Is your marketing operations team set up to be a strategic driver of growth, or are they stuck managing tools and putting out fires?

Today, we’re joined by Mike Rizzo, Founder of MarketingOps.com. Mike is here to discuss the 2024 State of the Marketing Operations Professional Report, which is based on insights from over 600 MOps professionals. This report sheds light on the evolving role of marketing ops, the challenges they face, and the opportunities for B2B leaders to elevate the function as a strategic driver of growth.

About Mike Rizzo

Mike Rizzo, is the Community-led Founder of MO Pros and MarketingOps.com. With his extensive background in marketing Mike helped build, launch, manage and optimize Mavenlink’s first-ever user community and Client Advisory Board programs. He is the founder of MO Pros – The Community for Marketing Operations Pros that is growing with an average of 110 new members every month. He is also the co-host of the podcast called Ops Cast by MO Pros. As the founder of MarketingOps.com, Mike is taking a community-led approach to building resources that are purpose-built for MO Pros.

Resources

MarketingOps website: https://www.marketingops.com

The B2B Agility podcast website: https://www.b2bagility.com

Sign up for The Agile Brand newsletter here: https://www.gregkihlstrom.com

Get the latest news and updates on LinkedIn here: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/b2b-agility/

Check out The Agile Brand Guide website with articles, insights, and Martechipedia, the wiki for marketing technology: https://www.agilebrandguide.com

Transcript

Note: This was AI-generated and only lightly edited

Greg Kihlstrom:
Is your marketing operations team set up to be a strategic driver of growth or are they stuck managing tools and putting out fires? Today we’re joined by Mike Rizzo, founder of marketingops.com. Mike is here to discuss the 2024 state of the marketing operations professional report, which is based on insights from over 600 MOps professionals. This report sheds light on the evolving role of marketing ops, the challenges they face, and the opportunities for B2B leaders to elevate the function as a strategic driver of growth. Welcome to the show, Mike. Hey, thanks for having me.

Mike Rizzo: I appreciate it.

Greg Kihlstrom: Always good to talk shop about marketing ops. Hey, you know, I like it too. So we’re definitely looking forward to this. Before we dive in, though, why don’t you start by telling us a little bit about your background and your role at marketingops.com.

Mike Rizzo: Sure, yeah. The brief version, for those that haven’t heard it, is I got my start in marketing, mark tech, really, on the ad tech side of things. Learned all about ad networks, retargeting, and pixels, and all the fun things. And from there, got a healthy respect for what it’s like to write some HTML and do a little bit of coding. told me that that wasn’t as daunting as I once thought it was. And I sort of parlayed that experience about the broader sort of advertising technology landscape and some of this like new sense of comfort with HTML to, well, maybe I could build some emails and eventually tried to build out some email, like, you know, HTML emails and websites. Took my first opportunity at a B2B SaaS company during like 2017-ish area. And I was in a demand gen sort of field marketing role, mixing like multiple hats as one does as a startup, doing all things marketing operations and demand gen. And so I was building out a full tech stack for webinars and you name it. Most of my career has been in B2B SaaS, startups and ad tech. I’m based here in Orange County, California and often was a team of one. So, you know, people would sort of roll their eyes back in their head if I came to them with a problem that I was having. And I endeavored to start a little channel on Slack. And now my role today is to figure out how to best support the elevation and sort of advocacy for how important this role is, this marketing operations role, because it’s, you know, it’s a bit lonely at times when you’re a team of one. And so now today we’ve got thousands of members in the community, literally like 6,300 people hanging out in Slack, talk and shop every day. And, you know, thousands more that watch all of our content or listen to our podcasts, all that kind of stuff. And so I like to say now you can go from a team of one to team of a thousand pretty quickly.

Greg Kihlstrom: Nice. Nice. That’s great. Yeah. Well, and definitely, you know, marketing ops has grown quite a bit over the years, right? So, you know, it’s, it’s turned into a, you know, a respected, not that it was disreputable before, but it’s turned into a respected career path. And, you know, it’s, what do you think has driven this, this transformation over the years? And, you know, I want to also want to talk about the 2024 report, but you know, what, what do you think has driven this transformation over the years?

