Strategic Marketing Operations Leader hiring & growing marketing operations superstars @ Salesforce/Slack!

Sara McNamara

Sara McNamara is a Revenue Operations and Marketing Operations leader helping high-growth B2B teams turn chaotic GTM systems into scalable revenue engines. She’s the creator of The Marketing Operations Strategist, a widely read newsletter for modern marketing ops, RevOps, and GTM leaders who want clarity instead of complexity.

She works across marketing, sales, revenue operations, and customer success to align strategy, tooling, and data so teams can actually execute. Sara partners with founders and GTM leaders to design revenue systems that scale, covering GTM strategy, martech and salestech architecture, data hygiene, attribution, automation, and team enablement.

Known for practical frameworks and hands-on experience, Sara helps teams clean up broken processes, build trust in their data, and navigate growth without breaking their foundation. She’s equally comfortable advising executives, collaborating with marketers and sales leaders, or working directly inside tools like HubSpot and Salesforce.

Through her writing, consulting, and public work, Sara is one of the leading voices in Marketing Operations and Revenue Operations, focused on making complex GTM topics easier to understand and more actionable for operators at every stage.

Outside of ops: reality TV, chick flicks, video games, and pop culture 😎

Executive Member

Run by high-growth leaders, for high-growth leaders.

Pavilion is fueled by an international community of sales, marketing, success, and RevOps leaders from the world’s fastest growing companies. Together, we teach new skills, forge meaningful connections, and help our companies grow.

“Hey, so we don’t have any more headcount for ops, but we’re about to hire 5 new marketers, 5 new salespeople, and 5 new CS reps.

We also need to migrate an acquisition to our platforms and we just purchased 3 new tools. We can onboard these people and tools this month right? Seems like it should be easy enough, the vendors said the tools are so easy to set up!”

Helping B2B teams scale with AI-powered RevOps strategy, tech, and automation // 👻 RevOps & GTM Strategy @ Vector.co // 🏆 Pardot Champion · Marketo Fearless50 · Top Clay GTM Engineer // ex-Cloudera, Slack, Salesforce

World's falling apart but here's your attribution model I guess 🫠 😂

More than ever, the talent of the people running the tool matters more than the caliber of the tool itself. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

🆕 I've finally relaunched my personal website! 🙂‍↔️✨ 

Finally, a singular place where you can:

1️⃣ Read my newsletter (The Marketing Operations Strategist 🐈‍⬛ ☕)

2️⃣ Access all of my RevOps guides and MOPs Salary Survey!!! 📚 

3️⃣ See the latest tools I love and access templates/guides I've created for them, in one place 🤩 

4️⃣ More to come! 👀 

All at saramcnamara (.) com!

“Hey Sara, can we just update all our territories real quick?”

Back in 2009? Sure. A few clicks in Salesforce, done!

In 2026? That request sounds like this Mario level:

🧱 45+ GTM tools

💀 Partial integrations

😶‍🌫️ What do you mean, “documentation?”

🚨 High team turnover

What should be simple now kicks off a multi-day audit. No one remembers how things were set up. Every change introduces risk to the business.

When I joined Vector 👻, our inbound routing was split across 3+ tools. Any update meant opening a ticket, praying the documentation was still accurate, and hoping I didn’t break anything...

So I simplified.

We replaced the sprawl with one tool that just works. Now routing lives in one place…I can run tests, make updates, and move fast without fear of breaking the funnel.

It’s not magic. I just centralized everything in Default. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

In fact, I’m centralizing even more soon…looking at moving PLG motion stuff into there.

If your GTM stack feels like this Mario level, the solution probably isn’t more tools.

It’s fewer, better ones. Tools that act like teammates and grow alongside you, not massive tool sprawl.

Are you dealing with tool sprawl? Who's Mario at your org? Any tips? ↓

#DefaultPartner #revenueoperations #sales #sponsored

Brand partnership • Helping B2B teams scale with AI-powered RevOps strategy, tech, and automation // 👻 RevOps & GTM Strategy @ Vector.co // 🏆 Pardot Champion · Marketo Fearless50 · Top Clay GTM Engineer // ex-Cloudera, Slack, Salesforce

"Why our our data a mess? Why can't our marketing operations person just fix it?"

