Marketing Ops isn't Marketing - The Spicy Hot Take

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

Hello and welcome to another episode of OpsCast brought to you by marketingops.com powered by the MoPros. I'm your host today, joined by my Counterparts, my amigos, uh, Naomi Liu.

Three amigos.

The Three Amigos.

The Three Amigos episode.

We don't need no stinking badges. Does anyone get that reference?

No.

No.

No?

No. All right, I'm old, so.

Thanks.

Uh, I'm seeing all these posts on, on like not LinkedIn social media stuff about movies that came out when I was like in high school, and it's like depressing. And the like awesome at the same time because there were great movies back then. But, um, anyway, so there you go.

That's fun.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Like, say, like some kind of wonderful— if you haven't seen that movie, go see it. It's great.

I probably should. Yeah.

Um, okay. So we are gathered here today because Mike kicked off, uh, like this firestorm of like online chatter, including like people getting together to talk about it in like live sessions and things like that. And you'll have to correct me if I get it wrong, Mike, but I think the question was simply, is marketing ops marketing? Right? I think that was the gist of the question. There was a little more context for it and you can provide more. But, and when I saw it, I was like, kind of eye-rolled, honestly. I was like, here he goes again, right? Just trying to be provocative. Like, I don't actually get the question. So like— Am I about right? Is that what it was?

No, I wasn't trying to be provocative. I really don't like to stir up the pot, to be honest with you. I don't like controversy.

But has it been controversial? I don't feel like it's been controversial.

No, it's actually been nice that people have recognized that the post was not me putting a stake in the ground. It was more just like it was a statement and a Someone tell me what their thoughts are on this because I've talked about it a lot with like Mark Serkin and a number of others before, right? When we first got the community going, Mark was like, do marketing ops people view themselves as marketers? And I was like, I think some do and I think some don't. And that was 2 years, 2+ years ago now. And that statement that I posted, it was literally a 5-word post that has now I don't know if it's gone viral, but it's definitely gone a number of places.

I'd say that's been like, at least in our world, right? That's pretty viral, right? Yeah. I think many, many people. Yeah.

There's been a minimum of 6 that I'm aware of that have like put their own thoughts out into the world about it, which is great. But the post was, is marketing ops or marketing ops isn't marketing, period. Thoughts? And that was it.

And was that you also stating your stance as well?

No, no, it wasn't. And it was something that was said out loud in a discussion that I was a part of sometime in the last, like, 3 or 4 weeks, roughly. And And so I just, on a whim, I was like, well, let's see what happens. I could never have imagined that it would turn into what it's turned into now. So yeah, it's been really, really interesting to see people's take on that. But I don't know, like Hartman, you eye-rolled. You're like, is that even a question?

Yeah, I mean, I think I seriously, I was like, I don't, like, I really was like, I don't get the point of the question. At the same time, I was like, I don't think there's really— it's not a binary— there's not a simple answer to that question. It's one of those ones that in my mind, it's the kind of thing that requires nuance. And yes, I think a lot of the time I think of marketing ops as being marketing. I think of myself as being more in marketing than in technology, I guess, for lack of a better term. But On the other hand, I also think of myself as in ops and change and like kind of in the middle of a lot of different things, which is part of why I like those kinds of roles. But I just didn't, like, I was like, this is not the kind of question you go yes or no. And I think it was phrased that way. And so there's a part of me that is both surprised and not surprised about the reaction.

Yeah.

Because I think the way it was set up. And it's been, truthfully, I haven't really kept up with the reactions in detail. So if either of you have any insights, and I, this is where I should have done a little more research on my own, like pulled up some of those posts, but like, I don't know what the kind of the, if there's a, you know, 1 or 2 or 3 sort of consistent themes that people are, in terms of the way that that gets answered, that are You know, the majority or if there's just a lot of different views. Yeah.

Yeah. There's been, there's been a lot. Naomi, what are your thoughts?

I think, I think you texted me. Yes. I texted you right away, actually. Yeah.

Naomi, not wanting to put her, you know, put a stake in the ground publicly.

She's afraid.