Mike Rizzo: Yeah, I mean, look, we’re at a bit of an inflection point with marketing operations in general. So I would say the term marketing operations was really born out of B2B SaaS, right? It’s sort of comes from the B2B side. If you look at the B2C landscape, you’ve seen marketing technologists for a little bit longer. In fact, they often just refer to themselves as things like lifecycle marketer, for example. And so for those of you out there that are sort of, that fall into the category of a lifecycle marketer or B2C sort of brand, you’ve probably been doing marketing technology and operations for even longer than some of us that now have this role marketing operations by title. And the B2B side of things, the complexity of trying to understand the lifecycle management and You know, all the demand waterfalls that were popularized, of course, over the years. We, we were given this sort of greenfield opportunity earlier, right? About 10 years ago or so, maybe a little more. To say, we have to figure out how all this stuff works and try to apply these concepts in theory, right? These, these demand waterfall principles, MQLs to SQLs to opportunities, all of the life cycle that you’re trying to manage and figure out how to stitch together this go-to-market technology, you know, stack, right? But really, when we got started, it was just marketing automation. And so we were just kind of figuring out just the marketing automation piece of that. Fast forward, part of the shift today is that we’re not trying to stumble and fumble our way through how do we just make this stuff, send emails and do things. We’ve, we’ve reached a new tipping point where it’s like, well, wait a minute. How does a business go to market today? How do we achieve the outcomes that we’re looking to achieve? And fundamentally, we all understand that it is not done without technology in the modern go-to-market business, right? And so now it’s about the strategy and the opportunity for marketing operations. The strategic impact is really being influenced by, okay, the market understands that this technology, A, is definitely here to stay. And B is critical to your ability to go to market. So I think that’s sort of the thing that’s cascaded, um, into this new era for marketing operations, which is, you know, allowing us to be seen as more strategic. Um, I, I will say like we, a thousand percent were, were the, Hey, push the button and hit send on the emails, right? Like that was our, our job was to figure out how to do that. There wasn’t a ton of like, is it the right way to do that yet? But there was always the challenge of, is this the right way to do this? Should we be thinking about this deployment strategy a little differently? And now we’re reaching a new point where we have the opportunity to ask those questions and push back on the organization to do it the right way.

Greg Kihlstrom: Well, yeah. And that’s where, you know, I’m going to pull a few stats from the, the 2024 city of the marketing operations report here. So, you know, one of those is right in line with this, with, um, 37% of marketing ops professionals reporting that they have that strategic voice that you’re talking about in, in decision-making. you know, it’s 37, you know, there’s, there’s still room to, to, to grow there, um, upwards, but you know, that’s still to your point from several years back being the, the button pusher or whatever, that that’s still some, some significant growth. What does this shift mean for the future of the discipline?

Mike Rizzo: I think first and foremost, it means that you, if you’re let’s, let’s just. Two different lenses to look at this through, right? If you’re a leader of a marketing organization or just a business in general, your opportunity now is to go find your, your expert and go to market technology, which is now this marketing operations professional and ask them. Okay, I make widgets or I sell services, right? Whatever it is that you’re doing. Here’s fundamentally the thing that I do and I do it well. What I don’t know how to do well is package that all up into a tech stack and deploy it into the market and make sure that I get the feedback so that I understand what’s working and what’s not. Your job is to go as the business leader or marketing leaders to go hire the individual that can build you a go-to-market tech stack of the future. that’s in line with your ability to get market feedback on a consistent basis and create a nice customer journey, right? For the marketing operations professionals, that should be like, you know, your eyebrows are going up, you’re getting a big smile on your face because you’re really excited about the opportunity to go build effectively a product. in the market, right? Your product is now made up of many tools and many systems, and you get to stitch those together in really unique ways because every business has its own unique fingerprint and its own unique motion. And it’s an exciting time for you to now go and sort of charge forward and think about how can I align to your goals, executive, right? what are you looking to achieve this year and how can I best support you and build a product that supports this organization’s ultimate outcome, which is like, you know, renewals and net new customers, new logos, that kind of stuff. So it’s, it’s just a, it’s an exciting time depending on which side you’re looking at, right? If you’re a practitioner, step up and ask the questions on, on how you can Say, Hey, let’s optimize our go-to-market motion and build a go-to-market product. And if you’re a leader say, Hey, I’m looking to optimize my go-to-market strategy and I would like to work with you to do that. Yeah.

Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah. So that, because that’s, that is the flip side of the, you know, with 37% feeling like they have a strategic voice. There’s probably, I mean, I’m sure there’s some in there that those leaders or the execs are not seeing the value necessarily, but I think, you know, for those others, I think that’s great advice to like bring them to the table. Right. I mean, what, what advice would you have to like, what, what are some symptoms of, a greater need for, you know, strategy and marketing ops that those leaders that may be skeptical or don’t even know what they don’t know, like what’s a symptom that could point them in the right direction of like, Hey, let’s bring the marketing ops folks to the table.

Mike Rizzo: Well, yeah, it’s a good question. Usually. Usually it shows up in the form of distrust or lack of clarity on sort of aligned definition of your go-to-market business like strategy, right? So like that was a lot of like fluff words to say, very concretely, if there is a data point that you’re looking at, let’s say the conversion rate between stage one to stage two in your pipeline, or maybe your buyer’s journey stage one to stage two, And you don’t trust that those numbers are coming from a particular place. It’s probably time for you to bring in your marketing operations team and figure out how to create a more trustworthy go-to-market operating model. They’re, in a lot of ways, they will act a little bit as, I think the, you know, the turn of phrase is to be Switzerland, right? Someone that’s a bit of a neutral party. And to say, okay, well, do we all agree that we’re going to measure success in this way? And they can be that sort of purveyor of truth to say, no, no, no, this is what we said that the plan was. to be able to go measure our capabilities. If you have a lot of question marks about where data come from or what’s working or what’s not working, or even when you’re presented with something and you’re like, I don’t know if that’s true or not. It’s probably a good idea to just break into your marketing operations person and start having more discussion earlier in the process about how to go to market.

Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, no, I, I think that’s great. And I think there’s a lot of organizations that might. I mean, I’ve seen it a little of that, right. It’s yeah.

Mike Rizzo: For sure. I mean, it’s really hard to trust every single number that you’re looking at. I mean, I I’m running an organization today and you know, I’m like, Hmm. Who owns the foundational sort of data layer that’s feeding this machine right now that we’re looking at, this report that we’re looking at? Right. Is it me? Oh, shoot. Well, then in that case, I don’t trust it.

Greg Kihlstrom: Right, right. So another thing from the report, talking about employee engagement. metrics and some of those potential struggles there. There’s some challenges with engagement metrics, concerns over compensation, role clarity, feeling valued, you know, touched on this a little bit maybe and just some of the lack of clarity from the from leadership and stuff. But how can leaders address some of these issues so that, you know, the teams are not only doing valuable work, but feeling valued?