🤦‍♀️

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Hunter Merritt

When a stakeholder buys a new tool without including ops and needs it set up “this week”

(”the sales guy said it would be quick and easy!!!!”) 💀

One of my hardest learned lessons in my career is that doing great work isn’t enough.

We all work with humans, and humans have biases. Humans love compliments and flattery.

What’s more important than doing great work?

1️⃣ Being easy/pleasant to work with. This doesn’t mean being a yes-person, but it does mean being enjoyable to work with and great with managing expectations.

2️⃣ Being great at self-promotion. If your work was great but no one knew about it, it almost doesn’t count in the corporate world. We are especially vulnerable to this in ops, where so much of our work is “in the background” and not as flashy. You have to learn how to document and share your successes loudly, across the organization.

3️⃣ Being a suck-up. This one is probably going to irritate some people, and rightfully so…it was a hard pill for me to swallow, too. But I’ve seen to many peers get away with barely working, while being a bit of a brown-noser to the boss. Maybe you don’t need to completely suck up, but you do have to “manage up” and have them always walking away feeling good about themselves/you/the work you do.

This is hard for us ops folks to accept, because so much of our work really does rely on us being good at what we do, and executing well — but sadly, if we don’t focus on these 3 areas, our work will largely go un-noticed in most orgs.

Build these muscles early and often, if you want to climb the corporate ladder! 🪜

Did I miss anything you've learned? 👀

FWIW I hate that there are so many tools coming out that focus on having AI write LinkedIn posts for you. I don't want more AI slop in here...I want honest, experienced, human-written takes 🤷‍♀️ 

Like c'mon y'all, you can't leave me out here as one of the few nerds actually writing their posts 🫠

🎁 I've thrown just about everything I know about email deliverability into this guide. Years and years of managing email deployments, setup, campaign operations management, from SMB to Enterprise orgs...all braindumped into one doc. 😮‍💨

Why should you care? Because in MOPs, SOPs, RevOps....if we can't get our GTM Teams' emails landing in the direct inboxes of our prospects, we are....in big [REDACTED] trouble. Email is one of the highest ROI channels, we can't afford to screw it up. This guide will help ensure you don't screw it up!

Check it out here and please let me know if you find it helpful or if you have any feedback: https://lnkd.in/gzMppnDB

Call me crazy but I think fake job listings should be illegal....does anyone disagree with me on this?

I have a friend looking for a job and it's a nightmare with all of the fake listing spam out there 🫠

People think about tech first when they think about RevOps or Marketing Ops, but tech is actually the easiest part of the job. And maybe the smallest.

Campaign ops is HUGE. Underrated. If you have a broken campaign ops practice, you'll feel the pain everywhere else.

Marketers will lose trust and try to work around you instead of with you (🙄😒 don't get me started on this one...). Data will become disjointed and a mess to clean up for a simple report. The business won't be able to actually track and optimize the campaigns, where a huge amount of marketing spend is going.

So we have to get campaign ops right. But it is HARD. Not for the faint of heart: there is a lot of pressure from all directions.

I've learned many lessons over the last 10+ years of either directly or co-managing campaign ops...and I can save you some grief. 😅 

The latest edition of The Marketing Operations Strategist just went out this morning, and it includes a guide on how to run campaign ops effectively -- as well as:
→ News of the month (aka hot gossip) 🗞️
→ Dear Sara (where I answer anonymous reader-submitted questions) ✍ 
→ Interesting tech of the month ⚙️
→ Meme of the month 🖼️
→ and other playbooks and resources you can use to up-level your ops 💪

To check out the guide, go to the top link in my bio ↖️ and subscribe to the full newsletter at the bottom of the guide if you want to start receiving all of the rest of the value in the newsletter!

Happy New Year! And happy circling-back week. 😅 

Question, for those feeling generous: who are the best paid media/paid ads professionals you know? Who should I be following to learn the latest and greatest in the B2B ads space? 👀

RevOps work can be a little dry, so a few months ago I decided to really amp up the creative on my weekly slide decks at Vector 👻 -- these are some company favorites 😆

- Lisa Frank-inspired
- Emo
- Grinch
- Neopets
- Elf 

Which one is your fav, and more importantly...what theme should I do next?! 