She just, No, she just likes to like immediately like go straight to me and just be like, exactly.

I mean, just go straight to the source, right? I'm like, no, I do not feel that marketing ops is marketing because, you know, I feel that we are much more concerned with how marketing gets done than what is being said. And that might be an unpopular opinion or people might resonate with that. And I do feel that it I do feel, or I believe, that a lot of it can depend on 2 things: where someone is in their marketing ops career, and if they work, have traditionally worked for maybe an organization that has had less resources. So they are doing and wearing multiple hats, and they, that line between ops and marketing gets blurred, right? So not only are you demand gen, but you're also copywriting or working with the agencies to figure out, you know, cadences around marketing and go-to-market campaigns, and what does that look like, and the strategy, then those lines can become blurred. But I think someone had said in the comments on your post, Mike, that, you know, is sales ops sales?

And it is not. I asked the question as a follow-up.

Yeah, sales ops is not. And I believe I texted that to you too, before I went and read All on the comments, and the folks that I work with in sales ops, you could not convince them to then go and try and sell to a customer. Like it's completely different. So why is marketing ops any different? Yeah, those are my two cents. Yeah, no, I love two Canadian cents.

Two Canadian cents.

We actually don't have cents. Well, we don't actually have cents anymore. We don't actually have cents anymore because we got rid of the pennies. So it rounds up to five, I guess.

Oh, well, those are your 2 nickels. No, I mean, I've shared this now a couple of times in follow-up, either responses to folks or just reposting it again in a different way. I'm not convinced one way or the other. And I think that is because of the nuance of where the role sits in a sort of lifecycle of both the practitioner and the company. I think my audience has grown on LinkedIn, so I feel comfortable that I get to see now a broader range of responses from industry verticals and sizes of organizations, people who have worked at larger and smaller organizations. I think that wouldn't have been true 3, 4, 5 years ago when I was really, I'm just, I come, as a lot of our listeners know, I come from the startup world. So marketing ops is like very much a marketer.

Playing from Naomi's iPhone.

Very much a marketer in the startup lands because, you know, yeah, you have to wear lots of hats and you're sort of a, you're all playing on a team and trying to figure out how to go to market and come up with campaigns and strategies and all that other stuff. And then I think there's definitely opportunity in upper larger organizations, sort of upmarket, that you start to fall away a little bit from marketing, quote unquote, from the, as I do my air quotes there, from the perspective of what would be considered the traditional definition of marketing. And I think I posted about that in a follow-up comment too, right? Like the traditional definition of marketing Marketing ops doesn't fit that, right? And it doesn't mean that the definition of marketing shouldn't adapt and change because modern marketing has evolved. You know, to Mark Surkin's point, like modern marketing can't be done pretty much without any form of technology these days. And therefore the argument is marketing ops is marketing. It's a core component of it. You just can't go to market anymore. And I in fact support that at the same time, right? Like, I wrote a post a couple of weeks back that said, if you are an enterprise go-to-market executive and you don't understand just the bare minimum level of the art of the possible with the tools you're using, you shouldn't be in your job. Like, it doesn't mean you have to know how to integrate them, run data, object orientation. You don't have to know the ins and outs of exactly how the tool works and functions, but you should know the art of the possible with the tool and the fact that it can integrate with other things and it can get data from other places so you can ask better questions. And get the help that you need from the technology you need. And so I agree, right? Like, to an extent, I agree. To your point, Naomi, no, I don't think sales ops is sales. Like, I don't think you can put somebody in a position to go from a sales ops role and just to become a seller. I think you can go the other direction. You could be a seller and have learned some things and been like, hey, I actually really like sort of the other parts of this process better. I want to help organize the chaos because I'm living the life, right? But I think if you started more in a technical operations background and you've never got on a discovery call or done a contract or a negotiation of any kind, those are very wildly different skill sets in my opinion.

Yeah, but I mean, I'll disagree with you on the point that I don't think it would be as common. At the same time, I think it is definitely possible because I'm a big believer that a lot of people can be, you know, if they have the right environment, the right kind of coaching or teaching or whatever, and then their own desire to learn, they could learn these other skills. It's not all that much different to me than someone who wants to be an individual contributor moving to a manager role, which requires a completely different set of skill sets to be effective at that. And I truly believe that that is a learnable thing.

