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 .

Data is the fuel that propels the revenue engine of every organization today. While low quality data can “gunk up” your revenue engine and leave you on the side of the road with the hood up, high-quality data can help you reach your destination faster (i.e., revenue growth through marketing efficiency). So if data is the fuel, then the lead-to-revenue process is the engine, which makes MOPS the mechanic who enables the fuel and keeps the revenue engine humming along. As our 2021 Marketing Operations Report  makes clear, marketing operations does double duty with data: MOPS enhances the quality of your data while also ensuring that an efficient infrastructure exists. Why? So high quality data flows smoothly throughout your organization in order to drive revenues, optimize customer experience, facilitate alignment (of marketing, sales, and beyond) and serve as the basis for ongoing improvement of marketing performance. This post will explain the connections between MOPS, data, and better marketing ROI. MOPS delivers stronger processes around data Organizations with a defined MOPS function are, by definition, going to (1) have their data management systems better set up and integrated and (2) are going to understand how to use their data and data infrastructure to drive revenue outcomes. A good data management infrastructure and a good data governance process create the systemic conditions to support higher quality, cleaner data as well as the capacity to drive better results from that data.  MOPS delivers a richer understanding of your customers, gives you visibility into the buying journey and enables you to drive better marketing based on tracking results and adapting engagement approaches. MOPS also supports stronger, data-enabled alignment among marketing, sales and the entire organization, and becomes the foundation for the credibility of marketing as a whole. According to our 2021 Marketing Operations Report, organizations having a defined MOPS function “are over 2X more likely to strongly agree that their data management processes increase the value of data in their organization and help them achieve measurable results. MOPS not only helps organizations enhance data quality but also helps them utilize that data more effectively to drive revenues.” MOPS is the foundation for analysis and reporting. “With a richer, data-driven understanding of your customer,” says Rebecca Le Grange, managing partner of Sojourn Solutions, “organizations can drive better marketing based on monitoring results and adapting their campaigns and engagement. With good data and analysis, marketers can understand how campaigns are impacting revenues. They can have marketing attribution and increased credibility too.” Four data-related benefits MOPS provides The following are 4 of the major benefits MOPS offers around data management and leveraging data to drive ROI: 1. Better data for understanding and engaging customers.  MOPS enables you to integrate and update your data and systems so you gain higher quality data and full-funnel visibility into your customer/buying journey. With the capacity to access and share customer insights, you can drive more effective campaigns that better address the evolving needs of customers. These full funnel insights propel more targeted, effective campaigns and higher rates of conversion, boosting ROI. 2. Better alignment.  When there’s high quality data and full funnel visibility, you enable better conversations among marketing, sales and the entire organization about strategy and tactics, improving the customer experience, driving conversion rates, and who does what and when. MOPS and the accessible, quality customer data MOPS provides is the fuel that drives ongoing funnel conversations. 3. Performance optimization.  MOPS gives you a GPS so you have full visibility into where you’ve been and where you should be going next. MOPS allows you to course correct in real-time based on customer signals -- you can monitor campaign performance and customer behavior and adjust course accordingly. You can use data to build a continuous feedback loop that supports ongoing improvement.  4. Attribution and credibility.  MOPS offers you the data to connect what you’re doing to revenues, and gives you the capacity to prove the value of marketing to the wider organization. Attribution doesn’t just enhance ongoing marketing performance, but also gives marketing a more credible voice when it comes to requesting more budget. Marketers can say, “if you invest $1 in marketing, here’s what you can expect as ROI.”  As our 2021 Marketing Operations Report explains, “companies with named MOPS functions are 2.5X more likely to have significant insight into attribution of how marketing actions relate to customer behavior.” That builds marketing’s credibility and reputation across the organization.  The takeaway is clear: you need high quality data coming in and also an infrastructure to effectively deploy that high quality data in order to create a revenue engine. MOPS enhances data quality, as the fuel that runs through that engine, and also maintains the engine itself. It’s easy to understand why organizations with a defined MOPS function drive significantly better results with data as compared to organizations lacking a MOPS function.  To learn even more about how MOPS improves your customer data and how you manage that data to drive improvement, download our 2021 Marketing Operations Report .

