In Part 1 of our Data and Analytics study summary, we looked at how maturity shapes data strategy – from ownership and speed to confidence in decisions. But what keeps most teams from getting there?
For many Marketing Ops and RevOps professionals, the challenge isn’t a lack of ambition. It’s the constant drag of day-to-day blockers: unclear ownership, tool sprawl, inconsistent metrics, and data that doesn’t get trusted.
The good news? These friction points are predictable, and in high-maturity organizations, they’re often designed out of the process entirely! Here’s a closer look at this challenge and how it is dealt with based on our study.
This blog series is based on the 2025 Data and Analytics Members-Only Research conducted by us at MarketingOps.com. We aimed to understand how Marketing Ops and RevOps teams are approaching data strategy today, and what separates high-performing organizations from those still finding their footing.
We surveyed and interviewed 200 marketing operations professionals across multiple roles, company sizes, and industries. Participants shared how their teams operate, where they face friction, and which practices help them move faster or align better.
To analyze the findings, we segmented respondents into three levels of maturity:
The segmentation was based on criteria such as:
By comparing these groups, we identified patterns that consistently slow teams down and practices that help the most mature organizations avoid common blockers.
Across the board, six barriers consistently show up in lower-maturity organizations, causing over 25% of our study participants to seriously lag in data maturity. And they rarely appear in isolation. Each one of these factors adds friction that slows teams down:
1. Scattered ownership
In Beginning and Developing organizations, strategy ownership is likely to be shared without clear accountability. Without a lead, strategy slips into maintenance mode, and teams often end up duplicating work or waiting for direction.
Key Answer or Key Solution: Assign one clear owner for data strategy, ideally in Marketing Ops, to eliminate duplication and speed decisions.
2. Disconnected systems
Manual exporting, siloed platforms, and conflicting field names create delays or errors that shake trust in the data. A significant 29.8% of organizations say system integration is still a major obstacle, with a higher incidence among Beginning and Developing cases.
3. Report overload
Low-maturity teams often produce more reports than needed, but fewer decisions are made from them. The focus is on volume, not action, which leads to dashboards that confuse more than they clarify.
4. Unclear business alignment. While Advanced organizations are more likely to align KPIs to company-wide goals, early-stage organizations often report on what is easiest to track, not what drives business decisions.
5. Bandwidth strain
Smaller teams are juggling campaign execution, report requests, system issues, and analytics, all while trying to improve processes with limited time or support.
6. Data quality issues
Poor data quality remains a major issue for most teams, with 60% considering it a continuing challenge. 80% of advanced maturity teams better deal with it by enforcing a data-driven data culture, while only 48% of beginners say the same.
These challenges slow teams down as reporting delays lead to slower pivots and conflicting KPIs muddy cross-functional conversations. And when teams do not trust the numbers and do not agree on what matters, decisions get delayed or second-guessed.
In the end, it is not just a systems problem or a reporting problem. It is a coordination problem, and it shows up in everything from the tech stack to team meetings.
Mature teams don’t necessarily have more tools. They have more clarity. They avoid complexity where it doesn’t help and focus their effort where it drives outcomes. The patterns are clear in our 2025 Data and Analytics research.
Here is what these teams consistently avoid by design:
1. Confusion due to extensive reporting
25% of Advanced and Leading organizations get daily key insights. They streamline dashboards, align metrics to decisions, and avoid reporting for the sake of it. Meanwhile, 9% of other lower-maturity segments get daily insights. Even with a generally lower frequency of reporting, most are unable to effectively use insights.
2. Reactive clean-up
More than half of lower-maturity organizations cited data quality and sync issues as a weekly challenge. In contrast, higher-maturity teams invest early in governance and integration, which reduces the time spent reconciling errors downstream.
3. Fragmented access
Advanced teams are more than twice as likely to have unified data access across functions. This shared visibility improves collaboration across Marketing Ops, Sales Ops, and RevOps, and builds trust in the data itself.
4. Strategy as an afterthought
Leading organizations are nearly three times more likely to say that data plays a direct role in quarterly planning. In lower-maturity organizations, strategy is often defined separately from analytics, which slows down alignment.
5. Tech stack sprawl
High-maturity organizations are more likely to streamline their tools and automate key processes. Instead of layering platforms on top of one another, they design integrated workflows that cut down on manual work and reduce error rates.
6. Inconsistent definitions
Mature teams emphasize data definitions and shared KPIs. This consistency helps teams move faster and avoid unproductive debates about what the data is actually saying.
In short, these teams avoid waste in terms of wasted time, duplicated effort, conflicting numbers, and missed opportunities. And they do it not by working harder, but by working more intentionally. What they don’t do is just as important as what they do!
The leap from reactive to strategic doesn’t start with more dashboards or better tools. It starts by clearing the friction that slows everything down.
Based on what high-maturity teams do differently, here are four steps MOps and RevOps leaders can take right now to shift from maintenance mode to forward momentum:
1. Assign real ownership – not shared responsibility
Choose one team to own the data strategy, even if execution is shared. In high-performing organizations, Marketing Ops increasingly plays this role. Alignment and accountability are much simpler to enforce when the ownership is clear.
2. Streamline before you scale
Before adding more tools or reports, simplify what already exists. Audit your current dashboards, remove redundant metrics, and identify which reports actually drive decisions. This shift reduces noise and improves adoption across the org.
3. Standardize definitions early
Align on key terms like “lead,” “opportunity,” or “marketing-sourced” before you build the reporting infrastructure. Clear definitions reduce the need for reconciliation later and help teams trust the numbers.
4. Build feedback loops, not just reports
Don’t let reporting be a one-way street. Mature organizations regularly review reporting frameworks to make sure insights are timely, relevant, and tied to business outcomes. Set up monthly or quarterly check-ins with cross-functional teams to refine KPIs and retire stale metrics.
These aren’t massive transformations. They are focused moves that create the conditions for better insights and faster execution. They are the everyday choices that build maturity over time.
This blog offers just a slice of what the 2025 Data and Analytics Members-Only Research covers! The full report includes maturity benchmarks, real-world comparisons, and practical steps that can help your team move from friction to focus.
Pro Membership gives you access to the full report, along with invite-only Slack discussions, expert-led webinars, peer-reviewed templates, and tactical playbooks.
Pro+ Membership includes everything in Pro, plus access to advanced workshops, 1:1 mentorship, early research access, and exclusive in-person roundtables.
If you want to align your strategy, systems, and decisions – this is where the real work starts!
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