Is 2022 The Year of the Marketing Ops Professional?

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 rev ops 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.

Hello everyone, welcome to another episode of OpsCast brought to you by the MoPros. Today I'm joined by Naomi Liu, Mike Rizzo. I'm Michael Hartman. Say hello. Happy New Year.

Hey, everybody.

Happy New Year.

Happy New Year, 2022. I'm calling it the year of marketing ops.

Are you now?

Yeah, it's the year of the marketing ops professional. That's what it is.

Okay, well, I think we're going to get into that a little bit, but I think before— but just before that, I wanted to— so we are recording this. We're sitting here recording this on January 7th, 2022. And I hadn't looked back in a while, and our first episode of OpsCast was on January 15th, 2021, the day before Mike's birthday.

That's right. That's why I remember it.

Happy early birthday.

Ah, thanks.

I'm excited. So it's hard to believe, like a year. I actually thought we started later in 2021. I didn't remember it being January.

Yeah, I didn't either. And back then we were doing the radio-style version, right, with that startup that pivoted away from from the platform. And so we had to go back to this sort of podcasty, still radio feel, but more prepared kind of thing.

Yeah, and I think it set a tone for us, right?

It did.

I think I still, when we talk to guests and potential guests, I still want it to feel like it's as if we had an audience listening.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

In real time.

I prefer— I like the vibe that we have. I mean, I know I'm biased because it's our show or whatever. Like, I appreciate that about it. It's a little bit more organic and not so produced. But hey, high production quality shows are also like really easy to listen to, right? So yeah, to each their own. All right, so 2022, what are we doing?

Yeah, so the year, the year of the marketing ops professional. So yeah, when we were talking about what we could talk about today, we said, you know, we saw Someone who's been a guest, Darryl Alfonso, recently published on the martech.org website an article about his predictions for 2022 in MarkOps. So I'm just going to read through them real quickly and then we can jump into sort of a conversation about what we think of these. So number 1, a rise in VP and director-level marketing ops roles. Number 2, formalized training for marketing ops. Number 3, marketing ops will overtake advertising ops. Number 4, account-based marketing will be owned by marketing ops. Number 5, marketing ops will become the 1st or 2nd marketing hire. And number 6, data privacy will become a marketing ops core competency. So, um, I don't know, Naomi, initial reactions. What do you think? Any, anything that's missing? Anything you want, you think is, uh, we should do a deeper dive on?

Yeah, I like this list. A few of them catch my eye, definitely. We had been talking about some of these topics before we started recording. The one that definitely kind of raises my eyebrow is number 6, which is the data privacy will become a marketing ops core competency. Because for me, at least within EFI, it's been a core responsibility for myself and the team since day one. So I'm curious now for companies that don't have this as a core competency for marketing ops, where does that sit? And would love to kind of talk about that with the two of you a bit more. And then, you know, maybe we can just start off with first in the list about the VP and director level marketing ops roles. Can kind of dive right into that one.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That number 6, just, just to latch onto that for a second. Like, yeah, that caught my eye too. I feel like it already is a part of the function, right? But it's also incredibly important for the C-level CIO to pay attention to data privacy. And so while it might be a core competency in that you understand it, it doesn't mean that it's just owned by that department. The whole org is sort of responsible for it in different ways, but the alignment therein with that CIO-level role, I think, is going to increase, if anything. I think the C-suite will realize, and the marketing ops person will be responsible for, hey, this tool has access to our data, and so how do we make sure that we're compliant and all that other stuff?

Yeah.

But yeah, um, let's jump in. I'm good to jump in with the rise in VP stuff.

Yeah, so I'll give you my— this is the number one, is the one that I probably, um, that caught my eye the most, just because I'm not, I'm not convinced that— I think the director, senior director roles, I think definitely those, there's been more and more of those. I, I am hopeful that there's more VP-level roles, but I Don't see that in 2022 personally. One of the things I do think is a potential is sort of VP-level roles that combine marketing ops with other functions within marketing, maybe even to the level where, you know, I have seen some more of this where, you know, we're seeing people coming out of marketing ops being elevated into overall marketing leadership. So what are your takes?

