Hire Marketing Operations Director — marketing’s infrastructure, owned

Full-time $130k–$180k. Fractional directors suit companies whose stack is complex enough to need ownership but not a full-time executive.

The martech stack, attribution, lead lifecycle, database health, and marketing processes. They are the reason campaigns launch cleanly and numbers can be trusted.

Full systems audit, attribution fixed, critical integrations repaired, data hygiene program started, core processes documented. Marketing’s foundation visibly solid within the quarter.

Attribution accuracy and trust, data quality scores, campaign launch cycle time, martech cost efficiency, and — ultimately — every other marketing metric becoming more reliable.

When marketing has more than a handful of tools, reporting is disputed, launches are chaotic, or nobody can say confidently where leads go. Usually around the time marketing headcount passes ten — often earlier.

They overlap but aren't the same. A marketing operations director owns the martech stack, attribution, lead lifecycle and campaign ops end to end; RevOps sits above marketing, sales and customer success and optimises the full revenue engine. If your pain is specifically in marketing's systems and reporting, hire for marketing ops. If handoffs between departments are the problem, you want RevOps — and I can help you scope either correctly before you commit headcount.

Both, and I'm explicit about which. On a fractional basis I'll own marketing ops hands-on — building the automations, configuring routing, modelling the data, fixing attribution — typically a few days a month on an ongoing retainer. Many clients hire me to run it while they recruit a permanent lead, then I define the role, vet candidates technically, and hand over a documented system. You're not forced to choose between doing and directing.

The systems audit and a traced lead path take about two weeks and usually surface quick wins I can ship immediately — broken tracking, a dead automation, obvious tool consolidation. Attribution and lifecycle rebuilds are a 60-to-90-day job because they require agreement with sales and finance, not just configuration. Anyone who promises a fully rebuilt marketing ops function in thirty days is selling you a dashboard, not infrastructure.

I start by trying to make what you own work, because replatforming is expensive and risky. I'm tool-fluent across HubSpot, Marketo, Pardot, Salesforce, Segment, LeanData, Snowflake, dbt and Looker, so I can usually fix the integration and governance rather than rip and replace. When a tool genuinely can't scale with you, I'll make the case with numbers — cost, risk, migration effort — not preference, so the decision is yours and defensible.

A full-time director plus the martech they'll justify is a large committed cost. A fractional engagement with me is a monthly retainer scoped to the work — typically far less than a loaded salary — and it flexes down once the foundations are stable. The honest guidance: hire full-time when marketing ops is a daily operational load; hire fractional when you need senior architecture and a rebuild, not a permanent operator in every standup.

Yes. When clients hire me to establish marketing ops, I often also define the supporting roles — ops analyst, campaign manager, data specialist — and screen candidates on the technical fundamentals most interviews miss, like whether they can model a lead lifecycle on a whiteboard or explain a dedup strategy. I'll set up the documentation, naming conventions and runbooks so whoever you hire inherits a system, not a mystery.