This week, new hire Andrew Sarmiento offers a look into his experience of joining the Bluewolf team, and his unique  introduction to Bluewolf’s methodology.

I started my career at Bluewolf eager and excited to utilize everything I had learned while earning my marketing degree less than a year ago. As I began making my way through the onboarding process and testing the waters of the different marketing automation tools utilized by Bluewolf, I realized learning the ins and outs of a platform was going to be tougher than I thought. I decided to dive into learning about Marketo first, and while the online documents and tutorial videos I went through every morning provided a wonderful outline for my endeavors, I knew I needed context and a real world application to really make the learning process click. That’s where the Marketing Services team stepped in to make that context a reality—and that reality was bagels. 

The goal was simple: automate a method of getting bagels for the team once a week by building out a robust, fully functional campaign. We crowded around a table and talked out not only what we wanted the program to do but how it would do it. We drew flowcharts on the walls, developed a consistent theme for use throughout the program, and accomplished our tasks by dividing and conquering. This was my first time watching the Bluewolf methodology in action— I absorbed it all like a sponge.

Tasks were divided between the other business analysts and myself in order to give us all exposure to designing assets, building landing pages, and creating the flow steps of the logic our smart campaigns would follow. When we reconvened to put all the pieces together I learned another valuable lesson— how important troubleshooting is. It was a great learning experience to have the senior members of the marketing services team push me to figure out how to do things on my own but steer me in the right direction when needed. After we scraped a few assets, made our smart campaigns work correctly, and ran a full test of the program, we were ready to launch.

The Marketing Services team whiteboarding out our strategy, and putting it into place.

With the program launched and our breakfast orders submitted, we debriefed and talked about what we learned and what we could do in the future to make the program even better.

My key takeaways from this experience were:

• A lot of thinking and planning goes into marketing automation; it is so much more than just scheduling emails.
• The importance of the Bluewolf way of doing things and how the culture here truly differentiates us.
• A supportive marketing team can help increase the potential for delivering on a successful and creative campaign.
• Now not only am I Marketo certified and bringing these crucial lessons to my work on projects, I’m enjoying a well-balanced breakfast.

The team and I surveying our completed campaign.

To learn about open positions and the different roles with Bluewolf, see our Pack page. For more information on our Marketing Services teams, see our work.