EP 1 - How do you define Marketing Ops?

Hi, I'm Michael Hartman.

I'm Naomi Liu.

And I'm Mike Rizzo.

And this is OpsCast, a podcast for marketing ops pros and RevOps pros, created by the MoPros, the number one community for marketing operations professionals.

Tune into each episode as we chat with real professionals to help elevate you and your marketing operations career.

All right, we're live. This is awesome. Thanks to everyone who's out there listening or listening to the recording. Welcome to the first episode of OpsCast by the MoPros. We are very excited to kick off this podcast with you all, all the rest of the marketing operations professionals, including my dogs there. You know, of course, we, you know, we're happy to bring in anybody who wants to be a part of this and just learn or whatever. Today we've got your hosts today, co-hosts today are Naomi Liu and Mike Rizzo, and I'm Michael Hartman. Today, you know, with this kickoff episode, one of the things we know is a challenge out there is just like, what is the definition of marketing ops? And so we're going to talk a little bit about that. And then we're going to talk some about how we got there and what we see as kind of the key things to learn to do well and move up. And, you know, kind of a little bit about why there's maybe a lack of, you know, development opportunities out there in general. So we're ready to kick it off. If you've got a question, let us know. I think we'll be able to bring you on as well. But for now, we're going to kind of let everybody introduce themselves. Let's start with you, Naomi.

Sure. So hi everyone, I'm Naomi and I am the Director of Global Marketing Operations at Electronics for Imaging, or EFI for short. And I spent like the last decade of my career working in the enterprise B2B software space for tech companies. And, you know, I really enjoy working in marketing ops because it's one of those career paths that's allowed me to exercise both the right and left side of my brain. I would say that I definitely came to my career in a bit of an unconventional way. I've always had just a very strong technical aptitude. I taught myself how to code HTML as a kid, and I built my first website when I was 12 or 13. And I've just always been fascinated with computers and that you could, you know, input something into this box and it would do what you told it to do. Um, you know, I'm just super excited about the show launch and talking shop with people that I view as, you know, much smarter than myself. So—

Awesome. How about, how about if I go next? This is Michael Hartman. I, um, I worked at a couple of different places. Most recently was the director of demand gen and marketing tech at Freeman Company, big events company. And similar to Naomi, I like— I actually started my career in IT management consulting and had an engineering degree coming out of college and kind of found my way into marketing through database marketing back when it was setting up call centers and doing a bunch of direct mail. So you— yeah, I was one of the people behind you getting all those credit card offers for a while. But, you know, as things have evolved, what I've— what really attracted me was the ability for— with the technology, and it was evolving— was to be able to really understand what was effective or not. And so that's been a big part of what I've enjoyed is, you know, really that, that piece of it. The other, the other big piece is, you know, I'm a curious sort of learner as well. And, you know, what I like about these ops roles is they're in the middle of, you know, there's a little bit of marketing, there's a little bit of IT, there's a little bit of finance, there's a little bit of legal, there's a little, like, there's a little bit of sales, all of those different components and being in the middle of that and having to kind of shift your focus and speak different languages, if you will, has always been a part of what's attracted me and kept me in it. Mike, how about you?

Yeah, so I guess introduction-wise, I am Mike Rizzo. I am the founder of MoPros, the community that is hosting this show. But Michael, as you've heard from, has graciously decided to step in and, and help curate and craft some really nice content. I think you'll hear from myself and Naomi on a pretty regular basis as well, but You know, I guess the first thing to say is thank you to Michael for helping us out with this first run of the show and hopefully a continued broadcast for everyone to participate in. So, you know, I think this is a prime example of why we come together as a community, right? We want to help each other elevate our status in the space of marketing operations. And so that's, you know, largely why I had created the community, at least early on in my career. I was, I was quite alone, as many of us are in the marketing ops function. And I started the community in 2017. It was really, I don't think you would have called it a community then. It was just a channel on Slack and people, I wrote a blog post about it. People showed up, kept asking to get invited, and eventually we automated the process. Thanks be to the automation gods. And Over time, we've grown. So, you know, I think as of today, we have like 1,420 members in the community and we are trying to find more and more ways to elevate each other in the space of marketing operations. And, you know, really, again, a prime example of that is Michael having an opportunity to step in and help share some knowledge and collect knowledge from everybody in the community on this. on this new show that we're producing. So I'm really excited about it, and I hope that everybody else who ends up tuning in at some point here in the future, you'll be able to come in and talk shop with us and talk about all the hot topics in marketing operations. And I'm sure we won't shy away from things like RevOps and CSOps and SalesOps and all of those things. As Michael alluded to, you, you often have to touch many different roles in many different departments and many different functions. So, You know, maybe you're playing a little bit of that role and wearing that hat sometimes, and maybe you're actually moving in that direction. So we'd love to hear from everybody, and I'm really excited about it. Awesome.