Yeah.

It's not— doesn't mean it's easy or natural even, but it's doable. Yeah.

Yeah.

So that's my way.

You know, that, that can be said of pretty much anything, right? Like all things are doable, right? You can learn, you can learn new skills. It might not be the natural path, but you can, you could do it, right?

Yeah.

And so—

So what's interesting, so interesting to me in like the timing of when this came out. So we're recording this right in the middle of August of 2024. So just for reference, this, like this post came out what, a week ago or something. That started it all up. Right around that time, I recorded an episode with Ali Schwenke on one of her podcasts. And the genesis of that actually was me kind of riffing with her online about, like, I get really, I see a lot of people in marketing ops and marketing whining, I guess is the best way to put it, right? About their peers in other teams. So if you're marketing ops, you're whining about marketing and, or you're whining about sales ops and marketers whining about salespeople and SDR. And it really rubs me the wrong way because I think, yes, there's probably some valid things where it's frustrating, but whining about it, I don't think solves the problem. And so when you asked that question, like the other part that was going through my brain when it was like, I was in the middle of like, we didn't end up, that's not how The trajectory of the podcast episode went, we kind of went into, it was part of it, right? This idea of like understanding what other people do is an important, valuable skill to understand. If you're in marketing, you don't understand how you actually make money as a company and how your teams sell and what they're, what the interactions are really like with their prospects and customers, right? You should learn those things. You should try to, to try to do that. And that will make you a better marketer, will make you a better marketing ops person. It will just give you a better framework for understanding like what is important to do when. And so it feeds into being able to make the trade-off decisions that come inevitably with any role, especially I think these ops roles. So like for me, this idea of like adding another thing that is potentially driving a wedge between marketing and marketing ops, like just it, I think that's my, my, if I'm honest about my reaction, like that part is like, I'm getting this like, I really don't like that it's even a question.

Yeah, yeah, no, that's, that's why I asked for thoughts. It's good.

Yeah.

I don't know. So, so here's the other thing, like, would, would you consider this truth? Marketing ops, I'm going to try to find the words for it because I don't have it like written down or well thought out. Forgive me, listeners. But I'm asking the two of you, would you say that it's a true statement that marketing ops is not well-defined and runs the risk of taking on work that they shouldn't take on?

Yes, I think that traditionally, that has always been a point, a topic of conversation, right? What functions roll up under marketing operations? I think it's the word marketing that throws a bit of a— that is the wildcard there, right? And I've kind of, I've said this before in other podcasts and in other sessions that I actually don't like the word marketing in marketing operations. Yeah. There's a lot of things that a marketing ops team does that is outside of marketing. A lot of it is around analytics. A lot of it is around data hygiene, data, data privacy laws. We also support internal processes. You can also do things like employee onboarding, internal IT notices, back office stuff. work really heavily with sales operations. I almost think that the word marketing pigeonholes the function and what it should be. I don't know. Is it a revenue ops? Is it a business ops? Is it, you know, XYZ? It's— I feel like that word gives it a— it influences how people think about the role, right? So, you think marketing, you think demand gen, you think content creation, you think landing pages, forms, emails, events, and all of that stuff, right? We are the underlying support layer, but, you know, I, you know, and before we started recording this, I was thinking like, if there was a, for example, if there was someone who worked in marketing ops and a role came up and it was for something like, you know, field marketer, right? So, you're doing field marketing, you're running events, you're coordinating, you know, open houses for your company, you're coordinating specific outreach, working with agencies to do Google Ads, paid ads, all of that stuff. Is that something that a traditional marketing ops person would apply for? And vice versa, somebody who does field marketing, would they try to get into marketing ops? Maybe if that's what the direction that they wanted to go. But if your career trajectory is traditional marketing, there's not a lot of overlap there.

