**MOOPs** Episode 1 - Mike Rizzo & Jessica Meyers

So Mike, you want to start by telling us, uh, who you are a little bit about you, like where you work and how long you've been in marketing and Reverend drops. Yeah. So my name is Mike Rizzo. I am the founder of pros, the community for marketing operations professionals. I'm also working on a stealth mode products right now. So I'm pretty excited about that. Um, I have been in marketing operations for over 10 years now. Uh, I would say somewhere closer to 15, maybe. Nice. Uh, one of the originals, it seems like, like, yeah, at least I, you know, I go pretty far back. We're talking like, you know, act on, I did the act on today. I did the part out before it was a part of Salesforce saying, would you ever work in silver pop? I never did. I never worked in Silverpop, but I wanted to. Um, so knowing that we're gonna be talking about, uh, key moves in your career, uh, when in your career did the moops that you're going to chat with me about today? Happen? This moops happened earlier in my career. I would say it probably happened. Three or four years in, um, though I'm sure there were others that happened prior to that and have certainly happened after, but this particular one happened about three or four years into my career. Nice. So you were a seasoned pro at that point? Yeah. Well, in marketing operations, we definitely feel like we're seasoned after just a couple of years, somewhere like along the peak of the Dunning-Kruger graph of like, I know. Right. At least, at least I feel like it, everything just getting straight into it and going to start with the hard hitting stuff right away. What were you trying to do? Um, so I was preparing what was a, an email campaign. Um, now that I think about it, it was an email campaign specifically to, uh, register. Members from a webinar. So we had done a webinar, like any other marketing ops person. We were then taking the registrant's list and then doing the follow-up email. Um, I think I was parsing out like who attended versus who didn't and changing some language and all that stuff. Um, but just trying to get that, that follow up email out to. And knowing the worked in some contemporary systems and some dinosaurs, uh, what system were you working in at the time? Um, at that time we were actually still using HubSpot. I had started my first startup gig and we were using HubSpot as the platform. Um, we were integrated to Salesforce as. Was the webinar provider at all involved or is this totally irrelevant of the webinar? This happens to be, uh, not related to the webinar provider. Um, at the time webinar provider integrations into any mapping is still pretty, pretty rare and definitely clunky. Um, and so I didn't trust it. Hey, maybe the moves wouldn't happen. So, so what was the actual mode? Yeah, so, um, I think this has happened to everybody. The. The thing that happened was we got the email or organized. I was parsing out who attended and who didn't. And then, um, I hit send on the email and I've also got the email because like any good marketing operations person, you list yourself as both, uh, both, you know, all the types of people, if you can. Um, and the link was to the old. And the reason that happened was because I had cloned an email that was already pre-built, you know, we're all looking to save time. Um, and yeah, so I, I realized that I was literally sending someone to a webinar from like a year ago and yeah, that was not right. Oops. Oops. So you kind of answered my next question, which is going to be who noticed it, but did anyone else notice it at the same time as you, since you set yourself a test email, or how did that kind of play out? So I'm like, okay. The, the whole thing was actually all, all self fulfilling. Um, I, I caught the mistake. Um, and what I ended up doing is, you know, reaching out to my management team and I said, Hey, we asked that we sent out the wrong link. Um, We of course me, but I'm going to go ahead and, um, fix it and I'll send out the corrected link, like any, any good, you know, email will do. And, um, I went ahead and I hit send, um, I don't know if it was me this time or if it was HubSpot. But, uh, I definitely sent the wrong link again. Oh no. And I was like F*MOOPs! Like Super, super loud and I was home. I happened to be working from home that day and my wife was like, what happened? It's like, ah, I just sent the wrong link in a follow-up email to an email with the wrong link. Uh, so it wasn't just one MOOPs. It was a double news, which is why I was really excited to get this program off the ground so I can laugh about it now, obviously. Um, I think I've seen a couple of those where the follow-up like the oopsie daisy, email is also an oopsie daisy. Uh, it's just like kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy. It just keeps spiraling and then you keep getting panicked and you're like, oh no. Yeah. And it's, so it's made so much worse when you're the one noticing it, right? Like, like, no, one's really even bringing it to your attention. You just know you did the wrong thing. It's like how, like, you're just like beat yourself up about it the worst. So what beyond, uh, send yourself the email. Uh, what else did you learn by making the same mistake? Twice in a row? Yeah. Um, well, a couple of things. One is to always create a process, to have other people test your emails, right? Even if you make a mistake, it'd be good to have someone check the follow-up email. Uh, And, and I actually ended up hacking a solution in this case. I was lucky. Um, as I