GTM Solutions Architect for B2B SaaS

Defined by adaptability, integrity, and curiosity, I approach problems with a strategic mindset that drives meaningful results.As a seasoned marketing leader, I transform go-to-market strategies by fostering collaboration, leveraging AI-powered solutions, and equipping teams with actionable data insights. My ability to simplify complex processes and technology has consistently enabled double-digit revenue growth and competitive advantages at private equity and VC-backed B2B SaaS organizations.

Ian Shields

Mike Rizzo

When it comes to Community and Marketing Ops, I'm your huckleberry. Community-Led Founder of MarketingOps.com and MO Pros® - the community for Marketing Operations Professionals

Mike Rizzo is a career marketing operations professional passionate about using a people-first approach to building scalable and efficient solutions to the challenges faced by marketing, business operations, and client success teams. 

With his extensive background in marketing Mike helped build, launch, manage and optimize Mavenlink's first user community and Client Advisory Board programs.

In 2017 he also founded the growing community of MO Pros - a place where thousands of Marketing Operations Professionals connect, collaborate and help elevate the practice of Marketing Ops. He is also the co-host of the podcast called Ops Cast.

As the founder of MarketingOps.com, Mike is taking a community-led approach to building a platform purpose-built to elevate Marketing Operations Professionals.

Founder

The number one community for Marketing Operations Professionals. 

I don’t know about you, but I have always found it really hard to find other Marketing Operations Pros to network with both locally and online.

So in January 2017, I started a Slack channel dedicated to connecting with Marketing Operations Professionals.

Today we're a growing community of wicked smart Marketing Operations Professionals who love learning and collaborating with each other.

You can join us here: https://www.themopros.com/join

I'll be hosting "connected events" to bring the community together at the events you're already attending. 

Will you be at any of these events? If so, tell me which event(s), and I'll add you to the meetup list so you can find peers you know, reconnect with old friends, and network!

- B2BMX
- Adobe Summit
- INBOUND
- Demand & Expand

Where else will you be? Let's bring the members together to connect, learn, and grow!

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Founding Member

Stack Moxie Industry Advisor

Growth Master Certification

MO Pros Ambassador

HubSpot Sales Software Certified

HubSpot Design Certification

HubSpot Certified

Inbound Marketing Certification

Buyer Behavior

GrowthHackers University

International Marketing

Marketing For Entrepreneurs

Marketing Information Technology

Marketing Research Methods

At CSUF I mostly stuck to business and technology. I took courses in entrepreneurship, digital marketing, international business and the standard business economics and statistics. My education taught me that I'm a very analytical personality with a knack for understanding & solving technical problems.

I built out a new website for Orange Logic in 10 days using the HubSpot platform... It was only a start but it was an important step to getting our marketing department and brand off the ground.

Orange Logic Website Launch (10 Days)

As part of the BedrockData article on HubSpot Power Users, I sat down with Zak Pines, to share my story on how we use HubSpot and give my perspective on best practices.

HubSpot Power User Interview

Built out their LinkedIn Corporate page, updated the content regularly, Consultation on how to implement strategic LinkedIn campaigns.

US Claim Solutions - LinkedIn

Announcing our newest client. US Claim Solutions. They came to us under the name “Church and Company” seeking a new direction.

InDygital guided them to their new brand and a new look. Check it out

US Claim Solutions

InDygital Is proud to announce one of it’s newest clients: Backyard Mary!

Our team put together the web design and marketing campaign to help them as their business continues to grow. 

Connect with them on LinkedIn (here: http://www.linkedin.com/profile/view?id=132046186)

Backyard Mary

The first accomplishment was launching the new website in less than 2 weeks. The next accomlishments were achieved in less than 6 months: 

Increased lead generation by 650%
157% Increase in Website Sessions compared to prior year (199% compared to old site)
154% Increase in User visits compared to prior year (191% compared to old site)
188% Increase in Page Views compared to prior year (237% compared to old site)
10% Increase in pages/session compared to prior year

Orange Logic Website

When it comes to Community and Marketing Ops, I'm your huckleberry. Community-led founder and CEO of MarketingOps.com and MO Pros® -- where 20K+ Marketing Operations Professionals engage and learn weekly.

