Hey! 👋

Hope all is well with you! Things have been crazy over here, between some unexpected family events and moving to a new place in San Diego, all in one month. That’s why this edition is a little late…but at least you know it’s me and only me writing it, I guess. 😅 Thanks for your patience and for taking the time to read these, it means a lot. 🥹

It’s a really interesting time to be in operations. I see so many promotional ads for AI tooling, saying that AI will replace operations jobs…but then I watch the video, and I’m like…it’s a “no.” Because AI can’t yet replace strategic or consultative operations roles. It can’t handle human emotion, politics, and creativity.

My take on AI in ops is that AI will become our best assistant and enable huge efficiencies in campaign ops. Don’t get me wrong, campaign ops is still both an art and a science, and will always need human oversight IMO (at least, let’s say, for the next decade). But we won’t have to struggle against terrible HTML templates, manual list cleansing, manual report creation from soup to nuts, that sort of thing.

It’s been a huge priority for me at my current company. I want to keep people’s PII secure, but I also want to make sure that the talented people in our company can focus on the most strategic, creative, and impactful work and can give the rest to AI — so I’m running a Claude pilot to make sure it retains data as stated, that we have the right use cases and permissions, etc. I’d recommend doing this at your org, too…in ops, we have such a special seat where we can either embrace AI and “own” it for GTM or lag behind and end up supporting it after-the-fact.

All this to say, this edition is all about Claude and how it can help you in your job. Of course, you have to work with your company’s information security/legal team…BUT I think this will be inevitable, it just might take some orgs longer than others.

This section is sponsored by Knak, a partner who supports this newsletter. 💌

I partnered with the email experts at Knak to put together a comprehensive guide on how AI is reshaping the email marketing process. Whether you're on a lean team using free tools or working inside an enterprise ESP, there's something here for you.

Key takeaways from the guide:

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In case you don't have time to read the full guide now, here are the top tips:

Right now, I’m super focused on making sure we can track all sales activities, for better visibility so we can accurately forecast and make sure Sales is active on each open Deal.

Curious to hear your experience, but my experience lately: more and more conversations are happening in LinkedIn DMs and text messages than in email. Which is amazing, because these channels are more intimate — but also are a nightmare to track.

I love HeyReach, but I’ve had difficulty integrating it back into HubSpot as we mature. So I went on a hunt: can I find an alternative that is more HubSpot native, or at least that can more seamlessly give me visibility into what my reps are doing in LinkedIn DMs?

My requirements:

So far, I’ve found FirstTouch, which seems promising. I’m about to do a deep dive test implementation to see if it all works as expected.

Next up: text conversations — the most promising solutions there seems to be JustCall, Aloware, and Dialpad. Checking these out and will post the results in future editions! Also check out my favorite tools page that I’ll update as I pick solutions and create guides/templates/etc.

I’m also really focused on creating the foundation for our Solutions (some call this Customer Success) team — deliberating over whether we should use a designated DSP or build everything in HubSpot. Or maybe HubSpot and Claude… 🤓

I also have my eyes on potentially using Gamma or something similar for Quarterly Business Review presentations…any way to help Solutions create personalized decks really quickly while ALSO adding some razzle dazzle. Our customers mean so much to us and deserve the best…and we are not a company that plays by the typical “this is the way others are doing it” rules.

Finally, I’m working with our marketing leaders to figure out how to best implement Claude so we can protect PII but also have it do jobs for us, especially when it comes to doing some borderline-deranged scraping and market research. 🤣

At Vector, I’m focused across the entire revenue stack, which is super exciting but also can easily become overwhelming, especially with AI proliferating itself and other new tools so quickly.

All this to say: I’m all over the place, trying to figure out how to build the foundation with AI threaded in…very much in the weeds, like I know so many of you are. Would love to hear if any of this resonates with you and any learnings you’ve made in these spaces!

This section is sponsored by Zapier, a partner who supports this newsletter. ⚡

Zapier just published a practical breakdown on how to connect Claude to your existing workflows — and if you're in MOPs or RevOps, you'll immediately see the applications.

Key takeaways from the post:

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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:

Oohhh, interesting question! If you want to go into non-email marketing ops work, I’d focus on learning more about non-email technology — whether it be integrations or other automation/capabilities within HubSpot or Salesforce.

If you want to move into a whole other role in ops, I’d either focus on AI or revenue operations. There seems to be a lot of consolidation happening in operations right now, typically with marketing operations getting the bad end of the stick — so I’d learn more about the rest of the customer lifecycle, like sales operations and customer success operations.

