Marketing Operations: What I Do, What I Don't, and Why It Matters

Before you spend another dollar on marketing, you need to know if the last one worked. Most companies don't know.

Marketing operations is the plumbing behind every marketing decision. The data sources, the dashboards, the attribution model, the way your CRM talks to your ad platforms and your analytics and your BI tool. When it works, nobody thinks about it. When it doesn't — and it usually doesn't — every other marketing decision you make is a guess wearing a suit.

I fix this for my clients because I have to. Most of my work is SEO, paid media, and lead gen. None of it is defensible if the reporting underneath is broken. So I got good at fixing the reporting.

What I mean by marketing operations

Marketing operations means different things to different people. RevOps teams claim it. Salesforce admins claim it. CRM implementation firms claim it. What I do is tighter than any of those:

Connect data sources — Google Analytics, GA4, ad platforms, CRM, email tool, call tracking, customer data warehouse — so the same numbers show up in the same place.
Build dashboards leadership actually uses — not 40-widget Tableau monstrosities. Clean, functional, answer-the-question dashboards that support real decisions.
Close attribution gaps — multi-touch attribution that accounts for the channels you actually run, set up so it reflects real buyer behavior instead of last-touch fiction.
Fix broken tracking — UTM discipline, conversion event hygiene, consent-based tracking setup, server-side tagging where it matters.
Reporting cadence that holds — weekly team reports, monthly exec reports, quarterly board reports that all tell a consistent story because they're pulling from the same source of truth.

What I don't do

This is where marketing ops work falls apart most often — buyers expect the full RevOps stack and get disappointed, or consultants overpromise and underdeliver. So, clearly:

I don't rebuild CRMs. If your Salesforce or HubSpot instance needs a full rebuild, hire a CRM implementation firm.
I don't do sales operations. Deal stage design, commission tooling, quota management — not my scope.
I don't do finance operations. SaaS metrics, revenue reporting, ARR waterfalls — not my scope.
I'm not a Salesforce admin. If your daily MOPs work is permission audits and workflow builds inside Salesforce, hire an admin.

What I do is narrower: fix the data and the dashboards so marketing decisions are defensible. That's the job.

Who this is for

Companies where marketing is actively running and nobody can answer basic questions about what's working:

B2B companies where the CMO can't defend the marketing budget at the exec meeting
Ecommerce brands where Google, Meta, and Shopify each tell a different story about what's driving revenue
Mid-market companies with a marketing team and no one dedicated to operations
Private equity portfolio companies where reporting needs to get serious before the next board meeting
Agencies that need attribution and reporting cleaned up across a portfolio of client accounts

If your marketing operations problem is actually a sales operations or CRM implementation problem, I'll point you toward the right kind of help. But that's not me.

Tell me one number your executive team trusts and one number they argue about. I'll tell you why the one you argue about is untrustworthy and what it takes to fix it.

Gary Corriston runs Corriston Consulting, working with agencies and in-house marketing teams on paid media, SEO, marketing operations, and demand gen infrastructure. He's also building Campaign Budget Optimizer, an AI-native cross-platform budget allocation tool launching May 2026.

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Frequently asked questions

What's the difference between marketing ops and RevOps?

Marketing ops is the subset of operations work focused specifically on marketing — attribution, dashboards, CRM setup for marketing campaigns, tracking. RevOps is the broader discipline covering marketing, sales, and customer success operations as a combined function. Most mid-market companies need marketing ops; only larger companies with complex sales orgs typically need full RevOps.

Should marketing ops live in marketing or in RevOps?

Depends on company size and complexity. Pre-100-employees, marketing ops should sit inside the marketing team. Post-200-employees with a complex sales motion, consolidating into RevOps often makes sense. The wrong move is usually leaving it unowned — marketing ops without a clear owner drifts, and every marketing decision gets worse because of it.

What does good multi-touch attribution actually look like?

Multi-touch attribution assigns credit to multiple touchpoints in the buyer journey, weighted by their contribution to the conversion. The implementation matters more than the model. A thoughtful last-touch setup with clear channel definitions often outperforms a poorly-configured multi-touch setup. The right model is the one your team actually trusts and uses.

Why do our sales and marketing dashboards tell different stories?

Usually because the underlying data sources don't match. Common causes: different definitions of "lead" and "opportunity," different attribution windows, timing differences between when marketing captures a conversion and when sales creates an opportunity, and duplicate records that inflate one system while deflating the other. Marketing ops work includes reconciling these.

What's the most common marketing ops failure point?

Broken or misconfigured conversion tracking — the foundation everything else depends on. If the CRM doesn't reliably receive conversion events from ad platforms, every budget decision downstream is unreliable. This is often discovered late because the numbers look plausible and nobody checks the raw event data against what the platform is reporting.

Can I fix my attribution problem without rebuilding the CRM?

Usually yes. Most attribution problems are tracking and configuration issues, not CRM architecture problems. The typical fix sequence is: audit what's actually firing (tag manager, pixel, CRM webhook), reconcile the definitions (what counts as a conversion in each system), then build a reporting layer that acknowledges the gaps rather than papering over them. A full CRM rebuild is rarely the answer to a marketing attribution problem.