MOOPs TV | Episode 4 | Chelsea Kiko & Jessica Meyers

In the fourth episode of MOOPs TV Chelse Kiko shares how she made a mistake with routing programs between Marketo and Salesforce.

Watch the episode or tune in on Ops Cast to find out what the mistakes were and how (if possible) they were resolved.

Transcript:

Episode 4 – Chelsea Kiko

Jessica Meyers: [00:00:00] Thanks everyone for joining us for another episode of moves TV, I’m on Gusto, one of your house, and I’m joined today by Chelsea Kiko. Uh, Chelsea, I’m gonna go ahead and get started with, tell us a little bit about who you are and where are you currently? 

Chelsea Kiko: Yeah. Sounds good. Thanks for having me. Um, my name is Chelsea Kiko.

Like you just mentioned. I am the director of marketing operations at McGraw-Hill for the K to 12 side of the business. And I really lead our marketing automations, email marketing within our systems and our marketing ops data infrastructure, backend system integrations type of team. Um, and I’ve been here.

A little over a year and a half, my previous life I’ve been in agencies, other larger corporations. So I’ve definitely been around the block when it comes to doing marketing 

Jessica Meyers: apps. Uh, yeah, you’re, you’re definitely one of the head originals in the scene. Uh, how long have you been practicing marketing and revenue operations?

Chelsea Kiko: Yeah, I would say specifically marketing and revenue ops about seven years that I’ve been really in the systems and [00:01:00] working them. Day-to-day okay. Awesome.

Jessica Meyers: I’ll get you the mistake. We’re going to talk about in a little bit here, but at what point in your career did the mistake we’re going to touch on today? Happen? 

Chelsea Kiko: Actually pretty recently. Um, and I feel like it takes a lot of guts to like own up to a mistake where I’m currently at the organization. So let’s hope a lot of people from my company don’t watch this.

Um, but yeah, it was only, I want to see I was in. I was here for about six months. So it was about a year ago and I should have been an expert. I still think I am an expert with this was a pretty, a pretty shitty mistake. So, 

Jessica Meyers: um, so what exactly were you trying to do that 

Chelsea Kiko: caused the mistake? So this one is.

Funny and interesting, because I was trying to fix another mistake and you know, how you try to fix something and then it just keeps compiling. That’s kind of what happened here. So I was trying to fix, we’re having an issue with our task routing to our sales reps. So we notify a sales rep when [00:02:00] somebody reaches, uh, well, we don’t do a threshold, but when someone does like a handraiser form, um, sales ready form, we reach out to them with the task and our task routing broke for some certain pieces.

Of our hand raiser forms. And I was trying to remit update that and send those tasks back out to the sales reps. 

Jessica Meyers: Um, oops. In front of the stakes are always so stressful. Um, in my opinion. Yeah, but systems where you in, uh, when you were working on this 

Chelsea Kiko: project, I was in Marketo for the marketing automation system and Salesforce for the CRM.

Jessica Meyers: Awesome. Um, and so like kind of what specifically happened from an error standpoint? What broke, what caused some hoops? 

Chelsea Kiko: Well, the first thing that broke, um, was actually, it was the way the routing was set up and we were tokenizing a field that is relied upon for the system to trigger a workflow, to create a certain task in sales.

That’s kind of the best way to describe it [00:03:00] quickly. Um, and we noticed that the issue we went to update some of our routing programs, the issue was live for about a week. So some, the only way that we can kind of fix our routing problems is by manually routing. So essentially I’ll go back through and see everybody who should be contacted by a sales rep, send out the task to the rep and fix it.

So I felt like I was a super hero for the day I was going to fix it so excited. Um, at the time we had a big duplicate problem, so I’m sure a lot of people can kind of. Um, commiserate on that, where we have some people who are dupes three times quads. I mean, we have the whole thing. So instead of doing a fix of, um, you know, like a program membership or a Smartlist, I just did it by email address because I pulled the report from Salesforce.

