Mark Kilens

TACK

TACK ⛵️ is a media and go-to-market firm helping startups and scaleups match how they go-to-market to how people buy. Modernizing how businesses go-to-market to create, capture, and convert demand into revenue. 

Companies like Commsor, ZoomInfo, Swoogo, Coursera, Aiven, CloudBees, Audette, Terminus, and more partner with TACK to evolve how they go-to-market using a People-first GTM approach. 

Its mission is to match how companies go-to-market to how people buy by making every experience and interaction with a business more human.

TACK Network is a GTM media network of content and resources all about B2B go-to-market. We produce original shows and authentic stories giving some of the brightest people in B2B go-to-market the support they need to share stories and ideas.

TACK Insider is for marketers and entrepreneurs looking to learn how to go-to-market to match how people buy today. Members learn how to use seven different growth strategies that are all part of the People-first GTM Model.  The membership and community comes with hundreds of resources, weekly masterclasses, and personalized coaching.

TACK GTM is Uber for GTM Leaders. An on demand go-to-market services firm specializing in People-first GTM strategies and services that grow pipeline and revenue. We partner with CEOs, Founders, and Marketing Leaders to design and deploy People-first GTM strategies.

Chart your go-to-market with TACK.

CEO and Co-Founder

Stage 2 Capital

The Stage 2 Capital Catalyst supports early stage B2B software companies in scaling their businesses by combining Venture Capital and Go-To-Market, empowering founders with hands-on coaching from an unrivaled network of go-to-market leaders.

Limited Partner and Advisor

Airmeet

Airmeet helps marketers book more meetings and create pipeline faster using premium webinars and online events. 

Airmeet's Event Experience Cloud is an all-in-one premium webinar and event platform helping B2B businesses generate more pipeline and revenue.

I lead Airmeet’s global marketing team and are working to advance the event-led growth movement.

Chief Marketing Officer

Drift

Content and community are key ingredients to accelerating a business's revenue, delivering more customer value, and building an enduring brand.

My team's partner with Drift's marketing, sales, and customers success teams to develop the right content, programs, and experiences to accelerate revenue, deliver more value to our customers, and grow Drift’s brand.

Get your 100% free Drift Insider account. https://www.drift.com/insider/

Check out a couple of Drift's newest digital books. https://www.drift.com/books/

The Conversational Marketing Blueprint: https://www.drift.com/books/conversational-marketing-blueprint/

The Guide to Conversational ABM: https://www.drift.com/books/conversational-abm/

Learn something new on Drift's blog: https://www.drift.com/blog/

Vice President of Content and Community

HubSpot

I was the VP of Marketing and founder of HubSpot Academy.

HubSpot Academy is a global learning community and platform with millions of people in more than 200 countries.

It’s a tremendous growth driver of demand and interest - signing up and certifying tens of thousands of new HubSot users and community members every month.

We focused on converting free users into software revenue and helped retain and grow that revenue by building onboarding, expansion, and community programs.

I had the honor and privilege to lead a team of extremely passionate, motivated, and intelligent people. 

HubSpot Academy's purpose is to educate and inspire people so that we, together, transform the way the world does business.

We created content and education to teach people the inbound methodology and how to use the HubSpot platform to grow their business.

Vice President of HubSpot Academy

HubSpot Academy was launched in May 2012 after running it as an experiment for 18 months. 

I was responsible for creating the Inbound Methodology with Brain Halligan and Dharmesh Shah. 

I updated the original methodology in early 2018 to HubSpot's new Inbound flywheel model. 

We created content and education to teach people the inbound methodology and how to use the HubSpot platform to grow their business.

HubSpot Academy's purpose is to educate and inspire people so that we, together, transform the way the world does business.

Director of HubSpot Academy

I was a Senior Inbound Marketing Consultant at HubSpot. I worked with B2B and B2C businesses helping them create, execute, and measure their inbound marketing goals and strategies.

Senior Inbound Marketing Consultant

I joined HubSpot as an Inbound Marketing Consultant. I trained businesses how to use HubSpot to get found, convert leads, close leads into customers, and analyze their results.

Inbound Marketing Consultant

SalesQuest

I was responsible for email marketing campaigns, building prospect and customer databases, social media, inbound marketing, lead generation, the website, and helped create new products and services.

Director of Marketing

I managed a team of market research analysts that created and maintained a library of more than 850 Fortune 1000 and Global 500 company profiles. 

I was responsible for all inbound marketing activities, SEO, social media, and marketing campaigns.

Manager, Marketing and Operations

I performed research on Fortune 1000 companies which included investigating their technology implementations, org charts, budgets, financials, and operating models.

Research Analyst

CEO and Co-founder of TACK ⛵️ & ClubPF ⚓️ | People-first GTM Champion

Mark Kilens is the CEO and Co-founder of TACK, a media and go-to-market firm helping startups and scaleups match how they go-to-market to how people buy. TACK modernizes how businesses go-to-market to create, capture, and convert demand into revenue.

TACK helps B2B organizations transform how they grow using its proprietary People-first GTM model and approach. TACK'S mission is to make every experience and interaction with a business more human. Companies like Commsor, Swoogo, ZoomInfo, Casted, and UserGems partner with TACK to unite their go-to-market teams to grow more efficiently and effectively.

He previously was CMO of Airmeet, a leading virtual and hybrid event platform. He oversaw Airmeet’s global marketing team responsible for brand, demand, lifecycle, and product marketing.

Before that he was the VP of Content and Community at Drift where he led the brand, content, creative, and events teams. He oversaw Drift’s community, Drift Insider, which has 65,000+ members, and Drift’s FLASH, RevGrowth, and HYPERGROWTH events.

Prior to joining Drift, he served as VP of Marketing and founder of HubSpot Academy. As a former customer, Mark joined HubSpot in 2010 where he spent two years working with thousands of HubSpot customers to scale their inbound strategy. 

From there, he went on to build HubSpot Academy from the ground up, and in doing so, educated and certified millions of people and helped grow HubSpot to more than $600 million in revenue.

When he’s not building TACK, Mark enjoys plenty of steak and lobster, a round of golf or two, and loves being on snow or in the ocean.

Go fast, take chances!

Leading Airmeet’s global marketing team and working to advance the event-led growth movement across B2B.

Airmeet is the most customizable and immersive virtual and hybrid event platform for growing businesses. 

Here's how I almost failed scaling HubSpot Academy.

At the time, HubSpot was becoming a global company serving several different languages outside of just English. 

It was tricky. Do we create native content in each language? Do we translate some of the content but not all? Do we use automated translation solutions?