And what do you do to make RevOps updates a little more exciting?

Every martech and salestech company seems to be selling a "signal" nowadays. 👁️ 👄 👁️ 

I even saw "phone intent" the other day -- the only *intent* I have with my phone is to NOT answer it. 😅 But I guess that's a signal to not call me!

As an ops practitioner, how can you operationalize these signals? Where should you start?

I've put together an ops guide on signals you can use right now -- link in bio because LinkedIn will tank this post's reach if I link it here. 🙂‍↔️ ↖️ 

Btw, if you enjoy it --  The Marketing Operations Strategist newsletter subscribers get these guides the second they're published. 😇 

Would love to hear from you all -- what are your favorite signals to use? Mine are probably product signals and website visitors. 👀

🤑 Every "Closed Won" comes with a hidden fee:

30 minutes of… “so, what did we actually sell them????”

→ “What other tools are they on?”
→ “What did they say their main goal was?”
→ “Who’s actually owning this implementation?”
→ “Wait…did they care about ads or intent or both?”

Whether it's entering in the data manually or fishing for it later, it's a real time-sink for sales, solutions, marketing...anyone who could be interested in that data.

So we built smart automation.

📙 HubSpot Closed Won → Zapier → Fathom.ai Transcript → ChatGPT → CRM update

Now, the second a deal closes, we pull the historical meeting transcripts and plug in need-to-know data:
⇒ Tech stack
⇒ Use cases to kick off first
⇒ Goals / success metrics
⇒ Customer roles (exec sponsor, champion, technical, end users)

The coolest part about this is that my founders, Joshua Perk 👻 and Nick Masters, built v1 of this -- I’ve just tweaked and added more to it. That’s one of the powers of Zapier IMO…just so easy to use. 😍

And now that we have the connections all set up, I can pull data in at any stage, without wasting the GTM team's time — think:

1. Product interest after the initial demo (sharing with marketing the products/features they are interested in, so we can nurture them alongside sales)
2. Deal risks (mentioned on the calls by the prospective customer)
3. Competitors mentioned (to see who is coming up the most, any new competitors making waves)

Those are coming up next. 👩‍🍳

Want to know how I set up this transcript automation? Comment “YES CHEF” and I’ll send you the recipe!

#ZapierPartner #revenueoperations #ai #sponsored

Let’s be honest…most ‘AI for email’ demos don’t survive contact with real-world email teams. 🫠

Here are 6 things I’ve pressure-tested that actually hold up in a real enterprise email setup (and a surprise at the bottom!):

1. Localization at scale (without breaking everything)
Translate a single email into 5 languages in about a minute.
Layouts stay intact. Brand rules survive. No emergency Slack messages. If you’re still nervous, have a human review the translation — but either way, no waiting days on word-by-word manual translation.

2. Accessibility without panicking
Auto-generate alt text across multiple emails so accessibility isn’t a last-minute “oh no” right before launch. AI can help you with this, without compromising your content.

3. On-brand emails from a true blank canvas
Build emails using an existing brand system.
No painstakingly enforcing rules for fonts, colors, logos, or spacing by hand. Guardrails are already enforced by the building platform.

4. Feedback and approval without a million docs
Invite the exact approvers into the process where they’re needed, and let them comment on something as tiny as a pixel on the email — WITHOUT having to manage tons of docs, screenshots, Slack messages, and emails. All in one place, all in a repeatable, defined process.

5. Fewer handoffs, fewer meetings
Marketing teams move faster without dragging design into every iteration.
Pull designs straight from Figma into Knak, with no manual rebuilds.

6. Less design debt over time
Standardized components stay intact even as campaigns scale (which is…not a given otherwise 😅).

I’m not in the camp of “AI replaces marketers,” because bots can’t replace talented marketers. I love creative storytellers and marketers, and I don’t believe they’re going anywhere. If anything, they’ll be in higher demand (y’all see that NYT article about storytellers the other week?).

But better tooling *can* remove the annoying parts of email production that slow good teams down, with no real benefit.

