Hi, everyone, I’m gonna be talking about real career options for Pardot marketers. Like many of you, I fell into marketing automation. In 2009, I’d just moved to Singapore. I’m based normally, as you can probably tell by my accident, in the UK. I live just outside, between London and Oxford. But I moved to Singapore sort of 11 years ago to run the APAC marketing team for a leadership and sales training consultancy.
Month later, I flew to Toronto for our Eloqua implementation, and then onto Boston to join the rest of the team for training. We were a small global team, and I ended up becoming the Eloqua power user. My passion for marketing automation was ignited, and I haven’t looked back.
Now, you won’t even find retiring marketers today who spent their entire career working with marketing automation. It’s a relatively new industry. So it might not be easy to see where your career could take you, and that’s what we’re gonna cover: real career options for Pardot marketers.
Pardot Ninjas, Unicorns, Rockstars?
So why the name? Why the title? I don’t have anything against unicorns, ninjas, or rock stars, for that matter, but I don’t think they’re helpful descriptions.
Consider Unicorns
The problem was neatly summed up by Scott Brinker when he said that unicorns are just too damn conceptually perfect. The expectation is unrealistic. When companies are looking for marketing automation experts, they need to be realistic about the skills and the experience they need. Doesn’t help but perpetuate that unicorn myth.
Technology may be developing fast, but good marketers bring a set of skills and experience and a passion for learning that equips them for roles. Technology, as it changes, can be done. You stay on top of it. I’ve worked with some excellent marketers who didn’t have all of the expertise in a specific technology, but they learned. They had the right experience and the right attitude. And as the technology changed, they kept learning. They kept moving.
Rockstars & Ninjas
What about the rock stars, then? I’ve always had this feeling about the rock star title. It’s all about us, isn’t it, it’s all about them, and it’s not all about you. Collaboration is really key to success in a career within marketing automation, marketing technology, and digital marketing. I’ve actually seen a job title for a digital marketing ninja. I don’t know what it means either.
They say, “You are a digital marketing rock star,” so rock stars and ninjas mixed in here. “I want to see how you can disrupt it.” You see what I mean? It doesn’t really mean anything.
Ikigai and Purpose
Let’s move on to some real career options.
First of all, here’s a framework that I think is a really good place to start — Ikigai. And yes, I had to look up how to pronounce it. It is a Japanese concept which means reason for being. It combines internal and external factors that you should consider when you’re trying to work out your own purpose.
- What do you enjoy?
- What are you good at?
- What are you passionate about?
- What does the world need, and what will you get paid for?
And as you consider the right path for you, these are fundamentally important questions. If you focus on just the things that you’re good at and what you can get paid for, the danger is you’ll get bored. Where’s the passion?
Following my ikigai has led me down some unconventional paths.
What About You?
Let’s start with those two questions about you, though. What do you love, and what are you good at?
When I think about my own passions for marketing technology, now and over the last 11 years, the things that I really enjoy are problem solving. I’ve always liked getting into the weeds of fixing problems. I love being told things like, “Oh, Pardot’s broken,” or “Pardot’s not working.” And I really enjoy working closely with sales, having always been in B2B marketing, and I actually started in sales. I am really passionate about that alignment. I love working with new technology and new functionality. I like the fast pace of change and always learning.
These are just things that maybe you sync with, chime with what it is that you like about it, or maybe it’s other things that you like about it. But work out what it is that you really enjoy about working in marketing automation and also what you don’t love.
For me, it’s doing too much of the same thing. Like many of us, I get bored if I keep doing that same thing. Doesn’t mean I couldn’t happily clean up some lists occasionally. Chances are the longer that you stay in the role and develop your skills, your likes and dislikes will change and evolve.
What About the World?
So let’s move on to what does the world need? As we think about the two market-focused sections on the Venn diagram, what does the world need? And what will it pay you for?
Well, what does the world need now? What will it need in 2030?While we could hope that most years won’t see as much change as 2020 has, the general pace of change has increased.
