The Pressure Facing Today’s CMOs
Chief Marketing Officers face unprecedented challenges in today’s business environment. According to Adweek, CMOs have the shortest tenure of all C-suite positions, with their average tenure decreasing from 4.1 years to 3.9 years. This tremendous pressure comes from the need to align with other leaders. They must deliver what the organization requires. At the same time, they adapt to constantly shifting market trends. These trends focus on customer activation, growth, and technology adoption, specifically AI.
No two companies are the same. Each industry has unique characteristics when it comes to sales approaches. It’s no wonder that when organizations introduced Marketing Operations roles, there has been little consistency in what these positions entail.
What Marketing Operations Actually Does
Marketing Operations teams are currently responsible for marketing technology management and administration, system integrations, campaign management, marketing analytics for forms and email marketing (data from MAP systems), process management of requests, lead scoring, nurture campaign programming, and pushing marketing qualified leads to business development and sales teams. These individuals are highly tactical, systems-oriented, and data-driven.
As marketing professor Peter Drucker famously stated, “What cannot be measured cannot be improved “which is precisely why Marketing Operations emerged. Historically, marketing measured its impact through market research or surveys. With the advent of marketing technology and companies’ ability to own their marketing data, CMOs and corporate leadership have realized that there’s now a quicker and cheaper way to measure impact. No longer do we need expensive research projects or surveys; we can track campaign impacts with our own systems.
The Communication and Alignment Challenge
While measurement is one of Marketing Operations’ most important contributions, the pressures CMOs face mean that what they need to measure and report varies significantly from company to company. CMOs need clear information to support the narrative of their strategic plans, and most organizational leadership structures follow a top-down approach where Chiefs speak with direct reports more frequently than individual contributors or managers.
Information important to leadership strategy needs to circulate back to the CMO, which can become a game of telephone depending on how far the Marketing Operations team sits from the CMO. This distance from decision-makers also makes storytelling more difficult for Marketing Operations professionals, as they must adapt their communication to different personas based on their audience and the importance of the information.
The Misalignment Problem
A significant challenge is the potential disconnect between Marketing Operations and Marketing Leadership due to a lack of priority alignment. Depending on organizational distance from the CMO, Marketing Operations teams might not be aware of departmental priorities and achievement challenges.
For example, suppose a CMO needs to grow new customer acquisition by X% in the first quarter, but the Marketing Operations team sees false leads infiltrating forms (bots) or qualified leads from gated materials declining quarter after quarter. In that case, those CMO numbers become unrealistic without new content production and a technology fix. Without communication between execution and strategy, and through all the middlemen, major misalignment occurs.
If Marketing Operations teams don’t know how to frame this information as challenge-solution pairs, marketing leadership will perceive it as complaints rather than serious concerns. Unfortunately, data doesn’t speak for itself; additional context is required for leaders to understand challenges.
How Marketing Operations Teams Can Better Align with CMOs
1. Develop Communication and Storytelling Skills
The first step in working effectively with CMOs is finding common language and storytelling approaches. Marketing Operations professionals must improve their communication and presentation skills to build trust with leadership. The strongest common bond everyone shares is the drive to succeed and help their organization. Marketing Operations individuals are no different.
There are numerous communication frameworks that the team can use. Do think through the different personalities of the audience you might have. One of the most significant challenges is communicating in a style that resonates with the personality of the individual. While this is another topic, I recommend going through the DISC exercise for yourself and others, identifying what your audience is and aligning with that storytelling framework. This might not be the way you usually share a story, but it is the way the recipient will best receive your information.
2. Approach Leadership with Curiosity and Clear Focus
Come to leadership conversations with curiosity and clearly defined outcomes. If something doesn’t make sense to leadership, Marketing Operations professionals should acknowledge this and adjust their communication approach. This awareness strengthens Marketing Operations individuals by highlighting areas where their communication needs improvement.
3. Bridge the Gap Between Data and Strategy
Marketing Operations teams must learn to provide context around data, transforming technical insights into strategic recommendations. This requires developing both soft skills and technical expertise, which may seem counterintuitive for data-driven, process-oriented individuals, but these soft skills unlock true opportunities.
4. Build Trust Through Quick Wins
To gain CMO trust, Marketing Operations teams must proactively identify opportunities and build trust with the CMO and their leadership team. This process varies in complexity depending on organizational size and management structure, but the principle remains constant.