I can tell you this. The automated translation solutions we tried and used at the time were not very good. 

Globalization and localization. It’s hard. 

There were thousands of hours of video, transcripts, and website content. It was an immense undertaking. 

Here’s how we solved this complex problem. We implemented a tiered system for the localization and translation of all content assets. For some content we localized and translated the piece. For other assets we just translated the content. 

That tiered approach saved us a ton of time and money over the long run. 

Since then I’ve advised many companies on how to think about content localization and translation. In the last few years a lot has changed thanks to generative AI. 

Recently I came across a new solution to help solve this problem. Something I wish I had back in 2015. Weglot.

What’s Weglot? 

It’s a solution that simplifies website and content translation. Some of the things I faced when doing this ten years ago were manual translation, page duplication, complex SEO setup, and technical integrations. Painful and time consuming. 

The number one thing you should be doing today is speaking the language of ALL your customers. Did you know that more than 70% of people prefer to buy in their native language

It’s now easy to expand your international presence in just a few clicks. You can do it quickly thanks to automated translation that’s accurate and crisp. 

Increase your SEO visibility in every market that matters. More markets = more reach = more potential customers. 

And thanks to solutions like Weglot, it's easy to integrate with WordPress, Shopify, Webflow, Wix, and more. In just a few minutes. No need to move to a different CMS. 

I recently decided to partner with Weglot to help businesses of any size create a more global footprint and make sure their content is speaking the language of their customers. 

It’s more important than ever to make sure your content is in the right language both for people and the bots. 

#WeglotPartner

p.s. still rocking my favorite HubSpot Academy custom Patagonia.

VP of Marketing at EasyLlama | People-first GTM Evangelist

Don’t fall into the status quo.

Here’s my marketing playbook for 2026.

1) Major investments in brand. Which is combo of content, events, community, and customer programs. 

I was so fortunate to bring on a rock star for all those things Katrine Reddin 🦕. She of course will have support and we’re going to be playing offense next year.

Expect to see the 🦙 everywhere. With some major surprises. 

2) Intent and network signals.

We’re an inbound heavy operation which means we can use signals to prioritize leads, follow up with other leads, and nurture a lot better.

Plus we can use network signals like if someone in our network knows someone that could unlock an introduction for us or give us some intel. 

I’m betting big on network signals next year. Both from our customers and our broader network.

3) Holistic revenue attribution.

We’re going to be tracking three types of revenue attribution.

Software attribution, first and last touch.

Self reported attribution in our demo forms.

Discovery call question attribution asked by each AE.

We have two of the three already in play and the data is fascinating. 

I’m also going to add incremental testing to the mix. Do something and then remove it or isolate the removal of the activity like not doing a billboard in one city but having one in another city, and using lead and pipeline data to determine impact. 

This data will help us understand number one and two a hiwnlot better next year. 

4) Monthly marketable moments. 

We already ship a lot of new products and tools in the reg. But next year we’re going to package them better and create one big wave each month. Beat the drum!

5) New offers.

We are cooking up come very compelling free new offers to launch in the first half of next year. I can’t give you any sneak peeks yet, but you should be thinking and investing in offers that will help you turn brand attention into business revenue.

Offers that are differentiated and compelling are key to your demand strategy today.

Don’t forget that your offers should treated as products built by the marketing team. Positioning, promotion, and distribution all matter.

I got a coupe of other ideas brewing. Going to wait to share them until I have more conviction behind each idea. 

If you think these topics are interesting, then you should join my marketing leadership mastermind group. We meet every week for an hour. 

Today we’re chatting about the homepage redesign process and the dashboards a marketing leader should be using to run their business. 

Drop ‘mastermind’ in the comments for more info.

Data is the lifeblood of a business today. Yet most businesses are missing two things. 

Clean data and actionable data. 

This problem costs businesses thousands, if not millions, of dollars in revenue.

What every leader should have are insights into revenue generation, customer health, competitors, and a whole lot more. 

Trust me, I have felt this pain at all of the businesses I’ve worked at. We're actually working on solving this problem at EasyLlama right now. Through a combination of hiring the right people, tech, and process changes. 

One solution that I’ve been trying out is Rows.com  

I’ve been able to upload CSVs and PDFs, connect GA4, and our paid media accounts.  Then I simply ask it questions in plain English.  Way easier than me trying to fumble around with Google Sheets or Excel. 

It organizes and understands the data without me needing to understand SQL or anything else. 

Things like, ‘tell me how many opportunities find us through paid search and also mention Google as how they heard about us.”

Simple prompts that can give me quick and impactful insights into how different channels, campaigns, offers, or messaging are driving results. 

It extracts, connects, analyzes, and keeps all the data fresh. 

Which means I get automated reporting and get insights and actionable recommendations on the regular. Exactly what a busy marketing leader needs. 


My point of view is every company should have at least one business analyst. But that’s not always possible due to the cost involved or other factors. So why not give that power to your founders, and other executives, heck your individual contributors too!?

It’s now possible for you to create your own business analyst copilot/agent helping you analyze and sift through data to find the golden nuggets. I’ve built my own business analyst at a fraction of the cost.

Rows is helping me flex my critical thinking skills and become an even more data empowered marketing leader. 

Helping me see around the next few corners and better plan and predict for the coming quarters. 

You can try it for free yourself. Rows dot com

Product launches are always exhilarating ... and stressful ... but so rewarding.  

Today, I'm proud to announce the third product pillar in EasyLlama's Compliance and Learning Platform. 

Security Awareness Training 🥳

Lots of small and medium businesses should be protecting their business and brand from cyber threats. 

Most don't becuase of two reasons, time and the cost.

We eliminate both reasons and give you a solution that's less than $2/month per employee. For a 150 person business, you can provide an important layer of protection from bad actors and cyber criminals for only $250/month.

It includes a powerful Phishing Simulator powered by AI.  

Giving you the ability to use pre-built phishing campaigns that can run automatically year-round.

You also get detailed ongoing reports so you can have a complete view of your organizational risk and how to better prepare employees to not be fooled.

It's time to: finally...

Prepare. Replace passive, one-off cybersecurity courses with interactive, scenario-based training that builds employee confidence and real-world readiness.

Produce. Demonstrate measurable results with dynamic risk reports and benchmarks that connect safer behaviors to stronger business outcomes.

Protect. Reinforce safe habits through continuous phishing simulations, instant feedback, and ongoing awareness campaigns that reduce risk all year long.

We now offer SMBs ONE platform to manage all of their compliance, security training, employee onboarding, and team training needs. 

