Marketing and Sales Operations today are more than just plumbers. These roles typically started as tactical positions, performing tasks like database management, data hygiene, spreadsheet analysis and reporting preparation. But over the last 10+ years—in their respective departments—each has risen in prominence to support the increasing use of technology to drive business objectives and the desire for systems, processes and data to be integrated across departments.

Marketing Ops and Sales Ops roles have evolved into strategic and pivotal positions. They are typically the right hand person of the Marketing or Sales Executive they support. They’ve become integral by intimately understanding how everything works in their departments and “across the aisle”. They manage technologies, processes, data organization, reporting and analytics and the interfaces of these systems to other departments. More importantly, these are the people with the expertise to bridge that knowledge to business advancement. They see how all the different pieces work together to best achieve the team’s objectives.

Poised to be strategic

The next big step for Sales Ops and Marketing Ops is to connect all of their internal knowledge and operational expertise with the buying audience. They currently see the programs, and the results, and have the quantitative skills to connect the dots as to what is working. Add in-depth knowledge of the buyers to the mix, and they will also understand why their organization’s efforts are (or are not) working. This combination of perspectives will propel these positions to not only be the implementers of strategy, but also developers of and contributors to business and operational strategies.

These operations leaders are so in tune with the technology and activities that bring better results that these roles can be one of the first to discover the importance of interacting with buyers in a way aligned with buyer preferences.

• They oversee the marketing technology used to deploy campaigns, evaluate leads, and sync qualified leads to the CRM for Sales.
• They manage the sales technology that delivers leads to Sales, reports on opportunities and pipelines, as well as create reports for the Head of Sales to evaluate performance and build forecasts.
• Operations also typically hears the feedback from Sales about the quality of the Marketing leads.

With this full circle visibility into planning, process, execution and analysis, your Sales and Marketing operations staff are a goldmine of knowledge.