Hey! 👋

You did the work. You built the case, ran the numbers 3x, walked in ready for every question -- and someone who started thinking about the topic ninety seconds ago killed it with one shrug. OUCH. 😭

You were technically right, maybe even strategically right, but politically wrong. If you've spent any time in ops, you’ve probably run into this situation before.

Early in my career, I used to think those losses were about the work, so I'd respond by doing more of it -- more evidence I was smart, more support for my argument, more more more. Looking back, it was a waste of time. But why?

By the time everyone sits down, the decision is mostly made -- the real vote already happened in DMs, 1:1s, five-minute catch-up before someone's next call, etc. If you're not in those, if you aren’t aware of who influences who, if you’re not managing stakeholders and whipping the vote, you probably don’t stand a chance.

Why ops keeps losing the room

Most of us were trained to win on merit: build the best solution, support the business, make an impact, and you’re doing a great job. That works within ops, but it doesn’t work in the larger company, because the people deciding aren't just weighing your logic in a vacuum. They're also weighing it against their own targets, their last conversation with their boss, the political bruise they took last quarter, the thing they're privately worried about that has nothing to do with your project… largely: their emotions (as a technical person, this is very annoying to discover!!!!).

And even though this is annoying, it still means that after a certain point, you should stop optimizing the presentation (or even the argument), and instead start counting votes ahead of time and influencing 1:1.

The Pre-Wire

Here's the system I run before any decision I care about. I call it the pre-wire, and it has four moves:

Map the room by power, instead of by title. The org chart tells you who reports to whom — it doesn’t tell you who decides. In most decisions there's one “real” Decider. Around that person is a Shaper or two whose opinion the Decider borrows (usually without saying so). There's also usually a Blocker who can't say yes but can absolutely say no (think legal, finance, etc). And there's a row of Spectators who mostly want to be consulted so nothing surprises them. It’s always worth knowing which is which before you waste your time talking to the wrong people.

Find each person's currency. Sadly, pretty much nobody backs your proposal because it's correct. They back it because it moves something they care about or protects them from something they fear. The Decider might care most about pipeline coverage. The skeptical director cares about not piling more work on her already-drowning team. For the same proposal, you could have two completely different pitches depending on your audience. If you sell the same way to everyone, it’s gonna be a flop.

Pre-sell one conversation at a time. Before the meeting, talk to each person who matters -- privately -- and you surface their objection while you can still do something about it. An objection raised in a 1:1 is a problem you can address ahead of time, and get the person comfortable. The same objection raised in the room is a verdict that hardens the second it's spoken, or might feel like a trap they don’t want to fall into, because once they've said it in front of their peers, walking it back costs them face.

Walk in with the vote already counted. By the time you present, you should know exactly how each person is going to land, because you've heard it from them directly. The meeting becomes a formality.

After a quick break, I'll hand you the template I use… 📺

This section is sponsored by Knak, a partner who supports this newsletter. 💌 

💌 You won the room. Now you have to…build everything.

The reward for getting your campaign approved is getting to build it under a deadline. That's where MOPs teams burn days -- chasing brand feedback one Slack thread at a time, then rebuilding the template that broke the second someone pasted in from Word.

Knak is where that production is a lot faster. It's drag-and-drop email and landing-page building with brand guardrails baked in, so nothing ships off-brand. And they just added an MCP server, so your AI agents can pull from your real template library and hand back a launch-ready asset for you to review and approve. 🤯

🔗 Learn about Knak’s new AI MCP

 …back to our regularly scheduled programming. 📺

Steal the template

👉 Steal the Pre-Wire template here.

Fill it in for the next decision you can't afford to lose. You'll probably feel slightly ridiculous mapping people like chess pieces, but hey — it is corporate theater, after all. 😅🫠

What I’m up to/what I’m studying 💭

Oh man…lately, I am building our HubSpot MCP. Attempting to largely vibe code it with Claude and some counsel from a software engineer. 🫠

We’re trying to simultaneously grow the business, while cleaning up some old tech and data debt, while also innovating with AI….the list goes on and on! So if you’re feeling overwhelmed, you aren’t the only one… 😅 Would love to hear how you’re juggling it all!

P.S. If you want to follow along with our wider GTM strategy and tactics, follow the Vector blog! You can subscribe to our newsletter too! 👻

This section is sponsored by Zapier, a partner who supports this newsletter. ⚡

⚡ Turn your meeting decisions into CRM actions before you forget them.

You just spent a week pre-wiring a decision. The meeting happens, the call gets made -- and then the follow-ups sit in your notebook until they evaporate. Here's a small Zapier build that closes that gap.

