On the 8th of October, we held the 6th edition of our online discussion series with a panel of marketing operations experts from leading B2B tech companies.

We were joined by:

Matthieu Baril, Marketing Operations Manager at Causeway 
Darrell Alfonso, Global Marketing Operations Manager at Amazon
Maggie Butler, Senior Solutions Marketing Manager at Hubspot 
Rhys Priestman, Director, Marketing Operations at Enstoa

Here’s what happened:

To kick off the discussion, our panellists were asked, ‘what is the marketing operations role?’

  • It aims to make marketing activities sustainable and repeatable
  • It builds core processes for governance, policy, training, data and compliance in alignment with business goals
  • Marketing ops enables marketers to do what they do best – Marketing! It allows them to be creative and focus on building revenue

Next, our panellists outlined a few key skills to look for when hiring a marketing operations role:

  • A foundation knowledge of digital marketing to understand what a marketing team is trying to do and why
  • An understanding of business functions to build alliances and work with various stakeholders to drive forward business objectives

The panellists then agreed that marketing operations should aim to strike a balance between efficiency and effectiveness. They stated:

  • Build efficiency first and then measure it’s effectiveness. Keep asking questions to evaluate if the process is still effective
  • Aligning processes with your revenue data will help you to see if your processes are proving effective
  • Marketing ops should always be looking to see how they can make things more effective!

But what if you don’t have a marketing operations person? What can you do to implement marketing operations processes within your business?

  • Make it part of someones remit to see what can be done to start streamlining activities. They can start building templates, standardising and organising 
  • Start by building one thing exceptionally well. Make it elegant – simple and effective. And make it about something you are interested in!
  • Documentation – write down what you’re doing, and where someone might find this information

The marketing operations panellists then shared how they know if their efforts are paying off:

  • It’s a balance of business metrics and personal team achievements
  • By the amount of projects that improve processes and impact revenue
  • When you don’t hear from marketing ops, things are going well!

Finally, our online discussion ended with some recommendations of MarTech that can help organise work flows and create a smooth operation. Remember – You should make the MarTech work for you, not the other way around.

  • Wrike – project management
  • Trello – project management
  • Asana – project management
  • Vidyard – Communicate to colleagues with video
  • Uberflip – Content marketing platform
  • Blissfully – SaaS management
  • Cabinet M – MarTech stack organisation

Here’s what FINITE members had to say about the discussion on LinkedIn and Slack!

To catch-up on the full online discussion, apply for a free FINITE membership & details will follow!