Is 2022 The Year of the Marketing Ops Professional?

During this (sorta) Ops Cast After Dark, we talk about one year of Ops Cast and we talk about predictions for 2022. Our starting point was 6 predictions about Marketing Operations in 2022 written in an article by a friend of the show, Darrell Alfonso.

As you will see, we don’t all see things the same and predictions are almost always tough. Listen, and then let us know what you expect for 2022.

Recorded live on January 7, 2022.

Hi, I’m Michael Hartmann, I’m Naomi Lou, and I’m Mike Rizzo. And this is ops cast, a podcast for marketing ops pros and rev ops proscreatedraided by the MO Pros. The number one community for marketing operations. As professionals tune into each episode as we chat with real professionals to help elevate you in your marketing operations career.

Lower one. Welcome to another episode of OpsCast brought to you by the MO Pros today. Uh, I’m joined by Naomi Lou, Mike and Mike Rizzo. I’m Michael Hartmann say hello? Hey everybody happy new year 2022. I’m calling this the year of marketing ops. I, yeah, it’s the year of the marketing ops professionals. Okay.

Well, I think we’re going to get into that a little bit, but I think before I, but just before that, I wanted to, so we are recording this. We’re sitting here recording this on January 7th, 2022. And I had looked back in a while and our first episode of OpsCast was on January 15th, 2021 the day before my birthday.

That’s right. That’s why I remember it. Happy early birthday. So it’s hard to believe like a year. Like it, I actually, I actually thought we started later in 2021. I didn’t remember it being January, so yeah, I didn’t either. And back then we were doing like the radio style version, right. With that startup, that pivoted away from, from the platform.

And, and so we had to go back to this like sort of, podcasty still radio field, but you know, more, more like prepared kind of thing. Yeah, I think it, and I think it set a tone for us. Right. I think there’s still, I still, when I, when we talk to guests and potential guests, I still want it to feel like it’s as if we had an audience listening.

Right. Realtime. I prefer I’d like the vibe that we have. I mean, I know where 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. Uh, produced, but Hey, high production quality shows are also like really easy to listen to. Right. So yeah.

Teach their own. All right. So 20, 22, what are we doing? Yeah, so the year, the year of the marketing house professional. So. Yeah. When we were talking about what we could talk about today, we said, you know, we saw, uh, someone who’s been a guest Daryl Alfonzo recently published, um, on the martech.org website, an article about his predictions for 2022 and mark ops.

I’m just going to read through the real quickly, and then we can jump into sort of a conversation about what we think of these. So number one, arise at VP and director level marketing ops roles. Number two, formalized training for marketing ops. Number three marketing ops will overtake advertising on. Uh, number four account-based marketing will be owned by marketing ops.

Number five, marketing ops will become the first or second marketing hire. And number six, data privacy will become a marketing ops core competency. So, um, Oh, Dami, initial reactions. What do you think? Any, anything that’s missing, anything you you think is, uh, we should do a deeper dive on. Um, yeah, I like this list.

Um, few of them catch my eye. Definitely. You know, we had been talking about some of these topics before we started recording. Um, the one that it definitely kind of raises my eyebrow is number six. Um, which is the data. Privacy will become a core marketing ops core competency. Um, because for me. 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? Um, and we’d love to kind of talk about that. 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, um, can kind of dive right into that one.

Yeah. That number six, just, just to latch onto that for a second. Like yeah, that caught my eye too. Uh, I feel like it already is a part of the function, right? Like it’s, but it’s also, um, incredibly important for, for the, you know, the C level, uh, CIO, right. To pay attention to data privacy. Um, and so while it might be a core competency in that you understand it, it doesn’t mean that it’s just owned by.

Uh, department, you know, the whole org is sort of responsible for it in different ways. Uh, but like the alignment there in with that CIO level role, I think is going to increase, uh, if, if anything, like, um, there, I think the C-suite will realize, and the marketing ops person will be responsible for, you know, Hey, this tool has access to our data.

And so how do we make sure that. We’re we’re compliant and all that other stuff, but, but yeah. Um, let’s jump it. I’m going to jump in with a Ryzen VP stuff. Yeah. So I’ll give you, 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 20, 22 personally. Um, what are the things I do think is a potential is sort of, uh, VP level roles that combine marketing ops with other functions within marketing, maybe even to the level where, you know, we, 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 think about that? Like if do you think the path to I, 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 working ops wants to be CMO.

Right. 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, you know, does demand gen fall under marketing ops? I don’t know if it does. And I feel like you can argue both sides.

