What’s up everyone, today we have the pleasure of sitting down with Danielle Balestra, Director of Marketing Technology and Operations at Goodwin.
Summary: Marketing operations power organizational change through deep system understanding. Danielle reveals how strategic operators transform corporate landscapes by mapping intricate human networks, turning complex bureaucracies into adaptive innovation platforms. Her approach reconstructs marketing from a tactical function into a critical strategic driver, where understanding organizational dynamics becomes the primary method of creating meaningful business transformation.
About Danielle
- Danielle started her career at a big ad agency in NYC before trying marketing at all sorts of different places like b2b media, financial education and brand reputation intelligence
- She spent time as a Senior consultant at a boutique agency and also freelanced as a Marketo specialist
- She became Director of Marketing Ops at one of the top cancer hospitals in the US and later VP of Marketing Ops at CIT Bank where she led a big MAP transformation
- Today Danielle is Director of Martech and Operations at Goodwin (a global law firm), where she manages of team of 16 that includes web, CRM, Ops, Email and Solution Architect
How to Defeat Enterprise Inertia with Tactical Marketing Ops Strategies
Marketing ops in enterprise moves like molasses compared to SaaS startups—and Danielle has the battle scars to prove it. After years in consulting, she deliberately jumped into the enterprise arena, not despite its notorious sluggishness but because of the massive internal transformation potential. "The reason I pivoted into large enterprise was because it's an opportunity to sell innovation internally, but also get paid," she explains with refreshing candor.
You face a completely different animal when implementing martech in a 4,000+ employee organization. Your job morphs into part-marketer, part-internal lobbyist:
Finding the hungry change-makers scattered across departments
Building coalitions with colleagues who crave efficiency
Selling the vision repeatedly to overcome institutional inertia
Implementing solutions that feel revolutionary in environments resistant to change
The satisfaction comes from moving mountains that seemed immovable. Tech startups already expect and fund scaling technologies—the path glows with green lights. Enterprise paths bristle with red tape and "we've always done it this way" roadblocks.
Danielle's enterprise journey reads like a marketing ops fairytale gone rogue. "My three enterprises was like Goldilocks," she laughs. Memorial Sloan Kettering, despite its prestigious reputation, crawled at a pace that drove her to distraction. "It took us six months to put a preference center up. This is way too slow." The bed was too soft. CIT offered more speed but lacked investment for sustained growth. The bed was too hard.
Then came Goodwin, where the legal industry's appetite for evolution aligned with her expertise. Fresh leadership—a new COO and chairman committed to "running business with data and intelligence"—created fertile ground for her marketing ops vision. This bed was just right. The transformation feels electric precisely because legal firms typically move at glacial speeds.
You'll recognize the right enterprise fit when leadership actively hungers for data-driven decisions rather than merely talking about them. Words matter less than resource allocation and willingness to disrupt comfortable patterns.
Key takeaway: Map internal influence networks, document wins with leadership-valued metrics, and secure early budget control. Build a six-month roadmap of small victories that advance your larger vision without triggering organizational resistance. Treat internal stakeholders as customers by selling efficiency improvements as competitive advantages.
Why Enterprise Martech Can Be as Fun as Tech Startups
Enterprise martech gets a bad rap for being outdated and slow. "Legacy enterprise tools-ish," as the skeptics call platforms like Microsoft Dynamics and Marketo. But this surface-level dismissal misses what actually happens inside regulated industries. Danielle dismantles this misconception with the calm precision of someone who's lived both worlds. "Being in a healthcare organization, being at a bank, do you really want to put your data out there for anyone to grab?" It's a practical question that trendy martech vendors conveniently sidestep.
> "The banks and even some financial institution clients have had data lakes and orchestration systems in place for over two decades. This is old hat for them and just new for the tech world."
Regulated industries pioneered data intelligence while today's "innovative" startups were still in diapers. "The banks and even some financial institution clients have had data lakes and orchestration systems in place for over two decades," Danielle points out with a hint of amusement. "This is old hat for them and just new for the tech world." The irony stings: what passes for cutting-edge today has been standard operating procedure in banking since before most SaaS companies existed. These industries understood customer behavior, engagement patterns, and product usage long before "customer journey orchestration" became a conference buzzword.
The real enterprise challenge isn't technological capability—it's processing time. When vendor onboarding takes nine months and you need a solution in six, you return to established platforms with comprehensive portfolios. Danielle's experience with an event scanner technology purchase illustrates this perfectly: "We started the process in 2019 and ended it in mid-2020. It took us almost a year to process that." During that implementation period, the vendor was acquired by another company! You face two options:
Wait patiently through lengthy security reviews for innovative tools
Expand usage of already-approved enterprise platforms
Accept that this gatekeeping prevents wasteful impulse purchases
Acknowledge that crucial tools still eventually make it through
Microsoft Dynamics gets unfairly maligned in this "latest and greatest" obsession. Danielle's first experience with the platform revealed unexpected advantages: "Working with an organization that still programs and builds from their own code is pretty awesome." With native integrations, consistent data across systems, and direct connections to BI reporting through Fabric, Dynamics eliminates the integration headaches that consume marketing operations teams. No more asking, "Why is this in Salesforce but not in Marketo?" The data lives in one cohesive environment.
Key takeaway: Master enterprise martech by: (1) Ruthlessly audit system integration points, recognizing each connection as a data vulnerability and maintenance challenge. (2) Distinguish between product limitations and implementation failures by testing workflows across deployments. (3) Create a security-first evaluation matrix scoring tools on compliance, data isolation, and authentication before considering features. Transform security constraints into competitive advantages that protect data and career.
Building Martech Stacks That Solve Actual Business Problems
Enterprise martech builds differently—forget your perfect-world stack exercises. While workshop participants happily connect hypothetical Salesforce instances to Outreach in frictionless diagrams, real enterprise teams face vendor mandates and security roadblocks that crush agility. "You can't really just connect to this," as the stark reality goes. Danielle brings refreshing clarity to this enterprise constraint, flipping perceived limitations into p...
Humans of Martech