Why Marketing Ops is Stuck in IT Support Mode and How to Break Free

Marketing Ops was supposed to be the strategic engine of modern marketing. Instead, most teams have been demoted to the ticket queue — running campaigns, managing licenses, cleaning lists, and being asked ”how many pieces of tech can we get you to run?” In this episode of Revenue Marketing Raw, Jeff Pedowitz and Debbie Qaqish unpack why MarOps got stuck in IT support mode, why Sales is now buying martech directly because Marketing can’t move fast enough, and what the role looks like when you actually rebuild it from a blank sheet of paper. They make the case that the best Marketing Ops leaders are process architects and revenue engineers, not platform administrators — and that the AI moment is the forcing function that will either elevate MarOps to a seat at the executive table or eliminate it entirely. If your MarOps team is buried in tickets, this is the episode that gets you out.