The Marketing Operations Strategist - Copy my new growth roadmap template: How to expand from Marketing Operations into Revenue Operations

Hey! 👋

Welcome to 2025! I predict that it will be an exciting year in marketing operations for a few reasons:

1. The proliferation and maturation of AI capabilities within our tech stack 🤖 

2. The growth of revenue operations (RevOps) orgs within VC portfolio companies 🪴 

3. The potential for the economy to be a bit of a rollercoaster 🎢 

Today, we’re going to talk specifically about the growth of RevOps orgs within VC portfolio companies — and how you can prepare for this shift.

Let me tell you more about it after a quick note from our wonderful sponsors 💖

Have leftover professional development funds and looking to invest in your MOPs career? Check out my new course, The Marketing Operations Master Playbook and learn from yours truly! Save years of mistakes and hard lessons learned, as I share what I’ve learned through my 10+ year marketing career.

Okay, back to the template! 🗒️

You’re probably wondering — why would you, a marketing operations professional, be interested in learning more about revenue operations? A few reasons:

1. It will make you a better partner to your sales operations and customer success operations teams, even if you decide to stay within marketing operations. When you can speak their language and better understand your partners, you can communicate more clearly and be more persuasive when pitching ideas to them!

2. It will help you work more strategically within the GTM business. It can be easy to get siloed within marketing, but if we can better understand the entire go-to-market business, we can come to senior executive leaders with more impactful initiatives.

3. It will open you up to more potential jobs. While we’re seeing some promising signs of an improvement in the marketing operations market, I’m personally seeing more opportunities pop across all of revenue operations. In a tight market, the more relevant experience you can get, the better.

4. Word on the street is that VCs are endorsing pure RevOps orgs more and more. Take this with a grain of salt as it’s hearsay, but it does seem like VC companies are seeing the operational efficiency/alignment benefits of a centralized revenue operations department and promoting that idea to portfolio companies. If this is the case, your options to stay marketing operations-only may become more limited (or you may be funneled into a marketing operations org under a revenue operations leader umbrella).

I put together the template as a V1 of the ideal journey you’d take (it follows the general journey I’ve been on!). It emphasizes building a strong foundation in marketing technologies, analytics, and collaboration during the initial six months, followed by broadening your knowledge to encompass sales, customer success, and financial principles in the subsequent six months. Then, you focus on gaining hands-on experience, and, finally, you formalize your experience towards the end of the 24 months.

Download + make your own copy of the V1 Roadmap Template here 👈️ 

Please do share any feedback you have! If this is a helpful resource, I’ll continue to build upon it for the community. 🙂 

Here’s a quick win to get started:

Want a simple action step for this week? Start by mapping out how your marketing tech stack integrates (or doesn’t) with sales and customer success tools. Identify one integration or workflow to improve, and document the potential impact on team collaboration or revenue metrics. Performing this exercise will help you see the entire GTM org at your company and how the customer journey touches on across all areas.

What I’m up to/what I’m studying

I recently went to New Orleans, which was so much fun…until I got Norovirus. 🫠 Otherwise, I’ve been relaxing and getting ready for the new year. I’m working on more and more content for you all, including with more tech partners…more technical how-to’s on the way! 😄 

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:

Oh boy, this is quite a meaty topic. 🥩 Thanks for sending it in, and sorry to hear about your situation.

Here are the top red flags I’ve run into (or heard about from peers):

1. Looking for one marketing operations unicorn to cover all of marketing ops for a team of 20+ marketers. Why is this a red flag? Because, chances are, you’re set up for failure because there is not enough time in your day to actually support the team well.

2. Leadership doesn’t understand the value of marketing or marketing operations. Why? Because you’ll spend most of your time and energy trying to justify your job’s existence, taking away from your time and energy to actually do impactful things for the business.

3. Your new manager doesn’t have any idea of a career path for your role. There could be exceptions to this rule depending upon the exact work you do, but in general — this either means that the manager isn’t invested in your career success, on the company has a built-in ceiling for marketing operations folks.

4. Marketing operations has no budget. Budget for tools doesn’t count if you or your boss don’t get to manage that budget. If you have to beg another team for every dime, you will spend a lot of time convincing someone to spend budget on tools rather that campaigns…and that is not a fun fight to have.

5. Leaders (like CMOs) are churning left and right. This is a sign of a larger company issue, or it could be limited to your department…either way, the constant leadership/stakeholder turnover will ensure you spend most of your time enabling, re-enabling, re-enabling again….convincing, re-convincing, re-convincing again….you get the idea. You’ll spend your days treading water with new hires, rather than driving the business forward into growth.

I could go on and on, but I actually wrote a previous newsletter on this topic — read all about the rest of my thoughts here. 🙂 

By the way, I probably don’t advertise this enough…if you want to read previous editions of the newsletter, you can check them out here (just scroll down to the archive).

Thanks for reading,

❤️ Sara