Annette Reed on the Power of Operations and Your Ability to Scale

Overview:

In this episode, we sit down with Annette Reed, Senior Director of Global Campaigns and Demand Generation at SentinelOne, about operationalizing marketing processes to scale effectively and do more with less. Drawing from her background in ISO 9001-certified manufacturing and demand generation, Reed emphasizes the necessity of standard operating procedures, documentation, and close collaboration with marketing operations teams to maintain consistency, prevent costly errors, and maximize content reach (such as repurposing webinars). She shares practical approaches using project management tools like Asana alongside Slack to coordinate cross-functional teams and manage global complexities, underscoring that clear and frequent communication remains the most essential element for sustainable growth and efficiency.

Transcript:

Kerry Guard  0:13  

Hello, I'm Kerry Guard, and welcome to Tea Time with Tech Marketing Leaders. Welcome back to the show. I hope you all were able to tune in with us last week, where I talked to Heidi, and she spilled so much tea, y'all, around the death of the MQL. It is real, and she's got all the data to prove it. And if you haven't seen that show, I highly recommend you go check it out. It was epic. I'm sharing it with everyone. I'm like, get your pen and paper out. Go check out my show with Heidi, and it just changes the game of how we talk about and think about marketing with data to prove it and back it up from like a real brand that was VMware. It was amazing. Go watch it, y'all. Appreciate you. This week, I am so stoked to be talking to Annette Reed about one of my all-time favorite passions, Nerd Alert. We just love talking about operations and scaling and streamlining and SOPs and all that jazz. Yeah, jazz hands, you're here. I'll tell you,

Annette Reed  1:14  

I'm doing jazz hands.

Kerry Guard  1:17  

Let's do it. Let's do it. And we want all your questions. This is the beauty of being live. So, if you are here with us today and you're trying to figure out how on earth you are supposed to do more with less because team members got laid off, or maybe your budget got cut, or all those fun things that are happening in the glorious 2024 that it is, and that's got the answers for you, so please chime in. Please ask the questions. I will be paying attention to chat, and we are here for it. A little bit about Annette before we dive on in and hear her story. Annette is passionate about marketing, design, and building and empowering teams. That's all going to come through. You just wait. She is a holistic perspective to designing end-to-end customer experiences, building strategic marketing plans, and developing integrated communication programs. She thrives in a collaborative team environment while successfully leading multiple projects, cross-functional teams, and outside agencies. She has built successful programs too, in product, brand, channel, and retail marketing with experience working with teams from North America to Latin America, Europe, and even Australia. And let me tell you, having lived in Europe and the time zone difference struggle is real. So hats off to you, Annette, and figuring that out. Welcome, welcome to the show. So excited to have you.

Annette Reed  2:45  

Thanks, Kerry, for having me. Yeah, the APJ APAC, depending on however you guys like to say it, that time zone is so fun. I have two Tim members that are in India. Yep, they're up late. I'm up late. Depending on the day, we try to split our time so that we're not all having to work crazy hours, but yes, that's fun. But it's a really important region. Depending on your industry, it can be really really huge for growth. So it's an important one that, as global leaders, you're integrating with those teams and making sure that they have the support that they need to be able to scale.

Kerry Guard  3:22  

And it’s why we're all tired, but it's also why we're also so successful.

Annette Reed   3:26  

Yeah, it's a trade-off. I know it's a trade-off, right? Everything is a balancing act.

Kerry Guard  3:33  

I know, but I gotta say, I have you know, living. I've lived in New York now for the last four years, and having my mornings to myself, like to get non-work stuff done. Like I drop the kids off at school, and then my husband and I go grocery shopping. We're so exciting, and I get laundry done, and I like, and then I like settle into my day. And it's pretty. I gotta say, I used to live in Seattle. It was the other way around, where like I got up and I got going and there was meetings, meetings, meetings, meetings, and then like the end of my day was like that smooth ride. But yeah,

Annette Reed  4:07  

yeah, the adulting part of our lives is always really fun. I hate repet. I to be honest, I hate repetitive chores, laundry, getting like doing dishes. Those are I hate those. I love the ones that are like one-time tasks that you can just complete, and you don't have to do it for like another month or you know oil changes. That's fine. I don't mind that because you don't do them frequently. But oh, the laundry, I hate that. Grocery shopping, I hate it. We order, we do all deliveries for groceries now because I'm like I don't. I can thank COVID for all of that kind of stuff, because I hate your job.

Kerry Guard  4:43  

So true. I do miss. I do miss America for that reason. Living on this teeny tiny island, I have some limitations there. But man, do I miss. I miss delivery. I also miss next day shipping.

Annette Reed   4:55  

Oh,

Kerry Guard  4:55  

it's the little things. It's the little things.

Annette Reed   4:58  

That is very helpful.

Kerry Guard  5:00  

And the operational things that make our lives easier, which we are going to get into before we get there. Though, in that, I want to hear your story. What do you do? What do you do now? And how did you get there?

Annette Reed   5:11  

Yeah. So currently, I am the senior director of our global campaigns and demand generation teams here at Sentinel One. That includes our campaigns, our programs, which are kind of our repeat activities like webinars, is a great example of that, and then our digital marketing team. So all that function sit with sits within our growth marketing group, which is field marketing, etc. So, and I've been here since just November, so I'm running on six months, but have been working in demand gen for several years. And even whenever I was in other roles, I was demand gen adjacent. I would say I worked in product marketing for several years and was leading their launches. Which often, you know, what's part of a big launch is the communication strategy. How are you getting people where? I had one leader that I always loved. It she talked about it as being a launch is the wedding, and then you've got the marriage as well. So campaigns teams are working on not only the wedding but also the marriage and how to keep the how to keep the product alive and well. So