I'm curious what you, what you guys think about that. Like, if, do you think the path to, and I know that we had Vivian on as a guest and we had an episode around that, like the path to CMO is via marketing ops, but not everybody in marketing ops wants to be a CMO.

Right.

And so when you talk about a VP of marketing ops role, you know, there you think about like, okay, so what does that mean? Does that mean like expanded responsibility or expanded like team functions or whatnot? And. Does demand gen fall under marketing ops? I don't know if it does. And I feel like you can argue both sides of that, right? Because some people may say, well, marketing ops is purely a technology adoption, enablement, data hygiene, data management function within an organization. demand gen falls under a head of marketing potentially, right? So then if you do VP of marketing ops, then how is that different from a CMO or head of marketing general?

Yeah, I mean, I think that's a great question for everyone to try to answer. Personally, I agree. I don't think while the path to CMO might be carved through marketing operations, certainly not everybody wants to be a CMO. There's a broad skill set that needs to come from the rest of that T-shaped marketer band that that not all marketing ops people really want to jump into. And then for VP of, you know, marketing operations, yeah, I don't think that they are necessarily— personally, I wouldn't see that as overtaking responsibility for demand gen and those kinds of things. I see it as, you know, it's a technology role that is looking to understand the momentum and direction of the business objectives. And needs to build a roadmap for technology to help achieve set objectives across the organization, and that's alignment between you know sales, client success, IT, and marketing, where they're saying, "Hey, if we want to grow in this market, you know by 20% this year, there's these different levers that we can pull on because the that particular market responds in a different way, or we need the right tool to be compliant inside." of another market, and so I need to build that roadmap. And it's really just a technology function, a throughput and adoption function to make sure that these tools are actually doing, you know, the thing that you're saying that you want them to do, but certainly not responsible for driving pipeline, right? It's— I see it as like a throughput kind of function more than anything else.

Yeah, I mean, I think the point about Not everybody in marketing ops wants to be a marketing generalist leader. I think that's totally a valid point. Part of this is probably coming from me that it's in a couple of my recent roles I had traditional marketing ops, but I had stuff that I think would traditionally not fall under marketing ops that was under my responsibility. One was an inbound SDR team and one was digital, in particular paid digital kind of stuff. So that's, I think part of it is a little bit just from my own personal experience too. I mean, I would love to be proved wrong on the VP thing. I do think it's, it might be somewhat related to point 2 about, you know, training as well, or maybe more pointedly, like, I think, and I've thought this for a while in marketing in general, marketing apps for sure, is that I think there's a bit of title inflation that has happened. Simply because that was the way to get people paid what was appropriate, regardless of whether or not the title was appropriate or whether or not that matched what they actually did on a day-to-day basis. If that makes sense, right?

It was like trying to adjust, take using title to get to the pay.

Yeah.

That's so— yeah, I could see that happening. That's unfortunate that that happens.

I think when it comes to training for marketing ops though, it's like, it's also important not to forget that there needs to be education and training around the organizations and the people that these ops folks will report to, right? Because you can train all these folks and then you have all these people, but if nobody understands what they do and there's no education around the benefits or any of that, then it's kind of a moot point because then it's just, you're going to be hitting a wall constantly, right? Or you're always going to be trying to upsell yourself within the organization, trying to prove value when there's a lot of other organizations within a company that you don't have to, like sales Sales ops generally doesn't need to, but marketing ops is always this uphill battle.

