Marketo Engage  has a full roadmap for 2022, with new features and innovations coming down the line fast. Venu Tavisala, senior director of product management for Adobe Marketo Engage, described this 2022 roadmap in a presentation at the Adobe Summit 2022 (here’s the full, on-demand presentation  – registration required).  Tavisala began by detailing research from Forrester around the impressive impact Marketo Engage has had on its customers and their marketing efforts. Those impacts include:  an average ROI of 267% across Marketo Engage customers; 29% improvement in customer engagement; 59% improvement in lead conversion rates on top of the funnel and 25% conversion improvement from marketing qualified leads to sales. As Tavisala says, “we know that getting results isn’t easy these days, and that the challenges are many, including the pandemic, the pace of change, business disruption, and rapidly-evolving customer expectations.”   Marketo’s vision and strategy for 2022 Before he began getting into the specifics of Marketo’s 2022 roadmap, Tavisala briefly explained Marketo’s vision and strategy. “Our vision is to empower marketing teams, to orchestrate personalized experiences at scale in concert with sales to drive highly efficient demand with agility and measurable business impact,” he says. The Marketo strategy Tavisala detailed is multi-pronged, and includes: 1. Delivering industry-leading marketing automation for B2B that is optimized for both scale and time-to-value. 2. Providing the orchestration that powers marketing and sales engagement and effectiveness across all channels and stages of the customer journey.  3. Delivering best-in-class marketing automation in the context of Adobe’s full customer experience management suite, connecting with content workflows, customer data and profiles, artificial intelligence, analytics, commerce, and marketing workflows. 4. Supporting a wide range of marketing strategies, including lead based and account based, inbound and outbound, online and offline, so as to help customers adapt to changing conditions and advance their digital maturity. 5. Continuing to improve our ecosystem with strong partners and have an open architecture with pre-built integrations, allowing companies to create marketing stacks that will deliver value now and in the future. Marketo Engage 2022 roadmap highlights “Strengthening the core of the Marketo Engage platform is important to help our customers grow and adapt their winning strategies,” says Tavisala. As such, Marketo is launching a number of features and innovations on its 2022 roadmap, including these:  Predictive Lead and Account Scoring “We're really excited about predictive lead and account scoring because data is exploding, and it’s becoming imperative for our customers to identify and engage with the right contacts and right customers at the right time,” says Tavisala. The tool offers an intelligent and configurable propensity-to-buy scoring solution for both Lead and Account profiles, and includes: AI-powered scores that offer higher accuracy to increase Marketing ROI; Ability to configure scoring without data science expertise, enabling faster time-to-value; and Actual vs. predicted analytics to drive user confidence and boost adoption. “Customers will also get scoring insights that will clearly identify the reasons for the score,” says Tavisala, “which will drive transparency as well as better adoption.”  Predictive lead and accounts scoring will be available for Real-time CDP customers in the second half of 2022, and then will be rolled out to the rest of Marketo Engage customers after. Dynamic Chat “This tool maximizes every opportunity on websites with integrated, 1:1 personalized conversations without additional investment, moving buyers through the marketing and sales funnel faster through real-time conversations,” says Tavisala. B2B businesses can thus engage with prospects on the web in a personalized and contextual way, generating more qualified leads and booking meetings with sellers. Marketo went live with dynamic chat in March, and will be doing a phased rollout to all customers over the next six months. Sales Insight – Actions (Salesforce CRM) This feature improves the accessibility of campaign-context data for sales, so they can make informed decisions about their prospects based on a unified view of the customer/prospect. Marketo and Salesforce are platforms “our customers depend on to keep their marketing and sales teams in lockstep to close deals,” says Tavisala, so getting those platforms connected and sharing with each other is a big focus. “We have plans to expand Marketo’s sales insight capabilities to now include integrated sales actions, empowering sales reps to initiate personalized, one to-one conversations with their prospects, right from their CRM system,” he says.  Reps do not have to leave the sales insight panel within their CRM to access marketing, curated sales emails, and send one-to-one personalized emails to their customers. Insight and action can happen in one place and sales reps won’t need to toggle back and forth between different screens or systems anymore to go from insight to action. The feature has been available to Marketo customers as a limited rollout since February, with a broader rollout slated for later in the year. Adobe User Credentials   Constantly inputting your user credentials to access systems can be time-consuming and frustrating. This feature streamlines user administration and enables single sign-on across Adobe Experience Cloud. Product admins can manage users and user entitlements through a common Admin Console. In addition, IT/Security admins can manage Marketo Engage product instances along with other AEC products through a common console. The feature “also simplifies admin tasks, such as license management, user management, and entitlement,” says Tavisala. Marketo will start onboarding the new capability to new enterprise customers in the first half of 2022 and start migrating existing customers in the second half of 2022.  Conclusion Marketo has a lot of innovations and integrations coming down the road to help improve what its customers do, especially around connecting Salesforce and Marketo. Other improvements include enhancements to usability/UI and improved data sharing capabilities. As Tavisala says, “Marketo continually responds to our customer feedback” through our roadmap.  To learn even more about Adobe Marketo Engage and how it can improve your marketing efforts, reach out  to us. We  partner with Marketo  to implement marketing automation solutions that drive marketing ROI for our customers.

