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What does a Marketing Operations Manager do?

Marketing operations managers run the systems, data and processes behind marketing: automation, CRM, attribution, lead routing and reporting.

Open roles now
43
Remote
33%
Most-requested tool
Salesforce

The job

Marketing operations managers keep the marketing machine running. They own the marketing automation platform and its integration with the CRM, lead scoring and routing, data quality, attribution and the dashboards the team runs on. When a campaign goes out, ops built the plumbing it runs through.

It's one of the most technical marketing jobs and one of the most important to scale. A team with good ops can launch faster, trust its numbers and hand sales the right leads at the right time. A team without it argues about data every week.

The role increasingly includes revenue operations work shared with sales, plus the AI and automation stack: enrichment tools like Clay, workflow automation, and AI tools that marketers want to plug into their systems.

A typical week

  • Fix a lead routing or sync issue between the automation platform and CRM
  • Build the tracking and reporting for a new campaign
  • Clean up and enrich a segment of the database
  • Review the attribution dashboard with the marketing lead
  • Evaluate a new tool someone on the team wants to buy

How they're measured

  • Data quality and completeness
  • Speed to lead and routing accuracy
  • Campaign launch speed
  • Trust in reporting (do people use the dashboards?)
  • Tool cost and adoption

Skills that matter

Marketing automation
HubSpot, Marketo or Pardot is where most of the work happens.
CRM administration
Salesforce or HubSpot CRM and how marketing data flows into it.
Data management
Clean, enriched, deduplicated data underpins everything.
Attribution and reporting
Dashboards the team trusts.
Systems thinking
Seeing how a change in one tool breaks another.
Automation
Connecting tools with Zapier, Clay and APIs to remove manual work.

Tools employers ask for

Share of 44 marketing operations job posts on HeyMarketers in the last 12 months that name each tool.

  • Salesforce57%
  • Marketo50%
  • SQL50%
  • Generative AI25%
  • Clay23%
  • Tableau18%
  • Google Ads16%
  • Zapier16%
  • HubSpot14%
  • Google Analytics11%

Career path

  1. 1

    Marketing operations specialist

    Builds campaigns and maintains the automation platform.

  2. 2

    Marketing operations manager

    Owns systems, data and reporting.

  3. 3

    Senior manager or head of marketing ops

    Owns the full stack and roadmap.

  4. 4

    Director of marketing or revenue operations

    Owns go-to-market systems across teams.

Open marketing operations roles by level right now: entry level 7%, mid level 28%, senior 28%, lead or director 37%.

How to stand out

  • Show a system you built or fixed and the time or money it saved.
  • Explain a data problem you diagnosed end to end.
  • Show a dashboard leadership actually used.
  • Have opinions about which tools to cut.

Preparing for interviews? See the questions marketing operations managers get asked, or read a typical job description.

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Open marketing operations roles

Hiring now: Brex, Stripe, Klaviyo, ClassPass, Elastic, NerdWallet.

See all 43 open marketing operations jobs

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How often

Questions

What does a Marketing Operations Manager do?

Marketing operations managers keep the marketing machine running. They own the marketing automation platform and its integration with the CRM, lead scoring and routing, data quality, attribution and the dashboards the team runs on. When a campaign goes out, ops built the plumbing it runs through.

Are marketing operations managers remote?

33% of the 43 open marketing operations roles on HeyMarketers right now are remote. The rest are on-site or hybrid.

What tools do marketing operations managers use?

The tools named most often in marketing operations job posts on HeyMarketers are Salesforce (57% of posts), Marketo (50% of posts), SQL (50% of posts), Generative AI (25% of posts), Clay (23% of posts).

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