I think it's interesting you bring a point up that I hadn't thought about by having the word marketing. So field marketing, marketing is after field, right? So, whereas marketing ops, it's before and it almost I think what you're saying is it, it, it, whether intentional or not, right, it makes it feel like it's subordinate to other parts of marketing as opposed to an equal component. I don't know.

I don't know.

So you have like content marketing, event marketing, field marketing. Those are all very clear what they're about. Creative, right?

Yep. Mm-hmm. I hadn't thought of that.

This is why I asked the question the way that I did, because Because as a community, I mean, you name it, Darryl Alfonso, Jess Cowell, Naomi, Michael, Courtney Micara, Sarah McNamara, right? We've all talked about how you need to be seen as strategic, you need to be seen as a critical sort of important sort of lifeblood of a company. All of these things that we've often articulated in many ways, sometimes very directly, that it needs to have more of a sort of definition. And that was a lot of what started in this community. Like a lot of our conversations right at the beginning of this MoPros journey and what we've become was around this idea of like, well, what the fuck is marketing ops?

Yeah. I mean, it's like one of our best Episode we ever did. Yeah, right.

And it's because people are trying to define the role. Now, at the same time, you've got all the thought leaders— Stephen Stouffer, Sarah McNamara, everybody else, myself included, right? We're also at the same time saying, well, it is kind of marketing. And it's, and it's like, are you, are you grasping at the desire to want to feel noticed? Are you grasping at the desire to want to feel a part of something that's an important factor in an organization? Like, what is it that's making you think that you want to go against creating better definition and solidifying what marketing ops is and the value to an organization by diluting it to say that it is just broadly marketing?

Right. So I have a, I have a thought on that and I feel, right, it's When you're talking about roles, right? So, I think strategy versus execution, right? So, traditional marketing, field marketing, they're often involved in setting things like the strategy, defining target audiences, creating content, knowing what resonates with the customers, right? Marketing ops, it's more about the execution. And I think those of us who have worked in ops for a significant amount of time, At some point, you will have a gripe or a complaint about, ugh, why didn't the team bring us in earlier? Why did they define this entire campaign and then give it to us to build? Like, you know—

Only on days that end in Y.

Architects, like, the architects, they're building these plans, but then us, as the builders, we're looking at them like, this doesn't make sense, or, we can't do this, or, we don't have the tools to do this, or, you know, we're missing this piece of the puzzle, and going back to them and saying, hey, Like, we actually can't do this. And, you know, that's one of the things that bothers me a lot because I never want to say, like, I will try to find ways to creatively implement something that a business partner or stakeholder wants to do before I will say, yeah, we can't do this.

Right.

And you should have invited us into the conversation earlier, and we could have steered the direction in a different path or told you right from the beginning that this isn't gonna work. Right. And that could be also one of the reasons it's like, we wanna be involved, but we also don't, if that makes sense. Like we, we wanna be involved in the conversation, but we also don't wanna be responsible for defining the messaging, for example.

Well, this gets back to my, this is where I was saying like this, this, it makes it easier to whine and complain about those other teams when you're not involved with that stuff upfront. You know, and I think that's true. And I, and I think this is where your opportunity should be, or what you should be doing. Opportunities are everywhere. If you need to find opportunities like that where you get those requests and they're late and you have to go, maybe you go through some heroic stuff and you get them, you know, close to what they wanted to achieve from a go-to-market activity standpoint or tactic or whatever it is. And then you have to take that opportunity to go back and say, here's what I think. If it brought me in at this point, we could have helped you go faster. We could have tried to build something more robust or whatever you want to call it. And I think there's— so rather than just complaining or whining about it, I would encourage people to take those opportunities to not point fingers. Right. There's, there's a way to do this that you have to like learn to do and talk about, here's how I think we could have done this better if we had worked together. I mean, the other part for me that I see that is a challenge for most marketing ops folks is because, Naomi, you brought up things like data quality and efficiency and things like this. Like those are things that are, they have, they have at least 2 challenges, right? They're hard to quantify in terms of their impact. And then the secondly, they're not highly visible on a regular basis. Now, some of the symptoms of them, like if you have poor data quality, you get to this point where I'm trying to build a segmentation to target for an audience and I can't do it for, it takes me, you know, a week to do it because our data is crap. And if we had done the work upfront to try to get our data consistent and clean so that we could reliably just like, here's our segment, it's done in hours kind of thing.

