Most leaders see Marketing Ops as the team that keeps the trains running on time, essentially the plumbers of the marketing department. But what if I told you they’re actually positioned to be the architects of your company’s most durable competitive advantage?
Agility requires moving beyond the transactional nature of campaigns and technology. It demands building a durable, responsive ecosystem around your brand, one that can listen and adapt not just quarterly, but constantly.
Today, we’re going to talk about how to reframe the marketing operations function from a cost center or tactical execution engine into a strategic driver of growth. And we’ll explore a powerful, and perhaps counterintuitive, way to do it: by building a genuine community, not just as a marketing channel, but as the core of your go-to-market strategy.
To help me discuss this topic, I’d like to welcome, Mike Rizzo, CEO at MarketingOps.
About Mike Rizzo
Mike Rizzo is a career marketing operations professional passionate about using a people-first approach to building scalable and efficient solutions to the challenges faced by marketing, business operations, and client success teams.
With his extensive background in marketing Mike helped build, launch, manage and optimize Mavenlink’s first user community and Client Advisory Board programs.
In 2017 he also founded the growing community of MO Pros – a place where thousands of Marketing Operations Professionals connect, collaborate and help elevate the practice of Marketing Ops. He is also the co-host of the podcast called Ops Cast.
As the founder of MarketingOps.com, Mike is taking a community-led approach to building a platform purpose-built to elevate Marketing Operations Professionals.
Mike Rizzo on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aharze/
Resources
MarketingOps: https://www.marketingops.com
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Transcript
[00:00:00] Greg Kihlstrom: Many leaders see Marketing Ops as the team that keeps trains running on time, essentially the plumbers of the marketing department. But what if I told you they’re actually positioned to be the architects of your company’s most durable competitive advantage? Agility requires moving beyond the transactional nature of campaigns and technology. It demands building a durable, responsive ecosystem around your brand, one that can listen and adapt, not just quarterly, but constantly. Today, we’re going to talk about how to reframe the marketing operations function from a cost center or a tactical execution engine into a strategic driver of growth. We’re going to explore a powerful, and perhaps counterintuitive, way to do it, by building a genuine community, not just as a marketing channel, but as the core of your go-to-market strategy.
[00:01:28] Greg Kihlstrom: To help me discuss this topic, I’d like to welcome Mike Rizzo, founder and CEO at Marketing Ops. Mike, welcome to the show.
[00:01:35] Mike Rizzo: Hey, Greg. Thank you for for having me on. I’m excited to chat with you and, really love the initial positioning statement. So that was spot on.
[00:01:43] Greg Kihlstrom: Love it. And I guess I should say welcome back to the show as well. So you’re a returning champion here. So we’ll, we’ll, you know, maybe touch on a few things we touched on, but, you know, definitely, definitely looking to diving in. But before we do, why don’t you give a little background on yourself and your role at Marketing Ops?
[00:02:00] Mike Rizzo: As mentioned, I’m the CEO and founder of marketingops.com. today that is effectively a marketplace. it serves two parts of the ecosystem, predominantly in B2B, but we do have a number of B2C, folks in our network as well, which means that there are practitioners that are in the ecosystem, the community, and we serve them with content that helps elevate them in their career. we are moving towards becoming a certification body, not too dissimilar from something like a PMI to the PMP certification. and then at the center, of all of that is marketingops.com, where brands come in and engage with our members, in meaningful ways where they don’t just pitch-slap them constantly, but, you know, really try to show them the art of the possible. And so, yeah, my role today is all about curating excellent, experiences, content, networking, and, sort of the the path to becoming a certified go-to-market product manager and go-to-market product architect, that is what we’re marching toward. but I have a a breadth of startup experience, most notably in B2B SaaS. So I kind of, built my career from there.
[00:03:12] Greg Kihlstrom: So yeah, let’s, let’s start and, you know, I want to start with the the premise that I teed up in the intro. And, you know, a lot of our listeners are marketing leaders and so, you know, they, they are leading marketing ops teams or or working with them at the very least. And this perception, you know, is often that they’re kind of a service department that’s focused on campaign execution, tech management, things like that. What do you see as the fundamental flaw in that as the sole perception of of Marketing Ops? And what’s maybe what’s something that would elevate that Marketing Ops team from that perception?