Where to start for RevOps:

If you want to stay in marketing ops, I’d look into becoming really good at leveraging AI. There’s a huge demand for AI expertise in this space and I believe that those who fill the gap will be generously rewarded.

Where to start for AI:

Lastly, you could go down the route of GTM Engineer…that’s a very hot job market right now as well.

Where to start for GTM Engineering:

Ultimately, the path you choose is up to your own passions and interests. Sadly, I think pure email marketing is a dying breed…at least as we know it today. BUT that doesn’t mean that email won’t need to be overseen and managed, regardless of AI. So my best advice to you is to do what gets you paid but also fulfills you. A career is a marathon, not a sprint. 😅

There's a growing conversation on Reddit about Salesforce developers moving their work into IDE + AI + CLI workflows — VS Code with Copilot or Cursor paired with Claude, plus Salesforce CLI for deployments. Instead of clicking around in Setup, people are writing and deploying metadata through code-first tools, and AI is making it way more accessible for people who aren't traditional developers.

Why you should care: If you're in RevOps or MOPs (and like to work at/with companies who use Salesforce) and you haven't touched Salesforce CLI yet, put it on your learning list. The admin-who-can-also-code profile is becoming incredibly valuable, and these AI-assisted workflows are lowering the barrier to entry. This is a skill gap worth closing now.

MarTech covered 10Fold's 2026 marketing budget report, and the headline stat stopped me in my tracks: 55% of U.S. B2B marketers reported budget increases this year, but they also reported the lowest confidence in meeting growth targets of any region. More money, less certainty. The report suggests some programs may have outpaced actual market demand after aggressive 2025 spending. Oh, and 27% of marketing leaders say their C-suite overestimates what AI will actually deliver.

Why you should care: If you're the ops person who can tie spend to pipeline and show what's actually working versus what's just... running? That's your superpower right now. Leadership is hungry for someone who can cut through the noise with data.

Ramp shared a look at "Ramp Revenue" — a fully custom internal GTM stack they built from scratch. They’re pulling in tons of data and millions of records to help sales and marketing prioritize which accounts and people to focus on. It’s custom built in-house, rather than purchased as a platform. I, myself, am looking to build something similar for my sales team, at least in a dashboard to start… 👀

Why you should care: Start thinking of yourself less as a tool operator and more as a systems architect. The ops people who thrive in the next few years will be the ones designing how data flows through the GTM motion — and willing to learn AI/test new custom ideas out — not just configuring individual platforms.

What else have you heard about recently? Reply back to this email to send me any other word on the street. 👂

OpenClaw, Aka Moltbot, Formerly Clawdbot: The lobster-themed AI agent that broke the internet (and maybe your API budget)?

If you've been anywhere near tech Twitter or LinkedIn in the last month, you've probably seen the lobster. OpenClaw (formerly Moltbot, formerly Clawdbot — yes, it's had a journey) is an open-source AI agent built by Peter Steinberger that connects to your messaging platforms and actually executes tasks on your behalf.

Think of it less like a chatbot and more like a 24/7 assistant with access to your computer. It runs locally, connects to WhatsApp, Telegram, Slack, Discord, or iMessage, and can manage your inbox, automate browser tasks, run shell commands, organize files, and maintain persistent memory across conversations. It supports Claude, GPT-4, and local models via Ollama.

This is incredibly cool and genuinely useful once it's running — but setup is not for the faint of heart. You'll need your own infrastructure, API keys, and comfort with OAuth configs and terminal commands. The security considerations are real (one of the project's own maintainers warned that if you can't run a command line, it's too dangerous for you). And token costs add up fast.

That said, if you're the kind of ops person who likes tinkering with automation infrastructure, OpenClaw is worth experimenting with. It already has 150k+ GitHub stars and a growing skills ecosystem. Steinberger recently announced he's joining OpenAI, with the project moving to an open-source foundation. Even if it’s just for personal projects, it’s good to be aware of this tool, and potentially cool to tinker with. Perhaps, a peek into what’s coming with Claude, too. 👀

Let me say it one more time for those in the back… 😅🫠

If you have a moment, will you let me know if you enjoyed this edition of the newsletter? Thank you!

Thanks for reading,

❤️ Sara

P.S. Special thank you to our sponsors for supporting the creation of this newsletter. 🫶