All-in-one for the win. Finally one tool that employees need to use and one solution you need to manage and pay for. Nirvana, right?

A massive thank you to the team members behind this big launch. ❤️

From the folks on the product and engineering side, Lawrence Valenti, Michaël Devyver, and Merry Chin. To the people on the GTM teams, Alicia Falcon, PMMC®, Tan Tran, Katrine Reddin 🦕, Carmen Choi, Hana N., and Laura B..

A great product launch take an immense amount of coordination, planning, and execution. We use Asana, Google Doc/Sheets, and Slack to make it all happen. Of course Figma, Canva, and our CMS have something to say too.

Here's how to create the best possible webinar. 

I call it the webinar triple threat play. 

Yes, I did steal that from Bobby Flay's Triple Threat show. 🥓

Here's how to cook it up. 

By the way, I shared this playbook in my weekly marketing leadership mastermind group yesterday. Let me know if you are interested in joining. 

Start first by creating a webinar outline and agenda that has THREE distinct segments. 

1) A 20 or so minute conversation with a thought leader or subject matter expert focused around the webinar's topic. 

2) A ten minute product demo that ties what the thought leader spoke about with the use case of the product. Make sure at the end of this segment you ask the audience, using a poll in the webinar, if they would like to get a full demo of the product they just saw. I usually see about 5% to 20% of the attendees asking for a demo. 

3) A customer speaks for about ten minutes and shares their perspective on how they are using the product and the benefits value it's creating for them and their business. 

Make sure you have a DYNAMIC host. Their job is to host the entire webinar and to facilitate each segment. Getting the audience fired up, engaged, and keeping the webinar on track and managing the overall webinar experience. 

Use something like Wistia's webinar platform to make the webinar feel like a well produced show so what people are seeing is changing every couple of minutes. The key is making it not boring. 

Once the webinar is done, you now have three amazing pieces of content to repackage and reuse. 

One that's thought leadership centric, one that's very product focused, and one that is your customer proof and voice of customer segment. Wisita makes it super easy to create clips from each segment and for you to turn those clips into a format that's right for the right channel. 

So there you have it. My tasty Webinar Triple Threat Play™ 

We're run this playbook many times at EasyLlama and it never fails. 

Drop a note if you want me to share an example of one of our latest webinars using this format, or if you want to join the mastermind group. 

Happy Webinaring!

Don’t start your strategy by thinking of a tool first.

It never works. 

Always think about your STRATEGY first. 

For me it's, 'What is the best way to win the game I’m playing?'

For people in marketing and sales the answer is not AI. 

The answer is how can I best match how I’m marketing and selling to how they like to buy what I’m offering. 

For some businesses, it’s more a PLG motion. For others it’s PLG + Sales-assisted. And others use an enterprise-grade consultative GTM motion. 

But no matter what you’re trying to sell, using buying signals is a smart part of your strategy. 

Buyer signals are key to helping you understand what a buyer is doing so that you can match your approach to them. 

You can start really simple by first identifying what are your low, medium, and high intent buying signals. 

Low intent would be downloading a piece of content, going to an event that you hosted, or reading your newsletter. 

Medium intent would be checking out your pricing page, going to a webinar that includes a product demo, or researching competitors. 

High intent would be signing up for a fee trial or account, requesting a demo, or raising their hand for more info during a webinar. 

Signals can be at the contact or account level and include activity data from any first-, second-, or third-party data source.

Once you know your signals and where to find them. Don’t forget that part. :) You can then determine how to act on each signal. 

The easiest way to think about this is what signals are marketing-led, sales-led or a hybrid approach.  

Alright so we now let’s talk about tools. One of my favorite tools I’ve used to run a signal-based GTM strategy is Common Room.  They make it easy with their RoomieAI suite to find, organize, and act on all the buying signals. 

The key, IMO, is to try and keep the signal architecture in one centralized place. Much easier to manage and maintain. Helps streamline the prospecting motion of creating deals and using signals to close deals.

One of the most important things for your signal-based strategy to work is making sure the salespeople know where to see and how to use the signals. Sure, automation can help, but when a salesperson is given a power that they didn’t have before and knows how to use the power responsibility, great things can happen. Take a look at the image to see what a salesperson could get.

Things like faster lead follow up, meeting the buyer where they are, sending the right message at the right time, and reaching out to the right stakeholders to increase the likelihood a deal closes. 

The big takeaway is to please make sure you design your GTM to match how people buy today.

My new community and resource hub is open for business. 

It's called The GTM Library.

A hangout for founders, fractional folks, and marketers who wants to sharpen their go-to-market skills and execution.  

I'm an entrepreneur at heart which means I'm obsessed with all things go-to-market.  I've built a pretty big private collection of my favorite go-to-market resources, including a 100+ masterclasses from people in my network.

When you sign up you'll get access to the community and my regular masterclasses. I'm hosting a new one in a couple of weeks about my latest positioning and messaging framework that I've built. 

For a small one-time payment you can get your library card and access to my private collection of resources and masterclasses, including a private call with me. 

Hope you find it valuable. 

https://lnkd.in/eK27VGsG 

p.s. that's me with one of my favorite books about entrepreneurship and leading a business.

Mike Rizzo

MarketingOps.com

With very few exceptions, the majority of products in the Marketing Automation and MarTech space have completely failed to build products and features for the Marketing Operations Professional. The industry just keeps giving us more tech to integrate, manage and maintain.

I'll be taking a community-led approach to building resources that are purpose-built for MO Pros to: 

- build centers of excellence that help us demonstrate ROI and earn us a seat at the proverbial “table” of leadership
- help us easily and efficiently accomplish work that we NEVER have time for (hang on, I have another fire 🔥 to put out)
- prove that we’re getting the most out of the technology we’re managing

Community-led Founder and CEO

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

Founder

Ops Cast by MO Pros is a podcast for Marketing Ops Pros by Marketing Ops Pros.
Tune in here: www.themopros.com/opscast

Co Host

Outset

Strategic Advisor

Stack Moxie

Helping Stack Moxie as they continue their community-led approach to building product(s) and features. They'll soon launch an Industry Advisory Board, and a Customer Advisory Board.

Head of Community & Advisory Programs

Mavenlink

In the span of just a few years (with a great deal of cross-department collaboration) I helped build, launch, manage and optimize Mavenlink's first-ever user community and Client Advisory Board programs.

Manager, Community and Loyalty Programs

human.marketing

Orange County full-service Inbound Marketing Agency. We take great pride in becoming a fully integrated team within your organization and promise that you'll think of us as a remote marketing team. 

