Mike Rizzo, CEO and Founder of MarketingOps.com, joins the show to explore how marketing operations professionals can drive strategic impact by running the tech stack like a product.
Mike Rizzo believes marketing operations pros are sitting on one of the biggest untapped opportunities in business today: owning the tech stack as a strategic function.
In this conversation with Sara, Mike shares why modern marketing doesn’t happen without technology—and why the people managing that technology need a seat at the leadership table. He breaks down how ops teams can bring structure, product thinking, and ROI discipline to their tech investments, especially as AI and consumption-based pricing reshape how we buy and use software.
You’ll learn:
Mike:
“Modern marketing doesn’t happen without technology. Someone needs to run the technology—and translate the language of the business to the tools.”
“These new models should force people to stop and think: where will this actually make an impact? Slow down to speed up.”
Links & Resources:
Timestamps:
00:23 Guest Introduction: Mike Rizzo
00:40 Challenges in Marketing Operations
02:20 The Role of AI in Marketing Ops
03:43 The Evolution of MarTech and RevOps
05:52 Navigating AI Tools and Implementation
10:42 Resources and Inspiration for Marketing Ops Professionals
#MarketingOps #MarTech #AIinMarketing #Podcast #Progress #MarketingLeadership
0:00:00.2 Sara Faatz: I'm Sara Faatz, and I lead community and awareness at Progress. This is 10 Minute Martech.
0:00:05.3 Mike Rizzo: These new models should force people to stop and think about, well, where do we really think this is going to make an impact? Which is a really valuable exercise for the organization that's buying the tool, because then they're going to try to tie it back to ROI and say, hey, I'm going to make a bet. I'm going to put a stake in the ground. This is what I want to implement.
0:00:23.7 Sara Faatz: That's Mike Rizzo, CEO and founder of MarketingOps.com. Let's get started. Well, Mike, thanks so much for joining today. Let's start with, what's keeping you up at night right now?
0:00:43.7 Mike Rizzo: Marketing operations professionals are not seen as strategic leaders, and they should be. That's predominantly what keeps me up at night. It's establishing this credibility for them.
0:00:56.7 Sara Faatz: Why do you think that is? Why do you think marketing ops people aren't seen that way?
0:01:00.6 Mike Rizzo: I think it's sort of propagated by the sort of like where we've come from as a tech ecosystem, right? This like explosion of marketing operations technology that happened, or sorry, marketing technology that happened in general over the last decade plus sort of created this environment for marketing operations professionals, at least in the B2B sector to sort of like be born. And they stumbled and fumbled their way through just like implementing things that were sort of sold to us as magic. And then they became the people that just like make that tool work. For whatever reason, that shift hasn't really happened yet where everybody takes a step back and go, hey, wait a minute. Modern marketing doesn't happen without technology. And someone needs to run the technology and someone needs to be able to translate the language of our business to the technology. And that's not just somebody that's hitting send on emails, right? That's like a fundamentally different role. And for whatever reason, we just haven't seen a full shift in the perception of what these professionals are capable of.
0:02:16.7 Sara Faatz: With that profession being clearly misunderstood right now, how do you think AI plays into that? Is that making the problem worse or is it, do you think it's an opportunity or a turning point to show the true value of marketing ops professionals?
0:02:32.2 Mike Rizzo: Yeah, yeah. I'm glad you asked the latter part of that. I think this is a tremendous opportunity for, it's really actually for the practitioners themselves to step up and take a leadership role in saying, hey, I actually know how these technologies work. And I also know how your business works. And now I know how to use AI to get the tools to do the things that I want it to do. And if you don't know how the tool works, which you don't, because that's not your job, you're going to struggle a little bit with the way in which AI can interact with your ecosystem. And then really, it all comes back down to the data, right? And we've all been talking about this data. I almost hate the word data now because it's said too much. But really, it's a tremendous unlock opportunity for leaders to turn to the practitioners who know how these tools work to say, how do we go faster? What do we need? What are the requirements? And let them go do the things that they're really, really good at and provide strategic value to an organization with AI as sort of the unlock. I think what's also troubling about this era that we're in is we've seen this movie before. And unfortunately, when all the technology exploded onto the landscape, we rapidly saw a new sort of emergence of different categories, right? So there was Martech, and then there was SalesTech, and now there's CSTech and all these other things. And we created these silos of technology sectors to try to address very specific pain points. And then RevOps was born. And RevOps was like, oh, yeah, this is the orchestration layer.
0:04:16.0 Mike Rizzo: It's going to connect all these things. It should be those three functions at a minimum, MOPS, SOPS, and CSOPS. And it was like the answer to who is running this tech stack, right? Right. Lo and behold, RevOps actually is just SalesOps 2.0. In most cases, I would say 98% of the time, that ends up being the truth, which is frustrating for a lot of us, but still tends to be the truth. And yet here we are, AI is on the scene, and it's actually more accessible than previously because the buyers before had to go through some crazy hurdles to be able to pay for an entire annual subscription and all this other stuff. And now today, a sales rep can whip out their credit card personally or even professionally if they have an expense budget and just buy a Clay tool to go do enrichment and stuff. And it's creating these silos again, in fact, completely disconnected environments where the right hand doesn't know what the left is doing. And again, for the organizational leaders out there, that's a really big problem. You need somebody to run your GoToMarket tech stack like a product. And that's what we're working hard on here at MarketingOps.com is certifying our members to say, I am a certified GoToMarket product manager, and I'm going to help you navigate this landscape and create alignment between all of these capabilities that we have access to across all of the AI and all of the SaaS products that we bought. But it's just like, why haven't we learned from our past experience? Why are we seeing this happen again? It's like crazy to me.
