What is Rev Ops? What is Growth Ops?

On this episode we discussed the topic of “Rev Ops” and asking how it’s different than (or similar to) Sales Ops, Customer Success Ops and Marketing Ops with our guest, Melissa McCready.

Recorded live on March 12, 2021

Hi, I’m Michael Hartmann iI’m Naomi Lou, and I’m Mike Rizzo. And this is ops cast, a podcast for marketing ops pros and rev ops pros created by the MO Pros. The number one community for marketing operations. As professionals tune into each episode as we chat with real professionals to help elevate you in your marketing operations career.

Okay. Hello everyone. Welcome to episode four of OpsCast brought to you by the MO Pros. Um, you know, this has been really fun. We’ve had a number of different topics and we’ve got more coming up that we’re really excited about. Um, I’m Michael Hartmann today. I’m joined by my cohost Mike Rizzo. Again. One of our normal co-host Naomi Lou is not able to join us today, but that’s okay.

We’re going to carry on today. We’re going to have an interesting conversation, I think, and we’re like our guests, uh, let our guests get into this little load. It really it’s what the hell is rev ops. I think we’ve probably all heard about that in, you know, in our marketing ops roles or other roles that we have.

And joining us today to talk about that is, uh, Melissa McCready from Ruth ops, formerly mocha. And if you want to participate in the conversation, feel free to, um, you know, raise your hand. If you want to get on air or pop something in the chat. If you’re online on the web, on a browser, we’re looking forward to getting everyone involved.

So, Melissa, thanks for joining us. I know this was sort of put together kind of rapidly, but why don’t you start off by just introducing yourself and tell us more about growth ops and mocha and whatever you want to cover. Sounds great. Thanks, Michael, Melissa McCready here, I’ve been in the. Rev ops space since it’s been around and before it was even called this.

So, uh, before Salesforce was even a thing, I was doing this stuff so long time at this and have seen so many changes. Um, I’ve been working with the growth ops community. We were known as mocha before marketing and operations cross-company Alliance, which has been around for about 16 years, took it over about a year and a half ago and said, Hey, let’s rebrand this because of.

Operations is not just one spot. And when we’re talking about rev ops and growth ops, they can sound one of the same, but growth operations is actually a level above it because what it’s doing is it’s looking across all operations in organization. Orchestrating those things. Whereas revenue operations is more of a customer facing with the goal of revenue.

Growth is both internal and external. Whereas rev ops is more of the revenue growth. And so that’s more of a, what we’ll call internal growth. So, um, with that, I’m very passionate about this and work with numbers of. Uh, companies, um, helping them with projects and strategy and in the weeds doing still doing list imports nowadays, it’s amazing that that never seems to go away, uh, in doing this sort of work, but happy to be here.

And, uh, I can’t wait to get into the chat. Yeah. So I think you’re leading us right into the, the big question is, you know, what the hell is rev ops. And I think he, it was interesting as we were chatting just before we came on. Um, you mentioned that you have a passion about clear definition. Rev ops versus growth ops.

And I’ll throw in one that I’ve heard go to market ops. Um, I would love to kind of get your view on how do you distinguish those? How do you define them? Uh, and maybe what’s in them and what’s not in them. Yeah, definitely. I mean, I think that either any of those, it just depends on who’s defining them, but if we really want to say from a technical level, let’s define those.

So revenue operations. Uh, operations, marketing, operations, customer operations. So customer success and channel operations will typically fall under revenue operations. These are all everything that has to do with driving revenue in the organization, whereas with go to market. You are driving in demand, right?

So you’re usually going to find a go to market operations team that is more mercury in operations and maybe brand and awareness focus, uh, is in there as well. And they’re going to be tied into sales operations, but the goal of a team that is doing go to market and operations. I of course revenue is in that goal, but it’s driving that pipeline build.

And then with growth operations, it’s both of those things that are wrapped into growth. Operations growth operations is more around front office, back office as well as customer engagement and looking across the entire. And saying, what are all the things that we’re doing? So it’s now taking in, you know, the people planning process as well and processes across the board to grow a business.