Yeah. Right because I, some people may say, well, marketing ops is purely a, um, a technology and an, uh, technology adoption and enablement data, hygiene, data management, um, uh, function within an organization, demand gen falls under a head of marketing potentially. Right. So then if you do VP of marketing ops and how is that different from a CFO or a head of marketing?

Yeah. I mean, I think that’s a great question for, 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 skillset that needs to come from the rest of that. T-shaped marketer banned.

That not all marketing ops people really want to jump into. Um, and then for VP of marketing operations. Yeah. I don’t think that they are necessarily. I personally, I wouldn’t see that as a overtaking responsibility for demand gen and those kinds of things. I, I see it as, you know, it’s a technology role that, um, 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, uh, it and marketing. Where they’re saying, Hey, if we want to grow in this market, you know, by 20% this year, uh, there’s these different levers that we can pull on because the more that particular market responds in a different way, or we need the right tool to be compliant inside of another market.

Uh, and so I need to build that roadmap. Um, and it’s really a, just a technology function. Um, a throughput and adoption function to make sure that these tools are actually doing, you know, the thing that you’re, you’re saying that you want them to do. Um, but certainly not responsible for driving pipeline.

Right. It’s it’s I see it as like a throughput kind of function more than anything else. Yeah. I mean, I think the point about, um, not everybody in marketing ops wants to be a marketing generalist leader. Right. I think that’s totally a valid point. Part of this is probably coming from me that it’s, um, 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.

It was under my responsibility. One was an inbound SDR team. Um, and, and, and one was digital. Uh, in particular pay digital kind of stuff. So, um, 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 to about, uh, you know, training as well, or maybe more pointedly, like, uh, I think, and I thought this for awhile in marketing in general marketing ops 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 they had 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 nice. I could see that happening. That’s unfortunate that that happens. I think when it comes to training for marketing ops though, is 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 who report to.

Right. Cause you can train all these folks and then you have all these people, but if nobody understands like what they do and there’s no like education around the benefits or. Any of that, then it’s kind of a moot point because then it’s just your head and you’re going to be hitting a wall constantly, right.

Or you’re always going to be trying to upsell yourself and the, 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 ops generally doesn’t need to, but marketing ops is always this uphill. Yeah. Yeah, I would, yeah, I can see that.

I, um, I was recently talking to Daniel Murray who, who has, um, you know, his podcasts for, um, marketing millennials. Um, and one of the things that he’s, 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, um, we’ll talk shop a little bit, but one of the things that he, he shared with me was this idea that, um, You know, wow.

Not everybody wants to be a generalist. Some of the standout marketing operations, uh, experts out there actually have a broad spectrum of generalist capabilities and understanding that really set them apart. Um, and I tend to agree with that, right? Like some of the real standout marketing ops folks that are not just deep technologists in Marquetto or a particular.

Platform, um, they have a broader understanding of, of the function across marketing and how they all kind of interplay. Uh, that doesn’t mean that you’re inevitably going to become a VP or a CMO, but, um, it certainly is one of the core. Skillsets. When you think about training and kind of upskilling and leveling up to start standing out in a marketing ops function, it’s really a good idea to go look at, um, 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 rev ops org or across teams, like a sales team and it and client success. And so, you know, I agree with that. I think. Some of those standout marketing ops experts are really broadly skilled.

Um, but yeah, the, the training and the, the kind of upskilling stuff, you know, obviously here with MO Pros and what we’re working on, like, we certainly want 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 two, on that article from Daryl to say like, yeah.

I, I personally think that there’s going to be more training and upscaling because this community is literally building it every day. So this is, you know, spot on. But, um, but yeah, anyway, broad skills are definitely important for, for growth and 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 of 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 camera, so 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, either that when I was basically doing programming.

In the oil and gas industry, like, I want understand this code I was writing like, 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’ll want to get. Yeah, I would, I would definitely agree. And it’s funny, like right now, as we’re recording this episode, uh, within the last, you know, 24, 48 hours, Jen Berger, and who’s a wonderful contributor to our community.

And she, I think she’s currently employed at remote dish. She actually wrote an article. It says my career journey into operations and operations origin story. And it’s got this wonderful graphic. If you could picture this light. Uh, what would normally be a straight line in the middle of that straight line as 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 and, um, 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.

