Like most RevOps leaders, Mike Rizzo’s path to the top spot took an unexpected turn from an early start in digital marketing creating newsletters and field marketing to handling site migrations and other forms of revenue technology. “I was basically trafficking ads on an ad server and learning about pixels and retargeting, experimenting with different display ads,” Mike said. “That’s when I fell in love with the whole concept of marketing and sales tech.”
What started as a need to wear multiple hats to help grow a business evolved into a powerfully diverse knowledge base that redefines what we need from marketing operations today.
Read more: Building a Stronger RevOps Foundation
During this episode of Go to Market with Dr. Amy Cook, Mike defends his evolutionary definition of today’s marketing operations and explains why a RevOps leader with expertise in executing, marketing, marketing operations, and the tech stack reinforces the most pivotal role in GTM.
Here are some interview highlights:
Amy: You recently said that Marketing Ops isn’t marketing. What did you mean by that?
Mike: What I meant by that, based on my own experience, is that I was exposed to ad tech. I was exposed to HTML, and then I was exposed to marketing and sales technology including some of the implications of how technology, like SaaS companies, operate, and I needed to weave that all together.
So when you look at marketing operations, it requires a little bit of that mile-wide-one-inch deep skillset. It might not be the same ones that I picked up, but does help when you have a general understanding about SEO, ABM, digital marketing, tracking, pixels, all those kinds of things, so that you can address questions about actual object orientation, work database structure and how the relationships of those things happen?
If you can wrap that little bit of understanding about how a business recognizes revenue on the finance piece of it, you can have a constructive conversation about where we’re going, where we’d like to go and how we’re actually growing alongside your finance leaders.
Read more: Lonny Sternberg: Today’s Operations Need to Scale for Tomorrow
That’s marketing operations in my mind, where you have a well-rounded set of experiences that help you enable a business to achieve its goals through marketing technology and revenue technology. Your job is to figure out how to build the tech stack of the future. Very few people understand the entire go-to-market process, the product, tech stack and how this applies to revenue. So when I said that marketing Ops isn’t marketing, it’s actually about putting guardrails in place.
Listen to the full interview here.
