What BDMs actually need to see in Salesforce
June 1, 2026
Marketing Operations
I work on marketing stacks I did not build.
Map, Triage, Hold is how I take control of them. The work is governance: how data moves between systems, whether the reporting can be trusted, and which new capabilities get into the stack and under what rules.
The work
Inherited systems
Most marketing operations work starts in the middle. The stack was assembled by people who left. The workflows were built for a go-to-market motion that changed two years ago. The attribution has been quietly wrong for longer than anyone realizes, and nobody is sure which of the four hundred workflows still matter.
This is the normal condition. It is not a failure state, and treating it like one leads people to rebuild instead of understand.
My work is the governance layer, mostly in HubSpot and Salesforce environments. Mapping what is actually running and what depends on what. Deciding what gets fixed, what gets retired, and what gets left alone. Setting the rules that keep the system from drifting back. That includes AI features, which are arriving in every platform faster than operational rules for using them.
The tools change. The problem does not.
Framework
Map, Triage, Hold
A three-stage method for taking control of a marketing stack you did not build. Ten instruments, one assessment, and a sequence that works when you cannot pause operations to fix things.
Map
Find out what is actually running. Systems, data flows, dependencies, and the gap between what the documentation says and what the platform does.
Triage
Decide what gets attention. Not everything broken is worth fixing, and fixing things in the wrong order makes the system less stable, not more.
Hold
Keep it from drifting back. Rules, ownership, review cadence, and the decision rights that determine what enters the stack and who approves it.
Where is your stack right now?
Six areas, twenty-four questions, five to seven minutes. You get a number out of 100, a band, and the two or three areas to start on.
Writing
Recent notes
Judging
Stevie Awards. Marketing and Event Awards judging committee, 2026 American Business Awards.
Associations
American Marketing Association, Oklahoma City Chapter. New Member Director, 2026 to present. Also a member of HIMSS and MOPros.
Education
B.E. Electrical Engineering.
M.S. Marketing.
M.S. Data Analytics, in progress
About
Sakshi Patel
I build and govern marketing operations infrastructure. My hands-on depth is HubSpot and Salesforce, the data moving between them, and the reporting that depends on both being right.
Almost every system I have worked on, I inherited. Someone else made the architecture decisions, and by the time I arrived the person who made them was gone and the reasons were undocumented. Map, Triage, Hold came out of doing that repeatedly and noticing I was running the same sequence every time.
