The Journey to VP of Marketing Ops - Kimi Corrigan

Justin Norris: today. We're joined by Kimmy Corrigan. She's led marketing ops teams for companies like duo security, Cisco, whiz, expel, and most recently data robot, where she is currently vice president of marketing operations and strategy. And we don't often see VP level marketing ops roles and this is a position Kimmy's actually held a few times.

So we'll get into what does it look like to lead a mops team at that scale? What does it mean to have both ops and strategy in your mandate? I think that's another really interesting topic. Mops at small companies versus, you know, 90, 000 person behemoths like Cisco.

And a whole lot more, Kimmy, welcome to the show. Kimi Corrigan: Thank you for having me. Justin Norris: It's a real pleasure to speak to you. And actually, even before we get into it, you are one of those people, you know, we've spoken a few times now, but like, kind of like, I feel like I've known you for 10 years without really knowing you super well, like from swimming in the small Marketo pond, we've both been in.

curious, What was your entry point into that universe? Kimi Corrigan: I, well, cause I've been in it for so long. I was in it from when it wasn't marketing operations. It was just marketing automation.

so the abbreviated version was, I was just a marketing coordinator at a company a long time ago. And my boss at the time taught me how to run a Salesforce report, very simple Salesforce report. And it just kind of blew my mind of like, Okay. So we have this system with all these people and I can just query it in this certain way.

And that opened up my brain to just operational systems in general. And at the time we had silver pop as a marketing automation tool. So he said, Hey, we don't really have anyone owning the system. Do you want to kind of like try to figure it out?

So I did, I dived into that. And then we merged with a competitor who had Marketo. So we had to do a little bit of a bake off of like, should we keep silver pop or should we keep marketo? Luckily, we landed on Marketo.

So from there it was just making the move of our data and processes from Silverpop to Marketo. So that was an interesting experience. And then from there, I just started learning about other companies who were trying to do the same thing. So I moved to another company who had Silverpop and wanted to move to a new, more modern tool called Marketo.

So they said, Hey, it seems like you've done this before. Do you want to come do it for us? And that was the first time I decided to take a role that was All marketing automation. It was a much bigger company than the one I had come from.

And I had that moment of like, is do I really want to specialize in this one really tiny specific thing that feels like career suicide, but it was a company that was like everyone wanted to work there. It's a local place in Cleveland that had slides and the diner and like the onsite daycare. It was like the Google S experience. So I was like, well, whatever, I just want to get into that company.

And then I'll go figure out what I'm going to do there. And then many years later, here I am still in this world and now it's a whole different world. But yeah, like most of us, no one wanted to do something. And I said, I would do it.

And then it led to this. Incredible career so far. Justin Norris: curious. I remember during my very first marketing automation evaluation was looking at players like silver pop or like Manticore like software that doesn't exist anymore.

What was silver pop? Like, I never actually used it. This is random and probably irrelevant to most people, but I'm just curious, like what an early generation marketing automation platform was Kimi Corrigan: All I really remember was the email capability of it. and that's no shade to Silverpop.

I'm sure it had much more functionality at the time that I just didn't even have the brain power to understand. Like, I don't know what the lead processing power was or any of the operational stuff at the time. It was just like, an email automation system for us. And that was still a very impressive use case to utilize at a company as well as.

To learn and be able to own like I'm the person that knows how to do this behind the scenes that was very impressive at the time, which, looking back now that says how long I've been in the game here, but, now I always I'm just like, Hey, marketing operations is not email marketing because it still has that stigma. I think, but back then, like, That stigma was something to be proud of. So that's all I really remember about the platform because it was so long ago. But I remember at the time being like, I am so technical.

This is incredible. Justin Norris: I know exactly what you mean. Maybe we'll have a long time silver pop user in the audience who will write in and, uh, educate us. Kimi Corrigan: I do remember going to like one silver pop.

user group type conference experience. It was in like a very small ballroom somewhere. And just being like, I'm on the forefront of marketing technology. This is incredible.

Justin Norris: So that vibe, I mean, I know exactly what you mean. And I think for the first five years of my career in Marketo, it was like, Oh, you're Marketo. And like, if you're a Marketo champion, that was like a really big deal. Like you just, you know how to use it.

Nothing cooler than that. And it's, not to say that it's not cool or not an achievement today, but I think back then it had a certain cachet and a certain like, whoa, you really know how to do this dark art that other people don't understand. Just like what you said. And then I feel that marketing operations has changed, like you mentioned, but it still has its roots in that pedigree.

Sometimes I feel that's a liability. Do you, you feel that in terms of being able to expand beyond it? Like it can be limiting Kimi Corrigan: It can be, but also, I'm the first one to be like marketing operations is not email marketing, but email marketing is still marketing operations. Like I still have people on my team that are.

