The position of the sales staff is good, but we will get more, better – Chief Marketing Technologist

Last week, Mike Rizzo and the team at MarketingOps.com hosted their annual MOps-Apalooza event with 400+ marketing people. I was honored to be one of their keynote speakers, and I will share the main theme of my talk with you soon. But first…

They also release their annual Status of Marketing Operations Professionalsa landmark 87-page report that surveyed more than 600 marketing professionals in nearly every aspect of their careers. It is a veritable goldmine of data and insights about a discipline that is still very young and not fully understood in the entire marketing industry.

That said, marketing ops has come a long way from the “island of misfit toys” that one astute analyst called it a decade ago. Here are a few key points from the report:

Marketing ops has become an established profession, with respectable salaries for 6 people and a growing pool of mature talent with 6+ years of experience. On a scale of 1-7 — 1 being the least favorable response, 7 being the most — they generally score ~4.5 for feeling that they are fairly compensated, understood, and valued by their employers. Not great, but above the midpoint. (And not bad in today’s big world.)

As shown at the top of this post, ad ops is clearly a tangled mix of process, technology, and data with 77.8%, 72.7%, and 73.3% of responsibilities corresponding to those three pillars. (If asked to choose one which is basic responsibility, the responses were almost equally divided.)

Data is becoming a central part of marketing ops strategy and leadership, with an emphasis on advancing data development (52.4%), data quality (46.8%), and data integration (45.8%), and topping the list.

This is reflected in the top set of technologies that marketing ops expects to invest in in the next 12-18 months, with data enrichment and targeting tools at the top (54.6%). Yes, AI ranks in the top three (42.2%). But the next two are also data-centric: analytics tools (39.2%) and ABM tools (35.5%).

So given that the main responsibility of marketing ops is the evolution of the marketing technology stack, and they have a significant list of new technologies that they are planning for the next year, we come to find out that it is my long-term pet rock. : integration.

“The ability to integrate” is the #1 process (81.3%) – almost double the top-ranked thing – that marketing ops professionals have when evaluating new marketing technologies.

That’s not to say that price, scalability, compliance, ease of use, service and support, etc., aren’t important. Yes, of course.

But the most important martech purchases are made (or should be) made with a buying team, where other stakeholders often combine these other elements well. But the marketing activities are the participants who listen to the integration. Because they know that even if a new product or platform checks all the other boxes, if it doesn’t integrate well with the rest of the technology stack, it might end up anchored above the canvas.

Another pet rock of mine has been promoting agile management practices in marketing and martech since 2010. It’s good to see that agile is the leading approach that professional ops teams are taking in managing their work.

It’s also great to see that marketing functions now work closely not only with sales, sales ops, and rev ops, but also with the C-suite and IT. Although as some of the data in the report shows, we still have a lot of room for improvement alignment with this cooperation.

Another finding from this report that I want to highlight is the level of digital maturity that marketing ops respondents rated their organizations:

The low digital maturity of these companies, especially Level 1 or Level 2, proves that although we are no longer talking about “digital transformation,” many companies still have a long way to go. Or, to put a more positive spin on it, there is still great potential for growth in digital operations as a whole.

Marketing ops teams can play — he must play – an important role in this promotion.

Which brings me to the core theme of my keynote at MOps-Apalooza. Marketing ops has grown as an important part of marketing. But it is still under-resourced and under-recognized compared to other aspects of the department. Strategy and creativity are more important than anything else. But it is still not where most of the marketing work is allocated.

Most of the hours spent in marketing today go into various forms of production and analysis. Because it takes a lot of skilled work to turn those strategic and creative ideas into reality.

But I believe that in the next 5 years, AI will automate and expand a large part of that production and analysis work. At the same time, it will dramatically expand the scope and scale of creative experimentation that advertising can do. I think it will be a golden age of marketing strategy and creativity – you haven’t been seen nuttin’, Don Draper – and a lot of human energy is allocated to that task.

The caveat, however, is that for all that amazing AI automation, optimization, and creative power to work, the underlying technology and data infrastructure and operating system need to be run very well.

That’s the job of marketing.

As that influence and recognition grows, so will the investment and appreciation for good marketing ops.

Looking for more great insights and data points on sales ops? Download a free copy of the Status of Marketing Operations Specialists report. It is an amazing resource. Kudos, Mike and team!