Kerry Guard  6:22  

As it has a baby. as well,

Annette Reed   6:23  

yeah, and babies and all that growth. I actually started my marketing journey working for a manufacturing company that was, if people are familiar with it, ISO certifications. It was ISO 9001 certified, which is manufacturing certification that basically you have to go through and you have to document all your processes, and it's a quality system to help ensure that the quality of your product is consistent. You've got checkpoints to make sure that products are not getting out to customers that are faulty. So we had to we went through yearly audits, but even in the marketing side, every process had to be documented. We'd have to make sure our art, everything had rev numbers, had dates behind it. So I kind of started my career in a place where operations documentation was really important, and so it has set a foundation for a lot of the things that I do as a leader now, just to make sure that my teams are working effectively, and we're trying to make sure that we're reducing errors because a lot of that stuff makes you slow down. So processes, I know everybody in marketing's like, well, first off, I don't need to document process. It's not a formal thing like you know the product engineering teams and you know quality teams they might think oh I don't need to document this I don't need to build a process but or they're scared of how it might impact their speed to deliver things but I have learned that you can find a good balance between process slowing the system down but also having the right checkpoints, so you have to do a. There is a compromise. You can't have one without the other. But you can find ways to marginally impact the speed while really improving your quality and making sure that you know you've got the right message being sent out to customers, and you're not going to get those three a.m. calls from, you know, a leader being like, "Where did this come from? Who approved this? Which we you know we all still get those, but hopefully it's fewer of them.

Kerry Guard  8:33  

Oh, I source for you in it. 

Annette Reed  8:39  

Yeah, I know we could all like if everybody was on the call would share so many like

Kerry Guard  8:41  

Oh, if you're here with us, share your stories of those moments, those three a.m. calls, or when you woke up. I woke up recently to a client having very unhappy thoughts about what was going on. We've all been there. Shit happens. It's about what we do, about and how we move through, and that's going to help us. But share your stories. Yeah, we've all been in the boat. We've all been in the boat. Before we get to that cover, our core conversation, Annette, and I loved your story, and it's so helpful to know where all of this great knowledge is going to come from, right? That's why I like people to tell their journey, right? So because the intersectionality of the conversation we're going to have with your career is always a nice dichotomy to really understand the expertise behind what it is we're talking about. So thank you. That line came through beautifully. Yeah.

Annette Reed  9:40  

Sets the stage.

Kerry Guard  9:41  

You set the stage perfectly. You did my job for me. I appreciate you. Before we get there, Trevor, yes, Trevor Van Warden in the house. Trevor's always got the greatest questions, so buckle up. It's going to be a good one. What challenge are you currently facing right now, Annette? Like, what's you know at Sentinel One? What's kind of feeling hard? In your way and making it maybe a bit more difficult to do your job than you would with him you would wish.

Annette Reed 10:05  

Yeah, I think one of the big things is we have, like many in the test tech industry, have gone through changes in leadership, have gone through layoffs, and so a lot of it is the hard thing is like it's rebuilding the systems. It's rebuilding things that were maybe in place with previous leaders that maybe got dropped, or shifting things that weren't established that need to be established. So, I think a lot of it is establishing new processes, getting the right tools in place, and then following up on those processes. I'll give you an example. We are working on a couple different things. One being, you know, trying to be more of a global organization and making sure we have translations for our key content across the globe, and that means we have to connect with all of our different stakeholders. We have to make sure we have budget to go out and hire translation agencies, or we have the tools and house to manage those translations. How do we identify the content? How are we requesting it? Does everybody know what's being requested? What the review process is? So we started to build out a translation process that would identify. Okay, here's the content that we're translating, we get it queued up. We identify it. We get budget. We start working with an agency. It goes through our regional marketing teams to have a review. But we had to make sure that we had a way for us to see where everything was in the stage. So we use Asana at Ascentina One. I've used it in my past as well, and so we created a whole Asana project that allowed us to automate the request process with all the stages in there, who the owners for review were, and that way. And then we had different boards that were set up for different stakeholders, so leaders in each of the regions could see the amount of work that was being sent to their teams, and that could be helpful for them to prioritize because obviously translations is just another project, a task, an ongoing one. You know me; I just said I hate ongoing. I hate the laundry. Translations, the laundry here of the stuff that you can't really check the box. It's an always thing you're trying to do, and so there has to be a way to monitor. You know, from our regular day job to this translation thing, what's happening? But what we're finding is, you know, processes if they're not well documented, if we haven't done well good training, and we're not retraining as we go. Somebody who hasn't done a translation for several weeks or a month, or has is just now starting to do it because they hadn't been prioritizing it. Now they are. They're having to go through and be like, "Wait, I didn't do this correctly. What did I miss? Things aren't happening in the time frame that they thought they were going to be happening. So I would say that's the biggest challenge is when you're implementing, and that's what we're doing a lot of right now. We've implemented a ton of new things, new budgeting tools, translation process, new digital ad briefs, and the process of collaborating across our teams, making sure that we get approvals from the brand and design and content team, the PMM teams. All of these groups are part of the process. So the first time you do it, you're everything's golden, and then a month later, everything's broken again because you have to retrain. So, so we're literally, I would say, Trevor, that's like the biggest thing we're having right now is we're implementing a lot of new things, and it's a lot for everybody to take on, and so I would say something I'm even reminded of through this process is I have to go back and say, okay, every couple weeks, let's sit down, let's review this. Where are we at? Like, does anybody have any questions? And checking in, it can't be a one and done. You can't say I've launched it and you're over, which is, like I said, so always frustrating for me because I'm like, I'm done. I'm done. I launched the process. It’s everybody else's problem now.