So what do we need to do in HR? What do we need to do in sales? What do we need in customer success? So it’s a much wider. Way of looking at it. And the goal that I had when I said, Hey, this really needs its own name. Its needs, its own stake in the ground is to get that a seat at the table. What we’re seen as their traditional COO’s.

They come in their finance, their legal, their accounting, but their. Operations to that extent, right? If you’re working with a larger company that has a physical product, you’re going to have supply chain falling under there. But if you’re talking about cloud, you’re not going to necessarily have that for a deliverable.

In general operations for driving growth is going to be about growing the business up, right. And scaling that business. It’s such an important piece of it. Um, that has been, I feel very much missing and I think it definitely is ahead of its time talking about it. But if we’re on that path to get to that point, we’re going to be in a good spot.

I think rev. And, and throw to market operations hearing that tells me that we’re on that path, but we definitely have a long way to go. I mean, I don’t see this coming up in the next five years, that would even be early. Um, but if people are thinking about it and they’re building their organizations and their plans with that framework in mind, it’s going to help them so much later on down the.

Yeah, I I’m, uh, this is Mike, Mike Rizzo, everybody. Um, I totally, it resonates with me. I think Melissa, when you and I first met, um, you know, about a year ago, a year and a half ago, or so, um, you, you had shared this, this idea of growth operations with me and I found it fascinating. I think, I think. When you’re talking about the overarching strategy of revenue operations.

And I think the thing that you shared with me back then, which, which you, you largely touched on just, just through what you shared, um, right now was the sense of revenue operations. Is that it’s a little bit self-serving right? Like it serves the organization. You’re thinking about growing revenue. And you’re, you’re thinking about like, how does the business grow, but it doesn’t necessarily keep a lens on the pulse of your clients and the health of your clients.

And I think that was the thing that resonated most with me being that I had recently stepped back into. Yeah. So I have recently stepped back into my role of. Mavenlink and I was, I was heading up building out our client, um, customer advisory board, our customer, community partner, community, those kinds of things.

And my purview was that, you know, we’re trying to enable the clients to have better success with one another and connecting with one another. And so this notion of growth ops really resonated with me in the sense that, Hey yeah, revenue, revenue, operations, and it sort of feels like it’s missing. A little bit of the connection to the client right there.

They’re thinking about how do I get the best, the most revenue for our company, but not necessarily, how do I make our clients super successful? Um, and I, and I liked the term growth operations, cause it feels like that that’s more all encompassing. Um, and so I, I definitely appreciate that. Yeah, it’s, it’s probably early days to be talking about it, but I can say that, you know, In my full-time role.

We, we are, our new team name is called the client engagement team and we’re thinking about, yeah. And it’s, it’s fun. I’ve been moved out of the client success organization back into marketing. Um, I’m still head of our community, you know, programs, our client advisory board, but I’m on a team called the client engagement team.

And we’re really thinking a lot about that. Right? How do we enable the. Of our customers to feel success, have success and be educated about how to attain success through our products, our partners, and other. Connections that we have in the marketplace. And I think that, you know, we probably could have just as easily called it the, you know, the growth operations team or the growth team or something like that.

But, um, but client engagement, I think hits the mark for us. And I, I feel like the message, um, is starting to come through in different, in different channels. I’ve seen it in other organizations too. So, um, really, really exciting stuff. I, I appreciate the vision that you guys are trying to create over there at the growth opportunity.

Well, thanks then. Let me just add to that too, that I think, you know, when you’re talking about some of the client perspective, it is the entire customer journey from inception to just the repeat cycle. Right. And think about it. Partners are left out a lot. If you’ve got a channel model and that operations and how that supposed to work, you know, it’s crazy because a lot of companies that are channel focused, their engagement with their partners is.

Operational wise very well. Typically I run into this a lot, um, and they struggle with just trying to. Figure out how to move that in a way to operationalize it. So when you think of, um, the engagement, it’s the overall engagement and that drive is Brandon awareness, right? I mean, that is the stuff that, you know, like Kleenex and Xerox, you know, getting that branding out there in a way it starts at the beginning.

Follows all the way through, and it’s a continuation. And if you’re only thinking about one piece of it, you’ve missed the mark. So that’s my, that’s my opinion on it. And that’s what I continue to see. So it is very interesting talking to people about this concept. Um, and how do we put this into action and it’s not going to be easy, but you know, you got to start somewhere, I suppose, right?

