Copy this 7-Point Marketing Ops Assessment For Your Team
Also - Hearing first hand from a data engineer turned marketer
In this edition:
A 7 Point Marketing Ops Assessment Template
The Marketing Ops Wheel: A Visual Framework
Podcast Interview With Sarah Krasnik Bedell: A Data Engineer Turned Marketer
Exclusive For Paid Subscribers: The Truth About the Ugly Times in My Marketing Ops Career and How They Led Me to Success
Don’t Miss This Week’s Free Marketing Ops Interview Bootcamp - Make Sure to Sign Up
The Secret to Great Marketing Measurement? UTMs.
Everyone wants advanced marketing measurement—multi-touch attribution, AI insights, beautiful dashboards. But here’s the truth: none of it works without the basics.
And one of the most overlooked basics? UTM parameter management.
Here’s why it matters:
UTMs are the foundation of campaign tracking: Without clean UTMs, you won’t know what results came from which campaign or channel.
Inconsistent UTMs = Dirty data: “facebook” vs. “Facebook,” missing parameters, or random naming conventions lead to messy, unreliable reports.
UTMs make advanced reporting possible: Multi-touch attribution, ROI measurement, and customer journey analysis all rely on clean, standardized UTMs.
It may not be fancy, but it is super necessary. If you don’t have a clear UTM framework, naming conventions, and tools to automate tagging, you’re setting yourself up for failure.
The best measurement doesn’t start with dashboards or tools—it starts with operational discipline. Get your UTMs right, and everything else becomes easier.
Are your UTMs clean and consistent, or is it still a work in progress?
P.S. If UTM chaos is holding you back, tools like UTM.io can help you standardize and automate campaign tagging.
Copy This Template For Your Marketing Operations Assessment
Make a copy of this Google Slide template to conduct your assessment.
The 7-P Marketing Operations Assessment Guide
Marketing Operations is the backbone of any successful marketing team, but how do you know if yours is truly optimized? The 7-P Model—Planning, PMO, People, Platforms, Performance, Partnerships, and Prioritization—offers a structured framework to assess your team's strengths and uncover areas for improvement.
This guide will help you score your organization’s maturity in each area, identify gaps, and take actionable steps to elevate your marketing ops function.
How It Works
For each "P," answer the assessment questions and score yourself:
1: Needs significant improvement.
2: Functional but room for growth.
3: Best-in-class performance.
Add up your total score to see where your organization stands.
Use the recommendations to address weak points and level up your marketing ops function.
Join My Premium Workshop to Level Up Your Marketing Ops Career
I’ve partnered with Mike Rizzo and the team at Marketing Ops Community to bring you a live workshop that’s unlike anything out there.
You’ll learn exactly how to build, lead, and scale a marketing ops function from scratch—drawing from real-world lessons I’ve learned leading teams and solving complex problems. Sign up here.
A Visual Depiction of Marketing Ops - The Marketing Ops Wheel
Unfortunately, you don’t notice marketing ops until something goes wrong.
But make no mistake, these behind-the-scenes operators make GTM magic happen.
I’ve had countless conversations with teams trying to define what exactly falls under the umbrella of Marketing Ops. And the truth is—it’s a lot.
Here’s a helpful framework: a visual map of the 8 Core Functions of Marketing Ops and their sub-functions - including rapidly changing AI capabilities.
📊 Data Management: Including data strategy, data engineering, data pipelines, AI-driven data quality, and AI-supported data governance.
🛠 Tools & Tech: Encompassing tech stack strategy and optimization, solutions architecture, custom tooling, platform integration, and product management.
📈 BI & Analytics: Responsible for dashboards and reporting, AI-powered data visualization, proactive AI-supported analytics, attribution and measurement models, real-time performance and insights.
💰 Budgeting: Oversees cost optimization, procurement, ROI analysis, spend management, and budget forecasting.
🤖 AI-Powered Campaign Operations: Supporting multi-channel orchestration, AI-powered personalization, audience segmentation, generative AI for content, and AI-driven campaign optimization.
🗂 Enablement: Including training and certification, internal documentation, process design, knowledge sharing, and change management.
🛠 PMO (Project Management Office): Drives large cross-functional projects, internal communication, resource allocation, collaboration & governance, and project scoping & planning.
📅 Planning: Aligning GTM strategies with company OKRs, timeline development, and resource allocation to drive focus and results.
Marketing Operations isn’t just about planning or managing the tech stack.
—it’s about orchestrating all these functions to drive efficiency, scale, and business impact.
Design inspiration from LXA.
Podcast Interview With Sarah Krasnik Bedell: A Data Engineer Turned Marketer
Summary: What happens when a data engineer with an obsession for truth-testing crashes into marketing’s ‘best practices’? Sarah’s journey from code to growth unfolds like a trained detective story, where she picks apart marketing myths and rebuilds them with an engineer’s first principles.
Her fresh take on centralized vs decentralized data team structures favors embedding an analyst deeply in marketing and growth teams. She’s a fan of warehouse-first marketing stack but only after determining which pipelines require real-time processing versus batch updates. Her approach to AI echoes the movie Limitless, where AI functions best as an accelerator of strong marketing fundamentals, not a replacement for strategic thinking.
Whether you’re wrestling with developer outreach or trying to get sales and marketing teams to actually talk to each other, Sarah’s technical-meets-tactical perspective offers a practical roadmap you want to check out.
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