Fully responsible for building and sending emails and making sure the lists are right and making sure we're executing correctly. So I'm also careful not to like poopoo it too much because it's like, it's still, right in the middle of my responsibilities of what my team is charged with. So, I think there's just different ways to look at it. so I try to not get too big for my britches when I, when it's like, where did we come from?

Cause it's still part of our to do's every single day. Justin Norris: mine too. And that is a good point. So when you, think about that scope conversation, like someone new joins your team, what's the mission statement that you give them about, like, this is what mops does at data robot or whatever company you happen to be at.

Kimi Corrigan: Yeah, at the simplest, there's a couple ways I describe it. in some ways, like I've had my kid, he's older now, so he can understand a little bit more about when he was younger, when I would try to explain what I'm like, uh, I put together puzzles all day. With a bunch of missing pieces. that's one way of describing it.

But when someone's joining my team, like, really, our charter is like to make everyone's job easier and make the output better, my team should be making everyone's job easier. Maybe they don't feel that way as they're learning. The process isn't partnering with us at first and their output should be better because we're involved. because we see everything we're involved in.

Every area of marketing and cross functionally we are involved in strategy. We're involved in creativity. We're involved in tactical, operational data and reporting. Like there's just, no limit to what marketing ops could or should be involved in in my opinion.

So, joining my team is like be open and be ready because who knows where this adventure is going to take us Justin Norris: I think that's an elegant. one of the reasons why I often focus on like definitions in my own role in these conversations that I have is because it comes back to like, what does great look like? Like, how do you know when you're doing a good job? Like sellers know they're doing a good job if they hit their quota marketers, you know, if they hit their pipeline target, whatever.

And for us, it's kind of like the work is never done. how do you tell if you're doing a good job or if your team is doing a good job? Kimi Corrigan: I can tell my team is doing a good job. because they keep Showing up and wanting to be a part of it because I think as ops people, regardless of which spectrum of an ops role you fall in, if you're not having fun and you're not feeling accomplished and not feeling like you're being effective.

You're likely going to move on or check out because the work is so varied. The work is so challenging sometimes, even just like the communication and getting people to understand complicated things in layman's terms for their role. If you don't feel effective pretty consistently, like you will burn out. Like I don't think ops people generally burn out from like workload or amount of We're coming in.

It's feeling ineffective on a regular basis that burns us out. So I think my team is doing a good job, or I know they're doing a job when they're engaged, when they're excited about the work, when they're able to get all the work done because our processes have become effective and the way we work across teams and organizations has become effective. So that's not a KPI of are we having fun check? Yes or no.

But that's how I try to keep a pulse on how my team's doing, because if they're feeling effective, that means what we're trying to do across all of these different areas is working generally. Justin Norris: It's not as strange of a KPI as it might seem on the surface about having fun. think at least if you're wired the right way, because I know for me like fun at work is exactly like what you said, like things are working, it's a well oiled machine, it's like that yes feeling.

That's a pretty good indicator that you have like healthy systems around you. Kimi Corrigan: And, you know, we don't have full control, like, Putting out a fire with campaign ops today because we have forms down in Japan and we don't really know why. And there's some field not hitting the midpoint and it's not fun every day. but you know, if he's partnering with the right people internally to help resolve this and everyone's jiving and understanding what to do and how we're going to solve this problem and we have a path to get to the end of it, that is fun.

I mean, I don't want our forms to be down anywhere, but things are always going to go wrong. And like, My favorite moments in the history with all of the wonderful people that have been on my team are when those crisis of systems or data or something came crashing down and we rallied and like work through it and had a good sense of humor about it and trusted each other like Those are my favorite memories of my career so far of like, when we just kind of pulled together and got through, Marketo being down or a form crashing or something that we did ourselves to inflict pain.

But then we're like, that's okay. We can fix it. We just need an hour and some grace from our BDR team and we can fix this. those are my favorite moments because they're, they're always going to come.

Justin Norris: I've really been thinking a lot about this exact thing lately. And the problems themselves are never actually what stresses me at work. if everybody is aligned, just like you described, and then there's, situations where it's like, there's a problem, but then there's a second order problem, which is like the people surrounding the problem. And whether it's politics or misunderstanding or like, Oh no, like you have to, manage fallout internally.

That is not fun, at least for me. And what do you do? Is it luck of the draw? Do you do things as a leader to forge those connections, to build that trust?

Like I don't have that fully figured out yet myself. Kimi Corrigan: you know, I've been at my new company for the past six months. So, you know, I'm just getting through that first period of time, getting to know everyone cross functionally and how things work. And I'm still trying to uncover a few areas.

And I've had to really lean in on this area more than I have before, just because, you all companies are different. They're organized differently. Racey charts are different at every organization, especially when it comes to system ownership. So this is like probably been my biggest challenge over the last six months of like, you really need to push yourself to figure out how to navigate getting what, you know, needs to be done, prioritize when it's outside of your control and actually you have less than 50 percent of the control maybe, and these other teams hold more control than you.