[00:03:50] Mike Rizzo: I appreciate the question. let’s let’s journey back just briefly in time, when everybody was recognizing, you know, a few decades ago that marketing had the largest budget, you know, compared to even IT, right? This was a super hot topic many, many moons ago now. well, that’s still fundamentally true. in fact, most of the money that you’re spending on your sort of go-to-market motion comes from effectively a Martech go-to-market stack. And and ultimately, the the complexity of that technology, is really what I would refer to as a product. now, each of them are product in and of their own right, of course, that you that you purchase, but, for many, many years, out of all of that money that these brands have been spending and these teams are, you know, investing in, there’s always the question of, are we getting the most out of it? Yeah. And, the the team, or sometimes just the person that is, right, right. tasked with, you know, figuring that out is more often than not a marketing ops professional. but the problem is exactly what what you’ve hit on and what we’ve all sort of observed over the last handful of decades, is that they’re inundated with executing on delivery work. You know, we have to do an email campaign, a webinar, an event, upload a list from the event. You name it. deduplicate records and merge data, clean the data. there’s there’s a countless number of tasks that a marketing operations professional is inundated with, which distract them from the ability to make the most out of your technology. And if you start thinking about your technology as a product in its entirety, and that product is meant to deliver against a core set of KPIs, or a hypothesis, or a bet that you’re making in your go-to-market motion, then you need a product manager and an owner to figure out how to orchestrate the plays to best serve the needs of the business. And more importantly, you need to find the person who can translate the needs of the business, the goals, those bets you’re making, translate that language. It’s very unique to every organization, right? Everyone’s kind of got a different definition of what they want to try. And they need to take that and make it, translate it into the sort of the capabilities of the tech stack. Either the ones that you have today or the ones that you still need to invest in. And the only people that are really, really good at that are marketing ops professionals. But you need to like stop treating them like a service department and give them the opportunity to to fill that void, right? And so that’s Yeah. That’s how you can kind of move move away from that and start start thinking of them as, product managers and architects to to translate that language.
[00:06:38] Greg Kihlstrom: That sounds a lot more strategic than again, the the other the other framing. I mean, certainly there is the day-to-day work and, you know, in any function of of marketing or or elsewhere, there’s there’s gonna be a tactical function as well. But, yeah, I mean, do you do you think that is the just the prevalence of marketing technology in in the the the practice of marketing? is that what has been driving now AI and, you know, all sorts of other things as well. But like, is that what’s driving this kind of need for a more strategic approach or what what do you see there?
[00:07:14] Mike Rizzo: I think the I think AI is accelerating this change. what everybody is starting to recognize, or has already recognized at this point is that, the only way to really leverage AI is with some pretty quality inputs. The context really matters, the data itself really matters. and so ultimately the best way to make all of that possible is, by having like a a nice approach, a standard, sort of well thought out approach to orchestrate these motions. and and then there’s integration layers around all of that. Well, you know, it’s fine to say that you want to adopt AI capabilities in a native solution or start, you know, weaving across, the tech stack. But to do that strategically, takes a lot of, you know, technical understanding, both on the capabilities of the platforms, but also of the unique nature of the business and who needs what information at any given point in time, right? you know, you may have BDRs or SDRs in in your org, you may not, right? and and and if you’re just sort of like doing a B2C motion, there are totally different orchestration plays in which you want to surface, the right data to the right people at the right time. And so I think AI is just accelerating it, more than anything else and it’s, it’s becoming apparent that, you know, I I think I I to to challenge your listeners or your viewers, wherever you may be, you know, absorbing this content today, ask your leadership team, or your board, if you have the chance to ask them, you know, who’s in charge of the go-to-market tech stack today? Right? And and I would venture to guess most of them would be like, I don’t know what you’re even talking about. You know, marketing has a marketing tool, sales has sales, CS has CS, whatever. Support has support. Yeah. and the reality is is that we’ve been building business a long time with leaders across technology. In fact, if you’re building a software product, you have a product manager and an architect and an engineering team and and you’ve really intentionally built out systems that are meant to scale, but for some reason, we’ve never taken the time to think about the entirety of the go-to-market stack as some, you know, a thing that needs that same type of person to to hold the reins and say, well, don’t don’t those two things do the same thing? Why are we investing in one of those tools?