There's, there's the work upfront piece and then there's what Naomi was saying.

Right, right, right.

I do think it is quantifiable.

Tell me what you want to try to be able to target so I can set you up.

I do think it's quantifiable in the sense that, you know, a lot of the systems that are holding these data, it's not just an open-ended free-for-all that you can just store millions and bajillions of records, right? So there are, you know, a lot of them are based on how many records you have in your system, like Marketo, right? And in terms of quality, if you are emailing to a list and your deliverability rate or your opens or click rate is in the garbage. If you clean up that list and are like, okay, well, we're just gonna remove people that are obviously bouncing, look malformed, they haven't opted in or haven't engaged and done anything with us in the last 12 months. Like those, I think those things are already quantifiable. It just really depends on what you're looking at too.

So the quantifiable part I think is maybe easier. I think the visibility part is harder because, you know, the CEO, the CMO, the other C-suite, like other departments, sales, When an email goes out or an ad gets out or a web landing page, that's highly visible. People know it, they see it. They don't see the stuff behind it that made it happen. And it—

But is it because you're not telling them? Right? So if you tell them—

So, right. So if you're going through these heroics and getting annoyed and pissed off, that should be your signal that you are part of the problem, right? You're enabling that. like that ability, and you're undermining your own, your own, the perception of you or your team as being potentially strategic partners. But it also requires you to understand what they're trying to achieve, right? How does the company make money? How do we, how do we, what helps us win clients or customers? What doesn't, right? And understanding, like, being able to then provide feedback on data. This is where you should have a strength in that you have access to data. So it's like, when we do this kind of email to this kind of audience, it's shit, right? But when we do it this way, which by the way is an easier way, like say go from highly designed to text-based, right? Whether it's sent from— this is an example that has been true for me everywhere I've been for the last 10, 15 years, right? Do simple text-based email and it tends to perform better in like all measurable things.

Right, right.

And like, that's the kind of input you can provide. Because by the way, doing that is way easier than building out a highly designed email. And I get like branding is important. And like, so there's a, there's a balance and that's my point. Like it's not a simple A or B. It's, there's nuance.

Yeah.

And I think you need to like try to build that ability to discern what is there doing, what's gonna be most impactful for this particular business, and how can I provide value back to the organization to help steer this strategy to the point where I eventually get pulled in earlier And earn the right to that. Like, just assuming you should have the right to do that is, I think, setting yourself up for just being frustrated a lot. Yeah.

Yeah. And so—

All right, off my soapbox now.

No, it's great. This is all great. Um, so I think, you know, just, just kind of going back into this idea of like, what, what are we grasping at, right? I'm not, I'm not saying that we're grasping at air or grasping at straws or anything like that. I think they're, they're important things that Stephen and Sarah and these other folks are saying, that it is marketing, that it's a part of marketing, that it should be seen as strategic and all this other stuff. I totally agree with all of those sentiments, but I think there's the definition of your roles and responsibilities need to be clear enough that an organization at the top, board, executive, and everybody else can understand your strategic value to the process of go-to-market. And I think it's perfectly okay for you to be involved in a conversation at an earlier part of the planning phase, not to be seen as the strategist who's going to come up with the plan, but to be seen as an advisor to say, here, let me show you what we have in terms of the art of the possible. I want to hear from you what it is that you're trying to do, because I can either enable it or find the way to enable that. with things that we don't have in place today. But you have to, I don't think have to is a strong word. I think we are, I'll just speak from my own experience, actually. I found it a bit stressful to be speaking up about potential impacts to the organization's go-to-market plan because My job wasn't to be the go-to-market strategist at Mavenlink, for example, right? I wasn't the person coming up with demand gen campaigns. That was not my responsibility. Sure, I had ideas that I could have offered up. And my boss at the time said, you have ideas, you should speak up, right? You should speak up more. And it's this interesting balance that we have visibility into this whole funnel.