Consider the government-led changes to compliance and privacy or changes that the big tech companies are making that affect marketing. The changes that we’ve seen this year have perhaps given us a clue as to some of the skills we’re gonna need for 2030. A couple of months ago, Microsoft’s CEO, Satya Nadella, said, “We’ve seen two years of digital transformation in two months.”
3 Types of Marketers
So let’s look at the three types of marketers.
Fat T Marketers
In a Gartner blog post, Simon Yates talks about the growing need for Fat T marketers. T-shaped marketers are those that have got broad and deep skills across the marketing spectrum. Fat T marketers have several areas of deeper, more specialized expertise. Two critical skills are expertise in marketing technology and strategy.
Agile Marketers
Now, some of you will be familiar with Agile marketing or its methodologies of practices, such as Scrum or stand-ups. It’s an adaptive approach to project management that originates in software development. It isn’t a linear plan. It involves regular check-ins which allow you to adapt the plan as required.
Consider this, McKinsey has found that marketing programs are taking six months to go to market. Markets and customers change in that time. Six months, that’s just too long. If we look at 2020, consider the pace of change. You need to be able to adapt quickly, and Agile marketing really enables marketers to be able to do that.
Augmented Marketers
It’s a term that was used by Scott Brinker and Jason Baldwin in their report on Martech in 2030. As AI-led technologies evolve, they argue that the need for marketers doesn’t disappear.
What we will need, what we will see, what we’ll need are augmented marketers – those that can embrace AI and machine learning and combine their human strengths with sophisticated software. So it’s about adapting and keeping on learning.
Control the Change
Marketing is gonna change over the next 10 years. Technology will change. We can’t predict what things are gonna look like in 2030, so let’s not try. Let’s just think about what needs to, where we need to get to. But it’s going to be human responsibility to oversee the models, the data sources.
“Forbes” has stated that the new retirement age is never. So maybe that’s a little bit overdramatic, but really it makes me damn sure that I want to be doing something that I love, that I’m good at, that the world is gonna need, and that I can get paid for.
Real Opportunities
So let’s look at some of those career paths and the skills that you need to be able to move through them. First of all, though, I wanna start off with a poll and see where you are today, just find out a little bit more about you, the audience, where you’re working, what you’re focused on. So hopefully this poll has come up and you can see it.
Essentially, I’d like to know, where do you work? Are you working in-house in a marketing team or in-house in a marketing operations team, perhaps working in a consultancy, marketing automation or a Salesforce consultancy, in a campaigns agency, so a consultancy perhaps where you are building the emails, the landing pages, running those more creative campaigns. Are you working as an independent Pardot consultant? Or perhaps you’re at Salesforce or doing something else.
- About 57% of you work in-house in marketing teams.
- 17%, I’d say that’s the next one, marketing operations in-house. A lot of them, most of the audience, you’re working in-house.
- 10% in marketing automation consultancies.
- Couple of independent consultants, and others.
So there are a lot of career options that we could talk about here, and there’s no reason why you couldn’t change to do something else entirely, zookeeper, teacher, anything.
We haven’t got time to cover everything. But we are gonna focus on the most common, the most relevant career paths for marketing automation specialists.
What I’d like to point out is there’s no reason why you need to follow a linear path. I wouldn’t say that it was unconventional, uncommon to move between in-house or consulting. I strongly believe that as someone who’s done both career paths, both career paths teach you a lot. And these skills will make you better as a practitioner or as a consultant. During my own career, I’ve worked in all of these roles, and so I’m gonna share my experience, and I think, and the skills and the pros and cons of each path, and hopefully this will give you some ideas as you consider your own career.
Consulting
There are many ways that you could be a Pardot consultant. You could work in Salesforce, a marketing consultancy, working with clients that need ongoing support, or you can get involved in implementations and migrations. So I know that most of you listening aren’t consultants at the moment. It may be something that you’re considering.
The other type of consultancy I mentioned is working as a campaigns manager in an agency, building and deploying campaigns for clients. I made the move into consulting in 2014, and the reason that I wanted to move from working in-house where I had been happily working for a long time was because I was looking for a new challenge. I wanted a new challenge. I wanted to learn new skills. I wanted to throw myself in the deep end, which I’ve done several times in my career, and I’m sure, I know that I will continue to do that.
