What Would It Look Like If Marketing Gets Embedded Throughout the Organization?

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 everyone, welcome to another episode of OpsCast brought to you by marketingops.com, powered by all the MoPros out there. I am your host, Michael Hartman with the first one we're recording in 2026, which is hard to believe. So thanks to everyone for that. We'll be talking about our 5-year anniversary soon too. So anyway, to get things kicked off, today's conversation challenges a deeply held assumption that marketing should live in its own lane. My guest today, Ivelisse Arroyo, is a marketing operations leader, executive advisor on go-to-market operations, who has made it her mission to bridge marketing ops, rev ops, and broader business operations. She has a background in accounting and deep experience in manufacturing and healthcare insurance. She approaches marketing from a business-first perspective, one that connects sales, marketing, payments, onboarding, and operations into a single system. We're going to explore what it would look like if marketing were more embedded throughout an organization, not as a service department or a cost center, as some people call it, but as a core business capability. So Ivelisse, welcome to the show, and thanks for joining for the first time for have someone from the Caribbean.

I'm so excited to be the first one. Thank you so much for having me, Michael.

Yeah. How did I do? Did I get your names pronounced right?

You got it perfect. All right.

It's possible, is my goal, actually. So, well, anyway, well, hey, thanks for joining again. All right, so let's just dive right in. So, you have described, when we talked before, that connecting marketing ops and business ops is a mission. Kind of mission critical, I think, is the way maybe you think about it, not just a service. So where did that idea come from for you, and how did your background in accounting shape that perspective?

Well, that came from, it's not as far as what we know about business engineering, um, or business engineering management. It's very similar, the, the, the base concept. So, it's not that far of what we already know. Um, and it came up because when I started marketing, I started as a content marketer, um, very far away of administration, accounting, any of it.

Doesn't everyone go from accounting to content?

Right? I think it's a thing.

It is now.

Yes, it is now. Um, so. Like a few years after, I, um, went myself to work as a consultant in marketing specifically. And then my first client happened to be a manufacturing company. And the first thing I noticed within this first 6 months with them is that my work as a marketer was very difficult because customers were coming to social media to complain of things that were happening in the operations of the business. So it was hard for them to keep up with the calls. I mean, marketing was doing their job, everything was going great, but when the customer started to make the calls, it was swamped. The salespeople were swamped. Um, phone lines were busy. So that became a huge problem, but a good problem, right?

A good problem to have, right?

Exactly. So, um, I said, listen, I know you hired me for this specific role, but I think that if we don't fix this, we will have problems to deliver what you want me to do, right? So, um, I came up with a solution and that's where I stumbled upon marketing operations.

Ah, okay.

So that's where it all started. So I built a system around it to make sure that customers not only were able to receive what they needed by call, But also by online. And I mean online by their website, but also in social media. So that became a huge help.

And sorry, did they, so they had different ways of connecting? So you, I assume that what you're saying is you were doing marketing activities, so you were doing outbound activity or promotional stuff.

Correct.

And the response mechanism was place a call. And so you helped define other channels for them to respond, is that?

Correct, yes. By that time, I remember that Apple, they launched a new service online for the customers, and that's where I got the idea. Then why don't we do the same thing for our customers?

Which is true. So, my experience working with Latin America in Caribbean, uh, entities is limited, but I do, I feel like I do remember that phone, like phone is a very, very much a de facto way of communicating, right? As opposed to online or how it was, uh, back when I was doing it, probably 10 plus years ago.

Yeah, for this, for this client specifically in manufacturing, it was phone because most of their ICP, um, customer is Um, elderly people.

Okay.

So when your customer's elderly, it's more common, you know, to use phone.

Okay.

But we also had clients that were more into, um, online or mobile. So we moved those clients to mobile with this initiative.

Got it. Okay. That makes sense. Cool. So you said that you stumbled, that's how you stumbled on marketing ops, right? So this is maybe early days of marketing ops being a thing. RevOps was common, so.

No, I didn't know it was a thing. I just started working doing that and I discovered it was marketing operations like 5 years later.

How did you, how did you discover marketing ops at that point?

On LinkedIn. I didn't use LinkedIn as a, you know, big user, and I started to connect with marketers. And then one day, all of a sudden, the topic came up and I was, wait, so that's the name for what I've been doing all these years? And that's how I discovered marketing operations and the rest is history.

