Every day, marketing operations professionals work behind the scenes to help marketers do their best work. Their work is the foundation of any well-run marketing team, but their contributions often go underrecognized.
That's why we at Zapier created Marketing Ops Appreciation Day and launched the first Marketing Ops Awards to recognize outstanding achievements of industry leaders.
Meet the industry experts who are helping their teams maximize their impact.
Romana Amato joined uptime.com in the middle of their corporate rebrand and website relaunch, and took the lead on relaunching the website: implementing HubSpot's CMS platform, transferring the web pages into the HubSpot CMS, editing for SEO and accessibility, redesigning according to new brand guidelines, and establishing analytics and reporting. Her efforts resulted in a 100% increase in lead generation year over year.
Romana works with nearly every department at Uptime from marketing to sales and success to product. The company is on track to double revenue this year, and Romana's team attributes much of this to Romana's hard work in building their sales and marketing ops from the ground up.
When Amy Goldfine joined Iterable, she developed processes that allowed the team to fire on all cylinders. Her team highlights her ability to enable everyone on the team to be power users of the tools they use.
During her time at Iterable, Amy has developed naming conventions for campaigns to ensure accurate reporting, trained the team on new marketing technology, and created standard operating procedures for how the team sets up campaigns using different tools. She also identifies when errors are made and creates safeguards to prevent them from happening in the future.
Prior to working at WP Engine, Nora Graehling was the Marketing Operations Manager at A-LIGN, where her team described her as someone who is always willing to go above and beyond.
Her contributions at A-LIGN include implementing tooling to streamlining sales, marketing, and IT. She was instrumental in A-LIGN's recent rebrand, launching their new website, executing new sales and marketing processes and funnel definitions, and building Salesforce layouts for sales and marketing.
Alison Hebert was the first marketing ops hire at Orca Security, and since then, the team has grown to 10x the size in a little under a year. When Alison joined Orca, she implemented a complex multi-touch campaign architecture from scratch and integrated over a dozen new martech tools.
She also developed new lead scoring, created marketing templates, built automations, and developed a new campaign structure—along with many other processes that enable the marketing team to do their best work. She has deep expertise on how Pardot works with other systems like Salesforce, Zapier, and BrightTalk. She always has an eye on improving marketing ops, templatizing when possible, and creating efficient processes.
Ali's team speaks highly of her creative approach to improving Orca's tech stack and integrations, so the marketing team can use their tools seamlessly.
Christina Kay uses automations to save her team time and increase their impact. She uses Zapier to automate the closed-won sales cycle and initiate marketing onboarding campaigns in HubSpot, saving each sales rep 50 hours per week with a single Zap.
Previously, her team manually created and sent customer renewal emails, which Christina automated through HubSpot. This led to a 30% increase in contract value and 76% decrease in customer churn rate.
Christina also uses strategies such as progressive profiling, SEO facelifts, internal triggers, and outbound marketing, helping to increase traffic to landing pages by 25% year over year.
When Chelsea Katich joined McGraw Hill, the average lead time for a sales rep to follow up with a customer was 60 days. Thanks to Chelsea's marketing ops expertise, she created a robust routing strategy that enables sales reps to get back to customers within 72 hours.
Chelsea also created an automated process for customers requesting samples—allowing samples to ship directly from their warehouse without the need for approvals, saving each sales rep hours of time spent on manual approvals.
Veronica Lazarovici's team describes her as the backbone of their marketing function. In her time at Alma, Veronica set up a re-engagement tracking process that enabled the team to attribute an additional $4M in marketing-driven revenue.
Veronica was a key partner in reconifguring Alma's Salesforce instance and created a playbook for sales to deliver personalized outreach to prospective customers.
Sara Morton's team lauds her ability to contribute insights and expertise that help the company run more effectively.
She works collaboratively with the marketing team to clean bad data, define reporting for external vendors, create reports, and build complex workflows for drip campaigns and customer onboarding trainings. She created metric dashboards for the sales, marketing, and customer success teams to enable them to see their impact and outcomes. And Sara co-implemented lead scoring rules and workflows, which required cleansing of thousands of historically bad data records.
Stephanie Pounders has been with iOFFICE + SpaceIQ since 2019 and has been a vital part of the team from her first day. She was originally brought on to set up a bi-directional system, and has since led the operations strategy through multiple mergers.
In the last three years, she has led three mergers totaling over 75 martech tools that had to be optimized, merged, or transformed—ultimately saving $1.5M while scaling from a startup to enterprise organization. During her time with the organization, she's also been able to grow the team over 500%.
As a critical part of the organization's SLT, Stephanie helps direct the strategy behind Marketing Operations in conjunction with the Revenue Operations and Customer Experience teams to ensure a smooth funnel for customers from beginning to end and back again.