And, that can be. Initially, very frustrating for operators who have had such autonomy and other experiences, but then just taking a deep breath and being like, okay, well, this is the learning I'm doing at this experience at this, stop on my journey of my career of maybe instead of learning some really interesting, operational system use case over the past six months, I'm learning how to yeah. Work more effectively in situations where I have less control over the outcome of my systems and processes that I'm used to having, and it took me a few months to, like, open my mind to that of like, okay.

this is what's happening now, and this is what you have to figure out. So for me, I'm navigating that right now. So I don't have any, super strong advice, but for me, it's just been being more patient, talking to my cross functional partners more face to face on zoom or whatever. and just trying to understand their point of view, even if I still don't think the point of view is the longterm solution for the organization and how we want to operate.

That doesn't mean I can't try to sit. Patiently and understand it so that when I try to suggest change, they understand where I'm coming from versus me come in and saying, actually, this is how we're going to do it because this is how we should be doing it. It's like, well, still think my suggestion is good, but maybe I don't get to get to point a directly. Maybe I have to make three stops on phases along the way and be more patient.

So I'm just trying to spend more time with people be more understanding. And then that comes with a new set of experiences for me as in my career of I now have to figure out how to communicate to my manager how to reset expectations, even though the reason I'm resetting expectations are outside of my control without just saying, well, it's because they won't do it quickly or because it's not a priority for them because that's not fair or productive. So it's figuring out how do I navigate that communication and reprioritization.

Even though it's not what I want to be doing, and at the end of the day, remember, and I remind my team of this often is, there are plenty of people doing this every day, but it's not us. We're not saving lives. no one is going to. Die today because we don't get this ticket closed So, let's just take a deep breath and figure out what can we do to still feel effective in moments of feeling ineffective.

It's probably something smaller, more insulated to our team or within a marketing team. Can we lean in and help in a different area just to get that? Effectiveness feeling and keep the fun vibes up as we talked about. so it's a lot of just reconfiguring week to week, month to month, as we navigate, like how to work differently than we expected to work, Justin Norris: I think what you described as maybe one of the biggest things.

I've certainly experienced it, too. That kind of hits you upside the head as you move more into a leadership role where initially you're like, I'm solving problems and systems or in process or if you're a consultant, people are coming to you and the problems already defined and you're like, just fill this hole with a solution, which is very satisfying and all of a sudden you're in a scenario where like alignment is the problem and navigating people is the problem and like trust and relationships Kimi Corrigan: like now looking back six months ago, these people didn't know me from, a stranger.

So I'm coming in hot. Like we got a new go to market strategy. We got new systems. We got new processes.

Let's go. we're here. And they were kind of like, wait, hold on a second. and I found that very frustrating just because I wanted to feel effective.

I wanted to come in and provide value. and that's how I tried to spend my first six months. And then I had to reconfigure my expectations of how am I going to add value to this organization overall? And how am I going to add value to my team day to day when they aren't able to move as fast as they thought they were going to be able to move?

It's been a completely different experience than I expected to have coming in, but also super valuable. I'm learning a lot and I do feel like I'm leveling up my communication. in the role that I'm in, Justin Norris: for what it's where that sounds like you have a super healthy perspective on it. And like, I feel you, but it's like when that ball goes on and you're like, Oh, wait a second, like, this is the learning right now.

I should stop fighting this. actually, this is the thing that I need to do. that feels like the unlock moment I've noticed as well. Kimi Corrigan: I have to show up every day.

I want to keep getting the paycheck, every time it comes in, like, I still want to feel good and valuable here. So like. what other choice do I have? I can just keep fighting it and being like, stop my fee of like, well, we could be doing this other thing, but it's just like, okay, but we're not.

So what am I going to do about it? Am I going to be upset? I don't want to be upset. I'm generally a pretty positive.

Like, let's just have fun. Let's do some good work kind of person. So you just have to find a different way to like, get that value for yourself and your team, as well as providing value for the organization besides frustration, Justin Norris: So it seems to me that what you've described there in a lot of ways is people wonder like, what does it mean to be like a director or a VP? And a lot of it is not like you're like learning more about systems.

Like you're dealing with this sort of thing Kimi Corrigan: of negotiation, a lot of politics. I don't mean that in a negative way. but it's a skill set that you have to hone through situations you can't take A class, you can't read a Harvard business review and be like, okay, now I know how to negotiate and reprioritize through these situations. I just try to be grateful for the experience that I am and yeah, learning and trying to encourage everyone else to do the Justin Norris: should be documentation.

We need a knowledge base. So, coming back to this, notion of like the VP marketing ops, like if we're being candid, there aren't that many of those. positions out there, I probably know like a dozen VPs of marketing ops. You don't see a lot coming up on job boards and it, does worry me a bit for people that are marketing operators that don't necessarily want to go a rev ops path or go back into marketing.