This post was updated May 12, 2023, and originally posted December 17, 2021. Marketing operations (MOPS) is an evolving, multidisciplinary, and multifaceted function with a single goal: to improve and prove the value of marketing. MOPS is about blending martech, people, and processes to drive that single goal. In this four-part blog series, called “MOPS and Optimizing Martech,” we’ll explore the role of MOPS in: (1) developing a martech strategy, (2) integrating new martech into an existing stack, (3) driving martech adoption by enabling people/users, and (4) maintaining and adapting a martech stack, with a focus on scaling and future-proofing said stack. The stakes are always high when it comes to martech integration. As Sojourn’s 2021 Marketing Operations Report  explains it: “The long and often arduous process of integration must be completed before any value can be extracted [from martech] and even then, few organizations take full advantage of a given technology’s capabilities . . .Companies with a named operations function are more than twice as likely to say that martech integration is a significant strength.” To better understand why effectively integrating new martech is so important for marketing success, we spoke with Sojourn’s Phil Boyden  (Partner and Alliance Manager). “You need to connect and leverage your martech and your data in order to build a clear, actionable picture of your customers that you can act upon,” says Boyden. The more you know about customers, the better you can serve them the right messaging at the right time. “As you’re mapping the customer journey and all its touch points,” says Boyden, “your technology stack needs to connect to and follow that same journey in a seamless, integrated way.”  Martech integration should be viewed as a holistic process involving more than just connecting tech. Also critical? Marketing and sales alignment, data strategy and analysis, measurement, and the people and teams required to run everything. Getting martech integration right isn’t always easy, but it’s essential for marketing and MOPS effectiveness , as we’ll explain. The growing complexities of martech integration There are over 11,000  martech tools/apps now available to help you market effectively, adding to the complexities of martech integration. If you always selected the best-in-class martech tools for your particular needs, they may not necessarily integrate with the tech stack you've got now. “Middleware can start to come in to help. You need APIs and middleware that are capable of speaking smoothly to any of these pieces of martech as they get integrated into your existing martech stack,” says Boyden.  New martech tools are not always going to integrate at the push of a button, no matter what martech sales people might say about “plug and play.” Middleware can help with orchestrations or data flows, helping tools and systems speak to each other. There are also tools that can help transform your data to ensure it can flow in and out of martech and middleware to support integrations.   What could go wrong? (A lot) Much can go wrong with integrations, resulting in a stack that looks like a Frankenstein monster of random parts that don’t bolt together seamlessly. Boyden offers the example of “a company we spoke with where some of their preference forms sent data to one place and other forms sent preference data to another place -- they also had their CRM and MAP collecting and sending data.” The company had a custom integration sitting in the middle to make the data flows work, “but it was misfiring,” says Boyden. By the time they realized they had a problem, he says, they had no clue about what was “the actual source of truth regarding their customer data. So they couldn’t tell which systems were working or not.” There were ripple effects as a result. “They didn't know whether they were complying with GDPR. They didn't know whether they could contact any of the people in their database. They therefore had to stop communicating with their customers and get this mess fixed,” says Boyden, “and then try to track stuff back.” To make a long story short: the integration mess ruined all the company’s marketing efforts and put them in jeopardy of breach regarding GDPR, triggering potential legal liability and penalties. That’s an integration nightmare. Common integration challenges A great new martech tool comes along to save the day. You get told by an enthusiastic salesperson that integration is simple. They have this out-of-the-box integration included and it's a single click which sets up right away. It’s exactly what you wanted to hear. What could possibly go wrong? “When you get into the details of integrations, a lot can go wrong,” says Boyden. It might turn out that your customer data in custom fields is not included in the “out-of-the-box” integration. So you buy or build new options to solve your problems and next thing you know, you've got more issues than before “such as siloed data and then you have to find workarounds or make other adjustments that can disrupt your marketing efforts,” Boyden says. Marketing efforts can get disrupted and martech tools can get quickly abandoned or banished to “the island of unintegrated martech.” Planning and executing effective integrations Planning your integrations well in advance is key. “You need to get everybody involved in the same room at the start and build a roadmap,” says Boyden. “You should have discussions around what needs to happen, hash out disagreements, and then define a consensus around who does what and when, what data should flow in and out, the timing of everything and how to handle potential disruptions, along with what steps are required to make the whole integration process work.” It’s highly likely that existing data flows would be impacted during the integration of the new martech tool. Reporting would also likely be disrupted. How will you work around these issues every step of the way? “You can have the world's best martech tool and the best middleware for the integration,” says Boyden, “but it's no good if you’re not actually supporting your people and the business during the integration process.” That requires effective planning, execution, and coordination.  Consultants can help, bringing a clear focus on the big picture. They’ll understand all the systems that are in play and what the role of each system is within the integration process. They know which team members to speak to, and how to guide them. “Too often with companies integrating tech, the right hand doesn't know what the left hand is doing: good consultants will pull everything together and guide the project so the work gets done efficiently and with minimal disruption,” Boyden says. Sojourn, for instance, has expert professionals from different backgrounds who can draw upon their expertise to drive effective martech integrations for a client company.  “We know marketing operations, what data needs to flow where and when, we know the relevant platforms and how the entire integration processes should work,” says Boyden. “Marketing has often been viewed as a cost center, but we help marketing clients improve and prove marketing  as a revenue-driver.” That shift changes everything, helping marketing not only integrate martech effectively but also get more budget and more credibility with the C-suite.  For more information about MOPS and martech, and how you can build your MOPS maturity in order to improve marketing outcomes, reach out to us . Next post in this series:  MOPS and optimizing martech: Driving the adoption, utilization, and optimization of martech (post 3 of 4)

Note to Readers: “Building a Successful MOPS Team” is a 5-part blog series that focuses on people. The series will cover: (1) when and how to hire MOPS talent, (2) how to onboard talent, (3) how to effectively manage a MOPS team, (4) how to support professional development within MOPS teams, and (5) how to approach the future of MOPS. We asked Sojourn Solution Delivery Directors Claire Robinson and Carmen Gardiner, both with long experience working within MOPS and helping MOPS teams on behalf of Sojourn Solutions, to share their insights with us (and you) for this blog post series. “In the future, MOPS is only going to grow in scope,” says Carmen Gardiner. “MOPS didn’t even exist as a dedicated function two decades ago. Back then, marketing operations meant sending emails and preparing reports. Now MOPS encompasses life cycle management, attribution, privacy, governance, data plans, content management, reporting, you name it. The function has just exploded in scope.” What does the future hold for MOPS and MOPS professionals? We asked Gardiner and Robinson to gaze into their crystal balls and offer advice for adapting to the future of MOPS.  MOPS will increasingly blur into SalesOps and RevOps. Gardiner sees MOPS increasingly merging towards sales, customer success, IT, and other functions.  “If you think of a Venn diagram,” says Gardiner, “marketing ops is blurring in from the left side and sales ops is blurring in from the right side, and then there's revenue blurring in from the top. Eventually they're all going to overlap. I just don't know if MOPS and the other functions are going to maintain their autonomy.” Robinson agrees that MOPS will blur with revenues (and potentially into RevOps): “MOPS is going to have to help people see how revenue is being generated, and that's where data and analytics play a big part, attributing revenues to marketing and to other teams,” she says. “That's quite a big shift in mindset and skill set for some people, particularly within marketing. I think we're moving away from the creativity-first side and towards this data and analytical side.” Balancing tracking with data privacy will become an ongoing MOPS challenge. “I’m so interested in observing how we're going to track or predict customer behavior in the future with all this available data, but also while keeping people's privacy in mind and complying with emerging data privacy regulations,” says Gardiner. “Data privacy is evolving, and will continue to evolve as a major issue impacting MOPS.” Bringing meaning to data will get harder and will matter more. “Within MOPS, we have all this data we can use to predict what people are going to do next,” says Gardiner. “But the hardest problem remains knowing what to do with all this data and being able to understand what it's telling you and what it's not telling you. Separating the signals from the noise is difficult. And then believing your analysis enough to actually change your approach is even harder.” Talent will increasingly make the difference in MOPS. “Today, every organization including startups can afford marketing automation.  I think the easy availability of technology makes MOPS people even more important,” says Gardiner. “Creativity will be a key differentiator. And being able to make intelligent decisions based on available data will offer competitive advantage to organizations. People drive all that.”  Empathy will remain essential. “MOPS has always been, and will always be, a highly-collaborative function. Being able to understand the challenges that other people are having within different functions is going to help you understand how you can help them with those challenges,” says Robinson. “What MOPS is there to do is enable others to meet goals, so applying empathy is key to helping people change and succeed.” Never-ending curiosity about technology and human behavior needed. “MOPS professionals will need to understand and keep pace with what's new and what's available technologically,” says Gardiner. “Curiosity about technology and curiosity about human behavior will always be needed, because marketing operations is really a study of human behavior and how we can better affect human behavior with our actions.” Carve out dedicated time for reflection. How do you keep updated on the latest developments while you're so busy doing your MOPS job? “You have to set aside structured time to be curious, to reflect, and to talk with other people who are experiencing what's happening out there,” says Gardiner. “And once a new trend or idea is on your radar, start to think about what it might mean for you and your team and the way you do business down the road.”  Adaptability and resilience required. “You’ll have to be okay with being told you need to stop doing what you’re doing right now and accept that you need to learn some new technology. You're probably going to have to be okay with learning more about data and analytics, but also about business processes,” says Robinson. Choose depth over breadth. “I've always been a proponent of depth of experience above breadth of experience,” says Gardiner. “If you're a Jack of all trades and master of none, then you're not going to be extremely valuable when tough projects come along, when critical thinking and critical problem-solving are needed, because you won’t know enough. Go deep into something first and then you can broaden out and go wider.” Be ready to embrace change (because it’s coming). “The future of MOPS will require us to learn complicated technologies and processes, because we have to prove and show business value in everything MOPS does,” says Robinson. “Just being open to that will put MOPS professionals in a good place. People need to keep up because technologies have always changed and buying behaviors have always changed, and those changes won’t be stopping.”  If you’d like to learn more about optimizing your MOPS team and your marketing, reach out to us here . Full series here:  Building a successful MOPS team: When and how to hire MOPS talent (post 1 of 5) Building a successful MOPS team: 10 steps to onboarding MOPS talent (post 2 of 5) Building a successful MOPS team: How to effectively manage MOPS talent (post 3 of 5) Building a successful MOPS team: Developing your MOPS talent (post 4 of 5)