Yeah, yeah, I would— yeah, I can see that. I was recently talking to Daniel Murray, who has, you know, his podcast for marketing millennials, and one of the things that he's definitely a marketing ops guy, right? I think he's going to join us on an episode at some point here too, and we'll talk shop a little bit. One of the things that he shared with me was this idea that, you know, while not everybody wants to be a generalist, some of the standout marketing operations experts out there actually have a broad spectrum of generalist capabilities and understanding that really set them apart. And I tend to agree with that, right? Like some of the real standout marketing ops folks that are not just deep technologists in Marketo or a particular platform. They have a broader understanding of the function across marketing and how they all kind of interplay. That doesn't mean that you're inevitably going to become a VP or a CMO, but it certainly is one of the core kind of skill sets when you think about training and kind of upskilling and leveling up to start standing out in a marketing op function. It's really a good idea to go look at Even to your point, Naomi, right? Like, how are you going to interface with the rest of the team, your actual core team on marketing, if that's who you're kind of reporting under, if you're not like in a RevOps org, or across teams like a sales team and IT and client success. And so, you know, I agree with that. I think that some of those standout marketing ops experts are really broadly skilled. But yeah, the training and the kind of upskilling stuff, you know, obviously here with Mopros and what we're working on, like we certainly to create more opportunity for people to learn. And so that's a mission of ours. And I, you know, I selfishly will agree with, with point number 2 on that article from Darryl to say like, yeah, I, I personally think that there's gonna be more training and upskilling because this community is literally building it every day. So this is, you know, you know, spot on. But, um, but yeah, anyway, broad skills are, are definitely important for For growth in marketing operations.

No, I agree with you. And I was, as you were saying, I was thinking, you know, we've got, we've had a couple people and we've got some more lined up or getting lined up to kind of tell their story. And it's, it's another thing, right? These people who started, um, I can't remember, some, one of somebody was started as doing paid search and, you know, other people started in sales. And so I think there's not a path, but I do think that I have thought even from way, way back in my career that when I was basically doing programming in the oil and gas industry, like, I wanted to understand this code I was writing, right? How does it fit into how the business operates and makes money, right? And I think, yeah, that, that whole understanding is part of what we want to get.

Yeah, I would, I would definitely agree. And it's funny, like, right now as we're recording this episode, Within the last, you know, 24, 48 hours, Jen Berggren, who's a wonderful contributor to our community, and she, I think she's currently employed at Remote-ish. She actually wrote an article. It says, My Career Journey into Operations: An Operations Origin Story. And it's got this wonderful graphic. If you could picture this, like, what would normally be a straight line, in the middle of that straight line is this like super chaotic, like, like ball of string. And then the arrow comes out the other side. And I feel like the journey into MOPS is like that for a lot of us. It's a really great visual. You know, I'm excited to learn from some of those guests. But yeah, without a doubt, like, you, you kind of pick up a lot of different things along the way and then some of us just fall right into it.

So, all right. So I think it sounds like we sort of have a couple of different views on point one. Like, what's the next one? I actually had on the last point, I did want to add like the thing about privacy and that kind of stuff. I've thought for a while that part of my role was to be the advocate for the customer and their privacy. And one of the teams that I actually enjoy working with a lot, maybe it's because I'm married to one, is the legal team, right? An attorney. But I think that we always talk about marketing ops needs to be connected with the rest of marketing, sales and sales ops, and maybe finance and IT. And I think legal doesn't always get included in there, but I have always— that's one of the first places I go. And it's for 2 fronts, right? One is for, I think, privacy guidance and things like that. The other's like, we're often doing contracts, right? And so just, you know, getting to know them is a key part.

Yeah. On the legal side of things, like when I was back in my last role, I was actually just building community. And I went to our page, our legal kind of privacy page, and it hadn't been updated in like, I don't know, 8 years or something. And And I started kind of making us think about it. I was like, hey, you know, this stuff, we need new T&Cs on here because we're launching this community and it means a bunch of stuff and, and yada yada. And I started asking all these questions and, and, you know, at the end of the day, you're, when you're interfacing from a marketing ops, it doesn't matter what your role is. I happen to be in a community role. When you start to bring in legal, you are doing 2 things, right? You are becoming an advocate for the safety and security of your organization. And people don't like asking those questions. Like, all the way up through leadership, they'll like sort of avoid it, right? Like, I mean, I know leaders at the C-suite will care about legalese and making sure things are right. But there are so much—

I have a story that I can't tell you about on this.