MarTech's marketing operations experts to follow | MarTech

Volunteer for CSUF Business Entrepreneurship Course. We work with 5 students and a small business to help get that business' marketing campaign or product off the ground.

Like speed dating, with only 60 seconds each, I (along with a room full of other judges) hear amazing ideas from students whose ages ranged from Middle School to University. Then, I had the very difficult job of picking just 4 from each age group to proceed to the next round of judging.

Acting as an advocate and ambassador for the MO Pros community of over 1800 Marketing Operations Professionals. 

CEO of MarketingOps.com and curator of the MO Pros® private network - where 4,000+ marketing and revenue ops professionals architect revenue growth. Because every GTM engineer needs an architect.

Thanks for joining our exclusive live broadcast. Feel free to share your questions and interact with other participants in the chat.

If 2025 gave Marketing Ops a future, 2026 will demand ownership.

Here’s my prediction:

By the end of 2026, companies that treat their GTM stack like a product will outperform those that have siloed ownership of tools .

Not because they bought better software.

But because they put the right leaders in charge of designing it.

The market is rallying around the idea of GTM Engineers.

And that’s progress.

But engineering alone doesn’t transform a business.

Architecture does.

And the leaders best equipped to step into that role are already inside most B2B organizations:

They come from Marketing Operations.

MOps leaders understand:

→ How data moves across the entire GTM motion
→ Where systems break when teams optimize in silos
→ How tooling, process, and people actually intersect
→ Why execution without design creates downstream revenue drag

That perspective is earned.

Without GTM Architecture:

— AI accelerates chaos instead of outcomes
— Teams solve local problems while breaking global strategy
— The GTM stack drifts further from business intent

In 2026, AI will make execution cheap, ideas abundant, and automation accessible.

What will remain scarce is judgment, system design, and ownership.

That’s why Marketing Ops evolves again.

Not into “more technical.”

Into true GTM product leadership.

Here’s the message I want executives and boards to hear,

If you want a successful deployment of modern GTM technology,

You don’t start with tools.

You start by empowering or hiring someone who can own the GTM product.

And more often than not, that person:

Came up through Marketing Ops. Knows the system end-to-end and is ready to lead transformation, not just support it

This community is ready.

Our members are ready to:

→ Own the GTM tech stack like a product
→ Manage it with a roadmap and intention
→ Architect it to influence real business outcomes

Tech-enabled GTM. Architected like a product. Scaled with AI and led by Marketing Ops.

That’s the next operating model.

The fastest path to GTM transformation in 2026 is already on your org chart, if you know where to look.

Most people see Marketing Ops as the team that “keeps things running.”

That framing misses what actually creates leverage.

Give an artist a canvas and paint, and they create.

Give a Marketing Ops professional a GTM stack, and see what happens.

Modern B2B stacks are full of powerful products and capabilities.

But those products don’t tell you how to deploy them.

They don’t understand motion, nuance, or tradeoffs.

And spoiler alert: AI doesn’t understand that either.

That’s where Ops comes in.

The real work of Ops starts when capability meets context.

When the process breaks, the data doesn’t line up, or the system behaves in a way no one expected, Ops steps in, not to follow a script, but to apply judgment.

→ Noticing how a single field change quietly rerouted leads for weeks
→ Tracing why attribution shifted after a “small” campaign tweak
→ Realizing the workflow didn’t fail, it executed exactly as designed, and that design is now misaligned with reality

This is the work people outside the role rarely see.

It’s not admin work.

It’s systems thinking under pressure.

You’re translating intent into logic.

Balancing speed against risk.

Activating the right capability for the right GTM motion without breaking everything downstream.

This is also why integration matters so much, not as a buzzword, but as a survival trait.

As Scott Brinker put it when sharing insights from our latest research:

“After being burned way too many times by martech purchases that made a great case in isolation but failed to launch because they didn’t play well with the company’s overall tech stack, make no mistake: the decision-makers are going to pay very close attention to the assessment of their marketing ops team.”

That line lands because it’s a lived experience.

Ops leaders aren’t evaluating tools in isolation.

They’re evaluating how those tools behave once they collide with reality.

And yes, many Ops leaders already build roadmaps.

They do document.

They do think like product managers.

But too often, there’s no time to surface that work because the system is already on fire.

That’s the real opportunity.