As a Director of Marketing Strategy for Client Accounts, I partner with small to mid-size businesses to build and execute a KPI-focused Inbound Marketing Strategy.  My clients leverage our full-service marketing agency for content marketing, web design,  social media marketing, demand generation, email marketing and more.

Experts in HubSpot, Magento, Big Commerce, Shopify, Mailchimp, and much more.

Director of Marketing Strategy Client Accounts

InMobi

InMobi is a global mobile advertising platform that specializes in delivering the best ROI for mobile marketers. A mobile-first and mobile-only platform, InMobi has been pioneering the next generation of ad experiences, including video advertising, on the back of deep learning based optimization engines.

InMobi platforms help brands, performance marketers and app publishers engage mobile users across different stages of their lifecycle, converting each mobile moment into an opportunity to drive engagement and revenue. Recognized by Fast Company as one of The Most Innovative Companies in 2016, InMobi reaches over 1.5 billion unique mobile devices worldwide, and is redefining business models for the mobile ecosystem. For more information, visit www.inmobi.com

Sr. Manager Growth Marketing - Publisher Platform

AerServ (Acquired by InMobi)

About AerServ:
AerServ is the leading inventory and audience monetization technology for mobile publishers.  AerServ helps thousands of mobile publishers increase revenue through AerServ's ad mediation platform, and increase yield by delivering brand-based ads from the AerMarket ad exchange. AerServ's mediation layer is powered by OpenAuction technology, the industry's first true, comprehensive unified and simultaneous auction. AerServ's entire platform and infrastructure is built with a publisher-first objective and provides best in class support from account managers and software engineers. The company was founded in 2013 and has offices in Irvine, California. Visit AerServ at www.aerserv.com or follow us on Twitter at @AerServ.

My Role:
I'm in charge of designing and executing a marketing plan to achieve AerServ's growth goals.

Orange Logic

My primary Objectives / Responsibilities:

- Develop and deploy demand generation programs that align with our growth goals.
- Partner with sales leaders to manage and set pipeline definitions, metrics and goals.
- Liaise with executive leadership, product development, sales, and the marketing team to develop strategies for inbound and outbound campaigns. 
- Optimize lead management, data hygiene, lead scoring, and lead nurture models that align with industry best practices.
- Ensure optimal lead flow and follow-up on marketing generated leads.
- Manage and negotiate with vendors while managing the demand generation budget.
- Build and manage the sales + marketing alignment where neither department had previously existed
- Build a new website (www.orangelogic.com)
- Build and execute on product marketing, pricing, and brand marketing strategies
- Evaluate and provide strategic advice on market positioning across multiple verticals
- Implement and manage HubSpot CRM, Website, Blog, and Automation
- Plan and execute on content marketing strategies including social
- More to come as we see more growth!

Sr. Marketing Manager

Achievements:

- Generated over $1,000,000 in incremental opportunities with email campaigns and nurtures in less than 6 months.

- Improved conversion rates on the blog by 1000% with technology and “growth hacks”

- Generated Conference Leads and MQLs that turned to opportunities ~ 20-30% of the time.

Responsibilities

1. Design, manage and constantly improve lead management and lead flow processes and procedures through our marketing stack (HubSpot, Unbounce, and Salesforce).

2. Support marketing team & programs with underlying technology & best processes by providing training, analysis and documentation on all marketing technology operations.

3. Execute email, webinar & other demand generation campaigns to support marketing lead gen goals.

4. Own end-to-end funnel metrics and provide analysis/reporting using Excel/Salesforce/HubSpot to promote smarter data-driven decisions.

5. Provide logistic and campaign support for online and offline events.

6. Monitor, manage, and maintain quality of marketing database.

7. Research, analyze, recommend and execute conferences to help meet the marketing demand generation goals.

8. Develop a world class sales & marketing partnership that drives the company’s revenue goals via innovative process improvements, sales enablement, and accurate, intelligent funnel management.

9. Work cross-functionally with engineering, product and sales to identify opportunities to optimize data structures or processes to improve marketing and sales productivity.

10. Identify marketplace trends, tools and technologies to drive online acquisition, improve conversions, and support the growth of the business.

Marketing Operations and Events Manager

Medata Inc.

As marketing administrator, I worked with team members in sales, development, and all other departments in an effort to garner new sales opportunities and improve upon existing client relationships.

Responsible for project management of a new corporate website, marketing events/conferences, and email campaigns.

I was responsible for the integration & maintenance of marketing automation platforms at Medata. We used Pardot and ACT-ON. I acted as the CRM administrator for SugarCRM, although we started in Salesforce. 



Additional Responsibilities:

• Managed and update social media channels

• Managed corporate website redesign project and engage key stakeholders

• Helped set standards for design in alignment with brand positioning

• Oversaw the functionality, layout and CMS for the Medata website

• Managed process for creation and updating of content

• Assessed new technologies to determine if they were fit for our needs 

• Gathered and report digital metrics and trends

• Managed the process for content owners to update online content

• Worked with marketing organization to build lead generating and nurturing programs to 
attract prospects, build relationships and retain existing clients

• Played a key role in the marketing team to design, build and coordinate a wide mix of 
marketing campaigns and activities, including: partner programs, white papers, 
webinars, PR, SEO, Google AdWords campaigns, social networks, banners, e-
newsletters, blogs, etc.

• Enhanced and managed marketing information systems to include marketing automation 
systems, integrated CRM (ACT-ON / PARDOT)

• Advised Marketing on how to optimize offline content for online use cases

• Worked with IT on issues affecting website and online presence

Marketing Administrator

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.

As we close out one chapter and step into the next, I’ve been thinking about the people who make this community what it is.

This year wasn’t simple.

We made big decisions about the future of MOps-Apalooza.

We invested in new programs, experimented, stumbled, learned, and kept going, all with one goal: to build something that thrives long-term, not just survives the moment.

Through every pivot, challenge, and late-night scramble, one thing stayed constant…

The people who believe in this community and the vision behind it.

To the Team

The people who take my harebrained ideas and somehow turn them into reality:

Audrey Harze — stepping in as CMO and leading with intention, strategy, and heart. Your partnership means the world. I can’t express precisely how meaningful your partnership has been to me… but YOU ROCK! And THANK YOU!

Grace Miller — the voice of clarity and calm, keeping content, comms, and sanity in sync.

Veronica Drake — the quiet force behind programming and sponsorships.

Dan Mott — your fingerprints still guide so much of what we do.

Austin Weatherhead, Jeffery Lucas, Anton R., Adarsh, and Growth Natives — your work, design, development, and partnership built this foundation.

This team believed in the vision. They carried the weight quietly. They made it all possible.