You can't say that. You can't. Now everyone's going to— you can't drop that.

No, no, no. I know.

That's like saying, I have a really important surprise, but I can't tell you.

At winter camp, Summer camp, I'll share it in person.

In person thing, yeah, not recorded. Okay, but sorry. Yeah, so, you know, even at the C-suite, they care about it, right? But they're incredibly busy, and so it's like easy to forget, conveniently forget to start asking these questions and trying to poke holes in it. So the first part is that when you start paying attention to that, you become a business partner in a way that is looking out for the security and longevity of the business, which is huge. And if somebody doesn't recognize that value, like, that's a fault of their own. And then the second part is that, to your point, Michael, you are becoming an advocate and a champion for the customer. So you're making sure that the customer is also being taken care of when you think about data privacy and compliance and security and all that stuff. So if nobody's asking the questions and you feel like something is awry, like Bring it up because you're creating a strong relationship on sort of both ends of the spectrum there, the business and the customer. The customer is never going to thank you for it, but hopefully the business will. So anyway, that was my 2 cents.

I totally agree. All right, so let's— should we move on to— we kind of touched on number 2, the formalized training for marketing ops. I don't know that— I tend to think that actually will take hold as well, and we've had guests on and I really don't have anything to add to that. You all have anything?

Not so much on my end.

No, I'm good. Let's just move on.

All right. You can tell how much we planned this in advance, right? All right. So this is one I think, Mike, you might have the most to say on this one. I don't know. But this overtaking of advertising ops, it was one that stood out to me because I was like, For me, it was sort of an out-of-left-field one. I didn't really— I would not have ever thought about that as a, uh, as a thing that kind of we touched on.

Uh, yeah, I mean, I, I probably have stuff to say about this because I come from ad tech and I've spent some time in, in organizations that did display ads on networks and mobile. Um, So AdOps is a very different thing when you're inside those organizations. But when you're talking about advertising operations within an embedded org, like a software company, or just where that's not your core competency, is not to do display ads or what have you, I can see why MarketingOps will overtake a bit of the AdvertisingOps in terms of Again, sort of getting back to this idea of throughput and managing the tech. And that would be purely because it's about management of lead sources, right? And management, it's not like you're in charge of the budget or you're in charge of the A/B test or the results necessarily, or not necessarily results, the next test that you wanna try. It's that you're in charge of, did you actually set up the infrastructure properly for us to be able to report on this? And if you didn't, then I need to be the one sort of implementing it or making sure that the person who's in charge of doing the implementation on the AdOps team is aware of the, you know, the UTM sources that we use and mediums and all that other stuff. Are the images compliant? Right. If you're in a legal field that requires certain imagery and certain language to be on your images, When you think about it, like a company like Intelligence Bank, who's a digital asset management company, and we talked about episodes before, there's this whole kind of component of ad ops and marketing ops that comes into play there. And so yes, I can see it overtaking that in that regard, but certainly not from like the demand gen kind of spend perspective.

Yeah. And I was— where my head went to when I saw that was, oh, maybe this is tied to the, you know, the The cookieless kind of world we're supposedly going to, right?

Yeah, that's actually a really good point too. When you start thinking about creating your own kind of network, your own private party set of data, then yeah, I could see that. I didn't even consider that. What about you, Naomi? Are you going to take over ad ops at EFI?

Highly doubtful, no. I don't think so.

Yeah.

I mean, never say never, right? But—

For sure. Come on.

You're not out there trying to build a kingdom yourself there?

Well, what's interesting is—

It doesn't start with ad ops, though.

It doesn't start with ad ops.

