#008. 5 Marketing Champions, 5 Mistakes

This week, I wanted to share with you what everybody calls experience a few years later but that just started as a mistake.

We have a great community here and 5 Salesforce Marketing Champions accepted to share with us the biggest mistake they made when beginning on the platform.

Failure is on the path if you’re willing to become a Champion, so I hope you’ll enjoy these 5 little interviews!

Vicki Moritz-Henry

Vicki Moritz-Henry

Marketing Champion & Certified Instructor

Your biggest early SFMC career mistake:

As an instructor and even as a solution architect, one of my biggest mistakes was not prepping for demos! There is nothing worse than getting stuck on a live demo in front of a virtual classroom full of students or in front of a client and being unable to find your way out of the weeds. 

The one I had in mind was being unable to add records to a Data Extension for testing purposes. We had just created it and then I got off-topic in Email Studio. And you can’t add single records to a data extension in Email Studio – which I know now! The exercise was meant to be in Contact Builder, and it wasn’t until much later that I actually figured out what the mistake was.

How you learned it was a mistake:

The moment of panic and cold sweats you get was a pretty good indicator! When you’re first starting with demo delivery, you also don’t necessarily have the experience necessary to smoothly continue through the issue and not let it get to you. You may be floundering on the inside, but experience and plenty of practice help you to not show it.

What you would have done differently:

I’ve learned to take the time to go through the demo multiple times before the day. Not only do you need to be able to follow your click paths, but you also need to be able to narrate the storyline that goes with it, ensure a smooth flow, and figure out all the little quirks along the way! 

Follow Vicki on Linkedin or Twitter

Lara Mardini

Lara Mardini

Marketing Cloud Consultant

Your biggest early SFMC career mistake:

My biggest SFMC career mistake was during my first year of professional work. It was my first project and was assigned to a RUN project with a lot of raised bugs. Instead of directly going to the users and understanding their use cases to solve the problem from its core, I kept fixing issues and bugs and found myself quickly overwhelmed by a huge number of tickets for over 3 months.

How you learned it was a mistake:

I learned it was a mistake when I reached a point where I was working more than 12 hours a day and kept having a frustrated unsatisfied client. The client was even considering changing the platform altogether.

What would I do differently?

I would have done what I did after these 3 months right from the first week. I would have categorized the tickets and interviewed the marketing and IT users early on to avoid dragging in treating symptoms instead of solving the root cause.

Follow Lara on Linkedin

Vanessa Vazquez

Vanessa Vazquez

Marketing Champion

Your biggest early SFMC career mistake:

It was back in my first job on what was called Exact Target back then. There was this county where we shouldn’t be sending any promotions. I sent it to that particular state.

How you learned it was a mistake:

Everybody learned it pretty fast. 😅

What would I do differently?

Must say that ExactTarget was not as powerful as the current Salesforce Marketing Cloud… Anyway, the main lesson is to schedule sends and always double-check your lists…

Follow Vanessa on Linkedin or Twitter

Chester Bullock

Chester Bullock

Marketing Champion, Author

Your biggest early SFMC career mistake:

I was all excited that I learned how to send an email to a large list of addresses through an API call via some PHP code I had built (think 1996). Launched an email to the list on Friday afternoon and went home for the weekend. The net result was that I created an infinite loop where any auto-responder was cc’ing everyone else on the list. Basically, brought the ISP to its knees, and inundated all of our recipients’ inboxes. Definitely not proud of that.

How you learned it was a mistake:

The ISP hosting the site called the owner of our company, very angry, because the way I had built things, it took their whole system offline (essentially a self-inflicted DDOS attack). The owner called me to find out what I had done, and to see how I could reverse it. Unfortunately, it was out of my hands at that point.

What you would have done differently:

Well, that was 26 years ago. I have the benefit of hindsight now. I would have tested to a small list to see what happened, including scenarios with OOO inboxes, etc. We were a super small shop, so there was no such thing as a QA process or any of the guardrails I take for granted now. To this day I am a strong advocate for proper QA processes.

Follow Chester on Linkedin

Aman Batra

Aman Batra

Marketing Champion

Your biggest early SFMC career mistake:

The biggest early SFMC mistake that I made as an SFMC consultant was not considering the business while building solutions. For a few of my early projects, I was very eager to show off my technical skills and impress my clients. But this is not always the ideal case scenario when it comes to Salesforce Marketing Cloud solution building for consultants.

How you learned it was a mistake:

I realized that not keeping the business requirements as the focus of my solutions was a big mistake that I had been committing once I started working with other veteran consultants who had been in the space for longer periods than I had. A good consultant always develops solutions that are not only novel and creative but also keep the present and future of the business as the focal point. This approach to consulting leads to a better solution and an even better consultant-client relationship.

What you would have done differently:

In retrospect, my advice to the younger me and all new SFMC consultants is to listen to the needs of the client. Take as many discovery sessions as you need to understand the aspect of the client, how they intend on using the marketing cloud platform, and how they are currently using it. Time spent in getting to know the client’s use case is time invested. Also, acknowledging the client is imperative in building long-lasting relationships.

Follow Aman on Linkedin

See you next week!

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