Justin Norris

360Learning

360Learning is the learning platform that combines collaborative tools with the power of an LMS. We empower L&D teams to drive culture and growth through Collaborative Learning.

Sr. Director, Marketing and BDR Operations

Director of Marketing and BDR Operations

RevOps FM

I'm the creator and host of RevOps FM - a weekly Masterclass on revenue operations and go-to-market strategy. 

It's my way of thinking out loud about my work and sharing knowledge at scale.

Podcast Creator and Host

Perkuto

As Sr. Director of Solutions Architecture, I lead the architect team within our marketing operations practice at Perkuto and manage a team of seven. My role is to provide leadership and develop innovative solutions and marketing operations best practices.

Clients look to our team to solve their toughest marketing and sales operations challenges. We deliver results using rigorous business and process analysis, a relentless focus on the underlying business goals, and a rare depth of expertise configuring marketing systems.

Sr. Director, Solutions Architecture

Director of Solutions Architecture

As a Solutions Architect, I lead delivery teams in creating end-to-end marketing operations solutions for clients using Marketo and Salesforce and other best-in-class marketing tools.

Marketo Solutions Architect

As a Senior Consultant, I advise on and create end-to-end solutions for clients using Marketo and Salesforce and other best-in-class marketing tools.

Senior Marketo Consultant

ClearFit

I joined ClearFit as the third employee and the first marketing hire, tasked with growing the marketing function, generating demand, and building out the funnel. Our efforts generated thousands of new customers for ClearFit's hiring solution. I wore many hats during this time, and also helped overhaul the product UI, and hire the initial sales/customer success team, implement Marketo and Salesforce, and much more. 

I quickly discovered my love and talent for creating automated marketing, sales, and service systems and began to focus my energies exclusively on marketing automation and CRM. Using these tools we were able to more effectively nurture our prospects, identify our best leads, and effectively scale to thousands of customers - AND increase customer satisfaction - without massive increases in customer service headcount. This contributed to ClearFit experiencing triple digit % increase in customers and revenue during my tenure.

Director of CRM

CGA-Canada (Certified General Accountants Association of Canada)

I worked within the Professional Services team, which is responsible for providing online training and development opportunities to CGAs and other business professionals. 

My responsibilities included:

MARKETING STRATEGY: I managed the marketing function -- from developing the overall marketing strategy in line with organizational objectives down to the hands-on tactical implementation of campaigns.  
- Conduct market research, surveys, and gather customer insights
- Contribute to product strategy and optimize the product mix 
- Build integrated marketing communications programs across online and offline channels
- Manage, monitor, and grow CGA-Canada's professional development brand

PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT: I led the webcast and video course product lines, developing the overall product strategy and providing guidance on topics, presenters, and curriculum.

Marketing Strategist & Product Developer

Director, Marketing Ops @ 360Learning | Host @ RevOps FM Podcast | Thinking out loud about GTM + operations

I'm a seasoned marketing operations leader with 15+ years experience building high-performing teams.
Through this experience, I've learned what it takes to build marketing ops strategies, systems, and processes that will scale.

MY EXPERTISE:
• GTM operations strategy and roadmaps
• Designing, building, and optimizing Martech stacks
• Designing structure and processes for global remote teams 
• Data strategy and governance
• Analytics, reporting, KPIs
• Lead routing, management, SLAs, and follow-up
• Multi-channel lead nurturing and ABM
• Lead lifecycle and scoring
• Campaign operations
• Communication and change management

LEADERSHIP EXPERIENCE:
• Establish and lead a global ops function supporting marketing / BDR teams across 4 markets (Germany, France, UK, US).
• Provide coaching, training, and leadership to an expert consulting team (~40 people) on marketing operations best practices, with direct responsibility for a team of seven.
• Develop the solutions architecture function and lead the SA team at a marketing technology consulting firm. 

