SMS

My car is in the shop, and the mechanic sent me a text message, rather than call or email, to let me know it was ready to be picked up. In that context, text messaging works great. I certainly don’t want a call. I never want a call. And

Problem solvers

I’ve succeeded and grown in my career, up until a few years ago, purely through my ability to problem solve. And I love to problem solve. But as I shifted into increasingly more leadership-oriented roles, my roles demanded less of a direct hand in problem solving, and instead indirect

LTV

It used to be that an immature marketing organization would obsess about activities and leads, while a more mature org would focus on opportunities and revenue. Certainly the latter is better aligned with sales goals, but it's hardly the furthest a marketing team can evolve to. Pursuing true

Limiting app usage

Austin Kleon just wrote about his efforts to limit social media usage on his devices, and there's some worthwhile tips in there. I tried out the iOS screen time feature, but it tended to have the opposite effect on me. The little reminder that pops up is too

Is it really a paradigm shift?

Every year there's some new piece of tech or idea that promises to change everything. Yet almost always, it's a bunch of hype that everyone gets swept up in, and the net result is small, incremental change. The latest trend to get this treatment is chatbots.

Reusable Filters

One of the most useful features of Eloqua is the ability to build groupings of filters that you can use over and over in segmentations. You can even modify them, and any segmentations that use them will automatically update to use the new logic. It's a pretty elegant

Intentional Errors

I'm not a huge fan of using mobile apps for social networking sites like Twitter and Linkedin. Part of it's because the mobile experiences are basically the same as their more bloated app counterparts, and partly because I don't want to temptation of distraction

Get out of salesforce reporting

When you're stuck using basic salesforce reporting or your marketing automation platform, it ends up limiting the extent of the insights you can create from the data. Of course, you can always play the export to excel and vlookup game, but the tolerance for that, and room for

Durability

I think a lot about durability in the systems I maintain these days. Durability, to me, means maintaining continued functioning even in non-ideal or unexpected situations. Durability is building around the increasingly common bot clicks on email links when designing scoring or activity alerts. Should we lower the weight of

Public domains on forms

This discussion over whether to allow public email domains (like gmail, yahoo, etc) on forms is worth a read. And it got me thinking about something my friend Glen wrote about "Your Problem vs my Problem". Companies make decisions to gate off public domains for a few reasons.

Customer support tickets

A good support team will try and resolve an open issue as quickly as possible, both to solve the issue for the customer, but also to meet their own KPIs. Most of the time, aligning support engineers to velocity of case resolution drives good behavior, and makes customers happy. But

Conference season

It's conference season for marketing ops, and the only question I seem to be getting asked by vendors and colleagues is: "Are you going to conference XYZ?" I think this is my off year. At least for the big shows. I'm not as closely