Right?

We sort of have an idea of what's working and what's not. And when I said earlier, you don't need the extra work, right? Sometimes you don't want to raise your hand and say, oh, I have this idea for a go-to-market, whatever, whatever, right? Like, you don't necessarily want to do that because you're like, I have a backlog the size of Texas. You know, I don't, I don't want to become the person that now needs to lead the charge on strategy. Right. But I do want to be the person that can help enable us to go faster, support the vision, and build the ecosystem for you to get visibility into what's working and what's not. Do I have to make a decision myself on what's working or what's not? I can give you my opinion. I've laid out the foundation for you to collect the data and analyze it. I can analyze it too with you. But as a strategist, for those that keep touting that we are marketing And we, you know, we should be seen as strategic and all this other stuff. I think it's one coin and you're one side of that coin, right? And you have to be sort of careful about, well, how far away from what we're all fighting hard to figure out, which is the definition of marketing operations, how far away from that do you want to get to becoming this other type of role, right? And that's why I asked the question, because at the end of the day, It's about protecting the role so that it doesn't get lost in the mix of, well, can't Jane do what Mike does?

Yeah.

I mean, they're all marketing, right?

So you're getting to something where, like, I just steamrolled right over Naomi, where she made a point as I was on my rant about also making sure that we talk about what we do. So, like, I think that's an important thing. No, Naomi, I think you do a good job of that. You might— I always am impressed at how you do that.

Yeah, I mean, I, you know, I often will get comments from folks who are, you know, looking for a little bit of mentorship around how do they communicate their achievements to senior leadership or those who are really making the decisions and having visibility. And, you know, a lot of the complaints are around, hey, you know, My my boss or my boss's boss or the company doesn't really know what I do, and it's frustrating, and I'm unable to vocalize all of the achievements that we've done without you know eyes glossing over or whatnot. And just like data stuff is just not a sexy topic to talk about; they just assume that things were etcetera etcetera etcetera right? And part of it, and I want to go back to I want to go back to something that I said earlier, which is you know if you've worked in marketing ops for any amount of time, you know there might have been thoughts that come through your mind that are like well. I can't read their mind, right? And you could be speaking of people that you are, you know, collaborating with, your business partners, your stakeholders. We can't read minds, right? The assumption is that we can, but we cannot. And the same goes for the people that need to have that visibility. They can't read our minds. So, if there's something like, wow, I just used, I don't know, Ringlead to merge 20,000 duplicate contacts, and now I've cleaned up our database, and now we are, you know, 15% below our allocated contract maximum, as opposed to almost hitting the max. Like, those types of things should be communicated. And it doesn't have to be this formal presentation. It never has to be like— I just am a huge believer of say it when it happens, right? If you have a success, however small it may be, there's no issue to communicate that out, whether it be a quick one-liner email, a Slack message, a Teams message, or if you want to send it to a wider audience. I'm always, and you want it to be quick, create a chatter group on Salesforce, right? If you're a Salesforce user and just blast it in there, right? I do not feel that people in marketing ops, and it could just be, I don't know what it is. Like I've been guilty of it too earlier in my career is like, we don't want to celebrate these successes. And then later on down the line, we then say, well, nobody knows what we do. Well, we didn't also tell anybody.

Well, and I think it's interesting, because we don't, I think you're right, because we don't celebrate our successes because there's this thread, I've already used the term heroics, right? I think we enjoy being the hero and getting something over the line and enabling it, but not, and it didn't, and just assuming people will recognize that it was heroics, not just the normal, like, this is what, how it should work every time. Is that what you're getting at?

I feel like, I almost feel like the better something works, The harder it is to get that recognition because we live in a system where things just, we expect it to work and we expect it to function the way it's supposed to function. And we don't pay attention to it unless something's wrong.

Yeah, I'm with you, especially as a leader. Like, I tried to share even small wins, like things that my team would do, right? Look at this. And this is what it, but it's, I tried to do it in as much as I could in a context that would resonate with the audience I was sending it to, right? This was the impact that's going to help Or impact your team or your group's ability. Just one little thing, you said that like all this data stuff is not sexy. I said I was pitching the idea that we needed to allocate some team resources towards data cleansing on a thing. I said, I told my boss at the time, I was like, this is not sexy stuff, but it's like, it's gonna pay dividends down the road. She's like, no, it's sexy stuff. And I was like, yes, yes.

