10 questions to ask your Marketing Ops vendor before you make a decision

Choosing a Marketing Operations vendor is not like choosing a piece of software.

Software can be swapped. Contracts can be renegotiated. Bad decisions can be undone with enough budget and patience.

A Marketing Ops partner, on the other hand, gets inside how your business actually works. Your data. Your processes. Your internal politics. Your technical debt. If you choose badly, you don’t just waste money. You hard-code the wrong behaviours into your operation.

Most buyers don’t realise this until it’s too late.

That’s why the real risk isn’t asking the wrong questions. It’s asking the easy ones. The questions that vendors have rehearsed answers for. The ones that sound sensible but reveal very little.

If you want to make a good decision, you need to ask questions that force honesty. Questions that surface how a vendor thinks, not just what they sell.

Here are ten that actually matter.

1. How do you define Marketing Operations, and where do you draw the line?

This sounds philosophical. It isn’t.

Marketing Ops means very different things depending on who you ask. For some vendors, it’s platform administration and campaign execution. For others, it’s governance, operating models, and performance management. Some will happily call themselves Marketing Ops while functioning as outsourced button-pushers.

The answer you’re listening for isn’t a neat definition. It’s whether they understand Marketing Ops as a system.

A strong vendor will talk about how strategy, process, data, technology, and people reinforce each other. They’ll be clear about what they do not do, and why. They won’t promise to “handle everything” because they know that’s how accountability disappears.

If they can’t articulate their boundaries, they probably don’t have any.

2. How do you approach a new client when the problem isn’t clearly defined?

Most organisations don’t come to a Marketing Ops vendor with a clean brief. They come with symptoms. Low adoption. Messy data. Reporting no one trusts. Automation that looks impressive but delivers very little.

A vendor that jumps straight to solutions is telling you something important about how they operate.

Good Marketing Ops work starts with diagnosis. That means asking uncomfortable questions, mapping reality instead of ambition, and resisting the urge to “fix” things too quickly. It also means being honest when the root cause isn’t technology at all.

However, if their answer centres purely on frameworks, audits, or discovery phases - listen carefully to how those are used. Are they a genuine way to understand your operating model, or just a prelude to selling you more configuration work?

3. How do you balance "best practice" with how teams actually behave?

This is where many engagements quietly fail.

Most vendors know what good looks like in theory. Clean lifecycle models. Clear ownership. Perfectly documented processes. The problem is that most teams don’t work like that, and pretending they do doesn’t make it true.

A credible Marketing Ops partner designs for reality, not aspiration. They understand where compromise is acceptable and where it isn’t. They know when to push for change and when to adapt the system to fit human behaviour.

If a vendor talks only about best practice without acknowledging trade-offs, you’re likely buying a future state that never arrives.

4. How do you measure success, and who decides if it’s been achieved?

This question cuts through a lot of noise very quickly.

Some vendors define success as deliverables completed. Others define it as platform usage, or campaign volume, or automation built. None of those necessarily translate to better performance.

Strong vendors talk about outcomes. Decision-making clarity. Time saved. Reduced friction between teams. Improved confidence in data. They also acknowledge that not everything worth measuring fits neatly into a dashboard.

Pay attention to whether success is something you define together, or something they report on after the fact. Marketing Ops should increase your control, not outsource it.

5. What happens after the initial implementation work is done?

Many Marketing Ops engagements die quietly at this point.

The platform is live. The workflows are built. The documentation exists somewhere. And then the business moves on, while the system slowly drifts out of alignment.

A good vendor will talk about enablement, not just delivery. How knowledge is transferred. How internal capability is developed. How governance is maintained when priorities change or people leave.

If the long-term answer is “retainer support”, ask what that actually achieves. Support without progression is just dependency with better branding.

6. How do you handle internal resistance and conflicting priorities?

Marketing Ops rarely fails for technical reasons. It fails because people don’t agree.

Sales wants speed. Marketing wants control. Leadership wants reporting. No one wants extra admin. A vendor that pretends this isn’t part of the job is either inexperienced or avoiding the issue.

Listen for whether they talk about stakeholder management, change management, and decision rights. Do they help clients navigate trade-offs, or do they simply take instructions from whoever shouts loudest?

A strong partner understands that alignment is work, and that avoiding it only pushes the problem downstream.

7. How do you decide when not to automate something?

Automation is seductive. It feels like progress. It looks impressive in demos. It also amplifies bad process faster than anything else.

Experienced Marketing Ops vendors are cautious about automation for its own sake. They know that some manual steps are valuable. They know when stability matters more than scale. They know that complexity has a cost that doesn’t always show up immediately.

If a vendor frames automation as the default answer, be careful. The best operators are selective, not enthusiastic.

8. How do you work with data when it’s incomplete, inconsistent, or politically sensitive?

Every organisation says data matters. Very few are honest about the state it’s in.

Marketing Ops sits at the intersection of systems that were never designed to agree with each other. CRM, marketing automation, analytics, finance, product. Data ownership is unclear. Definitions are contested. Trust is fragile.

A serious vendor will acknowledge this openly. They will talk about pragmatism, prioritisation, and building confidence over time. They won’t promise perfect data. They’ll promise usable data that improves.

If they gloss over this, you’re likely buying optimism instead of experience.

9. What does a good client look like to you?

This is an underrated question, and it’s revealing in both directions.

Vendors who say “we can work with anyone” usually mean “we haven’t learned where we’re most effective”. The best partners know the conditions they need to succeed, and they’re willing to say when a fit isn’t right.

Listen for honesty here. Do they value clarity, sponsorship, and willingness to change? Do they expect engagement, not just approval? A vendor who cares about this is protecting both sides.

10. If we were disappointed after six months, what would you expect to have gone wrong?

This question disarms rehearsed answers.

It forces reflection. It surfaces assumptions. It reveals whether the vendor takes shared responsibility or defaults to blaming the client, the tools, or the brief.

A thoughtful answer will include things within their control and things outside it. It will acknowledge risk, not deny it. And it will sound like someone who has learned from difficult engagements, not just successful ones.

That’s the experience you want on your side.

A final thought

Marketing Operations is not a service you bolt on. It’s a capability you build.

The right vendor doesn’t just make your systems work better. They help your organisation understand itself more clearly. How decisions are made. Where friction exists. What’s getting in the way of performance.

If a vendor is willing to have these conversations before you sign, that’s usually a good sign. If they aren’t, the warning signs were there all along.