Yeah. So, so if I could, um, you know, Michael, I know we have a series of questions and just kind of bringing it back to this, this notion of, of revenue operations, um, you know, my personal opinion at this stage of the revenue operations life cycles, that it’s just largely focused on sales ops. Um, it’s it’s tactics to grow sales, uh, activity, you know, nurtures and sequences and stuff like that.

At least that’s what I continue to see and all the little. Uh, no, not little. They’re actually quite large with the rev ops communities that are out there. Um, and so, so just, just trying to get a sense of, you know, how, how are you defining rev ops today, Melissa, and what you’re seeing through your clients.

And, um, and do you think that it’s going to be rolled up into some other kind of, you know, role in the future where there’s like, ideally it’s a growth ops type of organization or something like that? Like, what are your, what are your thoughts? Yeah, it’s interesting. What I’m seeing is that people are calling it one thing and doing another right.

And if you think about what. Originally supposed to be, which was sales, marketing channel and customer success, operations being aligned. You know, that was the whole point of, by the way, for customer relationship management, back in the Siebel days before Salesforce was even a thing, it was about aligning those things through.

Right. And it was aligning those things through data that was actionable and getting analysis and figuring out how to pivot the business. So it hasn’t changed much from that time of that being, you know, customer relationship management. But what happens is organizations get to. Myopic, right. They go sales, operations, marketing channel, and customer operations are afterthoughts.

Right. I see too many times where I walk in and they have a rev ops team and it’s decentralized, which you can do. But when it’s decentralized, you know, there has to be. Project management. There has to be prioritization. There has to be collaboration and transparency in order for that to work. And that usually is not the case because there’s always been this natural tension between sales and marketing, you know, like how much of what I’ve done has attributed to the pipeline.

That’s, you know, there’s always this divide that happens. Whereas, if you’re working on a true rev ops team and you do have that transparency and the communication and the collaboration and all those things that need to be there works really well. And you’ll see that the organizations look at projects holistically and they look at impact of projects holistically, and they prioritize those projects holistically based on what the business goals are.

So it’s not that you can’t do that. You know, in a decentralized rev ops function where you’ve got, you know, the different components reporting in different people, it’s a lot harder. Um, it definitely is because working to the same goals under the same team, right. Operations teams, aren’t usually very big.

I mean, in big organizations, they can seem big, but you know, per number of sales people, how many operations people do you have? It’s usually a low number. You know, I get to walk into organization. Had called me for help and had the right mix of the number of operations people needed for what they actually wanted to accomplish.

So, you know, the definition comes back to. Having a holistic view of customer facing operations, so that you’re operationalizing the right things at the right time to get the most out of the business. And if you stick with that definition, you start to really quickly see that you can’t do one thing without the other.

Right. There’s there’s ties across everything and. When you start looking at it together, what an impact it makes, I mean, positive impact. People are happy or you’re not getting hung up with roadblocks and fixing things. You know, marketing needs something done on the Salesforce side. Sales ops usually is owning the.

Salesforce database mostly. That’s what I see a lot of. And you know, they’re now able to cross communicate that and it’s prioritized, right. You know, it’s not, oh, we’re going to put in this little widget here, but we’re not going to get this data updated because we’re on different teams and we have more of a priority to do that for ourselves.

So. Yeah, it takes the most out of it. I’m really interested. I honestly, I’m still kind of wrapping my head around your definition of growth operations that said what you were just talking about a minute ago and sort of these different definitions. And I think John, John Hughes in the chat chime in that if you asked a hundred people, you get a hundred different definitions of what all these things are, you know, I think, um, This makes it at least two questions in my mind.

One is, you know, whether it’s growth ops, the way you define it, or revenue ops the, with this sort of, I think the more ideal, I guess, for lack of a better term where it covers all those four major components from marketing sales customer and partner channel, I think you may really appoint the partner channel.