Organizational Size Considerations
Small/Start-up Businesses
For small businesses, introducing Marketing Operations immediately is easier and more impactful. Marketing Operations’ power lies not just in data understanding or technology knowledge, but in the love for solving problems and creating efficient, impactful, and repeatable processes.
Having a right-hand person to the VP of Marketing who helps operationalize and provide information while building organizational team structure helps invest in strategic individuals with significant business impact. Creating early partnerships and leveraging data knowledge, management, and operational efficiency leads to a common language, measurements, and understanding of work impact for all team members, enabling pivots and adjustments when expected outcomes aren’t delivered.
Early Marketing Operations implementation also prevents marketing team silos. Creating transparency systems and connected processes reduces handoff issues and prevents over-asking teams who aren’t expecting work.
While I was at a small business-to-business publication, leading the marketing team, I set the group up to be a matrix organization. This meant that each role we added was taught to the whole team, and if anyone was to leave, other individuals on the team could pick up the task from that position. The power of having the team matrix was that everyone could do what the other was doing, a common language across team members, but unique responsibilities across each team member. The team proved to be very close; everyone was working towards the same goals of success, and support was given to make sure others succeeded. The results included increased revenue year-over-year from our advertising lead generation programs, increased production of webinar and e-book content, and increased reader engagement.
Large/Mature Organizations
In mature organizations with larger teams, disrupting existing processes and introducing incremental efficiencies is very challenging. As the newest department, leaders joining enterprise organizations must demonstrate value to CMOs under significant pressure. These companies have established well-defined go-to-market strategies, sales processes, and systems that have proven successful.
Success in this environment requires multiple layers: executive sponsorship, strong change management, clear understanding of existing processes and systems where inefficiencies exist, and identifying improvement opportunities. A top-down approach works best for operational optimization. Gaining organizational trust requires listening to the executive team to understand where they identify improvement opportunities. Quick wins build trust and support for addressing additional challenges.
Leaders must then work with other department heads to build trust and support, creating efficiencies that allow larger groups to work more seamlessly. This takes longer without executive sponsorship when leaders aren’t incentivized to continue improving department-wide efficiency.
Developing Junior Marketing Operations Professionals
In large enterprise companies, junior Marketing Operations individuals often fall into task-based work like email deployment, nurture programming, and lead scoring, making it challenging to create operational efficiency. While they love operating tools, they need an expanded responsibility scope.
Senior leaders should help junior members learn more about the business by understanding the different roles and responsibilities of team members, such as CRM administration, lead generation, developing ideal customer profiles (ICP), messaging mapping to ICP, lower funnel data, and business intelligence. This keeps teams engaged and better prepared to provide strategic feedback.
Another engagement area is providing context for the technical information they create. That context could be a resharing of a leadership presentation about a campaign that is about to launch, or talking to the junior members through highlights from a leadership conversation about a program they are preparing to launch. Being part of the mission to reach more relevant customers and sharing insights when messages don’t resonate with intended audiences allows junior team members to support adjustments and tweaks with tremendous impact and minimal effort from the broader marketing team.
The Strategic Impact of Well-Executed Marketing Operations
When Marketing Operations is done well, CMOs are powered with information and insights that impact strategic initiatives. Effective Marketing Operations enables leveraging marketing technology data to grow new channels like social media for customer acquisition, identify relevant content based on cross-channel engagement, and increase year-over-year revenue by delivering relevant materials to customers.
Data-driven marketing teams allow CMOs to quickly pivot away from unprofitable customer profiles and adjust market messaging when content isn’t connecting with ideal customer profiles. Having first-party data readily available enables teams to work faster, making execution adjustments to meet expected revenue demands.
Conclusion
Marketing Operations are essential for supporting Chief Marketing Officers by managing technology, data, and processes to drive growth and customer success. Effective Marketing Operations enable data-driven decision-making and operational efficiencies, helping CMOs adapt strategies and achieve measurable results. Success requires addressing alignment and communication challenges across various company sizes and structures through curiosity, clear outcomes, and open communication. When Marketing Operations teams develop both technical expertise and interpersonal skills, they provide timely insights for optimizing channels, content, and messaging, ultimately driving revenue growth and market responsiveness.