Are you in a career called a sack, like not that being an executive is the be all and end all for everybody, but for those that want to, any thoughts on this, like how you've gotten into this role or what you see in terms of this role being rare. Kimi Corrigan: I think you just have to ask for it. been a VP of marketing ops twice. and both those situations came up through kind of like a back channel introduction.

Typically a new CMO at an organization is trying to figure out how they're going to come in and affect change quickly. And I got introduced to those people and, Okay. That here's what I think I can do. Here's the kind of team I want to build.

And here's a job description that I would like to align to. And I make sure that I put vice president marketing ops on that job description. it's still rare, but I think we have to start asking for it especially if you're going into like a casual conversation about joining, especially like a mid to late stage startup, that's a good place to try to get that job title. Cause they're just looking for someone who knows what they're doing, who can be very effective very quickly and who can probably recruit a few people that will, Help them be very effective very quickly.

So I think that's a good place to ask for that title. But you know, if you're in an organization and you're a director or a senior director and there's not an immediate path to VP of marketing ops, I think ask what would a VP of marketing ops have to do to earn that job title? Cause I think a lot of times senior marketing ops people end up being a real right hand to the CMO. They almost end up as like a shadow chief of staff plus marketing operations.

And I think if you're in that position and you're feeling like you're doing a dual role of leading a marketing ops team, both tactically and strategically, as well as almost being that chief of staff type role, good time to ask for the title or ask what would it take to have a vice president of marketing operations here. that's when we'll start seeing more of them is just kind of pushing that. Like we see VP of rev ops. All the time.

And, I think that's because people ask for that title at some point in the history and then it became a standard. Yeah, we need a vice president of revenue operations, of course, like what sales leader wouldn't have one. so I think we just need to start asking for it. maybe that's an oversimplification of the answer, but Justin Norris: So sometimes it's not sometimes it actually, but, and so you anticipated, I think my, my next question, which is, is it just a name between a director or senior director or a VP or, and it sounds like if you're allusion to like sort of that chief of staff role, maybe let's spell it.

Like, what does that mean for people that maybe haven't had that experience of partnering with a marketing Kimi Corrigan: I think you have to figure out how can you, even in your mops role, start to truly understand the full scope of all of the other marketing functions. almost, can you learn enough about product corporate demand, especially of course, which is a natural relationship for ops. can you learn enough about those functions to the point where if your CMO was going on sabbatical or there was a gap in a CMO that you could intern that role, and I think if you feel like you could, or at least, 60, 70, 80 percent could.

Then you're heading in the right direction of asking for that job title. That doesn't mean you have to be an expert in those areas, but you should be competent across the full spectrum of marketing, as well as, you partnering with revenue operations and understanding the sales side of things much better than most marketing functions do. I think that's where you can gain a lot of confidence in earning that title pretty easily. Justin Norris: Let's say I am like mid level marketing ops manager, but I want to start to position myself in that way, but I don't have that relationship today with the marketing leader.

How can I start to build that? Like, what could somebody do to start to like gain that trust? Kimi Corrigan: you know, especially if you can just get some time with them, whether it's, you know, once a month or whatever, just like, Hey, things are you unable to solve? Whether it's because of bandwidth or resources, or you just don't know how to solve it.

Cause at the end of the day, operations people in my mind are just problem solvers of like, Give me as much information as you have available, which could be a little, or it could be a lot, or you could only have a couple of the pieces. And I will try to solve the full problem for you. so I think it's trying to find out what those things are, whether it's directly from a marketing leader or, through just your observations and coming up with some solutions or suggestions, like it doesn't have to be the end all be all solution, but.

If you see a gap in, a process that marketing is doing internally, that has nothing to do with marketing operations traditionally, but like if you see a gap in how they are managing partnering through procurement, right? Like marketing spends a lot of money in a lot of different ways with a lot of vendors. And that can be an overwhelming process for so many people that spend dollars in marketing to navigate. Can be tough for finance because they're dealing with so many different stakeholders trying to spend dollars if you see a process like that where you're like I think I could kind of just map this out in a lucid chart and I could look for areas of efficiency and I could Do some really good documentation on this.

I'm not saying to loan out all your time without being compensated for it. But if you see something like that and say like, Hey, I'd love to take it past it, something like that, just to see if we can find some efficiencies and find some wins for everyone involved in this process. Like. look for some of those and go after them.

I think that helps show the value of like marketing operations. Isn't just Marketo and Salesforce and six cents. it's truly like overall operational efficiency and excellence and you have the mind for it. It's just applying in a different way.

I Justin Norris: coming back to your point about like, we're more than just systems and also that we are very, uh, systems rooted and oriented in many cases, depending on how we enter the field. Is there a role, to think more like about performance or about the actual marketing strategy? Like, Hey, like. I'm seeing this sort of shift in how people are going to market.

Like we should be thinking about this, that sort of thing. Kimi Corrigan: have one on my team. He's the best. And.