What's interesting is that, you know, I think the article reads like today's hype in B2B focuses on things like ABM and community building and product-led growth and all this stuff. Point number 4 was that account-based marketing is now going to be owned by marketing ops. And so this article, you know, Darryl touches on some pretty hot topics, some that are a little bit out there, maybe, at least in some of our opinions. But account-based marketing being owned by marketing ops, like, is it not sort of already like a component of it? Like, I don't know, is that a demand gen function? I saw it under demand gen and the org that I was at.

So I'd be curious. So I haven't actually— I mean, I'm familiar with it. I have not been in an organization, quite honestly, that was like really ready for it. And part of why I resisted it in the past was not so much because of the technology and marketing ops being able to sort of support and enable it. It was more because the coordination and alignment and the sales team's readiness, right, to do things like identify the top accounts you want to target, which is a really critical first step, really wasn't there. And so I think marketing ops and/or sales ops or rev ops all make sense for it depending on how you're structured and how you're going to market motions, what they look like, and where you think you're going to get the most value if you're particularly talking about the technology component that will support it.

Hi. So as I clear my throat in everybody's ear, uh, sorry.

I had dogs barking in the background already.

I know, like semi-live show, folks. Um, right.

Just like in episode 1.

That's right. And the episode with Darryl, the fire alarm went off.

Yeah.

Um, yeah. So account-based marketing, I executing on ABM. I don't know, Naomi, I don't know if you, have you done any execution or has anyone in EFI done execution around ABM?

Yeah, we've had a few false starts, but that's something that definitely is a focus for this year. And a lot of it is bandwidth, to be honest. Bandwidth and resources and developing these huge programs. So yeah, we have had a few false starts, but I'm hoping that for this year, this will be the year, third time's a charm.

This year. So instead of the year of marketing ops, it's the year of ABM for EFI.

Yeah, exactly.

But not ad ops.

But not ad ops.

No.

Yeah, I— so the message that pulls through from both of you for me as it relates to ABM, and at least from some of the examples that I've seen of this, is that it is like I can see marketing ops owning the data part of it and helping to enable ABM by aligning with sales and so forth. However, execution of ABM requires a lot. It's a lot of project management. It requires resources and it requires, you know, literal people time. And then there's sort of like a fulfillment component. Usually ABM comes with some air cover strategy on the digital side, as well as like a little literal physical product that gets sent out. That's a pretty strong tactic for folks, right? They ship a You know, a hat or a swag box or whatever to somebody. And that stuff is not owned by marketing ops, right? Like that is owned very much by go-to-market team, field marketer, or ABM specialist that's probably on the demand gen side. So I, yeah, like to some degree, account-based marketing can, from the data side, can be owned by marketing ops, but certainly not on the execution side. Like that's a totally different thing.

Yeah, I think, Naomi, so you said you're going to be going for 10.3. Like, what do you anticipate your role or your team's role will be in that?

On the IBM side? So a lot of it is like education, like the platform, how we can use it, guidance, walking hand in hand, lockstep with our demand gen team to figure out what accounts they want to target. How do they interpret the data? What is the cadence with messaging? message drops, like, you know, what channels we're going to target, things like that. So.

Okay. So are you involved at all with coordinating, like, with development of, like, the target lists and/or the account assignments and that? Okay.

No.

Interesting. Okay.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Because I won't know the accounts as well as our sales teams, for example.

Sure. Right. Yeah. I think this is going to be a really interesting one. And maybe Darryl's onto something in terms of maybe it depends on the type of company, like size, stage, structure, that may have a part of this as well.

Yeah. Yeah, I could see that.

Yeah, because at the end of the day, I want it to be scalable. So I want to build that framework that we would then be able to identify accounts that the sales team and our marketing leads identify. and enroll them into these ABM programs and not have it be so specific to one individual account, right? And I'm— there's a layer or two removed from me and the customer in the sense that, you know, I don't— while I know the data very well, I don't necessarily know the nuances of every account, especially our named accounts and strategic accounts, right? So.

