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From the desk of Kaelan Moss
Re: What questions to ask during a Marketing Cloud Project.
Did you know that most Marketing Cloud consultants don't know what questions to ask during projects.
The problem is that there's not a list of Marketing Cloud "questions to ask".
Which means consultants struggle with imposter syndrome and anxiety every day at work.
That's why I wrote this letter.
In this letter, I talk about:
The job description I posted last week
Someone's response to that
The questions to ask during SFMC projects
How to get better at Marketing Cloud
Last week, I sent a job description that I'm hiring for.
Here's what I wrote:
-----
In this letter, I'm going to answer those questions to the best of my ability.
Here we go.
"What kinds of questions or discovery areas have you found most critical in SFMC engagements?"
There are different questions to ask based on the project you're working on.
For each project, you'll have a new set of questions. It's dynamic.
There's not one single set of questions that you should ask your clients.
And the best way (I've found) to get better at asking questions is to do more projects and document the questions that you ask clients.
Take a ton of notes on every call, then categorize every question you asked + their responses.
Over the course of a project, you will have a ton of questions (and if you finish the project accurately, then you'll have a documented set of questions that produces results for that type of project you're working on.
With every business being so different, there's never going to be the same exact questions on every project. But there will be some questions that you'll always need to ask, depending on the project you're working on.
Below are some questions I would ask depending on the project.
What's the goal of the journey?
When should people enter the journey?
When should people exit the journey?
Should people re-enter the journey?
What time should the journey start?
What's the starting source of the journey?
Is the email content already written and who's handling that?
What's the criteria for someone to enter the journey?
Can you show me the SQL that you already use (if they're already segmenting people for a campaign in another tool).
What's the subject line of each email?
There's so many questions to ask related to building a journey.
This isn't the full list of questions I would ask. It would be much more in-depth. But you would need to paint the entire picture from beginning to end for the client.
The only way to do that is to:
Be genuinely curious
Ask a lot of follow up questions
Take a lot of notes during the call
Keep asking questions related to the "build out" of the Journey.
PS - I'm building a Journey Builder course, so if you're interested, then DM me on LinkedIn to let me know.
A client came to me and asked if I could help them delete contacts that they weren't sending messages to.
They were paying for 400,000 contacts in Marketing Cloud Engagement, but they had 700,000 in the system.
Salesforce was charging them a lot of extra money for those extra contacts.
They were confused about why they had so many extra contacts.
They had no idea how to get rid of them.
They didn't know the consequences of deleting contacts.
That's different than a Journey Builder project.
Which means there will be different questions to ask.
What are your sources of data?
How often are you bringing data into Marketing Cloud from those sources?
Who has access to import data into Marketing Cloud?
What's the reason for each person's manual import process (walk me through it)?
Do you want to delete people from SFMC who haven't engaged in the past 90 days?
Do you want to delete unsubscribed contacts and sync their status in CRM?
What's the formula you're using to make sure that people aren't re-introduced back into SFMC from CRM after deleting them?
Can we take a look at that logic and see what we need to update?
When you run a report in Salesforce CRM on the number of contacts that should be syncing, what is that number?
Do you have a field that you want to use in CRM to identify that a contact/lead/user was deleted from SFMC? If so, what's that field?
Do you want a file uploaded to you that tells you when a deletion process has run (and what data do you want to see)?
Those are just a few of the questions to ask in a Contact Delete process. And they're really nuanced because everyone will have different requirements, which means you'll ask different follow up questions.
It's like English. You can teach the basics, but after a certain point you have to engage in a conversation in order to learn new things.
That's the hardest part about explaining what to say to clients in the requirements gathering stage of a project. It's a full blown conversation and anything can come up.
You just have to get your reps in and keep doing projects, taking notes, and documenting everything.
If you don't document your process, you'll never have a set of questions for the next project to ask a client.
I hope those two example projects helped answer this question:
"What kinds of questions or discovery areas have you found most critical in SFMC engagements?"
"I’m curious whether there are areas I should be paying closer attention to, or proactively pushing vendors on."
The area to pay close attention to is knowing how business works.
The biggest problem I see with most consultants (and tech people in general), is their lack of "business knowledge".
What do I mean by that?
Most consultants are very good at their specific skill. Let's say that skill is Marketing Cloud.
They're really good at building emails, journeys, automations, reports, etc...
That doesn't mean they understand how a business works.
It doesn't even mean they know how marketing works.
It just means they know how Marketing Cloud works.
So the biggest thing you can learn are the fundamentals of how business works (and how marketing supports a business).
Learn things like:
MQL's - Marketing Qualified Leads
SQL's - Sales Qualified Leads
CAC - Cost to Acquire a Customer
Storytelling
Branding
Common email campaigns in your industry
Metrics to care about for each email campaign
Subject lines that get people to open emails
Email marketing best practices (what's interesting vs annoying to customers).
How marketing ties into the sales process
How marketing can prove ROI and get more budget
How marketing ties into advertising
How to attribute marketing campaigns to sales
UTM parameters and the role they play in Google Analytics, PostHog, etc...
How other email marketing tools work besides Marketing Cloud
There's more to marketing than just Marketing Cloud.
Clients appreciate your Marketing Cloud skillset, but they appreciate making money more.
If you know how to help them use Marketing Cloud within their marketing department to make more money (or save money) in their business, then you'll be doing them a huge service and they'll want to keep you around as long as you can do that.
It's okay to be interested in tech products that come out like MC Next, MC growth, Data Cloud, etc...
But if you don't know how that ties into the business making money, then it doesn't mean anything to the business.
The goal is to add value to the business by making them more effective and efficient with the resources they currently have.
And just knowing Marketing Cloud isn't enough honestly. The world is moving fast, and clients want real business input from consultants that help them think through challenges that are bigger than just "here's what marketing cloud can do".
You need to be able to show them how Marketing Cloud can help them accomplish their business goals.
When you do that, then the next best action or tech product will naturally reveal itself.
If that means they should use Data Cloud, MC Next, MC Growth, MC Intelligence, then so be it. But the goal should never be to push products on people without knowing these things:
Where they're currently at as a business
Where they want to go as a business
What the gap is to get there as a business
And the only way to have a holisitic way to see that is to understand business.
Specifically how marketing supports a business' goals.
That's why I'm talking more about Marketing in general nowadays.
Because it's a skill that many professionals aren't fully aware of. Not just Marketing Cloud folks. It's a skill that every business needs and not many people are well versed on.
So that's my biggest piece of advice to the question of:
"I’m curious whether there are areas I should be paying closer attention to, or proactively pushing vendors on."
I know it's not the question most people in Marketing Cloud are giving right now because they're focused on teaching the tech skills.
And that's great. There's a place for that. But without an understanding of how the business works, there's no tangible use for the tech.
The tech is designed to support the business's goals.
If you understand the business, it's goals, and how to get there, then you will be the most valuable person on the team.
Hope that helps.
Kaelan Moss - MinuteAdmin Out ✌🏽
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