Some of us just fall right into it. So, um, all right. So I think it sounds like we’re sort of, sort of have a couple of different views on 0.1 D like what’s the next one. I, I actually have. Um, on, on the last point, I did want to add like the thing about, um, 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, one of the teams that I actually enjoy working with a lot, maybe it’s cause I’m married to one is the legal team, right. An attorney. Um, but um, I think. That, you know, we always talk about like marketing ops. It needs to be connected with the rest of marketing sales and sales ups and maybe finance and it, and that like legal doesn’t always get included in there, but I have always like, that’s one of the first places I go in and it’s for two friends.

Right? What is. I think privacy guidance and things like that, the others, like we’re often doing contracts. Right. And so, um, just, you know, getting to know them as a key part. Yeah. I, uh, on the legal side of things, like when I was, when I was back in my last role, I was actually just building community and, um, I went to our.

Page our legal kind of privacy page. And it hadn’t been updated in like, I don’t know, eight years or something. And, and, uh, and I started kind of making a stink about it. I was like, Hey, you know the stuff we need new T’s and C’s on here. Cause we’re launching this community and it means a bunch of stuff.

And, and yada, yada, and I started asking all these questions 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 two 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 legal Lees and making sure things are right, but there are so much, I have a story that I can’t tell you about on, on this.

You can’t, you can’t say that everyone’s gonna know. I can’t drop that. No, no, no, no. It looks like, say I have a really like important surprise, but I kit and winter camp or summer camp in person not recorded. Okay. But, sorry. Yeah. So, you know, even at the C-suite there, they care about it. Right. But they’re, 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, Your 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. Cause you’re, 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, but hopefully the business. So anyway, that was my 2 cents.

I totally agree. Um, all right, so let’s see. Should we, should we move on to, we kind of touched on number two, 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, um, I really don’t have a, anything add to that. You all have anything?

Not so much on my end. No, I’m good. Let’s just, alright. You can tell how much we plan 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 w that was stood out to me because. For me, it was sort of an outlet 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 probably have stuff to say about this because I come from ad tech and I’ve spent some time in organizations that did display ads on networks and mobile. Uh, So ad ops is a very different thing when you’re inside those organizations.

Um, but when you’re talking about advertising operations within an embedded org, like a, you know, a software company or just a, you know, where that’s not your, your core competency is not to do display ads or what have you. Um, I can see why marketing ops will overtake a bit of the advertising ops in terms of.

Again, sort of getting back to this idea of like throughput and managing the tech. And that would be purely because, um, it’s about, uh, like 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 AB test or, you know, the results necessarily, or not necessarily the results, the, the next test that you want to 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 ad ops team is aware of the. You know, the UTM sources that we use and mediums and all that other stuff, um, are the images compliant, right?

If you’re in the legal field that requires certain imagery and certain language to be on your images, uh, when you think about it like a, a company like intelligence bank, who’s a digital asset management company. 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. Uh, from like the demand gen kind of sped perspective.

And I was w where my head went to was when I saw that was, oh, maybe this is tied to the, you know, the, the cookie lists, you know, kind of world war. Supposedly going to write. So yeah, that’s actually a really good point too. When you started thinking about creating your own kind of network, your own private party set of data, then yeah, I could see that.

I didn’t let anyone consider that. What about you, Naomi? Are you going to take over ad ops at EFI? Highly doubtful now? I don’t think so. Um, yeah, I mean, never say never, right?

For sure. You’re not out there trying to build, build a, a kingdom self there. Well, what’s interesting is

what’s interesting is that I think the article reads like today’s hype is. In B2B focuses on things like ABM and community building and product led growth and all that stuff. But yet point number four was that account-based marketing is now going to be owned by marketing ops. And so, uh, this article, you know, Daryl touches on some pretty hot, hot topics.

Some that are, uh, A little bit, you know, out there maybe, uh, 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? I got, I don’t know. Is that a demand gen function? I saw it under demand gen and the org that I was at.

So, uh, I I’d be curious. I haven’t actually, I mean, I’m familiar with it. I have not. Been 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 halo. It was more because the coordination and alignment in the sales sales team’s readiness, right.

To do things like identify the top of cashew at target. Right. Which is really critical for step really wasn’t there. And so I think marketing ops. And or sales ops or rev ops, or 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, where you think you’re going to get the most value.

If you’re particularly talking about the technology component that will support it. Okay. So as I clear my throat and everybody’s ear, uh, I had dogs barking in the background already, like semi live show folks. Um, but just like in episode one and episode with Darryl, the fire alarm went off. Yeah. Um, yeah.

So account based marketing, I executing on ABM. I dunno. Uh, Naomi, I don’t know if you, have you done any execution or you’re has anyone in AFI had done execution around ABM? Yeah, we’ve, we’ve had a few false starts. Um, but that’s something that definitely is a focus for this year. And, um, you know, a lot of it is bandwidth to be honest.