Note to Readers: “Building a Successful MOPS Team” is a 5-part blog series that focuses on people. The series will cover: (1) when and how to hire MOPS talent, (2) how to onboard talent, (3) how to effectively manage a MOPS team, (4) how to support professional development within MOPS teams, and (5) how to approach the future of MOPS. We asked Sojourn Solution Delivery Directors Claire Robinson and Carmen Gardiner, both with long experience working within MOPS and helping MOPS teams on behalf of Sojourn Solutions, to share their insights with us (and you) for this blog post series. Continuous upskilling seems to be the present and future for MOPS professionals, as new technologies and new marketing approaches continue to emerge. A lot of the skills MOPS professionals use today will likely be obsolete within five years to a decade, as more tasks get taken over by automation, AI, or other advances we can only imagine. As more aspects of MOPS get automated, MOPS professionals will have to evolve their skillsets to add value. A willingness and aptitude to develop your skills throughout a MOPS career is a prerequisite to success. We asked Claire Robinson and Carmen Gardiner to offer tips for how MOPS managers can support the development process of the MOPS professionals on their team. Nine tips for how MOPS managers can support MOPS pros development Enable MOPS professionals to lead their own development.  “One of the best things a manager can do is to enable MOPS talent to lead their own development,” says Robinson. “What you don't want to do is hand hold somebody through their development process or direct it for them. That doesn't set them up for success and doesn't teach them anything. If a MOPS manager is too directive, the person simply won’t learn the skills they need to drive their own development, to understand precisely what their passions are, what they’re good at, what they need to learn, and how to go about learning things for themselves.” Be a development coach.  “The MOPS manager should be a good coach, encouraging the person rather than being too prescriptive about how the person should develop themselves,” says Robinson. “That could mean drawing out the interests and passions of the person during employee evaluations and check-ins rather than giving them a development agenda that’s driven by the manager. You should facilitate and support, but they need to decide the direction of their own development.” Pay close attention to your people.  “You really need to pay close attention to the team and trust them,” says Gardiner. “As their manager, you need to be that supportive person on the team who enables the success of others. Look for what skills they enjoy using and which ones they’re good at using.” Catalyze development conversations to evaluate interests.  “For the MOPS manager, it's about knowing how to start the development conversation and guiding people through that exploration of their interests rather than defining it for them. You facilitate rather than direct these conversations,” says Robinson, “which means asking the right questions and listening carefully to what people say and don’t say.” Gardiner agrees. “The MOPS manager should hold structured, regular conversations with every member of the team around development,” she says. “And if you've been paying attention, you should know what interests and affinities they have. If you don’t know, then ask them directly about their aspirations and where they’d like to go next. For example, if they saw someone speak at the Oracle conference and it inspired them, then offer to help them submit a paper. Speaking and translating your expertise and accomplishments into an engaging story can be a great learning experience.”  Advocate for a large training/development budget.  “I started my career as a teacher,” says Gardiner, “so I've always been a big proponent of continuous learning and professional development. I've always carved out a large training budget, and advocated for it year to year. Having those resources allocated in advance makes team and individual development easier.” Incentivize people to use the allocated training/development budget.  “Incentivize everyone on the team to use part of the training budget in order to meet their yearly bonus goal. Make it part of how you evaluate their performance. It doesn’t matter whether they submit papers for speaking engagements or webinars, or if they do internal training for others on the team or within the organization, or if they get outside training and certification. Whatever they want to do, you need them to further their learning and development,” says Gardiner, “so incentivize it.” Develop skills through challenging projects.  “As a manager, you need to give each team member increasingly challenging projects and see how they handle it. If they come to you with questions and can still finish the project with minimal supervision, then you know they're good self-managers,” says Gardiner. “If they don't ask you any questions or if they ask too many questions, that’s a potential problem. When you see that, you know they're either not self-managers or maybe this particular project is outside their current skillset. Use all that feedback to help you help their development process.” Don’t forget to develop yourself.  “As a MOPS manager, you are the model for the whole team: you have to do for yourself what you do for your team in terms of spurring and encouraging development,” says Robinson. “If you've got to lead a team through change, which every MOPS manager must, you yourself need to feel comfortable and confident navigating change. The manager’s self-development is a good place to model the development of the team.” Know that development is never done.  “When it comes to anything within MOPS, but especially the development of your team, it can feel like the job is never done. That’s because the goalposts are always moving, just as new technology and new trends will always continue to evolve,” says Robinson. “The MOPS manager’s role is to help the team learn how to be adaptable, helping them develop a mindset that accommodates change. So that might include scenario planning -- getting people to think about what they’ll do if XYZ happens, so when change comes, they’ll have a better idea of  how to react and how they can change as a result.” If you’d like to learn more about developing your MOPS team talent - and thus your marketing performance - reach out to us here . Next in this series:   Building a successful MOPS team: Preparing for the future of MOPS (post 5 of 5)

There is no more important metric in a marketing organization than return on investment (ROI). If a marketing activity fails to bring in more revenue than it cost, then it cannot be justified; likewise, a marketing activity with a positive ROI is always a good idea, by definition. However, measuring ROI is not as straightforward as we in the marketing world would like it to be. There’s first point attribution, last point attribution, and all points in between, leading marketers to ask the question – which method of measuring ROI is the best? A helpful analogy   When thinking about complicated systems like a marketing/sales operation at an enterprise-level business, analogies can sometimes be helpful. Imagine that you are a pilot sitting at the controls of a modern jumbo jet, and you want to assess the situation the plane is in. In front of you is a dizzying array of dials, gauges and indicators – much like the array of marketing metrics, dashboards and reports that indicate marketing and sales performance in a typical organization. The equivalent of measuring ROI in this situation would be an equally key piece of information for the plane – such as your air speed. If this critical number dips below a certain level, the plane will stall and fall out of the sky (much like your ROI dropping below zero). Surely, in a state-of-the-art jetliner, the pilot is able to access a single, easy airspeed number to assess the situation?  If only it were that simple Worryingly for those of us itching to get on a flight after Covid, the answer is no. There are many types of airspeed , and a pilot in such a situation may have to use as many as 3 different air speed measurements to get an accurate estimate of the situation. Complicating matters even further, as well as “air speed,” there is also “ground speed” to consider – a number many planes have to call down to air traffic control to ascertain, leading to some amusing anecdotes  about ground speed one-upmanship amongst glory-hungry pilots.  All of which is to say – even basic critically-important questions such as “what was my marketing ROI” and “how fast is this plane going” do not and should not have simple answers. Both questions can be answered differently by measuring a complicated system in different ways. Instead of relying on a single number, astute marketers and pilots use multiple measurements to form a complete picture of the situation.  Multiple approaches, multiple ways A great example of the utility of multiple measurements is comparing different marketing channels. Email, for example, only becomes relevant in the marketing journey after an email address has been given by the contact. This means that other marketing channels such as social media or pay-per-click will always look better than email in a first-touch attribution model, as they tend to feature more strongly at different stages of the customer journey. Using a last-touch attribution model alongside a first-touch model would show email in a more favorable light, leading to a more balanced evaluation by the marketing team.  By combining multiple approaches to revenue attribution and measuring it in multiple ways, marketers can gain a more complete understanding than if they rely on a single number. And when it comes to ROI, knowing your numbers really is just as important as knowing how fast your plane is flying. Questions about how to make marketing attribution work for your business? It's one of our favorite conversations - reach out  today!   Editor's note: Steve McConnell is a Marketing Automation Consultant at Sojourn Solutions based in London. He's recently completed his Oracle Eloqua Marketing 2021 Implementation Specialist certification (yay - congratulations!), and enjoys writing the occasional blog post.

