In today’s data-driven marketing landscape, one question keeps CMOs awake at night: is our marketing plan working? At a recent customer panel, marketing leaders gathered to discuss how marketing operations has evolved from a purely technical role to become the CMO’s strategic planning weapon.
Jim Williams, CMO at Uptempo, moderated the discussion with Tim Doolittle, Senior Director of Marketing Operations at AppFolio, and Alyssa Veigel, Senior Campaign COE Manager at Workday. Their conversation revealed how marketing operations has become the crucial link between strategic planning and execution.
Marketing Operations: The Strategic Evolution
“Marketing operations came out of martech,” Williams explained. “It started with managing technology, then managing data, then integrations of the data, and then measuring and analyzing the data. But our vision is to elevate that role to something more strategic.”
This evolution is essential because the planning process has become increasingly complex. Marketing teams must now navigate multiple layers of planning across different timelines:
- Strategic goals at the top level
- Budget allocation in the middle
- Campaign plans and tactical execution at the bottom
All of this must ultimately be articulated in a calendar that stakeholders across the organization can reference. When these pieces don’t align, marketing teams struggle to demonstrate their value and impact.
Bringing Data & Insights to the Planning Process
At AppFolio, planning begins each April for the following year. Doolittle’s team kicks off with a thorough market analysis that includes:
- Annual TAM (Total Addressable Market) study
- Alignment with product and business strategy
- Analysis of individual product performance
- White space study within their customer base
- Channel performance metrics, including ARR driven per channel
“We get all the way down to how much ARR we are driving per channel, and what ROI that’s bringing back to the business, so that we can help facilitate asking for more budget,” Doolittle explained.
At Workday, the process starts in late summer or early fall and follows a structured hierarchy:
- Mapping business goals to marketing objectives
- Prioritizing audiences to avoid overlapping messages
- Breaking down campaign strategy into programs
- Aligning resources to capabilities
“We’ve actually prioritized how we’re going to market for an audience, so we’re not overlapping in our messages through our different campaigns,” Veigel shared. “What is our product focus? What are we trying to push? We have buying groups, of course, but what is that focus there?”
Breaking Free from Spreadsheet Chaos
Both panelists acknowledged that the journey away from spreadsheets has been challenging but necessary. At AppFolio, moving to Uptempo’s marketing planning platform has dramatically reduced spreadsheet sprawl.
“The number of spreadsheets that we have has actually really pared down over the last 12 to 18 months as we’ve introduced Uptempo,” Doolittle said. “Before we went to Uptempo, they were everywhere, which was always scary to know who had what and what was being updated.”
Workday has faced similar challenges with their program planning.
“Our program planning is happening, and has been happening for the past year, in spreadsheets. That is not sustainable, and that was a big reason why we were looking at a planning tool,” Veigel explained. “Google Sheets just gave us multi-select dropdowns like a couple months ago. That’s insane.”
Where Dollars Meet Data
The most powerful aspect of marketing operations’ strategic role is connecting performance data to financial planning. This connection allows teams to make informed decisions about where to invest and where to pull back.
“We’ve been able to do ROI reporting at scale,” Doolittle shared. “It was kind of the first time really we’ve been able to do like ROI reporting at scale… Great steps in the way of visibility.”
This visibility has transformed how teams approach budget discussions:
- Analyzing performance at a granular level
- Conducting regular performance reviews (weekly with the CMO, monthly with the whole marketing team, quarterly for strategy)
- Making real-time adjustments based on data
- Shifting resources to high-performing initiatives
Building Trust Through Transparency
Perhaps the most valuable outcome of this evolution is the enhanced credibility marketing gains with leadership. When marketing operations can clearly demonstrate the impact of marketing investments, it elevates the entire function.
“Marketing Ops is seen much more now as a strategic partner with the business rather than just a team that you go to get a report built,” Doolittle explained. “We are at that table with [the CMO], and we are providing that information to her.”
This strategic partnership extends beyond marketing to finance:
“We would only meet with finance maybe once or twice a year. Now, we are meeting with finance every single month to go through how things are performing. And I meet with them weekly, just being that business partner with them to make sure that they understand what marketing is, what we’re doing, why we’re doing it.”
The Journey Ahead
While both organizations have made significant progress, they acknowledged that the work is never truly done. Their focus for the future includes:
- Building better connections between systems
- Improving reporting and insights
- Enhancing planning processes
- Making more strategic resource allocation decisions
- Finding better ways to demonstrate marketing’s value
The evolution of marketing operations from technology manager to strategic partner represents a fundamental shift in how marketing teams operate. By bringing data and insights to the planning process, marketing operations professionals have become the secret weapon CMOs need to navigate an increasingly complex landscape and demonstrate marketing’s strategic value.