When it comes to lead generation, lead nurturing, and converting leads into revenue, B2B organizations with a defined MOPS function consistently and significantly outperform companies without that function. Effectiveness at lead management, our 2021 MOPS Report  makes clear, is directly related to having superior capabilities in lead/funnel optimization based on high quality customer data that can be transformed into actionable and revenue-generating intelligence. Put simply, MOPS enables better lead management. While it may sound easy to convert leads into revenue at a high rate, the complexities of the customer journey across channels and the challenges around gaining a unified vision of your customer across systems make “the leaky funnel” a massive problem for all modern marketers. Research shows  that only about 10-15% of all leads eventually turn into revenue.  Put simply, MOPS drives higher lead-to-revenue conversion rates by monitoring your funnel and showing you ways to plug the leaks as they appear. Sojourn Solutions managing partner Rebecca Le Grange describes the challenge and the MOPS solution: “there's so much technology, data, people and processes involved throughout the process from lead to sale. A mature MOPS function pulls everything together. If the balance isn't right and you're focused too much in one area of lead management, leads and revenue will simply leak out. MOPS helps close those leaks.” Visibility into the funnel Marketing operations is about optimizing. Modern marketing requires a complex, evolving mixture of data, data analysis, processes, martech, alignment with sales (and beyond), campaign execution, reporting, and more, MOPS itself reflects that complexity, offering an integrative, aligned approach to improving how marketing gets done. Lead management embraces the entire funnel, from customer awareness all the way to lifetime customer value. MOPS, then, isn’t about pulling the “right” lever but about figuring out your funnel in real-time and then making the appropriate (and constant) adjustments to continually improve as you move your lead management process forward. It’s a waste of time for marketing to do great, creative work generating more leads, hand them off to Sales, and then pretend the job is done -- that conversion will automatically happen. In contrast, MOPS encompasses all parts of the funnel, driving a “revenue engine” that has many parts that need to work together to move from lead to revenue.  4 ingredients in the MOPS blender So what are the various ingredients that MOPS seeks to blend in order to continuously improve lead management?  1. Data.  Great marketing is based on a deep knowledge of customers and their expectations. Marketers, and the entire business, are in the game of understanding and meeting customer needs at every stage of the funnel. When that happens, revenue happens. But while data is the foundation, it’s clearly not enough to collect customer data. Turning data into actionable insights and (finally) revenues requires an entire, structured eco-system where data is cleaned, made actionable, and drives improved customer engagement. MOPS is that eco-system. 2. Reliable Reporting.  With effective reporting, the organization has visibility into exactly what’s working and what’s not. You can prove value by connecting activities to dollars. As our 2021 MOPS Report explains it, “with reliable data and reporting comes an improved ability to communicate and align with the larger business.” If marketing is generating more than enough leads, but Sales isn’t effectively converting them, then reporting will show it.  Instead of having Sales ask marketing for “more leads, please,” MOPS can analyze the situation and report back on the potential causes of the problem, then suggest solutions. Maybe marketing is generating low-quality leads and needs to focus on creating fewer, but higher-quality leads. Or maybe the leads are solid but Sales is struggling with how to effectively convert them. Maybe it’s a combination of factors. MOPS can structure and help inform these “difficult conversations,” offering data and reporting and (most importantly) a willingness to experiment with solutions. That’s a better approach than finger-pointing and recriminations between marketing and sales. 3. Technology.  Customers neither see nor care about an organization’s internal systems and tech stacks. From the outside, they see every organization as one unit that should serve their needs. MOPS drives exactly this sort of customer-centricity as to systems and technology. An organization might consider purchasing lots of “cool” technology, but the role of MOPS is to ask: (1) how does this tool/technology serve our organizational strategy? and (2) how well does this tool/technology integrate into our existing systems/solutions?  MOPS, then, brings a much-needed strategic and integrative focus to all technology-related decisions. As Le Grange points out, “the role of MOPS is to be the voice of reason when it comes to aligning strategy and technology acquisition. Cool tech is great, but it takes more to justify a technology purchase.” 