Ep. 29 - Being technical is great, but being understood is better

Welcome to Driven Ops Power Talk. I'm Jasmine Warren. And I'm Rebecca Heisey. We're two work besties who have spent over a decade learning the ins and outs of sales and marketing.

On this podcast, we discuss all things go-to-market operations. The people, processes, and technologies that make up the engine of a thriving go-to-market function. Let's get to it. Welcome back to Power Talk.

This is our last episode of season two. We made it. It's crazy. I know.

I'm so excited to kick it off. Today, I want to talk about something that has happened recently to me. So I was working on a HubSpot transformation project with a client, and I was working with their web developers to implement a bunch of forms. And the web developer, so in HubSpot, there are two types of form builders.

There's the legacy form builder, and there is a new form builder. And different features are in each one. and they embed their forms on their website, WordPress. So when you embed forms, depending on which form editor you use, that will depend on the level of control that the web developer has in styling the form.

So for some reason, the legacy form has more capability in styling than the new form editor as of today. So when I was working with their web developer, and they were sending emails back and forth, And then they randomly sent something that said, hey, this has the H4 and not the HTML version that we need, something, something. And it was like not a direct sentence to myself and another architect. And we're just like trying to read between the lines.

And it was we're not web developers. so it took a couple back and forth and it took me knowing so using like contextual clues and reading in between the lines to understand like oh okay so you need a new form created with the legacy builder rather than the new builder and so it was just a frustration because I feel like it wasted some back and forth time and it was all because of as a as a developer or technical person sometimes you have to speak to the business and you have to speak clearly and you don't have to speak technically.

Like if you're writing HTML and you're a developer, you should not be speaking in those terms to the business in my opinion, because it slows things down. Yeah. And you shouldn't assume that somebody understands that language. Like if you know you are in this role, sometimes you do have to use more layman's terms, no matter what role you're in, no matter what role you in you not always going to know like exactly what the other person is talking about when they referring to specific things So yeah it just good business etiquette to try to say okay this is really you know specific to my job.

And so you probably are not, that's why, you know, you've hired me to do this role. So, or whatever, you're working with me on a project to do this role. And so obviously you're not in that role. And I was just thinking, this comes up a lot in marketing and sales apps because We are the technical person on go-to-market a lot of the times because we're the administrator to the CRM or the sales engagement tool.

And we have to talk to the business a lot. And we've developed a skill to be able to do that. And I'm not just going to go to my CRO and say, hey, we're having sync issues because of credentials and all that. I'm not going to say that.

Yeah, exactly. And when you do have to have those difficult conversations, at least from my perspective, I feel like I'm already running through it in my head of like, how can I clearly articulate this to this group of people who is not close to this at all? You know, you have to be able to rephrase things to make it much more impactful so they understand the urgency behind it without confusing them and getting like bubbles in their head, you know, like over their head or whatever.

Yeah. I like to state the problem, the impact, and the action required. Like keep it very clear and say, here's the problem we're having. Yes.

This is how it's going to impact us. And this is how we fix it. Yeah. Just speaking layman's term, business terms, we don't need technical jargon.

Yeah. And it's really interesting because, I mean, I've had instances exactly even with general like fields and Salesforce versus fields and other platforms that don't have the same naming convention, but they're the same field because you're just mapping, you know, like a phone field could be called like a company headquarter phone or something. But then in another platform, it could just be phone one. You know what I mean?

Yeah. So we want to go through three lessons that we've learned in our careers as technical people working within go-to-market functions and having to build up that muscle in talking to the business. Yeah. So the first thing you should do is always understand the business process.

You may be managing the system, but understand the processes that this system is supporting so that when you're asked for an enhancement or you're asked to build something out or troubleshoot something, don't just go and do it technically. First ask, okay, what business outcome is this process for? What are we trying to achieve here? What is this not allowing us to do?

like ask questions that are related to the business. So then you can build the technology to support that Yes You have to understand the why behind what is happening but you also are the person then who needs to be able to say like this is what your goal is But like is this going to impact anybody else You have to be able to kind of be that mediator in between your departments because you know you handle that tool. And maybe this is one department that just wants some change.

But yeah, you definitely have to understand like, what is that end goal they're trying to get to? Yep. So know the business process one. Two, understand the why behind any technical or development asks.

The third lesson is communicate simply and clearly. And this goes back to my experience with a web developer. Just understand if you're trying to communicate something to an end user or a stakeholder, you have to avoid technical jargon. It's just going to cause frustration.

It's going to take a lot of back and forth. You're going to waste time and you're not going to be able to execute. Yeah. And I think the great thing is that we have so much access to AI, right?

Like you have Gemini, you have ChatGPT, whatever you use, that's your favorite one, is a really great place to go to, to say, how can I explain this in layman's terms or to an executive team or to like a sales management team or a marketing team? Like, how can I explain this in these kinds of group settings that will be the clearest to them? And those kinds of platforms can also help you reword things that maybe you just can't think of, but break it down a little bit simpler for those groups.

Yeah. And this is an easy way to frame what you're trying to communicate to stakeholders. So first state the problem, state why it matters, provide your recommendations and next actions, and then the who and the when. So for example, say you are working on some lead routing and you're having issues because leads are routing based off of just an owner field and there are out-of-date owner fields and there's territories that aren't being accounted for.

So maybe you're a sales ops manager and you're going to your leader, your CRO, and you're saying that, hey, we have some user lookup fields that are misaligned that we need to correct. And they're going to look at you with your eyes glazed over. So instead say, hey, we have record owner properties that are not accurate. So we have some BDR owners that are not owners of their leads.

We have some people who have left who are owners and it's causing some misalignment in leads. Because of that, leads are sitting in queues or sitting owned by people who are no longer with the company. And it's taking us a while to find and correct that. We have leads that are not being managed Yes exactly That they can understand and then give a recommendation Because of this we need to reassign all of these leads and we need to do a new mapping of BDR to lead territory so that we can understand what rules need to be in place so that we can mitigate this issue.

Yeah. And then give them who needs to do this. So I'll do the mapping and I will give this to our, say you have an admin, I'll give this to our admin to reassign and I will let the users know that it's happening and I'll do this next week. Yeah.

I think that's exactly such a great point. And I've used similar situations like that, just like that breakdown to explain things because it just helps to sort of paint that picture so that they can understand the pain point you're dealing with without being more confusing, causing more communication. Like you said, with your email, where you had to kind of read between the lines and go back and forth and waste all those efforts of not understanding each other. It just helps to clearly paint that picture and get to the resolution as quickly as possible.

Yep. As an admin or system owner, being technical is very valuable, but being understood is priceless. Yes, exactly. That's perfect.

it's time for coffee talk coffee talk all right this coffee talk is a little bit different today because it is our season two finale we have an exciting announcement so starting season three i will be taking our mission forward without becca yeah unfortunately unfortunately but good things are happening for Becca and me. So we're excited for our next chapter. I'm excited where this podcast will go. Becca, this has been amazing.

Awesome partner. I can't believe we've got through two seasons already. So much fun. Thank you for doing this.

Yes, it's been so much fun. And hey, I might still do some cameos here and there. But yeah, it's been such a fun time. And we hope that all the information we've done together has provided useful tips and information for everybody who's listened.

So it's been a good time. This won't be the last time you see or hear from Becca. I'm excited to have you on as a cameo guest every once in a while. Thanks.

All right. Well, that wraps up our season two of Power Talk. Thank you for all of our listeners. Thank you for our YouTube watchers.

I'm excited for season three. Good things are coming. Yeah. See you next time.

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