Yeah, so this, this is going to be an interesting, I think, topic that we've probably all sort of gone around the horn around a little bit, and I've seen a number of conversations from people, whether it's through our Slack communities or other online forums or just you know, one-on-one discussions is just, you know, you know, what is marketing ops? And since this show is really meant for marketing ops professionals or those who want to get in it, you know, I think it's important for us to start talking about what do we see as what is marketing ops, right? What are the components to it? What are the things that are sometimes with it? Some of the things are sort of always with it, and that's kind of how I think about it. But, you know, maybe Mike, why don't you start since this is your, you know, you started the community. Like, when you think of marketing ops, what do you Like, what does that mean to you? And maybe a corollary is, you know, when, when people out, like your, your parents ask you, like, what do you do? And it's marketing ops. How do you describe it to somebody who's not kind of in the middle of it?

I know Naomi has a really funny answer for that question, or at least, at least we've talked about it in the past. Um, I, my parents, like, certainly don't They just stopped trying to explain to people what it is that I do. They just say that I'm in marketing, which is such a— it's a bummer because the nature of the role is so technical and so interesting, right? Like marketing ops as a function, I think you kind of— we talked to Naomi, you said at the beginning of your introduction, right? Left, right brain and left brain, right? We get to do very technical, interesting strategic thought processes while also being quite creative. It's like trying to figure out how to piece together technology. To accomplish a business objective, I think is like how I would define marketing ops in a, in a really, really light nutshell. You've got business objectives, you've got tools. Marketing ops is a way to kind of bridge the gap between trying to achieve those outcomes with the tools that maybe your company has purchased. So I don't know, that would be my stab at it. Going anything beyond that just gets confusing for folks, I think. Folks that aren't in it.

I've just started to say IT for marketing, honestly.

IT for marketing, I like that a lot.

Yeah, I mean, I use a similar sort of corollary or, you know, version is, you know, people are more familiar with like accountants don't actually still write things down in a ledger, right? They have technology that enables them to do that and Marketing ops is kind of that for marketing. So, you know, that's, that's the way I think about it.

Yeah, I could see that. And I think, I think what happens really fast too is that like, you see a transition from, you know, like it's not just about the tool though, right? Like, I think that's probably where the core of my passion comes in for the marketing ops community at large, you know, thinking about MoPros in general. It's not just about being really good at leveraging a piece of technology to do a function of your job. So like, I agree with you, you know, using, using, you're not writing things in a ledger, you've got tools for that now, is definitely the step in the direction of marketing operations, right? Like, we use the tools to better enable ourselves and our team members to achieve their outcomes, but like, It's so much more than just being an expert inside of like one particular toolset. My son, my son is going to join us for the call. So hold on just a second.

So, hey, so, Naomi, how about you and I, you know, while Mike's dealing with real life here, talk a little bit about like when you think of it, like when you— but once you get past the, like, how do you explain it to somebody who's not in it? Yeah, like, what do you think of as the components of marketing ops that are, you know, and I, and I know I would think of it as like, these are the non-negotiables, these are almost always part of it, and then these other ones sometimes are there but not always, depending on the size of the company, or they're embedded in kind of the people but not necessarily a formal, um, org chart component, if you will.

