The Marketing Operations Strategist - How to quickly tell if you have (or are considering joining) a healthy marketing operations function

Hey! 👋

Hope you’re doing well — it’s been a wild summer for me, and I had to take a little pause on the newsletter while I started a new job and put the finishing touches on my course. The good news is that I’m back and am more inspired than ever! 😄

Some exciting upcoming topics I’m currently working on, coming soon to the newsletter:

• My Marketing Operations Maturity Model

• My 30/60/90 Day Marketing Operations Ramp Up Plan

• Marketing Mixed-Model Measurement (IMO the future of attribution)

• My take on upcoming hot topic martech vendors

I’m also testing a new time for sending this newsletter based on your feedback. Hopefully this edition hits you when you’re in-office and marketing operations is top-of-mind!

This week, let’s talk about what I look for while trying to determine if a company has a healthy marketing operations function. Why is this important? Because if you’re considering a new job or a new client, heeding these warnings can save you a lot of trouble, stress, and grief (how do I know? Oh, a friend told me… 🙃 or maybe I learned these the hard way, LOL).

How to suss out the state of marketing operations:

1. Are marketing leaders able to understand and report on what is happening in the business?

This will tell me the state of operations within the organization very quickly; if a VP of Marketing or CMO can’t quickly pull up a dynamic report of business results (think: KPIs, goals, revenue markers), they are in a bad (or at least messy) place. Most companies have investors, so they have to report spend vs revenue to someone at least quarterly. If it takes hours of manual data work to pull together a spreadsheet, I know that the data is a mess and, by relation, the operations function is likely a mess as well.

2. What is the state of the team’s documentation?

Documentation is a hot topic because it’s so hard to maintain — HOWEVER, if a team doesn’t have any documentation, or the last piece of documentation is super outdated (think more than 1 year old) — this is a blaring red siren that the team is either stretched too thin or territorial about their knowledge/insecure about their roles. You should be able to get more of a sense of this by talking with various members of the team…is it an insecurity issue (trying to hoard information in one’s head in an attempt to avoid a layoff) or a bandwidth issue?

3. What is the status of their consent/compliance practices?

If a company markets to international companies and still doesn’t have GDPR automation implemented, that’s a bad sign — after all, they were supposed to implement best practices in 2018. 😬 This is likely a sign that either the marketing operations folks are super junior, the marketing leader doesn’t take lead consent seriously, or that the team is stretched too think with day to day tasks.

4. What is marketing’s relationship with sales like?

If the marketing leader hates the sales leader, or vice versa, much of your role will end up becoming a referee between the two functions. Why? Because at the end of the day, leaders can be petty all they want, but the jobs of everyone on their teams depends upon the company continuing to function. I don’t know about you, but I’d rather spend my time optimizing marketing and helping drive sales, rather than having to navigate a highly political, toxic environment. Pay close attention to the relationship dynamics between these leaders and organizations.

5. How many people are in the marketing operations team vs. how many people are on the larger marketing team?

In an ideal world, this ratio would be at least 1 marketing operations person per 10 marketers. In a dream world, 1 marketing operations person per 5 marketers. In reality, a lot of teams are 20+ marketers to 1 marketing operations person. It’s hard to gauge this on numbers alone, because some marketing operations teams don’t have a centralized campaign operations function and therefore don’t need quite as much resourcing to support the day to day for marketers…but still, a huge skew is not a good sign. A very high ratio will typically mean that you will either end up burning the midnight oil or be expected to somehow overcome the extreme under-resourcing within your 9-5 role (hint: you will fail, people will leave from burnout, it’s just not a good vibe).

6. How is the success of the marketing operations team determined?

This will be especially revealing if you’ve already learned that marketing can’t even measure themselves properly. If the answer to this question is “the success of marketing,” but marketing has no idea if it is successful or not, you’re potentially jumping on to a sinking ship. If the economy has a downturn, departments that can’t prove their value in tangible ways will be cut first. 🪓

7. What are the career paths for marketing operations team members?

If the marketing operations team is new, I would give them a little more leeway — but if they are not, this means that you may end up hitting a career development ceiling. Or, sometimes even worse — they may say “we’d like to hear your thoughts” which is nice and all, but meaningless if they are not going to commit to promoting you or fighting for budget for raises.

8. What is the average tenure of folks on the marketing operations team? What about the marketing leadership team?

If it’s a company with constant turnover, it’s a “no” from me. ✋

9. What is the status of their CRM and Marketing Automation Platform (MAP) integration?

If a company is losing leads somewhere as simple as the integration between their CRM and MAP, that usually either means that the team is understaffed or inexperienced.

