Director of Marketing Strategy & Operations | Martech Leader | Speaker

Author and speaker. Co-host of the Humans of Martech Podcast.

Subscribe to the Marketing Operations Leader newsletter for MOPs strategies and insights every week: https://darrellalfonso.substack.com/

Highlights: 
- Ranked as one of the Top Marketers in the US by Propolis 2022
- Named one of the "Top Martech Marketers to Follow" 2020 by Martech Alliance 
- Keynote speaker for Martech Conference and Get Stacked B2B Marketing Conference 2021
- Awarded Fearless Marketer 2018 
- Marketo Champion 2018 and 2019 
- VP of Communications American Marketing Association - 2017-2019
- Marketo User Group Leader 2017-2019
- Leading Program Manager for Connect@Amazon (35,000 member Amazon organization)
- Frequent Martech Speaker and Author 
- Marketo and Salesforce Certified 

Posts are my own and do not reflect the views of my current or former employers.

Darrell Alfonso

I’ve joined Impellam Group as Marketing Operations Leader!

Not every role works out the way you expect. What matters is finding the right place to do meaningful work with the right people.

Excited for what’s ahead and for the opportunity to build with this team.

Marketing Ops Town Hall is this week! 

"What the best marketing ops team do in January" 

Hear from experts like Mike Rizzo Audrey Harze ✨ Dr. Agness Mnena Gaadi, MBA, DBA AJ Navarro Michael Hartmann on how you can get a great start for the year. 

Sign up for free, link in the comments! 

#marketing #martech #marketingoperations

★ Human-Centered Operations Leader, Instructional Design, Instructor, Author, Speaker, Education and Lifelong Learning Advocate. Dedicated to Advancing Women in Leadership ★

Short summary:
My work involves creating and delivering educational experiences to help people grow their careers and businesses using the lessons I learned from building an agency from the ground up as employee #1. I also create plans, processes, and programs such as a knowledge management program, an award-winning comprehensive employee onboarding program, and an award-winning referral partner program that generated 45% of company revenue. I am currently creating courses for Maven, Teachable, and HubSpot Academy. I am also writing a book on RevOps to combine a love of research, writing, and lifelong learning.


More context:
I spent several years learning executive leadership skills in my operations career at Remotish, a RevOps agency serving B2B SaaS companies using HubSpot, which also aligned with my purpose of advancing women in leadership (Remotish is women-owned-and-led).

I have very diverse career experience, which helps me see the big picture, quickly thinking many steps and scenarios ahead, while being detail-oriented. Creative problem-solving and clarity are my superpowers – I can generate surprising ideas with an unconventional perspective, and clearly explain the steps to make those ideas into reality. 

Career Journey: 
1. Graphic designer / art director, mostly magazines, with an art & journalism degree 
2. Photography piqued my interest while directing photoshoots, which led back to school 
3. Career 2 was a photographer and entrepreneur  
4. My favorite part of running the business was marketing, inspiring a career change
5. MBA in digital marketing to help my career move further and faster
6. Starting at Chief Martech Officer (Remotish) in a client-facing role that led to the fast track to management
7. Discovering part of what I was doing my whole career was Operations 
8. Creating educational content to help others learn these operations & career lessons faster than I did (internal training programs, on-demand and live cohort courses, templates, workbooks, and more)


Resources for finding your superpowers and purpose: 
1. howtofascinate.com (My advantages: prestige, innovation, and passion) 
2. 16personalities.com has an eerily accurate personality test (INTJ Architect) 
3. startwithwhy.com first helped me find “what” I enjoy: creating, improving, or discovering/exploring

Jen Bergren, MBA

I began watching #MOpsApalooza recordings, starting with: Taking Mops to the Moon: A C-Suite Perspective, with Terri Avnaim, Carla Fitzgerald, Amy Holtzman, and moderated by Grant Johnson. 

Linkedin limits character count, so I’ll choose just a few questions.

How should CMOs coach marketing ops pros who want to take on more strategic roles?

Terri said to expose yourself as much as possible to the other areas of marketing. And always be asking the why behind the projects you're working on so you get more of the business-centric context.

Carla said to focus on ‘what problem are we trying to solve today?’ so leadership sees you as someone who helps get to the goal. Marketing ops has a tendency to think all problems are solved by technology. But consider a number of different capabilities as solutions, and the way all the components fit together cross functionally.

Amy said to think beyond marketing. Earlier in a career, we think about the impact we have ON marketing. But marketing fits into the much bigger picture of business strategy. Think about who is benefiting from this project? Why is the company doing this and how does my part fit in?


What’s the right balance between speed and structure in operations?

Amy said it depends on what the project and the ask is. Underlying infrastructure that deeply impacts the business has to be incredibly well thought out, and integrated with the bigger picture, and those things take time. Other projects we just need to get out the door, perfect isn’t required, it won’t have a bigger impact, so speed is more important.

Carla said it depends on the maturity and size of the organization, Early stage companies rely on speed because they are trying to establish themselves in the market. The larger and more mature orgs can’t scale, are spinning wheels if they don't focus on structure.

Terri said it depends on if it needs to be repeatable. Marketing ops rarely works on a one-and-done project, almost everything is a repeatable process, where structure needs to come before speed.


What challenges have you faced when trying to align marketing ops across departments?

Carla said what’s harder is getting what they do elevated at a strategic level so people can appreciate and understand how valuable that work is and not take it for granted.

Terri said a common tension point is with finance. Finance thinks if you can make it work in a spreadsheet, why can’t marketing make it work in the real world? She’s spending time educating finance about the length of the sales cycle because they think she’s spending this money in March and getting the opportunities in March.

Amy said it depends where marketing ops sits. Sometimes there is a need to align with marketing. Sometimes there is a greater need to align with other ops teams. Collaboration & sharing DOCUMENTATION 🎉 become really important. Legal can be hard to align with, since our industry and tools move faster than legal may understand.

Thank you all! #MOPZA25

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The Battle

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Engagements

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Performance Score.css-goub6s{font-size:var(--chakra-fontSizes-md);font-weight:500;color:var(--chakra-colors-gray-600);display:block;margin-top:var(--chakra-space-1);}Darrell Alfonso's LinkedIn Performance

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