mentioned previously, the link was going to a pretty outdated webinar. Um, and so I put on the marketing ops hat and I said like, how do you solve this problem without sending another yet another email.. And I went ahead and did a 3 0 1 redirect and just rerouted all the traffic, going to the old URL to the new one. And then about six months later, I went and like fixed the redirects to let them go back to their old destination. And they like strange events that somebody saved an email for like a year and wanted to go to that thing. Um, so, you know, I was able to remedy that situation. Um, but through that, Kind of remediation process. I, I went ahead and actually documented this whole experience and then figured out like what were going to be the steps that we needed to execute in order to like send a campaign moving forward. Um, we were a pretty lean and mean team at the startup that I was at at the time. And, you know, it's just me and a couple of other folks, like our team was like three marketers and really the other two were. Not they're focused on demand gen activities, right. And then the other one's writing content. Um, so they're not exactly testers by trade, but creating a process for us to follow and then explaining why that was so critical for us to follow moving forward and kind of falling on my sword was exactly what I ended up doing. I was going to ask about redirects because I've definitely had to put the emergency redirect in place. Um, not, not zero times in my career. So either myself or somebody, I had one, a couple of weeks ago where a marketer came to me and they built our, we built our own pages and Unbounce it's patient pop. And, uh, we sent an email out that it was linking to the previous name of the webinar. It was like the back part of the URL and it had, oh, no. You know, it's been an hour. Why is nobody registered for my webinar? So there is the quick, like selling, does it work? Like, do we send an oops email or do we just domain redirect real fast? Uh, and we went with a ladder and things were pretty smooth with so a good trick. That's a, it's a good hack to keep in your back pocket and always think about like, how do you solve for this? Um, if you, if it's not an important URL that you're going to then just temporarily redirect it you'll be fine. Yup. So it sounds like you put a huge process in place, uh, at least at that company, in that role, that team, have you made the same mistake? Yeah, I'm pretty sure I wrong link out in slack the other day. And I sent another email the other day. Yeah. Um, I, you know, being a team of one for running, all the things that in the Mopro is community right now. Um, I'm definitely making lots of mistakes and I am not following my processes. But I'm moving pretty fast and I'm hoping that people will just forgive me also, you know, it's just fodder for more episodes is really like, I'll just come in and share all the mistakes. Unfortunately, none of those will have outcomes and learnings like confessing, you know, it's like a whole nother series. Just the confessional, Beth. Yeah, exactly. Um, what would you say to be inevitable, someone similar who has made the same mistake? Uh, recently? Um, I would say just, you know, it's not the end of the world. Like it definitely blood pressure goes up, right. Uh, heart palpitations happen. You might start having some cold sweats, but that's on the one. Um, however, if you need to step away for a moment, I would recommend that or sit down or stand up, whatever makes you feel good. Um, and just like lean on your team. Um, especially if there's anybody around you that you can say, Hey, I, I made a mistake. I need to figure this out. I need to talk through this. Um, I think that's really, really important had I have had a chance to like talk through what I had just made the mistake. Um, you know, With, uh, on that email campaign, then I might not have sent the wrong link again. I probably would've like verbalized that I, this button was incorrectly late and I would've found it. So at a bare minimum, just try to reach out to folks. Everybody understands it's not the end of the world. Um, do what you can to remediate it and then move forward, shake it off because you're inevitably going to make another oops. So beyond that, what other advice do you have for other marketing and rev ops professionals? I'm going to shamelessly plug to just watch the rest of these moves episodes and learn through other people. Um, but I mean, truthfully it's like create good process. Um, I think process is like a four-letter word and a lot of companies, but in marketing operations, like it's like operational best practices to have a good process in place. Um, And even if you're a team of one, Mike, you need to try to follow a process, create a checklist. If it's on a whiteboard physically, or if it's on, you know, a project management system, just do what you can create a process, um, make it your own too. Like. You know, you can look for inspiration, but, um, everybody's company and all the different steps that you take to get something out the door is different. And so definitely think about which teams will be impacted and just create a good process. I've said a couple of times to people, the act of like making the checklist specifically has helped me not make the same mistakes. So many times I'm like, okay, I'm adding that thing to my checklist or whatever. Uh, I think super helpful. Yeah, for sure. Awesome. Well, thanks Mike. Excited to have you on for your next MOOPs. I'm not. Stop! Knock on wood! Find the wood!