When you give your Ops lead the space to run the GTM stack like a product with ownership, roadmap clarity, and outcome-based priorities, you stop reacting to breakage and start designing for scale.

And when someone asks, “Why is this happening?” followed immediately by,

“What breaks if we change it?”

That’s not troubleshooting.

That’s GTM product thinking in action.

If you’ve ever looked at your systems and thought, this shouldn’t be this fragile, you already understand the value Ops brings.

The GTM engine runs better because of that instinct, whether it’s visible or not.

Martech Analyst & Advisor | Ex-HubSpot VP Platform Ecosystem | “Godfather of Martech” – AdAge

High-maturity teams don’t win by ripping out systems every year or chasing whatever tool just raised a Series C.

They win through small, disciplined operational decisions that compound quietly over time.

Our research made this pattern impossible to ignore.

The teams that consistently outperform don’t look busier.

They look calmer. 

More deliberate.

More intentional about where effort goes and where it doesn’t.

Here’s what that discipline looks like in practice:

1) Fewer dashboards. Sharper decisions.

Advanced teams don’t measure everything.

They curate a small set of dashboards that map directly to decisions someone is accountable for.

Anything that doesn’t drive action gets retired.

That clarity removes noise and builds trust in the numbers that remain.
2) Feedback loops replace static reporting.

High-performing orgs revisit reporting frameworks on a cadence — usually quarterly.

They validate definitions, challenge assumptions, and ask a simple question:

“Does this still help someone decide faster?”

When the answer is no, it changes.

3) Intake is treated as a design problem, not a request queue.

Mature teams don’t accept “can you build a report?” at face value.

They capture context:

What decision is this meant to support?

What changes if the metric moves?

That upfront clarity prevents wasted work and aligns output to outcomes.

4) Time-to-insight becomes a managed metric.

Leading teams actively track how long it takes to surface usable insight after an event occurs.

Faster insight cycles mean faster experiments, quicker pivots, and less reliance on gut feel.

5) Progress is made visible, internally.

Instead of big transformation decks, advanced teams maintain simple internal scorecards: data quality, system health, adoption, and reliability.

This creates momentum, alignment, and shared ownership over what’s improving and what isn’t.
The pattern underneath all of this is discipline.

Not a dramatic change. Not heroics. 

A small set of repeatable improvements, reinforced quarter after quarter.

Over time, those small wins become muscle memory.

Muscle memory becomes standard practice.

And standard practice becomes a real competitive advantage.

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2025 was the year I stopped talking about GTM tech as “the stack.”

And started calling it what it actually is:

A product.

Early in the year, I introduced this idea to the MarketingOps(.com) community:

Your GTM technology isn’t infrastructure. It’s a product you’re responsible for designing, managing, and evolving.

The response was immediate.

A lot of head nodding.

A lot of “this finally explains why everything feels broken.”

That moment unlocked something bigger.

If GTM tech is a product, then someone has to own the roadmap.

Someone has to design for outcomes, not requests.

Someone has to think beyond tools and into systems.

That’s when it became clear our mission had to expand.

At MarketingOps(.com) and inside the MO Pros® community, we are committed to doing a few important things:

1. Establishing a certification path for the next generation of Marketing Operations professionals (we’re launching the first cohort soon!)


2. Giving the market language to understand the real value of this role

Not as support or automation.

But as GTM Product Managers and GTM Product Architects.

We said it plainly:

We’re not GTM Engineers. We’re GTM Architects.

The excitement around GTM Engineers is real but incomplete.

An engineer without an architect just scales fragmentation.

What’s been missing in modern GTM isn’t effort or tooling.

It’s an intentional design.

2025 didn’t give Marketing Ops a name. It gave it a future.

A future where:

• AI amplifies expertise instead of replacing it
• GTM technology is treated like a product, with ownership and a roadmap
• Marketing Ops directly influences revenue outcomes, not just execution

For practitioners, 2025 delivered something rare:

A clear vision to move toward.

And a real opportunity to step into GTM leadership.

2026 is where that vision gets operationalized.

Where GTM architecture becomes a leadership mandate and where Marketing Ops doesn’t just support the system, it owns the product behind revenue.

We’re just getting started.

Over the last five years of building MarketingOps(.com) and the MO Pros® community, I’ve learned something that changed how I think about all of this.