It gets ignored a lot. Um, What the, where should that organization or function be reporting into, within an organization? And is there any variance you see in different size companies or industries or something like that? And the second, your point about the ratio of people in ops to some other component of the company, whether it’s salespeople or marketing or whatever, you know, why do you think that whenever you go into these plans, That that ratio is lower than you think it probably should be for the, the, the, the level of where that company is, where it wants to grow to.

Yeah. Great question. So let’s start with the first one around definitions. And take me back for a second here. I, I got lost in thought on that second one. Uh, so the first question is. With the structure and reporting into and what works there. And what I would say is this, that’s not a one size fits all depends on the organization.

The most important piece of it is leadership and people, right. Those two things, and it’s kind of a singular, right? It’s the team and that team makeup. And, um, are they growth mindset? Are they collaborative, um, thinking, are they more individual contributors or not? Those factors all play into it. When I think of.

How I would organize something. So a smaller organization, let’s just say company, right. And let’s say that that department is five people. Hopefully, usually we’ll see it much smaller. They’ll have like two, but let’s say there’s five people. And you have a good strong leader who thinks, you know, big picture on those things and can, you know, guide the team that way.

It makes a lot of sense that that person that is leading that team is working with the COO or the CEO and reporting into them directly. So there’s a direct line of communications across the executive staff about what’s happening and when it’s happening and the impact on each portions of the business, for the projects that they’re working on.

And the activities that they’re doing now in another case is that you may not have that strong leadership. And that’s a huge problem. And I don’t want to go too far down that rat hole. When I will say is if you have, you know, decent leaders across the different functions, you could essentially create a change control committee in a data governance committee and a project committee, right.

Between those people functioning, decentralize, and they could be reporting into sales ops, or sales and marketing. The problem with that is you do tend to find that you get sucked into more of the day-to-day stuff and helping with, you know, generating reports and doing those sorts of things and end up less on the strategic projects.

So there’s a big. Problem with that because you have to do both. And so it kind of leads into that last piece. That last question you asked about, you know, what is that ratio look like? And I will tell you if you have 10 salespeople, you need to have at least one sales ops person and I’ll see companies they’ll have 50 salespeople.

They’ll have one it’s like, no, no, no. Now when you’re getting up to 50. You need deal desk, you need sales enablement, you need the tools, you need somebody who’s going to be doing your data analysis. You know, all of a sudden there’s all these different things that come in when you start getting to that sort of mark, where you’re a bigger organization.

And then that just scales up from there. With the enterprise, all the ops folks, just anybody listening right now, who who’s like working in an organization where they’re like a team of one or two for, for, for a group of like 50, they all just like threw up their hands and said, praise, praise, be to Melissa for saying what we all been saying.

Uh, I always tell people that, you know, where the, where the toughest tensions is it having been in leadership roles, just in marketing ops, is that tension between. What I always say is like the highly visible, but more tactical stuff of, you know, emails and ads and doing that kind of stuff. But there’s a whole bunch more that happens.

It’s like the iceberg, right? There’s a whole, but much more that happens under the, under the surface of the water. That is just as important, but not as visible. And it’s also hard to quantify. And I think that’s part of the challenge. Yeah. Getting, having ops seen as a strategic part of whether it’s a revenue organization or a growth organization or whatever that, you know, so that’s my, kind of my view on what that is, but, um, that’s one of the things I think, you know, I think part of why Mike wanted to start this community and do these kinds of things is to try to help elevate the, you know, everyone’s game, if you will.

And being able to, to talk about the strategic importance.

All right. All right. So, um, yeah, let me, if this kind of leads into kind of another question, which is, which is tied to that, as you know, you’re, you’re tied in with your community. You’re tied in with some clients. And probably a number of other people you’re unexperienced. Right. How, how do you see a sense that, uh, you know, marketing ops revenue, ops growth ops, whatever it is, is starting to have a different perception, uh, at the leadership level, in those organizations that may be all the way up to the CEO board level at like startup company.

I think so. I think it’s, I think it has traction. I don’t think it’s taken off yet. Um, the companies that are more progressive are doing these. So as I’m, you know, finding people and like I’m looking for people to join our community, right. I’m like, I wonder if they’re doing that at this company and, you know, just do some LinkedIn searches and you’re looking through titles.