I went to work for a Salesforce consultancy called Bluewolf, leading their marketing and services team in EMEA. The type of work that we did was typically implementation, solution design, ongoing support, migrations, that sort of type of work.
What skills do you need to be a good consultant beyond your marketing automation expertise?
Project Management
We know we’re Pardot experts, so beyond that, what do you need? The biggest one is really project management. This is critical, whatever type of consultant you want, whatever type of consultant you are or you want to move into.
Whether you’re managing large-scale IT programs or an independent consultant managing your own projects, good project management skills are highly prized in consultancies where revenue relies on projects to be delivered within scope and within budget. Good project managers are highly sought after. And project management is actually a career path that I’ve seen a number of great marketing automation consultants move into.
There are lots of great professional development opportunities available to project managers enabling them to get certified in methodologies like PRINCE2 or Agile. And project management actually opens up career pathways into professional services, engineering, or multiple other industries that really value good project management.
I mentioned in sort of the brief about this session that I’d mention a few unconventional pathways, and I think that’s one of them. I see it quite a lot, that people do make that move from marketing or marketing consultancy to project management. They realize that that’s what they’ve got a passion for.
Curiosity
Another key skill is curiosity. Don’t be afraid to ask questions. A good consultant is curious, asks a lot of questions, and listens. And especially if you’re making that move from being sort of in-house, an in-house marketer to a consultant, that is the big change. You have to realize quite early on that there are no stupid questions, but you have to work out how best to ask those questions.
You’ve gotta combine your curiosity with some really good communication skills and business acumen ’cause you’ll need to challenge assumptions and ask the hard questions to find out what your customer really needs. You wanna combine your curiosity with good communication skills and business acumen.
You’ll need to be customer-focused. And I don’t just mean your own clients, but your customers’ customers as well. Help them to connect with their customers, and make them more successful as well.
And then there’s resilience, the ability to cope under pressure and with changes. There will be tough situations, and you will get through them.
There are other skills, but I think these are the ones that if you master them, you’ll be in a good place to not only move into consultancy, but if you’re already there, or if you’re thinking about how you develop, really to develop into more senior consulting roles as well.
One thing that I would add is that some people prefer to fake it until you make it. I would say be honest. Sometimes you may have to do a little bit of that, but actually it just comes down to confidence as well. Have confidence that often you’ll be the expert in the room, so don’t undervalue that. You might feel like you’re faking it and being dishonest, but be honest where you can, but also have confidence.
As a consultant, you don’t have to work for someone else. 3 1/2 years ago, I decided I wanted to work for myself as an independent consultant, and there are a lot of others who feel the same.
Freelance
In 2018, “Forbes” found that 56.7 million Americans were doing freelance work, and this year there are over two million freelancers in the UK. People are driven to freelance by a number of factors, and I think that this year we can add COVID to that list of factors.
I wanted the flexibility to be around more. I had two seven-year-olds, but I also wanted to take control of the direction of my career and try something new, and I loved it. I jumped in with no projects organized, which worked for me. That doesn’t work for everybody. But if you are gonna do that, I recommend just making sure you’ve got enough savings to be able to keep you going.
The other thing I’d highly recommend is to speak to as many people as possible before you make the jump like those that have set up on their own, people in your own network doing similar things. I found this part of working for myself to be the most rewarding. And really make sure you’re active on LinkedIn.
There’s many approaches you can take to working for yourself. You can set up your own before and employ others. You can contract and just work on one project at a time. I like the variety of working on a number of projects. But I also really like being part of a team, and I get that from the clients that I work with.
I’ve also realized over the last few years that I am driven by the desire to keep learning and keep developing. If you’re thinking of doing something similar, feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn. Happy to help. I really appreciate other people helping me, and I’m happy to do the same.
In-House Marketers
We’ve already established that many of you are already in this role or in a role in-house. And we’ll talk about marketing teams and marketing operations as well.
So in smaller companies, if you, those of you that are working in smaller companies, you may well be the power user as well as the marketing expert, building the strategy, creating the plans, and executing the campaigns. You might have external support from agencies, others across the business, or maybe it’s just you.