Kerry Guard  14:10  

The laundry is done. The laundry. It's one and done. Oh, what I would give for laundry to be one and done. I want to say in that the struggle is real and you are not alone. We actually just had a conversation yesterday. Trevor was there, had a conversation yesterday, and Trevor brought this up about one of the biggest challenges is having multiple teams globally, and not having any of them talking to each other and feeling like you're completely siloed. And this is such a great example of both that feeling of we're not alone in that feeling, but also some wonderful examples which you're going to help, which you're going to unpack for us in a minute, of how to create some connective tissue there, so that there is communication happening, and why you got to maintain that communication. You got to create the connective tissue first. So, let's talk about operations. An SOP, like just like standard operating procedures within an organization. I don't know that it is standard. I don't know that people know what these things are or know that they should be doing them. So help us understand as marketers what it means to operationalize what we got going on to find it?

Annette Reed  15:23  

Yeah. So I think I really one of my last roles in this weird roundabout way. I joined my previous organization was Calibra. It's a a fast paced startup that's based was started in Belgium, based in New York now, and originally when I started, I was hired for campaigns, and very quickly realized, you know, there's some changes in the organization that needed to happen. And I was actually moved; my role was expanded. I was moved into underneath the marketing operations leaders, and it was kind of a weird fit at first, you're like demand gen campaigns under operations. I thought was like, well, I really like this leader. I huge shout out to Justin, one of my favorite bosses I've ever worked with, and so I was like happy to be moved into that team and working with that group. But I I thought it was a weird fit, but I will have to say it was fundamental in some of the changes in my thought process about operations. I've always worked with the operations, the marketing operations team in any of my role, but I gained one greater respect for the operations team and the stuff that they deal with, and also understood the the connection between what demand gens team teams and marketing teams are doing, and how things function in the marketing operations systems. And if marketers are not besties with their ops people, go do it now because it's going to one, it's going to change what you think you can do. There's so much more you can do out there with the existing things you have, the targeting you can use. If you've got demand-based six cents, any of those ABM type of tools. If you're on Marketo or HubSpot or any of those CRM systems, right? Like there are so many things you can do if you are besties with your operations person. They're going to bring ideas to you that you didn't know before. So, one big shout out to marketing operations. I've literally worked with some really awesome ones: Miles, Nate, Nicole, all these great ops people that I would just huge, huge helps. So, it one I would say be besties with your operations person, that's my like key key advice. But the other thing is, when you are trying to scale, operations is fundamental for you to scale. So, like I mentioned, we're going through. We've had layoffs. I don't know if there's a single tech company out there that hasn't had layoffs. That it's just, it's so sad that that's where we are right now. But you're even before that, you're always going to be asked to do more. The targets never stay the same; they're always increasing. Budgets never increase as fast as your targets do. So, if you want to get more out of what you're currently doing, you have to to have good operations. So a couple things I think about when I'm thinking about that is, do you have what inefficiencies are in your system now? Is it the communication between teams? Is it that reporting is really difficult to get, so you can't have the data to identify, you know, performance? We actually just have been working on a ton of reporting updates here, and we pulled some data that is really changing the way we're looking at our webinar program as well. We ran some data, and there was a few outliers of how many webinars we ran, what were the registration numbers, what was our attendance numbers, how many promotional elements did they have? So we could kind of level set. When we took some of the outliers, those ones that were really cool topics that you know just we don't have to do much, and then they set they just like sail on their own. When we took those outliers out, we were amazed at how little some of our webinars were registrations they were getting. I was like, that's the average for that is really low, and I was like, I've seen my past. We've seen way better, you know, registration numbers. So we've said, okay, we're going to simplify and we're going to go back to a smaller webinar calendar, so we can have better promotions. We can have fewer conflicting topics. Those because I think what happens, this is very common, is if something's working well, we just add another layer.

Annette Reed  19:52  

We just say, okay, we did one webinar and it was awesome. Let's do two now. Let's do three. Let's do four because one got us 500 registry. So if we do two, that's that's 1000, right? Immediately, right there, and that's what we were finding is that some of them did well, but some of them weren't doing that that great because they were competing in topics. So you can't scale just linearly. You have to scale in a different fashion. So don't just think, oh, it was good, so let's do it again. Think about how you can get this. You can get better. So if you had one webinar that was 500, what did you do? Evaluate what your promotion strategy was. Who was your target audience? Because you're not necessarily going to get the same amount from just continually scaling, and you're going to burn out people, right? One person,

Kerry Guard  20:45  

oh my gosh, so much energy,

Annette Reed  20:46  

right? Yeah, yeah. I mean, I would love to know, like, from your experience, also, like, what have you seen work from a scaling perspective? You can't do just the mapping, even even up the like it literally is not linear.

Kerry Guard  21:01  

No. Well, one there's just not enough bandwidth. The amount of energy that live video and webinars-I mean, even and Trevor saying it too-webinars suffer from accessibility issues too, right? So, just trying to scale it isn't always the answer. Scaling, as in just doing more of the same, right? And so, what I found, what why I love podcasting is not because I'm swimming in astronomical numbers. I'm not seeking to have the biggest audience ever, like the amazing marketing on Mars. Love that show! I it's awesome, and the founder's done a great job of really like putting intention behind like building an audience for that, right? So he did very key things to do that. My intention with the show was always about building relationships and connectivity with the guests, and then giving great content back to the the audience that's listening, whether they had been previous guests or our customers, focusing on a very specific audience. So it just really depends on what your intention is. If you're going after a big audience because you're going to monetize it, have at it yes and to that. But if you're doing more of webinars, podcasting from more of a brand awareness lead gen standpoint than less is absolutely more. It's the scarcity aspect of it too, right? If you keep doing the same thing and you're doing so much of it, then people are it's watered down.