Yeah. So not sure how I didn’t catch that. I think I was just trying to fix it quickly. So I ran, what, you know, in Marketo is called a smart campaign. I ran it by. Email is, um, and, you know, without the tasks that we sent to the [00:04:00] reps, so here are the refs got like way more tasks that needed to, um, I think one rep at one point reached out to me and she was supposed to only get like 72 tasks and she had like over 400.

So yeah. So there’s no way to. Yeah. And of course the reps had to see it. Right. I mean, of course they did. 

Jessica Meyers: Was that rep notifying you, that they had four X as many tasks as they should have the first thing, first person that caught it or did you know something had gone wrong prior to that? 

Chelsea Kiko: So I did not catch it again.

I don’t know how I didn’t. Um, so. What I, one rep I, I sent out an email to all the reps that were affected. I was like, Hey, I fixed this problem. That’s what makes it worse? Cause I like owned it. That it was me like, Hey, it’s your marketing ops manager here. I fixed a big problem for you. Like trying to come to save the day.

And um, I got, you know, I don’t know if your, your stomach ever sinks when you start to get replied to. But I saw replies coming [00:05:00] in from reps and I thought it was going to be like, great job. This is awesome. I immediately got like a pit in my stomach because everybody was saying, Hey, I have duplicate tasks.

Or this task came through and it is the same task, four times what’s going on. And then I was going through them and it like hit me. I was like, oh my gosh, because I did email address it, just compiled them all up. And that’s really how I got notified. Yeah. Oh, that’s the worst. 

Jessica Meyers: Uh, yeah, I’ve definitely had somewhere.

I was not the person to catch it and I know exactly what, like pit in your stomach feeling you’re talking about. Yeah. Um, was there anything you could do to remedy this, uh, situation? 

Chelsea Kiko: Yeah, so I had to think on my feet really quickly. And again, I mean, this is a really good learning opportunity for me and I’m kind of happy.

It happened really that I learned about it. So what I did at first, because I was so desperate to just get it off the sales reps plate. Um, I went through and I actually had some, we have an agency who [00:06:00] supports us and I had some team members. I was like, guys, listen, this is my bad. We all need to just kind of team, you know, team up on this.

I went through, we went through and assigned them all to me. So all of these duplicate tasks. Get them out of their view first. So then I was getting hundreds of emails that like tasks were being assigned to me. And at the time I didn’t care. Cause I was like, let’s just take them off, you know, the reps dashboards.

So that’s how I, I think that worked the best because it was a quick thought. I was like, all right, let’s just hide the problem and not in a bad way, but make sure the reps don’t see it right away. And let’s just, you know, scoop it under the rug. Um, so the reps can handle their customers correctly. And then I did more cleanup on my end, after they were all assigned.

It’s actually 

Jessica Meyers: a pretty good solution. Um, 

Chelsea Kiko: yeah, I mean, I will wait because you have to think the only thing that really implicates is reporting. Right. And like you reporting real time, but normally we report monthly or quarterly. So I was like, well, let’s just, I don’t want the reps to work the wrong task, so let’s just take them off right now.

So yeah. Um, [00:07:00] in hindsight, I probably would do it that way all over again. 

Jessica Meyers: That’s always nice.

I’m like headed. Chelsea says I did it the right way. Yeah.

Big thing in mistakes is obviously learning from them. Um, what did you learn in the remediation process of that? 

Chelsea Kiko: Well, um, I actually did some things afterwards to help with it, obviously solve a duplicate problem. Right. But, um, for, for those who are larger organizations, it’s not that easy. So we share a Marketo instance with two other bus and to solve the duplicate problem is like a year over a year process.

So I was like, okay, I can’t solve a duplicate problems. So how can I solve this moving forward? Um, I actually have something that I keep it’s like in my notes, it’s called a gotchas task. Uh, I wouldn’t say task. It’s a gotchas list where, um, I’ve had it my whole career, which is funny [00:08:00] because I still have it where it’s like, you dumb ass.