In our recent global webinar, Empowering Marketing Operations Improves Marketing Performance , the underlying message throughout the conversations was clear - more than ever, MOPS is a game-changer for enterprise B2B organizations. Speakers Dan Vawter, Managing Partner at Sojourn Solutions, Madeleine Bergquist Marketing Manager at Adobe EMEA North, and Stefan Tornquist, SVP, Research & Learning for Econsultancy, discussed the findings of our 2021 MOPS Report . Below are four essential takeaways from the webinar: On the “proper” role of MOPS (Vawter and Bergquist) Sojourn’s Vawter explained that “the job of MOPS is to make marketing more efficient and effective, to improve and prove marketing performance.” He detailed the following 5 key functions of MOPS:  “Lead management, meaning how leads are defined and nurtured across the customer journey,” “Martech optimization, meaning how technologies are sourced, integrated, and staffed,” “Customer data management, meaning how data is defined, reported, analyzed, cleaned, and shared,  “Performance management or measurement, meaning how performance is defined and reported,” and  “Marketing governance, meaning how data is organized for compliance and privacy.” Bergquist succinctly explained the role of MOPS: “MOPS are the people who can actually prove and improve the value of your marketing spend. When you can’t do that, you waste lots of money. That’s the most basic business case for MOPS. “ On how MOPS enables companies to adapt better to change (Bergquist) Bergquist explained how MOPS helped Adobe respond rapidly and flexibly to the COVID-19 pandemic: “When the pandemic arrived, we quickly changed some of the industry vertical nurtures we had in place, particularly for impacted industries like travel and hospitality. Some of these industry verticals were just turned off completely because we felt they needed to be left alone to work their way through things. We also changed the way we communicated, trying to be as supportive as we could with advice on how our customers could transition from face-to-face customer engagement to a much more digital-first marketing approach.” The agility MOPS enables helped Adobe make that rapid adaptation possible. Adobe also changed on the internal side, as Bergquist explains: “we changed how we scored leads. The biggest scoring activities pre-pandemic were face-to-face activities such as trade shows -- anything where you met with people in person pretty much meant an instant AQL in our systems. But because nobody was meeting in person anymore, we had to quickly adapt. So telemarketing, for example, became a new channel for scoring, which we’d never had before. We also diversified our virtual events, and planned a whole host of them.” On how MOPS proves and improves marketing impact (Bergquist and Vawter) Bergquist offered an example: “We have 3 main areas within MOPS: campaign operations, data analytics, and martech. Because each area and each individual within has a global view, they're able to catch stuff that might otherwise be missed. For example, we recently had a scenario where there was a high bounce rate from content syndication leads, and it was something like 12% when it should be less than 5%. So because it was the same person responsible for all the 3 global regions, she was able to quickly do a comparative analysis with the other two regions. Her analysis showed that the other two regions had a bounce rate of less than 5%, so there was obviously something wrong with the one region. She then flagged the issue to the team and they were able to take that data back to the supplier and renegotiate, basically saying ‘you've given us some leads that aren't of the right quality for us.’ That fast and data-driven approach impacted revenues, proved value, and improved performance.”  Vawter offered an example: “We worked with a company that hired a new CMO who set new expectations. Marketing would now need to measure and understand exactly what was working and what was not. And they had to do this in order to justify marketing spend. They’d been measuring last-touch for attribution, which was absolutely not going to cut it with the new CMO. So they needed the ability to measure every touch of the customer journey, and figure out which marketing channels and content were working in order to prove value and justify budget moving forward.  They worked with a vendor to integrate the technology into their existing platforms and modified all of their different processes. They also had to change mindsets because everybody was used to thinking about campaigns as opposed to touchpoints.  The result of all this effort was that they were able to measure every touch point of the customer journey. They had a fairly large budget and discovered that some of the spend was not performing well, while some was. Based on these insights, they shifted their budget and that improved performance immediately, by 30% in one paid channel. They were also able to see the impact of content at different stages of the funnel, which helped them improve content relevance and distribution. The lesson here? MOPS is core to understanding the touchpoints across the customer journey and helping companies improve revenues.” What MOPS success looks like (Vawter) “We started working with a client back in 2018,” said Vawter. “They had many challenges: (1) they had very limited capabilities, (2) they were in a large organization with lots of divisions, different products, and technology silos, (3) their marketing and sales teams worked completely separately,  and (4) all the silos were causing confusion, duplication of effort, and lack of efficiency. Over the course of two years, they were able to create a centralized center of enablement that all of their different marketers and sales people could go to for support. They built out a process for cross-team collaboration across data, leads, best practices, and thus dramatically reduced their time and cost for launching campaigns. They cleared up their lead management flows, and marketing and sales alignment happened. As a result, they were able to increase their maturity to support more campaigns with more complexity, and became more aligned with their customer journeys. They made significant gains across multiple revenue measures, and were using their technologies to create better, more seamless customer experiences. A strong MOPS function was instrumental here to improve impact and revenue, as well as enhance the customer experience.” Watch  our full, on-demand webinar. Download our 2021 MOPS Report .

