An ops event for the ops community

Ever since Marketo Summit and the MarTech Conference ceased to exist the way it was during its heyday, there has been a vacuum of in-person events for ops professionals. So when Mike Rizzo from the Marketing Ops Community (MO Pros) community first mentioned MOps-Apalooza to me, I got excited and wanted to know how Openprise could help to get a great community-led event started and make it into a destination event. One idea led to another, and we decided to colocate our own user conference, Open23, with MOpza in Anaheim, November 5 to 8, to help it achieve a successful launch.

Why is a community-led event important?

Most events these days are built for the vendors because they are the ones generating the revenue for the event organizers. Every aspect of these events is optimized for demand generation for the sponsors. More and more of the sessions are vendor-sponsored case studies, often not much more than infomercials with good headline ROI but little detail on the actual challenges and how-tos that a practitioner may find useful. A large percentage of the attendees we meet at these shows primarily go for the networking opportunities, as the conference treats them like a product.

The MO Pros team and Openprise believe the ops community deserves a better type of conference, a community-led conference where the experience is optimized for the attendees and not for the vendors. How is a community-led conference different, you ask?

Community-led events are about learning

Ops is still a very young profession. There are many new ops professionals who have not learned things the hard way and can’t effectively separate what is theoretical vs. what is practical, what is vendor hype vs. what is real, and what is sexy vs. what is necessary. Learning from ops veterans is the best way to shorten the learning cycle and create a community knowledge base that the entire profession can benefit from.?

A community-led event prioritizes the learning needs of attendees over the demand gen needs of the sponsors. At MOpza and Open23, sessions are curated based on a broad call-for-paper and selected based on quality of the content. The events are designed as a vehicle to generate, capture, and share educational content that can, over time, help to build up a community knowledge base akin to case law for the legal profession.

At MOps-Apalooza and Open23, sessions include how to assess your RevOps maturity, how to build a strong RevOps team, and how NOT to overinvest in RevTech before you need it by Benjamin Mohlie and Nicholas Rose from Hyperscayle LLC .

There’s also a rockstar panel on how self-service automation can revolutionize your approach to operational excellence, with Detrie Zacharias from Rimini Street , Melia Vilain from GitLab , Raquel Banderas from Adobe , and Alyssa Hewitt from my team at Openprise .

You’ll find me in the sessions, too, in a panel on the strategic significance of RevOps in facilitating seamless integration and maximizing value creation post-M&A with Jeremie Audran from Broadcom Software and Ali Rastiello from Health Catalyst .?

Community-led events are about peer networking

Learning is just one aspect of professional development. Building out your network is just as important, and community-led events play a key role in fostering the face-to-face interactions that are key to developing a strong professional network, which is the best way to hire, look for a job, and develop a business partnership.

At Mopza and Open23, you’ll find practitioners rather than sales people and field marketers from sponsoring vendors. For example, the majority of the attendees from Openprise will be from our customer success and product teams, not our sales and marketing teams. Learning often continues after the event through direct conversations with the peers you met at the event.

Community-led events are about vendor vetting

While vendor sponsorship is a necessary evil, if done correctly, it can add great value to a community-led event, because vendors are often thought leaders, especially in a nascent profession like ops. During planning, Mike Rizzo and I had long conversations about what role vendors should play at a community-led event. The short answer is, the vendors should behave as part of the community and bring value as a community member. The ROI for the vendor is brand-building and relationship-building as a member of the community. The value of the vendor is not measured by how big a party it throws or what fancy prizes it gives away, but how it contributes to building the community’s knowledge base and strength of network. In short, when a company is a good productive member of the community, it is often a good indicator of the value they can bring as a vendor.

At this event, I expect to meet vendor representatives who are more into learning about my challenges and point of view than just wanting to scan my badge.

If you are at MOpza, we invite you to Open23 to “Just Align It!”

You don’t have to be a customer of Openprise to attend Open23. We invite all MOpza attendees to swing over on Wednesday to check out Open23. This year’s Open23 theme is “Just Align It.” In this third year of the Open conference, we continue the effort of the last two years, trying to articulate what makes RevOps a uniquely powerful idea and what will define the RevOps profession.?

At Open21, we flat-out asked the question, “RevOps, who are you?” At Open22, we had an inkling that RevOps had to add net-new value to the enterprise and be a multiplier of speed, performance, and ROI. This year, we think we have finally captured the essence of what RevOps is all about: alignment. Come to my keynote to hear our point of view on why we believe the singular, powerful idea behind RevOps is alignment—and why RevOps is a once-in-a-generation change in the market that is more of a revolution than an evolution.