Chapter #5

Regardless of reporting structure, successful marketing ops leaders know how to work effectively with different stakeholders across the business. 

Key Stakeholders

We’ve seen that successful MOPs professionals meet with the following groups regularly. 

BDRs/SDRs + Account Executives (Sales): Staying closely aligned with sales is essential in any marketing ops role. Jasmine Carnell, Sales Operations Senior Analyst at Lessonly, believes tight alignment with sales teams enables ops to build processes with empathy and with the end-user in mind. And, we agree. Without regular meetings, ad-hoc conversations, and a strong understanding of sales’ day-to-day and the challenges they face, it’s impossible to build and implement effective workflows that are actually utilized. 

Maintaining effective communication with your sales team requires constant and frequent feedback. Sara McNamara, Marketing Operations at Slack, shares that a regular communication cadence is critical to staying on the same page.

Below is how we advise our customers to maintain an actionable feedback loop. While this is related specifically to lead and account scoring, the infrastructure and guidance can be applied to other operational areas.

Product Marketing & Management: With many companies adopting a product-led motion, MOPs must regularly meet their product team. Ingesting and understanding product data like critical activation events is a must-have for any PLG organization.

Data Science & Engineering: While MOPs has become an increasingly technical function, close alignment with technical teams is essential. Tamir Belzer, Marketing Operations Manager at Logz.io, meets with his BI team weekly and encourages others to do the same.

Peter Kirk, Senior Marketing Ops Manager at Lucid, and Stephanie Cameron, Senior Manager Strategy and Analytics at Lucid shared lessons learned on how marketing ops and data teams can effectively work together. 

1. Utilize project briefs: Stephanie and Peter developed a project brief template that enables them to stay aligned. The sections in the brief are business context, impact, problem to solve, current gaps, stakeholders, situation, complication, and key questions.

2. Invite analytics early and often: Over-communicate. Involving both marketing ops and data teams from the beginning ensures stronger alignment. 

3. Keep the user in mind: Turn user stories into tech specs. Peter gathers feedback from the sales team to translate requirements into data requests for Stephanie and her team.

Customer Success: As a part of the GTM team, alignment with CS is necessary. MOPs professionals should work with customer success to understand how they can better use data to communicate with customers, optimize upsell and cross-sell programs, and more.

Executive leadership: While this is a broad statement, marketing ops professionals must align closely with executive leadership. Marketing ops professionals are often seen as order-takers. One way to combat this perception is through ongoing communication with leadership.

Marketing ops is a highly cross-functional role and requires being able to work effectively across departments. 

Meetings

While collaboration across teams is essential, sales and marketing alignment is among the most important relationships (#smarkteing). Here are our recommendations on creating successful sales and marketing alignment meetings.

Recommendations:

• Facilitate collaborative meetings: Ensure that everyone has a chance to speak and share their perspectives.
• Keep it conversational: Come prepared, but don’t make the meeting too formal. An ongoing Google doc or Notion page often works better than trying to prepare slides.
• Prep! Share the agenda before the meeting, so everyone comes prepared.
• Focus on the numbers: Align on key metrics each week. Tracking shared goals regularly helps to facilitate stronger sales and marketing alignment and helps filter new requests. 
• Adjust meetings based on your organization’s needs: Depending on the size of your organization, consider whether it makes sense to have one meeting or separate meetings for operational and strategic topics.
  

When developing your sales and marketing alignment meeting strategy, here are some questions to consider:

• What meeting cadence works best for your teams?
• What day or time will make the meeting most productive?
• Who will facilitate the meeting? Will this rotate each week?
• How do you make the meeting effective and efficient for both teams?
• How will you track notes and action items?