I think it's a super valuable role. Um, I typically call that role, analytics and strategy or data and strategy, at whatever level your organization will support. Like I love a director type level role in that. and yes, that person should be very well versed in just like reporting analytics, hopefully maybe even dabbling in the technical side of like, Being out of like build out Tableau dashboards and stuff like all of that basic stuff.

But like for me, the most valuable part of that role is someone who can look at both like our data and trends and help people figure out how to take action off of it. Not just read the results, but also that role, is always looking out of like what's going on. Like, what are people talking about on LinkedIn? What are people talking about at these conferences?

What are the go to market strategies? Where are the trends when it comes to technology? Like, do we need to go all in on platform player? Do we need to do like this piecemeal?

Like we're going to do these six tiny tools and that's going to be a better way for it to build up our strategy around them versus letting like a giant platform drive our strategy. So, I'm lucky to have someone in that role who I think is excellent at it. So, if anyone out there is listening and wants to learn more about that person's day to day, specifically, I wouldn't be happy to make an introduction. but I think that role is a key component of a marketing operations team.

Justin Norris: That's amazing. And I think, turning to the notion of operations and strategy, cause you have two buckets in your title, that strategy piece is often missing. so I'm curious, like, what does it mean? For you to have both of those things in your title, Kimi Corrigan: it means I have to have really good boundaries as does anyone that has strategy in your title, because there's no doubt you're still very tactical.

You're very. Much in systems or data or whatever processes day to day. And you have to set aside time for the strategy, whether that's blocking time on your calendar or knowing how to make that shift in one meeting to come in and say, I'm going to talk to you about performance last month. And then at the end of the meeting, I'm going to talk to you about qualified buying groups and why that strategy might be what's best for us.

Like you have to be able to do both. And it's really hard to not get bogged down by the tactical. Piece of it, right? Because it feels good to cross things off a list and the list never stops growing.

But the more you can hold that boundary on strategy being part of your day every day or your week every week. The more optimized your to do list of tactical things becomes like, then you're working on the right things. Even if they are tactical, it's because you're driving strategy to improve overall efficiency of, you know, whatever it is, go to market or procurement or, whatever process, like you have to hold space for that strategy, both. whether it's setting aside 20 minutes every day to scroll linked in and read all the hot takes or read ebooks, listen to podcasts.

Like if you feel like you have strategy or if you have strategy, your job title and you don't feel all that strategic, ultimately that's a you problem to solve. that comes with like navigating priorities with your manager and your team and expectations of what bandwidth is, et cetera. But like you have to find a way to hold time and space for it. Justin Norris: maybe let's dig into the word strategy a little bit, cause it's kind of like lead or campaign where it can mean so many different things to so many different people.

what does it mean to you, in terms of like where you should focus? Kimi Corrigan: the simplest way I think about strategy for me and my team is just like, are we thinking about how to do things better all the time? Like we can design a really great process and it works great for six months, but that doesn't mean it should just ride forever. you know, even just like our intake form for our ticketing system for marketing operations, you know, we shouldn't set it and forget it for three years.

are we thinking about the experience people are having, even asking us to do work for them? Like, yeah. Are we constantly following up on one specific thing and then not optimizing the intake process for it? So it's just constantly thinking about how can we do this better and better could mean a lot of things.

It could be. More efficient. It could be a easier user experience. It could be better conversion rates.

it's just how can we improve the thing that we're thinking about and that we're doing? And that is up and running. so that's when I think about strategy of like, are we strategic? And it's like, yeah, because we are constantly like thinking about how can we do this better and then executing on it.

And if it works great. And if it doesn't work, okay, let's think about a new way to strategize on this. Justin Norris: So would it be the strategy of the marketing ops team? Like we're going to be strategic and how we're executing our operations or the strategy of the marketing team Kimi Corrigan: Oh, Matt, a strategy is so meta for marketing.

not only do we have to be strategic about how we work and how people work with us, we also need to think about strategy on behalf of all the marketing teams that are our customers. and we do that in a lot of ways. Like for example, like campaign operations, going back to email marketing is the bread and butter of where. We came from to get here.

I have worked with all kinds of campaign operations, people with internal external. I've had people that they want to come in. They don't really want to talk to anyone. They don't want to do anything.

They want to look at their ticket queue. They want to build, execute tests and schedule. Amazing. what a skill Justin Norris: you need that.

Kimi Corrigan: I also have someone like my campaign ops leader now does all that, but is also very integrated into the strategy of everything that like anything that comes into his queue. It's not the first time he's heard about it because he's been in the strategy meetings. He's helped people think about things differently. He knows what's coming something strategize on how we're going to do, you know, a trial nurture program and like, let's, trigger off of these data points, etc.

So, you can go any direction with that. And I think both are welcome. It's just. I like the way that my campaign ops person works now, because it does make other teams more strategic and hopefully teaching them, okay, we need to think about this thing differently.

It's not a we do these five things. It's we know two of the things we really want to do. So let's talk about what the other three things could be. Like, what is the Wild, wild world of possibilities.