Annette Reed  22:35  

Yeah, yeah. Your audience be should be like the center point of all of your plans, right? And often, I don't think it's intentional, but often we lose sight of that because we're just everything's a number. And once you take away the face to the number, then a lot of times, and it it it comes back whether marketers do it or not. It always comes back because at the end of the day, a BDR, SDR, an AE is like reviewing this, is talking to a customer. So that face comes back, and so we don't want to lose sight of who it is that we're talking to when we're trying to scale, right? So

Kerry Guard  23:08  

that's so true, and I would say coming back to the intention of it too with scalability, it's define scale, right? So for me, with the podcast, scaling isn't doing more podcasts. Scaling is like okay. I've done over two. I've done almost 200 of these. What themes are we seeing now that we have AI? One of the things we're doing is taking grouping episodes by themes, putting them into an AI, which is finding the corresponding content through that, and then producing blog posts to say we've had five guests around this topic. Here's what they're saying. Here's our two cents on it. And now we have we have the blog post for the actual single episodes, which is five. Plus we now have this one that's wrapping it all up on top of the clips we do. On top of the you know that's the beauty of taking something like this. You're able to then multiply it in ways from a scalability standpoint that isn't doing more of the same, but building on what you're already what you already got going on.

Annette Reed  24:12  

Yeah, and that's where the efficiencies really come in. So instead of thinking I always have to record a new webinar, we have to have live. There's tons of things that you can do from, hey, having the recording and snipping it into little pieces where it becomes now it becomes social. I love what you suggested of hey gathering a collection. You put it into a collection. You can promote it now almost as if it's new to a whole new audience to say oh check out this collection. I love the suggestion with the blog. You've got emails. Also, a lot of times because of the way systems work, you have time zone issues, different places. But you can record it, and then it can be new to that audience. You can exclude them saying, "Hey, you know, we're doing this in Americas, but we're gonna it's gonna be recorded, and that." Same content, so you have the subject matter experts in there, so it's good, still good content for your media media audience, for your APJ audience. So it's very still valuable, and you can run it semi live. You can run the recording portion of it, and then you can have a local you know sales engineer SE that's on the call to answer any of those questions that come up at the at time, and they have the expertise as well to make sure. But you're not having to completely redo it. We were more. I've got more resources at Sentinel One, but there's never enough. But in my in previous roles, we had very small teams, and so we had to. We couldn't do as many webinars as we can now at Sentinel One, but so we had to find ways to take that good content and leverage it further. And so we looked at that: how can we repurpose this and drive more demand with the same content? Because it can be really challenging to get speakers. They're so busy. Everybody has a day job, and usually speaking is not somebody's somebody's day job, right?

Kerry Guard  26:09  

Yeah, yeah. No, I would say speakers are hit and miss in terms of like if you have a solid topic or you know, for me, I I as long as I'm doing the outreach, right? The outreach, the finding, the doing, the doing the thing. When I do the thing, the thing works out. It's just by time to do the thing, which I think is. But do you know what the thing is? I do know what the thing is, and I know that it works so much better when it's me and it's personalized, right? I actually reached out to you. I don't know if you remember this, but you, I, I was sleuthing a little bit, and I saw that you were on my LinkedIn profile. We hadn't even connected yet. I just saw that you checked out my LinkedIn profile, and so then I messaged you and said, "Hey, Annette, I see you're hanging on my LinkedIn profile, and you know what? I think you'd be a perfect guest for my show to have a chat, right?

Annette Reed  27:04  

I’m a stalker, a little creeper on LinkedIn sometimes.

Kerry Guard  27:07  

I mean, LinkedIn is like sort of a blessing and a curse that way for sure. But it's that personalization, right? That was me. I saw that you were there, and then I I made a personal outreach to you, and that is what I find is hard. Is the hard part to scale. So let's talk about the operationals piece in this because we're talking about the beauty of of these things, but what we're not talking about is the actual work that is needed to make the the thing happen. So when we're talking about webinars in particular, and then multiple pieces of content. How are you? You mentioned this a little bit when you were talking through your challenge, and I imagine it's very similar. Asana is a beautiful, magical tool,

Annette Reed 27:55  

and not sponsored, right? Like we're not sponsored.

Kerry Guard  27:59  

Yeah, not sponsors. Not sponsoring Asana, we just both use it. Big fans of it. Maybe Monday can do similar things. I don't know. I just haven't used it. But the beauty of these project management tools is the almost the if this and that or the zapier aspect of it that they've brought into play, which is so great. And so I feel like that's where we're sort of heading in this conversation, which I think is really helpful to think about how do you get the laundry done without having to always be the one to go bring it downstairs, throw it in the washer, wait for it to be done. Remember to throw it in the dryer before it's been in there in the washer too long. I get sticky, and then you know bring it upstairs to fold it, and then you know, command all the medians to put it away. Like that is that is the process of doing laundry.

Annette Reed  28:51  

Yeah so, let's we'll stick with the analogy of the laundry. I mean, watch what look at what has happened in that industry. So laundries have been, you know, you had the washer and dryer. It used to be very manual. You had to like the soap on the board, right? The every step you had to do, and then they slowly automated some of those steps, right? I no longer have to sit there and actually hand wash my laundry. There's a machine that does it. But look at the newest technology. We just moved into a new house, and literally, when my laundry goes off, there is a song that plays. Right, I hear it's like it's actually surprisingly long. I'm like, this is a very how long is this going? It feels like forever. But so I get a really good reminder. My sister-in-law was mentioning to me that she gets a notification on her phone. She has a like there's an app or some sort of thing. It's synced up to her phone, so she gets a notification. So it's not sitting there and forgotten because you're getting reminders. That is what's so great about these tools like Asana, Monday, Trello, Basecamp, any of those type of project management and communication tools, is. You don't have to set it. It's like that old. This will date me, but you know those old rotisserie grill like infomercials that was like set it and forget it. Hopefully somebody remembers that. But,

Kerry Guard  30:13  

Yeah, you can't do that without.