Note to Readers: “Building a Successful MOPS Team” is a 5-part blog series that focuses on people. The series will cover: (1) when and how to hire MOPS talent, (2) how to onboard talent, (3) how to effectively manage a MOPS team, (4) how to support professional development within MOPS teams, and (5) how to approach the future of MOPS. We asked Sojourn Solution Delivery Directors Claire Robinson and Carmen Gardiner, both with long experience working within MOPS and helping MOPS teams on behalf of Sojourn Solutions, to share their insights with us (and you) for this blog post series. Managing a marketing operations team is a challenging role if ever there was one. The MOPS function is multidisciplinary, encompassing technology, process optimization, and the relationship-building skills necessary to drive alignment within the MOPS team and outside of it. The effective MOPS manager wears multiple hats, must be conversant with emerging trends and be continuously upgrading their skillset to keep pace. Moreover, the effective MOPS manager enables and empowers others to collaborate and keep pace with change. What soft and hard skills does an effective MOPS manager need to succeed? What are the do’s and don’ts for MOPS management? In this post, Sojourn Solutions directors Claire Robinson and Carmen Gardiner share the following ten tips for MOPS management success: Understand the “proper” role of a MOPS manager.  “A MOPS manager needs to be able to support the MOPS team while also supporting the overall needs of the business,” explains Gardiner. “She needs to inspire people, including senior leadership, to think about future needs while maintaining the processes and standards of today.” What enables the MOPS manager to do that? “They need to have extensive experience with marketing automation, customer experience, customer journeys, sales, processes, analytics, security, governance, and relationship-building. They need to understand how all these work together to move the organization forward. You can't put a just-graduated MBA in the role without the experience and think they're going to be successful,” says Gardiner. Have a collaborative mindset and skillset.  “The effective MOPS manager needs to be highly collaborative because nothing MOPS does happens inside of a silo. MOPS relies heavily on many other teams for cooperation, feedback and support,” says Gardiner. “Without a strong manager with a collaborative mindset, MOPS teams will quickly turn into ticket takers who add no value outside execution.”  Adopt and maintain a ‘growth mindset.’  “MOPS managers need to be lifelong learners, to really nurture a growth mindset within themselves and within their team. The best MOPS managers get people thinking about how to make themselves better and thinking about how to make others better,” says Robinson.  Develop and strengthen your empathy and emotional awareness.  “Because MOPS managers are constantly dealing with people and because they also need to equip those people to deal with other people too, they need lots of empathy and emotional awareness in order to be effective,” says Robinson. “If you can’t read a room or can’t read other people’s non-verbal signals, then MOPS management might not be the right job for you.”  Be honest when delivering feedback.  “Oftentimes, managers don't deliver enough feedback, which is a problem, but when they do, it’s not clear and direct enough for people to understand and apply, which is another problem. You can still be kind when providing feedback, but you absolutely must be clear so people know what the expectations are and how to change what they’re doing,” says Robinson. Develop the ability to bounce between the big picture and the small details (i.e., between strategy and execution).  “The MOPS manager can be viewed as a ‘practical strategist.’ A lot of managers love to spend time in one camp or the other, focusing solely on strategy or day-to-day execution, but the MOPS manager needs to constantly toggle back and forth between both,” says Gardiner. Get comfortable with imperfection but keep chasing perfection.  “What keeps MOPS managers up at night are the expectations of other teams, including the senior leadership team. There's always that expectation of perfection. Where systems are concerned, perfection isn’t achievable, but it's the North Star you just keep chasing,” says Gardiner. “Teams are always asking for more, wanting more, and you need to prioritize all those needs in light of your current resources. That inevitable imperfection can cause insomnia.” Robinson agrees, explaining that It’s okay for MOPS managers not to have all the answers. “When you tell your team that you don't have all the answers, you also give people space to contribute, make mistakes and learn from them. You can still be credible when you don't know everything, and that honesty and humility is important for building the relationships you need to be successful,” says Robinson. Be curious.  “Great managers come out of the gate from a place of curiosity. They have a willingness to learn about new technology, and what that technology might enable within their organizations. They also have a deep curiosity about how people work and think,” says Gardiner. “Often, being curious and asking the right questions can be a key driver of MOPS success.” Surrender control.  “Being a leader is not about being in control, but about giving up control. If you have good people, then you have to trust your team to do their job. Let them know you're there to offer advice, answer questions, to give support, direction, and guidance, but then let them do what they do best. You are the buffer between them doing their jobs and all of the pressure and noise outside,” says Gardiner. Don’t dictate.  “What you should try not to do as a manager is dictate. It's demoralizing not to be asked your opinion or to feel like you're not part of the decision making process. If you're a dictator, your team will end up not trusting you and only doing what they're told, and they won't be happy. You're going to miss the best ideas because people won’t share with you,” says Gardiner. If you’d like to learn more about optimizing your MOPS team and your marketing, reach out to us here . Next in this series:  Building a successful MOPS team: Developing your MOPS talent (post 4 of 5)

Note to Readers: “Building a Successful MOPS Team” is a 5-part blog series that focuses on people. The series will cover: (1) when and how to hire MOPS talent, (2) how to onboard talent, (3) how to effectively manage a MOPS team, (4) how to support professional development within MOPS teams, and (5) how to approach the future of MOPS. We asked Sojourn Solution Delivery Directors Claire Robinson and Carmen Gardiner, both with long experience working within MOPS and helping MOPS teams on behalf of Sojourn Solutions, to share their insights with us (and you) for this blog post series. The stakes are high when it comes to onboarding new hires: “in terms of employee experience, onboarding is where you start to build loyalty and engagement with your talent, where you start to integrate the new hire into your team and organizational culture,” says Claire Robinson. “It’s important to get the right people involved in the onboarding process.”  When done well, onboarding lays the groundwork for long-term success for the new hire and the MOPS team. Effective onboarding, according to   the Society of Human Resources Professionals (SHRM), “can improve productivity, build loyalty and engagement, and help employees become successful early in their careers with the new organization.” But only 12% of employees think their employer actually did a great job with onboarding them, according to a Gallup  survey. That’s not good enough . . . Here are ten steps to drive onboarding success: Use a buddy system, job shadowing or mentoring.  “You should get someone on the team who does a similar role to agree to act as the new hire’s buddy, coach or job shadowing partner for the first few days or so,” says Robinson. “The new hire can then observe, ask questions, and feel safe from the start.” Put the new hire to work as a member of a cross-functional team.  “That way the new hire can sit back and listen and learn as well as create relationships with cross functional groups,” says Gardiner, “all in an environment where everyone is trying to solve a larger problem.” Discuss expectations with the new hire and how the role will be evaluated.  “It’s important that managers fully discuss expectations with the new hire, and explain how they’ll be evaluated, so they’ll know what to prioritize. That helps drive not only the daily workload of the new hire, but also their engagement and sense of belonging,” explains Robinson. Define reasonable expectations with stakeholders too.  “When you introduce the new hire to stakeholders, maybe on the first day, just say that the onboarding plan is ongoing and will last for X days,” says Gardiner. “Explain that the new hire will be fully up and running soon, but until that time arrives, their buddy or mentor is going to be helping them with any requests that come in -- so please be mindful of these expectations as onboarding happens.” Enable with tools and know-how.  “You need to equip the new hire with the knowledge and tools they’ll need to succeed,” says Robinson. “The manager should walk the new hire through how to use the tools they’ll need, showing them the processes they should be following. Of course, as a manager, you'll need to explain these things multiple times -- it takes some hand-holding at the beginning with any new hire.” Check in on progress.  “Putting some time frames around the onboarding process helps and so does having checkpoints. So based on your past experience, it may take a month for someone to learn X,” says Robinson. “After a month, you check in about X and listen for feedback from the new hire and the team. How’s the quality of the work the hire is producing and how can we offer more support if needed?” Gardiner agrees, and offers even more specifics: “Set up a 30, 60, and 90-day onboarding plan with the new hire. These plans work well because reviewing expectations within each time period takes the pressure off the higher achievers to hit the ground running while they're still being onboarded,” she says. “That’s important because onboarding a new hire too fast can wreak havoc on a marketing ops team.” Have regular stand up meetings with the new hire.  “A 15-minute stand up every morning with the manager and new hire will enable both of you to understand what they have on their plate for that day and if they have any questions, because a lot of new hires are hesitant to ask their manager for help,” says Gardiner. Check in with the new hire’s stakeholders.  “Ask how the team and others are working with the new person, because they're typically closer to the new hire than the manager is,” says Gardiner, "as you want to get the full picture." Give new hires honest and constructive feedback, as needed.  “The manager needs to give honest, constructive feedback on the hire’s performance,” says Gardiner. “So you might tell the hire, ‘you should listen more in meetings or you should be more communicative because this particular stakeholder prefers more communication.’ Then see if that constructive feedback resonates with the new hire. If it doesn't, then you might have some problems moving forward.” Be ready to admit you made a (hiring) mistake.  “No matter how thorough you were in the hiring process, there will be times when you make a bad hire. It happens to the best managers and teams,” says Gardiner. “If you’ve tried open and honest communication, if you've given feedback and mentored, and it’s still not working out, you need to be able to recognize that you've made a bad hire. And a bad hire can negatively affect everyone around them and blow your reputation company-wide as a manager.” So, yes, do everything you can to onboard the new hire. “But if it's not working out, don’t be afraid to admit it and move on,” Gardiner says. If you’d like to learn more about optimizing your MOPS team and your marketing, reach out to us here . Next in this series:   Building a successful MOPS team: How to effectively manage MOPS talent (post 3 of 5)

Note for Readers: “Building a Successful MOPS Team” is a 5-part blog series that focuses on people. The series will cover: (1) when and how to hire MOPS talent, (2) how to onboard talent, (3) how to effectively manage a MOPS team, (4) how to support professional development within MOPS teams, and (5) how to approach the future of MOPS. We asked Sojourn Solutions Delivery Directors Claire Robinson and Carmen Gardiner, both with long experience working within MOPS and helping MOPS teams on behalf of Sojourn Solutions, to share their insights with us (and you) for this blog post series. Marketing Operations is about optimizing technology, processes, and people to achieve marketing results and increased revenues. People are an essential component for MOPS success. “People are at the heart of MOPS because you can't automate and templatize everything,” says Claire Robinson. “You'll always need smart, collaborative people within MOPS going out and building relationships with other departments.” While technology and processes can be similarly available across organizations, “it’s the MOPS professionals who drive competitive advantage and carry forward the vision and strategy of any organization,” Robinson says.  Evaluating skills gaps within MOPS teams What happens when a MOPS team lacks the skills and knowledge to fulfill its strategic function? Evaluating a team and its skills should happen on a regular basis. “Managers need to pay close attention to aptitudes and skills as the team grows,” says Carmen Gardiner. “Even if you don't need a certain skill today, you might need it in the future. You want to know what skills are on the team and if there’s someone who has an aptitude for whatever skills the team might need to add, whether it's a people skill, organizational skill or a technological skill.” Once your MOPS team grows beyond a certain size, you’ll probably need to develop areas of specialization. “You can start training your people, get them certified, and create specializations within your team for areas like campaign creation, architecture, data analysis, or whatever you think you need,” says Gardiner.  You may also need to hire to add additional capacity. “It’s a red flag if you start seeing the team making more mistakes, missing deadlines, turning down projects and overall struggling to deliver quality output,” says Robinson. “When you start seeing your MOPS team losing motivation and getting burned out, you need to start asking whether you have the requisite skills and resources you need.”  Closing skills gaps: 4 steps before you hire You don’t always need to bring in a full-time employee/FTE to close the gaps your MOPS team faces. Here are 4 steps to consider before you go out and hire an FTE:  Train internally.  “Begin by checking in with your team on whether somebody would like to learn the skill you need, because that will impact whether you hire an FTE or train someone internally,” says Robinson. “And yes, there's clearly a time investment in training someone, but it can be better to develop your existing employees rather than looking outside.” Prioritize the gaps.  “You should be prioritizing your skills/knowledge gaps based on the strategic goals your team needs to deliver on,” says Robinson. “You need to define a plan to tackle the gaps that impact you the most. For example, and depending on your strategic goals, gaps in analytics or measurement/attribution capabilities might be more urgent to act upon than gaps in communication skills.” Be proactive rather than reactive on filling gaps.  “You never want to get to the point where you feel like, ‘wow, we need to hire an FTE right now,’ because that urgency can lead to hiring mistakes that could be very costly to your MOPS team and your culture,” explains Robinson. Anticipate your needs, identify your gaps, prioritize them, then figure out next steps asap. Bring in a consultant.  Whether you need to add extra capacity or an additional skill, hiring a consultant can be a good intermediary step because the consultant is much cheaper than an FTE. “A good consultant can simultaneously fill a skills gap and act as a mentor/coach for a MOPS team member,” says Gardiner. “But if you find you're spending more money on a consultant per year than an FTE, you may need an FTE.”  How to hire FT MOPS talent: 7 great tips Robinson and Gardiner are largely aligned on how to go about hiring MOPS talent. Here are their 7 suggestions: Get a referral.  “You always want to hire a person that someone else in your network already knows and can vouch for,” says Gardiner. Referrals can greatly reduce the time and risk of hiring. Include the team.  “Ask your team, especially anyone in the same or a similar role to the one you’re hiring for, to provide input throughout the hiring process, from writing the job description to filtering candidates to conducting interviews,” says Robinson. “Your own people have all this firsthand experience and knowledge of what it takes to be successful in the role.” Be thorough and candid about the job description.  “The more detail you can give about the challenges of the role and about how your team does things,” explains Robinson, “the more likely you are to get the right candidates with the right experiences applying.” Consider cultural fit.  “Smart companies are changing their recruiting process to carefully consider the cultural fit of candidates rather than just the hard and soft skills required,” says Robinson. Every MOPS team has its own chemistry and culture. Involve your team in interviews.  “Your team’s involvement enables them to decide whether or not they can work well with the candidate and assess their cultural fit. It helps having multiple perspectives on each interviewee,” says Robinson. Give candidates a test.  “Whether it's troubleshooting an email or a lead flow, or giving the candidate a set of data and having them present their findings, any real-world use case you can throw at candidates will be revealing about how they think and how they approach the work,” says Gardiner.  Watch for candidate red flags. MOPS professionals need empathy, an ability to read other people so they can build strong relationships within the team and across the organization. “Beware of ego,” says Gardiner, “because you need collaborators.” Look out if a candidate says, “I did this and I did that,” when they worked as part of a collaborative effort.” If you’d like to learn more about optimizing your MOPS team and marketing, reach out to us here . Next in this series:  Building a successful MOPS team: 10 steps to onboarding MOPS talent (post 2 of 5)

