Design Your Operations With the End (User) in Mind with Chelsea Katich, Director of Marketing Operations at McGraw Hill

Design Your Operations With the End (User) in Mind with
Chelsea Katich, Director of Marketing Operations
at McGraw Hill

In this episode of the OpsStars Podcast, Rachael McBrearty is joined by Chelsea Katich, Director of Marketing Operations at McGraw Hill, an American learning company and one of the “big three” educational publishers that provides customized educational content, software, and services for pre-K through postgraduate education.

Chelsea is a 5x Marketo Champion, Fearless 50 member, MUG Co-Leader, 2019 Champion of the Year Revvie Finalist, 2020 Adobe Experience Maker Award Winner, and a 2021 OpsStars of the Year finalist. Today, she reveals best practices for marketing operations professionals to help them become more strategic and successfully manage complex projects.

Key Highlights:

2:52 – 10:55 – Taking the Wheel – As the Director of Marketing Operations at McGraw Hill, Chelsea oversees marketing automation and operations, managing two teams for each process. She details how the teams organize and function, operating as a central agency of all things operations and automation. Ultimately rolling up into a CRO that oversees both sales and marketing.
2:52 – 10:55 – Taking the Wheel – As the Director of Marketing Operations at McGraw Hill, Chelsea oversees marketing automation and operations, managing two teams for each process. She details how the teams organize and function, operating as a central agency of all things operations and automation. Ultimately rolling up into a CRO that oversees both sales and marketing.
10:55 – 17:12 – Engaging on an Individual Level – Closing the deal at a State level is the first part of the equation. Next follows the strategies to engage with individual decision-making coordinators or curriculum directors. Usually, they reach out to McGraw Hill, and that’s where Marketing Ops comes in. They’ve designed a process to ensure that requests get to the right team or rep, regardless of where it comes in from, and that it gets responded to within a set timeframe. Speed of response is important when it comes to hand-raisers, and it’s something they measure and have worked to improve. While the product they deliver remains more traditional, internally they are working to innovate to deliver a better customer experience.
17:12 – 19:58 – Implementing New Processes with Sales – When marketing designed a new process for routing leads, they wanted to meet sales where they were at. They work through Salesforce tasks and also now have the ability to track and measure activities and revenue for leadership.
19:59 – 23:38 – The Impact of Going Through Management Transformation Like any new process, it took time. They first got leadership buy-in, then ran pilots with individual teams before rolling anything out widely. From there, they held trainings, offered office hours, and took questions over email. Chelsea understood the process would take time and continued to slowly iterate and improve processes.
23:39 – 27:11 – What Changed and What Follows Next – It’s been a long journey, but Chelsea feels confident that she has processes and data in place to accurately report on revenue. Though the pandemic impacted their activity, she is able to report out not only on year-over-year numbers but pre-pandemic benchmarks that she’s been able to define.
30:13 – 31:52 – Piece of Advice for Newbies in Operation Roles – Be a sponge and learn everything you can. Reach out to those who do know what to do or have had some experience.

Who Would Chelsea Like to Take For Lunch in the Ops World?

Jenny Robertson, SVP Technology Solutions & Architecture at ANNUITAS
Taylor Enfinger, Senior Director, Demand Technology at ANNUITAS
All her past colleagues from operation teams

Episode Resources

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“We don’t want to see the fluffy stuff. I want to see where I can dig in more to help improve the process. Where are things going wrong? And what can we do to help with that?”

Chelsea Katich, Director of Marketing Operations at McGraw Hill

Any time you can see even a tiny bit of change that could be for the good, propose it and see if your reps find it valuable, and if it will be worth your time”

Chelsea Katich, Director of Marketing Operations at McGraw Hill