Building a marketing operations team from scratch, one year in

Rachel Beck had led Cisco Meraki’s demand gen team for just over a year when she was named the global manager of marketing operations in April 2018. The newly appointed marketing ops leader was put in charge of building a team that would oversee the tools, processes and systems to power Cisco Meraki’s marketing team — something the company previously did not have. “I was spending a lot of time on things that were foundational,” said Beck of her previous role before being named global manager of marketing operations. When the CMO realized Beck was more focused on foundational issues than demand gen priorities, he knew it was time to put a marketing ops team in place. “Before the team existed, we had a queue of things to work on,” said Beck. She started by listing all the projects the team could potentially be giving time to, and of those, which ran the greatest risk of putting the company in jeopardy if they didn’t get done. “You have to access and prioritize because there is no end to the things you could do.” Finding the right talent. In the 13 months Beck has been leading the marketing ops team, she has developed six roles. Her advice: learn to look far and wide for the right talent, but know that new hires may be available internally.