Uh, bandwidth and resources and, you know, developing these huge programs. Um, so yeah, we have had a few false starts, but I’m hoping that for this year, this’ll be the year third. Time’s a charm. So instead of the year of marketing ops, it’s the year of ABM for you? If I, yeah, yeah, exactly. Not at ops. No, no, no.

Um, yeah, I. The message that pulls through from both of you, for me, uh, as it relates to ABM. And at least from some of the like, 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, uh, by aligning with, you know, sales and so forth.

Um, However execution of ABM, uh, requires a lot. It’s a lot of project management. It requires resources and it requires, you know, literal people time. Um, 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 there. You know, a hat or a swag box or whatever, to somebody, uh, 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 specialists. That’s probably on the demand gen side. Uh, 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 Dami. So you said you’re going to be gone for 10, three. Like what, what, what, what do you anticipate your role or your team’s role will be. On the IBM side. Um, so a lot of it is like education, like the, you know, the platform, um, how we can use it, guidance, um, you know, walking hand in hand lockstep with our, with our demand gen team to figure out what accounts they want to target, how do they interpret the data?

You know, what is a cadence with messaging, um, message drops like, you know, what channels we’re going to target. Things like that. Okay. So are you involved at all with the coordinating, like with develop development of like the target lists and or the account assignments and that okay. No. Interesting. Okay.

Yeah. Yeah. I won’t know the, um, the accounts as well as our sales teams. Sure. Right. Yeah. That’s it. I think this is going to be a really interesting one and I, it, it may be. Maybe Darryl’s onto something in terms of like, maybe it depends on the type of company, like size stage structure, right. That may have a part of this as well.

Yeah. Yeah. I can see that. Yeah, because at the end of the day, I don’t, I want it to be scalable. Right. 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. Um, and not have it be so specific to one individual account.

Right. And, um, 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. Account, especially our named accounts and strategic accounts. Right. So, yeah, absolutely. All right. Um, so let’s hit one more then I, uh, I have, uh, kind of an open-ended question for you at the end here.

Um, so the last one is marketing ops will become the first or second marketing hire. So I think this is probably applies more to early stage companies, but, you know, what’s, what’s your take, Mike? You’ve probably been in more early stage companies. I have for sure. Naomi, I don’t can’t remember. I know you’ve been at EFI for a while, so, uh, what’s your take on that?

Do you think that’s, are you seeing that shift happening? I, yeah. I mean, I, 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 there’s 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?

Uh, I don’t want to create chaos, uh, for someone to manage later, but I, the reason I waver on this is that. I don’t know that someone wants that responsibility. Like maybe the second hire as marketing ops. Uh, 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.

Uh, 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. More than likely the business is going to 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 that is not to be responsible for go to market activities and doing demand gen, right.

It is, it is purely not demand gen focused. It is a part of the infrastructural system to make sure all that pipeline works. And as scalable, right. As you want to add more programs on. Uh, and so for it to be the very first hire. 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.

Um, they’re probably not gonna want that role. Right. Um, so I, I waiver on it. I see it being a second hire. I know Darrell commented about Dave Garrett. Sort of calling attention to the importance of marketing ops, which is great. Um, you know, we love, we love big, big voices like that saying marketing ops is an important, critical function.

Uh, 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. Uh, 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. Comment there to mean I’m the first hire after head of marketing, right?

It’s supposed to the first marketing hire. Yeah. Yeah. And that’s how I interpreted it too. But 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, 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’ve 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 play, 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 this first. Yeah. So, so, so maybe there’s, maybe this is linked a little bit to kind of the first couple of the 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, if they’re 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.

Um, yeah, that may, I could see, I could see that happening for the, the portion of marketing ops folks who are interested in doing something like that. Um, I, I think I put in general, Mike, I think I’m with you that, that it’s more likely it’s going to be a more of a marketing generalist that happens to have some tech savvy as well.

That’s. But I think, I think the, the point of an early hire needs to understand ops and technology for the marketing team to be able to scale over time. And do they get it set up as good as possible as early as possible is an important. 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 can, 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. Name me. What do you, what’s your thought on that one? Um, I think like one of the responsibilities for the marketing person that gets hired is going to be the tools that the company uses to.

Right. So I think that what you said earlier about the person needs to have a high. 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 health person? Right. So I think there was a, there was a, um, a discussion on the slack channel.

I think it was last week maybe about how, um, 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. 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 were like, what does that look like?

