. 

I usually anticipate tons of questions, follow up meetings, re-teaching sessions on campaign building, everything. After that, I only got a few minor questions on weird, edge cases, that honestly sometimes I didn’t even know how to answer. 

From that point forward, any new hire ramped to productivity much faster, and there were less errors. And my time had freed up as well, not having to retrain folks and not having to clean up after their mistakes. 

Why? I think it is because people learn differently, and at different speeds. And a comprehensive guide allows a learner to consume, assimilate, and implement new things at her own pace. 

In other words, the documentation, in this case in the form of a checklist guide, multiplied the efforts that I had already put in. 

My well-intentioned method of personally training everyone on every tool was miserably slowing progress, and was prohibitive to my team. 

I’m going to go into another example, this more recent, as I was introduced to the documentation process at Amazon. 

I had heard about Amazon’s peculiar document and meeting process before, from some articles that I had read online. Basically, the rule is no PowerPoint in meetings. Everyone will get their own copy of a 6 page document, and will spend the first 15-20 min (or longer) reading in silence, before starting to discuss. 

As a self-proclaimed PowerPoint master, I did not like the sound of this. But hey, I would play along and hopefully start winning people over by showing a slidedeck here and there. I didn’t think it was very effective, that is...until I started writing my own document. 

Excruciating. Writer’s block. Very humbling. 

The documentation process forces you to think clearly, to cut away the flashy but less important points of your idea, and ruthlessly focus on what matters the most. Just going through the exercise of writing down what your objective is, explaining your reasoning, and analyzing the risks and opportunities of your own proposals is extremely clarifying. 

You know what I often found? That some of my ideas were not good. Some ideas were better in my head than they were on paper. There were risks that I could only see when I wrote down the pros and cons list. But I also found that some of the ideas could be great, if only they were supported by data and carefully thought through. And most importantly, ideas could be great if other people clearly understood the why and the how of what I was proposing to do. 

So now we have two ways in which documentation compounds your initiatives and multiplies the benefits. Prior documentation helps to clearly define what you are trying to do, the risks involved, and the intended outcome. Results are multiplied because you are focusing on the right things and in the right way. Post documentation, which details current programs and processes, multiplies results because they make ideas accessible, and they reduce training time and error-time. 

The takeaways? 

For your next project, type out the answers to these questions: 

1. What is your objective? 
2. What is the context that someone not familiar with the issue should know about? 
3. What are your recommendations on how to achieve the objective? 
4. What are the benefits of doing so? 
5. What are the risks of doing so? 
6. Where is the data to support your assertions? 

This document is as much for yourself as it is for your coworkers. 

For a complex platform or process that you have today, write out a reference guide that includes:

1. The purpose of the process 
2. A high-level summary of the process 
3. All the tools and permissions required 
4. A clear checklist, complete with screenshots 
5. Helpful links 
6. Glossary of terms 
7. FAQs 

That’s it! 

Happy Marteching.