Mike Rizzo: Yeah, I mean, it’s, it’s a little, it’s sort of twofold. I think it’s hard. Marketing operations is a difficult thing to, to sort of wrap your head around as a, as an executive in some ways, because they’re, they’re not directly tied to revenue, right? They’re, they’re not like creating campaigns in the sense that they’re coming up with the next thing that they want to push into the market. They’re certainly not literally filling the top of the funnel. They’re, in many cases, they’re optimizing the delivery of that thing, and they’re optimizing your ability to be able to measure whatever it is that you think you want to try. And without it, you’re going to end up with a lot of question marks like we were just talking about. If you’re a practitioner, I think it’s important for you to advocate for establishing an effective sort of product roadmap. Right. And, and saying, Hey, based on the business’s goals, here’s how I’d like to make sure I impact our ability to go to market. And I, you know, I’m going to focus on enriching our pipeline at, at the top of the funnel to be able to have a trickle down impact on our ability to convert more leads as they come in. Right. I’m going to establish new mechanisms to get a feedback loop as we get further down the pipeline for closed loss deals and leverage a new AI model to be able to feed that data back to our marketing team to say, Hey, the leads and where they came from. And some of the closed loss reasons are now, um, you know, surfacing so that you can have a better go to market strategy and create some messaging to curtail some of those maybe maybe responses or what have you. That’s a product mindset, right? And so your job is to say, I’m gonna try to attack some of what I see as challenges or at least lay out my plan to support the business. And you’ll start to earn more of that opportunity and that trust and that feeling valued. The reality is that if you’re not able to articulate some level of what value you want to bring to an, I mean, in any role, right? This isn’t just marketing operations. If you can’t articulate the value that you want to bring to an organization, then you are going to run into some challenges around, you know, do I feel valued in my role or what have you? On the flip side, managers, these are incredibly, you know, executives and managers who have the opportunity to work with a marketing operations professional. They’re incredibly strategic thinkers. Every aspect of what goes into building a go-to-market tech stack I mean, down to whether or not you make the field a plain text field that you’re going to ask for inputs on, or a pick list, or a checkbox, or a Boolean, that has a strategic value to the organization. And whether or not the field should even be created, because maybe it exists somewhere else. There is a decision tree that happens every single time, and these are In many, many cases, it’s a different form of creativity, and I encourage you to lean on them because they’re sort of your strategists in a lot of ways, right? I don’t know. I know I’m on my own soapbox about this, and I obviously represent a community full of these professionals, but… There is no one better suited to try to translate the needs of the business to the modern technology stack today. Like just period. Yeah.

Greg Kihlstrom: So then, yeah, no, I agreed. And, you know, I think from a leadership standpoint as well, you know, another another one of the things from the report was just marketing ops professionals reporting insufficient training opportunities. So, you know, looking at this from a leader perspective that doesn’t know marketing ops inside and out. It’s like, you could go down the, well, there’s some project management, there’s some marketing, there’s some business. It’s like, where should organizations invest in upskilling their marketing ops teams?

Mike Rizzo: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, beyond sending them to our conference, you know, not, not trying to just plug for what we’re working on, but obviously we would love for you to send them to our community and for them to network with other professionals. Lo and behold, when you go from the era that we came from, which was stumbling and fumbling our way through how to use this technology to, you know, often being small teams. You end up with a group of people that, um, are just ready to help others. And, and what’s interesting about our community in this, this profession in general is that like you, you’re almost literally built to help people. Like if Greg, you asked me, you know, how do I go do X? My, my inclination is to try to figure out how to help you do that. Right? Like I’m going to like start to Google and my, you know, find my network and help you achieve your goal. Like I’m a problem solver. And so when you put your marketing operations professional in a community full of problem solvers, all of a sudden problems get solved really quickly. And so upskilling in this way, we’re working really hard to bring in effective new educational paths around just sort of like database management and integrations, how to think about your product roadmap, like a product manager. bring in the concepts, like the foundational concepts of what it means to be in finance, so that this professional can now have an even more well-rounded understanding of, okay, how does a business recognize revenue? In what different ways does a business make money? So that as I go to build out your tech stack, I can have a better conversation about how I think you as the executive are probably perceiving the business. I would encourage you to, beyond sending them to our stuff, I would encourage you to let them, of course, go earn their certifications and a wide array of platforms. The more that they can understand the broader landscape of technology, the more they can enable the business, right? So there’s certifications from all kinds of MarTech vendors out there. I would encourage you to let them sort of like spread their wings and try them even if they’re not currently using those platforms. The understanding of how they work can impact implementation and methodology and framework on how they might implement something even though they’re not using that same platform today. They’re seeing the art of the possible in another one. They’re saying, oh, you know what? I could recreate some of that in this other way. even though we don’t have that tool today. So I would encourage you to also let them go sort of explore some of those other things. And please encourage them to go pick up some of those core sort of foundational elements. Coincidentally, a lot of our community does not come from marketing as a background. I take for granted all the time that I went to a business school and I got an emphasis in marketing. Many, many, many of the members in our community come from psychology, they were bakers, they were teachers before, they were all kinds of different professions and they found their way, by accident, into this thing and they fell in love with it. And so there are aspects of You know what, let them go learn the foundations of marketing too, the four P’s and you know, some of the core principles of just marketing in general. I’m sure they picked them up along the way, but give them the opportunity to go learn some of that foundational stuff too, because it’ll just make them that much more impactful to your organization. Yeah.

Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah. It definitely, it definitely seems like being able to connect all those dots is kind of part of the job. You know, it’s part of the value, but. that those professionals can bring. And, you know, one thing coming up more and more often is data and, you know, data-driven initiatives. Certainly the report shows, you know, 88% of respondents are investing in or planning to invest in data-driven initiatives. I’m sure AI has a lot to do with that, but that’s not the only reason. But certainly, you know, AI requires good data to do better things and all that. What does an emphasis on data mean for the marketing ops role in general? How can teams ensure they’re making the most of their data?

Mike Rizzo: It’s a good question. Data is, at the end of the day, it is everything to a business, right? I mean, we sort of touched on it earlier in the show here where we said, look, if you’re looking at a report and you’re questioning whether or not that is a valid, you know, statement or fact, right? It all boils down to the data and what’s feeding into the engine. AI, you can’t escape it. It is absolutely a core like part of the conversation, it is only going to be as good as the data that you feed it within reason, right? Like obviously it can operate more intelligently than we can, especially if it’s trained in a particular way to understand just models and relational data and whether or not there is a factor of influence to a particular end goal, right? So you might, you might be able to work with an AI that is specifically trained to say, uh, I would like the outcome to be that, that the customer is assigned to a closed one deal. And now you need to look at the relationship of all these data points to the ability to achieve that goal. Are there any commonalities? And so, so yes, like you could just feed it all your data and ask those questions. Right. Uh, but within, within that’s sort of like within reason, ideally your feeding it the things that matter most to the organization that you’re all paying attention to anyway. And so when you ask about the emphasis on data and how do teams sort of ensure that they’re making the most of it, really it comes down to just definitions and alignment and what do you want to track. And starting to learn, you know, I don’t want to pretend like you can just be a prompt engineer and get all the answers from these AI tools, but starting to learn how to best leverage how these new tools in this new era that we’re in interact with data and, and, and make sure that those data pipelines that you’re, that you have access to, right, are feeding into some sort of system that allows you to create those queries. If they are all operating in different silos, that’s going to end up being a little bit more difficult to be able to get the answers to the business questions that you have.

Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, totally. So, yeah. Yeah. So, we talked a bit about leadership’s relationship with marketing ops, but I want to talk about the collaboration with other teams as well. So, you know, whether it’s sales, RevOps, IT, other parts of the business even, you know, it seems like collaboration is improving, but always room for growth, right? What are you seeing as some of the barriers to alignment and, you know, how can organizations, whether it’s leadership or people elsewhere in the org, how can they foster better cross-functional collaboration?

Mike Rizzo: I mean, first, seek to understand, right? That’s a message for everybody, whether you’re in marketing operations, rev ops, IT, sales, you know, it doesn’t matter. Seek to understand, try to find a shared language. Those are probably, I think, said differently, like the barriers are there’s a lack of understanding. And there’s a lack of shared language. And so if you can try to solve for some of those things, you know, you sort of heard me say it a few times already, right? Like creating a shared definition of what success looks like, that will start to break down a lot of those barriers. I will say you’re inevitably going to run into competing priorities, right? There’s sort of this I need to close a certain number of deals on the sales side. I need to generate a certain amount of reach and leads and brand awareness on the marketing side. On the IT side, I need to have a secure and stable infrastructure that doesn’t allow for any leakage or risk of all kinds of things. And so these are all barriers that if either of those groups don’t understand the other’s challenges, you’re going to run into alignment issues, right? I think for the marketing operations professional out there listening to this, it’s your job to figure out what their sort of these other departmental goals are, right. And what they’re looking to achieve. And it is also your job to figure out how to articulate and communicate sort of your limitations. You know, somebody says, Hey, let’s roll out ABM, you know, this year, you’re going to need to figure out how to stitch that together between marketing sales and IT. It’s putting on the size of your organization. Uh, and yeah, that’s a, that’s a product job, right? You got to figure out what their user needs are, what your tech stack looks like, what the feature deployment schedule looks like, all of that stuff. And so, you know, right down the barriers.