Yeah, I mean, I, and Mike and I have talked about this at length as well too, and it's interesting because he comes at it from like a small or medium-sized company perspective, and I'm coming at it from, you know, maybe a larger enterprise perspective. And, you know, from, from my perspective, yes, the technology piece is a huge component of it, but a lot of my day-to-day is around managing like timelines, people's expectations, technology adoption, change management is a huge one. anxiety management, and not so much like on myself or my team, but like on behalf of, you know, our business partners as well too, right? Because technology can be scary if it's not something you're, you know, if you're— if you don't necessarily have strong technical aptitude, or if you are not somebody that's in the tools all day long, maybe, you know, your skill set and your expertise lies somewhere else. You know, there can be anxiety when things change all the time, as they do in our world. You know, it's even hard sometimes— I don't know about you guys, but for me to keep up with everything that's happening, all these tools that are kind coming out, all of the acquisitions that happen, all of the, you know, you know, new releases and new features is just constant, right? And so just imagine what that feels like for somebody that is not directly interfacing with the tools. And a lot of that is, you know, I feel, at least on my side, because we are a centralized ops team, is how do I— and this is what keeps me up at night too, you know, aside from rogue emails going out to the entire database at 3 AM in the morning, like, you know, that hasn't happened. for a very long time, knock on wood. But, you know, things that keep me up at night is, you know, how do I make sure that I'm— that the knowledge gap between my team and the business partners that we support doesn't get bigger and bigger and bigger over time, right? It needs— like, we need to make sure that they're coming along with us on this journey so they, you know, know what to do, know how to do it, know what to expect. And that's something that I feel on, you know, the ops side is That's how I would define it too. It's a lot of it honestly is change management.

Yeah, I love that idea of anxiety management. I've never thought about it from that perspective, but I can see it, right? The obvious things like, oh, an email is going to go out to a pretty large audience and is everything buttoned up, right? Do we have the right dates and times for our webinar, or do we have it where the person's first name is going to go out? All those things that we all have probably gone through Something going out that wasn't right. Um, you know, I always—

Oh yeah.

I, I actually— so for me, it's funny, I always have a story because I actually have a friend who literally is a neurosurgeon, right? And I, you know, I, I don't know many— there's probably nobody in marketing ops who has quite the responsibility, right? It doesn't mean that it's not important that you get things right, but I think I, you know, and I've had new people on my teams, I've always kind of said, look, especially if they've never done push the button, if you will, on a big email, like, just know that, right, your anxiety is going to go down over time. And at some point, you're going to have one that's not going to be right. Right. And we've probably all gone through it.

Oh, yeah. Well, yeah. Well, yeah. So my anxiety hasn't gone down. I still—

You need some help managing it, Mike.

I mean, I've run a community of you know, not that many, you know, I think it's a great size community. I'm sure there's more of us out there, but like, I, I send an email to around 1,400 of us every once a month, and I still get nervous every single time I hit send. And so, yeah.

Come step into my, come step into my office. I have a—

Yeah, right.

Therapist session.

I need like, I need like a, yeah, a Zen therapy session or something like that. Yeah, and I think like going back to what you're talking about as far as like making sure the knowledge gap doesn't increase, Naomi, you know, between business partners and your team and all that stuff. I think that, you know, I asked a question in our actual community forum around, you know, defining what it means to be kind of a certified marketing operations professional and, you know, letting the cat out of the bag a little bit. Like, I think that's one of my biggest missions for this community is trying to figure out, like, in the answer to this question, like, What is it? What does a marketing operations professional really do? I think we have an opportunity as a collective group, not just us on the call, but every single member of this community and those that aren't yet in it, to try to define what it means to be a marketing operations professional and actually become like a certified marketing operations professional, right? Like, you've seen like certifications for ISO and all that stuff that are usually driven by external Kind of factors that say that there needs to be an adherence to excellence, and therefore this external agency kind of creates this thing that people need to level themselves up to, or organizations need to level themselves up to. I think it's actually a little bit reversed in this case. I think for long enough, we've been trying to illustrate the importance of the function of marketing operations, and today— I think it's seen as a pretty mission-critical function inside of an organization for those that actually have the technology suites inside of their tech stacks, right? They know they need someone to own these tools to make them, to make them work right and to make them sing and to get some ROI out of them. But I think there's still a job to be done in terms of managing up is kind of the way that I refer to it. And I think our responsibility as professionals in this space and as this community continues to grow, is to define what it means to be a certified marketing operations professional and go beyond the lines of just technology and leveraging technology and being an expert in Marketo, for example, or an expert in HubSpot, right? Just because I'm certified in that platform doesn't mean I'm a certified marketing ops professional. The certified marketing ops professional and what it really means to be in marketing ops is a lot of what you were just talking about, Naomi. Like, yes, I do come from the smaller organization side of things and you're in the enterprise side of things, but the— The day-in, day-out challenges that we're faced with are pretty similar, right? Like, I'm going across party lines, as I do my air quotes, to go talk to sales ops and talk to CS ops and talk to the IT team and ensure that they all have buy-in on what we are going to do at each stage of the funnel as people come through this tech stack. And I think that's really where you start to step into the realm of what it means to be in marketing operations. Right? Like, you're really starting to engage these other functions. You're not just like super, super versed at writing, you know, queries and that kind of stuff inside of Marketo or something like that. I don't know, it's just my 2 cents.