I mean, I think it's sexy. It's just, I'm just saying like, The audience may not, right?

Yeah.

But I like— so my point is like, I— so I think this is the other part, right? I think we make us— you were kind of hinting at this, Naomi. Like, I think we make assumptions about, oh, that we can't read their minds or they can't. But it's the, like, also assuming that they may or may not believe that. I didn't think she would believe that it was sexy or useful, but she did. And so I thought I had a much bigger challenge ahead of me trying to convince that this is how we should allocate resources. And like, just like just going out there and just putting it out there, it invalidated my assumption, which was in this case was a good thing.

Yeah.

Right. Right. So I think that's the other thing is like, be willing to, to talk about what you do or what your ideas are and you may get shot down. It doesn't mean you're going to get everything you want. I mean, that's unlikely for just about anybody, but you don't get a chance if you don't try.

Yeah, yeah, I agree. I think, I think what's, I think what's fun about, you know, and the word opportunity came up in this discussion earlier, like this, this discussion has brought up a lot of opportunity, and I think our opportunity is to go use the sort of unique skills that we all seem to have in this marketing operations role to do exactly what the two of you are talking about, right? Communicate, share the art of the possible in a way that doesn't say you want to necessarily own the strategy, but really just say, hey, I want everybody to see what I can see. Because I know I've had multiple firsthand experiences where I've been working with a VP of communications who has a couple of ideas. And I was like, oh yeah, we could do this. And they went, whoa, really? I had no idea. Right? If literally all we did was like act as, I don't know, our own little AEs internally for the products that we have, just to say, hey, I'm going to demo what our tools can do. Someone else come up with some ideas. Let me show you what the art of the possible looks like within our stack today. And if you've got questions about whether or not we can do something after this, I'll tell you if it's doable now or if we need to build in some other infrastructure to be able to do something different, right? Whether that's collecting new data or hitting a new market or whatever it is, right? But it's like, I think you're—

Yeah.

opportunity in the role of the marketing department and really the rest of the organization on go-to-market is to say, I want to show all of the organization the art of the possible and try to bring you as far along into my world as I can so that you know as much of the limitations that we're up against as possible without having to be an expert.

Right.

And I think that that's a really, really unique opportunity for us to seize in this idea of defining the role of marketing operations and trying to protect it a little bit so that it doesn't get handed a bunch of stuff and suddenly you're not accidentally stepping into a totally new world of roles and responsibilities that perhaps you didn't intend.

Yeah.

to go into. And then it creates clarity for the rest of the organization on, I need that type of person by my side because I can't possibly know every single thing that we have at our fingertips to go to market. I want them right next to me, whether that's a CMO or a VP or director of demand gen, it doesn't matter.

Right.

I think, I think that's a beautiful relationship and synergy that you can have. in partnership with your marketing organization. Does that make you a marketer? Maybe. But I think marketing operations needs to continue to fight for what its value is. And a lot of that, to your point, both of you, is about communication and then definition as well, right? I just don't want it to get lost in the throes of, yeah, that's just marketing.

Yeah.

So, I don't know. I have a lot more that I want to say on it, but I'm sort of, like, holding because we're going to do a session next week in an open forum. I hope the two of you can join. This episode will probably go live a couple of days before that actually happens. And then at Mopsapalooza, I'll probably share a bit more as I round out my thoughts from the rest of the community, you know, on sort of absorbing what I'm hearing from everybody and saying like, hey, like, this is kind of what I, what I think and what, what maybe we all could get behind. So I'll share more about that.

I'm thinking like celebrity deathmatch at Moxpalooza.