Anil Chakravarthy, executive vice president and general manager of Adobe's Digital Experience business, started at Adobe just months before the global pandemic began. For the next year, Chakravarthy and his team helped marketers adapt to the rapid acceleration of digital-first engagement spurred by the global pandemic. If adapting to 2020's “digital acceleration” wasn’t challenging enough, now there's another crisis impacting marketers: the transition to a future without cookies. Chakravarthy recently discussed the cookie-less future during an extended interview with Protocal  (excerpted below).  Overview: The coming cookie-less future Chakravarthy says the cookie-less future is already here and marketers need to adapt or get left behind: “You've already seen what [Apple] has done. And Google is very serious about where they are headed with [cookies and] Chrome. The timeline might vary, but  . . .the way digital marketing happens has to change, and has to change substantially.” Chakravarthy believes that the future of marketing will be first-party data given voluntarily by customers to the business organizations they trust. He also notes that some organizations have always relied primarily on first-party data: “There are companies that already have lots of first-party data. For example, member-oriented companies. You have a membership organization, and you know every member ID — it's not a new idea; membership-oriented companies have been around for hundreds of years. Those kinds of companies have always collected data; that's basically first-party data. So you really then have to gravitate towards first-party data.” Chakravarthy notes that customers now have more control over their data, and can decide who they want to market to them. That puts more of the burden on marketers to maintain customer opt-in by collecting and using customer data responsibly: “From a consumer's perspective, I have to decide whether I'm going to identify myself to you as a business, and if I value you enough to identify myself so that you can then tell me what you're trying to sell me, and whether it's worth giving up my information in order to do that. As a business, [you] have to then use that data responsibly. The answer is not rocket science. You have to have first-party data, you have to have the consent of the person providing you the data. And then you have to make sure that the business processes in which you're using the data, including digital marketing and so on, are consistent with the consent you've received.” Adapting to a world without cookies Chakravarthy notes that many companies have already adapted to a world of increased privacy protections for customer data. These companies are already ahead of the curve on a cookie-less future: “Many of our larger customers who operate internationally, because of GDPR, they're already there. And then many of the customers in California, with CCPA, they're kind of already there. I think the big "aha" that we have seen in the last couple of years is that people say, "Tracking — I let the data move, people within the business do what they need to do, and then I track what is potential privacy issue or violation and so on — I can't do that, that's too difficult. So I have to do it at the source." In other words, I have to make sure I have better controls when I gather the data [and] distribute the data for use.” Adobe itself is responding to heightened demands for data privacy by changing its data control processes: “We use something “called DULE: data usage labeling and entitlement. And that basically governs what data a marketer has access to, via which channel. Again, it's not easy, because it means a big change in how the process has worked in the past. But it's really the best way of addressing the new requirements and handling first-party data responsibly.” Timeline of cookies crumbling When asked to describe how fast the change to a cookie-less future is happening, Chakravarthy expects a rate of change similar to the pandemic’s acceleration of digital transformation (i.e., fast): “I think the next year and a half is going to be as packed as the last year and a half was. What people are going to realize is that some of them will have to reprioritize the second-half [of 2021] budget in order to focus on this. Almost everybody will say, "Hey, I'll do a pilot in my second half. But I really have to bake this into my 2022 budget, and make sure that I invest in 2022 for this transition." We definitely see clear evidence of customers saying they need to prioritize this.” B2B Marketers: Focus on first-party data Chakravarthy and Adobe are clearly betting big on the importance of first-party data for marketers as a cookie-less future arrives: “I think the first-party data is always the cleanest, right? If I have your authorization [as a customer], and I got the data directly from you, and you told me what you want to use it for, that is the cleanest. So that's the sweet spot.  Then from there, you sort of widen the circle. I have first-party data, but I had to get it through other things. Maybe I can't do it in one shot, but as I engage with you, can I collect your consent? Then, second-party data is a little bit harder. I have to make sure if I get the data, even before I use it the first time, I have to get some consent from you. But I think it's going to move in concert with the privacy changes.” Stakes are high in a cookie-less world Chakravarthy ends by noting that the stakes are high and failure is not an option as marketers adapt to a cookie-less future: “Ultimately, there is a huge incentive for everybody to make this [cookie-less future] work. Because virtually everything is digital. And if you can make this work, it'll have a significant impact.” To learn even more about an approach to first-party data and how to market effectively in a world where cookies are crumbling, reach out to us here .

Marketing Operations isn't about marketing technology alone, but about deploying marketing technology in ways that drive strategic goals, efficiency, ROI, and business growth. Technology, therefore, is a means to an end but not the end itself. Going out and purchasing shiny new martech without understanding how it fits into your strategy and existing tech stack, and not having a plan in place for its successful integration, adoption, and utilization, is the worst possible approach.  Our 2021 Marketing Operations Report  makes the link between MOPS maturity and technology optimization clear, showing that the stronger a company’s MOPS function, the more effective it is in (1) deciding on the right technology to suit its strategic needs and (2) integrating that tech, meaning not just systems integration but also having the right people with the right training so that the technology actually delivers value. Spending on technology is now the top budget item for marketing, outstripping advertising spend and every other budget allocation. When deployed wisely, technology can be a powerful driver of success. As our 2021 Marketing Operations Report explains, “today, hundreds of capabilities are available from thousands of vendors, serving companies that are in a constant state of evaluation, negotiation, integration and optimization of marketing and experience technologies.” Tech matters but can be complicated, which is why the methodical approach MOPS brings is so essential. Marketing Operations: Bringing a scientific approach Marketing Operations brings a methodical and holistic approach to the selection and implementation (and utilization) of technology. MOPS goes beyond technology “shopping sprees” and vendor hype to ask the critical questions that somebody needs to ask:  What are the exact strategic requirements of the business this tech impacts? How exactly does this proposed tech serve strategic requirements and add value to what we do? How do we effectively implement and utilize this tech, integrating it into our existing stack and enabling our people to use it effectively? How do we monitor effectiveness and improve the way we use this technology to drive goals? MOPS drives a scientific, evidence-based process that leads to informed decisions and better integration of new technology. MOPS is also about accountability, ensuring that whatever tech is purchased gets utilized and has a clear strategy and value proposition behind it. MOPS doesn’t care about "shiny" or whatever new software demo Joe just watched -- it helps eliminate the emotion and hype from martech purchases, a badly-needed “adult-in-the-room” function that sometimes (and justifiably) says “no thank you” to tech untethered to strategy.   