To the Community

You’re the reason this exists.

You show up online, in-person, and everywhere in between.

You share what you know, help each other grow, and protect the value of what we’ve built.

And you do it without ego, without pretense, without expectation.

I’m so grateful for all of you showing up the way you do!

To the Sponsors

Thank you for believing in a community-led model when it would’ve been easier to follow something more familiar.

Your partnership helped shape one of the most unique ecosystems in our industry.

And as we look toward 2026, I’m genuinely excited about the new ways we’ll partner, healthier, more intentional, more community-centric.

Such partnerships lift the entire profession.

To Our Chapter Leaders

Thank you for your patience, leadership, and faith in what we’re creating together.

You’re the ones helping people feel connected, supported, and safe, carrying forward the spirit of this community louder than any marketing campaign ever could.

You’re the heartbeat of this community.

We made tough calls this year.

Shifted direction.

Built new programs.

Planted seeds that are just starting to grow.

2026 will be our strongest year yet because of you.

Because this community is built on something deeper than events or content.

As we said at MOps-Apalooza:

We’re not “support.” We’re architects of scale.
We don’t “sit inside” revenue teams. We enable them.
We don’t follow the future. We design it.

AI won’t change the game.
MOps will.

Thank you for trusting us.
Thank you for building this with us.
And thank you for letting us serve this community. 💛

#MarketingOps #RevOps #Community #Leadership #Thanksgiving

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.

Marketing Ops are not “behind the scenes” anymore.

They are the engine holding every GTM motion together.

But here’s the part no one likes to admit 

Ops only gets invited into the strategy call after something breaks.

- A lead flow stalls.
- A dashboard stops syncing.
- A campaign misses attribution.

Then everyone suddenly remembers:

 “Oh wait, who runs the system?”

 — The people closest to those systems are the ones who see the patterns first.
 — They see where leads keep falling through the cracks.
 — They see when governance slips.
 — They see how small misalignments drain time, budget, and morale.

Ops doesn’t just fix the mess; they’re the first to see it coming.

And that’s exactly why Ops needs a seat at the table before things fall apart.

When they’re in the room early:

→ Strategy gets grounded in reality, not assumptions.
→ Budgets get tied to what actually moves the needle.
→ Execution stops being guesswork and starts being growth.

From my lens, it is about impact and designing GTM systems that don’t just look good on paper, but actually work under pressure.

Leaders → give Ops a voice before you give them a ticket.
Operators → use that voice to educate, not just execute.

Because the future of GTM belongs to the ones who keep the whole system moving, clean, fast, and quietly unstoppable.

#MarketingOps #Leadership #RevOps #GTM

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Talks about #mopros, #opscast, #community, #marketingops, and #marketingoperations

Too often, Marketing Ops gets treated like a service desk.

You know the drill: someone needs a form fixed, a campaign launched, or a system patched.

Ping Ops. Ticket submitted. Done.

However, that view overlooks the actual story.

Marketing Ops are way more than that!

They are the connective tissue between business logic, GTM execution, and system intelligence.

The best Ops leaders I’ve worked with literally operate on a completely different level.

➡ They’re Translators,

People who can take a CRO’s vision for “predictable pipeline” and turn it into something measurable: lead flows, data models, and automation logic that actually make sense.

They’re fluent in two languages. 

One strategy and two systems and somehow, they make them talk to each other.

➡ They’re Stewards 

The quiet ones who protect alignment when everything’s moving too fast.

They build governance, define taxonomies, and keep data clean so the business doesn’t lose trust in itself.

Because in Ops, alignment is oxygen.

And without it, even the best campaigns collapse under their own data debt.

➡ And they’re Accelerators

Always looking for friction to remove.

They find the manual handoffs, the redundant approvals, the things everyone complains about but no one fixes.

Then they build systems that scale growth without adding complexity.

They expand what’s possible.

Though none of that works if Ops isn’t empowered.

You can’t expect someone to lead strategically if you treat them like a ticket-taker.
If you’re leading a GTM team, this might sting a little:

Your Marketing Ops leader might be the most strategic hire you’ve made, and you might not even realize it yet.

Invest in them like you would a product leader.

Because in many ways, that’s exactly what they are.

They design the infrastructure that keeps your GTM engine running, the governance that protects it, and the clarity that lets it scale.

And (for many in this profession) if you give them room to operate, they’ll do what the best systems do,

Run quietly, efficiently, and powerfully in the background, so everyone else can move faster in the foreground.

This is the face I make when EMMIE asks to do something wild at MOpza...

💖 A huge thank-you to EMMIE Collective, the heartbeat of some of the most fun and creative activities we've seen at MOpza!

Over the last few years, EMMIE Collective hasn’t just sponsored MarketingOps(.com), the Marketing Ops Community, or MOps-Apalooza. 

They’ve helped shape it.

From bringing real tattoos (yes, real ones) to a B2B marketing operations conference…

to dreaming up the Barbie-inspired Pool Party and building “The EMMIE World” experience with our production team this year, they’ve turned the level of fun up to 10 at our community-led events... all while maintaining some of the most impressive clients on their roster.

Don't believe me? 

Check them out for yourself.

I couldn’t be prouder to have them as partners and friends in this journey.

To the EMMIE team: thank you for your creativity, collaboration, and courage to ask for all the fun!

You helped us close out a record-breaking MOpza, and you did it with style.

If you’re looking for a partner who brings professional polish and unshakable joy to every project,

 👉 Go check out EMMIE Collective.

Here’s to more memories, more community, and more magic together. 💫

#marketingops #eventmarketing #communityledgrowth #mopzapalooza #gratitude #thankyou

Marketing Ops Community

EMMIE Collective

I’ve been thinking a lot about the people who make everything possible for me.

This time it is not the community. Not the events. Not the work.

The three people at the center of it all, my wife and our kids, Wyatt and Ellie.

Building a business, a community, and a life at the same time isn’t simple. 

It comes with incredible highs and some quiet lows. Through every one of them, my family has been the constant.

My wife has trusted me from day one.

Long before MarketingOps was a thing, she believed in what we were building. 

She’s the realist who keeps me grounded and the dreamer who lets me stretch. 

Somehow, she balances the rollercoaster of entrepreneurship while raising two amazing kids with more grace than I can explain.

That trust shows up in a thousand little choices that keep our family moving forward.

Wyatt reminds me how fun it is to think differently.

He’s wildly analytical. If I say, “It’s 1:30,” he’ll correct me “It’s 1:28.”

He’s deep into books, obsessed with math, and curious about everything. 