TECHNOLOGY EXPERTISE:
• Marketo: 4x Marketo Champion and Marketo Certified Solutions Architect (MCSA)
• Salesforce: seasoned Salesforce administrator, architect-level skillset
• Hubspot Certified
• iPaaS / Enterprise Automation: Workato Gold Partner and 2x conference speaker
• Attribution and Analytics: Bizible (Bizible All Star '17, Pipeline Marketing Award '17), Marketo, Looker, PowerBI • Data management: Ringlead, Clearbit, Cognism, etc.
• Lead routing: Lean Data, Distribution Engine

Director of Marketing Operations

Many teams I talk to are still copying and pasting between ChatGPT and the systems where real work actually lives.

 Meanwhile, every vendor ships "AI features" that only see their own tool.

The result is limiting and frustrating.  AI feels tantalizingly capable but can't actually free up your capacity.

I believe the most fundamental shift in 2026 won't come from better models. It will come from creating a ubiquitous AI layer that connects the knowledge and tools we use every day.

If we want AI to start doing actual work that humans do, they need the same level of context and the same ability to act.

Here are some thoughts for system builders and operators on where to focus their energies next year. 

I've been focused on four pillars. The first two are already in production at my company. The second two are emerging areas I see as high leverage:

**1. UNIVERSAL CONTEXT**
AI connected across ALL your corporate systems—not just one tool. At my company, our assistant can pull from Google Drive, Confluence, Gong, Salesforce, Snowflake, and Amplitude. The difference between this and ChatGPT is substantial.

**2. UNIVERSAL ACTION**
AI that actually DOES work, not just analyzes. We've been delegating "paper cut tasks" one at a time—small Salesforce fixes, answering team questions, data updates. Each automation pays ongoing dividends. Once the scaffolding exists, you can justify automating the small, annoying things.

**3. PROACTIVE AI** *(Emerging)*
Systems that prompt YOU instead of waiting to be prompted. An agent that notices your funnel efficiency declining before you do. A sales coach that reaches out to reps with feedback after calls. A project manager that flags misalignment before it derails timelines.

**4. AUTOMATION CREATING AUTOMATION** *(Emerging)*
Agents that spawn workflows and become infrastructure. What if agents could create those workflows for you? This changes the calculus on what's worth automating as the build effort drops dramatically.

---

The gap between "AI can do amazing things" and "AI does real work for my team" is solvable. It's just not about the models anymore.

AI + Automation Architect | Marketing Ops Leader @ 360Learning | Editor @ aibuilders.blog

What’s keeping AI from doing real work—and how to fix it Right now, many teams are still copying and pasting between ChatGPT and the systems where rea

Open article: The operator's roadmap for AI in 2026 by Justin Norris • 11 min read

I suspect a lot of teams are going to get stuck in their AI journey because of a lack of internal documentation.

Most operators already appreciate the value of documentation, but historically it’s been about institutional memory or basic team clarity.

👉 What’s changed is that documentation is no longer just for humans.

The stakes are getting higher. Documentation is becoming a hard barrier to entry for collaborating with AI agents day to day.

That’s because many of the most valuable AI use cases won’t be neat, point solutions built to solve one narrow problem. They’ll be organic, ad-hoc, and fluid interactions with AI in the flow of work, delegating tasks much like you would to a junior employee.

And just like a new employee, the AI needs context in order to act.

Teams without clean, accessible docs end up re-explaining the same things over and over. The friction and time cost of delegation stays high, so AI gets used less, or only for shallow tasks.

Conversely, teams with strong documentation experience something very different. The AI starts to feel like it “intuitively” understands the business: how systems fit together, why processes exist, what constraints matter, and how to navigate unfamiliar tasks without everything being spelled out explicitly.

It develops real figure-it-out-ability.

Now is the time to invest in documentation across a few key dimensions:

FOUNDATIONAL CONTEXT
- A well-structured knowledge base with both detail and business-level overviews
- AI-accessible org charts with responsibilities and decision ownership
- High-level system architecture diagrams (ideally machine-readable, e.g. Mermaid)

SEMANTIC CLARITY
- Schema and KPI dictionaries
- Taxonomies for UTMs, lead sources, lifecycle stages, sales stages, etc.

PROCESS & INTENT
- SOPs that explain why a process exists, not just the steps
- Lightweight decision logs for major system or workflow choices
- Metadata inside workflows describing the problem they were designed to solve

OPERATIONAL GUARDRAILS
- Known constraints, assumptions, and “don’ts”
- Escalation paths and review expectations
- Security policies

In other words, documentation is becoming part of your execution layer.

