The First 30 Days in Your Marketing Operations Role: Lead Source Documentation

Jun 5

POV: It's your first week at an amazing new company in a marketing operations role. You're eager to leverage your expertise and experience to optimize processes, manage campaigns, and analyze data effectively.

While you may be tempted to dive right into program builds and processes, your initial focus should be on discovery and education. Before recommending any optimizations, it's crucial to have a deep understanding of your marketing and go-to-market infrastructure.

The cornerstone of your operations infrastructure is data. Best practice dictates that every lead or contact added to your marketing automation platform or CRM should be tagged with a Lead Source, at minimum. Although more advanced systems may include additional source detail or drill-down fields, let's concentrate on the lead source for now. Lead sources can vary, ranging from Paid Advertisement, Social Media, Website, to Sales Outreach. Regardless of how leads are added—via list imports, integrations, or manual creation—the lead source should be a required attribute that is populated upon creation.

One of the first tasks you should focus on in your initial 30 days, ideally as soon as possible, is to locate the existing documentation of all possible lead sources and their definitions. If such documentation doesn't exist, this is an excellent opportunity to roll up your sleeves and create it yourself. By utilizing reports in your CRM or MAP, you can quickly generate a report of all leads grouped by Lead Source. This serves as an excellent starting point for your discovery process. Other attributes to consider adding to this report include:

1. Created by

2. Created Date

3. Source Detail (If available)

Analyzing these data points before speaking to other power users and administrators will provide valuable insights into where leads are originating from and who is responsible for creating them.

If you have administrator access to your CRM, you can open up the Lead Source field information in the Setup and Configuration space of your system. Here, you will find all the possible values for the field, allowing you to compare it with your report and ensure you have a comprehensive list of Lead Source Values.

Once you have gathered this information, it's time to fill out the definitions and validate them with stakeholders and subject matter experts. As an experienced marketing operations professional, you may find many of these sources familiar and can make educated assumptions. Start by documenting your presumed definitions and then validate them with your manager or colleagues who are familiar with the system. Marketing leaders and sales operations counterparts are likely to be the most knowledgeable about usage around lead sources.

Now it's time to compile your findings and document them. If pre-existing documentation exists, this is an ideal opportunity to ensure it is up to date. If you are starting from scratch, take advantage of this chance to create your first of many documentation assets for the organization.

Remember, in the first 30 days of your marketing operations role, thorough lead source documentation is a crucial step towards understanding your marketing and go-to-market infrastructure. It sets the foundation for future optimizations, process improvements, and effective campaign operations.

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