Okay. So a lot of this stuff you were doing was before, well, maybe not before it was a common term, but certainly before you knew what it was.

So, well, specifically here where I live, it's not a common term. So for me, it was really new. I mean, what I didn't know what I was doing existed. And I was like, why things are not X or Y and Z if That's, it makes so much sense to make the connections between the operations and marketing. And then I discovered that was a thing in US and in, um, Europe.

Yes.

And I was fascinated with it. Yeah.

Um, so what, like, okay, so I get the, um, the response mechanism for, for campaign activity. Makes sense. What, it sounded like there were other things you were connecting the dots on, 'cause you said operations. So I'm assuming things like, you know, fulfillment or payment process. Like, what were some of the other things that you were trying to help connect the dots on?

The sales, the sales part of it, it was not connected. There were not a handoff for it at the time. So, um, they, um, relied mostly on those calls. I mean, that was it. And when I brought up the idea, I was really, really lucky to have a very open CEO. This was a woman-owned business, and she was very open to innovation and to changes and to new things to make sure that the business grew. So I became with the idea, I built the framework, and she said, okay, and we started it. And that helped a lot, not only to fix the problem, but also the brand perception in the customer's eyes, because we even had to close the review in Facebook, for example, because people were angry.

Oh, sure.

We had to bring up our PR team to take care of that, you know, do like a crisis management, um, thing because it was huge. So businesses, they treat marketing without having in mind the consequences of not having a framework that is connected to the operations. And I think that we see, I have seen that more now, but where I live is not common here in Puerto Rico. It's not a common thing. It's not something that is taught to business people. So it's a huge challenge.

So when you mentioned a framework a couple of times, so what were some of the elements of this framework that you proposed? And then, Um, what I guess I'm also curious, did it, 'cause you said you went to the CEO, uh, and I would assume you needed approval, okay, her to agree to just for change, but were there also costs associated with implementing that framework?

Well, cost was, is always a, a thing in businesses.

Of course.

So, um, to lower the cost, I made sure that I added to my services to help them, um, um, provide customer service online, which was something that they were not used to do, right?

Sure.

Or they didn't know how to. So we took that part, um, for them and we, um, they provided us with access to their Customer platform and we were able to help, um, customers online.

Okay.

Chatting with them directly. Hey, give me your, your order number. Let's see what's going on. Um, so that's how I did it and whatever needed the salespeople help, I did the handoff or my team did the handoff directly, um, with them using email. So we built like a, like a framework where, okay, if this happens, let's do this. If this happens, let's do this. So I built something simple for them to understand how it will work and they approved it. They gave us the access and we were able to mitigate that, um, small crisis we entered with marketing.

So the, but the crisis was you actually generated so much response that you weren't ready to handle it.

Correct. They were not—

The way that you were typically set up, which sounds like what you had was a, you know, maybe a person or a couple people who answered incoming calls and they just became inundated. Is that kind of the gist of it?

Yeah. Well, they took care of calls. We never touched a phone for them. We Only took care of clients on Instagram, Facebook, inboxes. That's what we did for them. All the mobile customers, we took them. I also, we also recorded a more efficient calling recording when people call to the company. Hey, press 1 for this, press 2 for this. So— We also included—

Exactly.

A better, um, um, communication with the customers. So they knew we were busy, to be patient, because, and that helped so much, you know, to, to build all those pieces. Sometimes businesses think that, um, small things are not important, but the customer, you gain customers and you retain them with the small things.

Yeah. I, so for a brief period of my, well, part of my career, I had, under marketing ops, which is a little unusual, I had a small inbound sale, BDR, SDR team. And in this particular business, we had local regional offices. And in some cases, we could kind of, how far we could extend out to deliver services varied. In some cases, someone would call for one of those places that was near, but not near enough for us to be able to do it, or we didn't have the capacity. And I always worked with the local teams and said, if we can't help them, can we provide them somebody else to go to? Right? Because my view was eventually if they get a good, like even if we just provide a good referral and they get a good experience, that will be something they remember and come back to us about, right?

Definitely.

So when the time comes that they've got a bigger project or it's in the market where we can help them, So that's the kind of thing like that, that I think you're building goodwill and trust.

