Weekly newsletter #35
The best of what I've read this week, about operations, training and education, communication, and more
Hello!
For the past week, I’ve been working on responses to a guest blog/interview about what your business needs to scale. Of course, documentation is on the list! ;) I’ll have a video to share with you next week with the main operational scalability question response, which the site/publication asked for. (I have more video editing to do, sigh…) There were other, more general, questions that I enjoyed thinking and writing about. You can read a draft of one of my responses here on LinkedIn.
For an accountability check-in for my on-demand course: Session 2 out of 4 is recorded, and I’ll finish editing it today. I think I can finish creating and editing all the videos this week. I’ll probably re-record session 1 after the remaining videos are complete, since that may be the first video people watch after the introduction and I don’t want it to prevent people from continuing the course! It was recorded before I figured out the right camera and script placement for better eye contact. I’ll wait until after beta testing feedback is done before spending time on any other re-recording. I hope your September projects are on track to wrap up this week, too.
Onto the resources!
What I've been reading, watching, and listening to:
Sam Jacobs shares lessons about institutionalizing knowledge and process
Kim Scott talks about using the term feedforward instead of feedback
Rosalyn Santa Elena shares advice on how RevOps moves from tactical to strategic, also expanding on it with this part 1 and part 2 posts
Caterina Torres shares advice on when to hire a RevOps team and when to speak in business vs metrics vs technical terms
Jeff Ignacio talks about burnout and the systems trap
Abby Hosterman writes about starting a podcast club with her sales team
Rob Harris advises on the top priorities when creating a website
Danny Asling writes about marketers’ worst nightmare – the ‘urgent’ lead meeting
Gisele Lempert shares how to balance enabling your sales team and offering a great buying experience
Arnie Gullov-Singh shares how to improve results from the self-serve customers
Dave Irwin writes about the drivers of change model for content strategy
Jeanna Barrett shares five things that really grew the business from $0 to seven figures ARR (including documentation)
Nektar shares tips from Darren Fay about change management for RevOps
LG Guerra explains that discovery is not a skill, it is a sales stage
Scot Chisolm shares 7 critical lessons for first-time founders, and how not to waste time in meeting
Jonathan Fianu discusses key tenets for partner management
Kathleen Booth shares about relationship-based marketing and imposter syndrome
Peter Coppinger shares takeaways from Teamwork’s State of Agency Operations report
Peter Caputa writes about how your marketing agency's profitability is predicated on your marketing & services strategy, and how simply increasing content production will not improve SEO results anymore
Rebecca Nash talks about measuring the success of change
Mallory Lee shares advice on how RevOps can be more strategic
Heidi Kirby writes about how checking boxes is NOT interactivity in training, how instructional design is NOT just learning authoring tools and building a portfolio like many bootcamps make you believe, and how learning & development teams are not pizza shops (order takers)
Stjepan Grcic shares takeaways from "Being an Indispensable Trainer to Your Clients" led by Jessica Palmeri and Chris Marr
Dhiraj Khot shares 2 reasons that CXOs are causing employees to leave
Kathryn Montbriand shares times when its smart to add a generalist to your team
Wes Kao talks about how good design can obscure bad logic
Abi Williams writes about 10 mistakes startup CEOs make and how to avoid them
Sara McNamara shares how to keep up your team’s morale
Jacalyn Beales shares the three goals of every email you send
Helen Tupper shares squiggly career language swaps for the legacy language of ‘climbing the ladder’
Gretchen Rubin writes about responding to criticism
Daphne Costa Lopes shares the first principles of customer success
Tracey Fudge shares the crucial role of marketing operations
Alex Hilleary shares about building transparency into your culture
Kristen Kelly shares how to stop back-to-back meetings and make each meeting efficient
Mandy Thompson shares advice on building good relationships between a professional services provider and their customer
Darrell Alfonso shares the Marketing Operations Maturity Model
Olena Bomko shares good questions to ask to create a case study
Jasper Polak shares a graphic about why change fails
Erica Schneider shares how her course launch made $60,000
Wes Kao posts about answering the question behind the question
Gagan Biyani posts about building in public
Codie Sanchez shares a COMPASS framework for better meetings
Articles, Reports, Guides, Newsletters
DevDocs writes about harnessing documentation as a powerful marketing tool
Daphnée Laforest writes about how async is a culture shift (and it requires documentation)
Dmitrii Ive shares 13 RevOps best practices companies follow this year (including documentation)
Teamwork released a The State of Agency Operations report
Gretchen Rubin writes about The Reason You're Clashing with Your Co-Workers—and How to Fix It
Gustavo Razzetti writes about Clearing the Fog: How to Stop Ambiguity from Frustrating Your Team
MKT1 Newsletter shares How to measure what marketing activities are actually driving revenue
Lorel Sim writes about Where Do Generalists Fit in at Later-Stage Tech Companies?
Harvard Business Review ($) writes about It’s Time for a New Model for Operations Management
Ethan Evans shares The Magic Loop of career growth
Emily Hecker writes about Elevating internal comms: shifting from task taker to strategic partner in conversations
Podcasts & Webinars
Aviv Bergman and Rosalyn Santa Elena discuss process optimization to navigate the Revenue Engine on The Revenue Engine podcast.
Jenny Blake and Pamela Slim discuss From Friction to Flow to Free Time: Finding Joy in Systems on The Widest Net podcast
Jessica Palmeri and Chris Marr discuss Being an Indispensable Trainer to Your Clients on the HubSpot Certified Trainer Spotlight
Charlene Chen and James Mitra discuss the evolution of the COO role on the 40 Minute Mentor podcast
Featured Events or Classes:
September 26 - Teamwork User Group: Insider Interview with Sinéad Jones on the New Google Calendar Integration From Culturish
September 27 - The State of Agency Operations Roundtable from Teamwork
September 27 - Making the Business Case for Documentation from Good Words
September 29 - Smarter, Not Harder: How Marketers Can Drive Sales Efficiency from Iron Horse
October 5 - How To Track And Improve Your Agency’s Project Management Metrics from Upsourced and ZenPilot
October 30 - Collaborating and building relationships with SMEs from the Instructional Design Institute
Sara McNamara is offering marketing operations career coaching
Jill Felska shares more details about the Training for the Modern Manager curriculum
Featured Book:
Featured Jobs:
Self-Promotion: More Ways I Can Help You
October workshops:
Documentation templates — the workbooks from my courses