Every question he asks makes me pause and think, this kid is going to lap me one day.

Part of me hopes he becomes a scientist.

Part of me thinks he’s already wired for Marketing Ops.

Then there’s Ellie.

Five going on fifteen.

Fierce. Creative. Loud in the best way.

If I match her energy, she’s all in, painting, taping, or crafting her next “gift” out of stickers and glitter.

She shows love through art.

She has a “good list” and a “naughty list.” I’m usually on the naughty one, sometimes for taking away dessert, sometimes just because. Both are fair.

This year, I’ve learned how much I need them and how much they need me.

Investing in my health forced me to slow down and rethink how I show up. 

Nights lying awake, asking myself how to be a better father, husband, and human.

Everyone says kids grow fast. They’re wrong. It’s faster.

Watching them become who they’re becoming makes everything else feel smaller.

Through all the work, travel, and chaos of life, my family has been my anchor.

So this Thanksgiving, I’m proud.

Proud of my son for diving deep into what he loves.
Proud of my daughter for being brave enough to speak up in class.
Proud of my wife for launching her cookie business on her terms, on her time, and for surviving (and, honestly, thriving) through days with small kids that would absolutely break me.

And when I think about what’s ahead... two amazing kids turning 8 and 6 this coming year, a healthy family, a home full of (let’s be real here folks) laughter, tears, fighting, and learning… there’s a bright future full of things to experience together, I feel incredibly thankful.

We’re stepping into a new chapter.

A fun one. A busy one. A meaningful one.

And I’m deeply grateful to be in it with them. ❤️

#Family #Gratitude #Thanksgiving #Leadership

If you’ve worked in Marketing Ops long enough, you know this rhythm by heart.

Budgets tighten. Tech stacks get audited. Everyone’s suddenly asked to “do more with less.”

And here we are again, 2026, another turning point.

Only this time, the systems we built are the ones deciding how fast (and how smart) we can adapt.

Here’s what’s shifting beneath the surface 

1️⃣ Campaign Ops

Campaigns today feel more like ecosystems than projects, full of triggers, dependencies, and feedback loops.

To launch one campaign, you’re coordinating segmentation, QA, enrichment, and reporting across a dozen moving parts.

The future of Campaign Ops is transforming from how fast you hit send to designing operational architecture that keeps creativity flowing without breaking the process.

2️⃣ Modular stacks are winning over monoliths

Teams are done being trapped in one vendor’s “all-in-one” pitch.

They want choice. The freedom to plug in tools that play nicely together and retire the ones that don’t.

With iPaaS and API-native integrations, composable architecture is becoming the real standard.

The edge for MOps is knowing how to make multiple systems act as one.

3️⃣ Data strategy is the new competitive moat

The strongest teams aren’t hoarding dashboards, but they’re defining what their numbers mean.

“Lead.” “Opportunity.” “Source.” These words get standardized, not argued about.

When data speaks a single language across Marketing, Sales, and CS, trust compounds.

And that trust shows up downstream in every GTM decision you make.

4️⃣ AI is moving quietly from novelty to infrastructure

We’re edging past the “prompt engineer” era.

AI is already running under the hood. We are seeing it in routing, enrichment, and anomaly detection.

The value is in cleaner logic, fewer manual fixes, and better feedback loops.
In 2026, AI will amplify the operators who understand context, process, and governance.

5️⃣ Ops convergence is no longer theory

In B2B, the walls between Marketing Ops, Sales Ops, and CS Ops are dissolving.

The most resilient teams now share systems, metrics, and accountability under one GTM Ops strategy.

The title might shift, but the mission doesn’t: simplify complexity, connect silos, and make growth measurable.

2026 won’t reward teams that move faster.

It’ll reward the ones who move together.

MOps leaders who think like architects, speak the language of systems (+ a bit of finance), and build with clarity will define the next phase of GTM maturity.

#MarketingOps #RevOps #GTM #Leadership #AI

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The definition of community is ‘’a group of people who work in the same space.’’

For me, it is different. 

A concept that goes beyond a Slack channel or a shared office.

It's purpose. 

It's respect.
 
It’s that steady momentum that comes from helping each other get a little better every day.

When people show up to learn, to stay curious, to connect for real, not just to trade favors, something shifts.

The collective brain power starts compounding.

It changes careers.

It shapes industries.

It even redefines what leadership looks like.

That’s what MarketingOps was built on.

By MO Pros, for MO Pros.

A place where operators, strategists, and problem-solvers could learn from each other, without ego, without gatekeeping, and without pretending we’ve got it all figured out.

The truth is,

In Marketing Ops, no one scales alone.

Systems evolve. Tech changes. Teams restructure.
 
But the one thing that never stops mattering is people.

The people who share knowledge at midnight.

Who answers questions they don’t have to.
 
Who push the entire profession forward just by showing up for one another.

That’s the domino effect.

When one operator joins a collective that learns faster, solves smarter, and supports deeper, the impact spreads way beyond individual roles.

Community goes beyond just connections, it’s definitely the infrastructure for progress.
 
And in Marketing Ops, it might be the most valuable system we’ll ever build.

#MarketingOps #CommunityBuilding #Leadership #ProfessionalGrowth #GTM

Everyone’s asking the same thing lately 
 
“Will AI replace Marketing Ops?”

My answer?

It won’t. Not even close.

Because Marketing Ops isn’t a checklist of tasks. 

It’s a mindset.

You can automate activity. Sure.

But accountability is something that’s still on people.

AI can execute. It can analyze.

But it can’t:

→ Bridge the gap between teams that barely speak the same operational language.
→ Decide which metrics matter when leadership priorities collide.
→ Build trust in the systems people rely on to make real business decisions.

That’s where Marketing Ops lives, in the gray space between GTM vision and messy execution.

It’s the discipline that turns chaos into clarity.

And the irony is, AI will make some of this faster... while creating a brand-new set of problems:

⚙️ Governance.
⚙️ Data integrity.
⚙️ Ethical decisions.
⚙️ Change management headaches.

They’re people issues.

If you’ve been in MOps for a while, you’ve seen this movie before, from manual HTML days to automation platforms to now, AI orchestration.

The tools change. The job doesn’t.

Because it was never about doing more.

It’s always been about thinking better.

AI can suggest actions.

But only humans can decide which ones actually matter.

Silos and misalignment are costing companies more than tech.

The 2025 State of the MO Pro Report from MarketingOps revealed something we’ve all felt but rarely said out loud:

61% of MOps pros say organizational silos are still the biggest barrier to impact.

Right behind that?

Poor data quality (56%).

Leadership misalignment (47%).