And then we can talk to the campaign ops person to say what is possible. And instead of him saying, you know, these two are possible. This one isn't, it's these two are possible. This one isn't, but I have six other ideas for you to think about.

so I think it's, we're responsible for our strategy as well as. Lending it to everyone else Justin Norris: I love that. And it's, it's funny, kind of ironic that as you like, you know, climb the ladder of marketing operations, it actually does lead you back to marketing. Cause when I look at like where I.

Do most of my learning. I mean, there's tons of great rev ops and mops podcasts. I do listen to them, but most of my time is actually spent on like marketing podcasts and books or go to market or like bringing in those ideas, like you mentioned, to like feedback into the business, like, Hey, are we thinking about this? And it's just kind of funny that it takes you full circle back to the thing itself.

Kimi Corrigan: is always back thinking about like being a VP of marketing ops and I've, I've been that for a few years now and I've had a few people reach out, I think, with good intent of, Hey, like, aren't you ready to move on? Like, why aren't you going for your first? CMO role or just VP of marketing role at a startup. I get the impression they're kind of like move on.

And I'm just like, you have no idea what marketing operations truly is and what it can be. Like, I feel like we're still scratching the surface of it. so I find it slightly insulting, even though I know that's not what they mean. I'm still learning every day.

I'm not bored. I love where I sit. I love seeing so much of the organization and so much of what we're doing. I think it's endless still, or at least it seems like a wide open road that will take me to the end of my career, hopefully.

So, not saying never, but I still have a lot to learn here in marketing operations. Justin Norris: I think that's inspiring. do you ever either feel concerned about or tempted by the prospect of like revenue operations of expanding into those other fields where you feel like actually it's a different field. Kimi Corrigan: yeah, I just don't think it's for me.

I love partnering with those teams. I like marketing ops sitting in marketing and I, and not under rev ops. I just think that makes more sense to me. Um, I know it works well for some organizations and people.

And I think that's great too. but yeah, it's just, there's something about it that just doesn't appeal to me in the same way. I sit in on some like forecasting and planning and pipeline meetings and I'm dangerous enough to understand what's going on, but the thought of like, just thinking about pipeline and forecasting and like that piece of it, just isn't as appealing to me. I'm glad it appeals to someone else I'm happy to just be their partner in it.

Justin Norris: Marketing is its own thing. And You know, the more I think about it, I think about this a lot lately. So it's funny that just the timing of this conversation, like, sales, it's very hard, like, I don't envy sellers carrying a quota Kimi Corrigan: I support them. They have all my.

Love and support BDR is more than anyone like, you know, what can I get for you? I'm here for you. But like the thought of even just sitting in a revenue organization that is so hitting that number and the stress of that, they clearly get some sort of enjoyment out of it, especially if you're good at it. And like, kudos, but like, I couldn't do it.

reminds me of, like, the same reason I haven't fully gone into, like, the consulting route. Like, there's just some risk aversion that I cannot quite. jump over of like, I like having someone, say, here's your health insurance and here's how you do this. And we're going to make sure your taxes get paid.

Like there's some aversion that reminds me of like consulting and sales of like, I'm just like, Nope, I'm good. I'm gonna stay right over here. Justin Norris: and yet marketing in a lot of ways, it's very ambiguous, it's very, especially like, if we think about like brand and, you know, we get away from like the directly linear performance marketing model, you're doing things that are kind of important, but you can't fully measure them and you can't fully like, there's this art.

To it. Kimi Corrigan: Definitely an art to the science. Yes. And I'm just trying to figure out, like, how to turn that art into something measurable.

like, we're rolling out HockeyStack right now we're not going to use it as, like, an attribution, they sit in attribution category, but that's not what appealed to us about it. It's more of, like, really understanding that full journey that people go on and then how to optimize it, You know, pulling this lever tweaking this. so even though it's an art, sort of a dark magic, I'm still trying to figure out how to measure all of it. Justin Norris: not a thread I plan to pull on, but since you mentioned it, is hockey stack really where it's at because, I've had their CRO Mira on the show before.

They look really cool. They look like they're really innovating beyond, you know, a lot of other players in the category. Kimi Corrigan: I do get that impression. I mean, that's what, sold us on it.

I think what we saw was really impressive and it's solving. It looks like it's going to solve what we're trying to solve. Currently, the team's very impressive and you can tell they're really trying to make this a big disruptor and some of the things on. The roadmap that they've shared with us seem like other gaps that we want to fill if those things become real and tangible to us.

So, we're fans and we're going to see how it goes. we're only a few weeks into our implementation, but we're very excited about it. Justin Norris: Really Sweet. it's a natural segue into, talking a bit more about.

Text stack and you alluded to some of the, questions that ops folks need to ask themselves right now around. Do I commit to a big platform? Do I go composable? am I still going to be using Marketo or HubSpot or whatever first gen marketing automation platform on?

Am I still going to be using that in 3 years? Those are big questions. How are you thinking about that? Kimi Corrigan: Yeah.