4. Relationships/Organizational Alignment.  MOPS, by definition, works across multiple parts of the organization and encompasses technology, sales, marketing, data management, and beyond. MOPS professionals understand how to talk the language of each department but also how to talk the language of the overall business, which is revenues. The role of MOPS is translational -- to bridge these departmental silos and strengthen structures of communication across the departments.  Getting everyone on the same page Lead management has never been more complex and multi-channel than today. As our 2021 MOPS Report explains: “Today’s deals are the culmination of a chain of events that is led by the buyer and enabled by marketing in partnership with sales” and other areas of the business. MOPS helps pull the entire lead management process together, explains the Report: “data and technology are the bedrocks of modern marketing and the processes that utilize [data and technology] to identify, influence and measure leads are the foundation. The positive impact of MOPS is in optimizing these fundamental capabilities, enabling automation, scale, and ongoing improvement.” MOPS doesn’t just offer full funnel visibility, but also aligns all the activities and processes that impact the buying journey, reporting on what’s happening every step of the way. MOPS aligns the internal approach around the customer, which is essential for lead management effectiveness. Funnel leaks will inevitably happen, but MOPS seeks to continually reduce them and improve conversion rates: MOPS methodically approaches funnel leaks “as scientific questions to be interrogated and solved,” explains the 2021 MOPS Report. At the end of the day (and this post), MOPS provides the tools and approaches to plug those funnel leaks as they happen, boosting conversion rates.  To learn even more about how MOPS optimized lead management, download  and read the full 2021 Marketing Operations Report: MOPS Increases the Impact of Marketing.

Our 2021 MOPS Report clearly shows that companies with a defined MOPs unit are better at navigating change and implementing new initiatives than organizations that lack a defined MOPS function. Whether change arrives in the form of a global pandemic, digital transformation, or evolving customer behaviors/expectations, having a defined MOPS function enables an organization to effectively pivot when needed. This post, part of a multi-post series that digs into the details of our 2021 Marketing Operations Report , explores how MOPS can help future-proof any organization by enabling agility when it comes to people, processes, and technology. MOPS: Enabling faster learning cycles Marketing operations is a multidimensional function encompassing data management, lead generation, technology optimization, performance measurement, and more. At its most basic, MOPS is about helping organizations optimize their marketing. MOPS requires an “optimization mindset” that’s willing to develop hypotheses and experiments, monitor the results, analyze lessons learned, apply those lessons, and keep on moving forward based on what performance data is showing. MOPS isn’t just an infrastructure of processes and technologies, but also a facilitator of continuous learning. The feedback loop that MOPS provides is the best tool for adapting to change. During the global COVID-19 pandemic, for example, organizations with a defined MOPS function proved to be much more adaptable and significantly outperformed their peers because they were willing and able to pivot their marketing approaches based on rapidly-shifting market demands. MOPS: Ideas aren’t enough It’s great when B2B marketers have new ideas, but ideas by themselves are not sufficient. Organizations also need the capacity to test, monitor results, analyze performance data and transform data into actionable insights, report key metrics, and connect ideas and actions to actual revenues. MOPS enables all of those capabilities, giving organizations the foundation for agility and change-readiness. As Sojourn Solutions managing director Rebecca Le Grange explains it: “MOPS enables organizations to fine tune marketing in order to support change rather than starting from scratch every time customer behavior or expectations change. MOPS is about improving processes and measuring results.” MOPS gives your organization a laboratory to experiment and test ideas. Data as fuel for change Organizations that have faster cycles of experimentation and learning are simply better at adapting. Decades ago, marketing campaigns would be launched with a “big idea” in mind, but performance metrics could take a full year to arrive. You’d make a big bet, investing massive budgets on campaign execution, and then wait months (or a full year) to see the results. And, yes, you could tweak the next campaign based on what you’d learned in a prior (failed) campaign, but the cost was losing the big bet you’d placed a year ago. Meanwhile, the market kept moving and changing -- by the time you’d learned your “big lesson,” customers had already changed and moved on, so the lessons you’d learned at great