Annette Reed  30:14  

Yeah, but with those with Asana, you can start to build out the processes that you want. You have all the checkpoints. So a lot of what I think my I would say Calibra and the ops team I worked with before was phenomenal with Asana. They really used it really efficiently. So one every type of request that was going to be in marketing was sent through Asana at some level, so we had every webinar, every regional event, every email, every ad was requested through Asana, and then was different projects were set up with different team owners. Everything came through a centralized point so that we could then see calendars of what was active and what was not active, when things were going to go live, but then every project type had a set of deliverables, and every little step was documented. So we knew, okay, hey, someone has to review this copy, and this team has to go in and design the ads. Then we have to go in, have the final approvals from these various stakeholders set it up. So the nice thing is with those tools, one, you're not going to forget a step. So this is where like operationalizing to scale really helps you because you're going to maintain quality when you can document all those steps. You know what has to be done. All the communication can be in there as well. So you, you know, if things are not happening, you can see it right there. You can set up automation in Asana that says, "Hey, if this is, if this task is incomplete and the duty has arrived, it can automatically add comments. It can send notices to different leaders. You can do a lot of that kind of stuff, so that it can flag, hey, this is out of date. It could be as simple as flagging it to someone to say, hey, review this and confirm if the date needs to move, you know, something of that nature. But we would build out all of those things, and it lived in all these different places, so those teams could see the web team could see all the tasks that from all the various projects that they were in, the design team could see their work, PMM campaigns. Everybody's seeing the work, and leaders then also have a beautiful view of what's going on in the calendar. Now, Asana has its shortcut short falls too. Like I don't love the calendar piece, and any Asana friends out there, like we could, if we could make the calendar better, because that is a really critical tool to the way that we all like to look and see. Leaders don't want to see a big list or a Kanban board. They want to see a calendar of how it's work, what's working, what's.

Kerry Guard  32:57  

But they also don't want to see every little task either. Like I look at somebody's calendar and it just looks like a rainbow. I'm like, this is so uncomfortable. I don't know what's going on. Yeah, yeah. I I do want to take a huge step back right now because I'm sure we have just overwhelmed the pants off of everyone. Because having being somebody who is somewhat a son illiterate, I'm not I'm not an expert or pro by any stretch of the imagination, just for how much functionality exists within this tool. Help me understand, Annette. Like this isn't you in Asana building out all of these workflows, or is it? I mean, like

Annette Reed  33:37  

It can be. It can be. So it depends on how your organization is structured. If you have an Asana admin or your marketing operations team is like the Asana owners, and they have pretty tight controls over it, then you can go in there. You can tell them like, "Hey, this is the way I want it to function, and they'll know how to build this out. I recently, because I mentioned earlier that translation piece, I was like, okay, well, our systems aren't as integrated here, so we I worked with the mops team to say, hey, we'd like to do this, and they're like, well, right now these things aren't connected, so I said, okay, we're going to do a separate piece that can then bolt into what we need in the future, so it can align very easily, but that didn't mean I had to go out and go and ask, "Hey, web team, mops team, design team, this process is going to document all these steps, and it's going to be things that your teams need to do. So, can we multi-home these tasks so that I have visibility and you have visibility? So, you do have to get partnerships with those team members. But you can build it yourself. That's the nice thing with Asana is you can go in there, and I learned so much from it. You can, from actually the doing part, you go in there and you set up a. There's a form, then you can go to the next. And said, "Okay, these fields within my form. What happens when they come into the system, and what tasks do I need to have added in here? So I actually did do it myself, which was fun because I learned so much more about the functionality of how it works. But if your organization is like more controlled and you have an Asana admin, or again, your marketing operation team is owning that one. Then work with them and say, "Hey, this is what I need. If I have a digital ad request that that needs to be done, I want to make sure my teams are doing these five things, and this design team is doing two things, and the PMM team is doing another thing, and you can have it all in there. But communication is huge. I will. That's my big soapbox. Is always communication. So I always tell people: don't assume that once you've said it once that they're going to remember. Don't assume, and then you've asked someone to look in something and collaborate seven times.

Kerry Guard 36:01  

Seven times. Seven.

Annette Reed 36:08  

Oh my gosh! Now I need to be more patient. I swear, I've repeated myself a million times.

Kerry Guard 36:10  

Yeah, yeah. People have to hear it seven times, and if you need a reference, you can reference friends for that. Yeah. Anyway, no, I think that's really key-the communication part. So, how is it for you guys internally? We're talking one of the most important things when it comes to operations is the tech stack. We've been talking a lot about Asana. Does everything? Does all the communication happen in Asana? Do you have other tools that help navigate that? Especially when you're talking time zone differences, how do you? What's your primary way of communicating across state lines and multi time zones?

Annette Reed 36:46  

Yeah, so we are very Slack heavy here, so that's one of our biggest tools. I have tons of channels and and conversations that probably should be channels because there's so much back and forth. But a big thing that I'm trying to, you know, do a shift of is getting more of that in Asana because one of the reasons is, you know, anywhere you're at, there's always the hey, we had this project where somebody told us to do this, we did it, and then we got in trouble, and it's it sucks. Hopefully, that's not a norm in any organization to be pointing fingers, but sometimes there's that time where you're having to go back and say like, did I misinterpret what I was asked to do? I had that case yesterday. I literally was like, I thought they told me to go work with this person, and I had to go back to my Slack to say, did I read that correctly? Because we're all running really quickly. The nice thing is with Asana, the conversations are connected. There's a great like background evidence, and Slack can be messy, can be hard. People are doing it really quickly, so I always like Slack or like Asana for a lot of things. And I'm kind of shifting back. I've kind of got a little lazy, to be honest, on on using Asana to like be like my center of truth for a lot of things. But Slack is number one, so if you use Teams or Slack, I mean that is just the way of everything to get rapid response. My personal philosophy is if you want something documented where you're giving like a readout, maybe it's a long message. I always go to email. That's the best way to have a good documentation piece. If it is, I need quick answers and collaboration. Slack is my go-to, and then Asana for any of your projects that you want to have like good evidence and like have that collaboration in there specific to the project because you don't lose the conversations the way you lose them in Slack. So

Kerry Guard  38:51  

lost, gone. If it it's yeah, Trevor, thank you so much for joining with us. Yes, come back and listen to the rest for sure. We loved having you and the band between you and Scott has been awesome. Thank you both for chiming on in.