I'm taking a different approach this time around than I have in the past. I'm not anti platforms in general. Like we just purchased Marketo a few months ago. We're launching in a few weeks.

you know, we're on Salesforce. but when we think about the other things I would typically put on the list of like, we need to get a ABM platform in here. We need to do this. am approaching it differently this time of like, I almost want to go back to like, breaking down all the platforms into the smaller pieces.

And that's the approach we're taking here for a few reasons. One, you know, budgets are tighter than ever. It's a lot easier to say, I want to spend 200k. On eight platforms, and I'm going to roll them out one by one as I piece together how the technology is going to support our strategy.

So that's easier to navigate just in the time of more scrutiny than ever budget wise. But I also just, I'm still a huge fan of all of those vendors. 6 cents demand base. Like all of them are amazing.

Their content's amazing. Their tools are amazing. I've been very successful with them in the past, but there's something about taking back some more control under the hood and piecing together these smaller tools. That's really appealing.

Um, there's a lot of those hot takes on LinkedIn. I'm seeing that kind of help validate where we're heading. I have never demoed so many marketing technologies that I have in the past six months. Cause there's just so many up and coming players that are leaning into that, interest from marketers to go back to specific tools for specific needs versus an all in one platform.

Cause I think the all in one platform is great for a lot of reasons, but you end up with a lot of black box feeling of like, I don't really know how this works. And as operators, that makes us generally quite uncomfortable. we want to be able to understand everything that's happening and why it's putting it's giving the output it's giving and I think some of those bigger platforms took that power away from us. And then we ended up getting questions we couldn't answer, which we are typically very uncomfortable with of like, I don't know why this account is saying it's in market.

Like, I can't quite tell you why, but I just know the platform says it is. I think that became a problem of trust between sales and marketing as well. And I think that's why, I'm interested in going back to this smaller tools with a bigger scope across all of them. And I think we will continue to see more of that in the market.

Justin Norris: Yeah, I'm so there with you. And for all the same reasons, we're literally just now in the process of moving from called a bigger legacy, uh, ABM platform to Matt Kudu, which some people know about already. Kimi Corrigan: Yeah, they're great. I've done their podcast before.

I haven't used the product, but heard great things. Justin Norris: night and day in terms of the experience of like, Hey, like there's just feels like there's more access to more knobs under the hood. That you can tune to get to a place. Whereas.

You know, with a bigger platform, like a bigger company as well, more established, you just hit a wall. It's like, no, we can't do that. And it's like, maybe it'll be on the roadmap in the year. Maybe it won't, but it's like, there is nothing you can do.

Kimi Corrigan: And now thinking about evolution, it just makes so much sense, right? Like we got overwhelmed with all the tiny tools we had and trying to like synthesize them. So then these platforms came in and sort of did it for us. We're like, okay, great.

we needed that. And then we started to understand or have more questions. And now that we all have better resource teams and have a better understanding of operations in general. Now we're ready to be like, I want more control.

Like, it's almost like I wish some of those platforms I could break up of like, Okay. Okay. Thank you for your model, unlock it for me. So like I can now mess with it and you just can't.

So, and I'm sure in, 10 or 15 years, hopefully when I'm getting to the end of this ride, we're probably gonna go back to like the full scale, all in one solution for this stuff as well. I think it's just natural. Justin Norris: way you articulated that. It's interesting that I've.

I've been feeling the same thing. think about, your team, uh, great article that you wrote that I read that I've alluded to before about like, how do you build a team? Like, what's the first, second, third, 10th person that you should hire? without retracing all those steps, maybe let's just talk about how do you think about what are the holes that you need to fill and how do you plug people in at different stages?

Kimi Corrigan: I would say it almost always platform ops first, at the end of the day, marketing operations is in charge of systems. Whether it's two systems or 12 or more. so you have to have platform operations and typically like if I'm building a brand new team and I have the option, like that's the first part, like I'm, I'm getting on the phone with like my most trusted platform ops people in the space of like, Hey, you want to come, you want to come do this? Like I need someone to like keep the lights on and start thinking about like.

What did we inherit here? What needs optimized? What's working? What's not?

So like platform operations is still just like bread and butter and platform operations can typically cover campaign operations in the short term or at a small scale. So that role is always number one for me. from there it's that data and strategy role has kind of risen to the top as like, also would like to hire that at the same time, but if not like second, And then campaign operations at scale, like whether that's bringing in someone full time, if warranted or outsourcing to a consultant, like, and then getting campaign operations off the plate of platform operations.

and then from there, my next favorite role to bring in is. general operations, project management, just like that right hand person to like help synthesize, like building templates for project management, not actually project managing everything across marketing, just keeping the team super organized, being the go to partner for finance and procurement for other project management roles within the organization. So like, those are kind of my, the handful that I'm always like. If I'm going somewhere new and they want me to build a team, I'm like, great.