expense were learned too late. MOPS enables the opposite of this older approach: it allows marketers to test ideas at smaller scale and “fail small” when it comes to results and budgets. Campaign approaches can be tested in rapid cycles, data can be collected immediately, analysis can happen within days or weeks (not months and years), and less budget can be allocated to approaches that don’t work. Marketers can discard, scale up or tweak more ideas in a shorter time frame. Failing small allows marketers to constantly pivot based on what the data is showing, moving constantly towards better. Marketing within a MOPS framework is like using a GPS when you drive, guiding you where to go. As the 2021 MOPS Report explains, data is key to finding your way amidst change: “standardized approaches to data . . .make companies better able to cope with change. In 2020, existing trends in the B2B buying process accelerated. Executives described unusual rates of digital adoption, increased customer churn as well as unfamiliar behaviors from existing customers.” Despite these challenges, organizations with a defined MOPS function simply iterated and pivoted their way to better results, while organizations without a MOPS function had to guess, rely on hunches, and hope for the best.  Having a lab available for testing, as MOPS provides, leads to better results. “Marketing organizations with an operations group were in a superior position because they were better able to rapidly test new solutions,” says the Report, “they were 50% more likely than their peers to say their organization is very strong at building experiments to test insights in the field.” Organizational alignment and change management Big changes that impact customers don’t just happen in one area of the business, but typically encompass multiple areas such as marketing, sales, IT, customer success, and beyond. MOPS enables the building of those key internal, interdepartmental relationships in order to drive change. MOPS “acts as a conduit and translator with other departments, such as helping to align sales with the integration of CRM and insights tools. This [MOPS] function can be vital to ensuring broad support of initiatives both before and after their implementation,” says the Report. Whenever change initiatives happen, MOPS is there to offer a standard approach, a workable framework for testing, and a structured approach to building key relationships across all relevant departments. Do these capabilities help change happen more effectively? The 2021 MOPS Report answers a resounding “yes.” MOPS develops the roadmap for change Among the multiple roles of MOPS professionals is helping organizations anticipate change and develop a roadmap for getting from here to there. MOPS is on top of technology trends and how those trends align with the organization’s strategic goals. The technology roadmap that MOPS helps build isn’t about buying “cool” technology but about finding the right technology to serve an organization’s larger strategic goals. The pace of change in business technology and customer behavior has never been faster than today. As the Report makes clear: the role of MOPS is “to track and analyze the innovation in technology trends with business goals and the technology roadmap for context and to maintain an ongoing conversation with IT partners about what’s necessary today and what’s emerging for the future.” Developing change-readiness is a big part of the MOPS function. To learn more, download  and read the full 2021 MOPS Report.

The evidence is in, the jury has spoken, and the verdict is loud and clear: business organizations that have a defined marketing operations (MOPS) function significantly outperform organizations that don’t have a MOPS function. Despite the open and shut business case for MOPS (more on that below), only half of all B2B organizations that generate $1 billion in annual revenue or more have a defined MOPS function. For smaller organizations, that MOPS number is even lower. So while MOPS clearly adds business value, most organizations have yet to fully tap into that value. MOPS as a discipline embraces many important sub-disciplines, including lead management, data management, martech, attribution/reporting, and more. We looked into trends around marketing operations with our 2019 MOPS Maturity Benchmarking Report , and now we’ve done it again. Here are the six biggest takeaways from our new 2021 Marketing Operations Report , with commentary on each takeaway from our managing partners Rebecca Le Grange and Dan Vawter. 