The benefits of Marketing Operations for martech stacks Almost 90% of organizations with a named MOPs group say that it “helps marketing and technology work together,” according to our 2021 Marketing Operations Report. This alignment leads to strengths across the organization in the purchase, implementation, and use of technology. “B2B companies with MOPS are more than 2X more likely to strongly agree that their process for evaluating necessary marketing capabilities identifies current and emerging technologies to achieve their goals,” says our 2021 Marketing Operations Report. Our Report also shows that organizations with a defined MOPS unit are significantly more effective in implementing and utilizing new technology to drive business value. “We sometimes see companies purchase technology quickly and without a plan for successful adoption and utilization,” says Dan Vawter, managing partner at Sojourn Solutions. “The stronger a company’s MOPS function, the better job they do with first deciding upon the right technology in light of their strategic goals and then integrating it into their organization so that the tech delivers real value.” MOPS is a process for making good, data-driven decisions about marketing technology and then implementing and utilizing that tech effectively. MOPS means marketing and IT have clear rules of the road and drive value together. Marketing Operations drives alignment between Marketing and IT Just as MOPS helps provide the shared data and common terminology/language that facilitates closer alignment between marketing and sales, it performs the same role between marketing and IT. As our 2021 Marketing Operations Report says: “This success [at marketing and IT alignment] depends on Operations developing a strong, natural partnership with the IT/Tech group. MOPS speaks the same language, providing a clear investment case and technical briefs backed up by data and business context to help decide on solutions and successfully integrate them.” MOPS professionals bring a deep, highly-useful understanding of marketing and IT/technology (i.e., they speak both languages), so they can broker better conversations that enable both marketing and IT to work together. “MOPS is [uniquely] equipped to grapple with the technical elements of technology integration that are traditionally most challenging to marketing. At the same time, they have the key interests of marketing in mind” and can help both sides collaborate and coordinate. Marketing Operations aligns tech vendors too You might think of MOPS as having a “bridge-building” function internally, but it can also build those bridges with external tech vendors. Depending on their size and go-to-market strategies, B2B companies typically have dozens to more than a hundred tech vendors. The pure volume of tech vendors can create its own kind of confusion and integration challenges. Effective vendor management is critical for the success of both marketing and IT, and MOPS facilitates effective conversations with vendors. “MOPS optimizes vendor management by applying standards and processes to every stage of a relationship that can otherwise vary considerably with each vendor,” says our 2021 Marketing Operations Report. “MOPS organizations [are] roughly twice as likely to rate key vendor management capabilities as very effective than their peers.” MOPS not only helps with implementation and utilization of a vendor’s tech, but helps B2B organizations have better ongoing relationships with vendors based on standard practices, KPIs, and shared terminology, all resulting in better cost control and better-informed decisions. To learn more about how MOPS can help your organization better align marketing and technology (and your tech vendors), reach out  to us. You can also download  the full 2021 Marketing Operations Report: MOPS Increases the Impact of Marketing.

Marketing Operations (MOPS) helps deliver cross-functional alignment, an essential element of success for any organization. B2B marketers can’t drive revenues and optimize performance in a silo: instead, they need to closely align with, and coordinate with, the sales function and every other function that impacts the customer experience.  The full funnel from lead to revenue is a long one with multiple touch points in between. Among the most critical roles of MOPS is enabling marketing and sales alignment through the sharing of relevant, high quality data that’s at the heart of cross-functional conversations and activities. This post will explore in detail the foundational role of MOPS in supporting alignment. MOPS: Quality data comes first If consistently high quality data is unavailable to share, then there’s little of value for marketing and sales to talk about and very little chance for alignment. Instead of having ongoing, evidence-based conversations about how to optimize the customer experience, you get the “blame game” where sales blames marketing for sending bad leads and marketing blames sales for fumbling the “great” leads marketing has sent over to sales. Who’s right here? Nobody -- both sides lose the blame game. MOPS doesn’t just help integrate the technology that hosts your prospect and customer data sets - in taking a step back, we see that MOPS helps integrate and align marketing and sales teams by literally providing the high quality data, PLUS common metrics and language to support productive conversations. Does technology need to be aligned to achieve high quality data? Yes! But we believe that it's more about the people and processes working cross-functionally with that technology to deliver the high quality data.  Factors driving alignment: Common metrics and language According to our 2021 Marketing Operations Report , a stunning 97% of companies with a named MOPs function say their marketing is aligned to key business outcomes. MOPS also facilitates the flow of high quality data that informs all activities from lead generation to closed revenues, involving marketing, sales, customer success, and beyond. The Report results are clear: “With reliable data and reporting comes an improved ability to communicate and align.” MOPS also lays the foundation for a single source of truth (i.e., shared data) and a common language (i.e., agreed-upon metrics). MOPS helps structure formal and informal conversations across the business supported by the same playbook for everyone. Our 2021 Marketing Operations Report notes that “82% of companies with an operations function say that it ‘gets everyone on the same page’ and working better together.”   As Dan Vawter, managing partner of Sojourn Solutions, explains it: “An organization with a strong MOPS function will be in a constant, ongoing conversation, one informed by quality data and common metrics, with sales and other areas of the business that impact pipeline and revenues.” For example, MOPS is going to know the number of leads delivered to Sales, how many leads were rejected, how many were accepted (and why). MOPS enables marketing, sales, and other functions close aligned around goals, on who is doing what and when. When something goes wrong, data supports deeper analysis and collaborative problem-solving, not finger pointing that leads to nowhere. MOPS gives marketing more credibility With stronger data and insight capabilities provided by a defined MOPS unit, marketers working “were 33% more likely to have had an expanded role in setting corporate strategy than their peers at other organizations (without MOPS),” according to our Report.  Marketers benefit tremendously from the MOPS function because it enables them to connect their marketing activities to revenues. They can go to the CFO and make a clear, evidence-based case for more budget. They can answer the one question all CFOs want answered: “If we invest X dollars in marketing, what will be our return on investment?” As Vawter puts it, “with a strong MOPS function, you're going to be able to present to leadership a set of defined, accurate results. In companies without MOPS maturity, marketers will present their metrics and the rest of the organization sees them as unrelated to the overall business.” MOPS thus becomes a keystone for marketing’s enhanced credibility and ability to gain more budget. Connecting alignment and marketing’s enhanced credibility Alignment is far better than toxic, cross-departmental finger pointing. The ongoing, data-informed conversations that MOPS fuels place the optimization of customer experience at the center, exactly where it belongs. If the funnel is leaking, marketing and sales can find out exactly where it’s happening and then set about plugging the gaps. Rebecca Le Grange, managing partner at Sojourn Solutions, sees a direct connection between the cross-functional alignment MOPS enables and the enhanced credibility of marketing: “MOPS can bridge the gap between marketing and other departments, and that creates credibility,” says Le Grange. “It all comes down to how MOPS professionals bring more of an analytical, scientific approach to conversations and processes. You develop a hypothesis about what's going to work, then make experiments, and tweak things as you go based on what the incoming data says. That evidence-based approach offers marketers real credibility with the senior leadership team.” To learn even more about how MOPS helps drive alignment and enhances the credibility of marketing, read the full report - 2021 Marketing Operations Report: MOPS Increases the Impact of Marketing .