Hey! 👋
This week’s edition is going to be a little different. I spent time with so many talented marketing ops and revenue ops professionals this week at MarketingOps.com’s Mopsapalooza, discussing the current state of ops and sharing knowledge. I’ll be sharing my thoughts below!
Before we dive into the main content, please check out a quick word from our sponsors, who are kind enough to support the creation of this free-to-you MOPs content 💖:
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Okay, now on to my reflections from MOPZA! 👇
I spoke with so many folks from all over, some people even traveled 24 hours (!!!) via plane to get to MOPZA! Talk about dedication.
The main learnings I had were:
There is a race to replace Marketo and “old-school MAPs.” So many little companies are popping up, trying to be the go-to — Infection, Paminga, Jon Miller’s stealth company. Where Adobe seems to be struggling to innovate with Marketo, these companies are wiring AI right into their platforms, which should be interesting.
They seem a bit too small to really be a direct replacement for sophisticated Marketo instances right now — BUT I bet they will be ready soon, so I am keeping an eye out. 👀
There is a lot of role compression happening in the marketing operations world right now. I keep hearing about more and more marketing operations Director+ roles being eliminated, lots of layoffs — and it seems like these roles are being “replaced” (notice the air quotes) by RevOps leads.
This is an important area to watch — for larger orgs, I think this will be a complete disaster, because marketing is too complex for a sales operations person to pick up quickly and easily.
However, in smaller orgs, I think this actually may work out over the longer term…especially if the org actually implements RevOps across the entire GTM. My personal take: if you enjoy working for startups or small businesses, I’d consider learning more about sales operations and customer success operations, so you can potentially move in the RevOps direction and be able to compete if the consolidation continues.
Everyone is talking about AI, but many are struggling to activate it. Lots of questions about where to learn about AI, especially AI related to GTM motions. Vendors are selling pie-in-the-sky theories of what can be done, or what huge companies are able to do with huge teams, but those use cases are not realistic for smaller teams with smaller budgets.
The main takeaway here: start with AI that vendors have already baked into their own toolset, rather than jumping right into MCPs or building your own AI tools — BUT make sure you learn about MCPs so you can be prepared to use them as they become more accessible.
One of the biggest career-ladder blockers = communication skills (or lack thereof). There were great sessions that talked about stakeholder management and communication — if you want to move up the ladder, you need to focus on communication skills more than technical skills, ESPECIALLY because of the potential threat of AI.
If you’re struggling, there are many courses you can take online — just search for stakeholder management/communication courses!
You are not alone in your frustrations. So many shared laughs, sighs, and groans…even if you are in a team of one at work, you definitely are not in a team of one within this MOPs community.
Check out my old edition to see Slack groups you can join, and Google to learn about local events you can attend!
Networking is key, especially outside of marketing operations. For those who were successful in finding a new job in this market, they almost always found that job through referrals, and often via VPs of Marketing or CMOs.
Make an effort to join general marketing groups or events next year, so you can network with potential hiring managers as well.
Find where you feel comfortable sharing your expertise (vendor forums, in-person events, social media) and share it! It will help build awareness, credibility, and can help you land your next job.
The MOPs community rocks. Everyone is so kind, so caring, so wonderful…and so many people volunteered to share their knowledge at the event.
With this being the last MOPZA, I really hope we are able to figure out another major event where we can all come together again!
This is a shorter edition of the newsletter than usual, due to recovering from MOPZA…thanks for your understanding! 🙏 More great content to come soon. 👩🍳
What I’m up to/what I’m studying 💭
I’m working on creating my own AI learning roadmap for the new year!
Do you have any recommended resources? Would love to hear from you!
Otherwise, I’m recovering from a busy week. 😅
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:
Are there any data validation AI tools to help clean the existing database? How to solve existing hygiene issues on fields - for example, job title has country or company values or junk data. How to automate this cleaning now that every company wants to incorporate AI to reduce manual work. I’m not sure if you have already covered this but this is something I’m looking forward to solve. Thank you!
SO I was curious about this too recently…and there is a surprising lack of vendors in this space. I have a few theories about this:
Data cleansing is not a perfect science, and hard to standardize outside of what’s already available (fuzzy matching, basic if-then logic)
Everyone is thinking ChatGPT or Claude will come up with something — they probably are the best-positioned to do this.
Where does that leave us? With a few possibilities, most being expensive for the functionality they offer.
My first pick is Clay, because I’m familiar with it — BUT any credits-based system can become pricey quickly, especially if you are cleansing your whole database. That being said, I do love their AI columns (Claygent) and have used them to cleanse files before. I know some companies use it to cleanse their database, which is awesome, but I would just keep an eye out on costs since it isn’t a flat fee.
There is a new contender in this space, Freckle — they also have AI agent columns, and their CRM/MAP integrations don’t jump up to $800/month before you even do anything with the data. BUT they also leverage credits, so you may run into a similar pricing challenge.
Then there are other newcomers, most of which I am honestly not familiar with yet, but may be worth a look:
Numerous.ai - you can use ChatGPT within sheets
Powerdrill.ai - it seems like they started with data analysis and have since branched out into some AI data cleansing
Openrefine.ai - this open-source tool has an AI integration that can allegedly do data cleansing.
Then there are the old-school solutions, like Ringlead — I do love Ringlead, it is a powerful tool…but I don’t think they have AI capabilities. There also is DemandTools, an OG Salesforce cleansing tool…again, very powerful, but not AI focused. Lastly, there’s Insycle, a pretty popular tool amongst HubSpot users — but no AI.
Long story short, there are some promising contenders, but they are still in infancy and I’d definitely make sure that your Information Security/Legal team is okay with using them.
I hope this helped!
P.S. You don’t have to use AI or even buy a tool for every data cleansing use case — check out my full data cleansing guide here. You can use some of these rules and set up safety net lists to capture malformed email addresses, data, etc.
Meme of the week 🖼️
Interesting martech of the week ⚙️
We have security for our website, our apps…why not our GTM data? 🤔
CHEQ protects marketing operations by detecting and blocking invalid traffic like bots, fake leads, and click fraud — before it affects analytics or budget. Its suite (Acquisition, Form Guard, Analytics, Defend, and Compliance) secures every stage of the funnel while enforcing privacy and tag governance. The platform also meets top security standards (SOC 2 Type 2, ISO 27001, GDPR/CCPA) with strong access control, encryption, and monitoring.
The most exciting piece for me is the potential cost savings — with their Acqusition product, you can block bots and automatically prevent waste across paid campaigns and ad platforms, including Google Search, Display, and PMax; Facebook and Instagram; LinkedIn, and more. 😍 IMO, this will be a space to watch, especially as AI becomes more prevalent.
If you have a moment, will you let me know if you enjoyed this edition of the newsletter? Thank you!
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Thanks for reading,
❤️ Sara