By the way, if a company flunks on some of these questions, that doesn’t mean it’s an immediate “no” from me. I’d just know what I’m getting myself into and ask for more money than I might if it seemed like a less stressful job. From a consultant perspective, I’d know that I’d likely be rebuilding from almost scratch, so I’d want to structure our engagement based on the responses above and a few looks into their systems/documentation.

Recommended book of the week:

Learning resource of the week:

Helpful AI tool of the week 🤖

When I started my new job, I needed a new headshot really quickly — and I didn’t have an outfit etc to get one taken. I utilized HeadshotPro and while it isn’t perfect, it did take my pictures taken at home (that didn’t look great) and made them polished enough to be used for PR pushes, client decks, and announcements. I took a huge sigh of relief when I realized I didn’t have to rush to find a photographer. I did end up buying the Executive (most expensive) license because I wanted to be sure I got enough iterations for it to be good, so YMMV if you go for the lower tiers.

What I’m up to/what I’m studying

Lately, I’m back to focusing on more certifications — looking to grab some HubSpot certs, as well as considering picking up some Salesforce Sales Cloud/Marketing Cloud certifications. The Salesforce certifications may take longer to prep for, so I might do some more Datacamp work in the meantime. In addition to work stuff, I’ve been preparing for a trip to Italy (Como and Bologna! 😍🍝) and watching horror movies — has anyone seen Cuckoo yet? Just saw it recently and it was WILD movie. 🫢 

Dear Sara ✍️

New to marketing operations? On a team of one at your company? Shy/introverted? Wish you could ask a question to an experienced marketing operations professional, without them knowing who you are? Here’s your chance! Submit an anonymous question to me here and I’ll answer a new question in every issue.

Here’s my answer to a question from last week:

Great question! Here are my favorite marketing operations resources: 👇

Groups to join:

MOPsPros - a great group of folks, primarly Marketo users but also other experienced MOPs professionals. This group is run by the agency Etumos. 🙂 

Marketing Ops Professionals - Mike Rizzo is aggressively adding value to this community, including more webinars, mentorship, and in-person events! The Slack group is really great too, with a smattering of all different types of folks with different backgrounds.

Wizards of Ops - Sonar runs this group of more revops focused people. I love reading up on what people are talking about, and I don’t find there to be too many sales operations groups to do that with.

Pardashians - I actually started this community! I had to divest when I joined Salesforce, but the Sercante agency runs a great community in there, primarily focused on Pardot and Salesforce Marketing Cloud users.

Huddles - the tech vendor UpTempo created this community, and they have weekly Huddles with marketing operations experts…it’s a bit early for me, but I do try to join live every new and then because I love the non-recorded, non-vendor, open format.

RevOps Co-op - a revenue operations community that has great learning resources from folks like my buddy Jeff Ignacio!

Publication recommendations:

ChiefMartech - a blog run by HubSpot’s Scott Brinker and friends! They do a great job covering the lastest and greatest in marketing technology.

MarTech - or maybe this is the blog run by HubSpot? Sorry Scott, I honestly get confused between these two publications — but in a good way, because they both offer excellent information! 😅

Etumos blog - Etumos is one of my favorite Marketo agencies and they have a huge backlog of great blog content from the legendary Josh Hill.

Marketing Ops Professionals - Not gonna lie, I spent a bunch of hours watching recordings of Mopsapalooza content and other courses this year, and I really enjoyed it. Great stuff.

Gartner - Gartner is my favorite pick of the litter when it comes to think tanks. Many think tanks come across as too hand-wavey or impractical, but Gartner puts out annual CMO reports that I know many respectable CMOs read and take guidance from. I love to read those reports to stay ahead of what I think my CMOs will be asking about/interested in.

Conferences:

MOps-Apalooza - I’m planning on attending this year! I heard rave reviews from attendees last year and had so much FOMO about the people and the speakers.

Martech World Forum - This is a brand new martech event in San Francisco and I’m kicking myself that I missed out on attending and participating this year!

LeanData Ops Stars - LeanData always gets great speakers and I actually like their vendor booths…the venue is on the smaller side so you can actually have a real conversation. They also do a great job recognizing operational excellence!

Salesforce Connections - I love a good Salesforce event…the vibe is always warm and they tend to get great musicians for their concerts too!

Adobe Summit - I honestly have never been to Adobe Summit personally (don’t sue me!!!) but I’ve heard great things from folks who have. I will say that I am sad I didn’t get to attend the summit before the Adobe acquisition.

AntiCon London - A great martech event put on over in the UK…it’s a goal of mine to attend this over the next few years.

What else do you want to hear about from me?

I have a bunch of content lined up, but I want to hear from you — did you enjoy this issue? Is there anything specific you’d like to hear my take on? Please do reply to this email with any and all feedback! 😄 If you enjoyed this issue, please refer your friends by forwarding this email/sending them here!

Til next time,

❤️ Sara