A community operates like a system.

The clearer we are about our plans, the better the outcomes are for our members.

And the more our members participate early and consistently, the clearer we become about what to build next.

It’s a constant input → output → feedback loop.

We’re not venture-backed.

Everything we build, events, education, programs, it all depend on our ability to forecast demand, allocate resources, and invest ahead of time.

When engagement shows up early:

→ Planning gets sharper
→ Investments get bolder
→ Experiences get better for everyone

When participation shows up late or inconsistently, the system goes reactive. Not because anyone did something wrong, but because systems behave exactly that way.

Here’s the part I want to say to this community.

Belonging is not passive.

It’s created through shared ownership.

And yes, especially for those of us in Marketing Ops, there’s an uncomfortable truth here:

We trained ourselves to expect value to be free, instant, and disposable.

Give an email. Get the asset. Move on.

That model works for campaigns.

It doesn’t build communities.

Communities grow through commitment, trust, and repeat participation.

Depth matters more than audience size.

Predictability matters more than hype.

When you lean in early by joining, buying a ticket, contributing ideas, or simply showing up, you’re not just consuming what’s been built.

You’re actively shaping what comes next.

That’s when the system stabilizes.

That’s when quality compounds.

That’s when everyone wins.

The strongest things we’ve built here were never built for people.

They were built with them.

And that’s the energy we’re carrying forward.

So, if you’ve ever wondered how to contribute... this is it!

The core responsibility of RevOps is owning the full revenue lifecycle.

Yet most teams can’t answer a basic question with confidence:

Where did this lead drop off and why?

That’s not a skill problem.

It’s a system design problem.

Because when you zoom out and look at the full inbound journey, from the moment someone fills out a form,

through enrichment…
through routing…
through handoff…
to whether a meeting actually happens or quietly falls apart, 

You realize how many decisions are involved, and how many tools touch the process.

But most “best-in-class” routing and scheduling tools were never built to show that full story.

➡ Routing tools show routing.
➡ Scheduling tools show scheduling.

And everything in between, or downstream or sideways… is left to inference, workarounds, and guesswork.

That’s the visibility gap RevOps ends up living in.

So teams compensate.

→ They bolt on Rattle to watch SLAs.
→ They wire up Zapier just to log events.
→ They build spreadsheets to track handoffs.
→ They may write internal scripts to answer basic questions like:

“Where did this lead stall?”
“Why did this meeting never happen?”
“Who actually owned this at the moment it broke?”

By the time you’re done, instead of running a system, RevOps is chasing breadcrumbs across four to six tools just to reconstruct reality.

And when visibility breaks, trust follows.

Reps stop believing the system.
Leaders stop believing the numbers.
Ops gets pulled into constant forensics instead of design.

The more tools you add to see what’s happening,
The harder it becomes to understand what actually happened.

The problem isn’t that routing tools are bad.
Or that schedulers don’t work.

The problem is that visibility was never designed as a first-class outcome.

When routing, scheduling, enrichment, SLAs, and handoffs all live in separate products, no one owns the full lifecycle. You just own pieces of it.
And pieces don’t tell stories.

Systems do.

This is why Default always gets my attention.

When the same workflow logic governs enrichment, routing, scheduling, and follow-up, you don’t need a separate monitoring stack just to understand what happened.

You get:
 • One timeline instead of five logs

 • One source of truth instead of stitched explanations

• One answer when someone asks, “Where did this lead die?”

That changes the job of RevOps.

And as a result,

Less detective work and less tool sprawl.

More time designing how the system should behave next time.
Because RevOps maturity is all about building a system where breakage is visible, explainable, and fixable by design.

And until we stop treating visibility as something we bolt on after things break, we’ll keep buying more tools just to see what the last ones missed.

#leadrouting #gtmsystems #gtmops #revops #DefaultPartner #mops

Default

Thinking about the future of MOpza (MOps-Apalooza)

See the thing about having a palooza of any kind is that it’s all about the mix and the festival. 

I want to see what the festival needs more of, or, at the very least, what it would benefit from.

So with that…

What topics/tracks do you want to see at MOpza’26 to expand your knowledge and learning in modern GTM?

One of the biggest misconceptions about data maturity is that progress comes from jumping ahead.

