Recognizing Your Data Moment for Marketing and Revenue Operations

At MOps-Apalooza 2024, I spoke about a concept that I believe defines the future of marketing and revenue operations: your data moment.

Data is no longer just a byproduct of business activities. It’s the fuel driving smarter decisions. But this also means that bad data is the difference between success and failure.

Many ops professionals face a daily battle with data continuity issues, outdated records, and gaps in customer insights. While fixing these issues on a surface level might get you through today’s meeting or campaign, it’s not enough to meet the demands of modern marketing.

A decade or so ago, marketing teams operated with a handful of basic tools, and data played a supporting role (if it was even part of the conversation at all). Marketing strategies were often guided by intuition rather than insights, and operational efficiency wasn’t the finely tuned engine it is today. Fast forward to now, and the landscape has completely changed. 

Today, data needs to move freely, accurately, and reliably across systems. Marketing and sales teams can’t afford silos or inconsistencies. This is where data reliability has become a deep need in today’s AI fueled world.

With this need, marketing and revenue operations professionals are no longer just behind-the-scenes players, they are the architects of their organizations’ success. They are the ones holding the joystick over business process technology, and their work fuels campaigns, and drives revenue in ways that were unimaginable a decade ago.

Yet, there is a lack of data reliability. It’s up to marketing and revenue ops leaders to fix the issue permanently by creating a data culture that creates continuous, reliable, data.

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Where Marketing and Revenue Operations Struggle

For many businesses, the challenge lies in data fragmentation. Customer data lives in multiple systems: CRM platforms, marketing automation tools, analytics dashboards, and more. Each of these systems serves its purpose but rarely communicates effectively with the others. The result is disjointed insights, wasted resources, and missed opportunities.

Here’s a scenario you might recognize: You’re on your 17th macro in Excel, trying to clean up contact lists or reconcile sales reports, and wondering, “Why am I doing this?” 

You’re fighting a losing battle against messy data, and it feels like no matter how many macros you write or spreadsheets you reconcile, the root problem remains unresolved.

This cycle of frustration is time-consuming and detrimental to your marketing and sales strategies. Too many times, I’ve seen companies launch a campaign based on outdated or incorrect data, only to find their bounce rates spike, or worse, they’ve reached out to customers who opted out of communications. 

These mistakes erode trust, waste resources, and ultimately hurt your bottom line.

Applying DataOps to Overcome Challenges

DataOps is a methodology that bridges the gap between data management and operational excellence. It emphasizes collaboration, process automation, and continuous improvement in data quality. 

By adopting a DataOps approach, marketing and revenue ops teams can:

• Understand every port of entry for your data so they can control its quality from the start.
• Create a single source of truth that eliminates inconsistencies across systems.
• Ensure that data is complete and meaningful.
• Implement consistent data formats and cleanse records of inaccuracies, ensuring your campaigns are built on a solid foundation.
• Use clean data to create precise, actionable segments for personalized marketing and sales efforts.

Additionally, marketing productivity can be increased through automation solutions, but they are only as effective as the data it’s built upon. 

Without clean, reliable data, automations fail to deliver personalized experiences and workflows break. High-quality data ensures that your automations run seamlessly, delivering the right message to the right audience at the right time.

Your data moment means treating your organization’s data like the high value asset it is. 

The Importance of Collaboration Between Marketing and Sales

For many organizations, the disconnect between marketing and sales data creates a cycle of inefficiency, and reduces the perception of the data value.

Sales teams collect data during customer interactions, but without proper standards, this information often enters systems incomplete or inconsistent. Marketing teams then inherit these problems, making it difficult to segment audiences or measure campaign success.

By fostering collaboration and creating a master data record, both teams can contribute to a unified, accurate dataset. This ensures that marketing insights fuel sales strategies and vice versa, creating a feedback loop that benefits the entire organization.

How We Can Help with Revenue Operations

We specialize in making data reliable, actionable, and continuous. Our solutions are designed to:

1. Unify Data Across Systems: We create a single source of truth that eliminates silos and ensures consistency.
2. Maintain Data Integrity: Our always-on approach ensures that your data remains clean, accurate, and ready for use—no more one-off cleanups.
3. Empower Marketing and Revenue Ops: With reliable data, your teams can focus on strategy and innovation instead of firefighting data issues.

Whether you’re grappling with outdated CRMs, fragmented marketing platforms, or disconnected sales systems, we have the expertise to turn your data chaos into clarity. If you’d like to learn more about our services, let us know.

As a marketing or revenue ops professional, you’re in a unique position to lead your organization into a data-driven future. By prioritizing data quality and adopting a DataOps mindset, you can deliver better outcomes for your company, and elevate your own career.

This is your data moment. Are you ready to seize it?