We’re Over-Engineering Marketing Into Oblivion

Is it just me, or has marketing become a parody of itself?

Lately, it feels like every time I open LinkedIn, a new job title has been birthed from the depths of a VC-funded brainstorming session. We’ve moved past “Growth Hackers” and “Demand Gen Specialists.” Now, we have AI Agent Builders and a personal favorite coined by the folks at Clay , the GTM Engineer.

At my last company (a large S&P cyber firm with a red bird logo), we didn’t just have a marketing operations team; we had a factory of “Ops” roles rather than actual marketers. There was Marketing Ops, Demand Ops, Campaign Ops, and Content Ops. I’m fairly certain there was an “Ops for the Ops” role that I simply missed in the directory.

To simply put it, we are over-complicating this industry for absolutely no reason, and it’s time we talk about why.

The cycle usually goes like this: We invest millions into a CRM like Salesforce or HubSpot. Then, we realize the data is a mess, so we buy “additional data layers” like Bombora or 6sense. We squint at the screen, adjust a few APIs, and say, “Look! It’s fixed. The data layer agrees with the CRM. My life is easier.”

Except it isn’t. Maybe I’m being hyperbolic, but these tools are nearly impossible to stitch together perfectly. Sure, there are highly technical people (apparently, these new GTM Engineers) who can manage the spaghetti code of APIs and webhooks. But we are essentially building a Rube Goldberg machine to do what used to be a straightforward job.

We keep creating more marketing tools for marketers, while the actual craft of marketing is fading into the background of a technical dashboard.

How do I know this? I managed a team of 11, and within that team were 3 managers managing a team of ops people.

Talk about inefficiency... INEFFICIENCY. Let’s talk about it. We created an entire market to compete against one another in the name of inefficiency.

Marketo, HubSpot, Salesforce: all major companies in the MOps space, and none of them are focused on streamlining jobs. They are focused on keeping you inside the platform. The longer you stay in their platform, your LTV goes up exponentially.

Here is the irony: In our quest to make GTM organizations “efficient,” we’ve made them brittle.

When you have five different “Ops” departments and two or three competing data sets, the system eventually breaks under its own weight. I’ve seen it happen:

We’ve become so “efficient” that we’ve created a single point of failure. When sales operations teams don’t talk to marketing operations teams, and sales data conflicts with marketing data, the whole enterprise starts to eat itself.

Do I think marketing people are going to be out of jobs? No. But I do think the era of the siloed “Marketing Ops” person is over.

Let me preface this by saying this: I think the best marketing operations folks can run RevOps teams. Someone who comes to mind is (so I am curious his opinion on this matter). I also think that most revenue operations folks can be effective marketing advocates if they are given the remit to do so.

Forward-thinking companies are realizing they cannot have two sets of data competing against each other. It’s inefficient, and it’s expensive. Marketing Ops isn’t dying; it’s being rolled into Revenue Operations (RevOps). Why? Because the business doesn’t care about “marketing data” vs. “sales data.” It cares about revenue. By merging these functions, companies are trying to stop internal civil war between departments and finally achieve a single source of truth that doesn’t require a degree in software engineering to understand.

Now, I know what you’re going to say. Marketing will just become a second class citizen in RevOps.

This is the whole point of RevOps. Singular function that provides an end to end support system for everyone in GTM.

We already do this. In RevOps today, you have deal desk, CS ops, sales operations, commissions, and more. Multiple teams being supported under one function.

It can work.

We are already moving in this direction.

Companies like HubSpot/Salesforce are going to need to completely rethink how they deliver value to companies. Startups are no longer buying Salesforce. Some are even moving away from HubSpot. The user experience has gone from “We’re the only one’s who do it” to “Why would I ever make my job that hard?”

Better RevOps systems will reflect the new reality of RevOps organizations. 1 tool. Actually connected. Simplified, yet powerful.

We need to take a massive step back and ask the million-dollar question: What is marketing actually supposed to do?

Let’s keep things really simple.

Marketing exists to:

This is obviously oversimplified. And you can dig deep into what these actually mean

Awareness: content (video, blog, web, newsletter, social, etc) distributed across channels where audience lives, both paid and organic. This makes the audience aware of who you are and what you do.

Inspire: the content you create should inspire them to take action when the solution is needed. (Demo, free trial, purchase)

Experience: the experience from consumption to acquisition and onboarding should be pure bliss. The best product experiences turn users into advocates. You do need to make the ask.

Data: this is the controversial part. I don’t think that marketers need to be the ones who orchestrate the data. But we do need to be our own advocates. We need to be able to get access to the data we need to make decisions. And we need to be able to understand that data.

You do not need a separate, fragmented platform for each of those steps. These functions should be integrated within the CRM you already own. We don’t need more “layers”. Most of the data you need is already there (and if it is not, change your CRM).

If we spend 90% of our time managing the tools and only 10% of our time talking to the customers, we aren’t marketers anymore.

We’re just highly paid mechanics for a car that isn’t moving.