1. Having a defined MOPS function helps organizations successfully manage change and also outperform organizations that lack a defined MOPS function. The report says that companies with a defined MOPs unit are 51% more likely to strongly agree that marketing is effective in managing change and implementing new initiatives. So whether change arrives in the form of a global pandemic, digital transformation, or evolving customer demands, having a defined MOPS function helps organizations effectively adapt and pivot as needed. MOPS also help organizations obtain more leads and also convert a higher percentage of those leads into sales. Le Grange : MOPS serves as the foundation for how organizations operate and execute marketing. MOPS enables those organizations to fine tune marketing in order to support change rather than starting from scratch every time customer behavior or expectations change. Vawter : Many marketers know their audience and are able to put together a really strong demand generation program. But how do you turn that demand and lead gen into pipeline and revenue? It sounds simple, but there’s a lot that needs to happen. It is the MOPS function that nurtures those leads, progressing them through each stage of the funnel, coordinating with different marketing channels to ensure that the messaging is all tied together and drives sales. 2. Businesses with a defined MOPS function outperform their peers in lead generation. B2B organizations with defined MOPs groups were 53% more likely to have significantly outperformed their sectors in H2 2020 than similar companies without the function. Their success relates to having superior capabilities in lead management and funnel optimization based on high quality data analysis that delivers actionable intelligence. Le Grange : There's so much technology, data, people and processes involved throughout the process from lead to sale. All of it requires a mature MOPS function to pull things together. If the balance isn't right and you're focused too much in one area, and you've got gaps, leads and revenue will simply leak out of your funnel. MOPS is there to close any gaps. 3. MOPS optimizes the relationship between marketing and technology.  Almost 90% of those organizations with a named MOPs group say that it “helps marketing and technology work together.” This results in strengths across the organization in the use of technology, including better utilization of existing solutions and the integration of new tech to faster turnaround on technology needs. Vawter : We sometimes see companies purchase technology quickly and without a plan for its successful adoption and utilization. The stronger a company’s MOPS function, the better job they do (1) deciding upon the right technology in light of their strategic goals and (2) integrating it into their organization, meaning, not just integration from a systems perspective but also getting the right people with the right training involved so that the tech gets utilized and delivers real value. 4. MOPS helps organizations drive better results with their data. Companies with MOPs are over 2X more likely to strongly agree that their data management processes increase the value of data in their organization and help them achieve measurable results. MOPS not only helps organizations enhance data quality but also helps them utilize that data more effectively to drive revenues. Le Grange : Data is the foundation for analysis and reporting. And with a richer, data-driven understanding of your customer, organizations can drive better marketing based on monitoring results and adapting their campaigns and engagement. With good data and analysis, marketers can understand how campaigns are impacting revenues. They can have marketing attribution and increased credibility too. 5. MOPS helps deliver cross-functional alignment A stunning 97% of companies with a named MOPs function say their marketing is aligned to key business outcomes. MOPS helps organizations connect their marketing spend and efforts to attributable revenues. It also helps marketers align with Sales and other business units that impact customers and revenues. Vawter : An organization with a strong MOPS function will be in a constant, ongoing conversation with sales and other areas of the business that impact revenues. For example, MOPS is going to know the number of leads delivered to Sales, how many were rejected, how many were accepted (and why). MOPS enables marketing, sales, and other functions to be completely aligned on goals, on who is doing what and when. 6. Marketing is elevated by the MOPS function.  With stronger data and insight capabilities, marketers working within organizations with a defined MOPS function were 33% more likely to have had an expanded role in setting corporate strategy than their peers at other organizations (without MOPS). That focus is supported by the standardization and common metrics provided by MOPS; 82% of those at companies with a MOPS function say that it “gets everyone on the same page.” Vawter : With a strong MOPS function, you're going to understand all of your systems and processes, how they're integrated, and how your data fits together. And 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.  Le Grange : MOPS can bridge the gap between marketing and other departments, and that creates credibility. I think it 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, tweak things as you go. You're looking at all the variables, at the data around what's working or not. That evidence-based approach offers marketers a lot of credibility within the senior leadership team. To learn more takeaways, download  the full 2021 Marketing Operations Report.