Exactly. And here in my market here, the referral is really, really heavy when to do business. It's less of initiative to, let me just find, no, it's more of Referring. So, making sure to, you know, um, the word of mouth, it's good, that's a top, always.

I mean, reputation is so important on that kind of stuff.

Definitely.

Yes. So, when I introduced you, we talked about that you've worked in, with, and you mentioned this one with marketing, with a manufacturing organization, but you've also worked with healthcare insurance. So, I'm curious, in, in those 2 domains, You know, what are you like, what are the common silos you've seen across businesses in those industries? And then in particular, we've had a guest on recently who's worked in like highly, what we call highly regulated industries. So I think insurance falls in that category for sure. Manufacturing depends on what it is, I suppose. But like, what are you seeing things that are unique to those kind of businesses as well?

Yes, the unique thing about insurance, same as healthcare that I've worked also as an overall industry, it's data governance. That's very important when you do marketing on how you collect the data, how much of the data you can collect. Who is going to take care of that data and who will have access to that? Yeah, that's very, very sensitive for that.

I'm just curious, so I don't, because I don't know, is it similar in Puerto Rico as it is in, say, the US, or is it more like Europe?

Similar in which way?

Like the level of Restrictions on access, you know, collection and access to data, is it?

Yes, because Puerto Rico is regulated by federal law. So from your— okay, US federal law. So we need to follow the same protocols for data governance in healthcare.

Yeah, that's That's a very important thing. Yeah. So that makes sense because you got all the, it was HIPAA requirements, right?

HIPAA. Yes. All that.

Okay.

Yes. We are liable for that. Every business that does healthcare business in any way, they need to have that. Also financial institutions, which falls into that same Category.

Yeah. Yeah, we had somebody in that space too. And the takeaway I had was, yeah, if you're in marketing or marketing ops, you need to become really good friends with your legal team because they had to review everything before it went out.

Correct.

And that was, I could see how that could slow things down quite a bit, but it—

I think legal and your IT team, just keep them as Bring them coffee, treat them nice, you know?

He does. What, so what are, what were some of the other silos you've seen in like manufacturing? I mean, you gave that one example where it sounded like, yeah, marketing was doing one thing, sales team was doing another thing, and then sort of the other part of the business operations fulfillment was, there wasn't a lot of alignment. Is that the common theme or is there other stuff you see?

Well, sales is Sales and marketing is always a theme, um, how separate they, they can be or they can get. Um, where there, when there is no handoff, um, process where SLAs are not, um, put in place, that becomes a huge challenge to the outcome of marketing. But that also falls into, again, the operation, the foundation. How do you build your, GTM system in order to make sense. Because one of the— it's not the misconceptions of businesses is that they think that finance has nothing to do with marketing, that operations has nothing to do with marketing or HR. And that's a really huge misconception. I think all the business should be, should have marketing at the center along with the customer. Marketing should be like the sun.

The main function.

The main function in the middle that helps the entire business, finance, HR, everyone, and help them navigate the GTM strategy. Um, and everyone will speak the same language, which is the final goal. If we speak the same language, we get the data we need. We can make the decisions that we need to make with the, you know, so, um, I think that for me, that has been the biggest frustration, but it's because I see the business differently. than a marketer. I'm not a marketer first. I'm an accountant first. So I see the business differently. And rather than seeing marketing as the promotion part of the business, I see how marketing can make us grow in terms of revenue. How, you know, it's very different. I don't see marketing as, um, The vanity metrics, for me, that's not important. I can have 5 followers, but if those 5 followers make me $1,000, that's what I need to know.

Yeah. Right. No, totally. So this idea of marketing being embedded, you mentioned when we talked before, Peter, an idea from Peter Drucker, which I, full transparency, I have not gone to dig into, but you said there's, he had an idea of That marketing should be embedded in the business. Is that kind of what you're talking about? And not treat it as—

Well, that it should be embedded, that's something that I always say. What he said, that the business is— marketing is the business seen from the customer perspective. So marketing, actually how we speak to our customers, how we do the enablement, to our internal customers, how we treat our internal customers, how we speak about our business in social media. Everything is connected to marketing because everything is a strategy, is our go-to-market strategy. So if we all speak the same language, then the awareness gets done, but also sales will increase. But that cannot be done if you don't have the marketing technology to— As the engine to boost that voice of the brand. So nothing is divided, nothing is siloed, everything should be connected.

