Brain Hurt Scale = 2/10 There's a famous quote by Kleiner Perkins' OG John Doer, "Ideas are easy. Execution is everything. It takes a team to win".
If you've ever been responsible for bottom line results, you'll agree and nod because you know this quote to be true. Unfortunately, mastering the craft of execution is not politically advantageous.
Instead, most companies reward those who are seen as a big picture thinkers not those fussing with details in the weeds. So we talk about higher-level constructs like brand, strategy, mindset, buzzwords, general approaches etc. And then outsource as much of the grunt work as possible to further this image, and as a political hedge.
But, it's only when you've done the task yourself and architected operational systems, that you truly appreciate how critical the smallest details are to success. Hundreds of layered details which cascade with compounding effects that have a massive impact on the final result. And this is something that can't be solved with more tech, more planning, new frameworks, more consultants or more close-the-gap meetings.
This phenomenon is especially pernicious in the field of sales/marketing/growth. A reliance on third-party vendors (agencies) to execute the work became necessary for political survival. But over time, it's led to an underappreciation of the value and importance of operations. If you work for a large brand, halo effects also hide this importance. It's only when we move to smaller organizations do we fully understand how critical it is to success.
If we just took some time to at least know the basics, we would save a lot of miscommunication, misinterpretation, and failure downstream.
Which brings us to today's episode with Mike Rizzo, founder of the MarketingOps community since 2017.
Whether you want to call it marketing ops, growth ops, sales ops or revops it doesn't matter. Chances are the name will change again in a year or two anyway. This chat with Mike will allow us all to get a crash course in the discipline and hopefully use this knowledge to do better work.
Strangely enough, most firms, don't even have a marketing ops hire. And if they do, it's more of a technician without a broader understanding of how everything else fits together into a system guided by strategy. Then there's other marketers who are doing marketing ops without even realizing it.
So lets step down a few tiers from the business strategy or functional strategy layers and explore the operational strategy layer. With someone who lives and breathes marketing ops.