If your processes only exist in people’s heads, your AI will never scale past an eager assistant that needs constant hand-holding, because autonomy depends on shared, durable context.

Treat documentation as a first-class system.

A lot of the work I do with AI doesn’t actually save me time. In some cases, it takes longer. And that’s a good thing.

Because the point isn’t just to automate busywork. It’s to raise the quality ceiling. 

There’s far more knowledge in the world than any one person can absorb, even inside the domains we specialize in. 

We all have blindspots. 
We all have days where our brains are running at 70%. 

Partnering with AI means pressure-testing your thinking against a wider field of experience -- communication patterns, best practices, risks you might overlook, alternative framings you wouldn’t have considered.

It isn’t perfect. But I almost never run a presentation, memo, or strategy through AI without improving it by at least 25%, sometimes a lot more. 

What's it worth to show up as a 25% better version of yourself in every thing you do? 

This is why I don't view partnering with AI as lazy or disengaged. It's actually about maximizing the quality vs. time ratio. I also actively learn from nearly every interaction and can disregard what's not useful to me. 

PROMPTS YOU CAN USE: 

1) Pre-empt critiques: "Take everything I've told you about [stakeholder] and how they communicate / process information. Identify gaps or weaknesses in this communication from their perspective and help me address them."

2) Avoid blind spots: "Review this from the perspective of a [specific domain] expert. Where does my thinking have gaps, show naivety or ignorance, or seem uninformed?"

3) Identify risks: "Review this strategy and identify as many critical risks as you can, then propose ways to proactively address them." 

4) Elevate your thinking: "Adopt the persona of a seasoned McKinsey consultant. Review this strategy and identify feedback to harden both the thinking and communication."

5) Pressure-test logic: “Identify weak logic, unwarranted assumptions, or leaps in reasoning in this argument. Suggest clearer, more rigorous formulations.”

6) Improve clarity and concision: “Rewrite this section in my voice but with sharper clarity, tighter structure, and more precise language. No embellishment, just refinement.”

Marketing Ops Community

Head of Training and Certification

Indeed.com

Director of Marketing Strategy and Operations

MarTech Alliance

I am the lead instructor for a brand new 8 week course on all things Marketing Operations! Visit Martech Alliance online for more details.

Course Instructor

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Global Marketing Operations Leader

Hitwise

Leads the marketing and demand generation teams in the Americas and APAC. 

- Oversee the planning and direction of marketing programs
- Partner and support sales to execute strategy for winning clients and upselling existing clients
- Report on key business metrics, campaign results, and drive optimization
- Development of Marketing ROI reporting and analytics 
- Lead nurturing, drip campaigns, lead scoring, sales and marketing alignment
- Oversees sponsorships, paid advertising, and online media spend
- Development and execution of campaigns across paid search and social, online advertising, webinars, events and content marketing
- Marketing automation and Salesforce implementation

Director, Global Marketing

American Marketing Association

Leads content marketing and communications strategy across all channels. 

Oversees communications and social media teams.

Manages writers and content producers for blogs, eBooks, and advertisements.

Director Of Communications

Leaf Group

Responsible for marketing and demand generation programs including marketing automation, lead nurturing, email marketing, messaging, sales enablement, and alignment across paid, content marketing, and event marketing programs. 

Leads and manages team of demand generation professionals.

Passionately implementing unified Marketo, Salesforce, Facebook Advertising and content marketing B2B programs. Marketo Certified Expert.

- Database Hygiene 
- Database Migration 
- De-duplication 
- Data Standardization and Data Normalization

Senior Marketing Manager

Trumpia

Drove 500% growth of new marketing platform through partner marketing and relentless adoption programs for AT&T Mobility’s 1,500+ business sales force. 

Established webinar lead generation program accounting for over 80% of marketing qualified leads 
Instrumental in product marketing, pricing, packaging, business development and go-to-market strategies. 

Online marketing including Google analytics, website and landing page optimization, marketing automation using Pardot, email marketing, collateral development and copywriting. 