Yeah, I think we will do a debate. I think we're probably going to bring in Amber Sellen, Steven Stouffer, find a couple more. We might, we might just put a couple folks on, on stage and just do a discussion about it. It should be fun, but I don't know. I'm excited for what's been happening in this conversation so far. And I think getting a chance to just sit down with the two of you and talk about it is like, again, opened up more opportunity for us to try to figure out the way forward. Hartmann, you started with, I rolled my eyes, and now you're like, well, okay, I kind of see. What you're saying, you know? So it's good, right?

No, it's maybe maybe you're still thinking I'm rolling my eyes.

I want someone in sales ops to ask is sales ops sales and should they get commission?

Yeah, yeah. That would be an interesting one.

Someone will do it.

Sales leaders would be like, "F no." You didn't help me close that deal.

You know how hard I worked?

You called me out that my pipeline was bullshit, right?

Instead, you saw that I was sandbagging it. I was keeping a couple deals to myself.

Yeah.

Came in last minute.

Yeah. Anyway, interesting stuff. Well, yes, I think you're right. Yes, I did. You did have an eye roll. moment for sure. At the same time, I do think it's been interesting that it's taken off like it has and that it's spawning these other conversations. So I think it's a good thing. And if it leads to more people doing what I hope they do, which is starting to do what Manomi said, like speak up, talk about things you're doing and why it matters in the context of the business and helping to try to get people to bridge across these teams to be able to share the art of the possible and learn from each other and understand how your business works. I think that would be a win, right? Whether or not that helps define what is marketing ops, that could be a byproduct. To me, it doesn't have to be. Yeah.

Yeah. I think what's exciting about all of this for me as we kind of round out this episode is I think it's giving me a little bit more clarity on what it could mean to be a certified marketing operations professional because a lot of the inputs from people are pointing to very clear signals about what matters in this role. And then beyond that, the thing that I've been saying probably on repeat lately, definitely for at least the last year, is There, I don't believe today there is anybody that is trusted to build the go-to-market tech stack of the future, right? Like, I don't, I don't think it's a CTO. And I don't think it's a CIO. Like, if, if a CEO was like trying to figure out how to build the tech stack that I need to be able to bring products and services to market, It's this mishmash of, well, I've got salespeople all buying tools and marketing people buying tools and all this stuff. And as we move kind of into this world of a data-first, data warehouse sort of centric model, which we're starting to see more of, whose responsibility is it to be that chief marketing architect, that chief martech architect person? I think Marketing operations is like absolutely the best suited to be able to slide in and be seen as that strategic architect for how you go to market with modern marketing tools and sales tools and all that stuff. And so a lot of this for me is about like, don't get it lost in just the mix of marketing, start realizing how critical these types of people are. to an organization because if it's just in the middle of marketing, we will continue to see the rounds of layoffs and then suddenly organizations go, oh, shit, I don't know how any of this stuff works. And now we got to start over and blow it all up, right? So, that's kind of where I think I'll leave it for now.

Yeah, I think, yeah, this has been an interesting conversation. It didn't go, I think, the way I even expected this conversation to go. So, but not a bad thing. It's like, but it's, um, I always learn a little bit something talking to you too. So thank you. It's fun. Yeah, it's fun. All right. Are we done? Are we done with this topic for, for now?

At least for today. Until next week. And then tomorrow, because, you know, Tao and UpTempo and, uh, whatever, The Huddle is hosting a session. So I'll be on that.

Yeah.

I probably won't speak very much on it. I'll be honest. Cause I just want everybody else to speak.

Yeah, so by the time this gets out there, it will have been like last week or something.

Yeah.

Or so, so it wouldn't matter anyway. Well, good. Well, always fun, um, when we get together. As I said, I always enjoy that. It's kind of how this all started, so it's, it's like old times. Anyway, so thank you for bringing that idea and putting it out there for the community, Mike. Thanks, Naomi, for all your insights. Always I always learn from you. That's great. Thanks to the community and to all of our listeners who are out there for continuing to support us with different ideas and topics and guest ideas. If you have an idea for a topic or a guest, or you want to be a guest, reach out to Naomi, Mike, or me through LinkedIn or through the marketingops.com Slack or email if you have it. Until next time, we'll see— talk to you later. Bye.

Bye, everybody.

Bye, everyone.