Annette Reed  39:06  

I'm missing this. I'm sad. I'm missing the chat.

Kerry Guard  39:08  

I know. Oh, oh yeah. You'll have to go back and and hang out with it because there's some good conversations around the webinar piece in particular. Scott's team actually did a bingo card for video, so I know I have loved that. I know so good. In terms of so we use we do one is I think because we're an agency, we do things a little differently in that we only use email for client communication. Yeah, try and keep things separated because we don't want to lose, we don't want to miss a client email. But Asana is our center of truth. To your point, we have figured out forms. We have an account manager who just turned supervisor. Hats off to you, Avery, who. Has figured out how to wire up Asana left, right, and center, and it has made such a difference. Like, if we want a new piece of content to launch on the blog, we go fill in a form, and then all of the tasks magically appear. And the time and effort, though, that it takes to set those things up, I want to be thoughtful in saying, like, it's a lift. It's magical for the long term, but it is a lift. I also want to say I don't know if if you'll back me up on this net or if you have a different point of view on it about not overthinking, like especially if you're a smaller team and you don't have a marketing ops at your wings, like we all wish we did like a net. It's the dream. We're leaning into it, and we hope to have it one day. But while we're waiting, don't overthink it. Like start small. Think about the things that you can that the can the repeatable tasks that you're. What are the tasks I'm always creating? Can I operationalize this to not have to create every single time.

Annette Reed  41:02  

Yeah, it's so true, and that's a good call out when you're a smaller team. And then the time, it does take time, but it's one of those things where, just like when you're hiring somebody and you have that onboarding process, and you're like, oh, or like an intern, you're like, I spend I'm spending more time with them than I'm getting the value back. There is that portion, and it is it is a trade off of being like, hey, there's the short term pain of building something, having to work late to try to figure out the nuances, literally googling everything and having to go onto the Asana boards to try to figure out how something works, watching demo videos. So there are pieces like that that can be really tricky, but in the long run, it's helpful because again, it's a trade-off of the pain front, but the efficiencies on the back end. And I love that I actually use a similar like you think through what's the critical things for you to do when I pack for travel. This is my little weird hack. When I pack to go travel, I literally start at the top of my day and at the bottom my feet, down by my toes, and I go through what do I do in a day, and like when I'm getting ready in the morning. Okay, what did I do in the shower? And I literally go through the routine in my head, and I literally dress myself from my feet to my head, and I think, okay, what are all the items of clothing? Did I get my socks? Did I get my underwear? Did I get my pants? Did I get shirts? Did I, you know, get the jewelry I want to wear? So I literally kind of go that. That's the same thing you go through when you are building a checklist of all the things. You're like, okay, what is it that I did? Imagine it in your head. I know this sounds so silly. I gave a really weird analogy.

Kerry Guard  42:43  

It’s happening. I know this is mom brained and full happening right now. I totally get it.

Annette Reed  42:48  

Oh yeah, yeah. So you just imagine you're like, okay, if I was doing this, who do I connect with? Who are? What are the things that I do repetitively? But I love it. Just like you said, you can start very small with the biggest things that you say. Okay, I know that there's a brief. I have to write this down. I have to get the copy approved, and I need the design team to do their part. And then I need to launch it. And you'll start with those four things, and then the next time you'll come back and you'll be like, okay, we had this problem. The audience wasn't reviewed. I wrote the audience, and I got some feedback later. So I want to have an audience, and I want to identify the audience for this ad upfront, and make sure it's part of the review process later. So, like you can add to it. So nice to be building it out, and that's where I mentioned earlier. There's a balance. So don't make you don't have to make every little tiny minutia of steps that you do in the process, because that might just you might be just checking the box. It might not be really valuable, and it slows you down too much. But in other cases, you may want that because it's something very commonly missed, or you want that proof behind the scenes, or you need that checkbox. So it depends on like your needs. Don't build it too robust that it takes forever to get through a process, but don't do it too shallow that you miss critical things that are going to cause quality issues down the road. And biggest thing, communication. The nice thing with Asana is you can tag people, and you have an evidence of who was on there and who had visibility to all the things that you were doing. And you know,

Kerry Guard  44:30  

The inbox is your friend. The inbox, the Asana inbox, is your friend if you're using it. Or I'm sure the other tools like Monday and Basecamp and all of them have a similar rollup of just like the activity of that's happening and the tasks that you're following. Get acquainted with the inbox. I want to come onto two things. One is Scott asked a really important question that I want to come back to, but before we get there, I want to I want to sort of harp on something that you said because I truly. Believe in the iterative process, and letting yourself be okay with mistakes and failure. Like that's just part, y'all. It's just part of this process, especially if you're building from the ground up, especially if you are a solo marketing-preneur, especially if you're a big team and you're doing this for the first time, and you got a lot of moving pieces, there is going to be mistakes. So just accept it in your heart. Now it's going to be okay because the beauty of Asana is, to Annette's point, is you get to go back and say, okay, where did we lose people? Where did the miscommunication happen? Where did this piece of important information fall off? Let's get that into the standard operating procedure within Asana, and we won't ever miss it again. And that's the power of it. But if you try and think through every single piece, to Nut's point, one you'll never get it up. You'll never launch because you'll be so trying to think of every possible thing. And and two, it will it will take it similar point. It'll just take you forever. So the best thing to do is just start and iterate, iterate, iterate, iterate, iterate.

