167: Moni Oloyede: The marketing ops identity paradox, why attribution is a waste of time and why GTM engineering is just sales ops

Humans of Martech

What’s up everyone, today we have the pleasure of sitting down with Moni Oloyede, Founder at MO Martech.

Summary: Your buyers can't remember why they bought from you, our brains physically can't store that information correctly. But we've built elaborate attribution systems pretending otherwise. Moni helps us understand why we need to stop crediting random touchpoints and start measuring how effectively each content piece performs its specific job in moving people through your funnel. We also cover why not all marketing activities need to drive revenue, why you shouldn’t ditch ideas just because you can’t track them and why GTM engineering is just job title inflation.

About Moni

• Moni started her career at Sourcefire, a cybersecurity company where she dabbled in everything from Eloqua, Salesforce and Adwords
• She shifted to the agency world and joined a revenue marketing agency and later a growth consultancy
• She went back in house in cybersecurity where she would spend the better part of 5 years becoming a Director of Marketing Infrastructure
• Today Moni (moo-nee) is the founder of MO Martech where she teaches and runs workshops to help business that struggle with marketing

Most Tech Stacks Are Stitched With Duct Tape

Born in the prehistoric age of marketing automation, Moni witnessed marketing technology evolve from early concept to tablestakes. Her first employer, a cybersecurity company, maintained such intimate ties with Eloqua that they earned a literal place in the vendor's office. "I cut my teeth in the early days of lead scoring and nurturing, like all those concepts were new," she recalls. While most marketers today inherit established systems, Moni helped build the prototype.

Those early days bristled with raw technological potential. Her CMO burst back from a conference, wide-eyed about "this new thing called the Cloud." Marketing teams fumbled through uncharted territory, concocting solutions with no rulebook. Moni found herself repeatedly cast as the test subject for nascent concepts:

* Early lead scoring algorithms that barely understood buyer intent
* Rudimentary nurture campaigns that seem prehistoric by today's standards
* Primitive ABM approaches before the category even existed
* First-generation dynamic content that barely qualified as "dynamic"

Her technical immersion might have continued indefinitely, but a pattern emerged across agencies and client engagements. The technology consistently underdelivered on its promise. "We seem to get to a point and then we can't ever get to the promise," she explains. The gap between vendor slideware and actual results remained stubbornly unbridgeable regardless of budget size, team composition, or technical architecture.

This revelation propelled Moni toward the marketing roots beneath the technology. She uncovered the industry's dirty little secret: nobody has their marketing technology working smoothly. Not even close.

> "Everybody always thinks that other people's tech stacks are perfect. You attend webinars and listen to podcasts and think, 'oh my gosh, that brand has it all figured out. Why don't I have it figured out?'"

Pull back the curtain on these supposedly perfect marketing technology implementations and you'll discover chaos. That Fortune 500 company presenting their "integrated customer journey orchestration"? They can't even track basic lead conversion properly. That unicorn startup showcasing their "AI-powered personalization engine"? Most of their segments contain default content. The larger the company, the more chaotic the implementation. "The bigger the company, the more mess it is," Moni confirms. "It's more duct tape and glue and just hobbled together things."

Marketing technology works as an amplifier, not a miracle cure. "Technology is not automagical," Moni states bluntly. "It can only do so much, and if the marketing's bad, the technology is not going to fix that." Her journey from tech specialist to marketing strategist stems directly from this understanding: fix the foundation first.

Key takeaway: Stop comparing your messy marketing stack to the sanitized versions presented at conferences. Even the most sophisticated enterprises run on cobbled-together systems and manual workarounds. Focus first on creating marketing that resonates with real humans, then apply technology selectively to amplify what already works. You'll save yourself the frustration of trying to automate broken processes while building something sustainable that actually delivers results.

The Marketing Ops Identity Paradox

Marketing operations professionals inhabit a peculiar career limbo. You build the systems that power modern marketing, yet find yourself trapped by your own expertise. Moni, a 16-year marketing veteran, captures this frustration perfectly: "For at least 10 years I've been doing my damnedest to try to run away from marketing ops, and it won't let me go."

> "No matter what I do, I can't get away from it even though I've tried forever."

This career quicksand pulls you back each time you attempt to climb out. Your specialized knowledge becomes both your superpower and your career ceiling. While executives strategize future campaigns in boardrooms, you transform their whiteboard sketches into measurable reality. The truth? Marketing strategy without operational execution amounts to wishful thinking on a slide deck.

The operational brain works differently. You see systems where others see individual campaigns. You spot integration failures where others blame the platform. Your value comes from this unique perspective—connecting dots across the marketing ecosystem that others don't even know exist. Moni describes this experience viscerally: "There's so much nuance into making it work that they don't get or understand unless you're in it or have that historical knowledge."

Marketing ops professionals often bear the weight of accountability without corresponding authority. When campaigns fail, executives look to you for answers. As Moni explains, "Since you're responsible for the results and the analytics, you feel like it's on you. When it doesn't happen, they come to you." This creates immense pressure: "You feel that pressure and it's like, 'but you gave me a crappy campaign that doesn't have good messaging and doesn't make sense to anybody. I'm not a magician.'"

Rather than fighting this identity, Moni transformed it into something bigger. She embraced her role as a "marketing educator" focused on teaching fundamentals to a generation that reduces marketing to:
* Getting attention
* Creating content
* Generating leads

"That's the result," she argues. "That's not what marketing is." This educational perspective allows her to leverage her operational expertise while addressing systemic issues in marketing practice.

Key takeaway: Your marketing operations expertise gives you unique system-level insights nobody else possesses. Stop trying to escape this identity. Instead, use your operational knowledge to command respect by translating technical realities into business language executives understand. Create clear boundaries around what technology can and cannot solve. When handed unrealistic expectations, respond with specific prerequisites for success. Your value comes from connecting strategy with execution; making you the bridge that transforms marketing from theory into measurable results.

Stop Crediting Random Marketing Assets For Conversions

That gnawing feeling you get when reviewing complex attribution reports should be trusted.. Your instincts know something your dashboards don't. Moni cuts through years of marketing dogma with a refreshingly brutal assessment: "I thi...