Heart or horse, right. Is it the technology that comes in first and then you hire the people to run it, or do you hire that 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. Um, those are all questions that, and maybe it’s the, maybe the, maybe the thought is that okay?

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

Yeah. Without a doubt. I, uh, I was, I was once told by someone who ended up replacing me that we connected and the person said, Hey, Thanks for all those workflows, man.

It’s like a nice was that, that I set it up correctly or that you’re like super pissed that you can’t even pay. Where are you being sarcastic or, yeah. And I, so I sincere to this day, I still don’t know what the actual intent of the comment was, but I was fine with it. 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 should likely be a part of the 2022 marketing ops slash. Now meet your thoughts. I mean, I think, I think this is a pretty comprehensive list.

I, I think that the diet data privacy piece is an important one. Um, especially as more and more countries adopt strict. Compliance laws, right? It’s it doesn’t usually go into reverse, you know, Canada’s not going to say, you know, castle, forget about it. Let’s just scrap it. You know, it just, it gets more and more complex.

Right. As, as you know, there’s more things that are connected, more data, just exchanges hands. And I think that’s an important piece. Um, I would definitely, I would almost even expand on that own personally. So just my two sons. No, that’s a good point. Uh, I would say it sort of, it sort of goes back to this commentary that was happening on LinkedIn a week or so ago where someone was suggesting that there’ll be a larger shift of marketing ops roles into rev ops people moving into rev.

And, uh, they were sort of asking the question. I think it was yet another poll. Right. Um, is that really a thing that’s going to happen? And a LinkedIn poll? Yeah. What, uh, I, my response to that was, uh, I don’t think that people will move into rev ops, uh, 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 flattened in your org structure, organizational pressure that comes on to marketing.

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 rev ops 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 rev ops.

Uh, 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, uh, 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 going to 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. You know, larger organizational kind of go to market objective fulfillment, um, and that’ll sort of force change in, in new ways.

Interesting. So the two things, and I don’t know how strongly I feel about these, to be honest with you like that. I think I would, I, I, I think I see bits of these coming. Uh, one, one is just. More of a focus within marketing ops on reporting and analytics and the skillsets behind it. I think it’s becoming, I think we’ve had so many conversations about whether it’s attribution reporting or other kinds of reporting analytics.

That that is a skillset like understanding data, understanding statistics, understanding analysis. Is a skill skits. I think there’s a skillset gap within marketing ops that needs to be filled because there’s going to be more and more pressure to provide timely act in clouds, right. Accurate reporting, um, and, and being able to then feed that back so we can adjust.

So I think, I think that. And maybe that’s just me being hopeful. I think, I think it’s a skill gap that needs to be filled and that, so it could be tied to the education. It could be tied to kind of, uh, 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 seeing 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 has 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 following 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 there. 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, but I think every team I’ve been on it and I, you know, I’ve been on small growing companies. Um, 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 did on the side, 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 hard. I I’m sorry. I said they actively want to be involved. No, that’s great. That’s incredible. I love that. But I think that’s, I think that’s highly unusual actually that like, uh, so those last two, uh, it’s not without a lot of work though, on that relationship part of it, it’s not just like something that just comes that just came by accident.

So. Yeah. And maybe my two predictions are me also hoping that those things will happen. Um, I just, I see, I, 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. Um, anyway. Well, I think we’ve pretty much exhausted that any other final thoughts on this topic of what we think the marketing ops landscape will be in 2022?

No, I mean, no, I think, I think Daryl’s article was great. Um, I, you know, I’m looking at the landscape myself. Um, I think Fronz the, you know, gentlemen that you’ve spoken to on his podcast, Michael. He talked about a couple of months ago. There’s like over 12 million global professionals. Now that have a job titles that specify marketing operations.

Now I don’t exactly know how he pulled all that data together, but like, that’s pretty impressive. And I took a look at the job market for the U S. Uh, 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 U S alone.

And when you look at them like, and you start breaking them down, like there are over a thousand of them that are executive level. Which is pretty impressive. Right. So I don’t know that that number will shift, but I think we’re going to see a lot of job posting and a lot of growth. I mean, our hiring channels popping off every single day.

There’s like five new jobs. So from a prediction, lots more, uh, opportunities, especially as we continue to sort of stay remote. Right. But I think that the market is insane. The demand is insane. So 20, 20 or 2022. The year of the marketing operations professional, I’m saying, put it out. There 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. Um, 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, um, thank you for being there and those who will be guests.

We’re looking forward to having you on until next time. Thanks. Thanks everybody. Thank you.