Annette Reed  46:21  

Yeah, I mean, if there's anything tech has taught us, the MVP, right? Minimal viable product. You get something out the door and you you iterate on it. I always used to joke. So, like I said, I started in manufacturing, and we had this big ISO. We had these audits and all these things, and the joke was like, if I got hit by a car tomorrow, if I got hit by a bus, if this was a if this was a mean girl situation, I got hit by a bus and someone had to like take over my role or come in tomorrow while I'm on vacation and they needed to know what was going on. That's the nice thing about this. When we have leadership changes, when we have layoffs, when you have good asana or systems in place. There is a record that has nothing to do with who's in charge now. They're historical, so you can kind of go back to it. You can evolve your processes, but try. It's so important. You don't want to have that tribal knowledge of, hey, I know I'm really good at my job, so I know what I'm doing. Versus someone who's coming in brand new, who did it in a different, had maybe really awesome in their previous company, but they're learning something new. So don't rely on. Again, I told them to check with me if they had this. They're not going to remember in three days. So put things in tasks in Asana. Set up meetings for your reoccurring, even if that meeting is just for you to check your Asana board every morning to check something. I do that all the time, where I'm like, I need to send a readout to one of our sales leader on Fridays at 4p.m. I have a a meeting invite for myself to dedicate that time to writing that little email that goes to the bosses, right? Like that. Those are the simple things. The hardest part is really spending. We're so busy, and I'm sure everybody's listening to this and be like, "Yes, Annette, I know, I know the same things you know, but I don't have the time to do it. And I'm like, I agree. There are so many things on my list of to-dos that I don't get to, and you have to just kind of try to find the time. So start with the ones that you're passionate about, the ones that don't both bother you staying up till like 10 at night to like or two in the morning sometimes in my case because I get really into it. And you just if you're passionate about it, it doesn't feel like work because you're solving that problem that's really important to you. So start with those ones. They, yeah, maybe they're not the most important ones, but they're ones you're passionate about. So you're going to get them done.

Kerry Guard  48:49  

I love that piece of advice. Yes, that and to your point, if you do have an ops team or you do have somebody who is Asana or project management efficient, who can you partner with to help you get it done too? I think is a really key piece of acknowledging what you're passionate about and what your strengths are and what isn't, and that's okay too. The important piece is getting it done. It's not who's necessarily getting it done.

Annette Reed  49:16  

Yeah, and like I said, be besties with your ops people because you you know the the you win more friends with the honey versus the the you know like you're gonna get if you're coming with those last minute requests if you're kind of mean and they're they hate working with you they don't ever you don't ever provide them what they need they're they're not gonna they're gonna be like yeah we'll get to it but if you have an urgent need, or even if it's not urgent but a project, if you're friends with them, if you guys have a good report, that's much easier for them to jump on that. I mean, we all do that. So make friends with your besties. Buy them the drink. Get them the like. Get them something that they need. That. Helps a lot to make sure you build those relationships.

Kerry Guard  50:04  

The interconnective tissue. Yes, yes, we need to do it. We do, we do. As an organization, we all need to be connected. Before I close out my last question for you, Annette, around this topic, Scott asked a good question ages ago. I'm so sorry, Scott. Thank you for your patience. He wants to know what your thoughts are on new people introducing "quote unquote" new tech into your tech stack. People have very strong opinions on jumping on the latest tool.

Annette Reed  50:32  

Oh, very very good. I probably am really guilty of this. I since I've been here, Sentinel One, I've been having lots of vendor calls and getting on different things and being like, oh great, let's see this out, let's try this out, let's do these things. So I can sometimes be my own worst enemy on that one. The biggest thing is to understand what the needs are and what already serves that need, and if someone is coming in and saying, "Hey, we want to do this thing, if you have already mapped out here's the different areas of the functions that we need, and these are the tools that support it. Only if there's a gap should you, or it does it better, right? So, like I mentioned, we have a really like we use Asana, but the biggest gap is sometimes the calendaring system, right? So when someone's willing is introducing a new tool, if it's not either better than Asana or solves that calendar thing, then it's not something that you maybe want to jump on. Also, you know, you can also use other things to be the bad guy. Budget is also a fun one to be like, we don't have the budget, so we're gonna have to have a trade-off of tools. Like, if we want to use it, that's always an easy one to be like, we don't have the budget for.

Kerry Guard  51:56  

Or migration, migration is a very easy one to say. Yeah, how do we move to this tool? Help me understand the manpower that that will take, and why is that worth it to us?

Annette Reed  52:06  

Yeah, yeah, but I think the hard part is like I've always said it with the lack of a plan, somebody else is going to dictate to you. If you have a plan of what you're doing, a roadmap of your process improvements, roadmap of your campaigns and your activities, and you have shared that, communicated regularly. When somebody comes in to say, "Oh, I have this new idea. Oh, you need to do this, it's harder for them to control your plan because now you have a clear saying, "Hey, you want me to do this? Here's the trade-off. Often people haven't documented, built out the plan, so it's too hard to have that conversation of hey, there's a trade-off that we're doing that. Same thing happens with your technology stack, right? You're working with your mops teams. You should know what are all the different things that you need and what are the solutions. If you need reporting, what tools are you using for reporting for your campaigns, if you are looking at hey, there's a new vendor that's come to us. What vendors do you already have that fulfill that? And is there a gap in they're not being able to produce enough for you, and so a new vendor is necessary, or this new vendor has a different solution that could complement, so you can be using both. The one thing I would just say, especially with vendors, what I have learned is there is no offense to any content syndication vendor out there, but there are millions of those vendors, right? So you've got there's so many, so you really want to find where they have like their niche and where they can provide value, but we often have the challenge of budgets are moved around frequently, and we're always getting like this weird incremental at a different time. It's really hard to spin up to overload one vendor with more work. So it's nice to have a even if you don't use them regularly, the ones that you don't have to budget like tools is hard. You have to put in that budget. You have to you can't just say I'm turning Asana on today or something like that. But with those vendors that are doing you know the demand gen activities for you, yes, it's easier to you need a good network of those that you can appropriately spin up the different activities, but identify your plan, identify your the things that you need, and the tools that are supporting you in those areas, and then identify the gaps so that when someone comes to you, you can say there is a gap here, and yes, this tool would do it. It also does this function, so we can replace both of those. Hopefully, your mops teams should definitely have that detailed out really well. And if they don't, you can help be a catalyst to make that change.

