A MO Pro’s thoughts on new marketing ops professional research

Knak recently partnered with MarketingOps to create The 2022 State of the Marketing Operations Professional, a research report to see how the profession is changing.

As a fellow marketing operations professional (MO Pro), I had a few thoughts while reading through the findings.

The study’s overall theme of “Lean” hits the nail on the head.

There are clearly so many awesome shifts happening in the profession – like being seen as more strategic, often being paid fairly, and seeing the field grow in demand.

But at the same time, many (contradictory) gaps popped out to me as needing to be addressed.

MO Pros are:

• In demand in the market but want more defined roles and job clarity.
• Becoming more of a strategic partner but are not getting the budget and resources they need to get things done.
• More focused on revenue ops, but there doesn’t seem to be a clear definition of what this means or how to put this into practice. (Personally, I’m of this mind – with it being less of a hierarchical thing, more of an alignment thing).
• Wanting to improve campaign execution but often don’t use or have access or budget to the tools that help them do just that.
• Finding themselves more aligned with pipeline creation and revenue but aren’t getting the headcount they need to support them in this mission.

The quote at the end wraps it up nicely, “A lot of orgs aren’t proactive about investing in Marketing Ops, but want to reap the benefits, like good reporting and attribution. This is a big learning curve for many sales and marketing teams”

Reading through the report, I was instantly asking myself…

Why is this the current state?

I wonder if it is rooted in a lack of awareness or ‘‘understanding’ of what marketing ops professionals (MO Pros) do.

To that point, would it be the fault of the MO Pros not doing a good enough job at proving their worth? Or perhaps the fault of executives not being aligned on core things like go-to-market motions, and thus MO Pros are getting caught in the cross-fire?

Maybe the role of MO Pros just evolved so much over the years, and now they’re stuck with unrealistic expectations.

What did we do to find ourselves in this position?

What MO Pros do isn’t universally understood across teams, even if they know it’s important. So, could we be in this position because of growing pains?

Other departments that are more ‘mature’ or ‘better understood’ could be getting more resources and headcount based on that fact alone.

It could just be a matter of time before the gaps narrow. Maybe when these MOPs folks continue to climb the ranks, they will. A good place to start is working on your marketing operations setup and team model.

How do we narrow these gaps?

Better educating team members on the role of MOPs and getting more executive buy-in could be a solution.

Or maybe MO Pros should ‘own’ more pieces core to the business and have a ‘seat at the table.’ It could be as simple as companies just biting the bullet and proactively allocating more resources into marketing operations.

I don’t have all the answers, but as we all work to figure it out, I do have to say it’s a pretty exciting time to be in marketing operations as the profession grows.