Why did you do that? And I put it on the list. So, um, I have things from when I was doing email marketing to what I was doing, more campaign planning. I it’s just something I’ve kept over time where. We’ll remember. Okay. I know that I made that mistake. Um, and the other thing we did too, is we now have an error dashboard that we created, which is actually amazing because we get to see anything that goes array within our data infrastructure.

But the nice thing is if we notice there’s a duplicate task that’s being created, we actually get alerted now versus me finding out a harder way, you know, people are letting me know. So it kind of helped us understand, um, a use case for a dashboard for our team. 

Jessica Meyers: I have ha I have slash had, um, the same, like got your list of like, Hey, dummy, don’t do that.

Or like things that I had to Google enough times that I was like, I’m just writing this down somewhere because I’m sick of asking somebody slash Google, how to solve that thing that I know. I learned that one time. [00:09:00] Yeah. So I think that’s a common, common way to solve the problem. Um, beyond that, God jealous.

Do you have any specific other processes you’ve put in place, uh, to avoid that kind of mistake in the future? 

Chelsea Kiko: Yeah, I would say I’m more. What we do now is, um, as my team has grown in, our strategies have grown. Um, we do a lot more reporting. Uh, the one thing I don’t want to happen anymore is because I want to keep my team credible, credible, um, People to trust us and trust our work.

That’s why I created something like an air dashboard. I also have team members of mine do certain monthly type of operation pieces that help us keep up and running where we should catch any mistake that has come through. Whether it’s a routing issue, an email issue, a data issue. We should have enough infrastructure and processes in place.

Now that if something does go wrong, we should find it and be able to get in front of it and communicate it. Um, cause to me, I think that’s more important, right? Like I think what. But [00:10:00] suck the most about this. This issue that I had was a sales rep, who you’re always trying to have good relationship with, came to me.

And, and that’s what really got to me. So I think now that we have more error prone process in place, um, hopefully we won’t run into this type of issue again, 

Jessica Meyers: next. Um, a couple of final thoughts before we wrap up, what would you say to someone who’s made a similar mistake? Uh, I think the worst ones are when there’s internal stakeholders involved.

So some somebody who screwed something up internally, what would you say. 

Chelsea Kiko: Uh, depending on what industry you’re in or what you do. One thing I always tell my team is like, listen, at the end of the day, it was a task to a sales rep, right? It wasn’t, we’re not talking about, you know, breaking up a family.

We’re not talking about a terrible healthcare mistake. I mean, it’s nothing remotely to what serious something else could be. So I’m big on putting things into perspective. So if somebody went through something similar. So what if a rep has four tasks to work instead [00:11:00] of one? Okay. They might be annoyed by you for a little bit and you can fix it later, but just breathe, move on.

Um, at the end of the day, it’s, it’s really not that big of a deal. So I try to talk myself down a lot to it. Of course, we take pride and integrity in our work, but we all mess up and it happens. And most people are understanding because you know, they’ve been in the same situation before. 

Jessica Meyers: I, uh, usually it takes a similar approach internally of like, uh, in this case, uh, no one got hurt, uh, by the mistake that we’ve made.

Um, do you have any other advice for any fellow marketing or rev ops professionals? 

Chelsea Kiko: Yeah, I think along the lines of like the moops, um, and really trying to work with other people is have compassion. If somebody else makes a mistake. So, you know, we, our team all the time there’s weather issues happen or, or somebody messes up.

Treat your team to just understand that we’re human and, you know, try [00:12:00] to teach them a lot of things. What I do is whether it’s, um, you know, mentees that I have, or my team itself has take ownership, say how you’re going to fix it, communicate it out and just own it. You know, don’t get defensive, don’t try to finger point and most people are compassionate and we’ll work with you on it.

So that’s my biggest advice is like, if somebody else messes up, don’t finger point, just own it as a team and try to move forward with it because you might be in that same situation. You know, a day, a year down the road you want, you would want to have that same support system. 

Jessica Meyers: Okay. That’s really good advice.

Perfect. Well, that’s all my questions. So thanks so much for your taking the time to chat 

Chelsea Kiko: with me. Thanks for having me on.