Kerry Guard  54:48  

Make the change. Yes, well, I also think interconnectivity between the tools is important too. So when you're when you're laying out that roadmap, how are these tools connected? Because so many times you run into the fact that like. Especially from a reporting standpoint, if you can't get all the data in one place, then like, what are you doing? So making sure that you can really wire those things up and added bonus if you know everything connects to Asana. Yeah. Does it? But does it connect to Asana? Yeah. And I'm so.

Annette Reed  55:22  

You really should be Kerry. You should get Asana to sponsor you here. Like.

Kerry Guard  55:26  

I know, I mean, I right here. This well, any whatever your project management tool is, right at the end, that is your source of truth. Like you're talking about, do all these other tools added bonus if they connect, because then you can streamline even further.

Annette Reed  55:41  

Yeah,

Kerry Guard  55:42  

it's just magical the workflows. Telling you. And now before we close out here with my people first question, I am so grateful for how you really laid out for us the importance of operations, how to buddy up with your operations team. If you don't have an operations team, how yourself can start to create some systems and processes in your project management system to make sure that all your teams are connected and everybody's on board. Especially if there's those points of approval, right? And then figuring out where some of those gaps are to then fill and iterate on your project management system, making sure communication, whether you know ideally an Asana is happening, but if you need something a bit quicker, you go to Slack, or if you need something more documented, email. What did we miss? What's like the one last piece of of advice would you give? I know we're out of time, man. It goes like that.

Annette Reed  56:32  

I know. Well, I'm like, have you not noticed? I'm a chatterbox, so like one thing that's too hard. Love us, but I.

Kerry Guard  56:42  

That's a few ideas. But like, what's the one last thing you want to say to the to our folks around getting your operations in order?

Annette Reed  56:49  

Yeah, I'd say in general, my big soapbox always is communication. Communicate early and communicate often. I really do. This is not a real stat, but I do think that communication solves 99% of a world problems because you understand, and it has to be open and honest, right? You can understand their challenges, their pain points. I've never had a problem via Slack that didn't get solved when I actually talked to that person in like on a call because I start. We started to elaborate on where the challenges are. We understood each other more. So communication is so critical for any of your operations to be successful. Not just getting something you didn't have before, getting it on the roadmap, or once you've got some sort of process in place, being able to use it and have efficiency there. If you don't communicate, everything's going to fall apart. So communicate like early and often when you're working on any type of project,

Kerry Guard  57:53  

and document, document, document, documenting it, making sure that you document it. Annette, thank you so much. Where can people find you? They want to learn more about Sentinel One, what you got going on, and the operations team, and how you all work together.

Annette Reed  58:06  

Yeah, so we obviously reach out on LinkedIn to me, and then SentinelOne.com for any of our latest updates of what we're doing and how things are going. But and follow us on LinkedIn. We always share information, but I do welcome all marketers. I love connecting with as many people. So connect with me on LinkedIn, and and just mention you heard this this podcast, so I can have a put a face with names. So

Kerry Guard  58:35  

yes, I just followed Sentinel One. That's happening. All right, perfect. Last question for you, Net. You're more than a marketer, and you're-I believe you're out in Utah.

Annette Reed  58:47  

Yes,

Kerry Guard  58:47  

yes, yes. Yeah, remember? I remember.

Annette Reed  58:53  

Right outside of Zion National Park, so.

Kerry Guard  58:55  

Oh gosh, so pretty. Oh, so pretty. I backpacked through Utah with a four by five camera, I was showing my age back in the day when I was in university and college, and oh my god, I could have just worked so much film out there. Absolutely gorgeous. 2024, we have figured out this COVID thing. We are living with it for better or worse. But we're all traveling now. We're back out in the world, what are you most looking forward to? I know, like q2, we're almost a month down in q2, but we still have the whole spring and summer to look forward to. What is it for you? What are you looking forward to?

Annette Reed  59:31  

Oh, personally, oh man, travel with the family. My husband's family had a farm in Illinois, and we're going to go out to the farm, and I have not been to the farm, so I'm gonna. I think I'm actually gonna get to milk a cow this year. It's like crazy bucket list items. Who knew?

Kerry Guard  59:50  

I love it, and you have kids too, so they're gonna.

Annette Reed  59:55  

Yep,

Kerry Guard  59:55  

They ‘re gonna absolutely love

Annette Reed  59:57  

Four kids, three step kids. A 15-month-old little girl who just lights up my world. She's gonna have fun at the farm, I'm sure.

Kerry Guard  1:00:05  

She's gonna have the best time. We have we're in Guernsey and Smalestyle ever, I know, but we do have cows, and even to this day, as eight-year-olds, when the cows cross the road, my kids are like enamored. What actually poked its head in our car? They were like, "What are you doing here? Oh my goodness! Yeah, this is cow. actually, but yeah, it's kids and animals. It's just the best.

Annette Reed  1:00:28  

It is. It is so cute.

Kerry Guard  1:00:31  

Have the best time. Safe travels to your family. And thank you again for being on this episode with me. I'm so grateful. And thank you to Scott and Trevor for the wonderful side conversation. We're going to be dipping back into that. So good. This episode is brought to you by MKG Marketing, the digital marketing agency that helps complex brands like cybersecurity get found via SEO and digital ads. Hosted by me, Kerry Guard, CEO and co-founder of MKG Marketing. And if you are a B 2b tech leader and you want to be on the show? Hit me up. I'd love to have you. Love it. It'd be amazing. Thank you again, Annette.

Annette Reed  1:01:05  

All right. Thanks, Kerry. Bye.