Yeah, absolutely. All right. So let's hit one more and then I have a kind of an open-ended question for you at the end here. So the last one is marketing ops will become the first or second marketing hire. And so I think this probably applies more to early-stage companies, but, you know, what's your take, Mike? You've probably been in more early-stage companies than I have for sure. Naomi, I can't remember. I know you've been at EY for a while, so. What's your take on that? Do you think that's— are you seeing that shift happening, Mike?

I, yeah, I mean, I waver back and forth on this. There's a part of me that's like, hell yeah, that's awesome. Like, that's, that is, I think just because I'm a marketing ops person, right? I'm like, yes, that sounds great. But I also happen to be a bit of a generalist, right? Like, I I can do paid ads, you know, not as well as someone who's really an expert in that. I can do email marketing. I can do a number of things. So I'm a bit of a generalist. And so, but I try to look at it through the lens of marketing ops, right? Like, how do we build something that's more scalable and not piecemeal? I don't want to create chaos for someone to manage later. But I, the reason I waver on this is that like, I don't know that someone wants that responsibility. Like maybe the second hire is marketing ops. If your first person who's leading marketing is the generalist that can do a lot of the sort of building and execution type of work, and you're relying on this marketing ops person to do maybe just a little bit of that fulfillment, but a lot of the foundational stuff, then sure, they could be the first hire. But like, more than likely, the business is gonna want to see results from, you know, go-to-market activities. And that, that, like, if we're going to advocate for marketing ops to have a definition, it is not to be responsible for go-to-market activities and doing demand gen, right? It is, it is purely not demand gen, like, focused. It is a part of the infrastructural system to make sure all that pipeline works and is scalable, right? As you want to add more programs on. And so for it to be the very first hire sort of seems daunting. I think if someone who is really a marketing ops person at their core that isn't a generalist that doesn't want to dabble across all those different types of activities, they're probably not going to want that role, right? So I waver on it. I see it being a second hire. I know Darryl commented about Dave Gerhardt sort of calling attention to the importance of marketing ops, which is great. You know, we love, we love big, big voices like that saying marketing ops is an important critical function. But I think the reality is, is that the business needs have to be fulfilled. And that isn't necessarily what marketing ops is all about. It's a, it's a component of it, but certainly not the go-to-market stuff.

Yeah, so I think I took that his post or his comment there to mean Um, the first hire after a head of marketing, right? As opposed to the first marketing hire, you know?

So yeah. Yeah. And that's how I interpret it too.

But okay, so yeah, every head of marketing doesn't necessarily do—

I know a lot of heads of marketing that don't want to do execution, right?

Like, agree.

Yeah, they want to, they want to have agencies and contractors and things to do that because they have a vision of what they want to build out. And that's fine, right? Like you've reached a level and you want to do that and you've got the buy-in and the budget and you built the plan and you want to execute on it. Great. Go do it. But if you don't have some of those other things in place, like there's a big caveat to that first hire. If you're going to be that first team hire, there's probably some other function that's already contracted or being fulfilled by that head of marketing, right? That, that's sort of where I was coming at it from. I agree. Yes. There's a head of marketing first.

Yeah. So, so, so maybe there's, Maybe this is linked a little bit to kind of the first couple of things we talked about where, you know, a lot of marketing ops folks don't want to be a marketing generalist, but then there are going to be some who are. Maybe this is the opportunity for them to, you know, if they either came up through marketing ops and want to have a more generalist, you know, they're sort of a tech-savvy marketer at that point. Yeah, that may— I could see that happening for the the portion of marketing ops folks who are interested in doing something like that. I think I would in general, Mike, I think I'm with you that it's more likely it's going to be more of a marketing generalist that happens to have some tech savvy as well. That's for sure. That's my take. But I think the point of an early hire needs to understand ops and technology for the marketing team to be able to scale over time and get it set up as good as possible as early as possible is an important piece.

