Service 09 // Marketing operations

Marketing operations
consulting.

For founders and marketing leads who pay for a stack and still lose leads between the site, the CRM, and the ad accounts. The work is what stays, who owns it, and the path a lead takes.


Marketing operations is the system under the campaigns. When it works, a person who fills in a form becomes a record sales can see, with a source you trust and a next step someone owns. When it does not, each tool has its own version of the truth.

This sits next to marketing automation, which builds the follow-up once the path is clear, and marketing analytics, which reads the result. If the question is which platform should run that follow-up, and the answer is HubSpot, that work has its own page: HubSpot consulting.

Who this is for

You are a fit when the company has bought tools faster than it has named owners. A new hire cannot tell which system is the source of a lead. Sales says marketing's numbers are wrong, and marketing says the CRM was never filled in. Common cases are software and services firms with a website, a CRM, an ad account, and a spreadsheet that still does the real work.

What the work covers

An inventory. Every tool that touches a lead, what it costs, who logs in, and what would break if you turned it off. The list is usually shorter than the invoice stack.

What stays. Each tool gets a job: system of record, source of traffic, place the email sends, or a candidate to retire. Two tools doing the same job is a decision, not a preference.

The path of a lead. From the page, to the form, to the CRM, to the person who should respond, with the fields that have to be present. We write that path so a new marketer can follow it.

Owners. One person accountable for the CRM, one for the site forms, one for the ad accounts. The fractional time of a founder counts only if it is on the calendar.

A quarterly review. What was added, what was retired, and where leads still leak. AI marketing consulting belongs in that review when a model is about to be given access to customer data.

How an engagement runs

  1. Understand. The tools, the invoices, the last ten leads, and where each one stalled.
  2. Strategize. The keep list, the retire list, and the path a lead should take.
  3. Execute. The field and routing changes your team can make, and a one-page map of the stack.
  4. Review. After a cycle, we check whether new leads arrived complete, and whether anyone reopened a tool we retired.
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A stack someone owns.

Fewer tools, a named owner for each one, and a lead that arrives in the CRM as a person sales can work.