Keepin’ it 100 with Max Fund, Zerto

‍Nelson Gilliat: Hey everyone. And welcome to another episode of Keepin’ it 100, helping revenue practitioners better tackle a new role or project. I'm your host Nelson Gilliam and today's guest is Max Fund, Marketing Operations Manager at Zerto. It is a disaster recovery, backup, and cloud mobility company. If you have any idea what that means, and you probably work in it from his journey, from an SDR to marketing ops, Max we'll share juicy tidbits, like why you should always have a plan seat.

And how you can carve out your own career path internally rather than have to jump ship to another company here's Matt's advice. So you can be your best and key moments. 

Max Fund: A good tip that I've gotten from a couple of my mentors in life here of, you know, how to make this next role available for yourself is really within a company is making yourself the obvious choice, right?

It's just always being there, being reliable in those situations. So that when they developed the need for that kind of a position, or there's the opportunity for that growth, they don't have to think about looking outside the company for that person. They know you're that person and making sure you're fostering the right relationships within the company, literally learning what people do within it, how they do it.

And then most importantly, like how you can help them do it more efficiently. Especially when you're on the operations career path. You know, my mantra for marketing operations is my goal is to make our marketing more efficient, not just our processes internally, but even just how it converts and how our sales reps are able to move it forward.

So it's always finding out how I'm able to help them, what they expect of me to help them with, and finding ways to really foster that. And building on that, right? It's a lot about building trust. You've got to be able, you want to be reliable. And when I say that, I'm not saying have the answer for everything being able to fix everything, but when someone asks you something.

Being on time and doing it. It's really more about responding timely, working on things, also being helpful, but it's being honest. Hey, this is what I can do to help make this request process easier for you now by helping clean up some reports, helping take care of some data, but also being honest that I can't change things at this point in time.

And now keying up for now, right? Having done all of that, I've built that trust within those teams, by being there, being honest about how I can help, and being helpful when I can to be able to start this project now of overhauling their entire processes. 

Nelson Gilliat: I like that. It's just making yourself available, being the go-to helpful guy.

And even if you don't know everything and just being honest about your abilities and, but just saying, Hey, I'm willing to lend a hand and help figure it out. And I guess looking back at your progression or looking at what other people in the company have done successfully, I'd actually like to take the negative viewpoint.

And what have you observed within yourself or within others to avoid? What are some of the no-nos as people sort of progressed through their career or take on new projects that, that you would caution against? 

Max Fund: So I got a big, no, no for projects that it's one I've learned over time too, is making sure you get stakeholder buy-in right.

It's really reaching within the company and finding the right people that need to be involved and want to be involved to help drive that project forward. Then also once you've done that is making sure their timelines all in line so that I know that, okay, I can't throw this on their plate and expect it to be done in the next month.

And I made mistakes with this, throwing it in my own projects. At certain points, not understanding the workload capacities of my other stakeholders at the time. So things fall through the cracks and not get done on time. And I observed this all the time with smaller marketing projects too. It's just the content creation or.

A-list needing to be built, not understanding who has the capacity right now, or when this needs to be accomplished by and really setting a coordinated timeline across it all, and that's where it's getting that buy-in is. All right. You guys see this as a huge pain and a real thing that we need to justify within the business. Are we all on the same page here? Cool. Then how are we moving forward? 

Nelson Gilliat: So, what other tips do you have for people when it comes to making a change, any type of change, good or bad? 

Max Fund: I’m going to give you two things. Using my, being a good coach metaphor here. When it comes to a project, if you're managing one, you have to be an effective coach.

And. Two ways. I take that analogy cause I'm a huge basketball guy, a huge football guy. Right? So thinking of it from that sense, right before you can run a play, you have to make sure everyone understands their role and expectations to execute. And the other, especially for projects, when it comes to ones with hard deadlines is always having an audible ready.

And an audible shouldn't be something like, all right, we're just going to switch it up and call it a hail Mary. No, it should be something planned based on how you've set yourself up. So I like to go into a process object, having a plan, a plan B, and then plan C plan. See, usually for me is what I like to call it.

Cut the rope, making sure that I don't kill what we've already have so that in case all else fails. And you can go back to that. Every time I come up with a project solution, like a, you know, a proposed solution for a project, you try to offer multiple options. So knowing they're going to go with option a, but keep option B in your back pocket.

Nelson Gilliat: Do you have a note of encouragement or insights to share email me? And we'll get you on the show at podcast@usergems.com