So you brought up external customers and internal customers. If anybody's listening to this knows, like, I bristle at the term internal customers. I understand the sentiment. I don't love the term. There's a whole story behind that, which I don't want to get into, but you talked about how that changes the way, like, how does that come to life in terms of how it impacts how you talked about speaking the same language, which I do think is critical. How have you seen that, like, where organizations have Take, kind of taken to heart this idea of marketing as a core function, as embedded within the rest of the business. How have you seen that translate into actual changes in the way that you're communicating both with, I'll call it real customers and internal customers?

Yeah. I will answer this with an example. I worked for a technology company for, I think it was for 5 to 6 months. I used to work for a for an advertising agency. And this technology business was my assigned client. So, the challenge that they had, which is the reason they brought me in, is that they wanted to increase the brand awareness for their teams. I mean, internally.

Mm-hmm.

So, they wanted to, rather than do Marketing externally, they wanted to do marketing internally.

Okay. Like employee communication stuff. Okay.

Correct. So that became my main job with them. Um, so precisely was to increase the awareness of the brand for the new hires, for the old folks, everyone. Um, so when they had the meetings with the clients externally, which were frequent, they felt pride of their brand and how they treated them. They paid them well. They were really relatable with the employees. So, they make sure that human resources had the resources in order to get that done, but human resources was a partner with marketing. So that was amazing. We did, I was able to do even a, um, these events that are done by Apple every time that they do a huge, um, virtual event.

Yeah.

We did that for them, and it was a huge success. They loved it. They were included. They were able to speak about their experience. We discussed the OKRs in that event and how successful they were. So, when customers were helped in the external world, customers were happy. They were pleased with the services and how good They were with them. So, does that answer your question?

Yeah. I mean, so, when I, if I sum up, think of it, what are the results there, right? One is it can improve and accelerate onboarding, right, for new employees to understand. But also then, not only that, but because it was rolled out across all the organization, you would also have people not only just having the pride in the company and the product and service or whatever that they had, but also they would be talking about it in similar ways. Now they might take their own sort of slight variations, but it was like there was consistency that would get there. And then it's interesting, the last part about how that also that employee orientation also helped affect how they communicated to prospects and customers. And I immediately thought, because I'm in Dallas, of Southwest Airlines, which I don't know that they've continued to hold onto it as well as they had for a long time. Like a big part of their ethos cultural-wise was to make sure that the people who are frontline talking with customers have a lot of authority to try to make them happy. And A lot of that, it was, I think, probably of a similar vein, right? There's leans a little bit more.

As someone that worked for airlines for 10 years, I can tell you for a fact that I worked for American Airlines and American Eagle, and frontline workers were really important for them.

Absolutely.

Always trained, always studying the new things for for the customer, that's huge. And when you empower your people and they own, they own the brand, that empowers the brand externally. And that's what customers will interact with.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, that's, that point of interaction is so critical across all the different kinds of ways it can happen. From marketing to sales, support, collections, right? All parts of it.

Every— everyone, yes, definitely.

So, okay, so since, you know, our main audience is marketing ops, RevOps people, you know, kind of 2 parts to this question, I guess. One is, what are you seeing that's happening that's being done well from a marketing ops, RevOps standpoint where there are some gaps? And then, Regardless of that, like, what do you think that role should be within an organization for RevOps, marketing ops to help drive that kind of, you know, marketing as a core part of the business forward?

I think that what we're doing good, and this is from my perspective, is building the engine. Marketing ops professionals are builders. So they're great in building the engine. The challenge that I have faced personally, and I think many marketing operations folks can relate to, is keeping up with what we need to do to optimize that engine. Because you cannot manage the technology plus do the analysis plus do the optimization. I think that specializing the industry is a must-do. Someone taking care of the martech, someone taking care of the analysis of the data, someone taking care of, um, making sure the funnels are working or, you know, um, I think that that's, for me, that's been a huge challenge. And so, and that affects the outcomes of marketing a lot because when you stay on the, on the, um, surface level, you can, You cannot go deeper to see what the customer needs and how you can, you know, um, get them to convert. That's the huge challenge.