Led event marketing team to successfully execute AT&T new product roadshow and events in 15 major US markets.

Digital Marketing 
Marketing Automation 
Google Analytics and Adwords 
Product Marketing
Customer Marketing 
Channel Marketing

Marketing Manager

Independent

Small business marketing consulting including: 

Digital Marketing 
Email Marketing 
Marketing Automation 
Social Media Marketing 
Online Marketing 
Website Design 
SEO/SEM

Marketing Consultant

Director of Marketing Strategy & Operations | Martech Leader | Speaker

Author and speaker. Co-host of the Humans of Martech Podcast.

Subscribe to the Marketing Operations Leader newsletter for MOPs strategies and insights every week: https://darrellalfonso.substack.com/

Highlights: 
- Ranked as one of the Top Marketers in the US by Propolis 2022
- Named one of the "Top Martech Marketers to Follow" 2020 by Martech Alliance 
- Keynote speaker for Martech Conference and Get Stacked B2B Marketing Conference 2021
- Awarded Fearless Marketer 2018 
- Marketo Champion 2018 and 2019 
- VP of Communications American Marketing Association - 2017-2019
- Marketo User Group Leader 2017-2019
- Leading Program Manager for Connect@Amazon (35,000 member Amazon organization)
- Frequent Martech Speaker and Author 
- Marketo and Salesforce Certified 

Posts are my own and do not reflect the views of my current or former employers.

Darrell Alfonso

Revenue leaders need both broad and deep data & insights to make better decisions.

Here are the 9 crucial reports that Chief Revenue Officers rely on to drive predictable, scalable growth—and how to turn insights into action.

1️⃣ Revenue & Pipeline Forecast
Expected revenue is how much in sales you expect to make in a given time period, while pipeline is the dollar amount of open opportunities in the same time period.

2️⃣ Revenue Contribution Breakdown
This report breaks down the proportion of revenue from new business, renewals, and expansions, as well as the split between marketing-sourced and sales-sourced revenue.

3️⃣ Net Recurring Revenue Over Time
NRR tells you if you are growing steadily, or if customers are cancelling/churning so quickly that it impacts your total business growth.

4️⃣ Pipeline Analysis & Breakdown
Total pipeline is the sum of all opportunities in a given time period. Weighted pipeline is the dollar amount of the opportunities that have a high probability of closing. Healthy pipeline is the dollar amount of the minimum amount opportunities needed to close to hit revenue targets. 

5️⃣ Average Deal Size by Segment
This shows the mean sale price by customer bucket. 

6️⃣ Win Rate by Segment
Win rate is the percentage of deals you close versus lose in a given time period. This report shows win rate by various customer buckets.

7️⃣ Conversion Funnel Breakdown
 This visualizes lead progression through MQLs, SQLs, opportunities, and closed-won deals. A significant drop-off at any stage signals inefficiencies in lead qualification, sales execution, or marketing and sales alignment.

8️⃣ Renewal Rate Over Time
This tracks renewal percentage trends throughout the year. A declining renewal rate highlights potential issues with customer satisfaction, competitive pressures, or pricing misalignment.

9️⃣ Revenue Efficiency Metrics
A low LTV:CAC ratio indicates inefficient acquisition costs. A declining demo-to-close rate suggests qualification or sales execution gaps. A longer average time to close points to deal cycle inefficiencies that slow revenue growth.

This is the foundation for revenue leadership that delivers results.

Which reports do you agree with? What would you add?

This diagram was created by me and the Revops genius, Jeff Ignacio.

Big thanks to the revenue leaders who gave us direction on this diagram - Connor Fee Multi-CRO, Tess Baldwin CRO at SixFifty, Robert Livada CRO, and Steven Dunston CRO at StackMoxie. 

NOTE: This initially started with more marketing-related reports, however, we only included the top 9 in this exercise.

Make sure to subscribe to our weekly newsletters to keep leveling up your knowledge, search RevOps Impact Newsletter on Google for Jeff’s newsletter, and The Marketing Operations Leader for my newsletter. 

#marketing #martech #marketingoperations #revops #CRO

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