🆕🎁 Now, for the surprise...I've put together a guide to walk you through what's possible with AI, in collaboration with Knak...check it out on my link in bio!

P.S. Would love to hear from others folks in the space — where is AI actually working for you in enterprise email?

#KnakPartner #sponsored #email #ai

Speed doesn’t break at scale because teams get slower.
It breaks because → leadership designs for control instead of results. ← 

Most exec teams say they want velocity, but what they actually build are…approval chains.
Design reviews.
Brand sign-offs.
“Quick checks” that slow down the team so much more than anticipated. 🫠

None of this feels risky in isolation. It feels responsible.
But collectively, it hard-codes lag into your GTM motion.

What started as a 1-day build ends up being 1-3 weeks. As the org grows, it could be over a month.
This is what I find compelling about the Knak platform — it helps humans get out of their own way.

Brand is enforced by the system, not by people.
Speed is allowed by default, not granted by availability.
Execution doesn’t stall when one team gets overloaded.

This will become more and more important with AI, by the way.

AI raises the ceiling on execution speed, but it also raises the floor for competition. 👀

If your GTM motion still routes through manual approval after manual approval while a competitor ships with AI and system-based guardrails, they will out-test, out-launch, and out-learn you — every quarter.

I know it’s frustrating, but don’t shoot the messenger here — it’s just math. 🤷‍♀️ 

So I’m curious: what are you actually doing to scale your teams using AI orchestration? Are you using AI to execute campaigns, or still stuck in “idea” mode? 🤖

#KnakPartner #sponsored #ai #marketing

So, how do we feel about paid ads in free ChatGPT?

I can't help but feel like it was inevitable...the world (and our economy) runs on ads. 😅

Marketing friends: will you be investing in this paid media channel early (to try to get the cheap bids), or wait to see how it performs first? 🤔

Head of Content @ LASSO | Co-host of That's Marketing, Baby | Delivering daily cheat codes for small content teams

I'm a creative director turned content marketer and strategist with more than 20 years of experience conceptualizing and executing breakthrough work for B2C brands like Eggo, Rice Krispies, Blue Cross, Cottonelle, and McDonald’s, and B2B brands like Fastly and Island.

I have a knack for leading cross-functional teams toward a common goal, bringing order to the oft-chaotic creative process, crafting insight-driven global campaigns, and bringing stories to life via long- and short-form content.

Jess Cook

Ya girl has a new title:
 
VP, Marketing at Vector 👻
 
And while I do my office chair happy dance, I see this as part of a larger and very exciting trend.
 
The next generation of B2B marketing leaders 𝘄𝗶𝗹𝗹 𝗯𝗲 𝗰𝗼𝗻𝘁𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝗺𝗮𝗿𝗸𝗲𝘁𝗲𝗿𝘀 because brand and storytelling have become non-negotiable for growth.
 
In a world where being forgotten is the most expensive problem you can have, the marketers who can: 
→ Tell a story that sticks 
→ Build brand that competitors can't replicate 
→ Create content that makes people feel something
 
... are the ones that smart founders and CEOs will want leading the charge.
 
So to all my fellow content people out there wondering if you can make the leap to marketing leadership:
 
👏 This 👏 is 👏 your 👏 moment.
 
Your ability to translate audience insights into ownable marketing moments is not a nice-to-have anymore.
 
It's the underpinning of modern marketing strategy.
 
And I'm crazy excited to keep proving it with the entire Vector team.

Things that have me 🐝 buzzing right now:

• I FINALLY hired a Demand Gen marketer and they start in two weeks! (Any guesses who? 😏)
• Vector's 2026 all-company kickoff is TODAY! 
• We're doing a LIVE episode of This Meeting Could've Been a Podcast on 1/14 - you comin'?
• My kids went back to school! (Hallelujah. I love them. But it was time.)
• The Stranger Things finale still giving me all the nostalgic feels

What's making this first Monday of 2026 a little less Monday-like for you?

Raise your hand if you plan on updating your website content this year. 🙋‍♀️
 
(hint, your hand should be up)

The times, they are a-changing. There are SO many new way to get your content to work harder for you: feeding LLMs, creating buzz, handling objections, building trust, creating die-hard fans, and nurturing the 95% who aren't ready to buy just yet.