The impact of the no-code movement is clear for B2B marketers. In the past (and in the present too), if the marketing team had a great idea about how to better engage customers, one that involved building an app or a chatbot, they’d have to write up a detailed proposal, present it to the IT department, then wait for IT to decide whether it had a software developer available to do the coding (i.e., to build the app or chatbot). If no coder was available, marketing’s great idea would get put on the shelf. No-code tools, which are becoming more available and flexible these days, are taking the coder out of the scenario described above. B2B marketers who have great ideas can use no-code tools to actually build whatever they want by themselves. Instead of relying upon and waiting for coders/developers to build websites, landing pages, apps, and chatbots, marketers can cut out the middle person and “just do it” themselves. No-code is basically DIY for marketers. What no-code tools unleash: Creativity and productivity Software developers can use no-code tools to become even more productive, enabling them to reduce time to “go live” even for the most complex coding work. No-code tools will also empower B2B marketers to build marketing assets without gaining buy-in or waiting for resources from the IT department. Instead of marketers requesting service via a drawn-out internal process, they’ll be able to build more of what they need (and faster) via self-service. This more streamlined journey from idea to execution will eliminate bottlenecks that stopped or delayed marketers in the past, creating opportunities for anyone on the marketing team to act on an idea rather than waiting in line for a software developer/coder. BTW, no-code tools still involve code No-code (and low-code) tools are basically visual, easy-to-use builders, using drag and drop functionality, that help marketers intuitively assemble and build things without any code application. There’s coding involved, but it’s built-in and happening “under the hood” so (non-developer) marketers don’t see any of it. As a marketer assembles and manipulates blocks in a simple user interface builder, the code is automatically generated in the background. No-code capabilities for 3 key functions Martech guru Scott Brinker’s keynote at the March, 2021 MarTech conference addressed three key areas  where no-code martech will be most beneficial: Automation: The ability to automate routine activities and processes so marketers can focus on developing ideas rather than coding or requesting coding professionals; Augmentation: The acquisition of new creative and analytical capabilities that improve existing tools and help marketers work smarter and faster;  Integration: The connectivity of no-code tools with other tools and data in your tech stack. There are an increasing number of no-code tools available for workflow automation, business process automation, and more. According to Gartner ,  the global no-code (and  low-code) market is projected to total $11.3 billion in 2021, an increase of 23.2% from 2020. Marketing automation platforms like Marketo and Salesforce have already baked in no-code workflow automation, enabling marketers to use drag and drop tools and other intuitive user interfaces to set up complex workflows. No-code tools aren’t being deployed in silos, of course, but are increasingly getting integrated across the tech stack. Even better, no-code tools are being integrated using no-code tools that make integrations easier. Scott Brinker calls these no-code integration tools Integration-Platform-as-a-Service (or IPaaS). Integration is so central to today’s business stacks that the big marketing automation platforms have even begun acquiring IPaaS vendors: Salesforce, for example, purchased  IPaaS vendor Mulesoft. Research  from no code IPaaS vendor Zapier says that 42% of U.S. digital marketers expect to use six or more new apps in 2021, so no-code integration tools are perennially useful. That’s a clear indicator that marketers are planning to augment their existing capabilities through adding various no-code tools.  A no-code use case & how to choose no-code tools In a recent B2B Marketing webinar, No-Code Martech in Practice , Kirsty Dawe of no-code vendor Webeo, explained that no-code tools support agility, which is especially important as customer demands are shifting so quickly and marketers are under intense pressure to keep up. Dawe demonstrated how a landing page could be changed within minutes using drag-and-drop and text editing tools that are no-code (i.e., no html know-how needed), resulting in a 61% increase in “time on page” for the client page in question. Dawe then went on to describe four key criteria that marketers should consider when selecting no-code tools: The user interface and user experience of the no-code tool needs to be intuitive and easy-to-use. No-code tools need to “play nice with others,” meaning they should integrate (or be easily integrated) with the rest of your tech stack, including your MAP, CRM, and beyond. Carefully consider “permissions control” available for the no-code tool so that only authorized persons can make changes and build marketing assets using the tool.  Carefully consider available training options so that your people can quickly and easily start gaining value from the no-code tools. Adoption is never a matter of simply handing random no-code tools to your team and saying “go at it, folks!” No-code martech is an emerging movement that promises to help developers work more efficiently, but also empowers marketers (i.e., non-developers) to go from idea to making (eliminating long waits for IT resources). The takeaway is clear, no-code tools transform marketers into makers. Are you interested in learning more about this topic or other hot topics in our industry? Reach out to us  directly and let us know - we'd love to hear from you and even interview you on the topic!