So even as we’ve invested in better automation, richer integrations, and smarter analytics, alignment still feels out of reach.

Why?

Because what breaks isn’t the tech.

It’s the trust that fuels collaboration.

We hire for collaboration... but reward firefighting.

We say “cross-functional”… yet still measure success in silos.
 
We talk about data-driven strategy… while half the org questions whose data is right.

And when there’s no shared truth, dashboards stop being instruments for decision-making.

They become debate stages.

Alignment comes from three operational habits:

→ Shared KPIs: Sales, Marketing, and Ops staring at the same scoreboard.
→ Single intake: No side-door requests or “urgent” Slack pings derailing priorities.
→ Monthly truth syncs: 60 minutes. No decks. Just blockers, fixes, and ownership.

Remember, clarity compounds and is attained through alignment.

And alignment is a culture.

And culture changes when teams start trusting each other enough to stop competing for credit.

Question for you:

If you could remove one KPI across teams to force clarity, which would it be?

P.S : You can download the full report from the Marketingops website.

#MarketingOps #RevOps #Leadership #GTM #DataAlignment #StateOfTheMOPro2025

Have you ever been in a situation where lead routing feels like a black box?

You launch a campaign, the form fills roll in…

and then, silence.

Leads disappear somewhere between enrichment delays, ownership conflicts, and misfired workflows.

Within the mess, your prospect goes cold.

The teams fight and scrutinize the outcome (or lack there of in this case).

Automation made routing faster, but it didn’t make it clearer.

Most teams can’t see why a lead went to a certain rep or where it stalled in the process.

That’s a real gap that can be solved, today.

See, we automated the workflow, but lost visibility into the logic.

And the other teams aren’t taking the time to work out the problem.

Instead, I’m hearing this in the community:

🗣️ “I just want to know why a lead went where it did.”
🗣️ “We need routing logs, not just routing speed.”
When routing is built in a transparent system and aligned with the team(s) involved:

→ Sales stops chasing ghosts.
→ Marketing stops over-enriching.
→ Ops stops firefighting.

It turns accountability from a guessing game into a system design principle.

That’s why I’ve been so impressed by what teams are building with Default.

They’ve created routing visibility that lives inside the orchestration layer:

✅ Real-time audit logs for every routed lead.
✅ Error notifications the moment workflows break.
✅ Multi-object visibility across Salesforce, HubSpot, and Marketo.

It’s a reliable routing that everyone can see and trust.

As a MOps or GTM ops leader, speed gets you attention.

But transparency earns you trust.
 
And the future of routing (and a strong career) depends on both.

#MarketingOps #RevOps #GTM #LeadRouting #DefaultPartner #Automation #Community

Default

Been working with Ahmed Datoo and Alysha 🌟 Khan at allGood on something I actually wanted for myself: an AI QA testing tool for marketing emails.

The tool checks your emails before you send them:
✓ Tests every link
✓ Validates UTM tracking
✓ Fresh copy/ grammar review
✓ Basic compliance in place

Free tool. In beta now. Actually very useful.

Reg link in the comments if you wanna check it out.

Organizational change doesn’t fail because of strategy.

It fails because the systems, data, and processes underneath it aren’t ready.

That’s why Marketing Ops ends up at the center of every transformation — even when we’re not brought in early enough.

This week’s newsletter breaks down:
>> Why MOps has a front-row seat to organizational change
>> How tech debt becomes the silent killer of transformation
>> The gap between expectations and authority for MOps teams
>> What leaders must do differently to make change stick
>> How MOps pros can push upstream and influence the roadmap

If your company is going through a rebrand, restructuring, new tech rollout, or any major shift… this one will hit home.

🔗 Read the latest edition here 👇

And if you want posts like this delivered weekly, you can subscribe directly from the newsletter page.

Organizational change doesn’t succeed without aligned systems, clean data, and scalable processes. That’s exactly where Marketing Operations shines. W

The Role of MOps in Organizational Change Management

The 2025 State of the MO Pro Report tells:

52% of organizations offer no formal training for their Marketing Ops teams.

33% see no defined career path for Ops professionals.

And yet... 92% believe AI will completely reshape how Ops gets done.

Let that sink in for a second.

We’re betting the future of GTM on AI but not investing in the people who’ll actually run it.

We’ll spend six figures on tools, then skip the five-grand budget that could teach someone how to use them strategically.

That’s how you end up with automation without adoption.

AI without accountability.

And dashboards that look impressive but don’t move the business an inch forward.

I believe somewhere along the way, we started treating “enablement” as a nice-to-have, instead of the engine that makes innovation sustainable.

We built tool stacks faster than we built talent stacks.

And in the process, we’ve created Ops teams that are over-burdened (with tech) and under-developed.

If we want real maturity, we need to shift how we invest:

→ Budget for Brains: Training isn’t an expense; it’s compounding ROI. Make it a line item, not an afterthought.
→ Shadow the Strategy Room: Let Ops sit in on OKR, budget, and GTM planning. Exposure creates fluency.
→ Narrative > Noise: Stop measuring activity and start storytelling. Translate data into decisions that matter.

Because the companies that win won’t be the ones with the most tech, they’ll be the ones with the most capable operators behind it.

A Question for you all…

If you could fund one team-wide course this year, would you pick AI automation or data storytelling?

Your answer probably says a lot about what kind of organization you’re building.

PS: You can download the full report from MarketingOps website

#MarketingOps #RevOps #Leadership #AI #ProfessionalDevelopment #StateOfTheMOPro2025

If your ops team is always putting out fires, it’s not a resourcing problem—it’s a systems problem.

This week’s newsletter dives into one of the biggest blind spots in go-to-market operations: integrating learnings across data, tech, and people.

MOps isn’t just the admin team anymore. It’s the connective tissue that should align marketing, sales, RevOps, IT, and product around a shared operational strategy.

But the research says most companies still haven’t cracked it:
>> 56% of MOps pros say they don’t get adequate training.
>> 81% rank integration capabilities as their top martech selection criteria—because we’re still buying tools for integration we haven’t achieved.

Integration isn’t just about APIs.

It’s about shared definitions, reporting frameworks, and enabling people to think cross-functionally.

This week’s piece breaks down four years of State of the MO Pro data to show where alignment breaks—and how to fix it.

#MarketingOps #RevOps #GTM #DataQuality #Leadership

If you want your ops team to stop putting out fires and start driving strategy, you have to connect the dots across functions: data, technology, and p

Integrating Learnings Across Functions: 
Data, Tech, and People

Innovation in Marketing Ops doesn’t start with a tool. It starts with your team.