1. Capture the meeting. Pipe your Fathom (or Otter) call transcripts into a Google Sheet or Zapier Tables automatically.

2. Pull out the decision. Trigger a Zap that sends the transcript to your AI model of choice with a prompt that pulls the decision out of the noise and tags who owns the follow-up.

3. Have the Zap create the task in your project tool of choice and post a clean summary to the right Slack channel, so nobody has to remember what got decided.

I couldn’t be more excited to say goodbye to manual meeting summaries and follow-ups. 🤣

🔗 Try it with a free 14-day Zapier trial.

Dear Sara ✍️

New to marketing operations? On a team of one at your company? Shy/introverted? Wish you could ask a question to an experienced marketing operations professional, without them knowing who you are? Here’s your chance! Submit an anonymous question to me here and I’ll answer a new question in every issue.

Here’s my answer to a question from last week:

I’ve gotten a few Dear Saras like this one, about Pardot and things like lead lifecycle and attribution.

I’m going to answer, and probably give a deeply unpopular opinion:

You’re probably better off having your lead lifecycle and attribution largely living outside of Pardot.

(Sorry!!! But it’s true)

Pardot does have an out of the box lead lifecycle report, but you have to go by their default definitions. So it may or may not work for you.

You can use automation rules and lead scoring to set up things like MQLs and to pass leads to Salesforce for SAL/SQL.

But in all of my past experiences, I’ve set up the brain of the rest of attribution in Salesforce Sales Cloud or tools like Tableau.

Why? Because, honestly, a lot of the businesses I’ve worked at or consulted for have been complex. And an out-of-the-box, basic report just wouldn’t cut it.

Salesforce Sales Cloud automation is more robust — you can build Flows that can be as complex as you need (as many of you know, I recommend starting simple, though!).

Tableau allows for deep data analysis and modeling, which can help with attribution.

In Pardot, you do have the option of Engagement Studio…and I have set up lifecycle-like things in there before. But you can run into some limitations, so double-check functionality before committing to a huge build.

Listen, I love Pardot. It’ll always hold a special place in my heart. BUT I have to be honest with you…unless there has been a major, groundbreaking recent release, it seems like a lot of the automation power development has landed in Sales Cloud. So I’d look there, if you need anything complex.

Btw, here’s a great little guide from Louis Chinnam.

And here’s documentation on Pardot’s Lifecycle Reporting!

And hit reply to let me know if you want me to do a deeper dive on lifecycle builds in HubSpot and/or Salesforce… 👀✍️ 

P.S. What is this gossip about Pardot being retired, that I keep hearing about…? Is it about the certification, or the tool? Spill the deets!

News of the week 🗞️

Databricks launched CustomerLake, an "agentic CDP", at its Data + AI Summit on June 16. The pitch: a CDP built natively into the data warehouse with no separate system and no data duplication, where agents read signals and activate campaigns in a continuous loop instead of one-off sends.

Why you should care: the CDP is moving to where your data already lives, and the agents come attached. If the warehouse becomes the GTM control center, the MOPs skill that matters shifts from "I know the MAP" to "I can model and govern the data the agents run on." Worth watching even if you're nowhere near buying one. 👀

More than half of MOPs teams now report into RevOps -- the share crossed 50% in 2025 and sits at 58% as of Q1 2026.

Why you should care: if you haven't been pulled into a RevOps reporting line yet, the odds say you will be soon. Better to shape where MOPs sits in that structure than to get slotted into it during someone else's reorg.

What else have you heard about recently? Reply back to this email to send me any other word on the street. 👂

Community poll of the week 🎟️

I ran a poll on LinkedIn this week that clearly hit a nerve: "Your company killed a MOPs backfill. 'AI can handle it now.' …what really happened? Did it work?"

Here's how it landed:

My reaction: four percent?!?!?!? After two solid years of "AI will cover it," four percent of you said it did. The other ninety-six split between two outcomes that both cost the company and employees, and a third that remains invisible. Half of you absorbed the work — yikes. A third said the work just went undone: the attribution nobody built, the lifecycle nobody fixed…

Let’s be honest: "AI can handle it" is getting used as a budget decision before it's a proven out. So if you're in that 48%, here's your job this quarter -- make the absorbed work visible. Track it, then put it in front of the person who signed off on the cut. Either get more support or at least recognition! Invisible heroics only prove the cut was safe.

Want in on the next one? I post these on LinkedIn -- come vote. 👀

Meme of the week ⚙️

Lately, with AI….trying to manage CRM, MAP, DW, Claude, MCP, and Skills….does anyone else see themselves in this gif? 😅

If you have a moment, will you let me know if you enjoyed this edition of the newsletter? Thank you!

Thanks for reading,

❤️ Sara

P.S. Special thank you to our sponsors for supporting the creation of this newsletter. 🫶