Greg Kihlstrom: It seems like the, the, the challenge is also kind of the solution in that. marketing ops, as you were saying earlier, it that’s kind of their role. And it’s, I would imagine it’s the kind of the person that gravitates towards that role of trying to connect dots and solve problems. And it doesn’t mean that every marketing ops person has that down, but it seems like it’s part of the role and good, you know, good marketing ops professionals want to solve those problems as opposed to be barriers. You know, there, there’s other, you know, stereotypical departments that might, you know, be perceived as, as having barriers and silos and, and so on and so forth. But marketing ops just doesn’t seem that way because I don’t think they can be right. Yeah.

Mike Rizzo: I mean, it’s a, it’s a great, it’s a great call out. There’s two things there. You’re right. Now in the landscape, I don’t think they can be a barrier. They need to be the gateway to make, it’s like they’re more of like the art of the possible people.

Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah.

Mike Rizzo: Right. Marketing operations often in the past and still today. is seen as like the no people. Like, how do you say no without saying no? Which is going to hold true still, right? Because if it’s just, if it’s just a pure limitation of like, there’s not enough resources to be able to make something happen, like you have to figure out how to do that. and show the reasons why. But like, you know, they’re not telling you, no, I can’t send you an email or send an email for you because they don’t want to. It’s usually because there’s some sort of actual limitation. You know, you bought the list and it’s illegal. Right, right. So, so historically there has been this sense of mops is sort of a barrier. They slow things down, but they do it within reason. Yeah. But today, you know, we, we hear the term Rev Ops everywhere. Uh, I often make the argument that the Rev Ops category is really a marketing ops person has the best opportunity to grow into that Rev Ops role compared to pretty much any other role. Cause really, when you think about the end to end funnel, Like everything that happens before the top of the funnel down to the end, there are, and the renewal, right? Like someone buying again, there is no role that is tasked with trying to figure out how to measure that whole thing other than marketing operations. Everybody else is like focused on a little piece, a very complex piece of their business and not to dismiss it, but it is usually just a slice of the funnel. of the bow tie or whatever version of your funnel you want to look at. Right. Um, but mops is like literally tasked with, okay, yeah, we need to be able to track people that are visiting our website and de-anonymize and then enrich. And then as they’re going through the funnel, I need to measure the whole thing. Then I need to know who renews. Like it is your job. That is rev ops, man. Cause everything, and I want to be able to attribute it to revenue anyway. So soapbox stepping down again, but yes.

Greg Kihlstrom: Well, so I mean, along those lines, and you know, as we wrap up here, you know, certainly you have a great purview with the community that you’re that you’re part of and that you’ve built, you know, looking at 2025 and beyond, you know, what are you excited about as in the evolution of marketing ops? And, you know, but what advice would you have to those that are, you know, that are that are part of that community?

Mike Rizzo: For sure. Um, and most excited about the opportunity to sort of seize the moment when it comes to certainly AI and leveraging this, this sort of new era. I’m definitely not alone. I’m borrowing words from some very amazing marketing operations professionals in our community. Paul Wilson comes to mind when I talk about this part of, of any talk track when I’m asked this question and yeah, you’ve been doing. your version of AI for a long time in marketing operations. Like lead scoring was like your best bet at trying to figure out how to prioritize and optimize a lead funnel. Now there’s just a machine that can do it even faster. You have an incredible opportunity to go just take advantage of moving even faster with, with these technologies. And so I’m most excited about the landscape of how quickly things are gonna change. And I would say my advice to you is to lean in, start asking the hard questions and figure out what your AI roadmap is gonna be. And if you’re a part of our community, definitely participate in some of the workshops and the conversations we’re gonna be having exactly to that effect, because yeah, the time is now.