And then I find the ones where I’m like, they’ll say something like integrated operations. I’m going, oh, ding, ding, ding. There’s one to look at and then I’ll talk to them and they’re doing this right. And they’re finding explosive growth off of it. They’re finding they can scale faster. They can move faster and they’re gaining revenue faster.

And, you know, I said this to Mike Rizzo, that revenue was a result of growth, right? It is a, it’s a symptom of growth. It isn’t the root of it. Growth is what the roots are. Right. You do not grow, um, and do that without having infrastructure in place. Right? And the result of that growth is you have happy employees.

You have happy customers, you have revenue growth, you have happy investors. So thinking about it that way. Um, when I talk to people, they’re like, yeah, that’s, that’s why we’re doing this. You know, we see that the operations itself are technical. Typically, you know, they’re process focused, they’re data focused.

But at the end of the day, when we have the strategy discussion about here are the things that we need to be doing, it just changes the game. And they’re getting that seat at the table to talk about strategic. Operations projects, whereas they weren’t able to do that before. And then there are companies that are flailing around with it.

They’re like, Ooh, this sounds exciting. And they’re trying to. And they may be successful for a while, but if you’re not doing it where you’re really starting, you’re, you’re starting with a framework where you’re going to be able to say, you know what, we’re just going to start with an operations team in sales that is also working with the marketing operations team.

Right. That’s what I, that’s the most of what I see. If they’re not thinking about, you know, what we eventually need. Hook into customer operations and hook into channel operations. Right? If they’re not thinking about that and moving in a direction, instruction themselves, to be able to basically envelope that stuff in at a later date, they’re gonna, they’re gonna hit a wall, right?

They’re going to hit the wall. They’re going to say, oh gosh, what do we need to be doing here? And then they’re going to realize, oh, if we just would’ve involved these people in our conversations, when we built this stuff, it would have been much better. Right. And that’s, that’s what you find a lot of it.

It’s just, there’s a lot of. That happens in operations that can be avoided by just this collaboration. It doesn’t necessarily mean a complete organizational shift. It means a mindset shift set shift. Yeah. I, that’s a great, great point. I loved your statement. I, I probably to butcher the, exactly what you said, but I think you said something like revenue is.

Symptoms, not the right word, but an outcome from growth. And I think that that really helps the distinction. I think of what you were talking about between revenue ops and growth, bounce rate growth ops broader has a broader view of. The overall growth of the company and revenue is just sort of one of the things that should just come out of that.

Um, very interesting take on it. So there, you know, I mentioned Naomi, Lou was one of our normal co-host here, but she did have a question for you that is somewhat specific and would love to get your thought on this. And it has to do. Yeah, some companies have a product or services includes professional services that are either, you know, part of it, or also kind of like an add on that you can get.

And she has seen, um, a few places where the, that professional services function is actually rolled up into a revenue ops or some other ops team, as opposed to kind of being part of whatever product team or whatever. Um, she was just curious if you’ve seen that before and if you have you, have you, have you seen them work well, not well kind of, again, kind of a very specific question.

I don’t know if we, for some reason we lost your audio there and Melissa,

well, so she has nothing to say. No, sorry. Folks. Technical glitch looks like we lost, uh, Melissa’s audio. Let’s continue on.

Yup. Yup. So a fun fact about me. Can you guys hear me?

Can you hear me? Okay. Yeah. Okay. So fun fact fun fact. I live on the backside of Pendleton down in Southern California, and it seems that when they do, um, tactical training, like they’re doing today, this happens with our phones and our internet. So I apologize. But so back to center on this one, I was saying about the professional services and that rolling up.

That’s a strange decision. I don’t know why somebody would do that. I would think that that would fall more on an enablement and onboarding. Um, professional services is not. It’s not case handling, right. It’s not customer success. It’s literally delivering a service. So for that to Senator rev ops is a little strange to me, for sure.

Um, I would think that that would sit under a professional services organization with a leader and that there’d be operations around that, but it wouldn’t be reporting into a Varage rev ops team that kind of doesn’t make logical sense to me to be blunt. That’s okay. Blunt is good. I think, I think the, the role Michael, correct me if I’m wrong, it rolled, ultimately rolled into a, maybe like a CRO function or something like that.

