As I reflect on the journey I’ve taken in my time in Marketing Operations, I recently came to realize that one of the hardest things is knowing how to advance my career.
The truth? It’s hard to know how to get “better” at Marketing Ops.
And what does “better” even mean?
There are a variety of interesting educational options, but not a lot of time to spend on them. And not a lot of guidance on which courses and resources truly provide value, versus just serving as another revenue stream for a vendor.
As a discipline, Marketing Operations is still fairly new. Even though marketing measurement, marketing team structure optimizations, audience segmentation, and targeting have existed in various forms over the last 100 years, it wasn’t until 2005 when Gary Katz first published his article Marketing Operations: Solving Marketing's Seven Deadly Sins that interest in Marketing Operations began to increase.
Similar to Revenue Operations is experiencing a rise in visibility and popularity (it was listed in the top spot on LinkedIn’s Job’s on the Rise list for 2023), Marketing Operations was identified as the fastest growing role in Marketing in 2011.
2011 - as in only 12 years ago.
Marketing Automation tools like Eloqua and Marketo came on to the scene shortly later, and I’m convinced that this is one of the many reasons that people still think Marketing Automation and Marketing Operations are the same thing.
Now a lot can happen in 12 years, but on the whole many of us in Marketing Ops roles haven’t been in our careers long enough to see things through to the end. Honestly, most of us probably didn’t even start our career in Marketing Operations. What does success look like for someone in our position? CMO? CRO? COO…? Something else?
To come back to the question I asked in the beginning - I’m not sure how to get “better” at Marketing Operations. I do know that my experience has given me an idea of where to start, and I am excited to continue to learn. With this in mind, I’ve started this newsletter with three goals in mind:
(Selfishly) Document what I’m learning so I can come back to it again
Share what I’m learning with others already working in Marketing Operations, so that they can (hopefully) benefit from these learnings in their own careers
Create more awareness around Marketing Operations (and Sales Ops/Revenue Ops/CX Ops) so we can get more great minds in these critical roles
Photo by Sapan Patel on Unsplash
If what I’m sharing resonates, I hope you’ll join me on this journey. I’m not entirely sure on where it will take us, but I’m excited to learn together.