Hey! 👋 

Hope you’re having a great year so far! There’s something about this year, it seems like everyone has really hit the ground running and hasn’t stopped. 🙃

In this edition, I want to teach you everything I’ve learned in 10+ years of running campaign ops within marketing ops. And if you’re in RevOps or Sales Ops, this could be helpful for you, too — it’s really about getting the fundamentals in place, so they don’t steal too much of your time. Or sanity. 😅

(A few quick notes: I’m planning on publishing this newsletter the last Wednesday of every month, and perhaps an additional edition the second week if I have more to share. I’ve also added some new sections to the newsletter! Check 'em out after Dear Sara👇)

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

⚡️ Automate Campaign Intake: Create Asana Tasks from Slack Reactions

If you’ve ever had a campaign request dropped in Slack that you forgot to follow up on — this one’s for you.

This Zap automatically creates an Asana task every time someone from your team reacts to a Slack message (think: new request) with an emoji. Perfect for campaign intake requests shared in Slack that need to be triaged before being accepted and created.

👉 Try this Zap

In case you don’t have time to real the full guide now, here are the top tips:

1. Intake is everything.
   If you have chaotic or disorganized intake, you’ll feel the pain every step of the way…and so will your stakeholders. Make sure you key in the best process early, so you don’t get buried.
   

2. Prioritization is your superpower and delivery is key.
   Align requests with business impact, but don’t forget that we are all human. You’ll find it easier to set expectations and boundaries (and let people down easy) when you are transparent and explain things to them kindly. Think: I care about your request, I can’t support it right now because XYZ initiative is higher impact at the moment, but I will add your request to our backlog and we will pick it up as soon as we get a chance. Not just “no.”
   

3. Templates are not exciting, but they will make or break you.
   There’s no reason a stakeholder should have to guess at how to submit a request, nor should your team have to figure out the list import process from scratch every time. Create intake templates and documentation to save your team tons of time and arguments over everyone’s preference on how to run things.

4. Do not skimp on QA.
   Too many teams assume that things launched well, without proper testing…create a QA process and stick with it to make sure everything is working as expected. Loop in your stakeholders too, they can help with QA!
   

5. Track the process, not just the performance.
   Measuring ops metrics like cycle time, defect rate, and SLA help you optimize and earn trust and see where your team is losing efficiency. It also helps you rally for more headcount. 😇

6. Campaign Ops is a strategic lever.
   People undersell campaign ops – it isn’t just “sending emails” or “creating landing pages.” It’s the heart of marketing campaign activation, and it HAS to work well or you lose key tracking data and risk missing pipeline or revenue expectations.

👉 For the full campaign ops insights, read more in the full guide. ✨

What I’m up to/what I’m studying 💭

WHEW, this year I’ve been crashing out (kidding) over Sales and CS process and tooling — Vector is growing quickly, which means our processes and teams are growing quickly. What started as 1 product has become 2, 3…add-ons, partnerships, and more.

So, basically, what I’m saying is that I’m becoming a HubSpot power user overnight. 🤣 So many reports, so many integrations, really pushing the tool to its limits. Excited to share more here soon. 👀

Outside of work, I’m keeping up with The Traitors, scheduling concerts and travel for the year, and, honestly….finding some time to relax. 😅

OH! And I almost forgot to mention — I relaunched my personal website! Check it out at saramcnamara.com — finally, a single place to view all of my content and a centralized list of tools I endorse. 😀 

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

✨ Email Creation Trends to Know: AI, Collaboration & Speed

Knak recently published a great breakdown on how email teams are evolving — and the stats are seriously worth a look if you’re in Campaign Ops.

Key takeaways from the data:

• 55% of teams use 4+ tools to build emails.
  Fragmentation slows everything down — Campaign Ops should aim to consolidate workflows wherever possible.

• AI is becoming a real player.
  37% of marketers are already using AI in their email creation process, primarily for copywriting and subject line ideation.

• Speed is still a pain point.
  Only 28% of teams can build and launch emails in under 3 days. If you're faster than that, congrats — you’re in the top tier.

Campaign Ops has the chance to lead the charge in reducing tool bloat, integrating AI intentionally, and shaving days off email timelines.

