Marketing operations consulting, hands on
A marketing operations consultant designs and runs the systems behind marketing: CRM, automation, data, attribution and the handoffs to sales. I do the work myself, in your stack, and leave behind systems your team can run without me.
What does a marketing operations consultant actually do?
The job is turning strategy into machinery. In practice that means:
- CRM and marketing automation architecture: Salesforce, HubSpot, Marketo, Pardot, and the integrations between them, built into a single source of truth.
- Data workflows: enrichment, deduplication, routing and scoring, so sales gets clean inputs instead of raw lists.
- Attribution and reporting: CAC, LTV and pipeline velocity you can defend in a board meeting.
- The handoffs: lead lifecycle, SLAs between marketing and sales, and the automation that enforces them without anyone chasing spreadsheets.
What is a marketing operations audit?
A marketing operations audit is a structured review of your CRM, automation, data quality and reporting that tells you which numbers you can trust and which systems are silently failing. Twice I have found a silent measurement failure within weeks of starting an engagement, at OnPay and at Feedzai, together distorting the read on roughly 60% of customers and open pipeline. An audit is how you find yours before it costs you a quarter of decisions.
Proof
The systems on the home page are the portfolio version. The short version: 100 sales meetings generated in one quarter, 14% prospect-to-meeting conversion across a 350+ person cohort, martech stacks adopted at 95% or better, and contact lists that outperformed purchased alternatives 3 to 1.
How do engagements work?
Usually one of two shapes. An audit first: a few weeks, fixed scope, ending in a findings document and a prioritized fix list. Or a build: a defined system (attribution, lifecycle, prospecting automation, an answer-layer program) delivered working, with your team trained on it. Either way I work inside your stack and the artifacts stay yours, including anything instrumented with open tools.
Questions people ask
Do you work alongside an in-house team or replace one?
Alongside, almost always. The usual setup is a marketing leader who owns strategy and needs the systems built right, or an ops team of one that needs senior hands for a quarter.
Which tools do you cover?
Salesforce, HubSpot, Marketo, Pardot, 6sense, Clay, Segment, Zapier and the analytics layer around them (GA4, Tableau, Heap). If your stack is different, the principles transfer; the audit will say so honestly.
Audit or retainer?
Start with the audit. It is fixed-scope, it pays for itself in found problems, and it tells both of us whether a longer engagement is worth it.
Resources for learning marketing operations
These will show you how you can learn to operationalize marketing your goods and services.
The Community for Marketing Operations Pros
Unlike some professional Slack communities that ask you to pay monthly dues, I've found The Mo Pros Slack to be a fun way to get relatively unbiased product recommendations, think of new angles into prospects' lives, and I've even spun up a Google Doc with email copy and had several Mo Pros contribute edits at the same time, which was amazing!
There are some great professionals here, and if you're interested in leveling-up your marketing operations game, The Mo Pros Slack is a great place to be!
Learn Using Free Courses from HubSpot
Great whether you use HubSpot or not
HubSpot is so much more than just a MAP (marketing automation platform). And, that's not just because the software company's offerings have expanded beyond marketing into sales and customer service. Think, instead, of HubSpot as a global community, which primarily consists of hundreds-of-thousands of marketers. They are particularly focused on the growth of SMBs. They appreciate HubSpot's user-friendly automation. They also have an affinity for the marketing philosophy that HubSpot evangelized from its infancy, "inbound marketing."
Inbound marketing is mostly thought of as the attraction of leads who search for content that you publish. That's opposed to outbound efforts you make to push your message into your prospect's field of attention (whether they want it or not). Full disclosure: I've always been a fan of "all bound," which is a blend of inbound and outbound. The truth is: all marketers usually practice a mixture of the two. It's how I learned marketing and the gossip is that's always actually been the HubSpot-way (even if it wasn't overtly stated).
As an organization that defined its category, HubSpot has gone public in a relatively short period of time, and they're astronomically further along from their humble Boston blogging startup roots. From its early days, HubSpot had to distinguish itself through content. And, as of the time that I write this, I find that HubSpot is the foremost provider of accessible marketing content.
You can get certified for free by HubSpot in a few of its heavier-duty tracks of study, but, for starters, you may wish to try getting answers to your burning marketing questions through one of their free, short, focused courses on subjects like lead management or business blogging.