Yeah, you're hitting on something. I think going back to the like, what is included in marketing ops, I think one of the things that is almost always, if not always, there is technology stack management, right? Both the day-to-day operations of it and the ongoing strategy of how it fits in. Once you get past that, I think the other responsibilities in marketing operations tend to vary quite a bit, actually. And I think that's part of the challenge here is that— and it's part of why I think the majority of the available training and certification and things like that is centered around the technologies. You know, the vendors and those, those kinds of things. But it doesn't really— you know, if you want someone who's going to come in and be able to not only do that, plus be able to think about how does this all relate to the whole customer journey across marketing to sales to support, then that requires a different mindset about thinking about things and sometimes making trade-offs about how you use technology across those different parts of the journey. So, you know, you know, then, and I think you layer on top of that, then company size and where they are, where the growth opportunities are, how they go to market.

Right.

And a little bit about, you know, where you are in terms of your, you know, are you more of a hands-on individual contributor? Are you a team of one? Are you a leader of people within this part? And I think, you know, I think if there were things that could be addressed across all that, that's— I think that's where I would love to see, you know, professional development for this, not only for people coming in but also people who are moving up in their career. So how do you know— what do you like— what do you know— what would you think is going to be the future of that? Where do you see that going, you know, over the next, you know, year, 5 years, 10 years?

Hmm. It's a good question. Naomi, what do you think? Where are we going the next year, 5 years?

I mean, like, is COVID still around?

Right?

I mean, I think that really depends, right? So, I mean, I think if we kind of just to kind of circle back a little bit on, you know, like, what does it mean to be a marketing ops professional? I think That definition as well, like, is going to vary depending on if you want to be an individual contributor, if you want to lead a team, for example, right? And there, you know, and it depends on what you want out of your career. And I feel like, you know, definitely the— if you want to lead a team and the higher up you go in your career, the further away you get away from the technology. And it's like kind of that fine balance between, you know, at least for me as well, it's like I don't want to ever be so far away from the technology that I don't know what I'm talking about. Right? Like, if my team comes to me and asks me a question about something or my opinion, I need to still know that, you know, I have the data and information to back that, to back that up. As far as where the industry is going to go in 5 or 10 years, I mean, I would like to think that the work that we're doing right now is going to help to, you know, not— when people ask me what I do and I say marketing ops, they're It's not just a blank stare that I'm getting back. You know, my parents still think I work for CSIS, which is like the Canadian version of the CIA or FBI. You know, like they don't have no clue. They just are like, you're traveling for work again and you work with computers?

Okay.

You know, it's like they just, they just don't, it doesn't matter how many times I try to explain it. They, they're convinced I work for the Secret Service or something.

Secret Agent Naomi.

I know, I know.

It's, uh, that's awesome.

You know, there's, there's truth in jest, right? They joke about it, but I'm like, secretly, I think you guys actually believe this. Yeah, I mean, I think that there's just a lot of technology that's out there right now. And I think that in the next 5 years, you might see a lot more acquisitions that we're seeing right now, just continued acquisitions. And a lot of people kind of just seeing, do we need all of this technology to be able to do what we need to do? Or can we simplify things a little bit? Because there is There can be a lot of noise, right? I think people kind of get zoomed out, you know, another year of virtual events. I don't— we're gonna have to get a little bit more creative when it comes to how do we want to engage with our potential customers, right?