The career path in a smaller company isn’t always so well-defined. There are less places to move to, so you may decide to move into a different role altogether. More unconventional career parts in small companies could see you move into sales or customer-facing roles that fit well with a marketing background. The path I’ve shown here is a more conventional one.
Well, at a high level, it’s easy to say that you move from being the doer, the individual contributor, to the leader. I think what’s interesting is there are some key skills that evolve and develop but are recognizable throughout these roles, attention to detail, organizational skills, project management, innovation, and looking at better, recommending better ways of working, and of course reporting.
You start off with reporting as being the person running those reports, then making recommendations, and then it’s sort of really the skill of being able to translate data into actionable insights and recommendations and communicate to people of all levels.
The things that I believe you need to do in order to develop and take on more senior roles are developing a proactive mindset, taking the initiative, and the ability to link strategy with execution.
Marketing Automation
We know from the focus within marketing automation, we start off, and we are very much operationalizing everything, but how is what we’re doing tied to what the marketing goals are and what the business goals are of the company? And it’s making sure that you know that link. So that will really help.
Inspiring and developing others, whether you’re managing them or not, whether they’re your peers. Strong analytical skills and that ability, as I mentioned, to translate that for different analytics and reports for different audiences.
Familiarity with a broader range of technology beyond just Pardot. So thinking about things like Tableau, Sales Cloud, even other things outside of the Salesforce ecosystem that support the work you’re doing in Pardot.
And finally, a solid understanding of data and how it gets used. When we think about the career path opportunities for a Pardot marketer in-house – it’s worth recognizing that you could also be part of a center of excellence within your company, which kind of works as a shared service. You work with teams all over your organization.
Marketing Operations Team
And that leads neatly onto the marketing operations team, which often does work as a shared service within an organization. So marketing operations provides the governance, infrastructure, and support enabling marketing to operate efficiently and with scale and consistency. Effectively, they lay the tracks.
According to Gartner, only 49% of marketing organizations say they have a dedicated marketing operations leader. It’s not surprising, while it’s been a growing function, it tends to be just the bigger enterprise-size companies that have a dedicated marketing operations function.
Marketing operations does exist in smaller companies, but it’s usually owned or part of the marketing team.
While the structure and roles within marketing operation teams differ between companies, these on the slide here on the left are typically the responsibilities that lie within the team. The structure you’ll expect to see, a well-run marketing operations team, means that for you as a marketing automation specialist joining a team, there’s plenty of room for development within marketing operations and lots of different roles and career paths.
If you’re passionate about marketing technology, then processes is a great environment for you. I really believe this is a function that is going to continue to grow and to change shape, and I think the skills you have as a Pardot marketer will really help you to develop within marketing operations.
5 Steps to Find Your Next Career Opportunity
Finally, I wanna leave you with some steps that you can take now, so five steps.
Talk with your network
First of all, I talked about the importance of talking with your network. It could be past colleagues, friends, peers, people that you’ve worked with, people that you haven’t, people that you know from events that you’ve attended.
Attend events
It’s a lot easier for us all now while it’s virtual. There’s no commute. The events come to you.
Get active on LinkedIn
Talk to people, and listen to what others are saying and doing. LinkedIn is a great community for commenting, sharing content. I get really good insights from the other things that other people share, the videos, whatever it is. I just find it’s been a really good way to connect with people. It joins all of the Pardot community with the network.
Participate in the Pardot Community
I think the Pardot community is a critical and really supportive community. So share, read blog posts, attend user groups. The Spot for Pardot, THE DRIP are two really good blogs that I would highly recommend.
Take online courses
Then there is online learning. Now, Trailhead, of course, is the obvious one. Get certified, Pardot consultant, as a Pardot specialist. But also think about the other skills you can learn via Trailhead, Tableau, Sales Cloud, all of the other Salesforce platforms. And then outside of Salesforce, think about the other complementary technologies we’ve talked about that it’s worth getting yourself up on.
Watch the video to take a closer look at this topic.
