With David Kreitter, Head of Marketing Operations at Workato
David Kreitter, Head of Marketing Operations at Workato, speaks about structuring systems architecture and teams. He talks about the potential of a master data management system, the optimal organization of people, processes, and technology, and centralizing operations.
David Kreitter is the Head Of Marketing Operations at Workato. He automates profitable business operations, nerds out with prospects who want to automate profitable business operations, and plays a pivotal role in sourcing and closing key deals.
How do we get to a point where we have a master data management system?
I think folks are starting to realize that having a really tight integration between two apps is good, but perhaps a better solution would be to have one database to rule them all. That way you connect everything: Marketo, Salesforce, everything. You stream all the data into a central location like Snowflake, which is growing like crazy right now.
Once you take all this data and stream it to a central location, you have that feedback out to each app individually. Then if you decide to make an update to every single account record in Salesforce for instance, there won’t be any significant issues.
Having a master data management system doesn’t eliminate the need to be able to automate workflows. So there's the master data management CDP side of things, but there's a lot of opportunity for other automations. We're trying to figure out where some of this lies in our organization as far as responsibilities go.
If we want to set up master data management, is that something Marketing Operations is going to do, piping all the data into Snowflake? Or do we need to work with BT on this sort of stuff? We’re working on those organizational questions and responsibilities.
What is the most optimal organization of people, processes and technology to facilitate the greatest leverage across not only the stack itself, but also service the overall go to market motions and organization?
It comes down to platform execution, intelligence and planning and enablement.
Let me say first that this framework is not specific to Marketing Ops. As we're growing the team over at Workato, I've reached out to connections who are leaders in Marketing Ops at companies like Zuora, Asana, Slack and Salesforce. I've been gathering feedback on this topic because it's something I'm thinking about a lot.
You want to have a platform team or a sort of systems team, which is your system admins for some of your major platforms. They handle the architecture of these key systems and think about tech strategy. They’ll think about what new tech we’re bringing on. Maybe what services we need and whatever else optimizes the tech stack from an architectural and integration standpoint.
Then you can have a Campaign Ops team. You could also call this the Execution team. They just execute campaigns or whatever marketing needs to do.
Marketing Intelligence. Once data is in Snowflake and you have some BI tools layered on top of it, like ThoughtSpot or what have you, you can dive into the data with data quality analysis, forecasting, etc.
Finally, you’ll want a planning and enablement department.
Regardless of which team you're on, as long as technology is involved, you want to have these pillars of platform execution, intelligence and planning and enablement.
How can operations be better centralized?
Ten years ago, Marketing Ops wasn’t necessarily a key role that was really consistent in enterprise marketing. As these new functions develop over time it's going to be interesting to see whether Rev Ops get accepted as an institutionalized thing that even the enterprises are doing.
There already are some rev ops teams but are we really going to centralize all these Ops and have them report to the CFO or COO? I see it happening in the SMB and mid-market. If it does move to the enterprise and becomes institutionalized, I'm very interested to see where the leadership comes from.
What area has the experience to lead it? Will it be more Finance? Sales? Marketing? Maybe the CS side? Or is it really just more about understanding Operations, conceptually and having strong leadership skills? Time will tell.