[00:09:54] Greg Kihlstrom: Well, and I think I think part of this too is, you know, it’s it’s the the people process platform thing where, you know, they they buy a tool, they stick it in and they think, you know, oh, now all our problems are solved, and, you know, we’ve all lived through this and cleaned up after this and and everything. So, you know, to me, maybe they may not be the only part piece in this puzzle, but I think Marketing Ops plays that role of, you know, to your earlier point, needing to know what the technology is and how it functions, but also how it needs to be used, right? And I think that that last part is the piece that I think gets everybody, right? And and so I think Marketing Ops has a unique role in in that to play, right?
[00:10:36] Mike Rizzo: They, you know, to use other analogies and terms, right, they can see the forest for the trees, if you give them the time to be able to do so. Now, now to the earlier comments you were making, no, this does not mean that your marketing ops person who’s in charge of campaign execution and delivery should suddenly become your product manager and architect, right? That is not a, you know, a transition you just do overnight. nor does it mean that the person who can evolve into that role, should vacate those responsibilities. In fact, they’ll probably find a way to leverage some agentic workflows to support them in some of their capabilities, but ultimately, my gut and what I’ve experienced so far in the market tells me that they’re gonna go build a service, a effectively their own product, and something like a Claude or an AI, agentic sort of co-work situation, and then they’re gonna hand that off because they’re a subject matter expert in your business, your go-to-market motion, and your tech stack. And they’re gonna say, hey, I built this little service engine to enable our team to do something way more effectively. And if I had hired somebody net new and tasked them with this thing to go build this, that wouldn’t have worked. But I built it, and now I can hand it off to someone who’s technically capable to go fill the role that I just left, and I’m gonna go work on architecting more go-to-market systems that support the business, right? But I still need somebody to own what I was previously doing. And so, sorry, folks, like AI’s not gonna totally replace, people. In fact, I would argue that you need, you know, maybe not as many people, but you do need people to manage the technology to make it really hum.
[00:13:22] Greg Kihlstrom: Agentic certainly, you know, it’s kind of the the, the buzzword du jour, right? But, but, you know, it’s real. And I’m I’m seeing some real, you know, even in the, in some initial use cases, seeing some real potential there. So, you know, there’s hype for sure, but there’s also some real tangible potential value. What does that look like, you know, because we’re we’re talking about, you know, we’ve always been talking about managing people. We’ve been talking about managing platforms and their function and and and all that. And, you know, is should we should Marketing Ops and and others perhaps, should be thinking about managing agents in a different way than managing a platform? Is this, you know, is this an, you know, because some people refer to it as like you’re gonna manage AI whatever, you know, you want whatever attributes you want to attribute to them, I guess, just for lack of a anthropomorphizing them or whatever, I guess you could say. Like, how far down, you know, from your perspective, like, how far down that path do should we be going? Or at the end of the day, is it just software or, I don’t know, somewhere in between.