Yeah, yeah, I totally, I totally agree with that. But that also means that you don't spend a ton of time just building dashboards and reports, right? Like, that's not— you could build— like, that's not the— that's not super mission critical to like an early stage company, right? Like, oh, the dashboards have to be perfect, right? Probably not worth it.

Naomi, what do you— what's your thought on that one?

I think one of the responsibilities for the marketing ops person that gets hired is going to be the tools that the company uses too, right? So I think that what you said earlier about the person needs to have a high aptitude for technical knowledge, like who is actually going to be responsible for that? Is it going to be the head of marketing or is it the marketing ops person? Right. So I think there was a discussion on the Slack channel. I think it was last week maybe about how, and maybe Jeff was the one that posted about it, but it was about how the technology that's within an organization is going to be there longer than the people that are there, right?

Mm-hmm.

So, yes, the person can be a second marketing hire, but are you going to have like 10 years from now the legacy decisions that they made at that time? Or like, what does that look like? Is it cart or horse, right? Is it the technology that comes in first and then you hire the people to run it? Or do you hire the person to come in and then implement that technology and make the decisions that this is what it's— what should be good for the business, right? Those are all questions that And maybe it's that maybe the, maybe the thought is that, okay, yes, you use agencies and you manage those agencies first until you determine like what's best for the business. But, you know, it's all a—

That's a good point. That's a good point about the, like, the legacy of someone's decisions on technology or process or anything else are going to outlive their time in a lot of places.

Oh yeah. Yeah. Without a doubt. I, I was, I was once told by someone who ended up replacing me that we connected and The person said, hey, uh, thanks for all those workflows, man. I was like, I was like, uh, nice. Was that that I set them up correctly or that you're like super pissed that you can't untangle them?

Were you being sarcastic or?

Yeah. And I, so I, I sincere to this day, I still don't know what the actual intent of the comment was, but I was fine with it.

It's fine.

We're friends.

It's all good. It's all good. Okay, so I think we've run through all those. I'm curious to know if you think if you were to build this list, is there something that is not on the list that you would have said will likely be a part of the 2022 marketing ops landscape? Naomi, your thoughts?

Hmm. I mean, I think, I think this is a pretty comprehensive list. I, I think that the data privacy piece is an important one, especially as more and more countries adopt stricter compliance laws. It doesn't usually go in reverse. Canada is not going to say, you know, CASL, forget about it. Let's just scrap it. It gets more and more complex as there's more things that are connected, more data just exchanges hands. And I think that's an important piece. I would almost even spend on that one personally. So just my 2 cents.

Yeah, that's a good point. Mike?

I would say it sort of goes back to this commentary that was happening on LinkedIn a week or so ago where someone was suggesting that there will be a larger shift of marketing ops roles into rev ops, people moving into rev ops. And They were sort of asking the question, I think, yet another poll, right? Is that really a thing that's going to happen?

And what, a LinkedIn poll?

Yeah.

What?

I— my response to that was I don't think that people will move into RevOps like in large numbers this year. I do, however, think that there will be some sort of— let's refer to it as like downward pressure From, or like organizational pressure, if you don't want to, you know, if you want to be flat in your org structure, organizational pressure that comes on to marketing ops to start looking at business objectives and goals holistically across the org that sort of forces the decision of a marketing operations professional to decide if they need to take on more responsibility as a RevOps kind of person, or if there needs to be some sort of restructure to their role or department at large that eventually begets a change into RevOps. And if somebody is feeling that sort of pressure in their function as a marketing operations person, they're either going to decide to make a shift and go find a new role that either suits their marketing ops tendencies that they prefer to stay in, Or they're going to advocate for one or the other internally, but it's more gonna be about the organization asking for those responsibilities of marketing operations that's going to increase this year. So from a prediction perspective, I would say, yeah, like organizations are going to start looking to marketing operations as one of the channels or one of the teams that they need to lean on. to try to implement larger organizational go-to-market objective fulfillment, and that'll force change in new ways.

