Mike Rizzo: Why Today's RevOps Leaders Need a Modern Marketing Ops Mindset

Welcome to Go-To-Market, a podcast for RevOps, sales, and marketing leaders to dive deep into industry insights and best practices. Go-To-Market is sponsored by Fulcast, the go-to-market cloud. My name is Amy Cook and I am so excited to introduce Mike Rizzo, founder and CEO of MarketingOps. Mike, how are you doing?

I am, I'm doing really well. Thank you for inviting me on, Amy, and I'm glad we finally got connected. It was a small world. We're, we're super close by.

So I know how crazy that we only live 10 minutes away from each other and never met. And I'm so happy that we have now.

Yeah, likewise. Yeah, I'm really excited to chat with you for sure.

Likewise. Well, um, what you are doing is so close to my heart because marketing operations is such a very complicated, um, very like intense and highly skilled job, and there's not a lot of knowledge about what that is. So before we dive deep into that, can you tell me a little bit about your background and how you got involved in this?

Yeah, yeah, I think maybe my background would be illustrative of the possible path to marketing operations. But what I can tell you from lots of conversations on our podcast and in the community is that people just stumbled and found their way into it. So don't take my path as the definitive guide to entering marketing operations by any stretch. But I did get my start in what a lot of folks would probably consider like digital marketing. It was at an ad tech company at the time. It was called Specific Media. I was based here in Irvine, California. They actually acquired MySpace back then, which was a really fun sort of thing to be a part of as a very new full-time employee. Like, I hadn't even finished college. I delayed my graduation by, you know, a semester or so to take this full-time gig. And I was basically trafficking ads on an ad server, learning about pixels and retargeting and different display ad types and all of that kind of stuff. Ultimately, that gave me a really healthy respect for, you know, HTML is not that scary. You can learn this stuff. And eventually I said, hey, I kind of want to try to build a website and some emails. And I I remember literally like drawing boxes on a white piece of paper to like understand how a div container works and how like structure kind of works in HTML. And eventually I was given an opportunity to go work at a company to quote unquote, help them send a newsletter because that was the task, right? Marketing automation. We're talking, right? Oh gosh, it was well over a decade ago. It was, it was starting to accelerate. We were starting to see players like Pardot get acquired, actually, you know, they were an exact target company. HubSpot was still pretty new on the scene, pumping us all full of the inbound movement. You certainly had Marketo and Eloqua, who were, you know, the original sort of like foundational products that sort of got there, got this whole industry going. And that is when I fell in love with the whole concept of marketing technology and just even revtech, as we might call it today, or sales tech. My very first gig at that company where I sent a newsletter, I was helping them. I can't pretend like it was all like my job or anything like that, but it was bootstrapping its way back to success. So this is a company that had to start over. Um, and I was like, why are we paying so much money for Salesforce? Like, this is really expensive. And even back then, that was like not the norm. Like Salesforce was the staple product. It still is arguably today. But back then it was like, oh, we can't, we shouldn't be paying for this. Like we could move to Sugar. So I did a full migration to SugarCRM, which is like, wow, yourself. Yeah, like I was just like, oh yeah, let's just move over and start using this thing. I was like brand new into martech. I was like, yeah, I got this, it's fine. So anyway, that's how I got my start in. I went from ad tech to basically what we would refer to as a SaaS company doing a migration because of the acquisition of Pardot. I had to move off of Pardot to Act-On. So I did a double migration and I was kind of hooked ever since. So it's a lot of fun.

That is so much fun. Well, okay, so tell me now, how did you go from, um, you know, how did you start going from digital marketing into marketing operations besides the Sugar implementation? Like, it was— there a mind shift for you?

Yeah, um, to some degree there was. It was, uh, right place, right time. The— again, like, the market was, was the role wasn't even really properly defined yet. Marketing operations by title was really in its infancy. I ended up falling in love with the HubSpot sort of side of that whole movement and took a gig at a company called Mavenlink at the time, now known as Contata. And it was a bit of a hybrid role. I was a sort of marketing operations manager by title, which was exciting for me, but I also had to figure out how to do some demand gen stuff. So I was doing field marketing, all that kind of stuff. And I think the shift was sort of really more about sinking my teeth into how to maximize the potential of the technology itself. Even at the first company, I was starting to ask questions about how the software worked.