Um, and I think that was interesting. I don’t want to misspeak, but I’m pretty sure with a pretty great certainty that ours rolls into our chief customer officer role. Um, So that that’s where it sits with us. Um, it’s a customer function. You’re delivering to a customer. Uh, whereas you’re selling to a customer or you’re marketing to a customer, right.

What’s the verb that’s being used. I like to use that as my way of defining things. Right. What do you, what’s your main goal of something and that’s what it is, right? This, this whole CXO thing is hilarious to me what letter’s going to get headed in the next, um, what is it going to stand for and how confused are we going to be about it for how long?

So, yeah, that one definitely would seem to me that would be under like a chief customer officer, but a revenue officer. Again, you know, you said something earlier, it’s kind of selfish, right? It’s it’s about revenue and in a service function, it’s all about the customer. So that’s why it may make sense to you.

That when you’re delivering something to a customer, especially where there is, you know, person to person engagement that you would want that under a customer umbrella, because it would be treated much differently. Yeah, that’s great. Yeah. Kind of, I think we’re kind of close to wrapping up, but I do, I would love to get your take Melissa on, because I think this is a general theme that we’ve had across our different episodes is know for those people who are either in marketing ops or interested in ops roles in general, and specifically revenue ops or growth ops, the way we’ve talked about them today and what, you know, any suggestions you’d have for folks who want to.

You are interested in those kind of roles to kind of, whether it’s to be, you know, individually individual contributor or a leadership role, resources, whatever that you suggest that they go to to kind of make that move. So I’ll say this, I think mentorship and finding people to help you is the best path to take.

And it’s, it’s interesting. People get a little scared of doing this. I think I definitely know, early on in my career it was something I was like, oh my gosh, I’m asking somebody for something and I don’t have anything. They really feel like I’m giving in return. But there people love to help other people.

And if they don’t well shame on them, but, um, helping other people throughout their career. So a couple of things, um, is in getting into the communities, right? The MO Pros community, the growth ops community. Um, you also have rev genius, women in revenue, terrific communities to go into and to join up in each of those have job boards in them.

And they have people to talk to. Right? There’s going to be people. If you pose the question out there, you’re going to find people could also just go on LinkedIn and poke somebody and say, Hey, listen, I’m interested in doing this because I mean, if somebody said to me, Hey, I want to contact you. I want to talk about, you know, white career path.

I’d be like, You know, let’s talk and I’ve done a lot of mentoring and it will say. You know, that’s a starting point. The most important thing to know, and getting into operations is that you have to like data and you have to like detail and those two things. If you hate it, please don’t do it. Cause you will be miserable.

Totally. It will be like the worst thing that you ever did in your life or something like the worst chore that you’re doing every day. Yeah. It’ll, it’ll just make you sick thinking. Oh my gosh. I’d have to wake up and clean data today, you know, and getting started. That’s the starting point. A lot of people come in and, you know, they have them doing data stewardship sort of work and cleaning things and, you know, just very tactical work, but it all leads into understanding things, right?

I mean, you start with data. Process. And you’re like, where does this data come from? And how does it get in? Right. That’s why we start people there. Yeah. And then like, how does it serve the organization? Like if you don’t get excited about a pivot table, it’s probably not, probably not the right place for you to be right.

But I intentionally took on a project recently from someone that doesn’t have time. And I was like, no, I really want to download that data. And I really want. I’m not a data, but I really want to do this so far that I can maybe get some answers and then hand it off to somebody who’s smarter than me. But yeah, I’m really excited about that

because you live in tools. Uh, there’s no doubt about that. Even if you’re building process, you’re going to do, do you use tools to build your process? Uh, you know, you’re going to need to be okay with, you know, using all different sorts of things at a different time. Because there are so many tools across all of these functions at that at any given point, like especially going clients, a client and not being a full-time employee at a company, I get so much exposure to so many different tools and you learn so much doing that.

It’s very overwhelming. There’s no doubt about it. So it doesn’t matter if you’re year one in your career. You’re five, you’re 10 I’m over 20. I still get overwhelmed at times from the tools, but it’s a necessary part of the job. Frankly love it, but it can get overwhelming. So definitely need to know that as well.