🔗 Read the full post if you want to benchmark your team and learn more.

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:

SO I have a hot take on this which is that this sounds like GTM Engineering to me, or at least what it should be. So many GTM Engineers are focused on sales tech only, when, IMO, they should be focused across the entire revenue/GTM stack.

Why? Because that’s where you get the real cross-stack benefit — being able to architect the customer journey in a way where you don’t constantly have misaligned teams and competing priorities. That was always one of the biggest struggles when I was in pure marketing ops roles — I had to become BFFs with my sales operations counterparts, and we often had to help each other “under the table” because we had different leadership who always wanted us to focus on our specific department, not how the entire customer journey and data flow fit together.

However, if you want to keep it in the marketing operations title realm, you could go with Marketing Operations Solutions Architect, or Solutions Architect - Marketing. That would help rein in the scope to marketing, if that is what you need to do organizationally.

If you want to pick from the roles you’ve mentioned, I’d stick with Revenue Operations Engineer — and see if you can stick some AI stuff in the job description.

In general, when I think about engineer vs solutions architect vs marketing operations manager (many of whom also manage integrations), I think: how engineering focused is this role? Are they basically the software engineer for marketing and have that software engineering background (and are writing lots of code), or are they mostly building with point-and-click tools and only a little bit of code? If it’s engineering focused, put engineer in the title. If they are writing a little bit of code but not primary code-focused, go with solutions architect. If they are writing little to no code, stick with an easier to market/match role like marketing operations manager.

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

🧩 Unified Control for Campaign Ops: How Cortex Did It with Default

In this case study, Cortex shared how they used Default to build a single “control layer” across their entire go-to-market tech stack — and it’s a perfect example of what Campaign Ops leaders should be thinking about.

Highlights from their approach:

• One place to manage ALL campaign logic.
  Cortex centralized workflows, audiences, and lifecycle triggers across tools like Marketo, Segment, and Salesforce — all through Default, which saves them a lot of headache.
  

• Fewer sync errors, more speed.
  By creating a unified logic layer, they avoided duplicative setups (and, duplicative/contradicting edits) and dramatically cut down on cross-system bugs and campaign delays.
  

• Better cross-functional visibility.
  Default became the source of truth for GTM logic — accessible and understandable by both Marketing and RevOps teams.

If your campaign logic is scattered across platforms and spreadsheets, Campaign Ops ends up being constant firefighting instead of strategic. Cortex’s model shows how a unified infrastructure can bring order to complexity and free up your team’s time.

🔗 Read the full case study here.

News of the week 🗞️

ChatGPT is getting ads, and it looks like they will be expensive — and will have limited insights. This will be an interesting approach, as usually ad platforms offer highly discounted rates to get advertisers onto their platform. In terms of privacy, ChatGPT has to keep the delicate balance of serving customer needs while also not making them feel too exposed. This is an area I will watch closely, to help my marketing team determine if we should use this channel or not.

Salesforce has agreed to purchase Qualified, the website chatbot turned AI agent. “By integrating Qualified’s agentic marketing expertise into Agentforce, we will enhance our ability to offer autonomous pipeline generation and empower our customers to scale their revenue teams with agent-first solutions that drive efficient growth,” Salesforce said in a release. To be honest, I haven’t really worked in Qualified recently, having been a Drift girlie back in the day…would love to hear from those using it. 👀 I do know that their integrations with Salesforce are really amazing.

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

Interesting tech of the week ⚙️

Claude Cowork - Open the desktop app, connect your files and tools, and let Claude get things done.

Claude Cowork is getting a LOT of hype right now. The idea is that you can install Claude onto your desktop and have it do work across web apps and your local computer — without having to manually pull in files, charts, etc. It’s in its infancy, but I recommend becoming familiar with it to keep up to date on the latest AI capabilities. As with all AI tools, make sure your infosec/legal team is okay with you using it on any PII or business data before you use it on your work computer.

This is one of the use cases I’m looking to tinker with, if I can get approval. 😅

Check out this and some other use cases here: https://claude.com/resources/use-cases

Meme of the week ⚙️

Marketing operations @ the marketing department party 🤣

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. 🫶