[00:14:29] Mike Rizzo: That’s probably somewhere in between, at the end of the day. But what, I would say we’re going to be managing, workflows. It’s it’s it’s really what it is, right? and there is a level of intelligence to these workflows now that we’ve just, been able to to access more readily now, thanks to AI. marketing operations professionals have been doing AB branching logic and lead scoring and ICP analysis and all these things to try to pull together correlative and causal sort of situations to help surface business for years. Yeah. the difference now is that we can do that on on a scale that is far more robust than it ever has been, and, because we have the foundational knowledge of of how to do that, we’re really now, understanding that, okay, I see how a workflow is better when I, you know, build different steps in the logic. And I know now that if I have one agent that is dedicated to a particular service, I will get better results if I string that together to say, now you hand it to this other one that is better at this thing. Yeah. And and so you will get to a place where, you’re sort of managing multiple agent workflows. but I I think it’s, it ultimately is a product at the end of the day. Like, you know, set aside my my my previous example of like your entire tech stack is a product, like, I’ll give you a really concrete one if I if I may. Yeah. You know, I’m kind of rambling here, Greg, but. Oh, no. God. The the product that I built, at marketingops.com, we offer membership. Okay? we we make it pretty pretty affordable, to try to invest in your career. It’s like, shoot, if you love marketing ops and technology or any part of the technology ecosystem in marketing, it’s like 350 bucks for the year to join. Great. We got a pretty sizable database, and lots of them have not ever signed up for membership, and, you know, to be fair, we haven’t really focused too hard on it. And so I said, hey, we need to really start focusing on this piece of of the organization. And and I brought this up with a colleague of mine who runs a similar organization for partners. And he says, you know, I said, hey, I’m planning to hire somebody offshore for this to help me out. And he goes, well, why wouldn’t you just use an agent? Right? And build your own little AI agent to do that. And I was like, okay, fine. So here I am, Greg, I’m working through my my Claude sort of project. It knows everything about my business. I’m saying, hey, I need you to build documentation and a system to help me onboard a person. Actually, quick pivot, we’re gonna make this a agent, a co-work agent situation. Fast forward, it’s done. I point the co-worker to the folder and I say execute this this steps in the folder. It’s magic, right? It goes into my database, I have a hooked up to HubSpot. It finds the 10 most likely candidates who might want membership and personalizes an email to each one of those people and drafts them in my Gmail inbox. And at this point, this is where everybody on LinkedIn publishes and they go, I figured it out. I did it. Cha. I just spent 12 hours. I’m I’m a superhero. You know, I am God, whatever, right? Right, right.
But the reality is, on the other side of that execution, it was about 80% accurate. I could probably work on it more to make it better. Yeah. But what I realized, Greg, and for all of you listeners out there, if you ever like task yourself with trying to figure this stuff out, the reality is that I am not gonna have the time to optimize that system anymore. Yeah. So I can have it run a cron job every day scheduled 9:00 in the morning my time, draft me 10 emails, I’ll review them, I’ll hit send. But am I going to tell it if it was successful? Am I going to have it suggest ways to optimize things to me? Am I going to suggest ways to optimize it? Should it be two emails, three emails instead of one? Should I somehow signal that that person actually signed up? How will it know? It is not being taught or trained to look for any of that information, and certainly I could write those steps. But those are all things that I now need to go spend time on, and this is what I was saying before, where I said, hey, I’m an SME in my business, I know what we need to accomplish, I’ve built this tool. I now need somebody to go focus on optimizing it in pursuit of the core KPI for our organization, which is membership. Yeah. Right? And so like, just really holistically illustrating the point that like, this stuff’s all great, but you still need somebody to keep making it better. Yeah. And maybe one day the costs of compute will drop enough to where the agent can just like self-optimize constantly. But today that’s not the case, right? You have limits on your credits in your systems, so. Yeah. Also, there’s just things that happen in conversation and in the real world where you’re like, you know what, today’s a really bad day to send those emails because, you know, I don’t know, there’s a a pandemic was announced, like, let’s go back in time, right? Like, who knows? Like, there’s things that just happen, right? And so, a human should be in the loop.
[00:19:35] Greg Kihlstrom: I know what you mean. I mean, I yeah, this, you know, I I have a I have a lean team that runs this show. Even, you know, it’s but it’s highly, highly automated and yet, to your point, I there’s things where, you know, when I have time, you know, that whenever I which will never happen, but, you know, when I have time, I’d like to tweak this one thing to make this one thing a little better, you know, but yeah, it’s, you’d have to have a system that listens for everything and knows everything. And then, you know, that’s that’s not possible now it’s possible to make some automations, you know, or some improvements at at scale, but but yeah, agreed, agreed. actually, I want to talk a little bit more about your community actually and and, you know, I I know you I know you mentioned it, but, you know, certainly this is a, you know, marketing operations definitely not a new profession, but I think the the approach that you’re taking with it and just the visibility that you’re giving to it is is unique. And I just wanted to get your your perspective on, you know, how has in addition to the the automation and things that you mentioned, you know, how has building a community kind of changed over over the years since you’ve started this?
