The Engine Room of the Marketing Org
In today’s data-driven go-to-market models, board members and executives have an insatiable appetite for data. Everyone wants to understand how the pipeline is growing, how campaigns are performing, and how new technology investments are paying off. While the demand generation team may be the one executing the campaigns and bringing in the leads, it is the operations team that is quantifying marketing’s contribution to the business in terms of pipeline, bookings, and ARR. Ops often operates behind the scenes, but they have a massive influence on how decisions are being made.
No marketing deliverable gets higher levels of visibility with the board than analytics produced by the ops team.
Marketing Operations – Key Functions
SaaS and cloud providers are investing big bucks in technology to collect data and even more in the analysts trained to interpret it. That is why many of the “cool kids” in marketing want to be on the ops team. Compensation packages for highly-skilled martech engineers are beginning to rival those of developers. But pursuing a career path in operations is no easy feat. It requires mastering complex skills ranging from integrating dozens of different Martech systems to performing analytics on billions of data points each month.
Tech Stack
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Marketing Automation
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Account-Based Marketing
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Email Deliverability
Data
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Identity Resolution
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Techno- & Firmographic
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Buyer Intent
Process Design
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Lead Qualification
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Attribution and Scoring
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Lead Nurturing
Analytics
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Leads, Deals & Wins
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Pipeline, Bookings, ARR
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Campaign Effectiveness & ROI
Spotlight
MarTech Stack
There are 10,000 different marketing applications available for SaaS and cloud providers to choose from. In recent years, dozens of new categories have emerged to automate everything from gathering competitive intelligence to generating new content ideas. The explosion in AI technologies will likely result in another wave. CMOs and CROs habitually want to chase every new shiny object with the hope that tech will provide the answer. Ops teams will face a significant challenge managing the burgeoning tech stack and all the associated bespoke integrations.
Data Privacy
CPRA for B2B Marketing
The California Privacy Rights Act (CPRA) is bringing GDPR-level privacy rights to the 40M residents of California. CPRA builds upon the original CCPA legislation that went into effect in 2020.
Although much of the language in CPRA targets B2C marketing programs, the regulations apply to B2B marketing programs as well. B2B marketers need a strategy for managing data subject rights requests as well as offering customers the right to opt-out of AI driven technologies.
Spotlight
Analytics and Reporting
CEOs have finally gotten religion around the importance of lead generation to growth. As a result, all eyes are on the pipeline and top of funnel metrics. Marketing operations teams are responsible for the “high visibility” metrics on MALs, MQLs, and SQLs to board members, investors, and executives. As marketing decisions continue to be more data-driven the role of marketing operations is likely to evolve from a support function enabling the team to more of a strategic function that is driving decision making.