Yeah, no, I totally agree. And you can definitely get like, you know, I think they call it Zoom fatigue and all that other stuff. The tech factor, you know, there's a lot of noise in the technology space. I think we've all seen the martech, you know, 8,000 now from Scott and his team. Scott Brinker, for those that maybe haven't heard of it, go look it up. And then, yeah, I think from a marketing operations kind of professional development opportunity in the future, I think we've all kind of touched on it today, right? Like, we've talked a little bit about, like, it depends on what role you kind of want to have.

Yeah.

Naomi, you're saying you never want to be far enough away from the technology to not be dangerous, right, and really know exactly what it is that you're talking about and have data to back it up and that kind of stuff. I kind of went the other way, right? Like, I ended up moving from a marketing ops role into more of a growth role, and then now I'm doing community work. And so I'm about as far away from like a traditional marketing ops role as you can be these days. But the point is, is that like I know enough of like how the technologies can work and can function that ideally what we do is we go hire these technologists as a function to, to really drive the excellence in that tool, in that suite, right? So like you kind of know at a certain point you make a decision, do you want to maybe move up a little bit in terms of strategy and and kind of the approach to leveraging technology in your business and overseeing how that all fits into an organization, and then hire talent that you trust to go run it. But you come from a place that says, hey, I know, I know that this tool can function largely in this manner. And therefore, you know, there's these kind of asks that are reasonable to make. And I think I kind of, I go back to I think, Naomi, you talked about learning HTML. I too, in my early days, taught myself HTML, started building emails and websites and all that stuff. And then I went a couple steps beyond that after I joined my first SaaS company, Mavenlink. And I was like, hey, what's this Ruby on Rails thing all about, right? Like, because we were built on Ruby and our website was running on Rails, like Ruby on Rails. So I went and took like a 30-day Rails course to just try to understand how to do development work. And that, that was, I mean, part of it was that, like, am I going to stay in marketing ops? Because I have no idea what the career path looks like. And then part of it was, like, you know, if not, like, maybe development work is like a really good path. Because look at, there's money to be made there. Like, it's a hot market, still is. But the other part was, hey, as I go to ask my team at this really early stage, we were like under 30 employees at the time. Like, when I go to ask the team for functionality that's either in the app or in the website, I'd like to know that what I'm asking for is like reasonable, right? And so this kind of goes back to the point that I was making where maybe I've learned enough in marketing ops, and I think about like developing myself as a professional, that I can move into a place where I, I know enough about how things work so that I can ask for a reasonable expectation of how to bring a program to life, right? I may not know the latest feature of HubSpot or Marketo, but generally speaking, if I get the updates, like, I'm well-versed enough in this space to just go and, you know, hire the talent that needs to be in place. And so I think, like, you know, maybe the path in terms of, like, what does your career path look like in marketing operations, it's— It's at some point, there's a split that you— it seems like still today, it's kind of, you're either going to become a pretty deeply entrenched technologist because you just absolutely love making this tool do really, really cool things. And boy, do I fit into that bucket. But I also fell in love with the idea of like collaborating at the strategic level to try to like make a program come together. So, you know, maybe you move into like a business strategy role, which is, I think, like why we see functions like RevOps kind of popping up and stuff like that. I think that's a whole other conversation for another day, but hopefully we'll get there.