Well, we had an episode one or two ago that was specifically about what, what, what is included in marketing tech? Because I think those of us who have been here a while, I had a certain view of it in this report that came out really broadened it. Right. So all the way down to things like Excel or. Google sheets or whatever that you think of as a tool, but maybe not part of your MarTech stack, so to speak.

So I think that’s right. There’s always new stuff. Any, any, uh, last minute thoughts or suggestions that you guys either want to share before we kind of wrap things up? I just have one last question. It’s it’s a little, it’s a little self-serving for you, Melissa, for, and self-serving for MO Pros, I think, but.

Uh, I’m on a mission to try to define, um, what it means to be a certified marketing operations professional. And I would, I would love to hear your thoughts on what you think it means to be a truly certified marketing operations. Yeah, I think, um, I think of things in these buckets all the time as people process technology.

And so if you’re certified in doing this, you need to be at a certain level right. In each of those areas. So from a people would be. Project management and collaboration and, and that management piece of just not managing the work, but managing team members and managing up. I think that’s very important to, to get a handle on that and, um, some coaching on managing conflict because there w there’s conflict with priorities all the time.

So I think that’s one the next with, um, processes. Having all the different processes down, right? What’s the process for MQL. What’s the process for handing leads over to sales and all the different subsets that are in there. Right. So understanding. The th the process across different types of marketing tactics and different deliverability channels that are out there.

Um, and it doesn’t mean all of them, but really understanding, um, how that works. Right. So asking somebody the question of, you know, what would you do to, um, To implement, uh, a lead to sales funnel for MQs. Right? I would think that somebody who’s a marketing ops professional absolutely knows needs to know how to do that.

And then from a technology perspective, I think there’s a couple of things there, right? There’s a lot of different technologies, but we know. And the core technologies are typically, you’re going to find, you know, Pardot, Salesforce, marketing cloud, you’re going to find Marquetto Eloqua, HubSpot. You know, there’s, there’s so many to lists on there, but you know, having at least one of those tools where they’re certified on it, um, Or they have a lot of experience using it because I’ll tell you I don’t go and get my certifications on Marquetto and it’s because I don’t have time, but I also have been doing, you know, Marquetto for as long as it’s been around.

So it’s kinda like what’s the point. Um, and Salesforce, or, you know, Microsoft dynamics, they definitely should have a CRM certification as well as an. And also, um, on just the marketing cloud piece in Salesforce, even if you’re not using that, but how campaigns work and how leads and contacts work. So I think if you took all of those three things together, that to me would be the right makeup of how I would, um, coach and certify somebody on marketing operations.

Very good. I appreciate that. Thank you. And Melissa, this has been fantastic. Really appreciate you joining us today. Where can people find you? Not like where you are physically, but yeah. Yeah. So you can find me I’m on LinkedIn. I’m also in the growth ops community.org, um, in our slack. Uh, and community there.

Um, those are probably the two best ways to find me. And then, um, feel free to email me. It’s uh, Melissa, I mean, L I S S a at navigate and is a Nancy, a V I G a T E C g.com. And I’m happy to answer questions and again, I put it out there. If someone’s looking for questions about their career and needs some help, I am here to help.

Fantastic. Awesome. This is great. So thank you, Melissa. Thank you. My thanks for all the people who put in some great questions in the chat. Um, it was really, um, saying to have that if you, uh, as always, if you have suggestions or requests for future topics or guests, let us know, you can find, um, all of us, my Naomi, me.

Uh, LinkedIn, you can also go to the MO Pros dot com T a T M O P R O s.com. And they either joined the community for not, and join us in slack. Our next episode is actually scheduled or will be scheduled soon if it’s not online yet, but is planned for March 25th at 12:00 PM. Pacific time. It’s a little bit later than it today.

And we’re going to have a spent guests. There’ll be Jen Spencer. Who’s recently promoted to CRO at smart bug media. So we’re really looking forward to that. We learned a little bit about different career paths, um, and as always, you know, send us your feedback, share this. Uh, we are here for you with that.

It’s a wrap. Thanks everyone. Thanks everybody. Bye-bye thanks.