Operations at Enterprise Scale - Paul Wilson

Oct 8, 2023

Paul Wilson, CEO of GTM Systems and former ops leader at Marketo and Adobe, shares insights on operational challenges in large enterprises. He emphasizes the necessity of collaboration and aligned strategies to tackle these hurdles. The conversation dives into the differences between marketing and sales operations, highlighting the need for effective communication. Wilson also explores the innovative realm of campaign architecture and the transformative impact of AI on marketing. His reflections provide a wealth of knowledge for aspiring ops leaders.

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ADVICE

Clarify Your Role Mandate

Establish and clarify the mandate of your role early, aligning it with organizational expectations including resources and budget.
Confirm boundaries of authority to avoid overcommitting and understand impacts of changes in scope or budget.

INSIGHT

Marketing Ops' Unique Sandbox Challenge

Marketing operations lacks sandbox environments unlike sales operations, creating higher risk in live production marketing systems.
Marketers depend on these live systems to deliver experiences, so operational control and change management are critical.

INSIGHT

Campaign Engineering's Role

Campaign engineering bridges marketing creativity and operational feasibility by advising on system capabilities early in planning.
This role ensures campaigns match what technology, data, and budget realistically allow before execution.

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Operations can be difficult in organizations of any size, but in large companies, there are special challenges.

What does it take to succeed as an ops leader in the world's biggest enterprises?

Today's guest is a former marketing ops leader from Marketo, Adobe, Slack, and Salesforce. He delivers a master class on navigating enterprise complexity.

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About Today's Guest

Paul Wilson has been a sales and marketing leader, consultant, and marketing operations executive at some of the largest companies in the world, including Marketo, Adobe, Slack, Salesforce, and OneTrust. Today he is the CEO of GTM Systems.

From Paul's LinkedIn: "GTM Systems is dedicated to reinventing the intersection of marketing, sales, and customer success operations into a unified go-to-market operations framework."

https://www.linkedin.com/in/pwtoday/

Key Topics

[00:00] - Introduction
[01:24] - Which type of work/company size has been most rewarding for Paul. Enjoyment from working with people to solve challenges.
[03:54] - What to do when joining a new enterprise. Establishing the mandate of the role and what resources you have.
[05:54] - The role of marketing ops in the enterprise. Important distinctions between MOPs and Sales Ops. Lack of sandbox environments in the MarTech stack creating greater risk. Everything is in production. Marketers are reliant on their tools to deliver experiences and are more impacted by issues.
[09:00] - Why we can't we have sandboxes in MarTech. Possible perception of finance that this is less critical. Proximity of CRM to IT. Growing distinction between operations and technology in many companies. Business Systems / IT teams absorbing sales tech.
[16:09] - Relationship between marketing operations and marketing strategy. The right way to relate to stakeholders. Need for campaign engineering and MOPS to have a voice in marketing planning discussions. Analogy to a structural engineer in discussions of building construction.
[23:50] - The biggest changes someone should expect moving from a smaller org to an enterprise company. Big companies don't move quickly. Importance of establishing relationships with navigators who can teach you. The experience taught Paul how to communicate effort, developing tiered messaging for different levels of the organization.
[36:28] - Inevitability of dysfunction in an enterprise. Will all enterprises approach being a real-life Dilbert strip? Some dysfunction comes with the territory.
[40:21] - The coolest/most complex projects are in enterprise. Paul's experience doing large projects and the thrill they bring.
[43:04] - Is Paul a lucky charm for M&A?
[43:41] - The implications of AI be for marketing. Justin sees some benefit as a convenience / efficiency tool but is skeptical of generative capabilities. Paul believes AI will be revolutionary, but we are still in the "dot-matrix" phase. Discussion of ethical concerns.
[48:56] - Paul's new firm, GTM Systems.

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