Interesting. So the 2 things, and I don't know how strongly I feel about these, to be honest with you, that I think I would— I think I see bits of these coming. One is just more of a focus within marketing ops on reporting and analytics and the skill sets behind it. I think it's becoming like— I think we've had so many conversations about whether it's attribution reporting or other kinds of reporting analytics that that is a skill set. Like understanding data, understanding statistics, understanding analysis is a skill set. I think there's a skill set gap within marketing ops that needs to be filled because there's going to be more and more pressure to provide timely, in quotes, accurate reporting and being able to then feed that back so we can adjust. So I think that, and maybe that's just me being hopeful, I think it's a skill gap that needs to be filled. So it could be tied to the education, it could be tied to kind of, it could be a standalone thing. The other one, and it's, I think, Maybe related to the first point, you know, I'm— I haven't seen a lot of these, but I've seen a number of— I've started to see more scenarios where there are roles that look a little bit like marketing ops or sound a little bit like marketing ops, but are really either— whether they're titled this or not— are like a chief of staff for head of marketing. And why I think they're different is because what they do is they typically will have ops and tech under them. But the thing that gets under them that is a little bit different, and I think it's been a missing part for a lot of marketing organizations, is overall project management, program management within the marketing team, and the place where sort of big picture strategic projects that don't have an obvious other leader within the marketing team to own fall on that person. And I think it's a natural progression for someone in marketing ops who probably has a process orientation anyway to take on a role like that. So that's my other prediction.

All right.

That we'll see more of those, but I don't know that it'll really take off this year.

Yeah, I definitely, I definitely agree that that's a possibility. Um, I think every team I've been on, and I, you know, I've been on small growing companies, uh, mostly for all my career. Every single one of them needed some form of project manager to try to step in, um, and we never actually had a dedicated function for that. So inevitably it was like me or someone else that would do your best, right? But yeah, I—

On the side.

Yeah, on the side, you do your best. Uh, and yeah, I could definitely see that.

Or like Naomi, where you outsource it to the IT project management team, right?

It's not that I outsource it, they actively want to be involved.

No, that's great.

That's incredible.

I love that. But I think that's highly unusual actually. So those last 2—

It's not without a lot of work though on that relationship part of it. It's not just like something that just came by accident.

Sure. Yeah. And maybe my 2 predictions are me also hoping that those Things will happen. So I just, I see, I have seen enough of that where I do think that there's going to be, there's going to have to be, there's going to be some more movement there. Anyway, well, I think we've pretty much exhausted that. Any other final thoughts on this topic of what do we think the marketing ops landscape will be in 2022?

No, I mean, no, I think, I think Darryl's article was great. I, you know, I'm looking at the landscape myself. I think Franz, the, you know, gentleman that you've spoken to on his podcast, Michael, he talked about a couple months ago, there's like over 12 million global professionals now that have job titles that specify marketing operations. Now, I don't exactly know how he pulled all that data together, but like—

That's crazy.

That's pretty impressive. And I took a look at the job market for the US on December 27th, and I looked at the last 30 days of posts. There were over 46,000 jobs posted for marketing operations when you type that in, just in the US alone. And when you look at 'em and you start breaking 'em down, there are over 1,000 of them that are executive-level jobs, which is pretty impressive, right? So I don't know that that number will shift, but I think we're gonna see a lot of job Posting and a lot of growth. I mean, our hiring channel is popping off every single day. There's like 5 new jobs. So from a prediction, lots more opportunities, especially as we continue to sort of stay remote, right? But yeah, the market is insane. The demand is insane. So 2022, the year of the marketing operations professional. I'm saying, put it out there.

Here we go.

Cool.

All right. Well, Naomi, Mike, thank you. It's always a pleasure.

Yeah.

I can't believe it's been almost a year since our first live session. Anyway, so also to our listeners, thank you so much for supporting us, continuing to provide us with great ideas and feedback. And for those who are guests, thank you for being there and those who will be guests. We're looking forward to having you on. Until next time, thanks everyone.

Thanks everybody.

Thank you.