It's a LOT. 

But just breathe. Here's your first step. 👇
 
Get your ticket to 𝗔𝗯𝗼𝘃𝗲 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗙𝗼𝗹𝗱 — THE event for all things B2B websites — happening February 9–11 in Ft. Lauderdale, FL.
 
Two full days of workshops (hosted by the amazing peeps below) on the stuff that actually makes B2B websites work:
→ Brand
→ Positioning 
→ Messaging
→ Conversion optimization
 
And, of course, Content — hosted by me!

I'll walk you through Vector's content strategy, page structure, AI processes, and more, so you can see how we turn content consumption into dolla dolla billz.
 
Also, South FL in in February? Big ol' cherry on top.
 
If you are SERIOUS about coming, (like serious, serious) DM me for my half-off promo code.
 
See you in Florida? ☀️
https://lnkd.in/gvmqwBiF

The message testing strategy Josh 𝘥𝘦𝘧𝘪𝘯𝘪𝘵𝘦𝘭𝘺 knew about:
 

👉 Run a small ad campaign to test your positioning before launch day.
 
We launched a new product - Signal-Driven Ad Audiences - to see how people would respond to our new positioning, 𝘮𝘰𝘯𝘵𝘩𝘴 before everything else went live.
 
And instead of spending months workshopping it to death, we ran an ad campaign around it.
 
→ Real budget on the line
→ Real buyers seeing it (contact-level ad audiences FTW)
→ Real engagement (or crickets)
 
The fastest way to see if messaging resonates with actual humans.
 
I know for a FACT I told Josh about this beforehand, though he claims otherwise. He literally approved the creative. 😆
(In his defense, he was probably thinking about 47 other things.)
 
But I digress...

Your ad campaigns can do double duty. They're not just for demand gen—they're also your fastest feedback loop on whether your message and offer actually land.

Joshua Perk 👻 and I dig into all things ads at Vector 👻 in the latest episode of 𝗧𝗵𝗶𝘀 𝗠𝗲𝗲𝘁𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗖𝗼𝘂𝗹𝗱'𝘃𝗲 𝗕𝗲𝗲𝗻 𝗮 𝗣𝗼𝗱𝗰𝗮𝘀𝘁 - out now!
 
AND if you dig what we're putting down, we're doing a LIVE episode next week. 😬 There's no telling what could happen. Get a front row seat with the link in the comments.

What's one of your Q1 marketing bets that's making you nervous?

Here's mine. 👇
 
Joshua Perk 👻 and I are recording a LIVE episode of 𝗧𝗵𝗶𝘀 𝗠𝗲𝗲𝘁𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗖𝗼𝘂𝗹𝗱'𝘃𝗲 𝗕𝗲𝗲𝗻 𝗮 𝗣𝗼𝗱𝗰𝗮𝘀𝘁 this Wednesday, January 14, at 12 pm ET.
 
No editing. No do-overs. Just us, talking through our entire 2026 marketing plan in real time.

We'll share:
→ The market forces that shaped our plan
→ Our 3 "big rocks" for the year
→ The channels we're putting most of our dolla billz into
→ Sneak peeks of our hiring, event, and influencer plans
→ How we'll know if any of this (gestures around wildly) is actually working
 
All delivered with our general weirdness... and nowhere to hide.
 
See you there?! 🤞
https://lnkd.in/g8GDaSw8

Hey, real quick...
 
Josh and I are doing a LIVE episode of the podcast in T minus 3ish hours—sharing Vector's entire marketing plan for 2026: big rocks, goals, hiring, the whole shebang.
 
Would love for you to be a part of it if you're free at 12 noon ET. (And if you're not, register anyway so you get the recording!)

Hope you can make it! https://lnkd.in/g8GDaSw8

Jess and Josh from Vector standing against a blue background with pink and yellow geometric shapes. Text reads 'This Kickoff Could've Been a Podcast LIVE! with event details 'Jan 14 @ 12pm ET' and 'TODAY!' on sticky notes. Vector logo and ghost mascot appear in bottom right corner.

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