Advanced analytics. New attribution models. More tools.

Our research shows the opposite.

The biggest gains come from tightening the fundamentals and stacking them deliberately. 

High-maturity teams don’t move faster because they have better dashboards. They move faster because fewer things break underneath them.

Here’s what actually matters as organizations climb the maturity curve:

1. Data quality is the floor, not the ceiling

Across every maturity level, data quality remains the primary constraint.

58% of respondents identified it as their top challenge.

That’s not a tooling problem. It’s a discipline problem.

When field definitions drift, sync logic fails silently, or enrichment runs inconsistently (or worse, on a record that’s already been enriched), every downstream output degrades reporting, forecasting, and decision-making, included. 

Clean data isn’t a phase you “complete.” It’s an operational standard you enforce.

2. Integration determines speed

Once data quality stabilizes, integration becomes a force multiplier.

High-maturity organizations are far more likely to operate on connected systems, CRM, MAP, analytics, enrichment with shared definitions, and predictable data flow. 

That connectivity reduces reconciliation work, shortens time-to-insight, and lowers the cost of every decision.

Disconnected systems don’t just slow reporting; they slow execution.

3. Reporting must drive action, not awareness

Mature teams don’t measure more. They measure with intent.

Their reporting frameworks answer three questions consistently:

What changed?
Why did it change?
What decision does this inform?

If a dashboard doesn’t influence behavior, it’s operational noise. High-maturity teams prune aggressively and protect clarity.

4. Marketing Ops holds the connective tissue

This shift doesn’t happen accidentally.

Marketing Ops sits at the intersection of data standards, system architecture, reporting logic, and business priorities. 

Our research confirmed this reality: nearly 80% of participants said MOps either owns or contributes directly to their organization’s data and analytics strategy.

That positioning makes MOps responsible for coherence.

Standards stick when one function is accountable for enforcing them.

5. Metrics mature when they map to outcomes

Early-stage teams often optimize surface-level metrics: opens, clicks, volume.

High-maturity teams align measurement to revenue velocity, customer value, and operational efficiency. 

The shift is all about relevance.

Metrics earn trust when they explain the business, not just the campaign.
The pattern underneath it all

Mature organizations don’t chase everything at once.

They choose fewer priorities, assign clear ownership, and build repeatable processes around them.

Over time, those choices stop feeling tactical and start becoming a structural advantage.

Data Governance is so important folks - join in on the research here.

🚨 Let’s be honest…

You probably don’t 100% trust your data.
And you’re not alone.

As AI continues to infiltrate workflows and expectations rise for compliance, data accuracy, and governance, we’re all under pressure to clean up our data act.

That’s why we teamed up with our friends at Integrate to launch the State of Data & Governance Survey 📊

✅ Just 6 minutes to complete
🎁 $5 Amazon gift card for the first 100 respondents
📥 Access to the 2026 Benchmark Report

Take the survey, share your reality, and help the MOps community level up 👉 https://lnkd.in/gpnDmeuU
#marketingops

Open article: Skip survey header by survey.alchemer.com

Couldn’t agree more. And Rachel is the best!

founder & ceo @ share your genius | it’s never just a podcast™ | mom 3x

If your 2026 podcast goals still sound like:

“Launch a podcast so we can say we have one.”
“Hit 10k downloads.”
“Book big-name guests.”

You’re already behind.

Those goals might look good on a slide deck, but they’re not what builds an audience, and they’re definitely not what drives growth.

Here’s what will get you there:
1️⃣ Design for depth, not reach.
Downloads don’t equal demand. The brands winning next year will measure resonance, the quality of engagement, not the quantity of ears.

2️⃣ Think content ecosystem, not channel.
Your podcast isn’t a silo. It’s the foundation for repurposing, storytelling, and social connection. If it’s not fueling the rest of your content, it’s underperforming.

3️⃣ Prioritize consistency over virality.
The loudest voices might get noticed first, but the most consistent ones earn trust, and trust is what converts in 2026.

4️⃣ Build community, not just listeners.
Podcasting isn’t about broadcasting; it’s about belonging. The smartest brands will turn listeners into advocates by making them part of the conversation.

The podcasting playbook is evolving.

If your goals don’t evolve with it, you’ll be chasing numbers while your competitors build movements.

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Ian Shields

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