So it's interesting because I think that you, what you're describing is you've got limited resources. So you're kind of inherently going to have to make trade-offs about where you have time.

Definitely. 100%. And also you, you, you cannot pretend to have a creative marketer To also manage the, the martech.

Yeah, that's, that's a, it's a rare combination of skills for sure.

Yeah, it's very separate. So you, you cannot blame marketing that is not using properly the technology. Perhaps it's not that they need more enablement in order to do it, right? So those are the main challenges that I have encountered.

So getting into this, maybe this is a good segue into the trade-off conversation. So one of the things you said to me that has stuck with me, and I'm still not sure I totally buy into it, is that you're seeing more C-suite type people, COOs, CFOs, CEOs, who are becoming more interested in how go-to-market works, in particular marketing. I think they probably tend to understand sales better than marketing in most of my experience, but you're saying you're seeing more interest in understanding how that works. Like what, Do you think, like, A, what's the evidence you have for that? I don't know if you want to get any specific examples or anything like that, but in general terms. And then what are you, do you think part of this driver is because they've got these limited resources and they want to see and hoping to see more from these marketing teams?

I think that It has become a time, I think we are living in an inflection time that the C-suite is pausing, like, wait, we have AI here and we have marketing having challenges. We need to look more into marketing. And I'm not saying that all C-suites are like that, because, you know, I have encountered C-suites like I just told you that she's open to innovation and I have stumbled upon C— CEOs or C-suite people that are, well, we don't want to invest on that, but it's how we deliver the message. I think that the main challenge for marketing is how they convince the C-suite to look more into them. And I think that marketers, now that AI is here, it's not going anywhere. Quantum technology is knocking the doors also. We need to, you know, get educated more into business administration, how businesses work, in order for us to have a conversation with C-level people.

How do you, like, with an accounting background, you've got an advantage. And so how do you frame those kinds of conversations when you talk to a C-level I just go straight to what they want to hear.

They don't want to hear nothing about, um, vanity metrics. For them, that's, that's nothing. They just want to know how much money we are going to make, how much money we're making, and money is the, is the topic. And as an accountant, I can tell you that's the topic.

Yeah.

And what I, What I have done with my, with the CEOs I have worked with is that I give them what they want, but I also, I am very honest on letting them know what is not working and what is, what is needed for things to work. And if I need to, um, do a procurement, either of a technology or we need more resources in terms of human resources. I just do a complete, um, analysis for them and I deliver them the problem with the solution. That's been the hit for me. And I give them, I give this to any marketer that is listening to us right now. Um, and I, as an example, I met one CEO, and he said, you know that I thought that when I was meeting you, I was going to be faced with a 40-slide presentation of a marketing agency. And I love that I just went through 15. And it's precisely because I have worked with so many of them that I know what they want to hear. Just give me just a bit of who you are. Just tell me what is my problem after our first briefing and tell me what is the solution that you propose. Tell me how much it's gonna cost and what is the timeline that you suggest for the product.

How confident are you that we can do it, right? That's usually a piece of it.

Yes.

Yeah.

Just, of course.

Yeah, I'm totally, totally on board with that. I'm, it's just small nuance. I'm curious cuz I think, I feel like there's been a shift, particularly in early-stage startup-type companies where the focus was very much on top line, just revenue growth, right? So versus where it feels like now it probably should have been more about profitable growth. So like profit.

Right.

So do you, when you're talking to those CEOs or C-suites about things, would it be important for you to understand like What is their driver? Are they more— if they're more focused on driving just top-line revenue, sort of, at least in the short run, irrespective of costs, right? You would probably go one way versus if they're focused on profit, then you might go another way.

I think that money has one language for the C-suite. Either we Gain money or we lose.

Yeah. So it's more about the state, like that particular thing, right? Is it's gonna be a net benefit from a financial standpoint?