I think even just in today's conversation, I've already, you know, I think there's a couple of topics that we could go deeper on. Yeah, you know, my, my, my take on this is what's really missing, I think, in, in terms of training development is I've always thought of, even though I've got a technology bent, I've always wanted to understand context and thought of technology as an enabler for, in a general sense, of a business objective, right, or business strategy. And I think the real challenge for people entering it is Yeah, that there's deep technical stuff, and that's relatively easy to get access in terms of training and learning and communities and things like that. What's not really easy is training or development opportunities and things like that around the, you know, the strategy behind marketing and how does the technology and analytics and things like that play a role in it. And then how does that work? And I think I think to me it's really easy to get enamored, you know, with, I can make this technology sing. I think, you know, do something really cool. I think it's the way you said it, Mike, and that's great, but if it's just for the cool factor and it's not for some sort of objective, then it's not really going to help build the, you know, the rest of the organization's view of marketing ops as a strategic partner. And I think that's what I'd like to see happening is one of the challenges I think we all run into is that, you know, there's always sort of 2 parts of marketing ops or even RevOps or all these other ones, right, which is there's always the highly visible stuff, right, the email that's going out the door, the ads that are going out, the webinar that we're supporting, that the rest of the organization sees really visibly. But then there's the other part of the iceberg that's below the surface of the water, which is Making sure that Marketo and Salesforce sync is happening right, that, you know, when we do a webinar that we're capturing who's on there correctly. Are we capturing, you know, are we going to market with ads so that we can assess, are they actually being effective? And to me, that's where, you know, like, you need to have both capabilities, but you need to be able to have someone who can come in and not only do that, but also be able to describe the value we're adding to the organization. that goes, you know, which is always a challenge in some ways, right?

Mm-hmm.

Our marketing partners often get more, you know, credit for a lot of the programs and things like that because the creative part and all that is much more visible than what we have historically done. And to me, that's one of the challenges we've got. And I think the more we can provide people with communities like this or even training opportunities that help that from a business strategy standpoint will be Useful.

So yeah, yeah, for sure. And I think like, um, you're, you're touching on another thing that is always a hot button item for me as, as a marketing ops professional and thinking about like being an advisor, right? Um, I think that's why so many of them move to, uh, move into like agency type of roles or consulting type of roles is because I think we want to be strategic advisors and we want to be involved in the strategic discussions because those other departments, the leaders in marketing, right, like communications or design or anything like that, they may not know how the technology could do something. And so they try to lean on us, but sometimes they don't know what questions to ask. So I think that's something like maybe we could unpack in another show or something where we think about like, what kind of questions can you ask your marketing ops team to try to like execute your programs and, you know, deliver something really, really unique? But I don't know, there's— I'm sure there's a ton of opportunity.

That's great. All right, so yeah, I think we've got a ton of stuff that I know that we're gonna be able to get to in future episodes, so I'm excited about that. Is there anything, like, just on a personal level, like, are you looking forward to 2021 about? I think we all were hoping that it would look better than 2020. So far, I'm not sure that's the case from a general worldview standpoint, but how about How about you? Anything you're looking forward to?

I'm personally looking forward to seeing the community grow and seeing this show continue to grow. And hopefully no, just no more, no more COVID one day soon.

I would have to agree with Mike's sentiment. Just super excited to see all the engagement that's happening in both the Slack channel and also our you know, new online community and just, you know, no more COVID, hopefully. And just seeing how people will combat Zoom fatigue while still keeping people engaged in new and creative ways. Always looking for different and, you know, creative ways to generate leads, especially when everyone's kind of in the same boat stuck in front of a computer, right? And we're not interacting with each other. You know, I think there's going to be some interesting things that come out of this, but hopefully we kind of get back to a semblance of I guess a new normal sooner than later.

Yeah, I agree. I hope that we can take this online community and bring it back to some in-person engagements one of these days here and really get a chance to shake hands with some of these amazing MoPros. I don't know that'll happen in 2021. Maybe it's aspirational thinking, but 2022.

I want to be able to strip new normal from our whole vocabulary, but that's very tough. All right. So, you know, I think this has been a great conversation. Thanks, Mike. Thanks, Naomi. For those of you who've been listening or listening online afterwards, thank you for being a part of this. And we'd love your feedback on the show, the topics, you know, this format. You know, this is something new we wanted to try, this little more of a talk show. So if you in the future want to be a part of this, either as a guest or as just someone calling in and asking questions, questions, we would welcome that. You know, if you're not part of the MOPROS community, you should go out there and do that. And that's at themopros.com, T-H-E-M-O-P-R-O-S.com. You know, just send us— join there, send us feedback about the show, send us suggestions for topics, and we look forward to the next one. If you want to, you know, keep up with these podcasts as we record, you know, get them posted afterwards, you can go to themropros.com/opscast. So it's /opscast. So until next time, thanks. We look forward to it. Thanks, Mike. Signing off.

Thanks, everybody.