Too many orgs treat innovation like a checkbox or a side project. However, the reality is that you can’t innovate your way out of burnout or tech debt.

Over four years of State of the MO Pro data show the same pattern: teams want to innovate, but they’re running on fumes.

To change that, we need to focus on the system, not just the software.

Here’s what the best teams are doing differently 👇

 💡 Fix capacity before you chase creativity. You can’t expect innovation from burned-out teams buried in reactive work.

 💡 Reward exploration. Curiosity drives growth—give your team time to experiment and learn on the job, not after hours.

 💡 Align innovation with strategy. It’s not about adding more tech. It’s about improving how work gets done.

 💡 Document and iterate. Treat your process docs like products—update, refine, and share them.

 💡 Bring MOps into the room. Only 37% of MOps pros say they have a seat at the table. Innovation dies in isolation.

Innovation isn’t a “nice-to-have.” It’s how you scale sustainably—reducing burnout, cleaning up inefficiencies, and driving more impact with less chaos.

If this resonates, check out the full post in this week’s newsletter and dive into the 2024 State of the MO Pro report for the data behind these findings.

P.S. Does the hanging word on this graphic bother you? I really struggled with whether or not to change it and then thought... "I wonder if anyone else is bothered? I'll just ask!"

Innovation in Marketing Ops is not about chasing the latest shiny tool. It starts with how your team thinks, learns, and works together. If you want i

Building a Culture of Innovation in MOps Teams

I’ve learned a lot from the MagicMirror team, and this session will NOT disappoint.

Join Daphna Wegner and Melissa McCready, you won’t be disappointed!

GenAI adoption in marketing is growing fast…but visibility, consistency, and control? Not so much. 😬

If you’re in Marketing Ops and being told to “make AI happen,” our upcoming session with MagicMirror is for you.

🗓️ Join us on Dec 4 at 11am PT/2pm ET for a very real convo on how to scale GenAI without losing your grip on data, brand, or compliance.

We’ll be covering:

🧩 The GenAI Divide → Why most teams stay stuck in experimentation and how to shift toward operational impact.
🚨 Industry Risks → Key considerations to keep in mind when adopting new AI tools.
🛡️ AI Governance → What problems are Marketing Ops leaders faced with today and how does MagicMirror help solve them.

👥 Featuring Daphna Wegner (MagicMirror) + Melissa McCready (HLX)

👉 Save your seat: https://lnkd.in/g4JqzuEe

#marketingops

Open article: Welcome! You are invited to join a webinar: AI in Ops—How to Scale Adoption Without Losing Control. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email about joining the webinar. by us02web.zoom.us

Welcome! You are invited to join a webinar: AI in Ops—How to Scale Adoption Without Losing Control. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email about joining the webinar.

Most Marketing Ops wins never make the slide deck, but you’ll always find them in the numbers.

Across every State of the MO Pro report from 2021 to 2024, pipeline has been the #1 KPI for MOps teams. When pipeline is the metric, impact becomes measurable — cleaner data, stronger alignment, smarter processes, faster execution.

That’s exactly what this week’s newsletter digs into.

I break down four fictional (but very common) scenarios that mirror patterns in the research:
 • Cutting manual lead routing from 24 hours to 30 minutes
 • Saving a budget cycle through tech stack consolidation
 • Restoring trust in attribution across sales and marketing
 • Reducing campaign cycle times with real documentation

Each example shows what the data has told us for four years: when MOps owns process, governance, and system design, performance moves — fast.

If you’re following the 52-week series, the next article is live now.

Give it a read and let me know what resonates.

👉 Read it here:

View newsletter: Mastering Marketing Ops'2025

Marketing operations wins are often quiet, but they consistently show up in the numbers. Across every State of the MO Pro report, pipeline is the top 

Open article: Celebrating Wins: Stories of MOps Driving Business Success by Mike Rizzo • 4 min read

Celebrating Wins: Stories of MOps Driving Business Success

Anyone looking to get into a HubSpot portal or account? Drop me a note - I have a few partners offering incentives to get you started in HubSpot or get your upgrade locked down and humming!

Clay is giving MO Pros a new kind of spotlight…and we’re here for it 🔦
They just launched Clay World Records, a challenge to celebrate the most creative, one-of-a-kind Clay tables being built by the community 💡
And yes, it’s becoming a real book 📚

✅ The first 100 submissions will be featured in the 2026 Clay World Records book
✅ Anyone can submit — as long as your table is original, useful, and a little outside the box

Some records already claimed:
🛥️ First Clay table built on a jet ski
🎭 First Clay table built as Ghostface
💘 First Clay table to help find a significant other
🏔️ First Clay table built at 14,000 feet

Try something new in Clay and get your work featured.
🔗 clay.com/world-records
#marketingops

Your year-end MOps review shouldn’t be a list of tasks — it should be a proof point of business impact.

Too many MOps reviews focus on what got done. The real story is what the work enabled.

Alignment. Acceleration. Accountability. That’s what leadership actually cares about.

This week’s newsletter breaks down the metrics that matter most at year-end — the ones that elevate MOps from “support” to “strategic operator.”

Here’s a preview:

✔ Pipeline influence: 
The top KPI in every State of the MO Pro report since 2021 up until 2025. If you’re not showing how scoring, routing, attribution, and enrichment moved pipeline, you’re missing the headline.

✔ Operational efficiency:
 Lead routing from 2 days to 10 minutes.
 Campaign cycle times reduced.
 Manual work eliminated.
 This is the story behind how the business moved faster.

✔ Data health:
 Bounce rate reduction.
 Duplicate cleanup.
 Field audits.
 A defined data quality score.
 With 88% of MOps pros investing in data initiatives (2024 report), this is the multiplier that deserves to be front and center.

✔ Attribution accuracy:
 If sales trusts your reporting more today than last year, that’s strategic impact. Say it plainly.

✔ Stack performance:
 Usage rates, redundant tools removed, integrations maintained, time to deploy.
 This is the real definition of “owning the stack.”

✔ Training, documentation, and enablement:
 SOPs created.
 Team members trained.
 Self-service adoption.
 
This is performance — even if it doesn’t show up on a dashboard.

And yes, we cover which metrics to retire once and for all (looking at you, email opens).

If you’re following the 52-week series, the newest article is live now.

Would love to hear how you’re preparing your own year-end MOps review.

Your MOps performance review isn't just about what got done. It's about proving the value of how it got done and what it enabled. Reporting on perform

Open article: Key Metrics for a Year-End MOps Performance Review by Mike Rizzo • 4 min read

Key Metrics for a Year-End MOps Performance Review

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