From Button-Pusher to Strategic Growth: The Future of MOps with Chris Willis

Why Tying Your Career to One Platform Is a Risk With Chris Wills

Introduction

Chris Wills has been recognized as a Marketo Champion five times, has run marketing and revenue operations for 16 to 17 years, and now runs his own consulting practice, GTM Rankers. He’s also built a career out of a lesson most operators learn the hard way: getting too attached to one platform is a liability, not a specialty.

On this episode of Ops in Motion, Chris joined Kawal to talk through why platform loyalty can quietly limit a career, how a marketing operations function should actually be structured if you’re building one from scratch, and what tends to go wrong when someone leaves a full-time role to start their own ops consultancy.

Who should read this: marketing operations professionals thinking about their long-term career path, and leaders deciding how to structure or scale a marketing ops function.

Key takeaways

• Becoming known as “the Marketo person” or “the HubSpot person” feels like expertise, but it’s a real risk. When a company gets acquired or switches platforms, that skill set can disappear overnight.
• The fundamentals that transfer across every platform, pipeline management, lifecycle execution, measurement, matter more long term than mastery of any single tool.
• A marketing ops function built to just execute tasks limits its own influence. One built as a strategic, outcome-driven business partner earns a seat at the table.
• Most new ops consultancies fail for predictable reasons: trying to do everything solo, chasing every opportunity instead of picking a focus, and neglecting internal processes like invoicing and onboarding.

Betting your career on one platform is a bigger risk than it feels like

Chris spent years building deep expertise in Marketo, earning Marketo Champion recognition five years running. Then a moment with a former colleague changed how he thought about it. She was considering moving her company from Marketo to HubSpot, and Chris realized how exposed he’d be if he stayed locked into one platform. So he started taking on HubSpot work, deliberately, the same way he’d recommend any operator starting fresh: with campaign ops, the core work every marketing automation tool is built around.

The bigger risk he points to is what happens during a merger or acquisition. If your value at a company is essentially “I’m the person who knows this platform,” and the acquiring company brings its own tools, that value can vanish in a single transition. The operators who hold up are the ones who understood the fundamentals underneath the tool the whole time: pipeline management, lifecycle execution, aligning marketing activity with what sales actually needs.

Most marketing ops teams get built as a task list, not a strategic partner

Asked how he’d design a marketing operations function from a blank slate, Chris gave what he called a controversial answer: he wouldn’t have it report into marketing at all. He’d build it as part of a broader RevOps organization, sitting in concentric circles, closest to fellow operators, then business partners like marketing and sales, then supporting functions like IT and finance, rather than siloed entirely inside the marketing department. His reasoning is that a function fully owned by marketing ends up driven entirely by marketing’s goals, which limits its ability to serve sales and customer success with the same weight.

His broader point is about what actually earns influence. Teams that define themselves by tasks and ticket volume, how many emails got sent, how many campaigns launched, don’t get a seat at the leadership table. Teams that can point to business outcomes do.

Kawal’s version of the same blank-slate exercise lands on a similar structure through a different lens: a strategic growth engine built on three pillars. Marketing operations acts as a strategic partner from day one, sitting in on go-to-market conversations rather than being handed a finished plan to execute. It owns a connected tech stack with clean, unified data, favoring fewer tools done well over a sprawling stack nobody fully governs. And it’s structured around specialized roles, data and analytics, automation, integrations, enablement, with clear ownership and a culture that keeps improving rather than settling into routine.

The measurement point is where both of them converge. Success isn’t operational efficiency, tickets closed, campaigns sent. It’s pipeline influence, revenue efficiency, and customer lifecycle impact. If your team’s marketing operations function is still reporting on activity instead of outcomes, that’s usually a sign it’s under-positioned in the organization, not a sign the team isn’t working hard.

“What gets you a seat at the table is that you can demonstrate and communicate that you’re driving business outcomes.”

— Chris Wills

Most new ops consultancies fail for the same avoidable reasons

Kawal has run her own agency for a while now, and when Chris asked her directly what she’d tell someone considering the same jump, her list split cleanly into dos and don’ts. On the do side: build a real network before you leave your role, since your first clients and mentors usually come from people who already know your work. Start with a narrow set of repeatable frameworks you’re genuinely strong at rather than trying to offer everything, then expand from there. Take client feedback seriously and often, since it’s the fastest way to know what’s actually working.

The don’ts are where most new consultancies actually stumble. Trying to do everything yourself instead of bringing in even part-time help early. Letting internal processes, contracts, invoicing, onboarding, sit in the back seat, since a client’s experience of your business depends on those details as much as the actual work. And chasing every opportunity that comes in instead of staying focused on the clients and industries where the work is genuinely strong.

Chris’s own experience backed this up from a different angle: the relationships that got his consultancy off the ground came from fractional CMOs and agency partners he already knew, not cold outreach. Network first, then build the rest around it.

Action items

FAQs

Talk to Digital DI Consultants

If your marketing operations function is still measured by activity instead of outcomes, see how we think about what actually drives business results, or talk to our team about your setup.