AMA: Morningstar Global Head of Demand Generation, Nicolette Konkol on Campaign Operations

First one would be a sound campaign planning process that starts with the outcome you are trying to achieve, who your target audience is, and an understanding of where they "live" i.e. where they spend time with their peers learning about new solutions. Second would be an airtight Q/A process that includes more than one set of eyes. The campaign planning process, if done well, should include time for the Q/A process.

Campaign operations and demand generation are part of the same value chain of campaign creation, so it depends on the size and scale of your teams as well as the specialization you chose to prioritize. Often in startups, you have demand gen and ops in one person, as the org scales, you begin to introduce specialization. On the other end of the spectrum, I’ve seen roles and responsibilities of ops, in particular, go as far as to be divided into 6 different specializations. For our team at Morningstar and consistent with my experience at other organizations we have the campaign architecture and channel selection live in demand generation and the actual build and measurement lives in operations.

This question is specific to scaling a business. No one size fits all answer, what you choose to centralize or decentralize has a lot to do with what growth stage you are in and your priorities. In the case of Morningstar, we have central marketing functions (like brand, PR, demand, and customer marketing) and marketing functions like product marketing that live in a decentral business unit. Decentral models allow for agility and focus and the central functions play a role in consistency and amplification. I do find it particularly useful to centralize a function if the discipline does not exist to drive consistent KPIs and processes. For more on this topic check out the great blog post from First Round Review on “Give away your Legos and other commandments for scaling startups.”

Perfection should never be the priority. "Don’t let 'perfect' be the enemy of 'good.” Formulate some hypotheses, strive for your best, and then always plan to iterate. The more data you collect from how your customer interacts with a campaign the better your campaign can become with optimization over time.

The MarTech stack is only as good as the strategy, people, and process it supports. Invest in the strategy, people, and process to set the foundation, and then select MarTech that will amplify and accelerate that. The MarTech stack at Morningstar includes 6sense, Asana, Bizible, Contentstack, Eloqua, SFDC, BrightTalk, ZoomInfo, and BigMarker