[00:20:47] Mike Rizzo: No, it’s a it’s a good question. I So I I first started, just to like touch on my background, again briefly for for everyone. my my role had always been in sort of B2B software companies, often on the demand gen and marketing op side. but I boomeranged back to one of my earlier startups to help them build their first customer community and advisory board program. and there was a lot that goes into, to to that, taking it from zero to one. I think the it’s funny, I sound like a broken record, but like when it comes to building any type of, community, it really is the same thing as building, a service or a product for the market. The best way that you can possibly do that is to talk to your end users, right? And so, the things that that we are doing, in our community today are probably sort of like a best practice, motion for anyone looking to build community. And it’s just talking to people and saying, hey, categorically, you know, what do you want to talk about? Right? How should we structure this in an information sort of information architecture manner, right? How do you want to consume content and engage with others? Who do you want to engage with? How can I best facilitate those kinds of engagements, right? And, and you’ll quickly, you know, come to discover that there should be a channel, in our case, you know, there should be a channel for AI, and there should be a channel for analytics, and then there should be a specific channel for HubSpot and Marketo and Eloqua and all, you know, Braze and all these software companies. and so the approach to building community hasn’t changed too too much over the last, you know, I don’t know, 10 to 15 years or so. And community had its little flare up hot moment, you know, about six years ago or so. and I and I think the investment in a community just needs to be done with great intention. just if you if you can, take the time, if you have any inclination to build your own community or you’re building one on behalf of your company, take the time to go look up what CMX had popularized. So it’s a community for community managers. Yeah. The meta community. Yeah. It’s the meta community. they had popularized a model called spaces. I still think it’s a pretty sound framework. and and it’s an acronym or or whatever, for, effectively what type of community are you gonna build? Is it a service? Is it a product? Is it an advocacy? you know, is it meant to basically be lead gen or brand focused? Is it attached to your brand or not? And and then don’t stray from the decision that you make and lean into it. For us, we, we exist as a tech agnostic sort of, you know, practitioner community. So a community for professionals. which means that we’re not really in service of generating leads for a software company or anything like that. We exist for our members at the end of the day. but I would also exercise a ton of caution, if you’re thinking about building a community, it’s just, it needs, I think out of all possible go-to-market motions, it can be incredibly fruitful, similar to like an SEO play. It’s just it takes a long time, to see the fruit from the tree. Right? And, and it also takes a lot of effort, a lot of human capital effort to do that because, suffice to say, people are connecting to people and you should probably have a person to help them, you know, do that. but it’s a very worthwhile, investment to make. So, sorry if that didn’t really answer your question. I kind of branched a few places, but.
[00:24:34] Greg Kihlstrom: I think you’ve built something great and and definitely look forward to to seeing it continue to grow. I mean, marketing ops is definitely something that I, deal work in and and around, pretty much mo most days. So it’s I think it’s great to to have a a place like that. So, yeah, great, great job with that.
[00:24:53] Mike Rizzo: I appreciate it, man. Yeah. We’re we’re really excited. we hope that soon that question that I posed earlier for all of you to to challenge your leadership and board with. we hope that the answer to who’s in charge of your go-to-market tech stack will be somebody, they will know. It’s someone that came from marketing ops and, and hopefully it’s somebody who ended up getting certified, through our program. But, even without that, I think you’re all, if you’re in that role, or you’re interested in it, you have more capabilities than, than are currently being impressed upon you, to go exercise. So, we’re excited to help hopefully carve a new career path, and create a new new foundation of leaders for for organizations. It’ll be fun.
[00:25:38] Greg Kihlstrom: That’s that’s great. Well, Mike, always great to talk with you. thanks again for joining. I got one last question for you before we go. What do you do to stay agile in your role and how do you find a way to do it consistently?
[00:25:50] Mike Rizzo: I try to tune in to as as much sort of of my broader ecosystem signals as I can. and so I take time to, to to basically put in big time blocks, to do deep work and and stay focused, while also allowing me the space to to choose whether or not I want to, you know, go deep on a project or, sort of explore what’s going on in the world. And so my my ability to stay more agile is creating those intentional time blocks to either work or learn, from shows like this or some of the, you know, I like to listen to books. So, that’s that’s that’s how I tend to try to absorb information. not the least of which also comes from our actual community members who are talking shop every day, so.