I need these three, four, five roles very quickly. Which ones can I hire immediately? Like those, those are where I think about like the most important priorities. Justin Norris: And speaking about priorities, And we're in Q4 of the calendar year, or at least at my company, we're thinking about 2025 right now.

what does that cadence look like for you? Or what sort of cadence do you try to drive in terms of like the business plan, the marketing plan, the marketing operations plan? How does that ladder work? Kimi Corrigan: we're finishing up Q3.

We're on a delayed start. So Feb one starts, so we're about to hit Q4. So we're right in the middle of modeling and forecasting for next fiscal. and not that marketing is driving that overall process.

That's definitely like a revenue finance process, but we have to work their numbers into our process. So we're kind of right now waiting, like, what are those final targets? And then how do we do our tops down model and then we're going to do our bottoms up model and figure out like what is that gap between what they say they need from us and then what our budget can actually provide based on our historical so that we're right in the middle of that and someone on my team is responsible for the marketing share of that so I try to stay really close to that.

specific to my current organization, we are on the verge of some like really big launches coming up next month. Um, so that's like going to kick off Q4 for us. And it's all about planning for next year. So doing marketing leadership off sites and then team off sites and looking at our roadmap, what did we actually get done?

What do we need to reconfigure? based on all the tech that we've brought in in the past six months, like what's reasonable to continue to try to prioritize over next year. And then doing that listening tour with all of the other marketing teams and leaders of like, what are your priorities for next year? Cause your priorities end up becoming my priorities, whether they're on my list right now or not.

So. It's really just like an active listening time of like, what are you guys thinking about doing next year? And they may not even realize they're going to ask us to do something, but we will start to kind of pencil them in based on what they're going to be doing. Justin Norris: It took the words listening to her out of my mouth.

how much of your roadmap would you say is like internal mobs driven? Like we need to do, I don't know, tech debt or a platform implementation. How much is like emerging out of the needs of those other teams and stakeholders? Kimi Corrigan: Yeah, when I think about my roadmap, it's typically What do we have to do because other teams are going to need us to do it.

And like, we will hold up their strategy if we aren't planning for it. So what do we have to do? That's outside of our wishlist. And then what do we need to do to keep our team and systems and processes healthy and scaled?

You know, it could be tech debt could be, you know, partnering across the org on page layouts, whatever it is. So what do we need to do? That's marketing ops driven would be the second bucket. And then I always try to keep a little bit of space for what do we want to do?

what are those cool projects that are going to make us feel joyful and productive and effective that also provide value to the organization that no one is going to ask us to do? It's not a we have to do this or something's going to break if we don't. It's. what do we want to do that's going to be valuable for our learning experience that still provides value?

And that percentage is always variable depending on what those first two percentages take up But I try to think about it in those three buckets I try to think about cleaning up the roadmap quarterly But looking at it monthly of like, okay, what is actually still happening this month versus what's completely changed because of, whatever scenario. And like, do we move it out a month? Do we put it in the parking lot? Can we pull it forward because something else is being held up?

so yeah, right in the middle of thinking about that for next year. And we'll probably have a bunch of stuff that we have to kick to next year because it just, those want to do's or need to do's for our team just didn't get done. And like, It's sometimes it's good when things don't get done, because then by the time you get to them, it's like, is this still actually a priority? Is this still actually something we even want to do based on what we know now?

And if it's not, that's okay. So roadmap is like a loose term for me. It's more of just what are the big rocks that we like and that we don't like that still have to get done? Justin Norris: I love the idea of integrating some like me time into the road.

I mean, it's, not unimportant. And there are often things that do have sort of a atmospheric benefit in the sense that like it, uplifts everything. creates a better working environment. So Kimi Corrigan: Like one of my roadmap to dues that is due this month has been marketing ops team culture.

been here for six months, three months in, it was kind of like the team was settling in. Some of the team was new. Some of the team was existing. And I'm like, our team Slack channel is just a bunch of like alerts from the air table that we have tickets.

Like we've got to get the vibes up. Like we've got to have some fun. So. You know, it's just simple stuff like that's on my roadmap to like improve marketing ops team culture to the level in which I think it should be at.

And that's just, okay, we're going to have a holiday party. We're going to do a secret Santa. We're going to do the meme Olympics next month. I signed every day of the week to someone on the marketing ops team to like put a prompt in the Slack channel of any kind, you know, Yesterday was would you rather Wednesday.

Today I asked everyone like what's your favorite food taste wise that smells terrible like just really silly things But I'm like it's important to me and I'm putting it on the roadmap because I'm gonna hold myself accountable to like getting this done for the team so anything can go on the roadmap. Justin Norris: I love it. I think that is the last question we have time for, but really grateful for you being on the show, sharing some of the wisdom you've gained. just super interesting perspective.

I think for folks that are like, I'm a senior manager, I'm a director, but I want to know like, what does that next sort of mountain look like? I think you've given a really clear picture of that and a lot of guidance. So thank you so much.