0:05:48.7 Sara Faatz: How much of it do you think is that people are trying to move so quickly? Do you think that that's playing into it? Like, I don't know if you're seeing this, but we see a ton of people like, I don't want to say panic, because that's not the right word. But there's this excitement, but there's also a fear that they're going to miss out if they don't do something. So everybody's trying to not just get on the AI train, but accelerate their business because of it. But I think it's causing a lot of, at least in my opinion, it's causing a lot of what you're experiencing. And then I think you also just have people not learning from their mistakes. But I'm curious what you're thinking there.
0:06:19.9 Mike Rizzo: Yeah, yeah. No, it's a good question. There's a couple of things, right? Unfortunately, there's a lot of layoffs in the B2B sort of SaaS and tech sector in general. They laid off a lot of senior talent. And I think what we're experiencing is it's just so easy to get started. And there is sort of a FOMO thing happening. And so we do need the more senior talent and our board members and our executives to remember that there are people that have seen this movie before, and they can help you see around a corner that you aren't aware of yet. But the reality is, I've used this talk track so many times that I almost feel like I'm just like beating on the drum and nobody's even hearing the beat anymore. But begin with the end in mind, folks. The other thing that I say, I borrowed it from the movie, aim small, miss small, or slow down to speed up. These new models should force people to stop and think about, well, where do we really think this is going to make an impact? This idea of consumption-based pricing and stuff is completely changing the game for people. It feels a lot more accessible, and it is in a lot of ways, but it also can get out of hand really, really quick. And that requires you to slow down and really think about how you want to implement it, which is a really valuable exercise for the organization that's buying the tool. Because then they're going to try to tie it back to ROI and say, hey, I'm going to make a bet. I'm going to put a stake in the ground. This is what I want to implement. Anyway, sorry, I'm rambling, but I think it's exciting.
0:08:02.9 Sara Faatz: Yeah, it is exciting. And I think we have mutual friends in Scott Brinker and Franz Riemersma, and they released back in May, I think, their Martech map and State of Martech. And there were 15,000 some odd pieces of marketing technology. That is insane, right? And the biggest growth from that came from AI tools, right? So when you stop and think about that for a second, even if you say it's easy for everybody to grab, how do you know that you're even using the right tool? What are some of the unintended consequences of implementing that tool? So to your point, you can pause and think with the end in mind and still be way ahead of the game. Actually, you will be ahead of the game if you actually take that approach, right? Because if you implement something and haven't thought it through, there are some risks in that, right?
0:08:52.1 Mike Rizzo: Yeah, 100%. I mean, I had this wonderful conversation with a community member of ours. She had posed a question in one of our Slack channels about purchasing an AI solution. And the long and the short of this is it's incredibly difficult for this individual to figure out how to buy. We're very used to being able to buy on a subscription basis and just have access to all the tools and it created a lot of bloat. We talk a lot about consolidation, getting ROI out of our tech stack and all that stuff. Well, the consumption-based pricing is going to change that for people, right? A lot of the AI models are built on this or AI tools, rather. And so again, it's really slowing down, being very, very intentional about, okay, we've decided, by way of example, we've decided perhaps that our organization wants to do an outbound approach to high intent visitors. And so at which point do we want LLMs to step in and enrich data and equip our team with the right type of outreach message? Is it at the point of ingest when they visit our website on the very first visit? Or is it after they've watched three or four of our videos or downloaded an ebook? There's very different trigger points, in which case the volume can go from very large to very small. And it's like this really difficult exercise to go through. And this individual's going, like, I don't even know where to begin with this thing, right? Like, I don't have the time for this. And so it comes back to this, like, resourcing problem of, like, you've got these great experts who want to solve this problem for you, but you need to equip them with the right resources and people, like humans, to go solve what AI can help you scale. And so it's a really exciting time to be in Martech.
0:10:39.7 Sara Faatz: Right. No, I love that. That's great. So let me ask you, where do you go? You mentioned your Slack channel, and we'll definitely make sure that we put a link to that for anybody who's listening who's a marketing ops professional. It's a fantastic area. So if people haven't joined, they absolutely should. But where else do you go for inspiration or information?
0:11:02.5 Mike Rizzo: Where else do I go for inspiration or information? I do follow some other leaders in our space. You mentioned Franz and Scott Brinker, of course. Those are natural folks to follow. They've been pillars in our community for quite some time. Daryl Alfonso is an individual that I follow as well. He's involved in our community. And then I'm largely attending these events, right? These various local meetups and things. Some of them are ours for our community. Others are put on by, gosh, what is it? The Marketing AI Con, MAICON. Those types of groups, I'm trying to insert myself in as many of those places as I can. Martech.org is often full of great information as well. So I tend to try to pick up on some of their content.
0:11:56.0 Sara Faatz: That's great. And I know you talked about events. You run a great Mopsapalooza. I had a chance to go a couple years ago. It's a fantastic event. Definitely check that out as well. Well, thank you so much, Mike. It's been great talking to you today.
0:12:08.4 Mike Rizzo: Yeah, thank you for having me. I really appreciate it. And yeah, for those of you who haven't heard of MarketingOps.com, we'd love for you guys to come check us out. I'm there. You can Slack me anytime or you can find me on LinkedIn. I'm floating around. So happy to be a part of the conversation.
0:12:21.6 Sara Faatz: Listeners, thanks for tuning in. Make sure you like and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Until next time, I'm Sara Faatz, and this is 10 Minute Martech.