Sojourn Solutions spends its days in the messiest rooms of modern Marketing. We see teams with solid strategies, ambitious leadership, and stacks of tech that cost a fortune. Yet, time and again, Marketing Operations is expected to be the brain of the organisation while being treated like the underpaid assistant...
Survival mode...
Marketing Operations is stuck in survival mode more often than not. On paper, everything seems fine. Campaigns go out, reports populate dashboards, emails get sent. But underneath, the systems that are supposed to make that happen are fraying.
Teams are constantly troubleshooting, firefighting, and patching holes rather than improving processes or trying new approaches. They’re asked to be strategic while being starved of time and resources, and the result is a slow leak of capability.
If you cannot clearly explain how a lead moves from first touch to closed deal, your operations are quietly failing.
The never-ending integration headache
Most enterprise tech stacks feel like someone just kept gluing new platforms on top of old ones. Legacy systems meet shiny new tools, with APIs and middleware trying their best to get along.
The result?
Data moves poorly, automations fail, and one small change can ripple across ten different processes. Integration isn’t a project you check off once... it’s a living, breathing problem that drains energy from every campaign and innovation effort. Teams spend more time fixing tech than actually using it to drive results.
Messy data and the attribution fantasy
Everyone says they’re data-driven. Few are.
Data comes from everywhere, in all sorts of formats, and is rarely clean. There’s duplicate information, outdated contacts, and inconsistent definitions across teams and regions.
Executives still demand “perfect” attribution models, as if buying decisions follow neat, linear paths. The reality is messy, and dashboards built on shaky data are at best misleading.
Until enterprises treat data quality and governance as priorities, decision-making will be noisy, frustrating, and expensive.
Drowning in dashboards
MOPs has become the reporting arm of the business. Endless dashboards, pipeline influence reports, ROI slides... much of this work exists to reassure leadership, not improve marketing.
Time that could go to optimising campaigns or testing new ideas is spent generating politically safe slides.
Healthy organisations use measurement to guide experiments. Most enterprises use measurement to validate yesterday. If your team is only showing what happened and not helping decide what to do next, they’re underutilised at best.
The AI promise, with a side of chaos
The latest AI tools promise so much, and yet most teams see little return. Pilots stall because data is inconsistent, processes are undocumented, and nobody is clear on ownership. Technology without process is just theatre.
The real value of AI comes when it replaces tedious work and frees people to focus on strategy and analysis. Otherwise, you just have another flashy tool that complicates things and adds noise to an already messy stack.
People are the engine and the exhaust
Marketing Operations people are rare, versatile, and often exhausted. They’re expected to be part data scientist, part strategist, part project manager, and part firefighter.
Expecting a small team to cover all of that while also managing daily execution is unrealistic. Burnout is rampant when the same people get pulled into endless meetings, firefights, and manual work that could be automated.
Recruiting and retaining these people requires giving them meaningful work, career paths, and breathing space.
Alignment isn’t a meeting
Every enterprise client loves to talk about alignment, but in practice it usually means conflicting priorities.
Sales wants speed, IT wants stability, Product wants experimentation, Marketing wants growth. Marketing Operations ends up being the referee, spending much of the week negotiating trade-offs instead of building repeatable systems.
Real alignment doesn’t happen in meetings. It happens when decision rights are clear, accountability is shared, and everyone actually agrees on how to operate.
Compliance is a constant shadow
Privacy laws have turned from a checkbox to a full-time operational concern. GDPR, CCPA, and a growing list of regional regulations mean consent, data residency, and lawful purpose must be engineered into campaigns from the start. Global teams need to tailor approaches by country, channel, and use case. That multiplies the number of scenarios MOPs must handle.
The solution is systematic: Reliable tagging, clear escalation paths, and integrating privacy into campaign planning so it’s a known variable, not a blocker.
Foundations over flash
Documentation, standards, and SLAs aren’t glamorous, but they’re essential.
Enterprises often invest in shiny tools and pilots while ignoring the plumbing that keeps everything running. Operational debt builds quietly and eventually consumes budgets and attention. Investing in standards, playbooks, and training isn’t exciting, but it’s what separates predictable delivery from constant crisis.
Moving fast without breaking
Marketing today is expected to operate at real-time speed. Traditional approval cycles and change management processes are too slow. Organisations respond by building more controls, which just slows things down further.
The alternative is smarter governance: Small decision units, pre-approved playbooks for common scenarios, and clarity on acceptable risk. Fast doesn’t need to mean reckless, but it does need deliberate redesign.
Turning Operations into advantage
Marketing Operations can be a strategic driver instead of a support function, but it takes investment and authority. Leaders need to treat operational excellence as a priority, not an afterthought. That means clean data, integrated systems, empowered people, and clear processes. It means giving MOPs permission to standardise, prioritise, and sometimes say no to tools and projects that create more work than value.
That’s how Operations becomes a lever for growth, not just a cost centre.
How Sojourn Solutions helps
At Sojourn Solutions we help enterprise teams move from messy to reliable.
We map operational bottlenecks, prioritise foundational fixes that have the biggest impact, and design governance that actually keeps the organisation moving.
Because we cover every single aspect of modern Marketing Operations, our clients see their MOPs function go from reactive firefighting to proactive strategic advantage.
So if you want your MOPs to stop being stuck in a never ending loop of survival mode and start being a predictable driver of growth, let us show you how.