Right?

Like, where does the data come from and where does it go? And, you know, we weren't referring to it as SaaS at the time. And I think my, my mindset was there's so much more happening here. And I wonder if there's a way we can streamline this process. I find that that is— to stop talking about myself— I find that that is a fairly common trait in the community. The curiosity piece, and then, uh, I'd say it's like the one, one of the most common sort of things we hear about from marketing operations professionals is that they're just like naturally curious. Like their instinct is to Google something first rather than like call somebody that's been there and done that. Thankfully now there's a community where they can, you know, just ask people who've been there and done that. Um, but it is also really fun. Like when we first got things started, I posted a photo of my garage. and like, I'm particularly like meticulous about how I like to organize things. Uh-huh. And I was like, does this resonate with anybody? And, you know, we were a pretty small community at the time and everybody was like, oh yeah, like this is exactly how, you know, not everybody, but a good number of people.

Founder people. There's a certain personality type is what you're telling me, where people, I think so, people really gravitate toward the operations side. It's interesting because the person who runs marketing operations for me is absolutely fantastic. And I know when she who listens to this podcast, she is going to identify exactly with what you've said because she and I are the ones that at 11 o'clock at night are like, oh my gosh, I just ran into this really cool new tech, look at what it does. And we'll get on at 11 at night and start going through it and how does it work. And she's much more technically adept than I am, but I have the very— I have definitely a lot of interest. And so, you know, get— but, um, I think what you've done is you, with this Marketing Ops Community, is you've harnessed a whole bunch of people who have felt alone on an island in a way and just understand each other, do some therapy sessions together. Yeah, yeah, 100%. Really help each other define that space because, you know, I think that RevOps is still being defined and marketing ops is for sure still being defined. So, and I think it bleeds so much into digital marketing that it's kind of hard to kind of put guardrails around and say, well, this is marketing ops and this is digital marketing. But how do you define it or do you differentiate?

Yeah, it's a really good question. I can't say that I have it all figured out by any stretch. I listen to the community a lot and I'm trying to convey something, certainly some of my own thoughts, but definitely things that we're just sort of hearing and observing in the market. I challenged some folks fairly recently with this notion that marketing ops isn't marketing. And in our little space, it, it sort of, I guess, went viral to a degree. People were like a little bit on fire with this idea that, you know, something with the word marketing in it isn't somehow marketing. Eventually, I came around and explained that it's not just marketing. And by that, I mean, you, you have to be, I think, successful. You know, just thinking about like a little bit about what I was explaining, like don't listen to my career journey as like the definitive guide to get into marketing operations. But between the lines, there's a lot of things that I was exposed to, right? I was exposed to ad tech, I was exposed to HTML, and then I was exposed to marketing and sales technology and some of the implications of how technology like SaaS companies are operating and weaving all that together. I did graduate, by the way, like from Cal State Fullerton with a business marketing degree. So I have— I didn't realize I was taking for granted the, the educational foundation that was given to me about just like traditional finance and statistics and, you know, that kind of stuff too. And when you look at marketing operations, I think in order to start to achieve some strategic initiatives and strategic positioning, you know, everybody's in this community now is like trying to seek a seat at the table. It requires a little bit of that sort of mile-wide, inch-deep type of skill set, right? And it might not be the exact same ones that I picked up. But it does help when you have a foundation of the traditional 4 Ps and, you know, general understanding about SEO, ABM, digital marketing, tracking pixels, all of those kinds of things, and then step into, you know, how does an actual object orientation work, database structure, and how do the relationships of those things happen? What is a Boolean field versus a picklist and all those kinds of things? And if you could wrap that in a little bit of understanding about how a business recognizes revenue, right, like the finance piece of it, so you can have a constructive conversation about where we're going, where we'd like to go, and how we're actually growing alongside your finance leaders, I think you start to really position yourself into, okay, I'm looking at a go-to-market product manager job, right? That's really marketing operations in my mind, is you have well— you have a well-rounded set of experiences that help you enable a business to achieve its goals through marketing technology and revenue technology. And your job is to figure out how to build the tech stack of the future. And when I said marketing ops isn't marketing, it was actually about— you mentioned guardrails. It was actually about putting guardrails in place. It was meant to say, if you're going to lay off your marketing team, it better not include the marketing operations person.