Correct. And they also like to know a lot about forecasting. Hey, how, how do you see if we work the marketing this way? How do you see? And then I prepare like a forecast for them as well. Um, so that's the, um, That's the good thing about being an accountant. I also sit with them monthly, quarterly, and annually to analyze how the marketing campaign's expense relates to the profit that we had. So they send the spreadsheets and I sit with them, hey, this is what happened. You see, when we started this campaign and I show them the campaign dates. or days that we run it and how it translated into money. So they see that marketing is not just an expense. You are spending this money, you are investing in your business, but you are earning this much. So that conversation, I have it straightforward with them and they connect me with their finance people and they provide all all these spreadsheets that I need to do the analysis.

Interesting to think about. I just, it just like literally just popped in my head the idea that if you think about this like an investment, if you were talking to a financial advisor, they would go like, what's your investment horizon, right? So, I assume that what you're talking about is like, we spent X dollars over this period of time, and then at some point later, right? And depending on what that horizon is, that, you know, what your sales cycle is or whatever, You're setting the stage to go like, the expectation is not necessarily that you're going to get the next month, the next day, the next week, whatever, that you're going to get that benefit right away. But there's some reasonable timeframe and you're showing that you can connect the dots even if it's not. I think the more evidence you have like that, the more you think you look at it as a causal thing versus a, you know, So, right.

Yes. And, and also what I do with them, that, which is the part that they don't know about, I educate them how that translates into how the social media platforms work, either Google Ads or Facebook Ads, because they think that by investing X amount, we're done. When I need to explain to them, hey, this is the amount that you're spending now, but remember, they work by reach. So if you want to reach more people, you need to pay a little bit more. So I speak to them, okay, by next quarter, think about increasing the budget for ads in social by 25%. And that means that you will need to also increase X% for the server of your website because the push is going to be higher, right? So, it's a complete analysis of the business, not only of marketing or finance, marketing operations, everything is thought about. And I provide that analysis to them with the cost and everything. And that's how we get to the numbers and approvals.

So I'm curious, so again, kind of thinking about how we could take some of these lessons for our audience and apply them. Maybe this is a bridge here. So you talked about having, like, thinking about all the sort of downstream impacts, right? We ramp up what we spend on for reach on social media, we expect more volume to come to our website, so we need to make sure our server's capable, we need to have enough people to take in the new Leads, et cetera, et cetera, right? So you're thinking through that, which I think is a natural way that a lot of marketing ops, RevOps people think anyway. Yes. The piece that I have not consistently seen with a lot of professionals is going that next level of like, what is the financial component of that, both in terms of costs and benefit? And so, I mean, that seems like a pretty obvious, like if we could encourage the audience to sort of, if you want to have a bigger seat or a bigger influence on that kind of decision-making. You need to add that component to your system-level thinking. A, does that sound right to you? And then B, is there anything else that you think, like other elements that they should be thinking about to have more influence?

Yeah, that's, for me, that's the main because that's what I do, try to translate the financial benefit of marketing, but also if the marketer does not have that knowledge, then invest a bit on that education. Um, get to get a course. You don't have to get a, uh, uh, you know, a bachelor's degree in accounting to, to know that just, you know, just—

They just part, like, go spend time, go, go to their finance or accounting people and see how you— help me understand how you think about these Correct.

Exactly. And also, if they get access to the data, I think that's also very important because it will help them to see at least the patterns. You can see, even though if you're not an accountant or a finance person, you— most people are good in seeing patterns.

Yeah.

So, if you see a pattern in numbers and you have the dates there, that's all you need to know. If your campaign ran for 2 weeks, then find the 2 weeks of finance information and then do the analysis. We don't have to go too deep into the finance or more.

It doesn't have to get to the level of a scientific analysis, right?

Yes, exactly. But I think that it gives you more power. As a professional, but also more value. So you, you, you make sure that you own your role and that you know the value of your role just by bringing that information.

Yeah.

Because that's good for you to know, hey, we had this kind of revenue this 3rd quarter, but you cut the budget. on this quarter, so that's why we fell in results. So you have a way to defend your role.

Connect those dots, right?

Connect the dots, exactly. And that's the main challenge marketers has always had. How, why we get laid off, you know, when we are driving the business.

Just one, so you talked about forecasting and that is one that, when I coach, especially people who are stepping into a first role of managing a budget or something, forecast, I always tell people like, finance teams love to know what to expect, right?

Yeah.

