With Mike Rizzo Community-Led Founder at MO Pros
Mike Rizzo from MO Pros wanted to build a place where people in Marketing Ops could talk shop. You’ll hear about the birth of MO Pros, what led to its continued success, why you should embrace mistakes for the sake of both your career and the entire community, and key takeaways from the MO Pros survey of more than 750 Marketing Ops professionals.
Mike Rizzo is the Community-Led Founder of MO Pros® - the community for Marketing Operations Professionals. He is a career marketing operations professional passionate about using a people-first approach to building scalable and efficient solutions to the challenges faced by marketing, business operations, and client success teams.
In 2017 Mike founded the growing community of MO Pros - a place where thousands of Marketing Operations Professionals connect, collaborate and help elevate the practice of Marketing Ops.
Why did you start MO Pros?
Like most marketing operations professionals, we're often a little bit on our own, unless you are one of the fortunate souls that are on a larger team or in an enterprise organization where you've got lots of folks to talk shop with.
In 2015 or 2016 I went to Dreamforce and met people I wanted to stay in touch with. That’s when Slack started to show up on the scene. I knew I'd really like to stay connected with some of the folks that are doing marketing ops because frankly, trying to talk to anybody about marketing operations outside of marketing operations was a bit of an eye roll. People just don’t know what you’re talking about.
This blog post that I had written about this Slack channel for marketing ops people started getting more traction. People kept asking me if they could have an invite. It got to the point where I couldn’t manage the process anymore.
Like any marketing ops person, I thought, “How do I automate this?” So we turned on an automation engine to say, “Hey, if you wanna join the community, it's always been a safe place to come talk shop, whether you're from Marketo, HubSpot, Pardot, or any other background. Come join this community and learn from one another.”
How does embracing mistakes create accountability?
Mistakes humanize you, and they humanize your brand. Humanizing brands by embracing and sometimes even highlighting mistakes is a tremendously valuable thing. I’m glad consumer behavior has changed to become more accepting of mistakes.
If you’re in the MarTech space you get that mistakes happen. It’s nice to see regular consumers rally around an employee who makes a mistake, like the intern who accidentally sent out a test email to the entire HBO subscribers list. The whole world rallied around that person trying to support them.
What results stood out from the survey MO Pros did of 750 Marketing Ops professionals?
The output of this research is to help us advocate for where, where we're all headed and where we want to go next. It’s good to know how everybody feels. If they feel understood. Do they feel well compensated? Do they have the right resources that they need?
Having the feedback of the entire community helps to answer questions like measurement for Marketing Ops. For instance, I personally don’t think marketing operations should only be measured on pipeline. The community overall will eventually tell us what we think those measurements should be.