Yeah.

Because guess what? There's somebody's got to run this stuff. Like, who knows how your entire product, your go-to-market product tech stack works? Like, very few people, right?

That's right. I find that as well. And I have had to become, you know, in terms of my own journey, I have been in charge of marketing traditionally. And then as businesses grow, people somehow magically think that marketers go, quote unquote, make magic. Right. And so, uh, and, but then they're like, well, what are your numbers? How do you do this? And there was a huge gap in every single company that I was in. They did not know how to connect the dots between the marketing metrics and how it applies to revenue. Exactly to your point. And so I had to learn enough about marketing operations. Again, so many people better than me, but I had to learn enough to be able to connect those dots on the revenue side, or else I was going to lose my job. And marketing would be devalued. And so I would argue that that marketing operations position, just like you say, is essential to getting your marketing in place. So I would say like you need a marketing director that's a Swiss Army knife that can pay, basically do whatever, and you need a marketing ops person. And then from there you can build out your operations and your marketing teams.

Yeah. That's, yeah. And it's, I like, here, here. I agree, obvious, for obvious reasons. And it's a hard, you know, I have a new role, right? I'm this CEO of this, this company, this community, this stuff that we're working on. And I have a lot of know-how on, you know, executing marketing and marketing operations. And It's hard to hear that as a leader, right? Like, you mean I have to hire two different kinds of people in order to do marketing? Well, it's like, yeah, but the same is true if you were going to go build a widget, right? Or a software product, right? There are people that know how the widget, like, if you're like, let's talk about physical product for a second. There are structural product engineers that know the makeup of how to put a thing together. Concretely from an industry that I work— come from more, more often is SaaS. You hire developers who understand the art of the possible. They're going to tell you, oh, it should be a Node framework or this type of server or that, right? You hire them for their expertise and you hire product managers to go figure out what to build. You have a vision and you need support to execute that product. The same is true for your go-to-market technology, right? You need somebody who knows the art of the possible and you need somebody with the ideas to translate the business needs, your go-to-market aspirations into actionable technology execution, right? So absolutely, yes, it's essential. You can't, you shouldn't do it without them. You can, you just shouldn't.

You shouldn't and you won't be successful either way. Mike, I love this discussion so much, and I would love to, if you're willing, have you back on another podcast so we can dive deep into all of the different roles that marketing should have at different stages of the business. You've been in businesses that are small and large, and now you're running a community. Would you be willing to do that?

Of course, yeah, I'd be more than happy to come back and talk about it.

Thank you so much, because I think we've really just scratched the surface of understanding that marketing is a million little things. And I'd like to really explore the psyche of why CEOs feel like you can have one marketing person who can do everything magically when they will hire, like you said, 10 different product people for 10 different product specialties. And so I really want to get into that psyche there. But, um, before we end, can you tell me what do you do to stay at the top of your ops game?

Oh, uh, I have sort of a cop-out answer. I participate in my community.

Well, that is the right answer for sure. And tell me, before we go, how does someone sign up for MarketingOps, uh, the community? I'm in it, but I want everyone else to know, and I find so much value, and your Mopsepalooza event that we just had was incredible. And so for all the marketers listening, how do we sign up?

Yeah, if you visit marketingops.com, it's marketing O P as in Paul S dot com, you can sign up and join us as a member. Jump right into the Slack. There's now 6,200+ people hanging out in the Slack channel across specific martech tools, B2B strategy, broad career advice. There's jobs that are posted regularly. So we encourage you to come and hang out and talk shop. Doesn't matter what tools you're using, B2B or B2C. And then if you are interested in connecting with other folks in person, become a member, join us at MopS-A-Palooza. That's happening again in October of 2025. And we actually have an event coming up in the spring called Spring Fling this May as well. So a few different ways for you to get involved. We would love to have you.

Awesome. Well, I will be there and so excited about that as well. And thanks again, Mike. It's been such a pleasure to have you.

Yeah, thank you, Amy Cook.

Business. Business. Yes, that's business. Business. Yes, that's business.