They don't like surprises. And that's one of the things I've done well in my career is make sure like, you know, I can manage that really well. Is that, do you think that's a skill that would be useful? Like thinking about how to manage a budget and be predictable about what you're expecting, being able to explain where there's variances, You know, like, definitely.

And even more if, um, marketing professionals are looking to become a CMO, you know, you need to understand that information in order to be at the level of the rest of the C-suite. Um, a marketer without understanding the business is going to, and I'm going to use this word, I don't want anyone to get offended. But it's useless because you need to connect the dots with finance and the rest of your team in order to bring value on, on your role and how important it is. For me, marketing is the most important role in a business. That's my opinion.

Sure.

It should be embedded into the business. So, from useless to the top, Performer, that's have been always my main goal when I get a role. Even if it's as, if it, if it's as a consultant, I go in and I become part of the business and I make sure that the business excels, but the finance part is really, for me, it's a deal, a deal winner or a deal breaker. Yeah.

Um, so I love it because this is The mind, like something I've, a drum I've been beating for a while. So like you need to learn enough about finance to have a conversation.

Yes.

I want, I want to shift gears a little bit. This, so one of the things I think when I think about career stuff for people, right? There's a lot of people get into marketing ops. Some are intentional, most are not, I think in at least historically. And then there's questions about like where, like career-wise, where do you go? So one of the ones that may makes sense for some people is to go into more of a general business operations role. From your experience, because it feels like you've kind of at least worked across those different things, what do you think are the skills and experience that would translate well from marketing ops into more general business operations?

Can you repeat that question, Michael?

So, I think a lot of people, when they think about, like, if I go in marketing ops, right? And, but I, hey, I want to go move to a path that would lead to, say, COO. Right. Oh, what are the skills that I, I could communicate that I've learned in marketing ops that could translate into, you know, me moving from marketing focus to more general business operations? Does that make sense?

Well, what we have spoke about throughout the call, marketing needs to be included at, at the table. We cannot leave them like They're a silo department. So that's the first thing that I would ask, to bring up marketing to every conversation, especially the MOPS, because technology, which is for me, is the second part. Even a COO must be informed or educated in technology because The business right now is run online, right? And so, it's not only the business technology, it's the business technology attached to the marketing technology, and that everything makes sense, and the customer buys, and everyone gets the notification that we have a new customer. No one is Um, you know, I'll get names.

Right.

Exactly. Um, so I think that for me, that's the future. Um, I, I really encourage marketers to get educated into technology very deep. Um, because what we are seeing and what is coming is not going back to the traditional marketing. I don't see traditional marketing. It's not that it's going to disappear, but I see more technology into marketing in the future. And I think that in order for us to keep our roles or to expand to a new role or transfer our skills to a new role, we must get educated and skillful in technology. And the business.

Yeah.

Both things.

Yeah. Well, I think, I think a lot of this in particular, like AI type technology is changing the way that people buy, right? And so, and that's really just the tip.

That's the tip of the iceberg, Michael.

Yeah.

Um, I'm going to soon start a martech role and that's the tip of the iceberg. I mean, we are, we, uh, a law passed, um, I think it was in 2024. 4, if I'm not mistaken, by summer, by the former President Biden about quantum technology. I mean, we are seeing AI now, but things are moving towards quantum technology into marketing. So AI for me is just a surface level. Exactly.

Yeah, it's going to be fascinating over the next couple of years. Well, Ivelisse, this has been a great conversation. I wish we could continue on, but we're going to have to kind of wrap it up.

Thank you so much.

Yeah. Yeah. If, if people want to connect with you, it sounds like you're more active on LinkedIn. So, I mean, I guess that's where you're going to go, but if people want to, you know, continue the conversation with you or learn more about what you're doing, what's the best way for them to do that?

Yes, they can connect with me on LinkedIn, of course, Ivelisse Arroyo, and Instagram as well. I'm very active there too.

Okay. There you go. All right. Well, Ivelisse, such a pleasure. It was so much fun. Thanks for being our first Caribbean guest. I'm happy about that. Continue to grow internationally. Well, I appreciate it. And as always, to everyone out there, thank you for listening and supporting us. If you have ideas for topics or guests, or you want to be a guest, reach out to Naomi, Mike, or me, and we'd be happy to get the ball rolling just like we did with Ivelisse. Until next time, bye everybody.

Thank you.